Episode 252 – Dying for Capitalism with Charles Derber

Macro N Cheese – Episode 252
Dying for Capitalism with Charles Derber
November 25, 2022

 

[00:00:00] Charles Derber [Intro/Music]: I have not yet seen any model of a capitalist economy, whoever is running it, no matter what their particular values are, which would lead us away from environmental and military catastrophe.

In my university, it costs almost a hundred thousand dollars for a student to come every year. So, it’s not surprising that about a quarter of the student body is now in finance. And want to go into financial careers to pay back their parents, and to feel that they can survive in a incredibly uneven, unequal economy.

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

[00:01:43] Grumbine: Alright this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. I’ve got a guest that I’ve never spoken to before today, and I’m really excited about it. His name is Charles Derber, and he is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College. He’s written 26 books on politics, democracy, fascism, corporations, capitalism, climate change, war, the culture wars, culture and conversation, and societal change.

And most importantly, a new book that we’re going to touch on today, which is Dying for Capitalism, which he co-wrote with Suren Moodliar. I’m very excited about this, because I think this is going to help us tie together a bunch of different concepts. Concepts that we have been building on, with our work with Fadhel Kaboub, Hamza Hamouchene, Jason Hickel.

This is a really important time for us to tie together, seemingly disparate ideas, that have a common thread, and that is capitalism. And we’re going to touch on something that I’m excited about, as you know. We spoke with Clara Mattei and we talked about the Trinity of Austerity… Well today, we’re going to talk about a different Trinity.

It’s the Extinction Triangle: Capitalism, Environmental Destruction, and Militarism… and Charles Derber is here to take us through all of this. Charles, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:03:04] Derber: Thanks for having me, Steve. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

[00:03:07] Grumbine: Absolutely. So, I did not have as much time to devour your book as I wanted to have, but I did get to dig in. And as I read through some of this, I was struck by the idea that there are so many things that we need to understand about the present time that we’re living in, based on historical context, and have an analysis that allows us to know, how all these threads come together.

It seems like this is what you are an expert in, is weaving these different threads together to come up with a common thesis. Help me understand what your book is about. Give us an overview of Dying for Capitalism.

[00:03:51] Derber: Well, I think you’ve done a good job of briefly introducing it, Steve. I am a guy who tries to look at connections between major economic, political, and cultural forces… and problems that tend to be treated separately.

So, I’m sure your audience is familiar with the term ‘intersectionality’. And that term is usually used to think about individual identity, and how individual identity is actually intersectionally defined and understood across race and gender, and so forth.

My approach to intersectionality is more associated with the way in which large systems of power are intertwined with each other. So, we have, of course, our economic system of corporate capitalism, which has taken this neoliberal, global, extremely encompassing and dangerous form, in modern times.

I think neoliberal capitalism really emerged in the United States with the Reagan revolution, and has been embraced by a bipartisan since then, for the last 40 or 50 years… although I think that particular regime is in crisis today.

The book goes into how capitalism, both before neoliberalism and more intensively in the neoliberal phase, is intersectionally, causally intertwined with two major forms of extinction perils or threats. Which most people are very familiar with, but don’t necessarily connect with the economic system.

So, one of those two extinction perils is environmental destruction, which of course includes climate change, very centrally. But there are a whole range of other things, biodiversity crises, pandemics, which are very tied to environmental invasion of humans of half the world, which has been wilderness up to this point.

And so, looking at what it is about the capitalist system that inherently is hardwired to drive environmental death is very important. And the reason I want to just highlight the systemic causes of climate change and environment to capitalism is, among people in the United States and much of the world, who believe that human driven climate change is real, there’s a tendency, very much sponsored by corporate elites like Bill Gates and much of the Democratic Party, who are focused on climate change, just imagine that this is a problem that is basically technologically induced and technologically resolvable.

So, people like Bill Gates are presenting the idea of a technological revolution. That when we engineer the relevant new technologies, it will allow us to stop and reverse climate change and create a sustainable environment, simply by embracing solar panels and wind turbines and non fossil fuels, without any changes in the larger political economic system… if we can just get these new technologies up and running as fast as possible. The idea of a green capitalism.

