| Title | : | Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1839762152 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781839762154 |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2020 |
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century Reviews
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21st Century Crisis Theory!
Preamble:
--Since author
Andreas Malm’s PhD thesis became the revelatory
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, he seems to be on a warpath to addressing civilizational topics with riveting syntheses.
--I first read
How to Blow Up a Pipeline comparing/contrasting
Extinction Rebellion with the role of sabotage by radical flanks in the censored history of social struggle.
--Next, this book tackles 21st century crises by combining the best of critical epidemiology (what I’m formally studying) + Malm’s Fossil Capital background + wartime economy (which I’m starting to explore). All of this haunts so much of my attention, so it was an absolute treat to witness Malm’s approach.
Highlights:
1) COVID, Climate, Capitalism:
--We start with unpacking the capitalist response to COVID. The distinction of essential vs. nonessential production is quite striking as some halted automobile production were temporarily transitioned to ventilator production, distillers to sanitizers, fashion brands to medical supplies, etc., as well as some nationalization of utilities.
…This is precisely a pivotal demand of climate change activism as part of a “Just Transition” from fossil capital to public green energy/public transportation/care economy. Indeed, the care economy includes less working hours (wasteful for elite accumulation) and more free time to build social communities, which is a much more appealing than the lockdowns enacted for COVID.
--So why did capitalism react so differently to COVID vs. climate change? One useful tidbit is COVID’s reversed “timeline of victimhood”, where COVID immediately spread to major cities (centers of capital) and key capitalist countries (esp. in Europe/US) which happen to be the lead importers in “unequal ecological exchange” (draining other countries of goods from polluting production/raw materials extraction/waste disposal). Luxury cruise ships, celebrities, etc. fell in short order.
--While the capitalist response to COVID seems drastic, it is still much more a militaristic reaction rather than long-term mitigation. Even liberal/progressive epidemiology technocrats (ex.
Laurie Garrett's 1994
The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance) were well aware of the mounting inevitability of pandemics due to some vague liberal notion of “globalization” and “Neoliberalism's” lack of social preventive measures.
--The radicals in the field like bad-ass
Rob Wallace (
Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19) are much clearer in connecting capitalism’s viral growth-as-survival in industrial agriculture (mono cash crops, esp. beef/soy bean/palm oil/wood products) to rampant deforestation/land-use disruptions/mass concentrated factory farming that decimate biodiversity’s buffers to zoonotic spillovers. Malm also highlights the capitalist marketing of “bush meat” beyond local subsistence consumption, especially the troubling luxury marketing. I’d like to see more synthesis with
Max Ajl’s focus on Global South small farmers/pastoralists regarding ecological land-use (
A People’s Green New Deal).
--Critical Epidemiology relates to Critical Vulnerability Theory, which looks beyond liberal notions of “natural disasters” as primarily geophysical issues. Instead, such disasters are a release to the mounting pressures of social vulnerability + natural hazards. I first dived into this for addressing the social factors of famines (
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World) as well as
Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. We see this social vulnerability described in Engel’s
Conditions of the Working Class in England, and
Rosa Luxemburg:
“‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’”
...Malm advances Critical Vulnerability Theory to climate change by stressing the interactions where social forces alter natural hazards, thus the “dialectics of disaster”.
--The capitalist roots need to be highlighted: “Capital” is the process of accumulating money. Capitalist property rights (
John Locke) treats the “wild Common of Nature” as “waste” unless it can be converted to exchange-value (sell on market) by enclosing it (privatizing, followed by a linear production/distribution/consumption/waste process that violates the recycling processes of life). This is a tragedy of capitalism, a reversal of the “Tragedy of the Commons” myth (
https://youtu.be/xcwXME-PNuE); this relates to
James O'Connor’s 2nd contradiction of capitalism, as well market “externalities” (
The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power) etc. We need to synthesize this with degrowth (
Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).
“Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.” -Marx,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
2) Chronic Emergencies and War Communism:
--Regarding chronic emergencies, Malm distinguishes the existential crisis of climate change (we should call it Earth Systems crises given the additional crises of biodiversity integrity, chemical pollution, nitrogen/phosphorus cycles, land-use soil fertility etc.) from prior historical “collapses” (i.e. collapses of empires, since those can benefit the masses on the periphery written out of status quo history since they are now freed from needless exploitation; reminded of
David Graeber).
