Jeorge and Jason mini

In this episode, host Gabby Lisi talks with theologian Joerg Rieger and environmental historian Jason W. Moore about the Capitalocene—a way of understanding the climate crisis not as the fault of “humanity” in general, but as the result of capitalism, empire, extraction, and the cheapening of human and non-human life.

Moore challenges the familiar idea of the Anthropocene, or “age of humans,” arguing that it hides the role of capitalism and imperial power in shaping the ecological crisis. Rieger brings this analysis into conversation with theology, labor, and faith communities, asking how religion can either reinforce systems of domination or help people build solidarity and alternatives.

Together, they explore class struggle, labor, ecology, Christian nationalism, economic democracy, false idols, and the power of working people. They also ask what religious communities might contribute when they recognize themselves as part of the 99% who work, struggle, organize, and depend on one another.

Key Points

· The Anthropocene can make the climate crisis sound like the fault of all humans equally. The Capitalocene names capitalism, empire, and extraction as central causes.

· Moore argues that capitalism is not only a world economy but a “world ecology” that organizes labor, nature, power, and profit together.

· Rieger emphasizes that class and labor are often missing from theology, even though work shapes most people’s lives.

· The conversation explores how race, gender, and class are used to divide working people, while solidarity can help communities recognize shared power.

· Faith communities can reinforce domination, but they can also resist it by organizing around labor, ecology, justice, and economic democracy.

· Rieger describes labor as an “ultimate concern” because life depends on work, including unpaid, reproductive, ecological, and care labor.

· The guests discuss “God the worker” as an alternative to images of God modeled on rulers, CEOs, or managers.

Guest Bios

Joerg Rieger, PhD, is the Founding Director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. He is Distinguished Professor of Theology, Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies, and Affiliate Faculty at the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures. His work brings theology into conversation with struggles for justice and liberation, especially around labor, economics, public life, and power.

Jason W. Moore is Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, where he coordinates the World-Ecology Research Collective. An environmental historian and historical geographer, Moore is known for his work on world-ecology and for developing the concept of the Capitalocene.

Resources Mentioned

Theology in the Capitalocene by Joerg Rieger
https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9781506431574/Theology-in-the-Capitalocene

Capitalism in the Web of Life by Jason W. Moore
https://www.versobooks.com/products/2124-capitalism-in-the-web-of-life

Anthropocene or Capitalocene? edited by Jason W. Moore
https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=779

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/a-history-of-the-world-in-seven-cheap-things/paper

World-Ecology Research Collective
https://worldecologynetwork.com

Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice
https://www.religionandjustice.org

Religion and Justice Podcast
https://religionandjustice.buzzsprout.com

Religion and Justice on Substack
https://religionandjustice.substack.com

About Religion and Justice
Religion and Justice is a podcast from the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. We explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering how these forces shape the work of justice and solidarity. Each episode offers space for investigation, education, and organizing through conversations with scholars, organizers, and practitioners.

Learn more at religionandjustice.org

The show is currently produced by Peterson Toscano http://www.petersontoscano.com 

Religion and Justice on Substack:
https://religionandjustice.substack.com

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Transcript

>> Gab Liese: 0:00

I now say to my students, well, why don't you go to the grocery store, talk to the person stocking the shelves and you ask them about class struggle. They might not know the term, may not ever have heard of Marx or Engels, but they know the reality. They know that they're under pressure. They know that somebody breathes down their neck.

>> Jason W. Moore: 0:17

We've not been taught this history, but before there could be large scale industry, what's sometimes called the Industrial revolution, which is a liberal trope, a pro imperialist liberal trope. But before that era of big factories and everything else, you had to have a cheap workforce.

>> Joerg Rieger: 0:36

Welcome to Religion and Justice, a podcast brought to you by the Wendland Cook Program in Religion and justice at Vanderbilt University. I'm your host, Gab Liese. Today I'm joined by two leading thinkers working at the intersection of political economy, ecology and theology, Jason W. Moore and Joerg Rieger Jason is an environmental historian and historical geographer at Binghamton University. He's a key voice in world ecology. His work, including Capitalism and the Web of Life, Seven Cheap Things, An Anthropocene or Capitalocene, challenges how we understand capitalism, nature and crisis on a planetary scale. Joerg is Distinguished professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University and founding Director of the Wendland Cook Program in Religion and Justice. Across decades of scholarship, including his recent book, Theology and the Capitalocene, he explored how theology engages struggles for justice, labor and liberation in all areas of life. In our conversation today, we explore the idea of the Capitalocene and how it reframes our understanding of, ecological crisis, capitalism and power. Together, we ask what this perspective reveals that the more familiar Anthropocene obscures how systems of extraction shape what we value and what role religion might play in either reinforcing or resisting those systems. We also turn to questions of class, labor and collective power and consider whether religious communities can help us imagine and build more just and sustainable ways of life. So let's get into it.

>> Speaker D: 2:18

Welcome Jason Moore to the podcast and also welcome Joerg Rieger.

>> Gab Liese: 2:22

Great to be with you, Gab.

>> Jason W. Moore: 2:24

Great to be with you. Thank you for having, me.

>> Speaker D: 2:25

Absolutely. So we're going to jump right into it. Jason, your work focuses on the Capital O scene, but I wanted to ask you first about the Anthropocene. You wrote that the Anthropocene makes for a quote, unquote easy story. What makes it so appealing and what does that easy story obscure?

>> Jason W. Moore: 2:43

It's a great question. The Anthropocene, which has become the meta in environmentalist or one of the meta environmentalist concepts of our times is the direct inheritor of the Maltusian program from the end of the 18th century with antecedents that go back even more deeply into capitalism. Civilizing project. The idea that the world is structured through an eternal conflict between humans and nature is a specifically capitalist invention and a specific instrument of capitalist rule. So the Anthropocene literally means age of man. It is a direct and frontal rejection of Vernadsky's famous concept of the biosphere, which was anchored in labor. There's been a neoliberal cleansing of that dynamic. it was not man versus nature, but rather labor in the web of life. For Vernadsky, the Anthropocene story is so easy for that reason. It provides a definition of the problem which is man versus nature, and then provides a tailor made, managerial, technocratic, elitist set of solutions, that is to manage the web of life. What the imperialists in the 70s and 80s called planetary management, and which the Anthropocene, sensing that planetary management was a bit too on the nose, now invoke planetary stewardship, which has all these warm and fuzzy theological implications that help liberal professionals who support capitalism to feel good about, what amounts to a program for planetary dictatorship on the part of the imperial west to resolve something called the climate emergency, to impose state of emergency politics on the world. This is the Anthropocene. It's not only a messed up, empirically flawed ahistorical story, but, but it is a specific instrument of, the imperial West.

>> Gab Liese: 4:45

And the notion of stewardship is actually right there in religion all over. Right. So you know, managerial planetary stewardship then is seen as a virtue and it copies a lot of what you're saying. So for religious people this is really important to realize.

>> Jason W. Moore: 5:01

And stewardship without a critique is a default to an elitist program of sustainability, which itself was a program to throttle the third world in the 1970s.

>> Gab Liese: 5:13

Right?

>> Speaker D: 5:13

Absolutely, absolutely. What does the Capitalocene argument that you put forward say that the Anthropocene argument doesn't or can't or won't say?

>> Jason W. Moore: 5:22

Well, m mostly Capitalocene, literally Age of capital was intended as a provocation, to mock and to ridicule the neo Malthusianism of the Anthropocene of the notion that the problems of the world are those of man against nature. which also by the way, historically concealed the fact that through the dynamics of imperialism from 1492 onwards, that the vast majority of humankind was relocated into the zone of nature, they were called savages. The Wilderness as a concept comes out of English ethnic cleansing and conquests and genocides in Ireland. The wild and barbarous, Irish, which then is of course projected and generalized onto American Indians in North America. That's the English learned how to do what they did by genociding and dispossessing the Irish and then went to North America to do more of the same. That's where a lot of this language comes from. That's the origins of capitalism, of course. Capitalism is a system of cheap nature, both to cheapen and price crucial inputs for doing business, above all labor, food, energy, raw materials, the four cheaps. And also of a grand epochal imperialist project of cheapening, in that other sense of the term, to rob of dignity, the labor and life of the vast human majority. This is of course what underpins the world historical dynamics of racism and gender, which are ultimately ways of securing and policing, juridically and culturally, labor markets and systems of unpaid work. And if you think about the rhetoric of racism and sexism across the centuries, it is bathed in naturalism, in the invention of nature as this separate domain that needs to be managed, that needs to be civilized, that needs to be Christianized, that needs to be developed in successive eras of capitalist development. So the capitalist scene basically names a problem and then offers an alternative solution based in Marx and Engels historical materialism, that the dynamics of the planet are indeed not reducible to, but grounded in. They flow through the human dynamics of the planet, flow through labor. And that in that sense the capitalist scene is the thesis of the class struggle in the web of life.

