43. Climate Memo Mondays, October 4, 2021
ANDREAS MALM Books on Capitalism, Politics, and Climate
Fossil Capital. 2016
The Progress of This Storm:Nature and Society in a Warming World. 2018.
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. 2020.
With the Zerkin Collective. White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Dangers of Fossil Fascism. Verso, 2021.
Fossil Capital:The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm. Verso, 2016.
Publisher’s description
How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power
The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?
In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.
Reviews
“Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming.” – Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear
The Progress of This Storm:Nature and Society in a Warming World by Andreas Malm. Verso, 2018.
Publisher’s description
An attack on the idea that nature and society are impossible to distinguish from each other
In a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency to set them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a counterargument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable.
Reviews
“Andreas Malm’s new masterpiece The Progress of This Storm fills an urgent need, as did his seminal Fossil Capital in 2016. In his earlier book, he demonstrated that the fossil capitalism was not preordained by God or Nature or Technology, and that the answer is system change not climate change. In his new study, he teaches us how we can transcend those fashionable, ecological philosophies, clouding our understanding, that stand in the way of the unity of environmental theory and practice. No more definitive work of its kind exists today.” – John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, author of Marx’s Ecology
“As the global crisis grows, it is more important than ever to understand the complex relationship between society and nature, but much of what passes for environmental theory generates more confusion than insight. Andreas Malm has written another essential contribution to ecological Marxism, a brilliant and clearly written polemic that demolishes constructionism, hybridism, postmodernism and related academic fads, and defends historical materialism as the only credible alternative.” – Ian Angus author of Facing the Anthropocene
“One of the most original thinkers on the subject.” – Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything
“[The Progress of This Storm] is a major contribution to ecological Marxism, and, more broadly, to the development of a climate map that shows both the direction of the storm and the paths we must take to escape it.” – Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism
Review in Monthly ReviewMarch 2018.
Helena Sheehan. “Between Nature and Society.” Monthly Review March 2018. “Malm believes that countering the threat of climate change demands the total de-carbonization of the global economy, and the expropriation of the top 1 to 10 percent.”
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century by Andreas Malm. Verso, 2020. 224.
Part of the Verso Pamphlets series
What does the COVID 19 tell us about the climate breakdown, and what should we do about it?
The economic and social impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been unprecedented. Governments have spoken of being at war and find themselves forced to seek new powers in order to maintain social order and prevent the spread of the virus. This is often exercised with the notion that we will return to normal as soon as we can. What if that is not possible? Secondly, if the state can mobilize itself in the face of an invisible foe like this pandemic, it should also be able to confront visible dangers such as climate destruction with equal force.
In Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, leading environmental thinker, Andreas Malm demands that this war-footing state should be applied on a permanent basis to the ongoing climate front line. He offers proposals on how the climate movement should use this present emergency to make that case. There can be no excuse for inaction any longer.
Review“ The prose crackles—this is an urgent book … Electrifying.” – Spectre Journal
Dick’s comments
It’s a short book, only 174 pages of text in large print.
The rave review that follows seems true. Malm‘s condensed writing reflects his intense and original thinking. Be prepared to reread some sentences or paragraphs. Maybe I can help with a few pointers.
Chapter 1, Corona and Climate
I’ll comment on a few pages in Chapter One, especially the section entitled “We Have An Enemy Out There” pp. 9-12 and their Notes pp. 178-79. The main theme is the war waged against humans and other species by fossil fueled capitalism (i.e. USA today).
It begins with Greta’s great disappointment. In 2019 she repeated to world leaders the IPCC warnings from world scientists that “the climate crisis constituted an emergency on a par with war” and hoped they would get it, panic, and act to save their countries. But, as we observe each warming day, they did none of the above.
The leaders had heard her message earlier not only from the IPCC scientists, but from other scientists drawing from their reports. In 2011, say it again Dick, in 2011 a well-known publication explained “how the US economy could replace fossil fuels with 100 per cent renewable energy” by pointing to “the factories of GM and Ford rolling out hundreds of thousands of aircraft during World War II” within a few months after converting from car production. “Then why not wind turbines and solar panels?” That year, ten precious wasted years ago, NGOs spanning the world urged leaders to “get on a war footing” because “global warming was already killing more than 150,000 people per year.”
But, as we observe every warmer day in the state’s largest intellectually and morally failing, growth-and-profit-intoxicated newspaper, there was none of the above. Right? Yesterday? Today? Tomorrow? Last year? Next year?
