Episode 245 – Decolonizing Our Minds with Fadhel Kaboub

Macro N Cheese – Episode 245
Decolonizing Our Minds with Fadhel Kaboub
October 7, 2023

 

[00:00:00] Fadhel Kaboub [Intro/Music]: The historic polluters, typically in the Global North will buy carbon credits from a developing country’s carbon market. So, the idea here is that they’re literally buying a license to continue polluting. They’re not reducing their emissions.

By 2050, which is ‘the day after tomorrow’ in the climate calendar, there’ll be more than 260 million people displaced because of climate events. The majority of them are in the Global South. There’s more than 110 million just from Africa alone.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is none other than Fadhel Kaboub. Fadhel has been on here many times. Fadhel is still an Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University and is the president of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. He’s been all around the world, in particular in Africa, where he’s now in Nairobi. And It’s a joy to have Fadhel on here because the subjects that we at Real Progressives and Macro N Cheese in particular, have been focusing on are directly on his radar. He is the guy that I need to speak to on this. And we’re talking about the just transition. We’ve talked extensively in the past about Global reparations for the Global South from the Global North. But we’re going to look at what we call ‘just transitions’. And we’re also going to take a look at a few of the things that are being passed around as if they are solutions, when in fact they’re really more like permission slips to do bad things. So without further ado, let me bring on my guest Fadhel Kaboub. Welcome to the show, sir.

[00:02:46] Fadhel Kaboub: Hi, Steve. Thanks for having me back on the show. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:02:50] Grumbine: Absolutely. I have missed you. You give me my center. So

[00:02:55] Kaboub: Thank you.

[00:02:57] Grumbine: when I start going off into outer space, it’s because I haven’t had enough time with Fadhel. So, I really do appreciate you making time for me today.

[00:03:05] Kaboub: Likewise. Thank you.

[00:03:08] Grumbine: You’ve been doing some really important work and I want to put a exclamation point on this. We’ve had Ndongo Samba Sylla join us several times here recently, speaking about the African debt crisis and also about some of the history of the African debt and went through the history of Thomas Sankara, really amazing.

We got to learn how corporations predate and extract from Africa. A lot of the work that has been going on has been done through this capitalist lens, and everybody’s trying to find ways of skirting and ignoring the issue, moving on as if these things aren’t really happening. And now looking at these carbon credits.

Why don’t we start there? Why don’t we start with the games people play within the capitalist space, and then we’ll work through the just transitions.

[00:04:01] Kaboub: Well, I’m glad you mentioned the carbon markets thing, because it’s been pushed lately as the main or one of the main solutions to climate change and climate finance, when in reality it’s a false solution. And my colleagues here at Power Shift Africa and other African think tanks and organizations put together this recent paper specifically on this.

And I encourage all of you to look it up later and we’ll put it in the show notes. It’s called Africa’s Carbon Market Initiative. And the subtitle is “A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing”. And what we mean by that is that this is presented to us as a solution to climate finance for communities on the frontline, for developing countries.

And it’s supposed to be a thing to reduce carbon emissions somehow. But when you look at what ‘carbon credits’ are and what carbon markets are, you realize that it’s the following: so the historic polluters, typically in the Global North, will buy carbon credits from a developing country’s carbon market. So the idea here is that they’re literally buying a license to continue polluting. They’re not reducing their emissions.

But now the flip side of it, is that every time you talk about a ‘market’, you’re talking about middlemen, you’re talking about people in the middle who do two things. One is the trading aspect, which is in financial markets. The other one is in the establishing of the market locally and actually monitoring the process of establishing this market. And that’s also another group of middlemen. Typically wealthy, powerful middlemen.

So you make those individuals rich, because they’re the winners in this process. We have not reduced the pollution. Yes, the buyers of those carbon credits, the historic polluters, they have to pay a cost. It costs them money to buy these things. So it’s a cost of doing business for them. And because they tend to be dominant, powerful market players, when the cost of doing business goes up, what do they do? They pass it on to their customers.

Many of their customers are actually in the Global South and they’re paying for it indirectly. When it comes to the communities on the front line, where these carbon sequestration projects are designed and designated, they tend to be the people who are the most vulnerable in developing countries and rural areas, pastoral communities that are now displaced from their ancestral land, from their pastoral land.

And their livelihood is cut off because we’ve designated this particular area or this particular forest, a ‘carbon credit territory’. And the disturbing thing about this, is that in the African continent, it is estimated that once this carbon market is fully established, that we’re talking about privatizing, essentially more than 5 percent annually of landmass, designating it as carbon markets. A country like Liberia already did this, signed a deal with a foreign company, a carbon credit company, to essentially privatize 10% of its entire territory designated for carbon credits. So if this is not a form of neo-colonialism, I don’t know what is.

So this is the problem. Because all of these countries who are struggling with massive debt issues, with climate events – and every year we go to COP, the conference of the parties meetings every November, early December – and developing countries are told repeatedly, you’re not getting climate reparations.