>> Speaker D: 7:56

You also argue that capitalism, should be understood as a world ecology, rather than a world economy. Talk to me more about that. What does that shift in terminology or language change in how we understand what capitalism is or does?

>> Jason W. Moore: 8:12

Yeah, it's so important. Capitalism is not a social system that acts upon the rest of life, although there is an element to which, that ah, claim has some, purchase in terms of capitalism's own project. Capitalism treats the web of life as a set of potentially profitable opportunities and therefore goes about fragmenting, rationalizing, subordinating and otherwise violating the integrity of webs of life. The notion that capitalism is a world ecology says capitalism develops through, not around nature. Capitalism moves through fossil fuels, not around them. The problem is not fossil fuels. It's not just stop oil that doesn't do anything. To touch the basic, problem and to present the world in terms of social forces acting on natural conditions is a modified version of the Maltusian program that most so called ecosocialists believe, they have become the liberal avatar or the socialist so called avatars of environmental liberalism and of imperialism across the centuries. So in this sense capitalism is a world ecology, not an ecology of the world, but a way of organizing power, profit and life simultaneously, unevenly and yes, to be sure, and this is what I've spent a lot of time writing on in recent years. Capitalism and class societies of all kinds are shaped by non dialectical events and processes in the web of life. Solar cycles for instance, have had a huge impact on the climates of class societies. Volcanic eruptions, which of course erupt regardless of mode of production, whether it's feudalism, capitalism, socialism, something else. The volcanoes don't directly determine the paths of civilizations and class societies. That's up to those specific class societies. And that's what we're looking at today with the liberal discourse of climate doom and climate fix, which are very closely linked of the climate emergency. What we have to recognize is that it is how we respond to these biophysical, biospheric developments that really counts. And what world ecology as a way of thinking tries to get at is this fundamental labor relationality of humans and the rest of life. That's different. I'll stop here in a moment, but I just want to say that's not holism. The holism that most people talk about is a holism of the rich. A holism that abstracts labor, that removes Vernadsky's conception of the biosphere, remove of a, of labor and consciousness as fundamental to his conception of the biosphere and the transition to what he called, following Des Chardins, the new sphere. But those, the ways those have been taken up is through the holism of the rich, which wants to include everything except for working people in the labor process.

>> Gab Liese: 11:16

Religion. So well, I mean, again, you know, I'm working as a theologian, religion scholar, with faith communities and so on. there's this holism, that totally overlooks labor. And then the other thing you mentioned a minute ago, the class struggle. I mean you say class struggle and religious people are appalled because they don't want struggle, they want love, they want harmony. And when you say class struggle, well, the only reason for that is, you must be a Marxist. I say to my students now, you know, of course, I've gotten this myself a lot, right? So I now say to my students, well, why don't you go to the grocery store, talk to the person stocking the shelves and you ask them about Class struggle. They might not know the term, may not ever have heard of Marx or Engels, but they know the reality. They know that they're under pressure. They know that somebody breathes down their neck at that level, we're back to catching up and say, well, what's really happening all around us? And of course, that's the grocery store. But as, as you and I know, Jason, even at the levels of tenured academics, we're feeling this class, struggle every day.

>> Jason W. Moore: 12:17

Well, it's a professional class illusion. And you, you have very bright and I would guess mostly very affluent students who are at a place like Vanderbilt and in other, other colleges and universities across the country. Even at Binghamton University, which is a very blue collar or dirty, sort of dirty white collar, student population. I always say you can learn about everything here, that has to do with your experience if it's race or it's gender or it's sexuality or the environment. But you can never learn. You can't take a single class, maybe, except for one or two professors at my university, you can't take a single class. That basically speaks to the labor question, the fundamental determinant of reality, that all of these students face and indeed all of these other dynamics that I mentioned around environment, race, gender, sexuality, et cetera, directly flow out of the class dynamics of late capitalism.

>> Gab Liese: 13:16

And that's exactly, I mean, probably worse in divinity schools, theology schools, seminaries.

>> Speaker D: 13:21

Yes.

>> Gab Liese: 13:22

Because there, you know, you have all the other issues, that you just talked about except the labor one. And even people talking about the economy and religion hardly ever touch, on labor. By the way, our students are not even that affluent. The, ones going to divinity school, Right. They'll come usually, I mean, dirty white collar, you know, maybe blue collar, but, of course. And then they go into ministry that doesn't usually pay a whole lot, certainly not anymore in the places my students go. But they still don't recognize what's happening to them.

>> Jason W. Moore: 13:51

Well, that's the, I mean, especially in America and western North America, Western Europe are the most propagandized, most ideologized people on the planet.

>> Gab Liese: 14:00

Yeah, that's right, Yeah.

>> Speaker D: 14:02

I mean, it's a complete alienation from, from something that connects all of us together and it's done on purpose. Jason, you touched on this earlier and I want to circle back for a second to allow you to sort of deepen that. Sorry. You argued that capitalism depends on vast amounts of unpaid human and non human work. What kinds of beliefs and worldviews make that extraction feel normal to us or justified. I know I just talked a little bit about alienation, but could you sort of broaden that for us or deepen it?

>> Jason W. Moore: 14:34

Well, famously, Marx identifies a fourfold alienation in the 1844 manuscripts. And let's see if I can keep this straight for the moment. An alienation from the means of production, an alienation from each other, an alienation from oneself, and an alienation from the rest of nature. That was how Marx and Engels, Marx was always insisting labor as a natural force. we're going to talk about the rest of nature. Because they were the theorists of a proletarian standpoint that understood just how insidious and violent the notion of abstract nature on the one hand, and abstract man, their words, that comes out very, very early on. The theses in Feuerbach, the German ideology, the critique of this eternal conflict, what I'm calling an eternal conflict between abstract man and abstract nature. So the originary moment of class formation Marx called primitive accumulation in the 16th and 17th centuries. It of course recurs. And basically this was a story of the rich and powerful using political power to create cheap labor. Now the only way you could create cheap labor on a, massive scale, and it's important for we've not been taught this history, but before there could be large scale industry, what's sometimes called the industrial revolution, which is a liberal trope, a pro imperialist liberal trope. I'm not making that up. You can go and read Toynbee's lectures from the 1880s on this. He coined the term. But before that era of big factories and everything else, you had to have a cheap workforce. And the only way you could get at a cheap workforce was to secure the unpaid work of females who were cast into a modern realm of woman, which was also the realm of nature. Think, think, as I'm saying this, the uppercase man and woman, humans and nature, that sort of thing. So the only way that capitalism could proceed was through a specific form of women's oppression that, enabled capital to force women into the position of being the bearers, literally the bearers of fresh labor power. And if we don't understand that, we don't understand very much about capitalism as a whole. Now that story of gender, where women were made into, as Federici says, the savages of Europe, they were naturalized, right? They were rendered natural beings. That story plays out again and again, not purely, of course, in relation to gender. And again, I want to emphasize a labor market phenomenon. And then it plays out in terms of race and ethnicity, which has in recent years been made into a metaphysic independent of history. This is racial capitalism in its dominant forms. For instance, that race and ethnicity were forged out of the ideas of nature and naturalism and savagery through the Christianizing project, then the civilizing project, then the developmental project. So race became culturally and juridically a way of securing super exploited cheap labor for the sugar plantations, for the silver mines. And then even later you look at American history, the late 19th century influx of immigrants who were regarded as savages. This was part of explicit American federal policy to Americanize, that is civilize the savage immigrants and teach them how to be good Americans and not cling to these old fashioned ideas of class struggle. And to see that their interests might actually be in common with each other, as the Wobblies and The famous Patterson, New Jersey strike before World War I demonstrated, as the Communist Party in the 20s and 30s demonstrated with a fantastic effect. Ub du Bois writes Black Reconstruction out of that. So these are all dynamics to enforce extra, to extract extra surplus labor from the proletarian majority who are often either completely or partially unwaged. And that's how the working class lives. It doesn't live by its wages alone. It lives through these systems that combine cash wages and then massive increments of, unpaid wages, surplus work. Once we begin to see it in that way, we can devastate the whole kind of woke critical intersectional approach that just sees. Well, there's these converging that are somehow meeting together in this geometric metaphor. No, they all grow out of the same soil of imperialism and the use of political power. And of course cultural power goes with this to create worldviews that are conducive to capital accumulation and putting more money into the pockets of Mr. Moneybags and Joerg.

