The Physics of Capitalism
Erald Kolasi, a physicist, writer, and researcher talks about his book ‘The Physics of Capitalism.’ His interdisciplinary approach merges economics, technology, energy, and ecological dynamics.
“Humanity… is at a critical moment in history where the decisions that we make could have massive, massive implications, for our future trajectory, for the future trajectory of human civilization over the next two centuries. Those decisions can either ensure that we have a prosperous millennium or that we have a disastrous one.”
Erald Kolasi joins Steve to talk about his book, The Physics of Capitalism. Erald’s interdisciplinary approach merges economics, technology, energy, and ecological dynamics. He explains that science can provide facts and data about the world, but to address the challenges we need to go beyond physics. Solutions will depend on the political, economic, and social spheres.
The discussion includes the flaws of neoclassical economic models, the limitations of technological innovation in solving ecological crises, and the necessity of systemic changes for a sustainable future. Erald describes a vision for a new political and economic order that emphasizes ecological stability, socialization, modularity, and localized production.
Erald Kolasi is a writer and researcher focusing on the nexus between energy, technology, economics, complex systems, and ecological dynamics. His book, The Physics of Capitalism, came out from Monthly Review Press in February 2025. He received his PhD in Physics from George Mason University in 2016. You can find out more about Erald and his work at his website, www.eraldkolasi.com and follow him on Substack:
FULL TRANSCRIPT with EXTRAS
Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43
All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese, and we are excited to have a new guest. This guest wrote about something that just totally blew me away because I was tying together Carey King. I was tying together with Steve Keen.
I was thinking about some of the stuff of Michael Hudson. It's trying to blend in all the MMT knowledge that I have and that we cover here on the show.
And he covers it all and he goes deep into the physics of it all. In fact, he's a physicist.
I mean, this is a guy who really understands the world and the universe around us at quite a molecular level, you could say. So without further ado, let me introduce my guest. His name is Erald Kolasi.
He's a writer and a researcher focusing on the nexus between energy, technology, economics, complex systems, and ecological dynamics. His book, The Physics of Capitalism, came out from Monthly Review Press in February of 2025.
He received his PhD in physics from George Mason University in 2016. You can find more of Erald and his work at his website. And I must say, I just recently subscribed to his Substack as well.
So without further ado, I bring on my guest, Erald. Welcome to the show, sir.
Erald Kolasi:
00:01:56
Thank you so much, Steve. Looking forward to a great discussion. Thank you for having me on.
Steve Grumbine:
00:02:00
You got it, man. So you wrote this book, The Physics of Capitalism. And I gotta be honest with you, from the outset, before I dove into it, I was like, capitalism?
Oh, no. What? What? Why is somebody bringing me a book on capitalism? What are they trying to do here? I started digging in and I was incredibly excited.
Your introductory email was quite enticing as well. I mean, it was like, "Hey, you want to find out more? You can either read my book or add me on the program." And here we are with you on the program.
It is an amazing book. I will tell you, it's a little deeper on the physics than I've ever considered. And yet at the same time, it wasn't overwhelming.
It was written in such a way that it was just very logical. And I was terrified that I was going to struggle with it.
And, you know, we read a lot of economic books around here, but, you know, physics is not my thing.
But it appears to be an incredibly important thing to the subject that we talk about so much, because without understanding the physics and the dynamics of the world in which we live, these technological innovations and these great ideas tend to always overlook the impacts that they have on other things within our biosphere, within the world in which we live. So I found that to be fascinating, and I was wondering if maybe you could talk to us about what is the book about and the why behind it. Right?
Obviously, once you read it, you'll know the why, but I want to hear your version of it.
Erald Kolasi:
00:03:20
Yeah, well, as to the why, I mean, I think humanity right now is at a critical moment in history where the decisions that we make could have massive, massive implications for the future trajectory of human civilization over the next two centuries. Those decisions can either ensure that we have a prosperous millennium or that we have a disastrous one.
And so I wanted to throw my hat in the ring, offer up some new ideas for people to think about. Now, you kind of hinted at it earlier.
I want to really emphasize for people who haven't read the book yet, that even though the book is called The Physics of Capitalism, it's meant to be highly interdisciplinary, comprehensive, multidimensional. So there's a lot in the book about economics and history, you know, science and even some philosophy in certain parts.
And the reason for that is because science is great at telling you facts and data about the world. But if you want to ask the difficult question of "What do we do to address the challenges that we have?" Right?
So what are the challenges and what should we do to address them? Then you need to go beyond just physics. Right? Then you're implicating the political sphere, the economic sphere, the social sphere more broadly.
And so that's why the book isn't just about physics, even though it's called The Physics of Capitalism. So that's the first thing I wanted to highlight as to what's the main theme, what's the driving argument of this book?
Well, there are actually several. At a very high level,
the book makes the case that we need to transition from the capitalist regime of biophysical growth to what I call the valerist regime, or valerism, which is a state of biophysical stability. And I talk about in the book what stability means primarily.
Primarily, it means managed fluctuations in energy use and resource consumption so that global civilization operates within the constraints of the planetary biosphere.
And again, we can talk more about those details. And that basic premise that this notion from growth to stability, you can say that the one sentence summary of the book, right? If you want to remember anything about the book, it's from growth to stability, from capitalism to valerism. What is driving that call?
Well, the fundamental problem that we face is that modern civilization is far too energy intensive and inefficient. So we consume vast amounts of energy and resources from the natural world.
We convert that energy to do useful things: to generate electricity, controlled radiation, mechanical work for our vehicles. But then we dump the vast majority of the energy we consume from the natural world back into the natural world in highly useless and degraded forms.
And we're dumping so much of this energy into the natural world that it's causing mass chaos and thermodynamic instability throughout the planetary biosphere. I mean, not just from global warming, but also ocean acidification and biodiversity losses.
And there's a mass extinction and fertilizer runoff from agriculture and expansion of wildfires and a million other things that we could get into.
So the planetary biosphere is becoming increasingly chaotic and it's going to threaten and undermine the fundamental ecological basis of global civilization unless we get it under control. So that in some sense is sort of the fundamental problem.
And then the book deals with some proposed solutions from other schools which we can get into. So a popular notion out there is that, well, we'll just solve everything through technological innovation.
I would say this is the default stance of modern capitalism, that it doesn't matter what our problems are because technological innovation can solve anything. And so that's an argument that I comprehensively attack in the book and that at a high level is sort of what's going on.
Steve Grumbine:
00:06:50
Yeah, it's fantastic. I think the things that jumped out at me early on in the book and I mean, this really, really kicked in.
You said basically that the world was extremely chaotic in terms of ebbs and flows with ice and then heat and then different blooms here and then different die offs there. And you said that we've only pretty much been stabilized environmentally for about 15,000 years.
And it kind of hit me like a ton of bricks as you talked about friction. I cannot tell you how much the friction section really grabbed hold of me.
The idea that friction with the waves and how it impacts each of us, like if we were trying to hold our child or trying to do any, we couldn't do any of the things we do today. Our whole world would be radically different if in fact we somehow or another didn't have friction. Just because I found that fascinating.
Can we discuss the friction element of physics here?
Erald Kolasi:
00:07:41
Sure.
I think the part that you're talking about is from the introduction, where I talk about some of the fundamental natural constraints and physical laws that allow us to exist as physical systems and do the basic things that we do. So without friction, you can't drive your car, you can't shake somebody's hand, can't put your hand anywhere, really, because it wouldn't matter, right?
There would be no sense of internal coherence or structure or anything like that.
One of the famous examples I give is friction between the oceans and the surface of the planet and how that's helping to reduce the rotational kinetic energy of the Earth. So hundreds of millions of years ago, a day on Earth was about 22 hours or so. 21 hours depends on how far back you go.
Steve Grumbine:
00:08:19
Right.
Erald Kolasi:
00:08:20
About 600 million years ago, it was like 22 hours. And then now, of course, a day is 24 hours, right? And that's because, again, the planet is losing rotational kinetic energy as you go forward in time.
And so friction was just one small example of a broader point that I was making, that a lot of the fundamental features of our existence depend on these physical conditions. And you brought up another one of them right there with the Holocene Epoch, as geologists call it.
So these last, you know, 11 or 12,000 years or so, where the climate of the planet has been remarkably stable. So, you know, average global temperatures have been generally stable.