And parts of the book, and this is really important in discussing the triangle of extinction, is oriented towards showing why that’s not the case. In fact, within capitalism, it’s very unlikely that we’re going to see, even the technological changes that Gates is promoting, because there is so much money invested in the fossil fuel energy system.

There’s so much oil and natural gas and other fossil fuel, coal, that in a capitalist system, the government is so heavily controlled by billions of dollars of lobbying and funding. Corporate welfare is the largest system of welfare in the United States. So, it would be very hard, within our capitalist system, to move toward the kind of massive, rapid, urgent technological change, that even Gates is talking about.

But even if we would do that, the book argues that even if you move very dramatically toward green energy sources and so forth, as long as we have a capitalist system, capitalism is a system that does not sustain itself in a steady state environment. It just needs to expand, grow, and essentially cultivates, for its own profit imperatives, and for its own cultural legitimacy.

A sort of addiction to massive commodity growth and to increasing markets and addicting people to the idea that consumption of more and more goods is central to their status in society and to their happiness.

And so, even if you’re in a greener technology, which I fervently hope we’ll move toward as fast as possible, you’re still going to be facing an economic system that is basically, essentially trying to create a kind of infinite growth and burden of production and consumption on a very finite planet.

There is no Planet B. And we’re seeing this with electric cars and the rare minerals that are necessary. The kinds of problems with wind turbines and solar panels. I don’t deny the importance of technology. I certainly support all the movement as rapidly as possible toward these green technologies.

But the core of the book is showing why and how, historically, capitalism ended up with a fossil fuel energy base. And interestingly, Steve- I don’t know how much you know this history, you probably do know it- in the early capitalist period, I’m thinking of Britain in the 19th century, the early steam engines in industrial Britain were powered by water.

And when they moved over toward coal and then toward oil, that was largely driven, not by questions of energy efficiency or cost per se, but rather the fear that industrialists had, that a water-powered kind of capitalism would be dangerous to challenge, because water was typically understood as part of the public commons.

And industrialists feared that if they relied on water as their primary source for steam, for driving production and heating and so forth, they feared a massive public uprising to take back control of water. Which was intuitively and historically understood as a public good, that was part of the public commons.

So, they moved toward coal. And coal became problematic because coal workers have a very long history of bonding together, working in mines in dangerous conditions. And by the mid 19th century, coal workers were already becoming more and more rebellious. And again, the industrialists were afraid of a kind of labor movement and solidarity. There were signs very early on that this could emerge.

And so, they were somewhat concerned that coal would be an unreliable source of energy. Because just like water would build potential public opposition to corporate expansion and use of more and more water, which of course it already does as it is, they were also concerned about the labor problems they would experience, in a purely coal-driven energy system.

It’s interesting- and I’ll finish this little history quickly- that the movement toward oil, which of course, came in the gilded age in the United States with Rockefeller and the building of his whole oil empire, became very attractive. It was started in the civil war, but it really took root in World War I.

In World War I, the uses of airplanes and tanks and all kinds of new military technology that was utterly dependent on oil, became a catalytic moment, in which capitalism would shift very, very strongly toward reliance on oil, and then on gas.

So, there’s a history here. And in much of American foreign policy since then, in the Middle East and currently toward Asia, is oriented toward continuing to secure oil as a central resource on which some of the most powerful companies, and much of the economy will remain dependent on, for quite a long time to come.

So, right in that little capsule history, you can see the intersection, where the connections between these three parts of the triangle, the capitalist push for expansion and profit, which required taking control of energy resources. And that led historically toward, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, reliance on fossil fuels that would erode any possibility of a sustainable environment. As well as hegemonic kinds of militarism or military expansion and war, that in the age of nuclear weapons, would become another extinction threat.

But I just want to return again very quickly to the idea, that even had there been an ability to restrain the shift toward coal and then toward oil and gas, capitalism would have remained the major causal danger to life and survival. Simply because it’s an expansionary profit driven system, in which environmental costs and military costs, costs which are extremely high to society, are treated within capitalism, by the way the logic of capitalist economics work… as basically, externalities.