Yes, we know you didn’t cause the climate crisis. Yes, we know we in the Global North caused the climate crisis, but we are not going to pay reparations. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to invent a market mechanism called ‘carbon credits’, and you’ll get crumbs, literally crumbs. And financial contribution from the historic polluters.

We will not reduce emissions. We’ll pretend like we’re reducing emissions, but literally, we’re selling these permits to continue pollution. We’ll make the middlemen rich. We’ll displace communities. And that is all you’re going to get. And if you go back a few weeks ago, when John Kerry, the U S climate envoy, was asked before Congress, ‘will the United States pay climate reparations to developing countries?’… his answer was “absolutely not”.

So, that is the reality that we’re dealing with. And sorry to use this metaphor. It’s like when you’re lost in the desert and there’s no water, no food, you’re going to die, right? You’re told, to save your life what you’re supposed to do, is drink your own urine. And that’s a survival mechanism.

This is exactly what we’re dealing with here in the climate space. We’re saying you’re not getting anything. You’re going to have to settle for crumbs, essentially drink your own urine and be happy that you’re alive. And that should not be acceptable on moral, ethical, or political grounds.

This should not be accepted by governments in the Global South. This should not be accepted by voters in the Global North, whose governments essentially are implementing this Global strategy. We should call them out. And The Guardian recently, and I’ll send you the link so we can put it in the show notes, did an investigation on the top 50 projects for carbon markets.

These are supposed to be the best of the best. These are the models that we’re going to scale up. And they did an investigation to see if this is actually greenwashing, or if there’s actual positive impact.

They couldn’t find a single piece of evidence in these top 50 projects, that this is actually making a positive contribution. In fact, they estimated that 60%of these projects, or something like that, don’t quote me on the exact number, was essentially straight out greenwashing. Another 17 or 18%, about 20% couldn’t really be fully determined, it’s like questionable to say the least. And then the rest was, there’s no positive contribution that can be noticed.

So we’re talking about a fraud on a Global scale that governments are selling to the Global South, because they don’t want to admit the historic responsibility of the historic polluters and pay for actual climate reparations.

So that’s the context of the climate crisis. And everybody’s familiar with the IPCC report and other reports showing that we are stepping on the accelerator, when it comes to all of the fossil fuel extraction that is causing the climate crisis. When what we should be doing is, number one, stopping any additional fossil fuel infrastructure. Right now we’re actually at a pace in the last 10 years or so on average, roughly sometimes 500 billion, sometimes up to a trillion dollars of new fossil fuel infrastructure added annually.

And 80% of the new fossil fuel infrastructure, by the way, is in North America. Between the US and Canada. Just so we know who’s responsible for stepping on the accelerator. So that’s the first thing we should do, is stop adding new infrastructure, stop building stranded assets. And the second thing is, sit down like reasonable people and say, ‘how are we going to phase out this massive industry, very, very rapidly?’

And that’s why I always refer to the initiative that many of us support, it’s called the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty Initiative, which is designed specifically to do this. And it’s an initiative now that’s been supported, endorsed by close to 10 countries, mostly small island states, as in government policy.

We have hundreds of cities around the world, including cities in the US, that have passed city council resolutions endorsing the treaty. Hundreds of Nobel Laureates, scientists, faith groups from all over the world, have called on their sovereign government to sit down and negotiate the phase out of fossil fuels, with a just transition.

Recognizing that some workers will be displaced. Some communities will be displaced. Some countries that are heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports, especially developing countries, they need a just transition. Countries that are locked into the fossil fuel economy in the Global South, and don’t have the fiscal capacity to leapfrog into renewable energy infrastructure, they need a just transition. Frontline communities and oil sites that have been exposed to pollution and cancers and disease and socioeconomic neglect, they also need a just transition.

So that’s why we talk about ‘just transitions’ plural. I mean, it’s a broader concept, but we’re talking about specifically, what do we mean by ‘just transition’? For whom, and under what conditions? And that’s all embedded in the Fossil Fuel Non Proliferation Treaty initiatives vision, with all of these pillars put in place… so that we can actually transition to a new era.

[00:13:44] Grumbine: It’s one thing to understand the economics of what the currency issuing nation can do. It’s another thing to talk about voting. Ultimately, our governments have to be aware of the science, and yet they’re not doing anything about it. Somewhere, someone has power over government that is blocking logic, reason, and our ability to survive.

Why is it that our governments aren’t taking action? If you could just vote your way out of this, Fadhel, we would be there. Something is not making sense to me. Why are we not taking massive action? Why is John Kerry, of a Democrat administration saying, “We’re not paying reparations”? I don’t understand. Can you help me?

