Episode 329 – Stage IV Terminal Capitalism with Hamza Hamouchene

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:42

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. My guest today is a returning guest and it’s been some time and the last time we talked we debunked green hydrogen.

We debunked this concept of greenwashing the Global South for the purposes of the Global North, the predation of green hydrogen and other things that have really, really given a black eye, if you will, to the very, very important work of dealing with accelerating climate change.

And one of the things that came from that was a tremendous understanding of how in order for the Global North to achieve its targets, the Global North in turn farms out its green efforts to the Global South. Hamza wrote a great book about it and we talked at great length in the past.

But Hamza is here for a totally different purpose today and this purpose is so near and dear to my heart. I am in no way, shape or form a biologist, a scientist, a researcher or anything like that for curing illnesses or cancer or anything like that.

But Hamza began his career that way, his education that way, and we’re going to discuss his journey. But before we do that, for those of you who have not met Hamza, I’m going to go ahead and read off his bio and then we’ll get ourselves started.

Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher activist, commentator and founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign, ASC and Environmental Justice North Africa, EJNA.

He previously worked for War and Want, Global Justice Now, and Platform London on issues such as extractivism, resources, land and food sovereignty, as well as climate, environmental and trade justice.

He is the author and editor of four books: Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region, which was the book that we covered in 2023, The Arab Uprisings: A Decade of Struggles, 2022, The Struggle for Energy Democracy in the Maghreb, 2017 and The Coming Revolution to North Africa: The Struggle for Climate Justice in 2015.

He’s contributed book chapters to Voices of Liberation with Frantz Fanon in 2014 and Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism in 2016.

His other writings above have appeared in the Guardian, Middle East Eye, Counterpunch, New Internationalist, Jadaliyya, Open Democracy, Roar Magazine, Pambazuka, Nawaat, El Watan and the Huffington Post. And without further ado, I bring on my guest, Hamza Hamouchene. Welcome to the show, sir.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:03:29

Thank you, dear Steve, thank you for having me again. We had a wonderful conversation last time and I’m really looking forward for this one.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:37

Absolutely. Let me help everyone kind of understand.

I have been on a bit of a mission to make people truly take a hard look at the lack of democracy that we have in this country and around the world, quite frankly, and to understand the way that the wealthy and the rich elites, the capitalist class, manufactures consent through these kinds of elections and stuff that they couch as a democracy while simultaneously exhibiting no real characteristics of a democracy. None of the things, the issues, the concerns that people have or want covered are ever addressed.

And in that, they end up fighting battles that aren’t really real, pitched battles based on false information, fake information, fake news.

And when I found out your background as a research scientist studying cures for cancer and dealing with the environment and others, to find out that your journey took you from a PhD in this study to getting completely out of the business based on the fake knowledge that we have that we think, “Hey, these folks are actually trying to serve the root cause of the problems.” They’re interested in the actual underlying things that create these externalities.

And ultimately they’re trying to get you to do designer genetic work so that you can help rich people basically, as opposed to actually solving problems at the root. They weren’t interested in those things and the taint that that put on your sincere and heartfelt research and efforts.

And as an activist, I applaud you for standing up in the face of these things. But I want you to tell your story. Hamza, how did this all begin?

Take us through your initial journey in academia as a research scientist and how that came to be, and your disillusionment.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:05:28

For sure Steve, I want to start from the outset by saying that my story is not a unique story out there.

And I thank you for allowing for this kind of conversation to link the dots between various issues that pertain to social, economic justice, to issues of public health, and basically to talk about capitalism per se as a system of exploitation, as a system that generates inequality and injustices out there.

So I want our listeners to take that story and the things that I’m going to share not just as a personal journey, but as a story about how capitalism works. So it all started, Steve, when I was still living in Algeria, my home country.

Actually I started doing a medical degree, a medical school for two years before I immigrated to the UK where I studied biology, basically I studied molecular genetics.

And then I went and I did a PhD in cancer research, specifically the intersection between health and environment, specifically looking at pollutions, lifestyle, what we eat, the chemicals we get exposed to and their impact on public and human health.

So I did that at the Institute of Cancer Research here in London, University of London, before doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College London.

I had a three-years contract before I decided to resign from my job after six months for various reasons that we gonna go through in this interview.

But from then I started moving on slowly from that field to the nonprofit sector, specifically towards some environmental NGOs here in London, working specifically around the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of the fossil fuel industry. And I started getting more interested by environmental and climate questions.

And I used basically the knowledge and the experience and the skills that I gathered through my scientific training, either through the Bachelor or the PhD or the postdoctoral fellowship, to serve the agenda of environmental and climate justice globally, which is for me interlinked with the agenda of global social, economic justice all over the world. So this is just in a nutshell, the journey from medical school and biology towards, you know, environmental and climate activism.

I’m sure we’re going to go through that in detail in that podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:08

Yeah, absolutely. Hamza.

You know, when I think about the intersections of capitalism and its impact on absolutely everything, I think the average person truly has, it’s almost like a hidden thing. It’s almost so pervasive that it’s hiding in plain sight.

Can you describe, like guess from the onset, what drove you to get into medicine to begin with? What was it that you sought by going this path? Because it’s obviously an extremely challenging road of education and so forth.

What was it that drew you to that?

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:08:44

I could say so many things around this. The reasons or the motivations behind going to medical school.

While I was still living in Algeria and I think a lot of us were dreaming of becoming doctors.

And I don’t think it’s just the dream of some Algerian youngsters, but the dream of so many in the world seeing the medical profession as a honorable profession, serving society, making society healthy. So I was seeing it in that aspect.

But then when I left to the UK, I was more interested in advancing biological research, studying more biology and genetics. I was fascinated by genetics at the time.

And I remember exactly that was the years 2000, 2001, 2002, with the advent and the big announcement around the genomics project. And I don’t know if you remember that, Steve? [Yes] That was a big announcement, I think in 2000 or 2001, if I’m not mistaken.

[Yeah] It was a huge announcement in the US and I was in Algeria at the time.