And your audience is probably familiar with the term ‘an externality’, which is simply a cost. In this case, a huge environmental cost or a huge military cost. The people who bear and have to pay this price of this cost, is externalized from the producers themselves, to the public.

So, these are massive, mega-negative externalities, which the system simply, is happily prepared to pursue, because the cost of these externalities, the climate costs and the military costs, which are as high as possible, are simply not bore by the people who run the capitalist system. And by the corporate producers and their allies at the state, and in wall street, and so forth.

So, we’re just locked in, as long as we have a capitalist system to, in my view, a hardwired system. And by hardwired, I mean it’s inherent in the basic structural form of capitalism. I have not yet seen any model of a capitalist economy- whoever is running it, no matter what their particular values are- which would lead us away from environmental and military catastrophe.

We’re seeing the manifestations of this, both in terms of climate and war, as we speak today. We’re in a state of emergency on both those fronts, where we’re seeing a level of weather change and melting much faster, not just in the Arctic, but the Antarctic. Where huge amounts of ice, particularly in the Antarctic, were not expected to be melting this quickly, which are changing sea levels.

It’s worth noting that about 60% of the world lives within about 50 or 60 miles of a coastline. So, as sea levels rise, it becomes very difficult for millions and millions of people. You see this even in the United States. Where in places like Florida, for example, if you live in many parts of Florida, you can’t get your home insured, because the insurance companies realize it’s too costly to try to cover the cost of your home.

So, you’re getting migration all across the world. Of course, the countries most affected right now are places like Bangladesh, which are very low lying sea level countries. Where millions of people live in the Delta, they are being over-flooded.

And it’s interesting that the Pentagon itself, which is legally required to tell the American people what is the greatest national security threat they’re facing, for the last few years has been explicitly saying that America’s greatest national security threat is environmental disaster and climate change.

So, the Pentagon is aware of this. But it’s not telling us that the biggest institutional emitter of climate change in the world- do you know what it is, Steve?…

[00:18:17] Grumbine: Oh yeah, it’s the military

[00:18:19] Derber: Yes, it is the military. Specifically the Pentagon. And so, while they acknowledge that climate change is essentially driving future wars, more and more military conflicts and genocides, like for example, what’s happened in Rwanda, Darfur, Syria, and not to mention our wars in the Middle East for oil and so forth… these wars are basically climate fueled.

Or whether it’s migration of people who are in conflict with other people. Or whether it’s going to war to get fossil fuels and so forth. You just see this incredibly powerful connection in the triangle between the economic system, the environmental disasters we’re facing and war.

And the same ways when you go to war, war is heavily based on the American military, as you see in the Mediterranean right now. Naval carriers, which are basically huge runways for airplanes, all of which are fueled by oil and fossil fuels and are creating massive environmental dangers.

 And, of course, war, by its nature, when you think about what’s happening in Gaza or in recent wars in the Middle East, you just get this massive destruction. Which again, environmentally produces all kinds of disease. And the book also deals with pandemics, which is a long history prior to COVID-19.

If you go back to the emergence of capitalism, say in Britain, again, in the 18th and 19th century, you have the chapter of the book, which I found interesting to research, which looks at the rise of pandemics. Whether we’re talking about cholera or tuberculosis, other diseases, pandemics basically, which killed amazing numbers of people in early capitalism. Which of course, pulled people off the land into very crowded urban areas, which were dangerous in terms of health, in the early factories and in the neighborhoods there.

And so you constantly had these epidemics and pandemics of cholera and tuberculosis, and other kinds of related waterborne pandemics, which killed off a very large part of population. And people like Charles Dickens and literary people were totally trying to capture the magnitude of the health and environmental costs of this rising capitalism.

So, there is a very large literature. And what’s striking, and I’m glad you focused on this when you introduced the book, Steve, Dying for Capitalism. I think what makes it different from the other books that deal with climate change and with militarism, is that it’s both very historical and it makes the systemic connections between these different systems of power and crises.

It’s the way I think our economic and political system manages public discontent, in the light of these incredible poly crises or catastrophes we’re facing, is to essentially create an analysis which I think is largely organized around the idea that technologies, America and capitalism are incredibly innovative sources of technological change, and to see all of these problems as technologically rooted. And not requiring any challenge to the political and economic system we’re dealing with.

