Upstream - Climate Leninism w/ Jodi Dean and Kai Heron

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Transition is inevitable, we’re past the point of literal climate denialism. Even the fossil fuel industry, which has known about the dangers of climate change for decades now, has a plan for transition. In fact, one could argue that when it comes to being prepared and having a plan for the inevitable transition that climate change has forced upon us, the capitalist class is much, much more organized than we are on the left. Why is this the case?  Well, the answer is kind of implied in the original question: it’s a matter of organization. And right now, the left largely unorganized. In this episode, we’re going to explore the problem of organization in the context of climate action and ask how we on the left can begin to get seriously organized in a way that will allow us to actually have a set of concrete, scalable programs that can be put into action at a moment’s notice.   To do this, we’ve brought on two guests. Jodi Dean is an American political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state, and and organizer with Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL. And Kai Heron, is a lecturer in Political Ecology at Lancaster University in the UK. Together Kai and Jodi authored the piece, “Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition: Organization and Anti-imperialism in Catastrophic Times,” published in the journal Spectre. Further Resources: Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition: Organization and Anti-Imperialism in Catastrophic Times Upstream: Capitalist Realism with Carlee Gomes Beyond Capital Toward a Theory of Transition by István Mészáros Upstream: Fully Automated Luxury Communism with Zarinah Agnew and Eric Wycoff Rogers Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm Ende Gelände Walter Mignolo Frantz Fanon Amilcar Cabral Thomas Sankara Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution by Walter Rodney Upstream – The Green Transition Part 1: The Problem with Green Capitalism José Carlos Mariátegui The Red Nation / The Red Deal Hugo Blanco Climate Strike, by Derek Wall Upstream: What Is To Be Done? with Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante Common Humanity Collective Party for Liberation and Socialism (PSL) Palestine Action US Answer Coalition Palestinian Youth Movement Shut it Down for Palestine Thank you to TK for the intermission music and to Carolyn Raider for this episode's cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert Raymond This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

This episode of Upstream is brought to you by EcoGather, a holder of space between stories. EcoGather offers guided learning journeys and free weekly online EcoGatherings that foster conversation and build community around heterodox economics, collective action, and living as a part of the natural world. To learn more, visit ecogather.sterlingcollege.edu. One of the things that a party enables is a line of battle, a set of shared commitments, and I think we need that for climate change. What if there was a clear left line that either an international of Communist parties or one Leninist party was able to fight for and defend, we would be able to actually make a difference in the struggles that are happening and unfolding. But we can't

make a difference right now because of the kind of generalized fragmentation and just, I don't know, real sense that we shouldn't have a combined and centralized left. It's not only that we're fragmented, it's like people don't think that a unified left is actually people don't think that unified left is actually necessary. They think that in fact, like small, divergent, multiple things is a preferable form. But that's just like trying to take an advantage

out of the situation of broader incapacity rather than to actually figure out how we need to solve it. So in sum, I think the party is a way to approach having the same kinds of power that the capitalist class have. If we don't combine, we will forever be fragmented, separated, and picked off. You are listening to upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Rehm.

Transition is inevitable. We're past the point of literal climate denialism. Even the fossil fuel industry, which is known about the dangers of climate change for decades now, has a plan for transition. In fact, one could argue that when it comes to being prepared and having a plan for the inevitable transition that climate change has forced upon us, the capitalist class is much, much more organized than we are on the left. Why is this the case? Well, the answer is kind of implied in the original question.

It's a matter of organization, and right now, the left is largely unorganized. In this episode, we're going to explore the problem of organization in the context of climate action, and ask how we on the left can begin to get seriously organized in a way that will allow us to actually have a set of concrete, scalable programs that can be put into action at a moment's notice. To do this, we've brought on two guests. Jody Dean is a political theorist and professor in the Political Science Department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York State, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL. And Kai Herron is a lecturer in political ecology

at Lancaster University in the UK. Together, Kai and Jodi authored the piece, Climate Lendingism and Revolutionary Transition, Organization and Anti-Imperialism in catastrophic times, published in the journal Spectre. But before we get started, just a quick note. Upstream is entirely listener-funded. We couldn't do this without the support of you, our listeners and fans.

We just launched our Patreon in February, which is a great way for you to support us if you can. Plus, there's a lot of great bonus content already there and more that you'll get access to. We will continue to produce at least one bonus episode a month, usually it's more, and we also have a variety of thank you gifts at different tiers, including our You Don't Hate Mondays You Hate Capitalism stickers. Please visit patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast to sign up. The link is also available in our show notes.

This support helps keep upstream sustainable, and we're also still fiscally sponsored by the non-profit Independent Arts and Media, so if you'd like to make a one-time donation, please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Also, if you can, please go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and rate, subscribe and leave us a review there. It really helps us get in front of more eyes and into more ears. We don't have a marketing budget or anything like that for Upstream, so we really do rely on listeners like you to help grow our audience and spread the word. Thank you.

And now, here's Robert in conversation with Jody Dean and Kai Herron. Kai, Jodi, it's great to have you both on. I'm wondering if you could maybe both start by introducing yourselves and telling us a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to do it. So I'm Jody Dean. I teach political theory at Hope Art and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. And I'm also an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation. And before that, I was involved in grassroots climate campaigns around pipeline struggles up here in upstate New York. And that's actually how I got to know Kai, but I'll stop there and let Kai pick up.