And I was really inspired and fascinated by that saying, “Wow, humanity is advancing in a positive direction, solving the human genome, decoding the human genome. And what would that entail in terms of solving our problems, tackling the disease, tackling public health issues and so forth.”

So when I had a scholarship to go to the UK, I said, “This is what I really want to do, molecular genetics.” And that’s what I studied and I learned a lot. I loved the field. That’s what I went and did a PhD afterward, specifically in cancer research.

But as I said, the field that I focused on during my PhD is the environment and health, basically the impact of the environment on human health. And I was studying, maybe I’m going to use some technical words here, some jargon.

The field was called molecular carcinogenesis or environmental carcinogenesis.

Basically looking at what we eat in terms of diets, what we get exposed to in terms of the air we breathe, in terms of the chemicals around us, in terms of pollution, also in terms of, you know, the lifestyle that we are leading under capitalism and the impact of all these elements and factors on the development of cancer.

And while I was doing my PhD, I realized from the studies and the research I got exposed to, the wonderful professors, academics, other PhD students, it was really productive, intellectually challenging and fulfilling experience at the time. I realized that cancer is largely an environmental disease.

Of course, there are some types of cancer that are largely genetics due to the biology, due to the human physiology. But cancer is largely an environmental disease coming or resulting from the interaction of our genetic profile, our physiology with the environment.

So lung cancer, for example, is largely an environmental disease due to smoking and pollution.

As other types of cancer like gut cancer, stomach cancer, a lot of them are due to what we eat, in terms of eating a lot of meat, eating or drinking a lot, or even eating hugely processed food. Because if we look at our diet, the western diet is not really a healthy diet. A lot of processed meat, a lot of charred meat, a lot of drinking.

And this is pushed by certain vested interests. And here we go to the big agribusiness and the food industry, what kind of food they are pushing. Too salty, too sweet.

All of these things are healthy and we keep hearing about them in the news without really tackling them in an adequate and appropriate way. So I’m just trying to tell you a story here, Steve, so the listeners can see where I’m coming from.

When we reach the conclusion that cancer, most types of cancer, are an environmental disease, what that means is if we really want to eradicate cancer, if we really want to fight cancer, if we really want to reduce the number of people getting cancer within their lifetime, it means that we need to tackle the environmental question. We need to look at what people eat, what people get exposed to, what kind of lifestyle they lead. Is it healthy? Is it too stressful?

Are they eating well? Are they eating enough? Are they eating the right stuff? And who gets to decide on those questions? Because a lot of people think that we have a choice.

We have a lot of choice in terms of what we eat. But most of us actually don’t, especially the marginalized and the poorest amongst us,
they don’t because they don’t have the means to eat that healthy food. So they go to eat in chains like McDonald’s or they eat processed food or cheap food, which is not very healthy.

Who gets to decide on those questions is, you know, our ruling classes, the private sector, the corporate sector, the food industry and so forth. So this is one element, what we eat, but then what we get exposed to in terms of chemicals and pollutants is another matter.

Like, I live in London, it’s one of the most developed countries on the planet. But London is a hugely polluted city. If you go to other cities in the south, much more.

Dhaka in Bangladesh, or Lagos in Nigeria, or Gabes in in Tunisia, these are really cities and towns and areas where they get exposed to a huge amount of pollutants, carcinogenic compounds, they breathe it, they drink it in their water. Their food gets contaminated, all their lives, their land gets contaminated.

So these will be causing not just cancer, but other diseases as well, respiratory diseases, skin diseases and so forth.

If an epidemiology, the field of epidemiology can detect or go into detecting some causality between those pollutants, those chemicals and those healths.

So in many cities where there are big fossil fuel or chemical industries, we see a prevalence of respiratory diseases, cancer diseases, skin diseases. So there is almost a causality there established between these chemicals and those diseases.

So then if you really want to tackle those diseases and tackle those cancer, you need to face and challenge the responsible people or the responsible entities. You need to challenge big business.  You need to challenge the big capitalist classes, the big capitalist conglomerates.

And I’m talking here, the food industry, the agrobusiness, the fossil fuel industry, the mining, the chemical industry. These are really not interested in public health.

If they were really interested in public health, they wouldn’t have been externalizing those environmental costs to the communities living around them or just by selling those unhealthy products that we eat. So you’re coming against vested interests, really entrenched interests in the global capitalist economy.

So do we go to the roots of the problem to resolve cancer or to resolve those diseases, at least minimize them, at least do not have the scale of the disease that we have now, or we just try to treat the symptoms? And in here we’re going to touch on the big pharma, the health industry.

The health industry is not really interested in eradicating those diseases because if those diseases are eradicated, the motif of making profit is not there anymore. So it’s much better to keep those diseases going. Maybe it sounds cynical, but this is the reality. This is what is happening out there, Steve.

Steve Grumbine:
00:17:26

Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the things I wanted to bring up momentarily to tie all this together a couple episodes ago, we had a physicist join us named Erald Kolasi.

And Erald spoke about the connectedness of all things; spoke together about how energy comes from the sun and the energy comes to the earth and it activates other molecules on the planet.

And it talked about how one piece of land is producing major crops, but because they used poisonous nitrates or they used different kinds of insecticide or whatever, the runoff from that goes into the drinking water.

And so on one hand you’ve got this bumper crop of food, but on the other hand you’ve got now an external health problem, you’ve got another climate problem, you’ve got something creating algae blooms that kill off entire water systems and ecosystems that have these long reaching effects that you have to trace. You have to actually think. You can’t just say, “Hey, this equals that.” It’s like you have to follow the chain of custody.

And what you’re talking about here is that, “Hey, we’ve got this end state, which is cancer, or we’ve got this end state, which is this profit motive.”

But if you trace it back to what the original problem is, which they don’t want you to do, because if you do that, then it’s going to disrupt these influencers, these very, very strong, powerful capitalist elements that we just ignore that just fall outside of the conversation.

Except for in these circles where people have not taken the time or have the mental capacity to really trace through and understand and organize around, these things are very complex. And you see it both in the climate which you’re going to talk about as well.