Of course, in the case of war and militarism, the threat of nuclear weapons from other superpowers is often used. But there again, you get a culture of, essentially, a moral culture that dominant foreign policy groups use. Which argue that American wars are essential. Not just to protect the United States, but to protect the world. Both, in their sources of energy and in freedom and democracy around the world.

An argument that’s getting a little bit more problematic as America is confronting its own extremely authoritarian and longstanding weaknesses of its own democracy, which are now entering another phase of crisis.

The purpose of the book is to lay this out, for ordinary readers- by ordinary, I mean people who are activists, part of a general public, who think about society- and for students and other academics as well.

And I get a lot of feedback. People appreciate from my books, my style of writing, which maybe you can pick a little bit up from my speaking, which is not at all academic. Or it’s very conversational.

When you asked me to join you, you had mentioned that typically, you engage in conversations with people. And I simply love conversations. And my books, in a way, are conversations with my public audiences. So, I’m a person who just gets an enormous pleasure out of conversation about politics and ideas. Which now, are just not a matter of self indulgence, but real survival.

[00:24:07] Grumbine: Yes.

[00:24:08] Derber: I think we’re in a national global emergency. I don’t think the world has ever confronted the kind of emergency, both regarding climate and environment and war. It’s simply an unprecedented situation. And we’re barreling full steam ahead, in ways that are just hard to believe, that we’re going to continue to pursue this path, but we are. And that’s the basis for writing this book.

The last couple of chapters of the book are to address, what many readers will think are, or people will hear this conversation, is an impossible political task. You can’t change capitalism.

The idea is that capitalism…

[00:24:53] Grumbine: The end of history…

[00:24:55] Derber: you know, the end of history.

The idea, capitalist, realist thinking. That the only reality that people can imagine is capitalism. And therefore, you’re just blowing smoke.

There is this, kind of, cultivated failure of imagination and cultivation of a political cynicism, apathy and despair. That leads very large numbers of people, including many, many young people, to simply feel we can’t change the world, and these big structures of power that we’re dealing with.

So people simply tune out of politics, and feel they’re going to live their own life. And people live lives that are very stressed by the working conditions, environmental conditions of their own lives, in their own cities and so forth.

So, we spent the last two chapters of the book, specifically addressing this problem. Looking at periods of American history, and particularly, for example, at the 19th century struggle against abolitionism, where people were told, ‘you guys are crazy.’

It was a small group of people initially. Slavery had existed for thousands of years. And the people said, ‘you’re never going to be able to raise a broad conversation and movement’, challenge slavery, or the larger slave system and the capitalist system, that was very intertwined with the slave system of the South.

The slave trade was immensely profitable up here in Boston, where I am, and around the country at the very beginning of the country. So, it seemed impossible that such a movement could grow. And of course, it was small, but it developed over time. And by the time we got close to the Civil War, it had grown because it had found a way of connecting very different movements, and very different strategies of opposition.

There were socialists like Lloyd Garrison, who was a literary and intellectual person in New England. With ex-slaves like Frederick Douglass, who was a global activist, who would speak with Lincoln, became a global symbol of the challenge to slavery and the Confederate system. And by the way, was very aware of both economic and cultural forms of change.

It’s interesting that Frederick Douglass, who was one of the great abolitionists, a former slave himself, became the most photographed person in the United States in the 19th century. And he was very aware that political change involved cultural strategies and cultural approaches. So, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, that became one of the best selling books of the 19th century in the United States. Maybe the greatest seller. And she was a moderate. Nothing like, say, William Lloyd Garrison, and some of the more radicals.

I think one of the ideas that we pulled away from studying the abolitionist movement, was that it embraced a huge array of different strategies and movements. And you had a person like John Brown, who was a militant, and was prepared to use violence, working with pacifists.

You had labor and this effort to free slaves, getting them out of the South. You had just this enormous white, black, multiracial approaches, and economic and political and cultural. All of which helped lead the country toward the kind of moral opposition, and steering the economic discontents that were arising at this time.