>> Speaker D: 19:23

You talk about this a lot with divide and conquer. Do you want to jump in here?

>> Gab Liese: 19:26

Yeah, Divide and conquer here. I mean, obviously, right? Working people are not dividing and conquering themselves. So what has to be seen here is somebody has an interest in dividing people. So there, of course that happens on the shop floor every day. The water coolers are now being watched, because people might actually be communicating with each other. But then of course race and gender, function here especially well, where you can divide white working people and black working people, men and women. And then the other side, the term I think I've coined that one is unite and conquer. So you divide the workers, in order then to unite white workers and the white managers, making the white workers believe they have more in common with the white managers, while of course fooling them, which is not true. So racism then white supremacy and so on. As Keeanga Yamata Taylor at one point says, they were never designed that all white people might be supreme, but they're actually out there. so that you know, divide and conquer works well and the ruling class stays the ruling class.

>> Jason W. Moore: 20:36

And look at, look at, I mean a great example of this is, is the contrast between the American Indian movement of the 1970s which was inspired by national liberation struggles, the Black Panther party and so forth, which advanced. If you look at the American Indian movement's program, it was jobs, housing, health care. This was a political program for the American Indian working class majority. Contrast that with the foundation financed land back movement, which is totally an astroturf movement whose constituency is professional class liberals who want to return to some fantasy of a pre industrial indigenous utopia, leaving the native American majority out in the cold. The same story applies to second wave feminism. Professional class feminism. And by the way, when I say professional class, not really a class, but essentially the labor aristocracy, a labor market segment. Professional class feminists were happy to advance legal reforms that assisted them in their career aspirations and left the working class majority out in the cold again with black politics. Martin Luther King comes out at the end of his life. He says, you know that speech, at Washington, the I have a dream speech? He says in retrospect that was quite naive. He writes a book saying, you know, everybody said it would be a big deal for black and white folks to hang out at lunch counters. Turns out that was no big deal. You know what people need jobs and housing and.

>> Speaker E: 22:12

Right.

>> Jason W. Moore: 22:13

And that's. And what we get instead is, Black Lives Matter, defund the police, these kinds of professional class slogan operations, totally supported by the billionaire foundations. And nobody talks. They talk about reparations, but they don't talk about jobs for all, housing for all, healthcare for all.

>> Speaker D: 22:34

Right, this, this is a good segue in your work. You also described, Jason, how capitalism sort of reorganizes M M. An employee's knowledge. This isn't an exact quote from, from, from your text, so feel free to correct me here. But a few examples of this would be the capitalist world ecology, where they would make science makes nature legible to capital. The economy channels relations through the cash nexus, and then the state enforces that nexus. Where do you see religion fit into that picture? What is Religion's role in the capitalist world ecology.

>> Jason W. Moore: 23:03

Well the history of religion and you both can speak to this more knowledgeably I suspect than I. But the history of religion from the origins of capitalism has been a class struggle. And you can look for instance at ah, the so called German peasant war which was also a massive proletarian revolt where you have Thomas Munzer who is just tortured and killed at the end of it. Marx quotes him m in on the German question. The creatures too must become free. there was always that communist tendency, in Munzer's case a primitive communism but not in a pejorative sense, simply that the classic forces had not developed over sufficiently to allow for a real for a radical leap towards what we might call a Leninist program of seizing political power to redistribute power from the dictatorship of the bosses to rule by the workers. But nevertheless there were these primitive communist and millenarian tendencies that up to not millenarian but of course famously from 68 on in Vatican II and the preferential option for the poor and liberation theology which begins to express that class revolt even within the Catholic Church, that's a long running tension. Christianity itself is reinvented. This is the famous Taney story on the rise of religion and the rise of capitalism. Christianity is reinvented to serve capitalism. famously his name escapes me at the moment. there's an important study of how that old Lynn White trope of well Judeo Christian theology is committed to the domination of the earth. And that means that it contributed to modern economic ecological crisis. That's entirely false because dominion of the earth was not understood in that way really before the 17th century. It's a product of primitive accumulation and the sort of mobilizing of and reinventing of Christian doctrine to support the civilizing and Christianizing projects. Two faces of the same dynamic. The civilizing and Christianizing project of early empires in Latin America and North America both. So yes, I mean like one of these anti Marxist cliches is like oh, you only look at material life. But if you look at arguably the foundational statement of historical materialism in the German ideology, Marx lays it out completely precisely. He says there are ruling material forces and there are ruling intellectual forces. They are dialectically joined, they are inseparable and they're a means of physical or material production and means of mental production. I always cite that. And people, even Marxists who should know better think that that's something I just made up. Like oh, that's just some post structuralist thing. No, the means of mental production. And we're all in the means of mental production right now. So what is our task is therefore to wage. Well, I think Lenin's, aphorism is great wage the theoretical struggle, which is. That is the struggle over ideas, which is fundamental not just to the critique of capitalism, but to organizing its revolutionary transcendence.

>> Joerg Rieger: 26:23

Absolutely.

>> Speaker D: 26:23

Joerg do you want to chime in there?

>> Gab Liese: 26:24

Yeah. Thanks so much, Jason. what's really crucial for theologians, for sure, people studying this, but even for people of faith, is to realize how closely these things are related. I mean, people always assume that either religion has a separate life or religion is so important, that it can shape and reshape the world at whim. And that doesn't work. the reality is, a lot of what's going. I mean, take dominion. Here is a great example. Picking up what you just said, Jason, we now have Dominionism, which is one of the big features of Christian nationalism, right? Namely the idea that Christianity has to take over, the seven mountains, all areas of life and all that stuff. But that sort of dominion is really mimicking and mirroring the, capitalist dominion over all of life. it's not the way this has always been. Certainly not anything you see in the Jesus movement. M Certainly not anything you see in a lot of religious movements, because there were these progressive alternative movements, that Jason just mentioned. But now religion with a vengeance becomes part of the problem. And of course, I'm a theologian because I also believe it can become part of the solution. But it has to see the problems before it can become part of the solution.

>> Jason W. Moore: 27:40

Well, there has to be a spiritual path, right? And the old cliche from the new right was that the left liberal milieu was on the one hand, spiritually bankrupt, which it was. And on the other hand had essentially invented a new religion around secularism and bourgeois science, what I call in an emphatically sarcastic way, good science. And they were right. And if you look not very even, you don't have to look very closely to see this. If you look at mainstream environmentalism and the way that it has become personal responsibility, very righteous kind of program. It has turned nature with an uppercase n. It has turned nature into a sacred object. It's become a false idol. And that's open space for the spiritual bankruptcy of the left liberal professional class milieu, following the destruction of its. Of. Of the working class left in the 1970s, has opened the door to so called Christian Nationalism.

>> Speaker D: 28:52

Absolutely. Joerg when you first encountered the capitalistine argument, what initially drew you to that? you know what, if anything, resonated with your earlier work in class and theology?