Yeah. Hi, thank you for having us on the show. I'm a lecturer in political ecology at Lancaster University in the UK. I did my PhD work on one of the movements that Jody studied. I did my PhD on anti-fracking protests in the United States. In the expectation that they would be heading towards the UK, I'd been involved in environmental movements in the UK for about 10 years at that point. Yeah, so it's through environmental campaigning that I came to academia and that we came to

write this piece. Cool. Yeah, thank you both so much for that. And yeah, so in the piece, Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition, I'm going to start with a quick quote. So you write, a transition of some kind is unavoidable. It cannot be said enough. Transition has become the question of our times, both for capitalism as compounding ecological crises start to eat away at the fiction of capital's compatibility with human and non-human flourishing, and for radical movements and revolutionaries. So I'm wondering if you could talk about why you decided to write this piece and what you were

ultimately hoping to communicate and why you felt like this piece really needed to be written? This piece is a sequel, a follow-up to another piece that Kai and I wrote about climate Leninism, where we were really concerned in part with the ways that too many on the left avoid the proper questions of scale and really avoid the state. And it's these avoidance of problems of scale that actually end up having real organizational effects because for many on the left, the most obvious ways to address climate change are local efforts. But that's a little bit like, I don't know, it's like a fantasy world to think that if even everybody in upstate New York changed their light bulbs and turned off their lights and never ate meat, that the climate catastrophe

would be averted. The scale of it is so much bigger than that that we have to take that into account. So that was one of our concerns. And then following from that is, well, how do we get from here to there? And there's a way that, again, the left, particularly we're thinking the radical left, is behind the capitalist forces, even all the reactionary forces, in that they're posing questions of how to address climate change on a global scale, right? In all their bad and evil ways. But they're at least thinking about that. And the left has a big problem with doing that, unless it's the doom and gloom, oh, it's

already the end of the world. Let's just learn how to be fossils or something. Yeah. So that Jody's answered it pretty comprehensively for us, but I'll fill in another part of the puzzle, I think, which for me, it's a kind of a generational thing. So it's about when I came of being politically conscious, right? I came up through the anti-austerity movement in the UK, and then through, as many of us did, the Occupy movement,

which was heavily influenced by Mark Fisher in the UK and then later elsewhere in his notion of capitalist realism. And there was this general perception around that time, you know, this is the idea that it's easier to imagine the end of the world and the end of capitalism attributed to Jameson and also to Zizek. And it became a kind of common sense among the movements I was a part of, you know, that this was the case

and that we needed nevertheless to keep fighting, but that it was really inconceivable to see how capitalism could end. And then without being, I can't really periodize it precisely, it's difficult to periodize this, but sometime around 2016, maybe with Corbin and Sanders, that began to decay and fall apart. And so we began to get people, you know, campaigning for Sanders under the name of socialism, or under Corbin

under the name of socialism, and we began to get books like, you know, books about the Green New Deal, or around fully automated luxury communism, Aaron Bostani's book and so on and so on. And I had a kind of, once this was great because we were no longer stuck in capitalist realism, we were imagining worlds outside of capitalism. But at the same time, we jumped over the problem of transition. So we weren't addressing the problem of transition head on,

we were just envisioning utopian futures outside of capitalism, or finding other ingenious ways to avoid transition, like the end notes collective were hugely influential in the circles I was in. But they just said transition is not a relevant problem. It's about immediately communizing the means of production, social reproduction. Don't talk about transition, it's a Leninist thing. And they're right there at least. And that we should be just moving on with communization initiatives. So this is that right. So there's that sense that we're returning to a question that is fundamental. And then there's the part Jody's already said, which is that capitalism is really good at thinking transition. So we really wanted

to bring attention to the left that we're lagging behind in many respects and that we can't afford to. Right. Yeah. And so you do talk in the piece, you do argue, right, transition is inevitable. And, you know, it's, transition is inevitable and it's simply a matter of what that transition will look like. And you describe the current capitalist path towards transition of some kind, sort of towards like an eco-partide kind of future. So I'm wondering, what has the capitalist response to climate change been? And what can we expect to see if we continue down that path?

We can think a little bit about some of the lack of progress or whatever we want to call what they've done at the cops. And one way to describe those could be climate imperialism in so far as even the measures that are presented as a kind of progress, like this giant trend, I don't remember what they call it, you can correct me on this guys, some kind of giant global transition fund that's supposed to have a hundred billion dollars to help the so-called third world countries, but who will face the brunt of the, and the initial brunt of a climate disaster that they were not responsible for causing. But a lot of this is in the forms of loans, which means increased indebtedness and increased forms of dependency.

So it's actually within the spectrum of really climate imperialism. And so this is why for me thinking with Kaibok, climate Leninism has been so important because some of the categories that we will think with with Kaibok, climate Leninism has been so important because some of the categories that we will think with include imperialism as the epoch in which we are located, right? An epoch of finance capital, of monopoly capital, of the territorial division of the world, of international kind of capitalist alliances, conglomerates, modes of association, through which they kind of organize themselves and organize the world, you know, for the benefit of imperialist powers and capital accumulation. And so I think one of the ways that we see capital responding to the climate crisis is

in forms of increased indebtedness, increased vision of the world, and something I think we'll talk about more, you know, in a little bit is state violence and territorial violence that we've been seeing in really horrific ways over the last four months. And I think that that's really that kind of imperialist response to anti-colonial movements and movements against apartheid. Literally, we're going to keep seeing this kind of state violence. Yeah, let me come in exactly. So the first thing, yeah, capital is leading a kind of transition of sorts, but it's also important to think, I think it's important for us on the left

to think about it being a conflictual and internally differentiated transition. So there are, to use the language of, you know, like Andreas Ma, there is still fossil capital in the world as an invested set of interests and there's green capital. And at times they're antagonistic and it's worth thinking about how and in what ways. And at times they're not, you know, BP,

beyond petroleum that rebranding, right? There's, they're often the same forces as well. But in general, capital is rowing in one direction, which is perpetuation of imperialism. And the phrase we use in the paper is eco apartheid, which is something that we take from a few scholars and I've thought about a bit since. So I'll name them because it's worth reading these people. So Samir Armin talks about a global apartheid system. Ali Kadri uses the phrase of a

global apartheid. The South African political theorist, Nyasha Mboti also talks about global apartheid. And then Harsha Walia does excellent work on climate apartheid. It's not a separate notion from imperialism. In fact, I think they're compatible and you have to think about them together. But it does emphasize a couple of things, right?

