Max Ajl
Biographic Data
| ID | 160826 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Max Ajl |
| GIVEN NAMES | Max |
| FAMILY NAME | Ajl |
| SIGNATURE | AJL M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1422-1010 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 150 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Settler colonialism and political theory
Today the term ‘settler colonialism’ and its associated theoretical frameworks hold obvious significance. The notion of settler colonialism now serves frequently as a lens for critical political and social thought in the humanities and social sciences and outside the academy in social movements. The laser focus on the politics of erasure ought to be impossible to evade, by dint of its gruesome salience to the continuing live-streamed Israeli geno…
Anticolonialism and Social Thought
Not only did the anticolonial movements of the past two centuries help bring down the global order of colonial empires, they also produced novel, innovative and vital social thought. Anticolonialism has been largely ignored in conventional Europe-centered social thought and theory, but this book shows how our sociological imagination can be expanded by taking challenges to colonialism and imperialism seriously. Amidst their struggles to change th…
Green Funhouses
This paper critiques two dominant articulations of contemporary core green thought—Northern eco-modernism and degrowth/post-development—arguing they form a mirrored, constricting dichotomy. It contends that despite their apparent opposition, both perspectives share critical blind spots: they reject a global class analysis, dismiss the imperative of sovereign industrialization and national liberation in the periphery, fail to seriously think throu…
Syrian Debates
Iran
Liberation, Ecology, and Industrialization in the Thought of Ismail-Sabri Abdallah
This article examines the work of Ismail-Sabri Abdallah in relation to two arenas of thought marginalized in the current Marxist debate: socially and ecologically "appropriate" planning and technologies, and national liberation and postcolonial planning more broadly. Abdallah was a senior official in the Egypt National Planning Institute under Gamal Abdel Nasser and then Anwar Sadat. He was also a central figure in arenas like the Third World For…
From Palestine to Turtle Island
This paper examines the historical and ongoing role of food as both a tool of colonization and a means of liberation, focusing on Palestine and Turtle Island (Canada). In Gaza, the latest wave of Israeli military violence, described by the UN as genocidal, uses food militarization and weaponization as key tactics of settler colonial control. These strategies, rooted in colonial and capitalist systems, have long been employed by settler states lik…
Palestine and the Ends of Theory
This article argues that over the past decade-and-a-half, amidst the resurgence of US/EU solidarity with Palestine, several anti-Zionist analyses have emerged that sidestep national liberation, regional politics, or imperialism. It connects that terrain to the rise of a new, and partially anti-systemic, political Islam that gained strength with the fall of the USSR and the contradictions arising within US-led imperialism. The article links this p…
Settler-colonialism in the Late Neocolonial Period
This essay discusses settler-colonialism in Palestine and the world system during late neocolonialism. It offers a materialist methodology for interpreting settler-colonial social formations, showing the linkage between settler-colonialism, class, imperialism, and world accumulation. It then considers how race continues to structure local reactions and condition local and international attempts at transformation. It concludes with some reflection…
Palestine's Great Flood
This is the second part of a two-part article on the Palestinian question. This part treats the development and trajectory of anticolonial nationalism, focusing on the post-1970s period in the Gaza Strip. It treats the growth and development of the main armed factions in the Strip, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and then discusses Israeli policies toward Palestine, broadly, and the Gaza Strip, in particular. It analyses the closure policy post-2006 an…
Palestine's Great Flood
This is the first part of a two-part article which considers the US-Israeli attack on Palestine in general and the Gaza Strip in particular in a world-historical and regional context. In contrast to a range of theories which resort to liberal international relations theory, economism, or methodological nationalism when theorizing accumulation in general or Arab region accumulation in particular, the article argues that the Arab-Iranian region is …
Logics of Elimination and Settler Colonialism
This article engages with Patrick Wolfe’s theoretical underpinnings and programmatic consequences of his settler-colonial theory. It contextualizes the renaissance of the settler-colonial paradigm, scrutinizing its theoretical innovations. In doing so, the article traces Wolfe’s work back to its origin in the work of Marcel Mauss and his notion of total social facts, discussing this theory’s political orientation around anti-racism and liberal su…
North Africa
This article examines recent international financial institution and national government policy in North Africa intended to address the climate emergency. It focuses on the role of the World Bank and general policy trends since the 1970s. These policy trends fail to understand the continuing centrality of small-scale family farming to social reproduction and food production. The article stresses the significance of historical patterns of underdev…
Planning in the Shadow of China