>> Gab Liese: 29:04

A couple of things. I. I think I. I was really beginning to realize how problematic the term Anthropocene was. And in some ways, I mean, affirming all that Jason said earlier, I would add, it's even worse in theology and religious studies because then theologians started to talk about anthropocentrism. And anthropocentrism means to center the human being. What's the solution? Well, to, decenter the human being. but then what gets centered, right? The reality is, once you decenter the human being, you give free reign to all kinds of forces. And in this case, of course, capitalism, if it's part of the problem, will not go away just because you push human beings aside. In fact, it may make it worse because you're now not having the muscle it takes to organize people. So on the one hand, there's a real problematic account. I mean, Jason already mentioned Lynn White, who basically blames anthropocentrism on Christianity, says it's the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen. And then that, according to White, shapes science, and other parts of the modern worldview. And so we have to get away from this. that didn't seem to be the most helpful solution. And then I came across, Jason Moore's work. as he said earlier, the Capitalocene, in some ways is just a pushback, right? It's almost like a satire on saying, well, no, the Anthropocene doesn't work. but once you then start thinking about it, it is a great way of analyzing, ah, coming much closer to what's really part of the problem, right? These scenes we talk about geological ages, Anthropocene, the age when supposedly humanity is in charge, which it isn't, right? It's not all human beings. It's not even most human beings. It's just a few human beings, behind this. And so the capitalocene, for me, became a tool of analyzing what was going on that was very distinct from moralizing. too many people in my world, theology, the church, religion, they stick with moralizing. And then you're blaming people, you're blaming individuals, maybe even just blaming greedy billionaires, you know, and you think you've actually now provided a solution for billionaires. You're making it. You're making it worse, right? I mean, well, they're greedy billionaires, as we know. the problem is, what created these billionaires, right? What are the structures? and then of course, the real benefit to me is really now thinking about how we can build alternatives. So rather than blaming humanity in general or even just greedy individuals, you can now think about these are the structures that build it. What could be the alternative structures that help us build true alternatives to what we're seeing? And that's not in the realm of moralizing in some ways. It's not even in the realm of protesting a whole lot. Even though I don't want to talk against protesting. I mean, I'm protesting myself. I want to encourage everybody who's out there. But think about what you're protesting for, right? Think about what you might be building rather than just a fairly limited analysis of what we're up against. So capitalocene in a nutshell then helped me think more clearly about what the challenges were. I wrote the book then titled Theology in the capitalocene, which one of my former editor approached me later and said that's just an awful title. And I said, well, but it hits the nail on the head and people are reading it an ugly word for

>> Speaker D: 32:38

an ugly thing or something like that.

>> Jason W. Moore: 32:39

Maybe it's an ugly word for an ugly thing. But then I got to thinking more deeply about capitalist scene and how all these people say about the capitalist scene, but they don't say it about the Anthropocene. And I'm sorry, Anthropocene is not exactly Shakespeare.

>> Speaker D: 32:59

You are listening to Religion and Justice. We'll be back after this short break.

>> Jason W. Moore: 33:17

So this is part of the insidiousness of professional liberal academic culture that is so deeply rooted into the meta structures of imperialism and its civilizing project, man versus nature, and so fundamentally aligned against any truly emancipatory project. They might as well, Yorga says, identify this or that issue. But the problem is systemic. And we can only make sense of the systemic problem of capitalism as a world ecology across five centuries, as a totality. And then to understand what's happening today in that light and to come up with a systemic response because a piecemeal small is beautiful transition town this or that, transition is not going to go anywhere. It is impossible and in fact worse than that. If your critique is and your suggestion of alternatives is limited to localism, that is absolutely a recipe for failure and in fact a support of the system.

>> Gab Liese: 34:24

What I'm also finding, maybe just to give a quick update Here, I mean my Theology in the Capital Scene book was published 22, so that's four years ago. But it's, it's really got a lot of resonance globally. last fall I lectured on pretty much every continent. took this project around and so many people, whether these might be indigenous people in Oceania, you know, or you know, folks in South Africa, I talked to, and many other places in between in Asia. They can immediately relate to it once you say it, you know, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And that's fantastic. I mean two, the Capitalocene book was just translated into German. I'll be headed to Germany soon to do some lectures on it because it resonates there too. And the Europeans haven't always resonated, you know, with the kinds of critiques that liberation theologies have brought out. But here is one that makes very quickly sense.

>> Speaker D: 35:21

Speaking of that, York, a lot of theology, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, has focused primarily on speaking from an identity like race or gender or particular culture. You argue that class and labor is often missing, or if it's there, it's really misunderstood. Why do you think class and labor has been so difficult or hard for theology to engage seriously?

>> Gab Liese: 35:43

I once was at a conference a couple of years ago in New York Union, Theological Seminary, a well known Buddhist feminist scholar, came up to me and said, I really don't know why you're so into this class thing. She said, class, Class is the only thing, that I can change about myself. That was her comment. You know, I cannot change anything else. Being a woman, you know, maybe she didn't think she couldn't change being a Buddhist either. But class she thought she could change easily, you know, which is totally ignoring the structures. Right? I mean first she was a prominent academic, successful person, person of blessed memory, passed away, now. But she did not realize the significance or even you know, in her own life. She couldn't see that this had function in the U.S. you know, there's this assumption we're a middle class country. we now talk a lot about the billionaires. So we think there are a few people that are rich and then of course we think there are few people that are poor. Everybody else is in the middle. That too is a total misconstruction of the reality in which we live now. A lot of this has to do with bad definitions of class. You know, anybody who's taken a Sociology 101 course probably thinks about Class as stratification, you know, status, income levels, whether they went to college or not. what they don't think about is relationships, relationships of power. And so for me then of course rethinking relationships of power via class and the economy and then of course very specifically via labor, labor relations, was a true eye opener. that helped me understand not only the social situation better. I mean class struggle is part of this. We just talked about this a moment ago. So many of us experience it. I mean, you know, the old Occupy Wall street days, we were saying we're the 99%. That's not a precise class analysis, but it reminds people that 99% of us have to work for a living. And more and more, those 99%, more and more of those 99%, the tensions and the struggles. And of course, if you think about democracy here, as Americans we're very proud of democracy. We haven't even ever had a conversation about economic democracy. That we might have democracy not just at the voting booth but also at work, you know, that we might have.

>> Jason W. Moore: 38:06

Well, we don't have that anymore. Right. I mean, not a Trump problem. That's a centrist liberal problem. That from 911 onwards, the tendencies towards a form of extreme centrist dictatorship have been, you know, implanted. I mean the other part. And this is why, and I have the same experience, Joerg, of that my audience is in the non imperialist world and in places like Ireland that know full well what imperialism means. So I go to Ireland and they're like okay, yeah, we get it. Capitalist anti imperialist Marxism. And that's, that's important. But you go, I go to. And I still do once in a while go to Germany or, or England and they're like, well you know, it's more complicated than that. And no it's not. I have to. And the only the intellectuals who always said, well it's not just about class. And of course, as you said, that's how you, you define it. I define it like Marx does, which is basically you have combinations of paid and unpaid work under the rule, the political rule of capital in service to endless accumulation. And that has all sorts of dire environmentalists, consequences. So partly okay, yeah. But everything is about who rules and who doesn't, who's exploiting and who's exploited. I'm sorry, that's if you want to understand the politics of the world, of the modern world above all. But I've written quite a bit about medieval Europe, it's the same damn thing. No, this is absolutely central. And the professional class move is like that of your colleague who immediately thinks class is an identity. Class is not an identity. Class is, pardon the old fashioned term, an objective reality of capitalism.

>> Gab Liese: 39:56

Exactly. And that's what I mean by relationship. Right. It is, ultimately at its core, a, ah, labor relationship. Who pays for your services, where do you spend the bulk of your waking hours and how much power do you have there? And once you're really looking at this, I mean, even if you're professional, somewhere, you know, I mean, we know this as academics now, more so than ever. We thought we were autonomous and independent. How Gramsci describes the traditional intellectuals. And now we know we're not.

>> Jason W. Moore: 40:26

Go ahead.

>> Gab Liese: 40:27

Sorry, but, but I mean, the whole insight here of course is, people then think we're now complaining about our lives. No, we're not. I mean, we're saying if that's the case, we need to organize differently, we need to build power differently.

>> Jason W. Moore: 40:40

That's exactly right. And that all the, all these critical academics forgot Mario Savio's point from the free speech movement at Berkeley in 1964. We are all working for corporations. We are workers in the knowledge factory now. Some are treated more, you know, poshly than others. And that's what, especially the elite academics, the tenure. Even if they're, even if, you know, people like you and I, Joerg are kind of marginalized still. I mean, we're outliers. That overwhelmingly the tenured professoriate is a labor aristocracy and believes as such, like the administrative class in the universities is content to basically pretend that the world is not changing, the demographic clip is not coming, the Chinese students are not coming. We're going to pretend that all of these problems are not coming home to roost. Never mind that young men aren't going to college anymore, that we're just going to pretend all of this doesn't exist. And it's absolutely corrosive to any kind of political culture that would call itself left wing.

>> Gab Liese: 41:43

So that's exactly what we're talking about when we talk about class analysis. Think, about these relationships, think about how to reconstruct them. And then of course, the beauty is you can take this back to your race and gender analysis because now this is not a matter of, well, now we're talking about class, but now we can think about how do we actually address racism. One way is to protest against it and maybe to become more inclusive. Another one is to build true power in black Communities, Right. what if an economic, you know, a black community builds economic power, builds some labor power? You know, what if that happens in a democracy? The reason our political democracy is in trouble is because we don't have economic democracy to back it up. somebody else has the power. If we had some economic democracy, political democracy would be in better shape. And I say this to religionists all the time, our religious democracies would also be in better shape.