One is a massive reorganization of capital on a global scale to invest in green capital and green accumulation or green forms of indebtedness like the loss and damages that Jodie was talking about. Another is the militarization of borders, right? So Catherine Bestamoon was written about globalized military, a part of militarized global apartheid.

It's the name of her book. So let me, I'll give a few kind of examples. The obvious examples are things like electric vehicles, right? In the global north, our transition not away from having personal vehicles towards commonly owned public transportation, but instead each of us owning an EV, the lithium of which, as people have written about extensively, is extracted out of somewhere else perpetuating imperialist dynamics. I think we also need to be wary of things like carbon credit schemes.

The UK at the moment is lifting a lot of productive land out of being agriculturally productive to offset the emissions of capital accumulation and put the burden of food production onto super exploited labour and land. Another one actually today, just an interesting one that I was reading about and a friend of mine told me about, Tuvalu is going to, is having an election today. It's an island in the Pacific with 11,000 inhabitants. And they are under threat of water salination from rising sea levels. And Australia has offered them 280 visas a year to save them from going under the ocean in return for essentially their sovereignty. So it's a colonization of their land, their resources,

and their diplomatic relations, which matters because Australia doesn't want Tuvalu to move its diplomatic relations away from Taiwan and towards Australia. So all of this is about imperialist power dynamics and plays on a global stage about resources and hegemonic control of imperialist green transition, the we call equal apartheid,

or green imperialism if you like Yeah, thank you both for those responses. And so I'm wondering yeah, we talked a little bit about you know, the capitalist response and Before we get into sort of climate Leninism I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the limitations with the current strategies on the left to bring about change You know things like mass demonstrations, which we've of course seen a lot of in the last three, four months, shifts in consumption, which you mentioned briefly as well, and various fossil fuel divestment campaigns and so on. So I actually was thinking about this.

I went to reread our paper and when we wrote it, we had a lot of debate about it and I think that we went a little bit more in the direction that I was pushing. We should have gone more in the direction Kai was pushing, which was to be a little bit more generous to the multiple forms of strategy on the left and to recognize how those strategies are important and can be fit together. And I tend to like to go for the jugular too quickly in an insufficiently dialectical way. And so, so now I want to answer a different question.

I want to say what can be positive about them, in part because of the last four months of solidarity struggles for Palestinian liberation. And I think one of the ways that mass struggles fit together, and the reason that mass struggles can be important, is they train people to be brave, they train people to come together, they train people to fight back.

And any one demonstration is not going to be adequate. Even a whole cycle of demonstrations may be inadequate, but they move the bar and they've strengthened people and made them brave. And so I think that we can't imagine a response to agro-apartheid that doesn't have mass struggle in it. And so we need to recognize how all mass struggle in fact can reinforce mass struggle as like basically, you know, more weights on a scale or more force, right? It just can continue to build. It may not build linearly, but it's a form of practice. And I think the same thing actually with any of the struggles of the left, that they can be understood and should be understood as building in as

components, not as ends in themselves, and not as isolated or separate actions. And that part of a climate-leninist approach is actually linking these, building these, helping these be present, kylites to use the expression, I think, composing the revolutionary subject, composing the revolution. And so the more that these different parts can be not just thought together, but understand themselves together, the stronger we are. And I think actually that's what we've seen on the anti-imperialist left over the past four months, in a way that we can only hope will bring it into the genocide and the occupation. That is beautifully put. So I'm just just gonna repeat it in a different way. And I think it's, yeah, exactly that.

So there are some limitations with some strategies. We could go into those, but I don't know. I'm tired of critiquing. I think most people on the radical left know that consumerism is not the solution and changing our consumer habits. I say it as someone who's been vegan for more than half of my life now.

I know that that's not a revolutionary act, right? I do it for different reasons. But mass mobilization has important effects. I really like the emphasis on it being brave. You know, the bravery of doing that. I live in quite a small town now. People go out every weekend on demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine and they face insults, threats and intimidation as a result.

But they've learned that the more of them are on the street, the braver they feel, the stronger they feel, right? And that has important consequences in all kinds of ways, in measurable ways. So that's the first thing to say about that. The other is, I think, Jodi, you touched on it already, but I'll say it again, there's maybe in terms of the environmental movement, my consistent bugbear now is that it is presented that the environment is presented as a separate issue to other issues, right. So we campaign about keeping within 1.5 C, which is just not going to happen anyway. And it's very, very easy to get depressed and think, well, we're powerless to act on these issues. They're so big. It's climactic. How do we deal with this? Right. Fine.

But, you know, literature around say, for example, the environmentalism of the poor, this kind of stuff has shown that very often there are material differences we can make that also relate to the environment. So things like fighting for better public housing or public transportation are things that workers need, you know, in the here and now, but are also linked to environment. Or in the UK case is retrofitting, like our bills cost loads, they would cost less if we had good insulation, but we don't. So that's an environmental issue, that's obvious.

Where I'm headed is to say that standing in solidarity with Palestine is in fact also an environmental issue, right? The powers that are oppressing Palestine, upholding the Zionist entity of Israel in the Middle East are some of the same powers that are blocking direct and immediate action on climate change. And so recognizing that and building a coalition of forces or composing a subject that can intuitively make those links between Palestine liberation and environmental issues so that I don't have to go on a podcast and say it. Is why we organize and why we fight on environmental issues, I think.

