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 Review
March 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 Century
by 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.
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