>> Speaker D: 42:40

I also just want to chime in to add here, something that helped me, you know, when I first started encountering your work, Joerg was, one of your main lines is, you know, you spend. 99% of us spend the bulk of our waking hours at work, but even the hours that we don't spend at work are still controlled and dictated by where we work. Right. who approves your pto? Who approves any vacation time you have off. Who approves your sick time. You know, I've seen attendance policies at hospitals that are, you know, you, you can't have more than 40 hours of sick time and a rolling six month period. You work at a hospital, you're around sick people all day long, and suddenly you can get fired for coming down with the cold or having the flu, or your child gets sick. Right? So they're even controlling the hours where you're not technically clocked in. or if you want to not be clocked in because you've earned pto, they're still controlling that too. It's not as simple as getting a better job or moving up in, in your, both of your cases, in the academic space. Right. even being a tenured professor, your, your job and just, you know, the autonomy and agency you have is still limited by who you work for. And I tell you, that's really important.

>> Gab Liese: 43:48

Yeah, thanks. Exactly, Gabby. that's something, that people need to keep in mind. Here's a story of a colleague of mine, at my school, actually. So we're at Vanderbilt Elite University. We're both distinguished professors, we both have name chairs. So we're sort of the elite of the elite in the academy. Yet this colleague says to me, not long ago, he says, I always thought I was a colleague here. Now I realize I'm just an employee. I said, okay, so now you've learned something. There's your class analysis. Now make that work in your theology. Right, right. We'll see if he does. But, that's, that's the insight. I, I thought I was a colleague. I thought I was an Equal. And I'm not. And again, it's not complaining so much as simply, figuring out what's the problem in order to solve it.

>> Jason W. Moore: 44:33

Who has the power and why?

>> Gab Liese: 44:35

So that is the part of the class analysis that. That most, well, meaning liberals forget. They think. I mean, my colleagues in theology, they think class analysis. Talking a lot about poor people and working people. And I say no. It's actually also an analysis of the ruling class, who has the power. And not to assume. I mean, this is a distinction I make in the Capital Book between privilege and power. To assume that because you have a lot of privilege. And I mean, I have a lot of privilege, Jason, you do too. And Gab, you have some. Also, our privilege does not necessarily translate into power. So why is that and who has it? That's the question of class analysis.

>> Speaker D: 45:13

You, Joerg talk about that labor, you know, functions as a kind of ultimate concern. What does that mean for how we understand faith communities and the role of, our faith communities in religion today?

>> Gab Liese: 45:27

With that term, I'm picking up a famous notion in my guild that was shaped by. By the theologian Paul Tillich, who talked about, you, know, the ultimate concern in his theology is really dealing with the ultimate concern. And he said the ultimate concern are things of matters of being and not being. I mean, I could add matters of life and death. So not every concern is really at the heart of theology, but it has to be the ultimate concern. Until he thought, this was a matter of questions of meaning, you know, he was an interested in existential philosophy. So anxiety, despair, those kinds of things he listed. I'm saying Tillich has a great term, but he might have misinterpreted the problems. Not so much. I mean, not that the question of meaning is irrelevant, but the deeper question, the question of being and not being in this world is actually the question of labor. And once I say this, a lot of my students, and colleagues, get very annoyed at me and angry. They think, well, Rieger is just sort of declaring his personal interest in labor as the ultimate concern. But let me explain. I mean, some of this came in conversation with COVID 19 when we talked about essential workers, right? Essential work meant there is work that's so essential that it has to continue. We cannot survive without it. So that's your ultimate concern right there, right? The fact that you cannot survive, without, you know, people out in the fields harvesting. That you cannot survive, without the medical profession and so on. you think about this as essential Work for a minute. But then it goes a couple of levels deeper because I'm really saying that there, would be no life at all without labor. And by that I mean not merely, what people think of as labor, productive labor, but also reproductive labor. And of course reproductive labor is usually the work that's not paid in capitalism. And that goes to minorities, goes to women, goes to non human, other than human nature. And so if you think about it, you know, without this, other than human nature or even, you know, women's labor, none of us would be here. I mean, take the word gestational labor in English. I couldn't translate that into the German. But gestational labor means, this is the labor of mammals, to give birth. We would not be here without it. that's a question of life and death. That's a question of being and not being. That's of course the foundation of productive labor. And once you put it all together, all of a sudden you realize the importance of labor for everything. And I mean, that's just a basic theological reflection. And then we could go into technical issues, the kinds of things that Jason understands much better. How exactly does this function? How exactly does labor then build power? Does it build a world? You know, how does it, this world ecology in the end, is what we're talking about.

>> Jason W. Moore: 48:20

But look, I mean this issue of being, how do you be in nature, be in the web of life without labor? Now of course there is more than one philosophical tradition that makes this point. One of the principal ones is that of Heidegger, the former Nazi. Now I'm not saying everyone who endorses some version of being in nature without labor is a Nazi. But I am saying that they live a few blocks down. And that's just honest. That notions of ecology, nature, wilderness without labor are invariably in the history of the modern world, reactionary and authoritarian movements. This is the scientist Ernst Haeckel, who coins the term ecology. And Joerg, you may know this, but most people don't. He was one of the founders of the German Monist League in the early 20th century and articulated a crucial prefigurative notion of Lebensraum, ecological Lebenstraum in the early 20th century. This is not a one off. I mean look at the history of post World War II environmentalism with people like Julian Huxley and then Garrett Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons, Ann and Paul Ehrlich in the Population Bomb. You can see it again and again and again. A conception of nature without labor leads to authoritarian and often quasi fascist notions of politics. This comes up today in climate emergency discourse. By the way, after all, the states of emergency that were imposed to make neoliberalism, in power in Latin America in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, now all these liberals endorse, oh, climate emergency. We need a state of emergency politics because we can't have a democratic politics.

>> Gab Liese: 50:09

Yeah, that is such an important, broader perspective because obviously we're not reinventing the wheel here. we're standing on all kinds of shoulders. But we have to realize, where the problems are. Even in, well, meaning environmentalism, then it shows that trying to fix this problem without labor, then, well, either it has these fascist implications or it just doesn't work. It's just idealism dreaming.

>> Speaker D: 50:38

Jason talks a lot about capitalism, as organizing the web of life through cheap nature and extraction. How do you see religion or faith as either reinforcing or resisting that system, of cheapening human and non human life?

>> Gab Liese: 50:52

In my field, a lot of my colleagues talk about the problem of otherworldly religion. And almost every new student that comes in, you know, has a story to tell about how religion, you know, draws their views away from the world. The immediate, drive to fix it is to say, well, we now have to get away from this otherworldly thing. We have to get back into real life. We have to get back into material reality or whatever that is. You know, not so much the transcendent, but more of the imminent. By that, I think, they tried to fix an otherworldly focus that has been part of Christian religion. But the problem is by meaning, to overcome that, you haven't necessarily overcome it. And so what happens is that people then come back, you know, they come back with a romantic idea of nature or romantic idea of humanity, you know, or all these dreams about, how wonderful it would be if we were all just helping each other out, you know, and loving each other.

>> Speaker D: 51:53

Very utopian.

>> Gab Liese: 51:55

Very utopian. but, but never, you know, analyzing what Jason, Jason and Raj Patel, wrote this book, on the seven cheap things, right. Which, which was an early book for me. I mean getting to know Jason's work, I, I found extremely helpful. And so, so, so here's the weird thing, right? The, view of, religion as related to the other world in a way, seems to be cheapening various things in life, the world as such. But bringing it back is not necessarily picking up the real value of it. So cheap nature then becomes romanticized nature and it still doesn't do anything except, you know, saying, well, we shouldn't, you know, throw our trash into the rivers. well, let's, let's throw it somewhere else. You know, that sort of stuff.

>> Speaker D: 52:41

Right.

>> Gab Liese: 52:42

Then of course there's an economic piece to say these things are cheap for a reason and we need to understand what these reasons are. But we cannot reclaim this simply by, closing our eyes to it or wishing it were different.

>> Speaker D: 52:55

You also have argued extensively that the 99% of us who have to work for a living still hold real power, even if they aren't using it or they haven't realized it yet, or it's being warped somehow. What role do you see religious and faith communities, ah, playing in helping, people recognize and organize that power?