Yeah. So one thing I really love about your piece is that it addresses a question that's often papered over by a lot of different proposals. Like, you know, we talk about needing communism and we can talk about that all we want. But the question about how we get there is not really discussed, I think, as much as it should be. And so you go through many strategies and tendencies on the left and outline their limitations. And if folks want to learn more about those, they can definitely check out the piece, which I highly recommend that they do. But I also want to read a quote from the piece here and ask you to give us an idea of what your vision of transition is. So I'm going to read this quote here and then ask you to sort of reflect on it. So you write, the problem of transition makes itself felt through a proliferation of post-capitalist imaginaries.

Collectively, we have imagined green new deals, degrowth futures, a red deal, a small farm future, fully automated luxury communism, half earth socialism, decolonized feminist horizons, agroecological matrices and more more. Yet each of these jumps over eschews or delays the problem of transition. How do we get from here, from a world on fire, to there, to a world slowly but surely regenerating from centuries of violence, plunder, and exploitation? What is our strategy? What are our immediate tactics? This is a problem that can't be avoided.

And so as you yourselves ask in the piece, if neither anarchism nor social democracy are up to the task, then what are we left with? How do we get to eco-communism? The way to get to eco-communism is through climate-leninism! Or eco-leninism. I like climate-leninism, right? Leninism is through climate Leninism or eco-Leninism. I like climate Leninism, right? Leninism is always the answer.

But this can be a little frustrating to talk to a Leninism, like, well, of course, Leninism is the answer. So why? And I think there's several basic problems. We've already mentioned the issue of scale and addressing the climate crisis at the proper scale. One of the key problems of transition is building political will, right?

The will to scale, the will to, enact the kind of change, the will to seize the state, the will to dismantle capitalism, the will to fight back completely against eco-apartheid. And building that political will is not easy. I mean, I think that's, you know, we've known this for like over 100 years. It's the 100th year since Lenin died. So that's kind of appropriate here, the ongoing challenge of building the requisite political will to make the changes that everybody knows are necessary. I mean, that's part of the issue of transition is once it's the case that the strong majority

of people know that global heating is happening and that everything is continuing down that road, what do you do? I mean, it's not just a matter of like, oh, if only people knew, right? It's not just this question of not knowing. It's a question of the will to make the changes that are necessary. And then that is a matter of political organization, which is why climate Leninism presents itself as, I mean, solution is a little too facile, but let's say the name of the location of the problem as a matter of organization and the generation of political will in the context of imperialism.

So I think that the question is the organization question, building organizations that can scale or organizing the movements that are already there in a way that makes strategy actually possible. Again, I want to co-sign all of that and again add just a few things. When, definitely when I write with you, Yodi, but when I write in general, one of the awkward things is you write and it's like you've put down a position and you do, but you also hope that it's a conversation and a dialogue, right?

So we write quite assertively and stridently and I stand for that. That's a very leninist thing to do anyway We should be doing that and making our claims But we also I hope get some kickback and feedback and people start thinking and challenging it So one I've got a few answers to this question one of them they seem contradictory, but I don't think they are one is That's the question right? How do we get to eco communism? What's the transition if we get people that far and they disagree with the Leninism stuff, come at us, that's great. I'd love to hear what you've got that's going to be more persuasive or more compelling. So one thing I hope to get out of this was

ask that question, right? And so people like Istvan Mezros wrote an amazing book called Beyond Capital Towards a Theory of Transition, which is really worth reading, despite the fact that's like a thousand pages long, but it also takes very seriously this idea of transition, which is really worth reading, despite the fact that's like a thousand pages long, but it also takes very seriously this idea of transition, but then doesn't answer how we get to transition. And I think that's fine, because he's doing the work of thinking it, which we need to be doing. So that's one way we get there. The other is just looking at history and study. It's a boring answer, but it's an important one, not just Lenin, but the broad anti-imperialist tradition. So we call it climate Leninism, but climate Leninism isn't Lenin, right? It's a boring answer, but it's an important one, not just Lenin, but the broad anti-imperialist tradition. So we call it climate Leninism, but climate Leninism isn't Lenin, right? It's a massive movement that was most active and often most forceful in anti-colonial struggles. So we

need to be reading from and learning from those. And then, yeah, I can just co-sign what Jody said. So the party, the question of scale and thinking at global and meaningful scales, the question of the state, a principled anti-imperialist position, something that, you know, is just objective reality has made this argument for us in a way that it hadn't when we wrote the piece. But if you're not talking about anti-imperialism now, what are you doing? It's been there in the Lennist tradition for ages. It makes sense that it's the repertoire we speak from. Or Jody, I liked how you put it, the space from which we think the location where the problem can be answered, whereas if you start from somewhere else, it seems like it's unanswerable. I want to keep on thinking with Kai on this. Maybe this is just the world of social media,

but I have been a little bit disturbed that there are some on the sort of environmentalist left environmentalist Marxist who have not agreed that anti-imperialism is a primary concern for a global climate movement and That I mean it means Strategically, it strikes me as a huge mistake in addition to like they're just politically wrong, but strategically, we recognize this as a global challenge. We know that with every degree of warming,

over a million people are displaced. We know that chaos and revolution are the global horizon. And to act as if, oh no, we can just, you know, organize, you know, electrical workers in the United States, that's all we need to worry about. It's bad politics. It doesn't really address the possibilities of say organizing workers in countries in the global south

and having that be compatible with very strong borders, horrible politics towards migration and continued exploitation. Right? There's a way that organizing workers, if you're not anti-imperialist, can actually facilitate eco apartheid rather than attack it. And so one of the key issues around climate Leninim as this name for addressing the question is that kind of recognition. Echo fascism is a real thing. And we have to combat that as well.

And an anti-imperialist vision is crucial for that. Yeah. So continuing the thinking together. You know how Marx says his famous line of capital is kind of reproduced behind our backs. There's this idea that we reproduce or build eco-apartheid behind our backs in an environmental sense if we aren't actually putting this front and centre. So Jodie, I think your example is great. I think Ender Galender is really disappointing.