[00:14:37] Kaboub: Well, because he thinks that the US Federal Government is broke. The US is going to shut down the federal government because there’s no money. That’s what the ‘sound finance’ framework does, to the country that has probably the highest degree of monetary sovereignty in the world. The country that has the largest fiscal policy space and the largest potential fiscal policy space, is the United States. The country that can actually afford to pay climate reparations is the United States, first and foremost.

So, there is obviously a lack of understanding of the economics that is needed, for climate change. But also we’re talking about power here, the power of the fossil fuel industry in the United States, and around the world. And when you come from an economics perspective that doesn’t understand how you could, or should interact with powerful corporations, then you lay down your weapons and you surrender to the power of the market. And that’s exactly what the US is doing, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats.

But to answer your question more directly, about why are we not doing this and why do we keep digging ourselves deeper into this mess – and you know me, I’m not a diplomat and I’m not a lawyer, so I can freely criminalize people, without people saying, ‘well, that doesn’t sound like a diplomatic answer’ – to me, it’s one of two things.

If you accept the science, and read and understand the science that says ‘you need to stop adding fossil fuel infrastructure and rapidly phase out’, and then you realize, ‘well, we’re adding a trillion dollars worth of new infrastructure almost every year’, then it’s one of two things…

You’re either duping investors with a fraud, selling them stranded assets: assets that eventually we need to give up because we have to eventually leave it in the ground and transition into a clean energy era. So, if you know that, and you’re still building assets and selling financial instruments, packing them into pension funds and university endowments and people’s retirement funds, then you’re committing a financial fraud.

If it’s not that, then you understand the science. You still don’t care. You’re still building more fossil fuel infrastructure. You’re stepping on the accelerator. Then you, as in governments who allow this to happen and fossil fuel corporations that are moving in this direction, all of them, then you’re essentially signing our collective suicide pact.

Either way, whether it’s a financial fraud or collective suicide pact, it is criminal and should be treated as such.

[00:17:26] Grumbine: Fadhel, when I look around, this feels like there are very few people that are vocally willing to risk it all to make these points. And in listening to Ndongo’s work and understanding the extraction of these multinational corporations throughout the Global South, and we’ve talked previously about the structural adjustments imposed by the long arm of the US and the IMF through these loans. Then we’ve witnessed the impact of that privatization and the opening of markets and the diminishing of the public space.

The catastrophic outcomes that that’s had all around the world. It’s not isolated. It’s everywhere it goes, it has this effect. You can see it happening in Ukraine, even right now. What do we have to do to get this word out?

You’re going to go to another COP session. You’ve got all these great meetings where you have great minds coming together to discuss these things. And yet the answer is always coming back: ‘We’ll have a capitalist solution for you. We’ll give you some loans. We’ll give you some credits.’ Things that in the end, ultimately benefit the Global North once again.

Is there any real pathway through the normal channels to make these things happen? I don’t see any of the normal natural pathways that people would like to take happening and I’m scared the clock is ticking. I don’t see, within the system pathway, to making these changes in a timely fashion that would save us from the catastrophic outcomes.

[00:19:15] Kaboub: You’re absolutely correct. And I’ll underline one word that you put in those last few sentences, which is ‘the system.’ When we talk about ‘the system’, and a lot of activists these days are talking about not climate change, but system change. What do we mean by that?

And even government leaders in the Global South are beginning to zoom in on some of those systemic issues, especially by bringing in the issue of external debt as part of the climate conversation.

And it’s because of a simple reason. The global trade, finance and investment architecture that we operate in, was essentially established in 1944, with the establishment of the global financial system. And then further deepened after the Bretton Woods meetings over the subsequent decades, but essentially, to reproduce and strengthen that initial architecture that was established in 1944. In 1944, most of the Global South was still colonized. There were only three African countries present at Bretton Woods, and we can debate whether they truly had sovereignty or whether they were still controlled by the UK at the time. So we’re talking about a colonial that was established by the colonizers.

There was no developing countries concept to think about development. So those institutions were established during colonial times to serve colonial interests. And today, if we’re going to deal with any of the multiple crises that we’re dealing with, a financial architecture that was not designed by us, not designed for us, cannot be the same financial architecture that will save us today.

Because that’s a financial architecture that failed us financially, economically, ecologically, it’s not going to be the same financial architecture that will produce the sustainable prosperity we’re all talking about.

So, that is one core component of it. And after the global financial architecture, meaning the World Bank and the IMF, both of which are controlled by the West, controlled by the US veto power, you have a series of international trade agreements culminating eventually in the establishment of the WTO, the World Trade Organization. That again, established the rules of the game, not in favor of the Global South.

So, when you talk about addressing the climate crisis and creating the fiscal space for climate finance, for climate adaptation and mitigation, it’s not going to come out of the existing system. Especially if the existing system tells you governments in the Global North are not going to admit responsibility or foot the bill.

There’s this thing called the market. And there is philanthropists and there is financial institutions that will channel and scale up climate finance towards the Global South, maybe on concessional terms with no plan to address the structural issues that have prevented those developing countries in the first place, from being able to finance their own development, to finance their own climate action.