But you also see it in healthcare because these externalities, you know, you’re solving one problem over here, but you’re not paying attention to the impacts that all those processes and chemicals and the waste and all that good stuff does to the human molecular structure of a human being and its ability to produce healthy outcomes. And you’re tying together yet again another chain of custody story. You’re talking about another situation where you must follow it through.

It isn’t just a simple question. Can you talk more about that kind of chain of custody?

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:19:45

I’m not sure if I mentioned this in our previous podcast, Steve, when I was talking in general about the capitalist system as such, when I was arguing that capitalism is a system of exploitation and destruction.

And clearly with the current climate crisis, it is taking us into the abyss because of the profit motif, because of the short termism, and because of the externalization of costs.

Those environmental, health and socio-economic costs are never internalized within capitalism or included in the price of commodities that are being sold there. It is always externalized somewhere else. And a Marxist, I forgot his name, said, “Capitalism is a system of unpaid costs.”

It always externalizes them somewhere else or to a section of humanity. First of all, it externalizes them to women and carers in terms of the non-paid or underpaid care and social reproduction work.

It externalizes them from urban to rural areas because we see a lot of those factories or mines or polluting projects taking place in rural areas.

And then it externalizes them from the Global North to the Global South, where we see the creation of sacrifice zones, those extractivist projects, dumping of waste, dumping of really carcinogenic compounds and carcinogenic waste, creating sacrifice zones and sacrificial people, but also externalizing those costs to nature.

So capitalism sees nature as something that needs to be dominated, controlled, commodified, so you need to extract as much as possible from it, but also as a waste sink where you can throw the waste and dump into it. And this is at the heart of the multidimensional crisis that we are going through.

Health, socioeconomic, environmental, climate, food and energy, always, if those costs were included, simply capitalism would collapse as a system. [Yes] There will be no profit for the capitalist, but at the same time there is also the labor exploitation in all of this. People are simply not happy within capitalism. If you are not happy, it means you are much more prone to disease, especially mental health disease.

And we see an explosion of mental health crises, especially in the north, not just in the north, but globally. So this is just a framing of what we’re talking about today in terms of health, because as you say, the connections are there.

And, you know, the more I think about it, the parallels between the health crisis and what happens in the health sector, what happens in scientific research, what happens in the level of biology, genetics and medicine, and what take place today in terms of the climate and environmental questions are really astounding.

Problems in those two seemingly separate sectors are just the results, or you could say just symptoms, of the capitalist exploitation of humanity and the imperialist domination of the planet. That’s what it is at the end of the day.

Just to come back a little bit to my story, because I started going specifically into the Big Pharma and the health industrial complex and what it is really about.

So I understood at the time that cancer is largely an environmental disease, but also resulting from a mismatch between our biology, between our physiology and our genetics and the lifestyle that we are leading. While we eat, we are living longer, we get exposed to much more chemicals, to much more stress and so forth. So cancer is the result of this.

And as I said, instead of focusing on the root causes of all these issues, what capitalism does, what the capitalists do is just first of all try to find false solutions. They do that also with the climate crisis. So they’re not solutions at all. Little reforms here and there.

When there are catastrophes and scandals, in terms of what those big industries, either the food industry or the chemical industry or the Big Pharma are doing, they introduce some regulations here and there and they say this will never happen again. But it keeps happening and happening.

So I always say, basically, you are treating the symptoms. You are not treating the root causes. You are not treating the disease per se. If you want to eradicate it, you need to ask the right questions. You need to have the right diagnosis.

I’m using medical language here, actually, I use that medical language when I talk about the climate crisis. [Yes] You need to have the right diagnosis.

And then when you see what is the root causes and you see what you have at your disposal, you come up with what you could do in the short term. Because in the short term you need to relieve the pain.  You need to relieve the suffering. There are things that need to be done on the spot.

So that’s why medicines and drugs are important. I’m not saying that we should give up on all medicines and drugs overnight. I don’t think that’s really realistic or either pragmatic.

We need drugs to relieve some of the suffering. But then having those drugs and medicines, they need to be within a medium to a long-term vision of going to the root causes of the problem.

Steve Grumbine:
00:25:40

With that in mind, who’s driving the ship there? Right? I’ll play the rube here for a minute, the newbie here. But what about government? Why isn’t government stopping these things Hamza?

Why isn’t government fighting for we the people? Why isn’t government making sure that people’s lives are whole?

Why aren’t they making sure with all that government R & D public money, why aren’t they ensuring outcomes and solutions instead of just capital accumulation and profit seeking?

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:26:09

There is an assumption in your question that governments, or whatever their place are there to serve the interests of the people. [Right] To protect their rights and make them, you know, live happy lives. That’s simply not correct.

Steve Grumbine:
00:26:27

You can’t solve a problem if you don’t address the root cause. And that is a fake news story. Exactly.

So I wanted to bring that up because to me, every time I hear somebody say, “We got to source the vote”, it’s like I feel like I’m talking to someone that is naive, that doesn’t understand that capital has captured these institutions. If they were ever free of capital, capital has it now, regardless of what it may be. Started out with your mind. That’s not reality.

Anyway, I’m sorry, I just needed to interject that I feel it’s such an important thing.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:26:58

I think you’re right in bringing that question. Because the more we talk about these contradictions, people would ask, “Okay, what are the governments doing if they know all about this?”

But then if you have a class analysis about the state and how governments function, you see that, yeah, they have been captured by capital. But it’s also a terrain of struggle, Steve. Like, we cannot just give up on all governments and say, “No.”
We need to pressure them as much as we can by organizing from below, by pushing for some kind of reforms, for some accountability, and by hopefully one day recapturing the state and revolutionizing it and making it really a state and a government for the people. Because what does democracy mean? Democracy right now has been bastardized and just reduced to bourgeois, western, electoral, liberal democracy.

But that’s not really.

We need radical participatory democracy, not just at the political level where people go and vote every three or four or five years, but where people have a say on their economic, food, energy, health, environmental and climate systems.

If you don’t have a direct say, if you don’t own the means of production if you don’t have sovereignty on your own resources, and I mean national and popular sovereignty. It’s not just national popular sovereignty. Local communities, workers really being involved in this, this is what we would like.