Yes, there's been some volcanic activity, but there haven't been, like, crazy volcanic chains going off like, every year, like, at some other points in the planet's history. So we've had relative stability in the climate, and that's been fundamental for making civilization possible in the first place, right?
You couldn't have civilization 20, 30,000 years ago in the way we have it now. And this is a separate question from whether the rise of civilization was a good idea in the first place, right?
So I'm not making any normative judgments here in what I'm saying.
All I'm saying is that in terms of the fundamental ecological conditions that were necessary for civilization to develop in the first place, they didn't exist 20, 30,000 years ago. I mean, the climate was so chaotic, so topsy-turvy, you couldn't build large sedentary settlements, you couldn't have mass agriculture.
You couldn't have any of those things.
The only reason why we have those things, or fundamentally why we were able to have those things, sort of the background condition, was the stability provided by the Holocene Epoch. And we are now threatening that stability by turbocharging the planet's thermodynamic instability.
We're essentially leaving the Holocene behind and heading into very, very uncharted territories.
And one thing I want to emphasize here, because this is especially important for the climate denialists who say, "Oh, it's good that the planet's temperature is warming up because human beings thrive in warm temperatures."
And what these people really don't understand is that the fundamental issue isn't that temperatures are rising or falling, it's that they're rising or falling at a very rapid rate. If global temperatures were rising by 2 degrees over 20 million years in a linear fashion, who cares?
They wouldn't influence human civilization at all. But if you increase global temperatures, average global temperatures by 2 degrees in less than 200 years and then maybe 3 degrees in 200 years.
Now you're talking about mass chaos throughout the planetary biosphere impacting everything, not just ecosystems, but agricultural production and industrial supply chains and really the fundamental basis of global civilization itself. So that's the fundamental problem.
It's that you've turbocharged the planet's thermodynamic instability, and in so doing, of course, you're now jeopardizing the very survival of civilization as we know it.
Steve Grumbine:
00:11:06
Well, you know, one of the other things that really jumped out at me, and this is a history, anthropology kind of lesson here as well, is the way that we were nomadic, right? People were nomadic. You can't really build sedentary stationary civilization, houses and industry and stuff like...
And you went into the Industrial revolution later. But I think the important thing was to note the conditions that allowed us to develop and to become what we are today.
Whether that's good or bad or not, we can have lots of conversations about.
But at this point in time, it's clear that the methodology that the capitalist class has used, that capitalism is an ism, has brought about the externalities that could make all this comforts of Western civilization go kaput really quickly.
I'd like to hear a little bit about the transition from nomadic living and lack of agriculture to the development of agriculture and these kind of primitive ways of organizing society and how that shift occurred and when it occurred.
Erald Kolasi:
00:12:06
Yeah, so that's a fascinating question, and it's also a complicated question, and a lot of people have different opinions on it. So let me just throw that as a caveat right there. Right? In case I step on the wrong toes.
So over 15,000 years ago, that's roughly when the last ice age ended. Right?
And so, you know, over the past 2 million years, we've been in this kind of Quaternary glaciation, as it's known, where the Earth has had a lot of ice sheets on and off. And so the last one ended about, you know, 15,000 years ago.
And before then, because the climate was not just cold, but just so unstable, blizzards everywhere, it was difficult in many cases to move from one place to another.
It was extremely difficult conditions to have large-scale agriculture, right, because to have large-scale agriculture, you need a stable climate, you need a stable hydrological cycle that's so fundamentally important. You need good soil quality, you need good temperatures, you need all of these things, right?
There's so many different conditions that you need in order to develop large-scale agriculture, and those just didn't exist in the Ice age.
So as we transition from that and as global temperatures got warmer, then you started to see the development of a lot of lakes and rivers and other things. So many of the world's lakes and rivers today, right, came from the glaciers melting and going away from the last ice age.
So it afforded people a lot of new opportunities, a lot of new opportunities to hunt, to play around with different seeds. So this is how many people, for example, like David Graeber and David Wendrow [authors of The Dawn of Everything] have suggested agriculture started.
Just people kind of playing around, play farming, if you will.
Steve Grumbine:
00:13:33
The Dawn of Everything, right?
Erald Kolasi:
00:13:34
Yeah, The Dawn of Everything. That's right. Sort of playing around in marshes and other places.
Agriculture obviously wasn't the main food source back then because we were nomads, so we had other food sources. So, you know, we collected fruits and vegetables from nature, we hunted, we did things like that.
So probably agriculture started off very haphazardly, but again, what allowed it to start off were these warmer conditions and just the bonanza of new animals and plants that it provided. And so people probably started messing around with different seed varieties, eventually noticed that certain ones tasted good or they wanted to grow more of them.
And people experimenting all around the world because agriculture was developed independently in many places around the world. Over time, you know, communities grew more complex, although again, there's some controversy over to what extent you need agriculture for a complex society.
There's a lot of people, The Dawn of Everything, that suggests that you don't really need that and also that you can have intensive agriculture without necessarily having hierarchical states, dictatorial overlords that are telling us what to do.
So there's lots of different theories, opinions, and I don't think we can untangle all of them in the show, but generally sort of, that's how it happened, right? It was probably play farming at first.
And then you may have had different ecological conditions and social conditions that pressured some people into intensifying agricultural activities.
And then those were the groups that got the larger populations and eventually became more powerful over other groups and eventually rose to dominance.
Although I do want to say, even in this day and age, in 2025, thousands of years after the rise of agriculture, there are still about 30, 40 million people in the world that live as nomads, right? Especially in places like Central Asia.
Steve Grumbine:
00:15:09
Wow.
Erald Kolasi:
00:15:10
So the nomads have not gone away. A small minority have found a way to coexist with modern industrial civilization.
Steve Grumbine:
00:15:16
You know the other thing that jumped out at me during this time, and I don't have the book in front of me, I'm going off of memory, but these are some of the things that jumped out.
Obviously today, flash forward, we can just blow past the Industrial Revolution for a minute and you just think about the way society organizes itself today. You can tell someone, "Hey, this is good for you, this is great for you, this is good for all of us."
But it violates the thing that they're trying to accomplish, it doesn't matter whether it's good for everybody or not, they're going to get upset. And you use the Netherlands to describe some farmers and the nitrates running off the things that make their incredible efficiency at growing food.
They were using fertilizers and other things. And I think this is a great way of showing how interconnected we are.
I think that's the part that made this stick out so much to me was here we are, we depend on food. They grow the food, they have a tiny amount of land that they use, but yet they produce six times more than the space.
I don't know, something to that effect. Right? The bottom line is they're incredibly efficient for the small size that they operate within.
However, the nitrates and the fertilizers and all the other elements that allow them to have such great output have a major deleterious effect on the environment around them as seepage and runoff go into drinking water and create these dead zones of algae blooms that when it dies off, kills the entire air. And you said something effect--this blew me away--there's like country-sized areas of dead zones where literally nothing.
I was like choking when I read it. I was like, are you kidding me?
Erald Kolasi:
00:16:47
Wow.
Steve Grumbine:
00:16:48
Talk about that, please.
Erald Kolasi:
00:16:49
Yeah, there's actually a massive one in the Gulf of Mexico in the Mississippi River Delta. So along the Mississippi river in the South, there's a, you know, there's a lot of huge farms.
And those farms have a lot of, you know, agricultural runoff or fertilizer and pesticides into the Mississippi ends up in the Gulf of Mexico. And then like you said, it forms these dead zones because all of those nutrients, they're first gobbled up by the algae, then the algae die off.
And then they, when they die and decompose, they suck out the oxygen. That's what causes the dead zone. And it's actually a big problem for the shrimp industry in the South. It causes like huge losses every year.
A lot of fishermen in the South, they have to go out really far to find the shrimp now because they're no longer where they used to be. The shrimp have left the dead zone. So just the economic impact is huge.
And the broader point of that isn't necessarily just about changes that we need to make for agricultural systems and our food systems. And that's a very important point in itself.
But at a deeper conceptual level, one way in which I distinguish myself from a lot of work that's previously happened in ecological sciences is that although I'm very, very concerned about overshoot and resource scarcity, and I talk about these things in the book, right? So this is the notion that, you know, we're harvesting and extracting the planet's resources at a faster rate than we can replenish them.