So that puts the question of the debt on top of the list. But unfortunately, even the current conversations in the Global South about the question of external debt is still limited because they’re still talking about a little bit of relief. They’re talking about more favorable terms, meaning better interest rates and less painful conditionalities. They’re talking about restructuring the debt, which is stretching out the payments.

But nobody’s talking about what is the engine that actually produces and accelerates the external debt, and those are the structural deficiencies that we’ve discussed on this show before, and many people in the MMT community are familiar with.

And those are, the lack of food sovereignty, Africa imports 85 percent of its food today, not by accident, by design, and we can talk about why. The lack of energy sovereignty, the fact that even a country like Nigeria, the biggest exporter of oil in the continent today imports 100 percent of its gasoline from Europe. Gasoline that is illegal, by the way, to sell in Europe; as if it matters where you burn the gasoline, in the Netherlands or Nigeria.

And number three, the fact that developing countries have been locked in the bottom of the value chain, either specializing in purely extractive industries with no value added or an assembly line, low value added manufacturing.

And you take the three together, it produces a structural trade deficit. When you have to import your food, your fuel and your manufacturing is deficient. And with the trade deficit, your currency is weaker relative to the dollar or the Euro, which means anything you import the next morning is going to cost you more.

You’re literally importing inflation that immediately puts countries in the South in a defensive position, trying to protect the most vulnerable by subsidizing food and fuel, which is unsustainable when you do that after several decades. And also forces their central banks to try to stabilize the exchange rate. And the way to do it is to borrow dollars in order to keep the currency as stable as possible. And that starts the vicious cycle of the external debt.

Because next year you also have a food deficit, energy deficit and manufacturing deficit. And fast forward 5, 6, 7 decades, you have massive unsustainable debts and you have massive conditionalities imposed on your economy, and now you can’t even prioritize investing in health or education, let alone investing in climate adaptation and so on.

So there’s the recognition now in the Global South that we can’t talk about climate, without talking about development, without talking about alternative energy sources, and without talking about the debt. Which means talking about the Global financial architecture that got us into this position.

And that’s why in this report that we released a few months ago, the Just Transition Report – which we’ll put in the show notes, you can look it up at justtransitionafrica.org, it’s available in English and French – this report essentially tries to link those conversations about climate policy, energy policy, and development policies, and highlighting the importance of just transition, coherent, comprehensive strategy from an African perspective.

This report is written from an African perspective. And when you talk about justice, then we underline justice in the just transition. Every time you talk about justice, you’re talking about power. So you have to understand what the geopolitical power map looks like, and has looked like in the past and what it will look like moving forward. Because these are long term transformations we’re talking about.

So from an African perspective, when you look at the world economy, there’s clearly three major economic blocks that have long term strategic visions for themselves, economically, politically, militarily, and so on. That’s clearly the US, the EU and China. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a long term strategic vision for yourself. Every block, every country has the right to have its own vision for its economy, for its geopolitics and so on.

And every country also has the right to use economic incentives and its economic diplomacy, to nudge everybody else in the world to where they want to see them on that map for the next hundred years. So there’s nothing unusual about this. And that’s why we wrote this report urging the African continent and its leaders and its people, to formulate our own long term strategic vision for the next hundred years ,and to position ourselves on an even footing with all the major blocks.

So we have a right to our vision. We have a right to use our resources and whatever capabilities we have, economic diplomacy, to nudge everybody else and carve a space for ourselves.

Because this is the problem: if you don’t have a vision for yourself, I guarantee you, you’re already part of somebody else’s vision. And when it comes to Africa in particular, the role that these three major economic blocks see for the African continent can be summarized in four points. Number one, they see us as the place for cheap raw materials. Number two, they see us as the place where their industrial output can be dumped for our consumers. Number three, they see us as the place for low cost, exotic tourist destinations. And number four, they see us as the place where obsolete technologies and assembly line manufacturing, that is no longer needed in the Global North is delivered to us as development, as aid, as trade, as partnership, as technical assistance, to lock us at the bottom of the value chain. So that’s the vision that the rest of the world has for us. And that’s the role that we played in colonial times, by the way, in post colonial times.

This cannot be the role that Africa plays for the next hundred years, if we’re going to see justice, in this concept of ‘just transition.’ And this is not about Africa dominating the world and turning into the empire, the Wakanda, whatever. No, this is really about rebalancing the global economy and repositioning ourselves to deliver for the needs and aspirations of the people of this continent.

And this is the beauty of this, this is going to be a win-win for everybody if we rebalance the global economy. Because as we invest in food sovereignty and renewable energy sovereignty and Pan-African industrial policy that moves us away from the bottom of the value chain, moves us higher into the value chain, wages on the continent will go up and that’s good for workers.