But what we have now, especially in the West, because you know, the big lie is in the West. A lot of people in the world think that the USA or the West is democratic. [Yes.] Yeah. If democracy is the democracy that they have here, okay, they are democratic. But really, people do not have a say in that economic system.

It’s the capitalist class. It’s the private sector. It’s the corporations. And this is ideological. This is a choice.

This is an ideological choice made by our ruling classes to give the reins, to give much more power and control to the private sector, corporations, financiers, to control the economy and to benefit from it. Because those ruling classes are benefiting too. There is always a revolving door between politics and big companies and hedge funds. And we see that.

So, yeah, this is an important point that people need to grasp for them to understand what we’re talking about.

Steve Grumbine:
00:29:31

So as we watch people dying all around the world from preventable diseases, I think one of the ones we talked about in preparing for this was malaria. Why in the world, when you have so many people that die from malaria, why has there not been a cure? Why has there not been that kind of research?

And let’s just be fair, the people that are affected by malaria are poor people. They’re black and brown people. They are in the Global South mostly. You are talking about it’s not profitable to save their lives.

Talk about these kinds of things for me Hamza.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:30:05

I’ll start with a very brief answer. Maybe I’ll just use two, three words and then expand. Why for decades there was no satisfactory development of malaria drugs or vaccines or whatever?

It’s simply about greed, racism and apartheid, global apartheid.

Because if this Big Pharma that presents itself as a health champion, promoting public health, coming up with health solutions, producing drugs for humanity to relieve suffering and disease, I think malaria should have been one of their targets a long time ago because millions, I don’t know the exact number, maybe hundreds of millions of people suffer from malaria in the South. But that wasn’t the priority of Big Pharma because it wasn’t white people who were being affected.

And also it’s not rich people who are affected because like they’re thinking, their logic is “There is no market for this and we’re not going to make money.” Who’s going to buy these poor people are they going to afford, I don’t know, £10,000 drug or something? No, they wouldn’t.

So they just neglected that field. And a lot of people died from malaria. A lot of people are still suffering from malaria.

There have been some new developments just in the last two, three years, but I think they are still being trialed. But then we could link it just to another recent disease, the pandemic, COVID-19. Let’s not just go to malaria.

COVID-19 impacted everybody in the world. Everybody. Yes, North and South. But there was a vaccine apartheid. There was a hoarding of vaccines in the North.

A lot of companies, a lot of countries just hoarded those vaccines. Yeah, it’s about inequality. It’s about racism. It’s about apartheid. And the Big Pharma are part of this.

And I’ll give you something else around the pandemic and those vaccines. And this is something that I knew, I got exposed to while I doing my PhD and my postdoctoral fellowship.

A lot of the research, scientific research that then goes and become medical targets or drugs targets and then they end up generating medicines. Most of it is funded by public sources like by our governments. So it’s public money.

And a lot of it also comes from charity people donating so they can help scientific research. And then what happens?

So scientists like myself in the lab, we study the problem. We study the disease. We come up with certain solutions and then suddenly this gets privatized. So some scientists create small startups to develop more, the concept that has been developed in universities, in research institutes, so then they will sell it to
Big Pharma. This is the dynamic still ongoing today.

So basically we socialize the costs. We use public funds, the millions and billions of dollars going into research every year for some private entities and some corporations to go and use that research for free to develop drugs that they gonna sell. Right? That’s what they’ve done with COVID-19 vaccines. MRNA technology that has been developed in universities and research institutes.

It has not been developed by Big Pharma. Yeah, Big Pharma played a role, but it’s a minor one. But then they will use it and sell drugs with exorbitant prices.

And our governments allow that, you know? [Sick] And you know the arguments that we should be using here and pushing here, look, health, health provision, access to health should be a public good. That sector cannot be allowed to profit from disease. This is sick, as you say. Really? [Yes.]

Then the Big Pharma, what they claim, they say, “Yeah, our drugs are very expensive. We sell them like this because we put a lot of money into research, into development and so forth.”

That’s total bullshit. Most of the money that they put it goes to marketing, to advertising, so they can convince you and me and governments to buy their drugs. That’s what they do. Most of the money that goes into research is public money.

Steve Grumbine:
00:34:43

One of the things that jumps out right away, and this is the thing that this podcast endeavors to make clear to people. Governments are currency issuers. Our taxes do not serve a funding purpose at the nation state level.

Those taxes are meant to keep that currency in a monopoly status within that country. And so a country like the United States never ever, ever waits for tax money to spend on war.

It never waits for tax money to spend on building military weapons or whatever. It never ever seeks tax dollars for any of this because this country itself creates its own currency when it spends on these things.

So what they do is they double whammy us.

On one hand, they have a never-ending fund to fund whatever it is that capital wants funded while simultaneously telling us they don’t have funds to do the things that we need to do. And so they make us go out after private foundations. They make us go after donations for saving cancer research.

All in the lie that it’s taxpayer dollars. And this is something Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were famous for. Thatcher came out and said, “There is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayer dollars.”

And this was an act of extreme austerity to make us not ask for more, to make us not ask to solve these major problems.

And so that lie has permeated every element of society. Fadhel [Kaboub] would tell you not only is it the taxpayer money myth, we just had him on, we called it tooth fairy economics.

But it’s also the big lie about intellectual property rights which they intentionally withhold and sell to the Global South. The old technology that is no longer useful in the Global North that is literally not solving the problem.

In case of health care, they’ll just let them die. “Let’s just let them die.” And they have all the money in the world has nothing to do with waiting on a tax payment. They literally could do it.

Intermission:
00:36:48

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
00:37:11

Every one of these things, from ARPANET and DARPANET to all these major scientific research are all done with public money to your point.

And then these companies end up lying about the expenditures. SpaceX is doing the same thing. Musk has gotten over $9 billion. It’s way more than that now. But it was $9 billion in subsidies alone.

And it’s not taxpayer money.

It is all brand-new money given straight to billionaires to fatten their wallet while they tell us “We got to cut costs on social services and health care and education and environmental research.” You name it.

It is the biggest scam, the biggest lie to cover up the biggest lie that you’re talking about here, which is paving the way for massive capital accumulation, exploitation and negative outcomes. I’m sorry, I just needed to insert that.