The canonical example being fossil fuels, which is why people speak about peak oil, but now people are speaking about peak everything, peak uranium, peak phosphorus, peak whatever, right? Everything's going to be.
So overshoot is an incredible problem, obviously, because if we run out of the critical natural resources that serve as industrial inputs for modern civilization, then we're toast. Overshoot is not the only problem, right?
This is the distinction that I bring out in the book, is this distinction between scarcity and stability in the biosphere. So scarcity-related issues, they're enormously important. And again, I talk about them in the book.
But the thermodynamic stability of the biosphere is important as well, right?
So if you are going to dump so much useless energy into the biosphere, whether because of agricultural runoff from all the fertilizer and pesticides that we use, whether because of all the greenhouse gas emissions that we're dumping into the atmosphere, right?
Which are obviously warming up the planet and then trapping more moisture, because when you make the climate warmer, that traps more moisture, then hurricanes and storms come in and they dump massive floods. Just witnessed what happened in North Carolina a few months ago, very tragically.
So the problem is that if you make the wider biosphere so chaotic and unstable, then it is going to lead to fundamental disruptions in the normal operations of modern civilization. And it doesn't matter. This is true.
Even if we had 20 million years' worth of oil, sand, iron, rubber, and uranium and all the other resources that we need, even if we had tens of millions of years of these resources, this argument would still be valid. Human civilization would still face a threat from the chaotic energy flows that we're creating in the biosphere.
This is an entirely separate issue from just overshoot and scarcity-related problems. So this is one of the things that I draw out in the book. And it has massive implications then for how we organize our society.
Because it does mean that we need to think about all of the chaos that we're injecting into the biosphere, not just about whether we have enough oil to last the next 100 years.
Steve Grumbine:
00:19:55
Right. And by the way, I hope you don't mind me saying this, I was really thrilled to hear that you've been listening to our podcast for about a year.
That really made my day. So what I'm going to say probably won't come as a shock to you. I mean, economics is how we move and mobilize activity in this society.
Mobilize resources, mobilize whatever it is, it's through economic activity. And economics has been run by these neoclassical neoliberal fantasy peddlers. Really, quite frankly, it's not even a science. It's mysticism.
You know, and I believe you brought up [William] Nordhaus, who I know Steve Keen took a baseball bat to, quite frankly, and the guy wins a Nobel Prize. So, you know, the Nobel Prize is about as worthless as wet piece of toilet paper. Right? It's just absolutely ridiculous.
But, but the point is, is that these neoclassical elements and economics that really dominate today, they dominate every bit of the media coverage we get. It's amazing how they permeate even comic books. And every bit of our lives is inundated with this mysticism.
You know, I got an MBA and I had to unlearn just about everything I learned in the MBA, other than to remember that shareholder value is the number one driver of capitalism. Right?
But other than that, though, when you start realizing the models they use are just BS and they can make these things say anything they want to say. If you remember Lord of the Rings and you remember the guy talking to the one king, he's like, "Surely you're still great."
He's like in his ear, just poisoning him with disgrace. That's what I see economists as, right? I see them as filthy vile beings that destroy our society.
And these heterodox folks that are actually trying to change and flip the orthodoxy on its head, I see them as kind of like superheroes, right?
You know, in your DC Comics or Marvel Comics or whatever, they're the good guys and these other guys, these neoclassicals represent the bad guys, at least in this kind of comic book world I'm describing here.
But in reality, so much of the pain and suffering in society has been based on these growth models, these economic growth stories, these concepts that there is no alternative. The T.I.N.A. - "There Is No Alternative." The Margaret Thatcherisms, the Ronald Reaganisms.
"There is no such thing as public money, there's only taxpayer money." These lies that Paul Krugman used to throw out there.
And if you saw the movie Finding the Money, you got to see Biden's economist just make an absolute ass of himself being asked, "Well how does money come to be?" He just babbled away. So you know that they don't know a God-blessed thing about economics.
They know how to baffle people with bullshit, they know how to carry the corporate line, but they don't actually represent the people. And you know, the more we dig into heterodox economics and the more we blend it with these ecological studies and degrowth and other things.
We frequently say that Modern Monetary Theory is the lens and the value system is the thoughtful creation of some sort of organizational tool that wraps around the plumbing, the accounting identities that MMT brings forth. And that's how you can assess the outcomes.
You went a little bit further; you went through this thing through an ecological and physics-based destruction of neoclassical economics. And knowing that even though you're a physicist, you served as an economist, I just find it fascinating the breadth of knowledge you have.
Can you talk a little bit about that neoclassical approach and how it's put us in a bad place and kind of bring us to where we are today?
Erald Kolasi:
00:23:13
Yeah, absolutely, Steve. So I spend two whole chapters in the book attacking neoclassical theory. There's a lot of ground there and you know, we won't get to cover all of it.
But I do want to say one thing right off the top, that even though I spent a lot of time in the book attacking neoclassical economics, and even though you just did that, right now, I think the ultimate problem is capital itself, right? It's the capitalists who fund the economists. So what did a Rockefeller say?
That his greatest investment was the money that he gave for the University of Chicago, which was founded from Rockefeller's money.
And University of Chicago has turned into a cesspool of right-wing economists famously associated with Milton Friedman and others, right, The Chicago boys. So ultimately that is the problem, right? We shouldn't get to idealist and think that the world's problems are all because of economics. Right?
Because of economists. Economists, they're just the cog in the machine, right?
The machine is driven by capital, and capital will fund whoever they need to propagate their propaganda. That's the first thing that I wanted to say.
But yes, we can talk about some of the flaws of neoclassical theory and we could do five separate episodes just on this issue, right? Like the flaws of neoclassical theory. There isn't enough time in the day, Steve, I'll talk about a few things. Right?
One of the issues I take umbrage with is, is this notion of methodological individualism. Right? So this is a big thing in neoclassical theory, in Austrian [school of] economics specifically, which inspires a lot of, you know, libertarians.
So methodological individualism is the notion that economic phenomena and outcomes should be understood by analyzing the actions of individual people. The notion is that individual people have internal autonomous preferences and motivations and then they go out there and act in the world, right?
So this notion of human action from Ludwig von Mises, they go out there and act in the world in accordance with their preferences and motivation.
Steve Grumbine:
00:25:02
Is this praxeology?
Erald Kolasi:
00:25:03
Yeah.
Steve Grumbine:
00:25:04
Is it?
Erald Kolasi:
00:25:05
That's basically the notion of methodological individualism which informs a lot of economics thought, right? Not just Austrian economics, but a lot of neoclassical theory.
And least of this notion of microfoundations from Robert Lucas, that in order to explain aggregate economic activity, we need to explain the actions of individual businesses or individual households or individual firms. The level of abstraction can vary and sometimes the computations are so difficult that they look at, you know, individual economic sectors. Right?
So the individuals sort of go away. But the point is, it's this notion that we need microfoundations.
So this is one of the ideas that, that I criticize and that's obviously strongly opposed by MMT as well. And so what are some problems with this idea?
Well, there are many problems, but I think the fundamental problem is that our personal preferences and motivations are ultimately causally subsumed in a social environment, okay? What do I mean by that?
What I mean is that it's absolutely true we have personal preferences and motivations, but they are often caused by the social environment in which we grew up. Right?
And so to attribute the ultimate causality for all of our economic decisions to the immediate personal preference that you had misses the larger point about how society structures our personal expectations and preferences. I'll give you a personal example, Steve. So I love chess. I'm a huge chess player.
And because I love chess, I've gone out there in the world and I bought some chessboards. You know, I'm a sucker for a good chessboard. You can convince me to buy just about anything.
So that's me using a personal preference, my love of chess, and going out there and making an economic decision in the world to buy a chessboard. But the question then is, "Why do I like chess in the first place?"
Did I randomly wake up one day and realize, "Wow, I would like to start a career in chess today, or I would love to, you know, play chess all day. Like, that's my calling in life." No, of course not. Right?
The reason why I like chess is because my father taught it to me when I was young, right? When I was five or six years old, my dad taught me how to play chess.
And I have a lot of fond memories of playing the game with him in our balcony at our house, at the beach. We'd play a lot. So that's really what kindled my initial love of the game. And then, yes, you know, the rest of my life took over.