And the wars, like the Mexican wars, which were being fought, basically because the South was running out of plantation land, and wanted to annex most of Texas, and further West, to build the slave trade.

All of these things became foundations, by which anti-war activists and folks concerned about transcendentalism… the socialists and the labor organizers, who began to emerge in early America with ex-slaves.

If you read that chapter on abolitionism, which was written by my co-author, who comes from South Africa, grew up with Nelson Mandela, and is really an authority. He’s a lifelong activist who has been incredibly influential in shaping activist communities in the United States.

So, in that chapter, and then pulling the lessons of that into the final chapter. We try to address directly, the skepticism and the cynicism that so many people, including my own students, have, when they hear about the argument that we need to change a large economic system. Anything like capitalism.

[00:30:20] 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.

[00:31:11] Derber: So, the book is about a grim subject, which is the extreme emergencies facing survival of the planet and life, non-human life, through this triangle of extinction. But it offers, I think, historically, it’s not just random, saying you should be optimistic, it argues that there is a historical foundation for looking at strategies for changing our economic system and getting at the heart of what’s fueling these extreme emergencies today.

So, the book, it’s very much addressed to people who like to read and think about politics in a more integrated fashion. By integrated I mean, as you said initially, Steve, where you are connecting issues that tend to be cropping up in the media in very discreet forms.

So, it’s very unusual. I don’t know of another book that brings together, in a very analytically rigorous way, by which I mean, I think the arguments are historically and analytically very clear and very strong, and shows the way in which these different forms of power and the threats to life are intertwined, and therefore require a kind of class politics.

Much of my work also, Steve, is- I have written a lot of books, a recent book called Welcome to the Revolution- is a critique of the way our left movements are organized today, largely in terms of identity issues, have abandoned the kind of economic and class politics. Which helped create the New Deal, and might be the form of a more revolutionary green new deal in the United States today. And also help build labor parties and other kinds of union strength in Europe, leading to more socially equitable and less environmentally damaging forms… social democracies, even though they’re far from sufficient and neoliberalism has taken over much of the financial elites in Europe now.

But in any case, I think that we put forward an argument, which says that- and just one other hopeful thing we’re seeing right now, as you know Steve, a resurgence of the labor movement, which with the UAW strikes, with the Hollywood Screenwriters and Screen Actors Guild, and then 10 or 15 other major strikes, which are either ongoing or which have been resolved recently, at airlines and healthcare and teaching and nursing- there’s a revival of labor activism. People like Sean Fane, the national head of the United Auto Workers, are really developing on that.

What’s been impressive, is not just the solidarity across the labor movement that they’ve achieved, but that they have unbelievable popular support. About 90% of the population is saying that they are supportive of these strikes, that are breaking out across the country right now.

So, I think we’re at a potential inflection point. The public has long been supportive of unions and cooperatives, worker owned or worker managed companies and so forth. And now I think the level of inequality, where, like in the auto industry, where you have nine CEOs over the last 10 or 15 years, GM and Ford, who have accumulated $10 billion of profit, whereas the family income of workers in these auto plants, remain stagnant or declined over the last 30 or 40 years. Which is pretty much a accurate description of what’s happened.

If you look at levels of inequality since the late ’70s, when neoliberalism took off, and today, what you see is an enormous growth of profit and GDP and extremely stagnant wages. People working more hours, more jobs per household, women working more, and yet, family income stagnant or declining. And I think it’s for that reason, that you’re seeing now, both on the right and the left, a kind of politics, which is more populist and anti-establishment.

The problem is that right-populism, Trumpism, speaks to the needs of workers, saying they’ve been abandoned, which they have been. But of course, Trump’s one legislative accomplishment was cutting taxes on the very wealthy. And he came out against unions during the auto strike and so forth. And we know that he’s unsympathetic to labor organizing and unions, and anything truly in the interest, the social programs and the job programs, that are essential for working people.

And then on the left, the Democratic Party, starting with Bill Clinton, after Reagan, basically embraced the turn toward neoliberalism, which was to reject the New Deal. The basic public goods economic agenda that came from the New Deal. And to say the Democratic Party would become, basically, the neoliberal party that would embrace militarism, and would embrace very limited forms of government.