They were a darling of people like Andrea's mom, and they just haven't spoken on this issue. And okay, so the German left has all kinds of fraught histories, but I think it's frankly unforgivable to not make those connections. And so groups should be called out for this. Particularly, mom himself is great on that. Like Graham Honest at the forefront, he's great, but you're absolutely right on that. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm sure he's equally dismayed about the situation. But they were the vanguard in a way of a climate movement in Europe, and they're really showing their limitations at the moment, unfortunately.

Just for any listeners, I'm going to try my best to throw some of these references into the show notes so that you can follow along. I'm wondering what role in Leninism, specifically climate Leninism and anti-imperialism when it comes to climate change. What role does decolonization or land-back efforts have in that conversation? You want to start with this one, Kai? Oh, I mean, what role does I mean, it has to be central, right? But I do think we need to think very carefully about what decolonization means. So can I start there by staking out some territory?

There's a certain kind of popular version of decolonisation that goes nowhere near the Marxist tradition or then Leninism in general. So people like Walter Magnolo, if you're in academia, you'll know that name. And if you're not, you probably won't. But you will know maybe people like Franz Fanon, if you're not in academia, who was also in favour

of decolonisation but read Lenin, Marx, and spoke about stretching them into new situations and new territories for decolonisation efforts. So people like Amal Kaabral, Thomas Sankara, Walter Rodney, these people were Leninists and they were principled in favour of decolonisation. So those things are fundamental. You mentioned land back as well. Land back is an indigenous demand for land. And there's often this perception that Marxism and indigeneity are in opposition. This is not true. There's a long and deep history of indigenous Marxisms. Jose Maretegris is a shared favourite, I think, for Jody and I, of people who do

this work in Peru, of linking indigenous theory in practice with Leninist, Marxist, you know, theory in practice towards decolonization. So I think this is a fundamental and central part of a Leninist tradition, a fundamental part of anti-imperialism, that is again missed in these kind of economic, just build your trade unions in the global North

position around environmentalism, you know, like a green industrial revolution. It isn't thinking about land back. And I would just make a plea for it to be right in the center of environmental politics. You're listening to an upstream conversation with Kai Heron and Jodi Dean. We'll be right back.

It's raining on me I don't want it to stop I don't want to breathe ʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻʻ� I want to be cold And I want it to snow so bad I hope your flames don't grow I wanna be buried in snow I hope your flames don't grow I just want to be cold, I don't want you to know. That was I Want to Be Cold by the Microphones.

Now back to our conversation with Jody Deane and Kai Herron. Before the break, we were talking about the important role of decolonization and land back in the transition movement and in revolutionary left politics more broadly. And I just wanted to shout out, before we moved on, the Red Nation, the indigenous group that put out the Red Deal, which was mentioned in your piece. And the Red Deal is an action plan for decolonization. So anyone who's interested in, and that should follow up with the Red Nation, if you want to learn more. They're principled Marxists and they have a podcast and a website and a whole program. So I'll put that in the show notes as well.

It's going to be a long show night, but it's going to be a good night. Yeah. Yeah. That's when you know it's a great conversation. So can you talk about the limitations of the base building strategy, which you mentioned in the book, if maybe you could talk about what that is. And then some of the gaps in the strategy of dual power. So yeah, maybe if you could first explain what these are for people who

may not be familiar or who might need a refresher and then explain the limitations as you outline in the piece. Yeah, sure. So I was also rereading the piece in preparation for this. And it's interesting returning to your work and thinking about the places where there were struggles in the past and lines to be drawn and maybe where they're not there anymore. I think this is one of them, but it's worth thinking together about maybe what happened to it and why. So, for those who weren't familiar, base building is a political strategy that was advanced,

I suppose most notably by a group called Marxist Center, by Philly Socialists and by the DSA, Communist Caucus. Marxist Center is now defunct, and that's part of the problem here. And this theory was very popular before COVID. So one thing here maybe is that post COVID, people aren't back on the streets and doing this kind of work. But the basic idea was that, look, unions are weakened and atomised, we don't have socialist power and trade unions. We are foreclosed from taking an electoral strategy in the United States for certain, and perhaps we're definitely now in the UK as well. And so we need a way to base build, rebuild a kind of mass group or base around socialist principles and ideals.

Kind of goes back to the notions around like, serving the people, serving communities around, say Maoism and the Black Panther Party. And so that could be things like working class sports leagues. It was very big, there's debates, there are lots of debates about this online. It could be education sessions, it could be cultural events, maybe food and donations.

And then the idea is to kind of win over workers to a kind of revolutionary cause as a result. So that's what base building is. Dual power that was then aligned with base building in some of these debates, I think it's a different thing, but there's a lots of debate. I just think it's fundamentally different.

And I think people like Hugo Blanco, who's a kind of Peruvian Campesino revolutionary, is quite good on dual power. He's like, it's not a goal. Dual power is a step you go through on the way towards revolution. So it's when the hegemonic power starts to break down and you're building your own forms of organization and power.