But the point is, there was a social reason for why I liked what I liked. I didn't. It's not like I randomly like things or have random preferences, right? And so this is the fundamental point.
And I'll bring you another more general example.
Intermission:
00:27:31
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.
Erald Kolasi:
00:27:54
Look at the cultural expectation that men need to buy diamond rings for women when they propose for an engagement. Where did that expectation come from? Again, you can all say, "Well, you bought the diamond ring because that's your personal preference.
You want to make your fiancée happy." And that's all perfectly true. But where did the initial cultural expectation come from? Well, it came from De Beers, right?
De Beers was this giant diamond cartel in the 20th century. They're still around, but they're no longer so dominant anymore.
But in the 20th century, De Beers was the dominant corporate cartel in the world for diamonds. And they had this massive campaign in the middle of the 20th century. You know, "Diamonds are Forever", that famous tagline that came from De Beers.
De Beers suggested that "Hey, you need to go and buy your fiancée a diamond ring, because otherwise, you know, you're not a good man." They're the ones that gave us the expectation that a man should spend two or three months of his salary on a diamond ring.
Literally was De Beers that suggested that exact number. Now, if you just look up online, how much did I spend on a diamond ring for my fiancée?
You'll get like, well, you know, two or three months of your salary. But that suggestion and the propaganda behind it came from De Beers, right?
And De Beers was ruthless in the way it controlled the diamond industry in the 20th century. In some years, it literally withheld 60% of its global diamond production so that it could inflate diamond prices. It was atrocious. Right?
And it's led to the notion that diamonds are rare. Right? Diamonds need to be expensive. Right?
And De Beers literally created that by controlling the global diamond industry and through a massive, massive propaganda campaign. So you can go throughout history and find a million examples like this:
Where what you think is a personal or a cultural expectation really has to do with a fundamental class power dynamic of a given historical age. And so that's one of the central issues with methodological individualism.
And like I said, we could spend five episodes even just about methodological individualism, right? Not even an episode, five just on this. But I'll pause right there.
Steve Grumbine:
00:29:50
I love it. I appreciate you bringing that out because we're all interconnected. And that's why I wanted to draw out the earlier stuff that we talked about.
And we think we're discovering a new land, but really the Indians were already there, so to speak, right? I mean, we're always thinking that we're doing something unique in this world. Like we just thought of it and it's ours, but it's not.
It's not only mentally connected to everything, but it's physiologically connected to everything.
And that was why to me, was so important to discuss the kind of the blooms and all the other things that you talked about with the runoff from the nitrates. I just feel like people don't realize the impacts that each of us have, both that we are being impacted.
We think we're these autonomous beings making decisions on our own, but we're not, as you just eloquently put out there. But it also is the things we do have carry on effects as well.
And I think that that interconnectedness, including the energy component and the work component and the way physics works to tie it all together, including the energy coming from the sun and all the rest of it that bake up this world according to Erald, which is the real world, by the way.
I think that it's important because as we go into some of your solutions, I really want to kind of elevate before we get there though, what some of these problems are, because right now, you know, obviously we've had guys like Jason Hickel come on and Fadhel Kaboub, and we've even had Stephen Hail come on previously and others, Erin Remblance, who have talked about degrowth. We've had a ton of people come on and discuss the way that the Global South is literally lifting up the lifestyles of the Global North.
The Global North ships its trash down to the Global South. Basically, the trash is still there. It hasn't changed. We're still in the same biosphere.
The difference is that the rich countries have exported their trash to the poor countries and the poor countries, in desperation take it.
And this kind of relationship of predation and exploitation and quite frankly, the alienation of the worker to their product and the alienation of ourselves to the biosphere really is, I don't think anybody sits back and says, "Wow, how interconnected we are."
And I think you make the great point that there's nothing done that doesn't have its own domino effect. Everything has some effect on something else. There is no, "Hey, I just made this dumb choice to buy things that we don't need."
And it doesn't have an impact. It may feel inconsequential, but overall, the connectivity of it all is really vital.
And I say that because the structures of the nations, while I enjoy the concept of national sovereignty because of the economic element of it all, that economic sovereignty may represent a totally different value system that ultimately somebody else that has a different value system ends up paying the price for because we all live on this marble and the connective tissues of all the energy and all the different molecules and different interactions that are beyond the normal sight of the human being, the regular person. If you don't see it, it didn't happen, right? But it did, and you demonstrate that.
And it feeds what I consider to be your master attempt at organizing the world. And I know you use the word valerism. I'm sorry, did I say that correctly? Valerist?
Erald Kolasi:
00:33:11
Valerism, yeah.
Steve Grumbine:
00:33:13
And the cosmopole. And I don't want to jump to the end. I want to go to the vision. I want to let you set the stage for your vision.
Because, you know, it's easy to point out what's wrong and you really, really wonderfully pointed out that we can't technology our way out of this problem.
Every time we technology our way out of a problem, we create another problem because of the energy consumption and the waste and all the other aspects that we didn't really consider in our new models. Can you talk to me, tie the problem up and begin bringing us into your vision?
Erald Kolasi:
00:33:50
Yeah, absolutely. So the broader vision is that, you know, to fix the fundamental problems that we have, what we really need is social and political transformation.
That's where the focus needs to be. And technological innovation, we can supplement these social and political solutions, but it can't be the main solution, and certainly not by itself.
And I talk about that extensively in the book when I criticize neoclassical growth theories for silly ideas like perfect substitution. This is the notion that "no matter what, we can substitute between the factors of production, there's not enough capital. You can just put more labor.
There's not enough labor.
You can put more capital or resources, and then you'll have technological innovation and, you know, that'll keep making the economy bigger and bigger and bigger," which is an absurd idea. Perfect substitution doesn't exist in reality. The factors of production are highly interrelated together.
Can you imagine a construction company building a skyscraper just with excavators and bulldozers and machines and without any labor at all?
No, of course not, because you need the people to actually direct the machines and plan and organize and, you know, have the vision and the architect who's going to tell you what the thing looks like and all that. So perfect substitution is a ridiculous idea anyway. And you mentioned Nordhaus, briefly.
I attack some of the IAMs, Integrated Assessment Models, as they're known, which are used by the IPCC to measure the economic impact of our ecological challenges, especially global warming.
I think a lot of these models are absolutely ridiculous, and Steve Keen has talked about them before on the show, so I'm not going to rehash that, but it's covered extensively in my book for anybody who wants the details. So the issue is that because technological innovation can't do it, and not just because of neoclassical growth theories are wrong.
Steve Grumbine:
00:35:38
Right?
Erald Kolasi:
00:35:39
I mean, I point out a number of other problems with thinking about technological innovation can lead us there. So, for example, all technologies, you know, they'll hit efficiency barriers. You can keep improving efficiency,
but you can't ever make a car engine more efficient than a Carnot [heat] engine, right? And Moore's Law is breaking down because of quantum effects and superconductors. And, you know, photovoltaics have their own theoretical efficiency limit.
We're nowhere near them right now, but eventually you're going to hit them. So to bank on efficiency just fixing everything is silly.
And then another problem, of course, is that when you get more energy efficiency, what you tend to get is larger energy systems, right? This is known as the Jevons paradox, after the British economist William Stanley Jevons.
So essentially, when you make a product more efficient, well, you also tend to make it cheaper, and so you tend to increase demand for it, right? And then you get economies of scale, people start using it more, and it leads to more and more energy.
And we see this happening in process after process. When the world invented the Bessemer process for making steel, we made a lot more steel after that, not less.
When we invented the Haber-Bosch process for making ammonia, we made a lot more ammonia after that, not less. And so the examples go on and on.
So these are some of the reasons and others which I won't focus on in this show, but I come up with a whole new theory of technological change under capitalism where I look at the conversional devices of an economy like computers, like cars and so on, as being part of this network work, right?
And they're functionally interdependent, which means that in order for a conversional device to work over here, it's dependent on some other conversional devices doing things over there, right? So before I can log onto my computer, the power plant needs to make a bunch of generate electricity.
Then you gotta send the electricity over the power grid through a bunch of transformers to change the voltage. Then it gets into my house and it gets into my computer, and that's how I can use my computer.
Before I can use my car, I have to get the gas and the tanker truck has to transport it and all of that. So there's this whole conversional network, coronets.