>> Gab Liese: 53:15

That's really the second half, to the question you just asked that I didn't quite get to. On the one hand I talked about religion as a problem. Otherworldly religion, romantic religion, even a lot of liberal religion I think doesn't quite get it. Now the response how do we do something else? In some ways, it's a matter of analysis. We want to see what our religious community is already doing. And the beauty is, that throughout history religious communities have been doing something, oftentimes the wrong thing. Oftentimes religion was on the side of the dominant powers. But there are examples when religion actually pushed back and built alternatives. Jason already mentioned something. Thomas Minczer here of course is a great example. This was the so called left wing of the 16th century Reformation, almost said revolution, but, there were some revolutionary moments, I would say. Today, I think what's really important, is for people of faith who understand that they're part of the 99%, to understand our own place in the web of life. There are a couple of things, right? first of all, we realize that we're in the web. This is the point of essential labor. Our labor, our contributions are actually important. That means we have some agency, by the way, for working people. This means that your boss can never say, only a dead worker is a good worker. They said this about many people in history and you know, that's an awful story, but you can't quite get rid of your working class that way. I mean, they can diminish us, they can push us down, they can lay more people off, they can do all kinds of things. But in the end, there's still some need, for working people that have some power. So when I say labor is the ultimate concern of course, I'm talking about non alienated labor. But even alienated labor has some power, has some agency that might help you build something that you couldn't build otherwise. Now, here's an interesting theological question because we also like to talk about God, right? In my read, you know, the fault view is usually, to read God as whoever is at the top at the moment. So in the olden days, this was the Roman emperor or kings and queens. Well, not so much queens, but kings, right. you had to keep it male, but.

>> Speaker D: 55:33

Right.

>> Gab Liese: 55:33

these days, you know, it's more likely, the CEOs, right? the people in control, the managers. But here, reclaiming religious images of God as a worker, I find extremely powerful. The beauty is, we have to use in many religious traditions. In the Abrahamic religious traditions, that's Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, we have images of God as making Adam from clay or from dust. you know, so God's the potter, God's the builder getting the divine hands dirty. And in Judaism and Christianity, God also plants a garden. Again, not God managing garden workers or agriculture workers, but God getting the divine hands dirty. So there's a labor piece there. You know, part of Christianity is a weird notion that Jesus is born into the working class. that's the point of Christmas. It's not, oh, hooray, Jesus is born, but Jesus is born in the working class. And then, the choir of angels, you know, the heavenly PR machine, gets again sent to the working class rather than to the ruling class, which would have been much better for PR if you think about it, right? If the angels had sang in the temple square in Jerusalem, that would have gotten more intention, more attention. And, maybe even some of the ancient historians would have, have, chimed in in a way that they didn't, because it just didn't seem significant enough. But here's the beauty that that's where I want to conclude this, to say there is some real power in the solidarity of the 99%. And if you think about solidarity here, not as an ideal or as a moral command, but as we're connected in this struggle of life and death, this is what ties us together. And then, for people of faith to say, well, what if the divine was part of that solidarity or anything else? Principalities and powers, you know, cosmic realities, you name it, not as dreaming identities, but as real solidarity, That's where I think some of that power, lies. And as the community organizers say, you don't always need everybody, to Make a difference. Community organizers have said you need as many is 3% of the people to change something. So organizing here is doable.

>> Jason W. Moore: 57:57

Look, I wonder. Joerg I'd like your opinion on this because if we look at the terrible state of the American left today, overwhelmingly dominated by professional class liberals, they call themselves Democratic socialists. So what Their view of the vast majority of working class people of faith in this country is as deplorables, to use Hillary Clinton's famous turn of phrase for Trump supporters. And there is absolutely zero institutional left mobilization to bring working class people of faith together around a politics of anti elitism, which is in fact the populist politics of the MAGA social base. Not the elites, but people who are furious about the endless wars, furious about genocide, furious about the Epstein files and all the rest. There's very little effort or even interest on the American left to build a class unity program around people of faith.

>> Gab Liese: 59:03

I feel this every day. Jason. I think you're right. I mean, in some ways, you know, I have been laughed at not just in religious circles, but also in certain circles on the left heading to Germany. One of the presentations I'll be giving is on, on the Capital Scene book is with the Rosa Luxembourg foundation, which is sort of the German left, right, and, and the European left and there too. You know, religion is usually not taken very seriously, but there are some people who want to do it. And so what we're doing this, this might be just a little plug for the Wendling Cook program. we, we're running what we're and in these circles we're putting specific faith communities together with specific projects of the solidarity economy. That means, you know, a church now, you know, it could be as little as a community garden, but it could be as much as a full fledged worker cooperative is building up its base, building up its power in relation to economic projects. So while the unions are a little hesitant, to join that, that's a longer story too. I've seen that many times. Some of Solidarity Economy folks are more interested and so we're building networks that way. Of course, the whole point here is not just little individual projects. you said this earlier, just local projects are not enough. But networking this, at the national and international level is what gives me some hope. But it's something that at this point is really just in its early beginnings. It would be good to get your advice as we go ahead with this because I know your analysis is oftentimes not only incisive in the sense of helping us understand stuff, but also helping us understand some of the dead ends that have been too oftentimes, the result of liberal do gooders. And don't get me wrong, I mean our listeners might see themselves as liberals. I certainly do not want to knock liberalism. What I'm saying though for theologians is there is a difference between liberation and liberal theology. The point of liberation theology is not to look down on liberal theology. It is indeed, to move us forward together in such a way that it finally makes a difference. Because first, for too long we have wasted.

>> Speaker D: 1:01:18

I've been doing some research on some, on data centers and the response to them, primarily in rural communities. I'm located in Columbus, Ohio. and one of the first data centers that ever existed in Ohio was M, like 2 miles from where I grew up. Like 2014, 2015. First data center popped up my hometown. Blew out a bunch of farmland to do it. What we're seeing in my research so far is that there's quite a lot of religious leadership speaking for the people that are sitting in their pews saying we don't want data centers here. This is what it's doing to our community. And that's happening across lines of identity like we were talking about earlier, that can often fragment any sort of organized response or organized construction of an alternative. That personally is bringing me a lot of hope right now. because it's in this situation they're picking rural areas, they're picking non rural areas. They're, you know, they're, they're trying to put it anywhere they can, to make more money faster. And so I think that gives me hope almost that the, that the world ecology itself is, could present us with an opportunity to actually make these connections with labor. The way that the Wendland program is,

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:02:21

is offering to, to quote Tucker Carlson, the data centers are a crime against God and nature. That's a statement that has resonance with the American working class regardless of who they voted for. I guarantee you that Trump's base has just completely revolted against him.

>> Speaker D: 1:02:43

They are quite upset.

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:02:45

Yes, rightly so. Data centers are a great example of this because data centers are the private face of the deep state, which by the way is a left wing concept. I always have to say that out loud. Yeah, Steve Bannon took it up later. But it's a left wing concept and it's good that the populist right took it up. There's this moment of, in the loosest possible sense of this term a Christian socialism, not only Christian, but a Christian socialism or a Christian social doctrine, more precisely, that can be mobilized across the political spectrum and especially in rural areas where the American ruling class has just put a huge, layer of the working class out there to die. Right. That's why the data centers are there, because, you know, fuck you. Sorry for my language, but that's what the ruling class is saying to all sorts of people.

>> Speaker D: 1:03:34

They're disposable. They're disposable.

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:03:36

They're totally disposable. And it's a spiritual crisis. I think that's what the left won't say that what we are looking at in the crisis of American politics and the crisis of late stage American capitalism, if it can even be called capitalism anymore because it's so hyper centralized, is this profound spiritual crisis that is completely compatible with Marx's fourfold alienation, where we began exactly.

>> Speaker D: 1:04:04

Well, and I think, before the last election, before the last presidential election, George Schmidt had said, you know, it'll be really good to organize under another Trump administration, which is a dark, a dark statement to make, but it's also a true one that these data centers not started cropping up, no pun intended, all over rural America. I think it would have been a harder task for us to for it to be, you know, used as a connective tissue here for, for the left to organize with. Tucker Carlson also, he's been saying a lot recently that have, has been making a lot of sense, which I think is a good thing. It's scary, but it's a good thing. He was asking Kevin o', Leary, you know, why do the taxpayers have to pay for a private data center? Why do they have to pay for any of it? It's private, it's not public. They don't own any of it. And Kevin o', Leary, of course, dodged the question by doing a bunch of word vomit. But those kinds of questions, the questions that rural residents and even metropolitan residents are asking about, why is my electric bill so high? Why is my water bill so high? Well, it's the data centers, they are taking your money, they're infecting your environment, they're infecting your water, they're, you know, compromising the electric grid, no doubt about it, and you are going to pay the cost for it every day. And so that kind of impact to direct personal lives is horrible and it's catastrophic and it is deplorable. But that is the kind of thing that will wake people up which is why it's giving me so much hope. and then the fact that you're finally having religious leaders and faith leaders stepping up, and speaking out about not just sort of identitarian issues, which are also important in their own right, but they're speaking up, for the group, collective right. It's not just we don't want a data center in our neighborhood. You shouldn't put it anywhere. It doesn't need to be here if it's going to have this kind of catastrophic, impact, wherever you put it. Which then I guess leads me to one of my next questions for both of you. If capitalism shapes what we value, time, labor, life, et cetera, does it also determine what we consider as sacred and what is sacred under the capitalist world ecology?