And at a certain point, there's a situation of dual power that kind of come into tension and hopefully you beat them. But I think some of the base building stuff took dual power as kind of the goal, right? Well, no, we've won when we have people dependent on us and that we've got our own forms of power and that kind of gets to my problems with it, which was that a lot of people put a lot of effort into doing good day-to-day work supporting their communities, which we should never say is a bad thing to do. But then it was very hard to extend that much further. So people became dependent on those

services that were being provided. But then how do you go the next step? How do you scale that to go back to our question to something that's more meaningful, larger, and can address this issue at the necessary scales? And there was a tendency in some of these movements for the politics to disappear in favor of serving people directly. So I'm thinking of tendency unions in the UK. They were very popular at a certain point before COVID. And it became more about, I don't know, smashing the landlord, you know, fixing that broken back door, literally that kind of stuff. Over, like, we're building a socialist organization to seize control of how we reproduce ourselves from capital and there was no effort to try and bridge that gap because if you start on the seizing control of capital you lost some of the people they thought they wanted to base build

and so on. So there's a real tension and contradiction there but yeah and then I think this is more or less fizzled out when you post COVID era. I think that's great, Kai. I'll just add a little bit on this. So it's not, as Kai was saying, it's not like the specific practices of the base builders are wrong. Let's say that's the theory of change or the political horizon, that's the problem. So they're symptomatic of neoliberalism's evisceration of the institutions of the working class, of communities, of social life. But in some weird way, I don't know, I kind of think of some of the base building things as like, you know, the poor leftist NGOs, the kind of strategy is kind of meet social

needs. And then like an NGO, the more that capacity grows, the more you become dependent on conventional institutions for acceptance, cooperation, funding, access. And it's like, it's like their material reasons that the politics dissolves is the orientation was never about, oh, we need to build a revolutionary party for organizing a diverse multinational working class for the fact that revolution will happen. Right? That's not even, that's not part of it. The politics is always ends up becoming secondary. And I think that's really, it's hard. A lot of young activists come in wanting to be base builders and wanting to do mutual aid because that's what they've heard. That's what they've seen, you know, out on the internet or whatever mutual aid because that's what they've heard. That's what they've seen on the internet or whatever. That's what you're supposed to do.

And the idea of political organizing, political education, that becomes really hard to transmit. Like, well, what do you mean by politics? Isn't that like a free lunch program or free breakfast program like the Panthers did? It's like, no, that was a means to connecting with the people. And so there are different means of connecting with the people. And we will never solve the problems of capitalism under capitalism, no matter how good-hearted we are. It might be like a succinct way I'm going to try and think about putting this. So the Leninist model is something like you need to engage with politics, right?

You go through the politics to have a social revolution, right? And that includes the state. Whereas if you like the base building model, just kind of takes the politics away to try and make social betterment, right? And you see like, if you don't have the politics, you're just left with mild social change. You need the politics in there for the social revolution part to be a revolution and not just be like sports clubs. Sorry to be that basic about it, but it's really fundamental that politics is in command of the way you strategize and think.

You know, Derek Wall has a very nice book, Climate Strike, and there's many things that I find helpful and agree with, but at the end of the day, his strategic orientation, he puts a lot of faith in base building. And he says in a kind of interesting way, it helps build activist culture. But actually, activist culture is not the same thing as organizing the working class, organizing across diverse communities. It's almost like creating like a little, I don't know, a little cultural subgroup rather than building political movement in a politically oriented way.

Yeah, thank you. That's all really, really fascinating and really helpful. And I like the way that you characterize it as base building. We're not criticizing it in and of itself but simply thinking about it is a strategy and it's limitations in and of itself and I like how you said bridging the gap between sort of things like base building and the politics and one thing that I really like to is a friend of the show and comrade Brett O'Shea was on a few months ago and he was talking about this exact thing and how when we focus all of our efforts, like you were saying on some of that Tenants Union work in the UK, oftentimes we're on our back foot and we're

playing defense and we're playing defense and before you know it, everything else sort of melts away and that's all you're doing. There are some examples that I think are different than that. I spoke with someone here in the Bay Area from the Common Humanity Collective that does work with DSA actually, and they work with the Tenants Union. And she told me that they have a lot of issues and that they're struggling with it,

but one thing that they were trying to do is in this organizing work at the Tenants Union, they're also trying to, and not in a secondary way, but try to pass out information and build political awareness among people so that it wasn't just about, like you said, fixing that backdoor. It was being all tied in

to this larger political project. So yeah, I just wanted to share that example too. I don't know, this was a couple of years ago, so I don't know where they're at now. Oh, I'm glad you are. That might be a crucial part of the question. It might be, but it's important to raise the examples that are successful just as much. Bay Area has very particular cultural legacies, dynamics, and rental economies that I can see

doing extremely well in those situations. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Okay, so I'm going to read another quote from the piece as we sort of start to close out here. So the quote is, the challenge of transition thus pushes us toward that form of political organization that endures, scales, supports a collective consciousness and enables coordinated action. Lenin's theory and practice point to such a form. The party. The party form is a specific response to a specific challenge, namely the imperative

of preparing for a situation that can never be fully predicted nor determined. The left was unprepared for the financial crisis and great recession in 2008. It was unprepared for successes in 2011 and thus unable to defend and extend them. It was unprepared for the COVID pandemic, a planetary ecological crisis from which no leftist power had the capacity to build. We no longer have the luxury of spontaneity. If climate change is not to intensify oppression and accelerate extinction, we have to build and join organizations adequate to the challenge of transitional thinking and acting.

So, I'm wondering if you can reflect on that, if you can talk about the party, and I know Jody, you specifically are a member of PSL, but I'm wondering, yeah, if you can talk about the Vanguard party and the party form and just kind of how that fits into your whole piece and your whole argument. Since I mentioned I was in PSL and you mentioned, I'm gonna use just a PSL example. Our Marxist-Leninist party, so we have a party line and we have a highly disciplined cadre. We knew what to do on October 8th. We didn't have to debate it. We were going to be out in the streets

for Palestine. Full-fledged Palestinian solidarity. There was not going to be a question. It was not going to tear apart the leadership. And if you just kind of think about what would it have been like if, I'd say in the United States, but you know across and I'm gonna mention this across the global north Because I think the responses were differently But let's say across Europe in the UK in the United States if there was a clear left understanding of what immediate demands should be regarding the COVID virus What if it immediately it had been you know full-fledged support for factory workers that they get complete salaries immediately everywhere across the board.