So, I think the public is feeling cynical about politics and fearful, because both parties have been non-responsive or hostile, very hostile, on the part of the Republican party, obviously, as it moves toward a neo-fascist politics.

And in the case of the Democratic Party, you see Biden, who did more than I would have expected on domestic economic stimulation and public investment, public goods.

You asked me, ‘what is the solution to all this’, question? It is an economy of public goods. Meaning, an economy, which is really oriented toward limiting what Karl Marx called the ‘fetishism of commodities’, which was the title of the first chapter of his first book of Kapital, his most famous book. That capitalism creates an almost erotic addiction to buying, buying, shopping, shopping, consuming.

The consumption of commodities on the market is the mark of being blessed by God, and being affirmed as a worthy person by your peers. And so, this notion of an economy of public goods, where people will come to feel that the consumption of private goods is subordinate to a kind of collective recapture by the public of the commons. Public space where you can create public transit and public kinds of decarbonized housing, which will do a great deal to deal with the environmental crisis. Massive cuts in military and shifting that money over to redevelopment of energy grids and jobs in this country, that will build a more sustainable community and so forth.

So, I think the fact that the public is, I would say super-majorities that range about 80%, hostile to finance, large companies, worried about the power of dark money and big companies in running the state, and the fact that there’s so much support now for labor, means that, despite the weakness of class movements in the United States and the difficulty of mobilizing them, there are many indications that we’re at an inflection point, among labor, among young people, among people of color, among women

And if we speak, it’s worth noting that in 2016, when Trump ran against Clinton in the primaries, you’ll remember that in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania… Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, won those primaries. And there’s a progressive caucus, which is modestly class oriented. They want to move away from neoliberal extremes. People like AOC and those people are talking about a green new deal.

And since I’m in touch with a lot of young people who are on a university campus, I know the climate change issues, the environmental issues, the violence, gun issues, the war issues, they resonate quite considerably to students today, and even the economic critique. I teach a course simply about capitalism, it is on how to think about and respond to the crises of capitalism.

And there’s enormous interest both in the environmental and military sides of capitalism. And in the economic system itself, the way finance works. And it’s interesting that this happens, Steve, because in my university, it costs almost a hundred thousand dollars for a student to come every year.

So, it’s not surprising that about a quarter of the student body is now in finance. And want to go into financial careers to pay back their parents, and to feel that they can survive in a incredibly uneven, unequal economy. But they are very open and receptive to structural, intersectional critiques of these systems of power.

They’re very aware that all is not right. And they keep trying to think about what it means for their own lives, to go into Wall Street or into private equity firms. Or dealing with the kinds of economic policies that are dividing the country, and keeping so many people in precarious economic conditions. Maybe just one job or one illness away from poverty.

So, I think the culture, while we’re in a period of relatively weak class politics in the United States, there are things happening on the ground and in the larger systems. And just because the emergency of survival, which is documented in this book, is just so strong and scary, and if you’re a young person, you know your life is going to be affected by it. Whether you’re going to be shot on campus randomly, or whether you’re going to suffer the effects of environmental destruction, or live under a dictatorship in the United States.

I think there are possibilities of change that are meaningful and could build an ongoing movement, like the very large Palestinian protest that happened in Washington of over 300,000 people.

I think there are signs that we might be able to build- as the abolitionists did, out of what appeared to be an impossible situation- a set of movements that can coalesce and intersect, in ways that the system itself intersects.

So, that’s the hopeful part of this all now.

[00:43:22] Grumbine: Really appreciate you taking the time to say all that. I want to take us back to the beginning of your initial comments. When you talk about militarism and the way the US and corporations are battling over energy. Trying to maintain access and control of energy.

The coal miners that you originally pointed to, and you can think about Pennsylvania, which is the state that I live in, the police started out there because of the violence that capitalism required, to maintain its hegemony… and that’s at a local level. But on a global scale, we’re looking at military forces taking the place of those police forces.

I think the most important aspect of this, and I want to blend a few things together, is, in 1917, something really big happened. We had the Bolshevik Revolution, and people were awakened to the possibilities that maybe there’s another system available, other than this predatory system.