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:06:14

Well, I mean, we only need to go to Marx that, you know, mammon becomes the, you know, money becomes the sacred object. But there are many sacred objects that capitalism promotes. Science is good science, bourgeois science, which always. We have the best money science can buy, and it launders ideology for capitalists and in its ideological form licenses, draconian state of emergency politics, including the, dramatic strengthening of the biosecurity state under Covid, where we saw the greatest and most rapid upward, redistribution of wealth in human history. Technology, you name it. I mean, there are all these sacred objects, all these false idols, including for environmentalists, nature. And we have to have a critique of that that says, yes, webs of life are important. Humans are fundamentally part of that. That is a labor relation. Anyone who's ever gardened knows that the soils work, our labor works. We mix our labor with the earth, not in the Lockean sense, but in the Raymond Williams Marxist sense. The soil and the worker. That liberation depends upon, I think not just a political, economic, cultural, revolutionary critique, but also a, spiritual that reckons precisely. And Marx does this, when he talks about religion as the opiate of the people. He says this is the heart of a heartless world he's decrying religion and socialist revolutions went against the church because the church was a bastion of the landowning ruling classes. This is a spiritual program that unifies us with the rest of life in a dialectical way, in a labor centered way that recognizes the dignity of life and work. And that's a spiritual program as well as, as an economic, social, political, cultural program.

>> Gab Liese: 1:07:59

Seconding, what Jason said, I still want to take it back to money and profit though, right? I, mean, the basic job of a CEO is to produce more Money for shareholders. And this is something that's actually enforceable, right? So if CEOs decided tomorrow they wouldn't want to do this anymore, somebody else would be CEO. So at that point, that is, that's part of your ultimate concern here in capitalism, to keep producing more money, for those who hold money and who are the owners. so in some ways, yeah, that is the golden calf. But if you think about what that does, then you know everything is for sale, right? Not just religion, not just money, but I mean we already talked about nature. People are for sale and that then subordinates, everything, under this funding. In around the year 2000, an economist by the name of Robert Nelson wrote a book, Economics as Religion, where he basically said the role of economists is no longer to do the number crunching thing. I mean he was talking about top economists, but their task is to keep the big ideas before people. He thought that's what religion was, right? Keeping big ideas before people. but that's the other thing. What's sacred here is the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats or something like that, trickle down economics, you name it. these are the sacred principles and they cannot be questioned. They don't even need to be questioned because we know they're right. So nobody needs to crunch any numbers because all we need is these big ideas. I have often said that what Nelson is talking about of course is a real problem. But it is both bad economics, that should be obvious. It's also bad religion because religion doesn't have to be holding big sacred ideas before people in which everybody has to believe. So at that level I would even question what we mean by the sacred unquestionable things, basic principles that we all have to follow. I mean everything will have to be tested I would say and if it cannot be tested, I wouldn't trust it. So take that back to religion now. religion, that's not the big idea thing, but that's producing the flourishing of life, you know, relationships, that's producing a better life for everyone, people and planet. That's something I think we should use to redefine what we mean by sacred, what we mean by religion. And ultimately we redefine economics from there as well.

>> Speaker D: 1:10:31

Jason, your work focuses heavily on large scale structures, world ecologies, capitalist world ecology, empire. You emphasize agency, especially amongst the nine, nine, who have to work for a living, in religious communities. Where do you each see a real leverage point for change? I know we Both, we've been like sort of edging that throughout this entire conversation. I'd love to hear from each of you, maybe your, you could go first, what your real leverage point for change is here.

>> Gab Liese: 1:11:00

I think it ultimately comes down to solidarity. And by solidarity I mean not this idea that we should love each other or love your neighbor, but the idea that, you know, you can read this, you know, love God, love your neighbor, commandment, that Jesus picks up, in this way you can say your neighbor is part of who you are, whether you realize it or not. And in this web of life, of course it's not just people, but also the planet, human, other than human, human nature. And to realize that there is some real common cause here. We're in this together. This is a life and death struggle in which we are all struggling side by side. Now that doesn't mean that everybody has to be alike, talk alike, look alike, use the same religious tools or ideological tools or even political tools. It means, however, that we now use whatever we have, for this common structure, struggle for life. And so for me, the leverage point here really only exists once we start, helping people realize the existing solidarity, build on it, organize in it, in such a way that we begin to make a difference that has to be measurable. So it's not just me dreaming another world is possible. But to say if we built these solidarities which are now inter religious solidarity, to be sure, intersectional solidarities, international solidarities, interdisciplinary solidarities. As we build that, I think something else is beginning to appear. And of course this is what happened in history, right? This is how change has been produced. this is how, slavery was abolished, this is how labor rights, were introduced and so on. It was never that. There was a great thinker who had a great idea and then people said, let's follow this person. But it was produced, in the solidarity of the working majority. And keep this in mind, there is always more of the working class than of everybody else. This American idea that everybody's middle class is a misconception. The working class is always the majority. And we're beginning, more and more of us are beginning to realize how we're part of that.

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:13:15

Yeah, that's so fantastic. And I would add that we are unlikely to see a fundamental break towards, with capitalism and towards socialism in the imperialist countries. That if we're looking at the world today, the weak link in the imperialist chain is precisely in the structure of imperialism and in the geopolitical space that's beginning to open up, between China and Belt and road leading, the brics of course a motley assortment of politics. But the capacity of Iran to defend itself against Israeli US aggression, the capacity of Russia to rebuild its defense industrial base and confront NATO expansion which everybody from Chomsky to Kissinger said would lead to war, we're seeing the ramifications on a negative side in the Americas with what I've called Fortress Americas as the new imperial strategy of the United States of course getting rid of nationalist Venezuelan government. Cuba's on, on the slate for invasion. We'll see what happens in Bolivia. The struggle for socialism will be fought and waged on the terrain of national liberation just as it was in the 20th century. And however you come down on this, I think it's fairly safe to say that virtually everyone on the American left today has no conception whatsoever of the history of socialism and socialist revolutions in the third world. From the Soviet Union all the way forward to Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam, all of these, Cuba, I mean all of these struggles for national liberation, which is what they were, and the attempt to build socialism which dollar for dollar delivered more benefits, housing, jobs, health care, quality of life in every conceivable way than any other than any capitalist project ever, even under threat of total annihilation by the empires. So let's take those lessons very, very clearly. Look at the rise of China as a very positive development and to see that what the rise of China is doing is opening space for actual self determination. Now in the imperial west we're seeing the move towards what I've called scientific dictatorship and that's pretty far advanced in the United States. I don't think the US can be described as either a capitalist state or a liberal democratic one anymore. It is completely and totally a dictatorship of capital where the deep state will exterminate any potential opposition. I mean this of course is something well understood once upon a time from 1960s and COINTELPRO all the way forward in the imperialist heartlands, I refuse to say global north because it's too vague. In the imperialist heartlands we have responsibility to organize against the war machine, against the deep state, for civil liberties and to advance, as Joerg keeps saying, solidarity across these identitarian lines which are after all the fanciful creations of professional class liberals.

>> Gab Liese: 1:16:14

Here's one additional thought, that to me is really striking when you explain this to American listeners. You know, once in a while we still talk about The American dream. And more and more people are realizing the American dream is dead. Well, what's the dream? Right. you work hard, and you. Something accrues to you, right, that you have some benefits, you know, well, you

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:16:33

do better than your parents. Yeah, right. You do better than your parents. Straight up. That was the dream.