It really gets me hot and bothered because they have got us so wrapped in these lies that by allowing us to believe they don’t have the money to do these things, we just stop asking for them. We just stop believing it’s possible. And it is a lie. And anyway, keep going.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:38:17

It is, at the end of the day, an ideological choice by the ruling classes. Where they put the money in which sector, how much is an ideological choice? It is always a political choice. Yes, the money is there.

As you say, when there is a war, the coffers are open and suddenly the money materializes. We’ve seen it nowadays here in Europe. Rearm Europe against the Russian threat. Suddenly $800 billion materialized out of nowhere.

I thought there was no money. But then, you know, they’re going to justify it with various reasons.

They’re going to impose more austerity on people. They’re going to cut social protection. They’re going to cut public services. So more suffering for European people. But then, yeah, they are pushing us towards more wars.

And as I said, the global ruling classes are willing to sacrifice millions, if not hundreds of millions of black and brown people as well as white working-class people. And we’ve seen it clearly. We can just go to recent examples, the vaccine apartheid.

They were willing to let millions, tens of millions of people to die in the South. They didn’t care, right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:39:34

At all.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:39:35

We see it with the migrants. They letting them drown or if they’re not drowning them themselves in the Mediterranean, or kill them if they’re going to cross the border from Mexico to the US. And then we’re seeing it right now with the climate crisis.

I was at the climate talks in Baku in Azerbaijan last November and it was described that it is the cop of climate finance.

Finally, the Global North, the richest countries in the world, the historically irresponsible countries, in causing the climate crisis are going to cough up the money, but they didn’t. First of all, there is nothing that is legally binding. It’s only promises here and there.

And all of them, most of them are loans and additional debts on countries on the South. Look at the justice of the whole thing. So clearly they are willing to let millions of people die because of the climate crisis.

They are willing to let whole nations drown because of the rise of sea levels while they are funding a genocide in Palestine, while they are preparing for another war with Russia. So yeah, the health question that we are talking about needs to be placed within that context. We need to politicize the health question.

Why are a lot of people getting sick? Look at the root causes of the problem. You know, what you eat, what you get exposed to, the capitalist exploitation. Capitalism externalizes costs as we said. This is the problem that we need to talk about.

If you want really to resolve the health crisis, if you want to eradicate disease, if you want to reduce suffering, we need to have a conversation about capitalism. And we need to pressure our ruling classes to at least push for certain kind of reforms, certain accountability in the short term.

But in the long term, we need a revolutionary outlook.

We need a different system, I feel an eco-socialist system that cares about people, their livelihood, their dignity, that make them to make decisions about how they would like to live, what they would like to eat.

Not certain big companies like Kellogg’s or I don’t know, McDonald’s decide for me what to eat, what’s in it, if it is processed or not, if it is cheap or not. So yeah, these questions need to be interlinked, Steve.

Not just health: health, education, energy, public transport, all of these needs to be functioning public services, not in the head of the private sector, run by workers and local communities for their benefits. And obviously some of these sectors shouldn’t be making money. Why do you need to make money out of sick people?

The logic is just baffling and astounding. Why do you need to make money out of sick people? I just don’t get it. And I’ll give you another anecdote, Steve. I have a lot of anecdotes.

I’m remembering them right now.

So while I was doing my PhD between 2007 and 2011 at the Institute of Cancer Research, I told you I was working in the field of environmental carcinogenesis. The leadership of the Institute decided that our field is not useful anymore because it does not bring in money.

At the time, and I’m sure it is still the case, there was the fashion of personalized medicine.

Personalized medicine, which is basically you profile people genetically, you check which profiles they’ve got, what kind of genes they got, what kind of mutations they’ve got, and then use this information to design drugs that are really efficient for each group or each person. What would that mean for the Big Pharma who sees this as more profits, is more drugs. You produce more drugs so you can treat the symptoms of disease.

And my field was not about making drugs, not at all.

It’s about going to the root causes of the problem, looking at the chemicals, looking at what we eat, and alerting the public that these chemicals are not good, what you eat is not good.

And these are not just personal choices because these are structural issues, these are society level issues and debates and discussion that need to take place. So it is very political, right? [Very.]

So you’re gonna attack some vested interest in the chemical industry, some vested interest in the Big Pharma, some vested interest in the food industry and so forth. So people are not interested in having that conversation.

It’s much easier and it’s much more profitable to make drugs to treat the symptoms, keep the problem, keep the money coming in. And let’s not talk about capitalism, let’s not talk about politics. That is the problem with how things are being presented to us.

And I see the parallels with the climate crisis. The false solution. Look, the problem. I’m just going to make a parallel and then stop Steve, I promise.

Steve Grumbine:
00:44:42

This is how my mind operates. I’m with you.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:44:45

So the big problem with the climate crisis is the capitalist system. The global climate justice movement puts a slogan out there which is system change, not climate change, system change.

We mean the capitalist imperialist system that caused that climate crisis in the first place. And one of the biggest economic sectors generating those CO2 emissions is the fossil fuel industry, followed by big agribusiness.

You have also infrastructure and transport and other industrial sectors.

So instead of keeping the oil in the ground, like not bringing any new projects in terms of exploration, of exploitation of gas, shale gas, offshore and so forth, they are maintaining those things. They are continuing those projects. They are betting more on them. They are doubling down on extraction.

And we’ve seen BP in the last few weeks, British Petroleum, the British fossil fuel company just said, “We are not going to invest in green renewable projects anymore because they’re not profitable. We’re going to put more money and more investment in exploration and exploitation of fossil fuels.” Just imagine the craziness, all the scientists.

There is a huge scientific consensus saying if we do not reduce dramatically CO2 emissions by 2030 and 2050. We’re going into the abyss. And BP comes and say, “I’m gonna exploit.” And then Trump in the US comes and says, “Drill, baby, drill.”

And you have the Saudi energy minister two years ago declaring that “Every hydrocarbon molecule will come out.” He said, “We will be the last man standing.”