I analyze the economy from the biophysical perspective of these coronets, and I draw some interesting conclusions there, basically about how energy is used in modern capitalism.
And I come up with this notion of spectralization, which is a change in the conversional methods of a conversional device that has an impact on the efficiency or the power output of the device. And then I cover the notion of spectralization in the context of the Industrial Revolution.
And I basically argue that capitalism is characterized by this technological regime of catalytic spectralization where you have these major catalysts that emerge in history, like the steam engine, the internal combustion engine. Right now, it's AI chips with Nvidia, right?
And so when these catalysts emerge and diffuse throughout the economy, they cause a bunch of other spectralization in other devices and it tends to expand the aggregate energy scale of our economic system and therefore imposes greater and greater burdens on the biophysical world. And I'll just talk about Nvidia very briefly.
So you know, the, the large language models that we've all heard about, they've been made possible by Nvidia's chips, these AI chips that are in all the data centers right now.
As more and more of these AI chips have gone on to these data centers, the whole ecosystem of technologies in the data centers have had to change, right? So Nvidia's chips now need, you know, on chip memory support for Micron's chips.
So Micron's making dedicated memory chips that work with Nvidia's chips. Oh, and you also need to change the network switches. The network switches control the amount of data that's relayed across the data center.
So now because you're processing more and faster data because of these AI chips, you need better network switches, right? And then you need new methods of generating electricity.
So a lot of people are trying to push, you know, small modular nuclear reactors and aero-derivative gas turbines and all of these things. So the point is that the diffusion of this catalyst is then causing spectralizations or changes in the conversional nature of other devices.
And when you do that, you have to change production methods and techniques. When you change all of these devices, you might have to change the logistical networks and distribution to get the devices to where they need to go.
You're now making these mega clusters, these huge data centers that take in more and more devices and they use a lot more power. I've talked about Meta before and OpenAI and vast new data centers, gigawatts of power that they're going to use in those data centers.
So it's really changing the techno-social structure of civilization.
So these are just some of the reasons why, and again, I go into details in the book, but these are some of the reasons why technological innovation is not going to get us there. We have this regime of catalytic spectralization under capitalism which tends to bring on these energy intensive waves and cycles.
And the net result is the biosphere feels more and more pressure and we keep growing and growing.
So then the issue is, okay, well if we're not going to keep growing and growing because we don't want a global civilization to collapse in a few centuries, well then what do we do? Well, I propose transitioning from this regime of growth to a regime of stability.
And this new political and economic order that I proposed, I use the label valerism for it. So where did that come from? Well, it's sort of a unification between the words valence and regeneration. So valence in this sense meaning stability.
And I got that notion of valence from essentially another book about history of world agriculture, which I cite over there in chapter 10. So I got this notion from there.
And then regeneration is meant to talk about the regeneration of the natural world and the regeneration of human society itself, right? After the challenges that we're going to go through over the following century. And so those two together, those are the roots of the word valerism.
Right? That's where the word valerism comes from. Right? And so what are the central planks of valerism beyond just saying stability?
Let me talk a little bit about what I mean by stability. So one thing I mean is that we should have managed fluctuations in energy use and resource consumption.
So in the book, I recommend that all societies have a per capita limit on energy use at 60,000 kilocalories per person per day. If you're wondering, for some perspective, what does that mean? Well, a country like China is sort of there. It's a little bit above it now.
A country like Britain is sort of there, a little bit above it. A country like Italy is sort of there. A country like Spain right there around there. The United States is a little bit higher than that.
But the point is, I make this recommendation of having this cap and then, you know, the dynamic equilibrium, the having these managed fluctuations around the dynamic equilibrium, you know, I also propose having a lower bound. So societies are very complex, right? You can't hold them steady at 55,000 kilocalories per person per day because there's all sorts of challenges.
So I recommend having a range. But the point is that we shouldn't cross the cap.
Steve Grumbine:
00:42:29
Right?
Erald Kolasi:
00:42:30
And this cap is sort of phenomenologically derived, based on other factors that I consider important.
So one of them is I adopt the framework of Johan Rockstrom and his collaborators, where they talk about Safe Operating Space For Humanity, a famous paper from 2009. And they talk about, you know, different critical planetary boundaries, the amount of greenhouse gases that we should have in the atmosphere, right, amount of freshwater consumption, and the nitrogen cycle, and things like that.
So there's all these critical planetary boundaries. You can debate the specific boundaries they set.
I myself don't agree with some of them, but the framework itself is very useful, and I adopt that framework, right?
So stability means creating civilization so that it operates within these critical planetary boundaries so that we don't transgress them for long periods of time. And then another thing stability means is creating healthy and sustainable ecological footprints, right?
So an ecological footprint is basically the amount of land that you need to produce the resources of a given civilization, of a given city, of a given country. You could study it at different scales of analysis.
But right now, our ecological footprints, especially in many countries in the western world, they're outrageously out of control and it's completely unsustainable for the planet as a whole. So this gets into issues of land-use dynamics, agricultural production, and how we should organize agriculture, how we should organize industry.
All of these issues tie together in having a healthy ecological footprint. So that's basically what stability means. And then I propose four pillars of a valerist society. So what are the four pillars there?
Stabilization, socialization, modularization and localization. Right? So stabilization I sort of talked a little bit about from an ecological angle, but it also has an economic dimension which we can get into, right?
So some of the proposals that I have in the book are for supporting a universal job guarantee, so universal employment, universal childcare.
I think it's very fundamentally important. Universal healthcare, universal education.
So there's a lot of universals that I talk about and a lot of that obviously has to be established through state financing. So you and I are both general supporters of MMT, so that'll play a big part of it.
So stability is from this ecological angle, from this economic angle as well. What does socialization mean?
Well, I'm in favor of having public-collective control over a lot of economic resources, especially energy-intensive industries.
Steve Grumbine:
00:44:52
Right.
Erald Kolasi:
00:44:53
So, [ditto] what does public-collective resources mean? Well, it means a lot of things.
It can mean cooperatives at a local level, but for a lot of the big energy-intensive industries, oil and gas, meat and dairy, and a few others, I actually support nationalization. So I support just making them, you know, state-owned companies. I don't see why they need to be private at all.
Steve Grumbine:
00:45:11
Agreed.
Erald Kolasi:
00:45:12
And why is that so important?
Well, it's important because nationalizing these companies will allow the government to quickly coordinate economic decisions and make changes related to energy transition. You know, we can't let a capitalist decide that
"Well, it's profitable for me to build wind and solar farms 50 years from now, so that's when I'll do it." That's not good enough. Right? If you want quick, highly coordinated decisions, then you need some kind of centralized control over that.
So socialization is another thing. Modularization is a big part of it. This is my attempt to create a modular society. What do I mean by that?
I mean having a society that's based on reusability, interchangeability, prefabricated components, a society that reduces a lot of waste. And Steve, if you have any follow ups.
Steve Grumbine:
00:45:56
Yeah, that modularization and the centralization.
I know a lot of people revile central planning and things like that, but I envision, like previous guest I had on was named Mike McCarthy and he talked about this mini-public approach to power sharing and kind of using the jury-selection angle for bringing people together, so there was never a centralization of power, but yet at the same time kind of. Right?
And in the sense that the ability to do away with some of the corruption that we experience today that allows negative things to happen. I really found it fascinating to break these things into kind of modular...
You know, I'm a Scrum Master, so I think in agile and I think about the ability to break down a software program into modular components and being able to develop them independent of the others while understanding they work together.
And the idea of creating modular elements of society that we can work out, we can discuss as a unit and understand how they interconnect with the rest of the puzzle, I think is a fascinating approach. I just wanted to jump that in there because that was one of the things I enjoyed about the last three chapters.
I enjoyed the whole book, but the last three in particular. Go ahead. I just wanted to throw that in there.
Erald Kolasi:
00:47:11
I really appreciate that. Yeah. And I hope at the end we can talk more about the international structure and the vision there.
Steve Grumbine:
00:47:17
Right, Absolutely.
Erald Kolasi:
00:47:18
Where more of that stuff ties in.
But modularization in this sense, in chapter 10, it's essentially a way of organizing society all the way from industrial manufacturing and industrial strategy to customization and consumption. So what am I talking about there?