This article considers the influence of Maoist China on Tunisian development theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shadow—or brilliant light—of the Chinese experience was evident in Tunisia by the late 1950s, where wide-scale agrarian reform within the People's Republic and the use of cooperatives and labor-intensive agricultural technologies to rationalize the use and allocation of labor were immensely impacting foreign technical attache…
Eco-socialism will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing
In this article, we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice.…
Peripheral Labour and Accumulation on a World Scale in the Green Transitions
This commentary turns a critical lens on the perspectives of labour in the potential green transition. It shows what changes when we focus on worldwide social labour-the labour which most of humanity currently performs-and its worldwide impact, going beyond climate to damages from mining and to biodiversity and other elements of the ecology. Such an optic forces scepticism about approaches which only consider the North when it comes to a large-sc…
Theories of Political Ecology
This article engages with and critiques dominant theories of political ecology. It takes the theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the framework of critique. It assesses the claims of "fossil capitalism," eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth, as well as the theories of "post-development." It finds that with the exception of degrowth, none of them take imperialism or the global history of accumulation sufficiently seriously, and ei…
Land and the US Agrarian South
This review essay summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the USA. It discusses how they recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical struggle. It then suggests parallels and divergences between those struggles and those in the Third W…
The Green Revolution and transversal countermovements
This article outlines the visions of Tunisian and Indian dissident political thinkers and agronomists, 1950s–1980s, for decentralised food and farming systems using just technologies. Amidst ascendent US imperialism, these marginalised proposals opposed the Green Revolution model of agrarian development, illustrating broader postcolonial politics of defending political sovereignty and advancing to economic/technological sovereignty. Erasing these…
Everything Stays the Same while Everything Changes
UNDP, Human Development Report 2020. The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene. New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2020. 412 pp. Available for download at: https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr2020.pdf The last years have seen bombshell reports dropped from international institutions with mounting frequency, including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018, 2019, 2021) and the UN…
A People's Green New Deal
The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal? In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, ideological underpinnings and limitations, he goes on to s…
Robert Vitalis, Oilcraft
Stories about Oil and War
People's Green New Deal
A People's Green New Deal
Within the past years, the Green New Deal (GND) became the common language for Northern climate politics, offering a seeming exit path from Northern social and ecological crises while erasing an older Northern climate discourse tied to Southern demands for climate reparations and rights to development. This Eurocentric GND has become the environmental program for an equally Eurocentric social democratic renewal. This article situates the GND in w…
Does the Arab region have an agrarian question
Discussion on food sovereignty and agro-ecology, and Anglophone rural sociology have blind spots when it comes to the Middle East/North African (Arab) region. This article explores them; outlines some initial concepts, discusses avenues for research, and notes some socio-political features of the region which make it distinct from others. It focuses on the necessity to include war and the national question to understand the regional agrarian ques…
Does the Arab region have an agrarian question
Discussion on food sovereignty and agro-ecology, and Anglophone rural sociology have blind spots when it comes to the Middle East/North African (Arab) region. This article explores them; outlines some initial concepts, discusses avenues for research, and notes some socio-political features of the region which make it distinct from others. It focuses on the necessity to include war and the national question to understand the regional agrarian ques…
Eco-socialism will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing
In this article, we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice.…
Auto-centered development and indigenous technics
Until his early death in 1985, at age 51, the Tunisian agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami carried out a path-breaking research program at what was then the Centre de Recherche et de Génie Rural. He wrote technical studies ranging from the agricultural capacities of the unjustly-marked-as-barren Kerkennah Islands, to possibilities for drip irrigation, to attempts to quantify the energy use of Tunisian agriculture, to a wide-ranging investigation of in…
The hidden legacy of Samir Amin
This paper considers the relationship between Samir Amin’s programme for delinking, smallholder agriculture, his theories of ecology, and the current of ecological dependency that developed out of North African dependency analysis. It argues that ecological forms of agriculture in fact underpinned the original case from which Amin derived delinking – the developmental model of Amin’s China. It goes on to show how collaborators and fellow travelle…