But when you do that, when you rebalance the wage structure in the Global South, guess what happens in the Global North? All of a sudden the jobs that used to be outsourced are no longer acceptable in Africa. So we will not take those jobs, keep them at home.

The threats and the pressure that workers in the Global North are constantly facing from their employers, that if you don’t accept these lower wages and working conditions, your job will be shipped to the Global South.

But if the Global South no longer wants those jobs and is settling for those jobs, because it has its own industrial policy on its own terms, then those jobs will have to remain in the Global North. And that will strengthen the workers position in the Global North, to fight for better wages and better working conditions, and that’s also a win-win for everybody.

So that’s why when we talk about justice, I always say, this is about power. Power, when it comes to workers. Power, when it comes to national sovereignty being asserted and Africa reasserting its position on a Global scale. It should be a win-win for everybody. And when it comes to Africa’s industrialization, the beauty about this thing is that it’s transformative from an economic standpoint, but it also happens to be the perfect climate set of policies to implement. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that.

We have all the strategic minerals needed for high tech industrialization, but especially for renewable energy manufacturing. Not for export, but to deploy on the continent to deliver electricity to the 600 million people who already don’t have any access to electricity today. To deliver clean cooking technology and infrastructure to the 970 million people on this continent today who are, on a daily basis, inhaling toxic fumes, because there is no clean cooking technology. And it’s mostly women and children who are exposed to this.

So the potential to manufacture and deploy clean energy technology, clean cooking technology, is both a development transformation solution, but it’s also climate solution. It’s a public health solution and it’s a gender balance solution.

So we’re winning on all fronts. We have the resources. We have the market at scale. We’re not talking about a small market here. We’re talking about 970 million people exposed to toxic fumes. That’s close to a billion people who will be your customers, if you deploy the technology and deliver it at low cost or subsidized cost, and transform people’s quality of life. And that’s millions of jobs of manufacturing on the continent.

Again, we’re not talking about export oriented growth, which is the old model that locked us at the bottom of the value chain. We’re talking about leveraging our resources and capabilities and the market potential at scale, to deploy transformative technologies on the continent. And that’s how you industrialize. You don’t industrialize by locking yourself at the bottom of the value chain and pretend you have containers going in and out of the country, and that’s industrialization. No, it’s not.

[00:33:13] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a non profit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:34:05] Grumbine: I don’t see how this can sustain itself. From a dialectical perspective as a worker, I know what I’m fighting for. And then the split personality of the capitalist class is looking for low cost of everything and maximum advantage in the marketplace. And so the dichotomy of labor and capital is once again, back in the forefront.

But you have this thing that’s outside of that, in the government space. And the government is acting like an extension of capital. I see zero support for labor. And so when you talk about power and just transitions, it’s presuming that governments’ desire is to bring about justice. The evidence suggests that that’s not the case.

And so it makes all the sense in the world to do these wonderful things for the Global South, it makes even more sense to do it for labor. But we’re talking about the intentional creation of a class structure that leaves workers at the bottom of the food chain. And they see the Global South as one big buffer stock of labor, at the lowest possible cost to extract value.

How does that change? I don’t see the pathway. And I guess what I’m looking for is, how do you take these ideas that should be so self evident, that it almost doesn’t require a conversation.

[00:35:46] Kaboub: Yeah.

[00:35:48] Grumbine: Help me understand what to do with this.

[00:35:50] Kaboub: No, you’re pointing to the right issues. And to be honest, colonialism wasn’t like a violent daily confrontation with people who clearly objected to it. Colonialism was also colonizing the mind and colonizing the elite and colonizing government structures. And then when colonialism left, it left all those structures in place.

So we still have to decolonize education, decolonize the mind, decolonize institutional structures in sovereign states. And the sound finance aspect that we referred to earlier, when we talked about John Kerry and thinking the US government is broke, the US government, as a government, has abdicated its responsibility for justice and for equity and for climate action, left workers behind, it’s like a lost battle.

So how do you restore that? You restore it through these conversations, through activism. You educate, you mobilize, you organize, and you empower people to call them out repeatedly. Not just vote them out, but call them out, so that nobody can use the old narratives to get elected again. Or to make a point that ‘we don’t have money, otherwise we’d love to help.’

We hear this frequently from government officials around the world saying, ‘yeah, we do have aspirations for justice, we would love to, but unfortunately our hands are tied, we don’t really have money and that’s the reality.’

So who’s going to deliver the money? It’s going to be, ‘maybe if we can manage to tax the polluters a little bit, maybe they’ll let us have some climate finance, or maybe we’ll just nudge the banks and beg them to channel a lot of their lending in the right direction. Maybe they’ll listen. Or maybe these carbon markets, historic polluters will just buy a license to pollute and they’ll give you little crumbs. There’s also foundations, wealthy people, they’d give a lot to charity.’

But that’s it, those are the options. But sovereign governments? ‘No, sorry, we’re broke. We don’t have money.’