They're not forced back into work. What if there had been like in the United States with no healthcare, a full fledged, the response to this has to be an end to private profit for healthcare and full fledged health benefits for everyone. What if it had not been these, like I was shocked when I learned that in Italy,

in the places that were spread, where it was spreading, and there was allegedly a lockdown. In fact, all factory workers were going on public transportation regularly to work. Like that was essential work meant you die for the state and you die for capitalism. So like what if there had been a way for an international left to know immediately what

to do, to know immediately what to say? Now it seems like a bit of a pipe dream, but that's in a nutshell I think one of the things that a party enables is a line of battle, a set of shared commitments, and I think we need that for climate change. Like for example, it's not the case that there is a line on these, you know, in the United States these stupid forms of hydrogen and, you know, these hydrogen green energy, but they're not even green energy. They're in clean energy hubs that are being used and it's

part of the Biden plan. But it's actually terrible. There's not a clear global line around the left on things like natural gases. Fracking is a complicated question, it shouldn't be. Nuclear power maybe makes sense as a complicated question, but what if there was a clear left line that either an international of Communist parties or one Leninist party was able to fight for and defend. We would be able to actually make a difference in the struggles that are happening and unfolding.

But we can't make a difference right now because of the kind of generalized fragmentation and just, I don't know, real sense that we shouldn't have a combined and centralized left. Right? Like it's not only that we're fragmented. People don't think that unified left is actually necessary. They think that in fact, like small, divergent, multiple things is a preferable form. But that's just like trying to take an advantage out of the situation of broader incapacity rather than to actually figure out how we need to solve it. So in sum, I think the party is a way to approach having the same kinds of power that the capitalist class have.

If we don't combine, we will forever be fragmented, separated, and picked off. I don't need to say much after that, Joe. You know, waving hands in solidarity, I don't need to say much after that, Joe, waving hands in solidarity or anything. But I do think it's, I guess one thing, yeah, I often think about a lot of the debates that happen online, it would be so much better if they didn't happen online. Like, it's like, you know, like we have to use online forums to have them where the whim of the algorithm, you can be read publicly and it makes the level of disorganized. It would be much better if we could have camaraderie disagreements about something like, let's say,

nuclear in a space where we could then settle on a position and move forward. So that's one thing to echo. And the other is for all of the... I don't know if the audience is probably mostly US-based, but the ruling party in the UK is the Conservative Party. They've had, I cannot count how many leaders in the last three years, but they have a certain kind of understanding

that they are rowing in the same direction, that they are a party that represents a certain faction of capital, and that if they split entirely apart, the Fascist Reform Party to their right is probably gonna swooping and take their position. These bourgeois parties, in other words, understand the role of collective good, if you like, solidarity or discipline in the interests of capital far better than some parts of the left.

And I find that really worrying and quite disturbing. They know that that is a space where power can be built, retained, knowledge can be transferred. You can train up future generations of people to be in your party. And they do it excellently. And yeah, it's really depressing to be in a situation where we don't quite seem to grasp that point on the left. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I couldn't agree more with all of that. And I've got one thing to go really quick. I want to clarify one thing. I am not saying that we should have bourgeois parties. I am. Steve Wright said they take a different form, but it just shows that there is, having that

space for those, that coordination is definitely impactful politically. I wanted to add one small thing about this. We're talking about discussions, debates. We mentioned maybe thinking through as a, let's say, a Leninist party, thinking through questions of nuclear power, for example, like without it being like an online Twitter rediscussion. I think one of the advantages of being in a party and thinking as a party is when we take positions on things, it's positions in relation to action. It's not kind of

abstracted questions of, you know, oh what do we think about X or Y and some kind of generic, like some sort of, I don't know, like the online left will will debate completely esoteric things that you don't need to debate. Like it doesn't matter if you agree or disagree this because you don't have any capacity to act around it. There's no political body that's having to act strategically or tactically or answer that question. And because we have real questions of tactics and strategy before us, we actually need bodies that are capable of having debates and then acting in accordance with the outcome of the

debates. You know, there's that famous learning quote of like politics happens in the millions or whatever. I find on the social media thing, the other thing is it's very easy to abstract away the numbers. The numbers of people is not very clear. And if you don't know the numbers of people that are doing the thing, you can't really think strategically.

So when someone says like, you know, what do we do? It's like, well, how many of you are there? Like if there are five of you, my advice is gonna be very different if I really need to give you advice on this, you know, than if there are like, obviously 10,000 of you. Like, your power to act is different as a result

and the way you will think strategically is different. And if you're not in a party, you can't do that. You can't go, we have 200 cadre in this town. What can we do to mess things up? Right? And so it's just, yeah, it drives me mad. Oh my God, that's so funny, Kai. I was in a discussion with comrades recently

and there was a lot of really engaged debate over the action that we were gonna do and should it be this and should it be that? And then it was like after 30 minutes, it's like, well, who's available? And in fact, nobody could go. Yeah. So as we close out here, just have one more question for you both. What would actually building this party look like for us here in the United States. And I know that there are parties that have already started building this, right? So I'm not suggesting that there aren't, but I think mostly what I'm trying to ask of you is maybe, you know, like, what can people do

today, tomorrow, next week, this year to either start building a party, to join a party, or to get involved. And yeah, I'll leave it there. Go to liberationnews.org and look at the PSL program. And I mean that, I've been a little tiny bit joking because it's such an advertising thing to say. On the other hand, I mean it kind of seriously. If people think that we're not going to get anywhere with that organization, you have to join an organization.