You had so much pain and suffering, and life was just about working. You wake up in the morning, you’re at work. You go to bed at night, dead tired. And so the little bit of free time people had, the idea of those folks organizing and pushing back, and yet they did.

In the present, the media control and the narrative control that is out there, keeping people chasing ghosts, running around from topic to topic. Incapable of seeing the target, because the target’s constantly moving. And yet here you’ve synthesized three key things within this triangle.

I’m curious as to your thoughts. I think, as a socialist, as someone who’s an MMT informed leftist, that the public purse, the ability to do things, is still there. We’ve just forgotten that. And we have allowed this belief that there is no alternative to this system that predates upon people and leverages all of the worst instincts in mankind, to make them feel better. ‘Here, buy another thing and feel better.’

And I believe that that addiction, that you so rightfully described, is part of everyone’s psyche now. And so, Fadhel Kaboub, who’s a dear friend of our show, often talks about decolonizing our minds. In order to decarbonize, we have to decolonize.

Tell me what your thoughts are on the minds of people that have been absolutely warped from this system. And how we help them decolonize their minds, to do these great things that you’re talking about.

[00:46:15] Derber: Well, it’s a number one question in many ways. One interesting avenue to approach this, Steve, is social media, and how the younger generation’s thinking has been framed. The average person, 18 to 25, is spending five or six hours a day on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook, or whatever. And I’ve had long talks with students about what they take away.

They don’t read newspapers and magazines, so the propaganda and the mind shaping experience, is coming in new ways now. And it’s terrifying in a way, because when many of them talk very frankly- even people who are not particularly political- about how, when they’re online, they’re being constantly bombarded with posts and requests by influencers. And other kinds of people who they have online connections with or friendships with, and so forth.

But they don’t really know, whether the information that’s coming at them so intensively, just a tsunami of conflicting messages, they don’t know who they’re coming from. Are they being commercially driven? Who’s offering a particular interpretation of whatever they’re talking about?

And so, it’s a particularly complex new way, in which people’s minds and consciousness are being shaped. In most cases, posts this bewildering tsunami of messages. They go online and they look at their feed and they see enormous numbers of messages, and they don’t really know who these people are, and how to think about it… often how to understand the message. But they feel bombarded and overwhelmed and confused by it all.

So, we’re facing- from the Silicon Valley capitalism that this generation is growing up with- this contradictory dynamic. Where on the one hand, they’re being subjected to a particularly toxic, and what appears to be, as you say, elusive and mysterious [messaging], and it draws them in, and yet leaves them feeling distressed and powerless and competitive, around who is getting likes and so forth.

And yet at the same time, I’ve seen on campuses, groups of activists who are incredibly good at using online technology to organize. Who can, within minutes, pull together a group of people who can quickly mobilize action around a particular protest that’s going on in downtown Boston. Or sending out a message around a climate issue related to a pipeline or a protest that they can get to.

So, I think we’re dealing, again, with contradictory dynamics. The idea that these forces are contradictory, I think, is very true to the best spirit of what people who have always been critical of capitalism, and people who have driven from Marxist related thinking, is that contradiction is the great engine of history and we’re dealing with contradictory forces.

So, as oppressive as the kind of cultural forces that are shaping our consciousness, for example, around the idea that technology is the solution to all these problems, which is diverting us from thinking about the economic and political systems. In fact, it makes it look like capitalism because it is technologically often dynamic is the solution because it produces technology that can solve the problem.

And it diverts people from the awareness that the technology is being used like this online media, postmodern technology, that is being used to control people in very, very deep ways psychologically. I feel people’s sense of themselves, their sense of self worth, their ability to have influence in the world is often being just devastated by the kind of insecurity that their online communication creates. At the same time, it’s been a source in which people have been able to reach out globally in some ways. And when they do connect with people who they really share common social and political values, they can mobilize this technology in a way that’s quite powerful in building actions. I have many students in my classes who start out at the beginning of the semester with absolutely no political engagement whatsoever. And by the end of the class, just from readings they’ve done and online sources that they’ve gone to have found themselves engaged in climate activism, anti war activism, like my students who went down to the Gaza protests in Washington and are joining local Boston area groups that are dealing with labor, environmental, and military all in one. There are physical places in Boston.