Delinking, food sovereignty, and populist agronomy
The article examines the weakness of discourses around food sovereignty in Southwest Asia and North Africa, and examines some older currents resembling the food sovereignty discourse. The author first historically situates the emergence of food sovereignty. He discusses agro-ecology – the ‘technics’ (or social embeddedness of technology) of food sovereignty – and its national-popular content, before then developing elements of the delinking parad…
Logics of Elimination and Settler Colonialism
This article engages with Patrick Wolfe’s theoretical underpinnings and programmatic consequences of his settler-colonial theory. It contextualizes the renaissance of the settler-colonial paradigm, scrutinizing its theoretical innovations. In doing so, the article traces Wolfe’s work back to its origin in the work of Marcel Mauss and his notion of total social facts, discussing this theory’s political orientation around anti-racism and liberal su…
Palestine's Great Flood
This is the first part of a two-part article which considers the US-Israeli attack on Palestine in general and the Gaza Strip in particular in a world-historical and regional context. In contrast to a range of theories which resort to liberal international relations theory, economism, or methodological nationalism when theorizing accumulation in general or Arab region accumulation in particular, the article argues that the Arab-Iranian region is …
Theories of Political Ecology
This article engages with and critiques dominant theories of political ecology. It takes the theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the framework of critique. It assesses the claims of "fossil capitalism," eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth, as well as the theories of "post-development." It finds that with the exception of degrowth, none of them take imperialism or the global history of accumulation sufficiently seriously, and ei…
Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa
no abstract
Palestine and the Ends of Theory
This article argues that over the past decade-and-a-half, amidst the resurgence of US/EU solidarity with Palestine, several anti-Zionist analyses have emerged that sidestep national liberation, regional politics, or imperialism. It connects that terrain to the rise of a new, and partially anti-systemic, political Islam that gained strength with the fall of the USSR and the contradictions arising within US-led imperialism. The article links this p…
The Green Revolution and transversal countermovements
This article outlines the visions of Tunisian and Indian dissident political thinkers and agronomists, 1950s–1980s, for decentralised food and farming systems using just technologies. Amidst ascendent US imperialism, these marginalised proposals opposed the Green Revolution model of agrarian development, illustrating broader postcolonial politics of defending political sovereignty and advancing to economic/technological sovereignty. Erasing these…
Peripheral Labour and Accumulation on a World Scale in the Green Transitions
This commentary turns a critical lens on the perspectives of labour in the potential green transition. It shows what changes when we focus on worldwide social labour-the labour which most of humanity currently performs-and its worldwide impact, going beyond climate to damages from mining and to biodiversity and other elements of the ecology. Such an optic forces scepticism about approaches which only consider the North when it comes to a large-sc…
Everything Stays the Same while Everything Changes
UNDP, Human Development Report 2020. The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene. New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2020. 412 pp. Available for download at: https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr2020.pdf The last years have seen bombshell reports dropped from international institutions with mounting frequency, including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018, 2019, 2021) and the UN…
A People's Green New Deal
Within the past years, the Green New Deal (GND) became the common language for Northern climate politics, offering a seeming exit path from Northern social and ecological crises while erasing an older Northern climate discourse tied to Southern demands for climate reparations and rights to development. This Eurocentric GND has become the environmental program for an equally Eurocentric social democratic renewal. This article situates the GND in w…
Development by popular protection and Tunisia
Recently a debate re-emerged between Adel Samara and Samir Amin on the state role in delinking – subjecting a social formation’s relationships to the world-system to a domestic, popular law of value. I suggest the arguments turns on the agent helming development. Amin’s agent is slightly more ambiguous than Samara’s, reflecting de-linking is modelled on postrevolutionary planning in Maoist China, with an explicit state role, whereas Samara, theor…
North Africa
This article examines recent international financial institution and national government policy in North Africa intended to address the climate emergency. It focuses on the role of the World Bank and general policy trends since the 1970s. These policy trends fail to understand the continuing centrality of small-scale family farming to social reproduction and food production. The article stresses the significance of historical patterns of underdev…
Palestine's Great Flood