So you have these global ruling classes with the capitalist classes, with the corporate sector doubling down on exploration of fossil fuels and escalating the climate crisis knowingly and willingly.

And what they propose in terms of solutions, they bring you the carbon offsets, the carbon markets, the carbon trading, all of these are false solutions because they do not reduce CO2 emissions. They are just there to treat the symptoms. And even treating the symptoms, they are not treating it well, as many drugs in the market.

A lot of those drugs in the market do not treat the symptoms well. And the Big Pharma know it. And sometimes those medicines, they say that they’re going to do something, they end up doing something else.

Like exactly those carbon offset projects, they do not reduce CO2 emissions. They end up privatizing land. They end up confiscating huge forests and surfaces from indigenous and local communities.

And the common point between all of these false solutions, either for the climate crisis or for the health crisis, the common factor is those industries are just making money. They are benefiting from the crisis, and they’re not really interested in tackling the crisis per se. So if we leave the decision or the control of our economies, of our health, of our environment to these actors, we are going into certain death.

And I think it’s really important to say it.

It may sound pessimistic, but this is the diagnosis we are seeing now, especially in the times of genocide, where hundreds of thousands of people are being killed, where millions of people are being sacrificed because the climate crisis is not being tackled. It’s really important to say, “Capitalism is a system of death.”

When we realize this, it means we need to organize. We need to fight the capitalist system. We need to create transnational solidarities. We need to connect the dots and our struggles. So it’s not just about fighting, you know, for a climate and environmental justice agenda. It’s about also fighting for social and economic justice.

It’s about fighting imperialist wars. It’s about fighting settler colonialism. It’s about fighting for migrants’ rights. It’s about fighting the Big Pharma. It’s about pushing for public alternatives, pushing for people and workers to have much more say in our economies. That is a revolutionary project.

Of course it’s not going to happen overnight, but this is the vision. It’s eco-socialism for the future.

Where people flourish, where people are not exploited, where the planet and nature is not seen as a commodity, where people are simply happy and people do not exploit each other. I believe that this is possible. It’s not just possible. It is necessary. Another word is necessary.

And we need to fight for it at various levels, realizing that our struggles are interconnected and we need to make the dots between those issues. And you mentioned the intellectual property regime.

The intellectual property regime affects every sphere of the economy, some corporations and the richest nations of this earth,
monopolizing knowledge and trying to make money out of it and not allowing that knowledge to be transferred so we can resolve the multi-dimensional global crisis that we are going through. That’s not the way forward. That’s not how humanity should behave.

And let’s not say it’s not humanity, it’s a tiny minority that is behaving in this way and not allowing for things to be shared, for wealth to be shared, for knowledge to be shared, for different knowledges to flourish and so forth.

Steve Grumbine:
00:50:40

I have a very important question and I’m going to use something that I’m test driving here. So it may work, it may not work.

You know, I am a relatively new student trying to understand historical and dialectical materialism and trying to understand why things happen and understanding that many people today, even though in spite of all the hell we see through capitalism, have gotten a very, very propagandized view of why revolutions failed or why authoritarian regimes took over. Never once understanding the underlying system, once again not understanding the underlying problems. We have French colonialism.

And I want to take specific look at Cambodia during the Vietnam War and looking specifically at Pol Pot as he took what he thought was basically Mao’s Great Leap Forward and in a twisted version of something grotesque and unrecognizable, created a killing fields with Khmer Rouge. And on the surface you see, “Pol Pot was an awful dictator. He was a horrible guy, blah, blah, blah.”

But nobody ever stops to think French colonialism created a population that had been dumbed down and was peasantry and was simply working to produce crops of rice and rubber for French output while simultaneously neglecting their own health, their own lives, their own sustenance in general.

And then as the US came through and bombed the bejesus out of Cambodia, radicalizing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Cambodian peasants, the outcomes were twisted and contorted and just gross. So when you think about people talking about moving forward in a revolutionary way.

We are inundated with propaganda that stops people dead in their tracks thinking, “All I can do is vote for this thing. I’ve got a duopoly. I can only vote for this or that.” They don’t understand that there’s a much bigger play here.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the resistance and the way the empire has worked and the way that capitalism has worked to pollute our minds against ideas of socialism and liberation?

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:52:57

If I was a capitalist, I would do everything to make people dumb and ignorant and tell them that “There is no alternative.” And actually that’s what they are doing. Margaret Thatcher again.

Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no such thing as society and there is no alternative. This is what it is.” And this is their propaganda. It’s an ideological propaganda through their ideological tools.

They do that through universities, through teaching, through the media, especially the media, the corporate media. It’s really nefarious. Its impact is really nefarious because it does not allow you to think outside the box.

It just tells you that the status quo is the natural thing. Because when you naturalize things, people think that it has been all the time like this. No, it hasn’t been. Capitalism is a historical system.

If we can date it, maybe it has been around just 4 or 500 years or 600 years maximum. There were other systems before, not necessarily better, but there were other systems.

And I believe as the historical materialists and as dialectician, capitalism would collapse at some point. I don’t know when, maybe not in my lifetime, but it will collapse.

My hope is that we need to prepare for a better system, a system that works for people, that works for the majority of the planet. And I think it’s really important also to say that what you are doing, Steve, is a work of political education, political, popular education.

These podcasts are really important. Not just podcasts, TV programs, radical lefty TV programs, books, book clubs, workshops.

There are many people who are doing summer schools trying to target younger people, trying to target different sections of society, to educate them not in a paternalistic or in a condescending way, but to tell them about different struggles, different stories. Because let’s say in the US on the West, a lot of people do not know what happened in Cambodia or Vietnam or Algeria or Kenya or South Africa.

They just know a little bit here and there.

And it is being fed from a neoliberal or even deceptive version that does not really center the resistance of people, peasantry that you mentioned, the anti-colonialist movement, the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement. And there is hope if we go throughout history, go back just to Haiti.

Like in the late 18th and early 19th century, when Haiti erected the first Black republic, it was a slave rebellion against French colonialism.

And they are still paying for that rebellion till today because the French, the Americans and the other imperialists erected a kind of a blockade against Haiti and forced Haiti to pay reparations for the slavers. That’s why Haiti is so impoverished today. It’s because of those capitalist and imperialist forces that kept it down.