Just like full stop period. If being in a militant party is not one's cup of tea, they're other organizations. But it strikes me that the problems we face are so extreme that it's not much to ask to give up at least half your life to solving them. That's just what it is, and that's what's required. So, and then let me say something, because I'm a kinder both academics. You know, that's not the only thing we do, right? We're organizers and activists,

but we also make our money to survive, sell our labor power to higher education institutions. Intellectuals can be a huge problem, right? to survive settler labor power to higher education institutions. Intellectuals can be a huge problem. Intellectuals think that what they bring to the struggle is critical reading skills. Well, really what you need are people who are going to make banners, who are going to arrange the chairs, who are going to hand out flyers, who are willing to listen, who want to meet people where they are.

So in some ways, like, kind of, and this is going to sound harsh, but like, people need to get over themselves. And if they recognize, like, the reality, the critical reality that we all talk about all the time that it is really real, then to see the only way we address it is through organizations that we devote ourselves to. And that kind of devotion means, you know, a little bit of self abnegation, a little bit of putting ego, you know, checking ego aside of realizing that you will always learn more actually than you'll teach. So I think that that's what people need to do. They really have to join a militant organization and

Do it and devote themselves to it. I'm glad you said in the United States Probably I mean so my my wife's from the US I lived in the US for a while But it is a question based on space and where you are So yeah, think about this concretely where you are and the people you're with but we can also give the feedback like you know The advice I Jodie gave I think applies fully so I have a bit of more abstract things like that myself. One is obviously political education, but like that is very easy to say. I also mean the right political education.

So yeah, brush up on anti-imperialist traditions and learning this work. I mean, you know, that's an ongoing thing that we should all be doing and I assume people listening to this are doing anyway. Join a party or local organization, right? It's not just a work of changing the world around you, Join a party or local organization, right? It's not just a work of changing the world around you, it changes you as a person, right? That's critical.

Revolutionary work is work on the self as much as it is on society. And if you don't have an organization that you're experiencing that in, you think differently about the world, if you're thinking as an individual. I think this is becoming more pressing to me. I don't know how either of you feel about this. But for me speaking openly about your politics, I was reading Mao's combat liberalism again, right? Because I think we're in a kind of McCarthyite era at the moment, where if you speak up in any kind of way around, for example, Israel, Palestine, there are real material repercussions that people face as a result of doing that. But it only works if we stop speaking. So I think speaking up openly, not holding back on your views

and being forthright about them is actually the best defense in that situation. And I say that as someone who has come under threats and intimidation as a result of doing that and yet continues to do it because it is important that we do that work and learn to defend and elaborate communist politics on that issue and elsewhere in ways that people were one over two as well.

Right. So I think that's critical. And right now I'm going to say it again. We've said it plenty but support Palestine. Right. It is a primary contradiction in global capitalism evidently and increasingly so. So that means things like boycott, divestment and sanctions. Look into that. Look into how you can get involved in it where you are. It means supporting groups like Palestine Action in the US. They're a new group in the US. They started in the UK trying to shut down arms trades. If there's any near you, even if you can't take that risk, maybe you're, you know, you're a carer or whatever it is, donate funds to support the people who are going on the front lines and stopping the sale of arms. I think you could do that right now. And my final one maybe is, I don't really care whether people feel hopeless or doom or optimism

in climate politics. I find that whole thing very boring. But act, right? Don't feel that you can act and change the world, do something and realize that politics doesn't happen incrementally, it happens in leaps. So we might feel hopeless and how does creating a banner make a change in the world? But things happen rapidly and quickly and we need to be in a position, as Jodie said earlier, to act when they do change. And for that, you need to go back to a party, join an organization so you can act. I'd love your answer so much, Kai. And I want to just add another advertisement, particularly because of your emphasis on that.

Everyone should be all out for Palestinian liberation right now in the US. And I guess there's also Canada, because the groups include the answer coalition and the Palestinian youth movement and others. I won't go through all of them. Have a pretty much a regular shut it down for Palestine announcement. And so we have almost every week all across the country and in much of Canada, there are demonstrations so people can look on social media for the shut it down for Palestine actions. If they're in a place where there's

not activists around them, there's small things that they could do. They can flyer. They can flyer in their area. They can wear a kafia in public. That can be a brave action if you're on your own and you're in a place where it doesn't feel like you can express these views. I think, you know, when Kai's like, you need to speak up, like we're in a McCarthy era, that actually makes a huge difference that the consciousness has been changed, has changed dramatically around Palestine in the last four months. The isolation of the United States and Israel has become more and more clear, and particularly with the really wonderful work of South Africa in bringing the genocide case to the ICJ, but that now it's clear

that Israel's on notice on its, and that it's publicly clear and acknowledged by an official body is absolutely crucial. So people can take small measures if they're not an area where there's a group, and they can even, you know, even getting two friends and standing outside with placards. That can be where it starts. And one week, there's three of you in the next week, so it's 10. Yeah. Beautiful invitations. Thank you so much. No action is too small. Just a quick anecdote before we close out.

I'll probably cut this and let your voices end the actual interview. But there's a high school that I live close to and there's a walking path that I walk on every day. And a couple months ago, I saw a little sticker that somebody put up that was like, I forget exactly what it said, something about raising awareness about how this is a genocide against Palestinians. And then the next day it was sort of torn off and there's like, you could just see the remnants of it.

And then the next day a new sticker was right back over it. So. The battle is right there. And lots of people walked down that path. So I was just like, yeah, every time I walk by now, I'm like, is it gonna be up? Yes, it's still up. That's a great example.

Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. I think I think you should keep that story on there. I think it's really good or, you know, record another version where we're not interrupting, but yeah. Okay. Yeah. Maybe I'll leave it up. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Kai Heron and Jody Dean, co-authors of Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition, Organization and Anti-Imperialism in Catastrophic Times published in the journal Specter.

Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to the microphones for the intermission music and to Berwyn Muir for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. This episode of Upstream was brought to you by EcoGather, a holder of space between stories. EcoGather offers guided learning journeys and free weekly online EcoGatherings that foster conversation and build community

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