>> Gab Liese: 1:16:39

Yeah, yeah. Your work is doing some, some good right now. Now you ask the question, where is that possible? And, and the real paradox here is to say it may be more realistic in, in a socialist world than a capitalist world. I mean the capitalist world basically makes us believe this is the heart of capitalism. But if you think about, you know, the adage, to each according to their need, that's what people of course know, right? Welfare state from each according to their abilities. In other words, your labor matters and it makes a difference. Well, I mean that could be The American Dream 2 point in, in a way that people haven't even thought about.

>> Speaker D: 1:17:15

Absolutely. Of course, if capitalism is running out of cheap nature and we're entering a planetary state shift, the new ways of imagining life become necessary. And Jason, you, you wrote about how the capitalist world ecology erodes our imagination as well. Can religion help us imagine those alternatives? and more broadly speaking, what else can help us imagine those alternatives?

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:17:39

The socialist visions and the history of social states was quite extraordinary. While as I mentioned, there was a profound opposition to the church because the church was often a bastion of the landed ruling classes. I don't know, Yorga, if you remember this, but Billy Graham, who was a cold war right wing America's leading evangelist coming up in the 50s, he goes to Moscow in 1976 more or less, and goes around and comes back and says, I don't know, I saw all these churches open, there was no problem with it. So I just want to say that to dispel the illusion that somehow if you look at actually existing socialism, you can't go to church. Well, you could and you did. But also I think to your point about solidarity, that if you look at all the great socialist revolutions, they all had a phase of all out solidarity and socialist mobilization, sometimes calling it to build a new socialist man and woman. And you can make of that what you will, but that kind of solidarity and all out mobilization was in itself, I think a spiritual project to, I mean what else do you call the Soviet slogan of towards a radiant tomorrow? And we can make fun of it, but the Soviets took a country that was overwhelmingly desperately poor and illiterate to putting, men and women in space within about 40 years, 40 some odd years, gave houses to people so they could have families and provided jobs from which they couldn't be fired and provided healthcare. All these things that would be very appealing to the vast majority of Americans today, given the crises on all those fronts. What I would add to this is we have to look at the actual experiences of socialist revolutions and the way that they created solidarities to mobilize for projects that were bigger than themselves. And that indeed, I mean, Joerg as you mentioned, delivered, the Soviet dream. If you talk to people who lived through the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s in the Soviet Union, they all say exactly the same thing every decade. It was better. You can't say that about America today

>> Gab Liese: 1:19:53

and you couldn't say that for a long time. I mean, I think that's the difference where we are told one story and the reality is a different one. Now the function of religion here, I mean, we started, this section by talking about what's sacred under the capitalist world, economy or ecology. the function of religion here is actually, for me, first of all, a critical one. So it's not just saying, well, believe this, believe that, but make sure you don't believe this, make sure you don't believe that. So atheism here has an actual important theological function because it is the rejection of false theisms, false gods, false powers that promise but do not deliver. And I think this is of course a metaphysical issue, but it's also an economic issue now and a political issue where we have to pay attention. By the way, the early Christians, this is the early centuries, were considered atheists by the Romans. And you think, well, why would the Christians be considered atheists if they did have a God? And the Romans were religiously tolerant? So the Romans, didn't mind having a couple of other gods, among their gods in the pantheon. The reason Christians were considered atheists was because their theism didn't make sense in the domination and theist picture, right? Jesus was somehow not compatible with Caesar. And so if you think about it this way, what difference religion makes here is it really, helps us expose the false theisms. And then, the question is not, which theism do we embrace, but what's actually going on in the world, what's moving in the world? What is it, that's helping people? What is it that's hurting people? That sounds a little simplistic, but if we paid more attention, it wouldn't be that hard to figure out, right? I mean we're just told a lot of false stories about what's beneficial and what isn't. And so as you reclaim religion in this way, I mean this is now bottom up religion, right? This is not the religion of God the CEO. This is the religion of God the worker. You're moving into a totally different world, where in the end you can keep assessing what's good for the many, what's good for not just people but also planet and so on. and of course these are all practical questions. So it's not just having an idea here and there, but how do you live your life, how do communities function? and then to keep an eye on it. And when it doesn't function, then you're honest about it, you do something about it. I mean to me this is the work of theology ultimately in a critical sense that ultimately is constructive because it is also critical.

>> Speaker D: 1:22:38

Thank you both. My former co host George Schmidt always ended the podcast by asking guests the following question and he would always tee it up. it's a quote that's often attributed to St. Augustine. It goes, Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are Anger and Courage, anger at the way things are. Encourage or hope to see that they do not remain as they are for each of you. And I'll start with Jason, what's giving you hope right now and what is making you angry and then your, you can follow.

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:23:04

Well, the liberals are making me angry because they're part of the problem of course, the endless wars, the torture regimes, the regime change, the you know, endless elaborations of the deep state and the installation of dictatorships. Not just in the US but you see this in Germany and the UK very clearly that those there's, there's plenty to be angry about. But to be, to be hopeful has to be a faith in labor far beyond the figure of the worker. But I love Jorge, your, your image of, of God the work worker, of Jesus the worker. It's hardly a stretch to describe Jesus's life as that of an ethos of communism and that we are at a turning point in the world, at the end of capitalism here and towards something else either worse or better. And we are at a turning point in America where the 50 plus year wage freeze for the American working class and austerity and the Epstein class and everything else, has really sort of come to a head here in America, in a decisive way. Whether it will find political expression. That's up for debate.

>> Gab Liese: 1:24:15

But I'm hopeful I'll start like Jason, by talking about what makes me angry because I think this sets the stage for what also makes me hopeful, especially since I was, traveling the world a lot, in this past year and heading out again. And you know, there's oftentimes this assumption that the biggest problem is the current American politics. And I mean, this is not just sort of a one American critical perspective, but this is a global perspective. You know, so many people are worried about what's happening in the United States. And then, this gets, then this tail gets pinned on one particular donkey and people think that's the problem. The question for me is, you know, what made the donkey possible? You know, and what, what is it, that that ultimately produces, the kinds of things that we're seeing right now, where, you know, I mean, if people are not seeing it yet, I don't know what else we can do to help them see. I mean, we're in deep trouble. I think that's, that's pretty obvious. But so, so my anchor then is not just about the symptoms, but it is really about the, the underlying structures and like Jason, about the people that could see these structures but are so resilient and resistant to seeing the them. And in this case, you know, we have a lot of well meaning, seemingly progressive, liberal, folks in the theological academy, in the theology, in the academy in general, but also in the faith communities where, I'm feeling, you know, what if we're a little on, a little more honest now. This is what also gives me hope because I see people waking up, maybe not my generation as much, but they're younger people, younger, students coming in. there are people oftentimes for faith communities, the people that reject faith communities. You know, we see this big exodus from religion everywhere, especially in the United States. they're not the ones that have lost faith. They're not the ones that have lost connections to something bigger than themselves. they're just realizing that religions and religious communities are playing sandbox games that, that don't get to this ultimate concern as we were talking about earlier. But that's part of my hope. so the people that have not lost their honesty, the people that have not lost or at least sold out their ability, to raise some deeper questions. More and more of them and of us are waking up, we're teaching each other what's going on, to see more clearly. But again, the ultimate hope for me is really the solidarity, which, you know, the Apostle Paul at one point says, if one member suffers, all suffer together with it. the wobblies. The IWW used to say, an injury to one is an injury to all. And once that becomes clearer, once we realize that what's happening here is not just to this or to that person, but to all of us, I think, the tide will keep turning even faster and I think we'll see more positive development. So back to what George was saying. At some point, maybe this is the time really to organize and to realize that, we need this deeper organizing deeper than we've ever done here in

>> Speaker D: 1:27:22

the US well, thank you both so much for joining Religion and Justice today. It was a pleasure to have both of you on.

>> Jason W. Moore: 1:27:27

Thank you.

>> Gab Liese: 1:27:28

Thanks for having us. Gab.

>> Joerg Rieger: 1:27:36

Thank you for listening to this episode of Religion and Justice from the Wendland Cook Program at Vanderbilt University. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe, share it with others, and follow along for more conversations at the intersection of religion, economics, and ecology. You can learn more about Jason W. Moore and Jord Rieger, including their work on the capitalocene ecology and theology in the show notes below. This podcast podcast was produced by Peterson Toscano. The music on today's show comes from Epidemic Sound. Our theme music is On My Way by IO until next time, I'm your host, Gab Lisi, and this has been Religion and Justice. Remember, the path to justice is when we navigate together.

>> Speaker E: 1:28:31

And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good and get them to understand that they, as well as you and I, cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year until they win it. Thank you,

>> Gab Liese: 1:29:16

Sam.