But still, it was an inspiring moment in history that inspired other movements in Latin America.

Steve Grumbine:
00:56:10

Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:56:11

Exactly. And then you mentioned Cambodia. I’ve written a piece last year in November. This is part of a Palestine liberation dossier I’m curating.

I’ve written a piece specifically looking at the struggles in Vietnam against the French in the 50s, the struggle of the Algerians against the French also in the 50s, and the struggle of the Palestinians today.

Trying to look at the intersections, trying to look how inspiring and how monumental and how historic the Vietnamese and Algerian struggles have been and how they inspired other waves, anti-colonial waves, and still keep inspiring the Palestinians.

Despite the gloom and doom around us, despite the genocidal and fascistic times that we are going through, I don’t think we can afford to just be feeling down, feeling low, feeling not hopeful. I think for me, hope is a revolutionary feeling. [Yes] In the medium to long term, things will change, but they won’t be changing on their own.

We need, as I said, I’ll keep saying it, Steve, [please do.] We need to keep organizing at a transnational level. But at the same time, it’s not just about organizing.

It’s organizing informed by theory, good analysis by good political and popular education. People need to know what is happening in the world. People need to be inspired by stories of resistance all over them.

And of course, we can go back throughout history and look at what happened, but we cannot romanticize the past. I’m against romanticizing the past and saying, “We need to do exactly as our ancestors did.”

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:54

Right.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:57:55

Because they committed a lot of mistakes.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:56

Yes, they did.

Hamza Hamouchene:
00:57:57

Yeah, they did. So we need to learn the lessons.

We need to draw the lessons where they failed, where there were shortcomings, where there were mistakes, to do better next time.

Steve Grumbine:
00:58:09

I love that. This is root cause analysis and that is the story of this conversation here. Right?

For my purposes of having this conversation, when we come into this thing, we come in with expectations. We come in with beliefs. We come in with ideas and hopes.

And when we clash our ideas and our dreams and our hopes against the current system, it can be incredibly daunting. It can be incredibly defeating. It can be overwhelming. How do we take on this leviathan? How can we take this on? And in your case, I mean, you took a very principled stand and left the field altogether.

You stayed in obviously within the activist community and working within the nonprofit sector. But quite frankly, we lost a scientist as a result of this capitalist structure, this way of doing things. And we all suffer from the system.

The system itself doesn’t know boundaries. It doesn’t know country outlines. It doesn’t know borders. It is a giant leviathan reaching around.

We cannot operate as if our boundaries are the ending of the story. To your point, it is an international struggle and it is a struggle of connected struggles.

I am curious within that space, Hamza, like I’ve been screaming for a long time, probably into a pillow, that we need to build parallel systems.

We need to build power outside of the electoral system so that it doesn’t rise and fall with every new candidate or election speech or whatever, that we need to build structures up that we can support one another. Because you can’t have a general strike, for example, without earning a general strike.

You’ve got to have the support in place. You’ve got to have the money. You’ve got to have people ready to sacrifice.

And without having those structures in place, a lot of these ideas are going to be a pop and a fizz and there’s not going to be any kind of follow through. When you think of organizing for such a massive kind of thing, obviously we have to right size our thoughts, but the problem is survival. It’s not something that can be done maybe overnight, but it’s survival.

It is the very essence of survival. And these systems are so massive.

How do we go from being overwhelmed by just the sheer size and magnitude of what we’re up against and just put the focus where it belongs?

Hamza Hamouchene:
01:00:34

Yeah, I would say simply, I think we need to globalize the struggle. Of course, we always start from the local.

It is important that our struggles and fights and the resistance is localized because we live in certain environments, right, and certain climates where we face injustices. We face inequalities. We face certain enemies that we need to fight local. But at the same time, our vision needs to be global because we are fighting the same system.

So our response to that system needs to be systemic, needs to be internationalist, and it needs to be multidimensional.

And I won’t claim, Steve, that I have, how can I say, a blueprint or let’s use a medical term, a medical prescription for how to resolve or to tackle the disease. But I have a few ideas, like many million of other people are thinking about those issues on a daily basis.

There are many revolutionary movements, there are many social movements grappling with the contradictions of their surroundings, the contradictions they are facing against the ruling classes, against colonialism, against imperialism, against various forms of crisis.

And they come up with their own programs that we need to heed, we need to learn from, but at the same time, as I say, connect those movements together.

And if I had to think about some struggles that I think will be primordial or crucial for an anti-capitalist or an anti-imperialist horizon, I would say the Palestine liberation struggle is fundamental to that. Because Palestine is not just a human rights and moral issue. And I think I’ve argued for that many times in various forum.

It is fundamentally and essentially a struggle against US-led imperialism and against global fossil capitalism. Because US hegemony in the region and beyond the Arab region rests on two pillars.

Israel as a Euro-American settler colony, which is a kind of an advanced imperial post safeguarding US geostrategic and economic interests. But also the second pillar is the reactionary oil rich monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Qatar and so forth.

And these monarchies especially, let’s say the Middle East in general, is a key nodal point in global fossil capitalism. We need to have that political economy analysis.

So the inspiring movements, especially the student encampment, the boycott and divestment sanctions, the inspiring resistance, ongoing resistance of Palestinians and other Arab people in the region against Zionism, against imperialism, I think is part of the longer term struggle. And I think we need to emphasize that within our own struggles.

If you work on climate justice and you don’t talk about Palestine, you’re missing the point. That’s what I say.

If you work on migrant questions and you don’t talk about Palestine, you’re missing the point because you’re not connecting the dots clearly, because migrants or Palestinians are being sacrificed by the same system in a much more brutal way. If you’re working on militarism, anti-militarism and peace and anti-war, and you’re not talking about Palestine, you’re missing the point.