So that’s why these conversations eventually get to ‘who’s going to pay for it?’ Can we afford it? Can we afford the spending without causing inflation, without bankrupting countries?’

And those answers… you’re not going to get the satisfactory answers unless you understand the MMT framework.

[00:38:25] Grumbine: Fadhel, I wrote something and I want to run it by you because I think it fits into our conversation. If you wouldn’t mind indulging me.

[00:38:32] Kaboub: Please.

[00:38:34] Grumbine: We’re surrounded by systems. Each idea has a system that allows it to function. Each system is both self contained and impossible to extricate from the whole. Hand-offs between systems ignore that they are simply subroutines in a larger macro system.

To focus on one, you miss the whole. It is too large to process fully. But systems are how we live, operate, and function within this maze. To see past the very narrow constructs we’re allowed to consider, seems to make us appear crazy. All the while the real insanity is believing the very narrow constructs we’re allowed to discuss in public, make up the universal set of possibilities.

In fact, it’s barely scratching the surface of what we could achieve, with the love and compassion we could show one another, if we let go and understood we are one within the system.

This part is thinking of Africa in particular in the Global South – and yet we do not breathe the same air, we do not drink the same water, we do not rest our bodies and our minds in the same comforts. No, the few predate upon the many, a beautiful system destroyed by the virus we call capitalism.

The other side is beautiful. It is achievable. It is love and plenty. It is the ceasing of striving. It is found in the being of stillness, of awakenings that we cannot achieve, looking at issues the same way over and over again.

We need a new dialectic. We need to change the script to ensure that the systems function to their full potential. We are stifled and crushed by norms. Forced to fit into holes meant for others, pieces of a puzzle we keep trying to shave our edges to fit into places that we do not belong.

We are prisoners of a system that rewards our worst impulses, and forces us to focus on ego, and forget our connectivity, our life source to one another. To share and not dominate. To be one as people and not allow the darkness to consume us. Capitalism is a virus, it is terminal, it is evil, it is unnatural, it is an alien monster devouring our souls.

We must end capitalism.

I read that to you because as we’re talking about these systems, each one of these systems, Fadhel, is its own battle. And there’s a larger macro battle that we’re fighting. But all of these things become so overwhelming that you can’t see the forest for the trees. Help me put this into perspective.

What should we be focusing on, to make the biggest impact? How can we do this with so many poly crises going on at once, that are making the average activist check out? They’re making people in general, feel overwhelmed beyond their capacity to make change. How can we narrow it so we can get the best from them?

[00:41:29] Kaboub: Well, first of all, that was very well said. You’re absolutely right. We live in these intersections of systems. As you said at the beginning of your piece, ‘if you focus on one, you miss the whole.’ And we do have very talented people and movements that focus on subsystems. And very important subsystems.

Whether it’s climate, whether it’s minimum wage, whether it’s gender issues, social justice issues, all of these are so important. Both at the national and local level, but also on a global level. And we have lots and lots of these organizations.

But what’s missing is a ‘movement of movements’, that sees the whole, and acts on the whole. And leverages the power of the sub movements and the subsystems, to push in the same direction towards the same tipping points of transformation. That is what’s lacking in a lot of the work that we do.

And the other thing that’s problematic is that the majority of people who operate on a government level, on civil society level, we’re products of educational systems. And educational systems themselves, there’s a whole spectrum of ways to introduce people to thinking about the world and thinking about the system. And very often we’re trained to think about subsystems, to work locally, to think small, to think from a micro perspective.

Philosophically, there’s this thing called methodological individualism, ‘focus on the individual, change the individual, don’t think about the system.’ So, we are products, and lots of government officials are products, of educational systems that produce that kind of ideology that, you have to focus on changing the individual, the crime and punishment ideology.

So, unfortunately we’re not going to go very far if we only have a handful of systems thinkers out there on global scale, or even on a national scale. We need to have millions of people who think in terms of systems. Because those millions of people will not be only social movement builders and builders of movements of movements, but they’ll be also informed citizens who don’t take no for an answer from a political establishment that thinks that it can’t meet the aspirations. The aspirations are impossible.

So, that’s why I believe in education. I’m an educator when it comes to the classroom or actually in the public space. You need to help people connect the dots, see those connections and see how systems interface. And recognize that the struggle of hundreds of very inspiring activists and organizers and think tankers on this continent, who are fighting for a very simple thing, like access to clean cooking technology, so that we protect hundreds of millions of women and children from having to inhale toxic fumes and losing their lives at the age of 50.

So it’s the right fight. And it’s usually perceived as charity work, as health work, as gender work, which is great, you already have these three dimensions. But very few people see in that work, the potential for restoring Africa’s economic and monetary sovereignty.

Why? Because when we’re talking about 970 million people who need access to new infrastructure, new technology, and you recognize that the continent we’re talking about has all the natural resources, the strategic minerals, to deploy that technology. And when you recognize that this continent has been locked into the role of extractivism: we export the minerals to somebody else to produce cooking stoves and electricity infrastructure, and then we try to figure out how we’re going to import it for those 970 million people to save their lives.