Well, the main goal, I think as we design our society and as people talk about the circular economy stuff, is to reduce waste, right? Not just to recycle, because recycling is a very energy-intensive process. So the less we can send to recycling, the better it would be.
It would be awesome if we could just reuse things, have interchangeability and create efficient processes around that so we can reduce so much of that waste to begin with.
There's a lot of evidence out there showing that, you know, prefabricated housing and prefabricated industrial manufacturing and other things like that help reduce resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and all of those things. So this is why I support modularization.
But another big fundamental thing that would change with modularization is in a valerist society is the nature of technological development itself would change, right? So think about Volkswagen's MQB platform. So this is essentially a modularized chassis with an engine, a transverse engine.
And then Volkswagen then uses this modular component to build different kinds of cars, right? So they built millions of cars this way.
And I really like this style of manufacturing, not just because ultimately under state control, I think you can be very efficient and productive, but you can really restrain a lot of the catalytic spectralization under capitalism. Suppose that we have this modularized standard, right, this prefabricated component that we use to build cars.
Well, it's difficult for another car maker to come along and say, "Well, I don't like my engines transverse anymore. I want them inline, you know, like I had them before."
Now that's difficult to do because the entire prefabricated component has been built on this transverse design. So it makes it harder to change a lot of conversional devices.
And of course you could adopt legal standards as well that help reinforce this message to private capital from the state.
But the point is having more modular manufacturing is a way of restraining a lot of the catalytic specialization under capitalism, again with some proper oversight from the government. Can't work without that.
Steve Grumbine:
00:49:29
If I look at the iPhone, I'm going to use the iPhone, for example, right? We've got the Android standard that kind of fits this kind of open systems approach.
But then you've got the proprietary iPhone that I remember developing software for iPhones. And the fact is that they wouldn't let you do anything on it
that violated their ability to remain proprietary, to own any money coming through, et cetera. And that in and of itself created a whole new charge cord, a whole new connector, a whole new status, or a whole new standard, if you will.
And now all of a sudden, instead of being able to make a simple power supply, you've got to make 400 million little, teeny pieces that create additional energy waste, you know, tons and tons and tons of ridiculous overpriced spending. And that's just from a consumer perspective.
But from an output perspective, you're duplicating once again and you're not really gaining anything there. Or is there a gain by the competition? I'm curious on your thoughts on that.
Erald Kolasi:
00:50:30
Well, unfortunately, in a lot of modern capitalism there isn't much competition is what a lot of people would say. That's why companies like Microsoft and Apple keep pumping out slightly different variations of the same product. And then, and then another problem.
So Your example is great. I love that example.
And another problem with designing things that way, of course, is planned obsolescence, which is planned obsolescence, which is, you know, you're designing your products so they can fail in two or three years so that people can go and buy more of them. Right? So I bring up a lot of those examples in the book. Highly wasteful and, you know, very energy inefficient.
And again, it forces you into slightly changing these products, but even slightly changing them means you need to change production methods and again, logistical distribution in some sense, and it just amplifies the energy scale of the system.
If you have these modular manufacturing, these modularized industrial strategies, what you can do is develop highly, highly efficient, pinpointed, highly efficient production methods and production standards. And they'll be good year in and year out. So the products will last longer, they won't break down as much.
You won't have to invent or create new production methods like often happens, for example, in the semiconductor industry. So the whole result is you have more targeted spectralization, as I talk about in the book, right?
So you're reducing that catalytic spectralization, less wasteful, less energy use, fewer consumption resources. And it's good for society and it's good for everybody and it's good for the environment. So modularization was a big part of it.
And then localization was another one. This is about promoting domestic, localized industrial production.
So much of the waste emissions, energy use in our global economy comes from international trade, right? From all these global value chains.
In the good old days, I use that term as a joke, not in any serious way, but in the old days you would send the raw materials to a factory and then the finished product will come out right there, right? Now you send different raw materials to different factories.
And one factory in this part of the world makes something and then they ship it over to, you know, Europe and then somebody produces something over there, they ship it off to Japan, and that's where the car is made. So there's all these different global value chains. It's very, very inefficient, very energy intensive.
And so I think there's a lot of opportunity for localization. And so these are some of the economic and ecological principles underlying valerism.
These four pillars, as I talk about, and then the superstructure to that is a whole new political vision which I outline and a whole new international system which I talk about for governing the global ecological commons. And the reason why, Steven, and I want you to press me on this because I know you might disagree with me a little bit, and I love a good discussion.
So, but the reason why I think it's so important for this to happen at a global level is because this is a global problem.
And unless we address it through effective, efficient global coordination, localized solutions by themselves are not going to work.
So you can make all the changes you want in the United States, but if India and China or a bunch of other countries don't play along, none of this is going to work.
Steve Grumbine:
00:53:32
I don't disagree with... just real quick, because what you're saying is really important.
I think from a monetary-sovereignty perspective, which is again, the catalyst for mobilization, the catalyst for making change is right now anyway, the nation state.
And when you think about, like the EU, for example, when they gave up monetary sovereignty in Europe, those countries, you saw what happened to Greece. Greece suddenly couldn't, you know, pay its bills. It was belly up. It was really, really hemorrhaging all the way around.
Conceptually, I think I agree 100% with you, actually.
It's just in reality though, once countries give up their monetary sovereignty and allow themselves to be pawns to someone else, that's where you start losing the ability. And maybe that's a good thing in some ways. Okay?
And again, I just recognize the here and now example of the EU and the pain points that they've experienced. Now all of a sudden they've lifted their deficit limits in the name of military Keynesianism. Okay? Warmongering is going to be the new norm there.
They're going to fill up the bucket that the US pulled back from. But that kind of thinking is why I also agree with you. And yet at the same time, I'm terrified of what that would look like in praxis.
Erald Kolasi:
00:54:47
Yeah. So let me clarify what I think are some possible misconceptions there. [Sure.]
I don't call in this new system for violating the national sovereignty and for example, creating your own money, having your own unit of account. And I'm going to give some context for people who might be confused about what we're talking about, because you mentioned the Cosmopole earlier.
People might not even know what that is, right? [Yes!] So in the book, in chapter 10, I propose the creation of a global legislature, which I call the Cosmopole.
And the global legislature would be specifically chartered for the purpose of managing and administering ecological issues. And I clarify in the book that it would not have the power to set taxes or mess with the finances of individual countries.
Those would still belong to the governments themselves.
So I'm very clear about that in the book. However, I do give examples of things that the Cosmopole would have the power to do which would have some indirect economic effects, even potentially on national budgets. So, the Cosmopole could be chartered to do things like establish national parks. Right?
Even overriding the will of a national government because it is the global legislature. And in this new system, I also want to emphasize there's no executive and there's no judiciary.
So it is just a global legislature which is recycled once every few years or so through sortition. So that's another big idea in the book that we didn't get to.
In my political vision, as I write from ancient Greece and on, people have recognized that elections are very easy to manipulate by the rich. And so I actually support the creation of sortitions for national legislatures.
Steve Grumbine:
00:56:25
Can you explain that concept? I really loved it, but I want to hear it. I think it's powerful.
Erald Kolasi:
00:56:31
Right. So as I point out in the book Aristotle, one of the things he said in politics is that systems that rely on elections, he actually called them oligarchies because elections are very easy to manipulate and control by the rich. And I think if you need any other evidence of that, you haven't been paying attention to what's been happening in America over the past few months.
So I actually propose a different kind of structure in the government where members to a unicameral legislature are selected through sortition. So I changed the method of selection. There's no more elections. It's just a random lottery of citizens. So it's just random lotteries.
There'd be certain eligible citizens that would be pretty much all of us. Unless you've done something horrible, you know, and gone to prison for it or something.
And with certain age requirements and the usual rational requirements, right? So everybody would be eligible in that sense. You would have this random lottery of citizens and then they would be going to the legislature.
Now I want to clarify something else which is I talk about a subnational unit as well. They're the demopoles. Actually the way it would work is people would be selected to the demopoles.
These are sort of more local executive councils for managing a lot of political, economic and economic psychological issues that I describe in the book. You can think of it sort of as council democracy. Right? So people would actually be selected to the demopoles first through sortition.
Then a certain percentage of those sortition from the demopoles would go to the mesopoles, as I call them. So the mesopoles are now the national legislatures. Right? So Congress in the valerist system would be a mesopole, right?