So Palestine needs to be at the heart of our conversation because what is happening today, especially in the West, in terms of crushing and silencing activists, scholars and people daring to mention Palestine, daring to uphold the rights of Palestinians for self determination, the right of Palestinians to resist colonialism by any means necessary is not gonna just be constrained to Palestinians, Arabs and their allies. It’s gonna be generalized. Because that’s how it starts. You know, in the US with the McCarthyist period, it starts with the communists, and then it gets generalized to everybody. Everybody becomes an
internal enemy. And this is exactly what’s going to happen with these people. So we need to connect the dots.

The fight against fascism, against Trump, against wars and militarism, against genocide, against the climate crisis is one that may seem daunting, but it needs to be done. There is no other way around it. You need to have the analysis and you need to organize accordingly, connect those struggles together.

And then the other movement that I think is important to consolidate is the climate justice movement. Because the climate crisis is really pressing.

We are seeing the impacts everywhere, including in the Global North right now, with the most vulnerable and the poorest getting much more impacted. So this is a terror struggle. The climate dimension is really important.

And the third one is we need to revive the labor movements in whatever forms, either in trade unions or in workers cooperatives, create connections between urban workers and rural workers, and integrate what is called the precariat, the informal workers, the peasantry, into this conversation.

Because at the end of the day, if we need to stop capitalism, working people are central to this because they can stop selling their labor through either strikes or blocking production here and there. And then when we talk about blocking production, I’m thinking also about Palestine. How do you stop a genocide? Workers can play a big role in here.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:10

Yes.

Hamza Hamouchene:
01:06:11

Stopping the weapons and the fossil fuels that go to the genocidal regime that is butchering Palestinians every day. I don’t know if I answered your question, Steve.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:20

You answered my question very well. Because, you know, here’s the thing. I always get asked, “So what’s your solution, Steve?” And I said, “Listen, here’s my solution.”

I’m a problem solver, but I understand the first step in problem solving is to accurately define the problem.

Hamza Hamouchene:
01:06:36

Exactly.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:37

You cannot solve a problem that you cannot accurately define.

And when I see people running around saying, “Well, these politicians are being pragmatic and, oh, they’re just, you know, whatever,” I realize that they have lost the plot. They’re defending politicians instead of worrying about what the real solution is.

And as a result of this misguided, weird kind of perverse alignment with politicians, instead of with justice, with peace, with the climate and so forth, our job is to make demands and to organize into pressure, not to suckle and to spoon and to coddle so-called “public servants,” but to literally make the pressure so incredibly intense that they have no choice but to make a difference, to change.

Hamza Hamouchene:
01:07:24

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
01:07:25

And when we sit there and defend a politician, these sheep, these folks that do this stuff really, really are unwitting simps for capital. They’re unwitting simps for the system.

They don’t realize that they are in effect perpetuating the very malaise that we’re claiming we must in order to survive, fight against. So I want you to take us out. Like this is kind of the exclamation point on this discussion.

Hamza Hamouchene:
01:07:51

Yeah. So look, of course we need to ask, “What is the solution? What is to be done?”

A lot of people before us, I’m quoting Lenin here, we’re asking, “What is to be done? What can we do?” We are making all this diagnosis. We are saying things are really bad, so what can we do?

The assumption in that question is again, that brainwashing that took place for decades, especially under neoliberalism, telling us that “There is no such thing as society. There is no alternative. Communism failed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and this is the American Dream and we need to continue.” But even that story does not hold.

Even in the US. Huge poverty, huge inequality, there are no jobs here in the West. The same thing, we are seeing wars, a lot of people get killed.

So that system is not working. It’s complete disorder. It’s a global disorder. But why I’m mentioning this in terms of neoliberalism, neoliberalism is pushing people, well let’s say neoliberal capitalism, I think that’s the most accurate one, is pushing people to think as individuals, as atomized individuals.

If that’s your position in front of all the problems and the crisis that we have, of course you cannot solve it on your own.

Of course you cannot solve it on your own. We need to think in terms of collectives, in terms of society, in terms of movements, in terms of people coming together for the common good.

That’s how you should start thinking about it. That’s why I say I don’t claim that I have a prescription, because I believe in the power. I believe in the genius of people.

And actually I get inspired from [Frantz] Fanon in here when he believed in the genius of peasantry in learning how to do things. He’s saying they are not ignorant.

If you tell them how to do things, if you put them in struggle, if they understand what is at stake, they become geniuses.

And we’ve seen how those peasantries that your vice president is mocking right now have made some of the most inspiring historical revolutions that we’ve seen in the 20th century. So we need to think in terms of collectives. That’s why I say, if you’re not part of a movement, join a movement.

If you’re not part of a union, join a union. If you have some good organizations doing good things around you, join an organization.

If there are some political and popular education stuff that teaches you about the history of the world and what is taking place from a critical point of view, of course, from an anti-capitalist, an anti-imperialist point of view, join them. Of course, there is no perfect organizations and we know that. There are a lot of shortcomings and limitations in our organization.

But we need to start somewhere.

If we don’t do that collectively, empower our own organizations, connect the dots, move from the local to the national, to the regional to the international, we are not going to win. We’re already lost. So let’s not think as individuals. Let’s get inspired by struggles. Let’s do things collectively at the international level.

And this is not going to happen overnight. And I always say it, this is a long-term revolutionary project with short-term, medium-term and long-term goals.

That’s how we think collectively. At least my alternative, my horizon, if we want eco-socialism, yeah, we need to construct eco-socialist forces right now. Simple.

Steve Grumbine:
01:11:27

Hamza, I love this. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate this. Tell folks where we can find more of your work.

Hamza Hamouchene:
01:11:34

You can find a lot of my writing and work on the Transnational Institute website, so www.tni.org and I think just type my name on Google. Google. Another big hegemon out there, but this is what it is.

You’ll find a lot of my writings in various places, including Africa as a country and so forth.

Steve Grumbine:
01:11:57

Fantastic. Hamza. Once again, thank you so much for this wonderful, wonderful conversation. It really is inspiring. Folks, my name’s Steve Grumbine.

I am the host of Macro N Cheese and I am the founder of Real Progressives nonprofit. We literally survive on your donations. We don’t get a lot and we need them, we need them desperately to keep going.

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So with that, on behalf of my guest, Hamza Hamouchene, myself Steve Grumbine, on the podcast Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits:
01:13:44

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