We have too much debt. We don’t have money, so we’re not going to be able to do it. Instead of thinking ‘we have the market at scale, we have the resources, we have the human capabilities, and then say, well, maybe what we lack is actually the manufacturing capabilities.’

Then you go, as a continent, and use that bargaining chip and say, ‘we’re looking for a partner on our terms, not neocolonial terms. We’re looking for a partner that will help us establish the manufacturing at scale, so we can deploy this technology and save people’s lives and address the gender gap issues.’ It’s a multidimensional thing.

And now all of a sudden we’re industrializing, and moving from the bottom of the value chain. Typically the reaction from the Global North, from the west, is: the situation is really sad. We’ll do a GoFundMe. We’ll do a fundraiser. We’ll get a couple of foundations to really pour as much as they can, $300 million, into this. And that’s it.

But to industrialize, so that you address a gender issue or health issue, that’s not even on the map. That’s not even a solution.

But when we start having lots of people thinking systematically and connecting the dots, then you see the development of these coherent, comprehensive ideas, that allow you to knock several problems with the same strategy. And then you get the commitment hopefully, the political commitment, to back those ideas and use that as a common position. And then when we go to negotiate with the IMF for debt relief, it’s not just begging for relief. It’s about saying, ‘yes, we’ve paid this debt many times over. We have a development strategy. We have a health crisis. We have all of these issues that we know how to address, and we need to channel new, fresh financing for this structural transformation.’

But you’ll never hear the IMF impose conditionalities on a country and saying…

‘You know what, we’re going to step in and help you out of this debt crisis, but here are the conditionalities that we want to impose on you: we want you to invest in your food sovereignty, so that you stop importing food for your consumers, so that you can minimize the amount of dollars you need to spend on food. We want you also to invest in renewable energy sovereignty, and we want you to industrialize differently so that you’re not locked at the bottom of the value chain.’

You will never see IMF conditionalities imposed in this way. What the IMF usually says:

‘We’ll give you money, but we want you to cut spending on health, cut spending on education, balance your books and export as much as you can. Oh, too bad, the only thing you can export is raw material, just go for it and things will be better.’

That is the problem.

[00:48:57] Grumbine: It is. And one of the things that jumps out is going back to the systems thinking. When we devise a student lunch program and we don’t take into consideration what happens once they leave the school, we end up building something that has no chance of succeeding. Because even though we’re solving one problem, which is getting children food, we’re not solving the underlying problem that’s creating the issue to begin with. So it’s self perpetuating.

So without looking beyond just that one problem, you’re only fixing one part. And so my question to you Fadel is, within in this space, things like BRICS, you’ve got an alternative because there’s no cooperation on the other side, are you going to create the same bastardized system simply because you’re not really thinking about the way the systems flow, you’re just simply providing another predatory alternative?

It’s really frustrating to me because I feel like we build stuff. We come up with ideas that don’t follow the natural order of where that goes. If you follow what each part of this system does, and you don’t fix the other aspects of it, the thing you did fix will fail you. Because it’s still not delivering on the promise.

So we’re always chasing our tail.

[00:50:25] Kaboub: Yeah, absolutely. When you think about systems and we think about system change, we’re talking about transformation so that we can push the system towards a tipping point for actual transformation that will deliver different results. But the problem is that all of these conversations about transformation end up getting watered down by people and key players, who don’t actually want a system change.

They hijack your language, the narrative, and they say, ‘yes, absolutely, we need a system change.’ And they come up with a whole package of quote unquote “system transformation policies and tools”, but they’re actually reforms. And as Martin Luther King used the phrase, they’re actually “tranquilizing drugs of gradualism and incrementalism that don’t add up to transformation.”

And our job in this struggle is to very quickly identify who are the key players who are trying to hijack your language of transformation, change it into reforms, orderly reforms, and try to identify from all of their ideas. And they’ll try to co opt your best friends into this process. And hijack their voice and their face and their narrative, and end up serving you a whole menu of tranquilizing drugs that make you feel good. You feel like you’re actually doing the right thing and moving in the right direction.

I’ll give you a quick example. As soon as the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Motley, clearly became the world leader in pointing at the system, and pointing at what needs to be done on the climate front, on the development front and on the external debt problem.

As soon as she got it, you see all the major world leaders hovering around her saying, ‘thank you so much, we’ve been waiting for somebody like you’, essentially, ‘and we’re here to help.’

And all of a sudden, the French president is talking about reforming the global financial architecture, like he didn’t know it needed to be done before.

And all of a sudden, all the great ideas that came out of the Bridgetown initiative, Mia Motley’s work and her team, slowly became much more tame. Reformist rather than transformative.