This is the second part of a two-part article on the Palestinian question. This part treats the development and trajectory of anticolonial nationalism, focusing on the post-1970s period in the Gaza Strip. It treats the growth and development of the main armed factions in the Strip, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, and then discusses Israeli policies toward Palestine, broadly, and the Gaza Strip, in particular. It analyses the closure policy post-2006 an…
Planning in the Shadow of China
This article considers the influence of Maoist China on Tunisian development theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shadow—or brilliant light—of the Chinese experience was evident in Tunisia by the late 1950s, where wide-scale agrarian reform within the People's Republic and the use of cooperatives and labor-intensive agricultural technologies to rationalize the use and allocation of labor were immensely impacting foreign technical attache…
Zionism
This review-essay looks at a recent trilogy of works on Israeli history, the political history of the relationship between the United States and Israel, and the effect of the Israel lobby on the relationship between the two states. While the books attempt to construct a narrative that essentially blame the lobby for close to one hundred years of American malfeasance in the Middle East, they falter due to their idealism, their weak grasp of region…
The Fall of Libya
Maximilian Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012), 341 pages, $27.95, paperback. Perhaps no war in recent memory has so thoroughly flummoxed the Euro-Atlantic left as the recent NATO war on Libya. Presaging what would occur as U.S. proxies carried out an assault on Syria, both a pro-war left and an anti-anti-war left [gave] endless explanations and tortuous justifications for why a small invasion, perhaps just a "no-fly-zon…
Oil for food
Amidst fear of food shortages, prices slash upwards, doubling and redoubling in a year's span. The arid countries can respond least to such scarcities, most of all the richer and more parched natio
Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions at Ten Years
Rich Wiles, editor, Generation Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 256 pages, $24, paperback. When in March 2012, Barack Obama paused briefly from approving orders for drone killings of Pakistani and Yemeni villagers, in order to reassure the attendees at the annual gala of the AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee) that, "when there are efforts to boycott or divest from Israel, we will stand against them," the real target of his dec…
Implosions /Explosions
In 1970, Henri Lefebvre put forward the radical hypothesis of the complete urbanization of society, a circumstance that in his view required a radical shift from the analysis of urban form to the investigation of urbanization processes. Drawing together classic and contemporary texts on the “urbanization question”, this book explores various theoretical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of Lefebvre’s hypothesis. It assem…
Imperialism and Class in the Arab World
Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied (London: Anthem, 2014), 250 pages, $40, paperback.Perhaps nowhere does violence collapse the horizon as it does in the Arab world. Imperial wars have demolished the Libyan state and turned Syria into a charnel house. Yemen, the region's poorest country, was a U.S. drone shooting gallery before Saudi Arabia...attacked it, sending it spiraling into famine. Iraq shudders under ISIS's car bombs after decades of wars…
Delinking, food sovereignty, and populist agronomy
The article examines the weakness of discourses around food sovereignty in Southwest Asia and North Africa, and examines some older currents resembling the food sovereignty discourse. The author first historically situates the emergence of food sovereignty. He discusses agro-ecology – the ‘technics’ (or social embeddedness of technology) of food sovereignty – and its national-popular content, before then developing elements of the delinking parad…
Radical political economy and industrialisation in Africa
no abstract
Development by popular protection and Tunisia
Recently a debate re-emerged between Adel Samara and Samir Amin on the state role in delinking – subjecting a social formation’s relationships to the world-system to a domestic, popular law of value. I suggest the arguments turns on the agent helming development. Amin’s agent is slightly more ambiguous than Samara’s, reflecting de-linking is modelled on postrevolutionary planning in Maoist China, with an explicit state role, whereas Samara, theor…
Auto-centered development and indigenous technics
Until his early death in 1985, at age 51, the Tunisian agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami carried out a path-breaking research program at what was then the Centre de Recherche et de Génie Rural. He wrote technical studies ranging from the agricultural capacities of the unjustly-marked-as-barren Kerkennah Islands, to possibilities for drip irrigation, to attempts to quantify the energy use of Tunisian agriculture, to a wide-ranging investigation of in…
The hidden legacy of Samir Amin
This paper considers the relationship between Samir Amin’s programme for delinking, smallholder agriculture, his theories of ecology, and the current of ecological dependency that developed out of North African dependency analysis. It argues that ecological forms of agriculture in fact underpinned the original case from which Amin derived delinking – the developmental model of Amin’s China. It goes on to show how collaborators and fellow travelle…
A People's Green New Deal