Here’s the crucial truth of their culpability. They could not have failed to have known, at least by 2016. By 2016 Laurence Delina had written a circumstantial book based upon the IPCC reports showing how leaders could “marshal their resources—money, labour,-technology--and phase out fossil fuels at the speed required”: Strategies for Rapid Climate Mitigation: Wartime Mobilisation. E nvironmentalist celebrity Bill McKibben immediately promoted the book with his essay “A World at War,” which described the Arctic meltdown “as a devastating enemy offensive and the fire-storms and droughts…as overwhelming assaults.” And he made the familiar case of conversion from WWII: the rapid retooling of production from tractors to tanks. AND Bernie was campaigning for president and recommended that “the US ‘approach this as if we were at war…we have an enemy out there.’” A N D the Democratic Party officially adopted his demand for warlike mobilization before the election, with Hillary Clinton pledging to create a White House “’situation room just for the climate change,’ “modelled” on FDR’s WWII map room.
The leaders knew by 2011, unquestionably by 2016, and they were told again and again during the successive years—by 2019 from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal, and Nobel Prize-winner in economics Joseph Stiglitz .
And by Greta Thunberg, who repeated her call for panic and WWII-scale conversion, and Time on December 23 portrayed on its cover as “person of the year.”
On that day a Wuhan market worker was ill at home “shivering and spitting.”
--Dick
Chapter 2, Chronic Emergency
Chapter 3, “War Communism.”
“War Communism.” In “Red Army of renewable energy,” pp. 154ff., Malm describes the communism established in Russia by Lenin—late 1918-late 1920-- during the brief period between the Bolshevik revolution and the retaliation by invading world ”dominant classes.” “Hardly had the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, seized power, declared peace and exited the world war before a new war was thrown at them” by the “Whites” of “revanchist royalism” and “ferocious anti-Semitism,” that captured most of Russia’s coal and oil. “The Bolsheviks, in other words, stumbled from one emergency into another, which spurred them to radicalize” by state control and forced labor as illustrated by nationalization of some industries—or “war communism.” Despite being surrounded by enemies and deprived of fossil fuels, depending upon wood for their army and industries, the Red Army won.
Is this book about our subject?! Recall the title of this section. His point is renewable energy when an “emergency turns chronic.” His point is a nation turning to wood—or to sun or wind—when the established, habitual, normal regime will not save us. The early years of the Bolshevik regime are like “rescue teams at mining disasters,” which require “chains of command and forms of discipline,” and our “global heating [our “transitional period”] is the mining disaster ne plus ultra.” But that’s just the beginning of the transition—read on 162 to end. I recommend the book, and the commensurate review by Garth Dale following.
A major review of Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Centuryby Garth Dale. Posted Aug 06, 2020 by Eds.
Originally published: Spectre Journal (August 1, 2020). |https://spectrejournal.com/global-fever/
Climate Change , Health , Imperialism , War Global Review coronavirus , COVID-19 , pandemic
What can a virus tell us about climate breakdown, in its causation and in humanity’s response? And what can both tell us about capitalism and communism? These are the questions that Andreas Malm addresses in his new book . . . . It is a remarkable work, a tour de force. It portrays capitalism not simply in metaphorical colors as a meta-virus run by parasites, but as the godfather of actual viruses, https://spectrejournal.com/global-fever/
White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism
by Andreas Malm and The Zetkin Collective
576 pages / May 18, 2021 /
Publisher’s description
What does the rise of the far right mean for the battle against climate change?
In the first study of the far right’s role in the climate crisis, White Skin, Black Fuel presents an eye-opening sweep of a novel political constellation, revealing its deep historical roots. Fossil-fuelled technologies were born steeped in racism. No one loved them more passionately than the classical fascists. Now right-wing forces have risen to the surface, some professing to have the solution—closing borders to save the nation as the climate breaks down.
Epic and riveting, White Skin, Black Fuel traces a future of political fronts that can only heat up.
Reviews
“This bold and richly detailed study of far-right approaches to climate change is a revelation. Its admirably transnational reading of urgent political priorities could not be more timely.” – Geoff Eley, author of Nazism as Fascism
“A highly engaging study, full of startling anecdotes and witty reflections. If you want to understand the political obstacles that will face climate action in the coming decades, White Skin, Black Fuel is a must-read.” – Cara Daggett, author of The Birth of Energy
“A beautifully written, passionate, richly researched warning about fossil fascism—and its mutant offspring, ecofascism. With acute sensitivity, it traces the surprising connections between racist, nationalist ideology and climate denialism. And it persuasively explains why climate disaster only reinforces denialism on the right. An essential insight into an emerging threat.” – Richard Seymour, author of Corbyn
The kaleidoscope of catastrophe – on the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm
Editor. Mronline.org (9-29-21).
Originally published: Viewpoint Magazine by Bue Rübner Hansen (April 14, 2021 ) - Posted Sep 28, 2021
The frustration with Malm’s lack of clarity and the praise for his ability to bring together Marxism and environmentalism are of a piece: they both attest to the enormous expectations generated by his work, and his willingness to place himself in a position of intellectual leadership.