And then the cosmopole is the global legislature, which is going to be formed from popular representation. So the idea is people will hop along each of these chains through sortition, right?
And so some people from the mesopole through sortition, they'll end up in the cosmopole. But the point is it's all random lotteries of people. Nobody's getting elected to the legislatures.
And then I talk about structurally tilting the system towards the power of the legislatures of the mesopoles and the cosmopole. So I talk about getting rid of things like judicial review, right?
So if a certain mesopole gets something wrong, if a certain legislature gets something wrong, that decision could always be reversed by a future legislature. The courts would no longer have the power to decide whether what the mesopoles are saying is constitutional or not.
And obviously the cosmopole can also overturn a decision that is specifically related to an ecological issue. And I identified what kinds of issues could be included there. Right? Where the cosmopole would actually have jurisdiction and power.
So that is how the whole system ties together, right? This new internationalist vision in the valerist world order that I propose.
And one thing that I emphasize is that local and global solutions, they don't have to stand in contradiction, opposition to each other. That's often how their relationship is often framed. Right? If there's too much central power, then there's not enough local power.
There's too much local power, there's not enough central power.
And if you're going to do big things like manage the global ecological commons so that we keep modern civilization within these planetary constraints, then you need some kind of centralized global power. I mean, you need to mobilize that power to enforce rules and regulations, right? Otherwise people are just going to go and do whatever they want.
And one of the examples I bring up in the book for these lines is I bring up Tokugawa, Japan. This is one of my favorite examples. So in the late 17th century, Japan had a massive deforestation crisis. I mean, absolutely massive.
The society was close to collapsing.
And so Tokugawa, the Tokugawa government came in there, the central government, and imposed a lot of rigid ecological standards, telling people, "Hey, you can only cut this much wood, you can only plant crops over here. Let's do more fishing", right? Substitute a little bit.
The point is, they rolled up all these regulations, and over the next century and a half, Japan's population was stable, energy use was stable, and Japan's forests regrew. Right? And therefore Japanese agriculture survived. Right? Because if you lose your forest and your soil quality is gone, everything's gone.
Your agriculture will collapse. That's why it was such a huge threat.
So by the middle of the 19th century, Japan's forests had regrown and Japan had really saved itself in a really incredible, incredible way. And they did it through this combination of local management and top-down centralized control.
Those two things don't have to stand in contradiction to each other. Centralized control can often enhance things at the local level.
Look at all the problems that people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are talking about now in Abundance, right? "Oh, we need more housing and you know, the local boards and counties don't let us have it." Well, why don't they let us have it?
Well, because in America we have federalism and they have power to prevent those kinds of things, right? But if you had more centralized control, the government could say, "No, we're building here. Forget what you think", right?
And this has been a problem in many civilizations throughout history.
In the 18th century, before the French Revolution, the government had a hard time building canals in Provence because the local landowners didn't want them. Right? And it wasn't until the French Revolution and a more powerful government came in, in charge in Paris that they said, "No, go screw yourselves.
We're, we're building canals here", right? So the point is these layers of governance can really enhance each other. They can also fight, right? That's the problem.
Whenever you have multiple layers of governance, they're going to conflict. There's going to be some tension there. That's unavoidable.
But the point is they don't have to stand in some kind of dialectical contradiction to each other. Other, right?
So once we have these broader goals that as a global civilization, we mostly agree on that, "Hey, we want to preserve ourselves or else we're going to go kaput."
One of the things I write in the book against the kind of very nationalist mindset is, okay, yes, the nation state is important, but can we think of interests that go beyond the nation state? And I say, "Yes, of course. If the biosphere collapses, all nations go kaput." So it's in the interests of all nations.
There's clearly a collective global interest there which supersedes national interest. And this is one of the theoretical arguments I make for the creation of this new valerist international order.
So I'll pause right there and get your take on that because I know I said a lot.
Steve Grumbine:
01:02:14
Yeah, you know, but it's amazing. The things that jump out at me are in the absence of a judiciary, which doesn't sound horrible at all, but how does one enforce things? Right?
Are we talking about a police state? We talk about military? We talking about just people agreeing to cooperate?
I mean, economics has largely been a system of who has a gun to manage what they want. And that's literally how society has been formed, by might makes right. Obviously that's not the way I would like to see it, but I, I genuinely don't know how you make that happen when you have diverse interests.
Erald Kolasi:
01:02:48
Yeah, Steve, I think you're getting at a very critical question there.
And it's a question that I myself don't have like a magical answer for, which is, you know, how do you bring this kind of society to life in the first place? Right? And I don't really know. It could happen through many different ways.
My hope is that it happens because people realize, "Wow, we're going in a really bad direction and we should change course."
Steve Grumbine:
01:03:12
Right?
Erald Kolasi:
01:03:13
Maybe people won't realize that. Maybe what'll happen is things get so bad. And unfortunately, this is often what happens in human history.
Things get so bad that, we have mass chaos throughout the biosphere, supply chain disruptions, agriculture starts collapsing, that then you have, you know, revolutions and wars, and people realize, "Okay, maybe we need to go in a different direction, guys." It could happen that way, right? I don't fully address that in the book.
I sort of mention it in passing, but I don't know how this world is going to happen from that sense.
My point is that if we can overcome, for whatever reason, some of the internal contradictions and challenges, then we need to set up some kind of global system so that these sort of issues that we're having now don't arise again in five centuries or a thousand years or 1500 years from now.
Humanity, now that we've gotten to this point, I think it's absolutely critical to preserve modern industrial civilization, because modern civilization has produced a lot of good things for us. Our life expectancies are higher, literacy rates are higher, education rates are higher. Right? So medicine is phenomenal.
So there's a lot of great things that we should want to preserve about modern civilization, but we're not going to preserve it in the current capitalist trajectory we're on. So what kind of society, what kind of alternative vision, once the political opportunity arises, should we establish in the first place?
And that's really what the last three chapters are trying to answer.
For whatever reason, once a political opportunity arises, what kind of system should we set up so that we have healthier, better, more productive lives built around collective values instead of short-term profit exploitation and all the terrible things that we're living with now under capitalism and that we're going to experience in an even worse way in the decades and century to come. So that is sort of what that vision in the last few chapters is about.
Steve Grumbine:
01:05:05
I am curious, just as an aside, I wouldn't put myself in any one camp at this point, but I would clearly say that my leanings would call me a socialist. And you know, I'm not a big fan of private production. I'm major fan of the public commons and enhancing that.
I am curious, obviously you published through MR [Monthly Review Press] which is a socialist kind of publication. What are your thoughts in terms of how socialists might perceive this?
Erald Kolasi:
01:05:29
Absolutely. So socialists right now I think are kind of torn about the direction that we should go in. And I just want to clarify this up front.
When right wingers talk about socialism, you know, all they really mean is Stalinism, right? So absolute centralized control over everything and you know, there's no private property or anything like that.
They don't recognize any other forms of socialism. Even though, for example, Lenin with his new economic policies in the 1920s actually allowed for market freedoms in many ways.
So he allowed peasants to sell their grain, their surplus grain in local markets. He allowed small and medium-sized businesses to be privately owned. Right?
So this was the new economic policy that the Soviet Union first adopted in the 1920s and had for most of the 1920s. And then Stalin overturned that starting in 1928 and later. So Stalin got rid of it and then we got Stalinism.
Just want to emphasize that there are many different variations of socialism and communism, not just at an intellectual level. Forget the intellectual, I mean from political leaders themselves, right? From people who've actually held power in communist government.
So even Lenin acknowledged that, you know, we need some capitalism to start off as we make this transition. Right? It can get pretty complicated there. But I'm not going to get into all those issues.
Where I was going is I think there's one camp of socialists that think this is more with people like Leigh Phillips, you know, Bhaskar Sunkara and associated with Jacobin [magazine], that we need energy abundance, you know, we need to grow energy, we need more renewable energy, you know, we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. There's that whole camp, right? And I'm not going to say much about that to refute it because I think I've already refuted it in what I said earlier.
Steve Grumbine:
01:07:02
Right.
Erald Kolasi:
01:07:03
You can't have infinite growth on a planet, blah, blah. I'm not going to say that again, but that's one sort of camp, right? So I think that camp would disagree with a lot of what I'm writing.