The idea of a Green New Deal was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. It has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what - and for whom - is the Green New Deal? In this concise and urgent book, Max Ajl provides an overview of the various mainstream Green New Deals. Critically engaging with their proponents, ideological underpinnings and limitations, he goes on to s…
Robert Vitalis, Oilcraft
Stories about Oil and War
People's Green New Deal
A People's Green New Deal
Within the past years, the Green New Deal (GND) became the common language for Northern climate politics, offering a seeming exit path from Northern social and ecological crises while erasing an older Northern climate discourse tied to Southern demands for climate reparations and rights to development. This Eurocentric GND has become the environmental program for an equally Eurocentric social democratic renewal. This article situates the GND in w…
Does the Arab region have an agrarian question
Discussion on food sovereignty and agro-ecology, and Anglophone rural sociology have blind spots when it comes to the Middle East/North African (Arab) region. This article explores them; outlines some initial concepts, discusses avenues for research, and notes some socio-political features of the region which make it distinct from others. It focuses on the necessity to include war and the national question to understand the regional agrarian ques…
Land and the US Agrarian South
This review essay summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the USA. It discusses how they recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical struggle. It then suggests parallels and divergences between those struggles and those in the Third W…
The Green Revolution and transversal countermovements
This article outlines the visions of Tunisian and Indian dissident political thinkers and agronomists, 1950s–1980s, for decentralised food and farming systems using just technologies. Amidst ascendent US imperialism, these marginalised proposals opposed the Green Revolution model of agrarian development, illustrating broader postcolonial politics of defending political sovereignty and advancing to economic/technological sovereignty. Erasing these…
Everything Stays the Same while Everything Changes
UNDP, Human Development Report 2020. The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene. New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2020. 412 pp. Available for download at: https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/hdr2020.pdf The last years have seen bombshell reports dropped from international institutions with mounting frequency, including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2018, 2019, 2021) and the UN…
Logics of Elimination and Settler Colonialism
This article engages with Patrick Wolfe’s theoretical underpinnings and programmatic consequences of his settler-colonial theory. It contextualizes the renaissance of the settler-colonial paradigm, scrutinizing its theoretical innovations. In doing so, the article traces Wolfe’s work back to its origin in the work of Marcel Mauss and his notion of total social facts, discussing this theory’s political orientation around anti-racism and liberal su…
North Africa
This article examines recent international financial institution and national government policy in North Africa intended to address the climate emergency. It focuses on the role of the World Bank and general policy trends since the 1970s. These policy trends fail to understand the continuing centrality of small-scale family farming to social reproduction and food production. The article stresses the significance of historical patterns of underdev…
Planning in the Shadow of China
This article considers the influence of Maoist China on Tunisian development theory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The shadow—or brilliant light—of the Chinese experience was evident in Tunisia by the late 1950s, where wide-scale agrarian reform within the People's Republic and the use of cooperatives and labor-intensive agricultural technologies to rationalize the use and allocation of labor were immensely impacting foreign technical attache…
Eco-socialism will be anti-eugenic or it will be nothing
In this article, we draw attention to similarities and synergies between eco-fascist and liberal forms of populationism which encourage reproductive injustices against Indigenous women and women of colour globally, increasingly in the name of climate change mitigation. Calls to intervene in the bodily and social autonomy of racialised women, at best, distract from ecological crisis and, at worst, encourage violent forms of reproductive injustice.…
Peripheral Labour and Accumulation on a World Scale in the Green Transitions
This commentary turns a critical lens on the perspectives of labour in the potential green transition. It shows what changes when we focus on worldwide social labour-the labour which most of humanity currently performs-and its worldwide impact, going beyond climate to damages from mining and to biodiversity and other elements of the ecology. Such an optic forces scepticism about approaches which only consider the North when it comes to a large-sc…
Theories of Political Ecology
This article engages with and critiques dominant theories of political ecology. It takes the theory of ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) as the framework of critique. It assesses the claims of "fossil capitalism," eco-modernism, extractivism, and degrowth, as well as the theories of "post-development." It finds that with the exception of degrowth, none of them take imperialism or the global history of accumulation sufficiently seriously, and ei…
Political science (24 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Geography (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Law (10 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (10 works)