My coauthor has founded a nerve center of Boston political action called Encuentro Cinco, which in one building pulls together immigration rights lawyers and feminists, activists and labor union activists. And so I see the contradictions building the intensity of the emergency and the propaganda, particularly associated with war that the Democratic Party has absorbed so heavily.

And at the same time, the kind of grassroots opposition and use of new technology that might become a foundation for activists. I can imagine that the abolitionists had had social media and were building because so much of movement building is about building social connections. And what neoliberalism does is undermine the idea of the social, of the community.

It says everything is around yourself as an individual, you rise or fall on your own. That’s neoliberalism, and it’s a politically debilitating cultural and identity analysis. The kind of economic movements, which are essentially focusing on the commons on what I call public goods again, which are the alternative to a commodified economy, a public goods economy is one in which the system is oriented toward producing goods by and for the public and where the notion that you would externalize environmental, social, and military costs would not be possible in that system.

So I think that when people look at countries, even in Europe, where there’s a lot of despair right now, but there are also these movements and these longstanding labor parties and unions. I have students, for example, in my class from Denmark and France. They talk in a very matter of fact way about having free healthcare, free higher education, 75% of the country in national labor organizations, a general acceptance of a idea of democratic socialism.

So all my students have been to Europe. So despite all of the neoliberal forces that are consuming Europe and which are in ascendancy in the United States, there are new approaches emerging. Which I think the younger generation has the potential to really exploit. We all have to be abolitionists today.

Abolitionists of fossil fuel, abolitionists of capitalism, abolitionists of war, which sound like impossible things in the same way that abolition of slavery and the capitalist system at that period seemed impossible. But again, history is so important because when you get really pessimistic and feel things are impossible, not that you can’t read history in a pessimistic way because there’s a lot of history that you can read that way, but that you can also see, if you look for it, a lot in history, which says there is the real possibility of transforming things that seem impossible to transform.

Breaking out into an area of political imagination, which the system has very effectively erased for large numbers of people. The idea that there is no real alternative to the existing economic and political systems that we have. And I think there’s a hunger because these systems, as you were saying, Steve, we’re all suffering from them, and we all know the damage that they’re doing.

And so there’s a real hunger for an alternative for a political imagination that leads in a new direction, and it really begins with people connecting with each other in new ways. Neoliberalism is an atomizing, isolating force. I’m working on a new book, just done a new book on democracy and fascism. I’m working on another book, which will come out next year, probably, on what I call socio side, which is about the erasure of social connection.

The breakdown of any kind of meaningful, sustainable social relations, including in the workplace as workplaces dissolve in the community and so forth. And movement work is all about building sustainable, affirming, positive connections with nature and with people in ways that can make a difference in the world.

And I think there’s just enormous hunger for that. And these oppressive forces that we see, for example, in high tech and big tech, social media can also be exploited and appropriated in ways that help to rebuild kinds of connections, both offline and online that can make a difference. So I don’t feel despite the grimness of this issue and the sense that this is truly an emergency, we may not be able to deal with that

there are pathways forward and much of this book, Dying for Capitalism, is an exploration of what those pathways look like.

[00:56:56] Grumbine: Well, with that, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. This was very enlightening. I’m really excited about the book and folks, if you haven’t gotten it, please go out and get the book, Dying for Capitalism by my guest Charles Gerber. And Charles, is there anywhere we can find your work aside from the 26 tomes you’ve already written plus the new ones?

[00:57:17] Derber: Well, I think if people are interested, you can go online and all these books, many of them are available free actually, because they’ve gone on to Google. They are written in ways that I think from what I know of your audience, Steve, would attract a large number of people because they’re very accessible but they’re addressing historical and contemporary issues about capitalism, about war and the environment that I think it probably universal concerns.

And I think it puts together, as you said, at the very beginning of our conversation, the connections between these issues that hopefully will be helpful and liberating for people as they think about how they personally can respond to these issues.

[00:57:57] Grumbine: Fantastic. All right folks, this is Steve Grumbine, my guest Charles Derber, the show Macro N Cheese. We are outta here.

[00:58:13] 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.