Another major camp now is sort of, you know, ecological socialism, sometimes called eco-socialism. This is what the Monthly Review school is. So my work falls more broadly into that camp and then another remote school.
Some people would say it's the same thing, some people would say it's different. I'll say a little bit about. It is a degrowth, right? So this is a term that's being used around. I deliberately avoided using that term for the book.
I came up with a whole new term, valerism, because I don't think that term accurately captures the full scope and ambition of my project. There are a lot of fundamental differences in what I'm proposing from other degrowth literature.
One other issue is that the degrowth movement itself is sort of broken up into many different segments and viewpoints. So for some people, degrowth means having GDP growth but just reducing the rate of growth. Right?
So it doesn't even really mean an absolute degrowth, like an absolute going the other direction in growth. It just means slowing down the rate of GDP growth.
Steve Grumbine:
01:08:10
Green capitalism.
Erald Kolasi:
01:08:13
Some variation of that, right? For other people it means no reducing GDP. For other people it means.
And sometimes even so, Jason Hickel, who you've had on the show, you know, I love Jason, read his work, I'm very familiar with it. But you know, sometimes degrowthers in certain academic papers they'll talk about GDP.
In other places they'll talk about restraining aggregate energy use and things like that. In one place, Jason talks about wanting aggregate global energy used to be 200 or 300 exajoules, but in other places now they talk about GDP.
And those are very different things, right? So another thing we didn't get, to which I point out in the book, is GDP is not really a great aggregate.
It's not a great indicator of aggregate scale. And so we shouldn't be trying to set aggregate limits on GDP. So I am utterly uninterested in growing or degrowing GDP.
I'm focused on the biophysical metrics that are relevant for building a kind of sustainable civilization.
Steve Grumbine:
01:09:04
You know, I agree with that. The GDP is such an indiscriminate non, non-thing. It really is a non-thing. You can make it mean absolutely anything.
I think the degrowthers would tell you that they would prefer something like a genuine progress indicator or a panel of indicators to handle that versus any kind of arbitrary GDP number. But, keep going. I just wanted to throw that in there.
Erald Kolasi:
01:09:26
Absolutely, you're right. Yes. And there's a lot of proposals that have been given along those lines, and I would say nearly all of them are better than GDP.
As I clarify in the book, I don't want to keep the focus on financial indicators, because what I really want to do is build a society that can satisfy these planetary constraints. And the constraints are not necessarily financial. They're biophysical.
So you can have a society that, for example, uses less energy per capita, whatever, than another.
But if all that society is doing is throwing methane into the atmosphere and turbocharging global warming, well, I would say what that society is doing is more harmful than the other society.
So how you're deploying energy, how you're using it, you know, what the sinks are, everything that you're doing, all of these issues holistically tie together. But the point is, it's this biophysical analysis that brings it together. It's not necessarily like the financial indicators.
And again, this is where there's a lot of overlap, obviously, between my work and degrowth, right?
But there are also sufficient enough differences that I don't think it's worth calling what I'm doing degrowth, which is why I don't, and why I don't think anyone else should either.
Steve Grumbine:
01:10:34
Fair enough. I appreciate that. And, you know, the interesting thing is, is that because you created the term valerism, I really have to chew on it more. Right?
But I really, at the fundamental level, really appreciate everything you said, because I agree it's like the energy is real, economics isn't, GDP isn't, but the energy is real. So if you're focusing on the economics and skipping the energy, you've kind of lost the plot. Right?
I mean, I understand why you might do that, because that's what other people are looking at. So if you can get them to think about it that way, maybe you get them to start making some changes.
But I really do believe if you break it down at the energy level, it's hard, though. I mean, how many people really understand physics? How many people really understand energy?
Much less the relationship with energy and production and energy with economics and energy with all these other things. I think it adds a layer of complexity that kind of could be missed by a TikTok generation. And that's the concern with all this stuff. I mean, we've been doing this podcast now for what, you know, since 2018, I think it was.
And within that space, I keep thinking we're trying to break these very, very complex subjects down for people to a level that an activist and I'm constantly told, "No, Steve, man, you know, this is like a PhD level podcast, brother, you, you're missing the plot there." But the reality is these important subjects, Main Street has a very, very limited TikTok mindset, and I don't think that's an accident.
I think we've dumbed down our society and stopped educating people, stopped teaching them how to think, how to think through problems even, problem-solving skills, and just they react, react, react, not think, and plan and collaborate and work together. So I think what you're talking about here is of vital importance and I consider this an honor to have you on.
I'd like you to give us your final parting words as to, you know, out of everything we've talked about, knowing full well we could do 40 more episodes now that you've uncorked a bunch of these ideas.
And believe me, I would love to do that, by the way, but all jokes aside, and that's not a joke, by the way, but for real, what would you say you would want everybody that has heard this podcast to take away from, what would be the key takeaways? And do buy the book, by the way.
Erald Kolasi:
01:12:44
Thank you for that, Steve.
So I would say that it's easy to look, as I write in the book, at the immensity of the earth and the natural world and assume that human beings can't have much of an impact on it, right? To assume that the natural world is kind of blind to our civilizational musings.
But that assumption is fundamentally a mistake and that we do have a window over the next few decades to unroll a lot of the damage that we've done and to prevent things from getting worse, because if we don't take this opportunity, they will get much, much worse. And I don't want to think about the potential consequences there, though I've talked about them in other places, including in the book.
I think the book should be a wake-up call for humanity. And I talked about things in a way not just identifying problems that are out there, because it's easy to critique and point out problems.
But I laid out a whole alternative vision that I hope would inspire people to think about some of the problems that we've had and we've been talking about, but to talk about them in a different way. And I hope people, even if they don't agree with that vision, that's fine.
I hope that they learn something from it, even a kernel, even a morsel, that could help them change some small part of their thinking and lead them to take actions that are ultimately beneficial for humanity and human civilization.
Steve Grumbine:
01:14:12
My goodness, this has been a great time. And I really, really, truly appreciate the book.
Again, I'm not a physicist and I was able to, you know, if you told me I have to give a five-minute synopsis of all the physics in it, I would lose. But I understood enough, you know what I mean, to really, for it to have an impact on me.
And I went from, "Hey, this is going to be an interesting discussion" to "I can't wait to do this discussion." And I hope that we were able to capture what you were trying to say because I do want to have you back on.
I'm just telling you right up front, everything you're talking about. I think you're amazing. I think you really, really thought through the problems in a way that most people would probably not do.
And that is so necessary. So in a world where all we can do is talk and think and ponder and lay out ideas and get people to think about, because we can't do it on our own.
We can't dictate that this will happen. We've got to pull people in to get them thinking about it.
And, boy, you see how hard it is to get people just to understand that the government's the currency issuer. I mean, you've got all the disinformation from these corporations that have an interest in maintaining the existing order.
And, you know, there's a lot of propaganda to get past. So I really appreciate you taking a stab at putting a vision out there. And it's so well thought out. It really is Erald. I really do appreciate this.
Tell everybody where we can find more of your work.
Erald Kolasi:
01:15:32
Yeah, thank you. So, people can find out more about me and my work at my website, eraldkolasi.com. And I've also recently joined Substack just a few weeks ago actually, less than a month ago.
So I'm writing a lot on Substack. Just look me up on Substack, Erald Kolasi. And hope to get in touch with you there.
Steve Grumbine:
01:15:49
Awesome. And I have followed you there, so Real Progressives, will follow, I think Jules followed you right after we got done sound checks.
So very exciting, thrilled, super happy. And I do hope we can have you back on again in the future.
Erald Kolasi:
01:16:03
Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
Steve Grumbine:
01:16:05
You got it. All right, folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese and the founder of Real Progressives.
We are a nonprofit organization 501(c)3. We live and die on your contributions, folks.
If you find value in the podcasts we produce and you find value and the other webinars and seminars and work we do, we'd really really appreciate you considering becoming a monthly donor. You can go to Patreon. Follow us at Real Progressives at Patreon.
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So without further ado, on behalf of my guest Erald Kolasi and myself, Steve Grumbine with Macro N Cheese, we are out of here.
End Credits:
01:17:02
Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.
It was a great discussion Steve! Thank you for having me on!
I'm really interested in the idea of sortition. I find it very intriguing. With some appropriate safeguards, it seems to me that it would be a far better way to run government at all levels.