And the whole conversation got locked into, we’re going to restructure debt. We’re going to put pressure on financial institutions to provide loans on more concessional terms. And we’re going to try to put pressure on the World Bank and all other international organizations and multilateral development banks, to channel their lending towards climate resilience and climate finance, but that’s it. We’ll give Africa a little bit more voice in international fora, so we’ll give you a seat at the G20. And now we’ve done our part.

That’s all there is. We’ll apply pressure on the IMF, maybe, to use those $650 billion worth of SDRs. Maybe we should actually use those for climate finance, even though it’s still a drop in the bucket. But that contains the conversation of the global financial architecture to that.

There’s no discussion about the international trade system and its rules, that forced countries into debt because they just couldn’t feed themselves, because the Global North is heavily subsidizing its agriculture and dumping cheap food in the Global South. To the point where we destroyed food sovereignty in most of the Global South.

There’s no discussion about industrialization in the Global South. They’re saying, ‘oh, we’ll just outsource more of the technologies and assembly line manufacturing that we no longer need. Now you can have it and let’s call that development and industrialization.’

So, we have to be alert and educated about these tactics that are used by those who have no interest in system change.

And I’ll give you an example. This example is at the international level, but there’s similar tactics used at the local, at the national level. Where you find ideas and narratives and keywords hijacked and co-opted, to produce the exact same results, and not transform or change the system. And we want more leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who can actually identify it and explain it to his audience. And call it out and name it the way he named it… tranquilizing drugs that don’t produce systemic change.

[00:55:36] Grumbine: I understand we all have different roles to play in this, but in the end, we’re talking about whether or not entire coastal areas are completely wiped out. Hamza Hamouchene wrote a phenomenal book about ending green colonialism, and the idea of sandstorms sweeping through the Middle East, 200 days of the year. Salt water coming into the main drinking water, major life and death struggles.

Years ago, you and I talked about climate refugees and xenophobia. We are talking about life and death. Because there’s so much, it’s so massive, and we’ve touched on quite a few things, why don’t you close us out with a clear message for what is at stake, and what we need to do.

So there’s no ambiguity, here’s the marching order.

That is, I think, vital.

[00:56:38] Kaboub: Well, I’ll start with the climate refugees situation, because the World Bank, not your most progressive climate organization in the world, their numbers, conservative numbers, they’re estimating by 2050, which is the day after tomorrow in the climate calendar, there’ll be more than 260 million people displaced because of climate events.

The majority of them are in the Global South. There’s more than 110 million just from Africa alone. So when you have a mass movement of people at that scale, it puts pressure on housing, on food, on jobs, on all kinds of health resources. And it creates conflict. Conflict on a scale that we’ve never seen before.

Are we prepared for that? Are we doing anything to mitigate the impact of climate change, to allow people and communities to adapt to these changes, so that we can treat people with dignity?

The answer is no, we’re just pretending like we’re doing climate action. And when we hear somebody like John Kerry, the US climate envoy, saying ‘we will not pay for climate reparations.’

And when we see the only solutions presented to us are literally tranquilizing drugs of gradualism, on a small scale actually. Then it becomes our responsibility as people, as civil society all over the world, not just in the Global South, to call it out. To work together to put forward a coherent, comprehensive pushback strategy and a coherent, comprehensive development, climate and energy strategy, that is actually transformative.

We should keep thinking in terms of transformation. What is it that we can do to transform the subsystems, to push the entire system towards a tipping point of full transformation?

And it starts with educating ourselves, educating our communities, decolonizing the educational system that all of us have been brought up into, whether it’s in the North or in the South. And with education, you empower people, you mobilize people, you organize people for system change.

System change is not going to be delivered at the board meeting of the IMF. Because the way the IMF is structured, there’s one country that has veto power it’s the United States. So the US is not going to change the IMF anytime soon.

What some people have been discussing, in this space, about system changes, ‘do we change the system from within or do we build parallel structures?’ And those parallel structures, if they’re coherent and focused and transformative, they can make the existing structures irrelevant, to the point where they have to disappear or they have to change themselves to participate in the new system, on the terms of the new system that we’re establishing.

And I’m more of the latter. I’m more on building these parallel structures from the ground up and forcing the existing system to disappear.

[01:00:02] Grumbine: This is what I talk about on the Rogue Scholar, is we must build parallel systems that allow us to amass power, that is not broken down and put on the shelf every election cycle. That allows us to continue to build and educate and create a way forward. And you just articulated it beautifully.

Fadhel, thank you so much for doing this.

[01:00:27] Kaboub: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

[01:00:29] Grumbine: You’re a visionary Fadhel. Thank you so much. All right. This is Macro N Cheese. I’m your host, Steve Grumbine. We are a nonprofit and we survive by your donations. Please consider donating to us at patreon.com/realprogressives. And on behalf of myself and my guest, Fadhel Kaboub, this is Macro N Cheese, and we are out of here.

[01:01:00] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.