--I’ve been inspired to explore wartime economies primarily from taking an economic development class by
Jim Glassman’s (author of US Military Industrial Complex’s role in South East Asia capitalist development:
Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945-1980) and
Steve Keen’s realistic assessment of climate change response mimicking nationalist wartime rationing.
--Malm takes a more radical step than these capitalist wartime analyses to consider the “war communism” of Lenin-era USSR, battered by WWI’s lingering famines, foreign invasion by the major capitalist powers, plagues (including the 1918 Great Influenza pandemic; need to read more on USSR’s pioneering public health efforts here), etc. Lenin diagnosed the systemic roots of the “impending catastrophe” as capitalism/imperialism, and emphasized speed targeting elite priveleges and using State power to break business-as-usual.
--Malm applies this to climate change, where State surveillance/data collection can be redirected from targeting citizens to targeting corporations via input/output analysis on ecological footprint (ex. tropical land appropriated) to plan cuts/redirections and to reverse unequal exchange: for more on decolonization, see:
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A People’s Green New Deal
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The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth
--Some liberal/progressive technocrats (ex.
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration) recognize the potential of negative emission schemes like direct air capture carbon drawdown, which does not require the outlandish land-use of the mainstream BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage), but realize the limitations under capitalist markets’ profit-seeking exchange-value survivalism (where captured carbon can be resold/reused rather than “wasted”, the worst type of “recycling”). Thus, fossil capital corporations need to be nationalized and turned into public utilities for carbon removal services.
--Finally, USSR’s rapid industrialization and “siege socialism” war production (vs. capitalist invasion, Nazi invasion, US/NATO Cold War) has overwhelmed “Ecological Leninism”: the State set laws for conservation, where ecological studies contributed to land-use planning and rehabilitation (citing
Douglas R. Weiner). Anti-capitalist ecological sciences also flourished. So much to synthesize with agroecology, agroforestry, etc. -
Oooof... so grim - the degree to which we are fucked as a planet and species is hard to understate. COVID, climate change, and capitalism are inexplicably linked according to Malm and a very convincing case is made that any response to the current situation that doesn't start from with forcibly revamping our entire way of living from how we eat, travel, and heat our homes is doomed to an eternal recurrence of shit. Either the germs are going to get us, or we'll cook ourselves and every other living thing alive in a hotbox, or both at the same time.
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an introduction and two major chapters. the first chapter is all about BATS and it rules. i mean, it's not only about bats, but they are the entry point to understanding coronavirus zoonotic spillover events and how they relate to climate change. I expected to dislike the second chapter, on "war communism," but i was surprised it wasn't more provocative. Overall, Malm's "climate Leninism" doesn't really adhere to the generic ML strategies that one would expect (no discussion of vanguards or parties, for example), so it mostly amounts to saying 1. only the state can plan, mobilize the labor forces, discipline the private sector, and institute laws to protect wildlife and enforce veganism at the scale necessary; 2. we only have the bourgeois state available to us, so guess we'll have to use that even though it sucks; and 3. some kind of popular pressure will force that bourgeois state to act in an ecologically beneficial way. Academic Marxism tends to be thin on strategic discussion (to the point of avoiding Lenin et al entirely), but even then I was surprised there wasn't more on the character of the collective subject who would actually bear such a regime - it's left as an open question in the last paragraph or so.
anyway, well worth the read if you are interested in bats -
Pretty interesting read on our current crisis.
For Andreas Malm, the coronavirus crisis and the climate crisis are not separate crises. They are both part of a larger crisis – that of globalised fossil fuel capitalism. Malm argues that the sort of Zoonotic spillover that makes diseases spread from animals to humans is accelerated by deforestation. Deforestation in turn is caused by extracting resources to export to wealthy countries for profit. Raising cattle, growing palm oil, and mining minerals have a devastating effect on natural habitats, making animals – especially bats – less healthy and driving them into ever greater proximity with humans. The rapid spread of diseases is further facilitated by oil-powered air travel.
When the coronavirus first reached the shores of wealthy liberal democracies, political leaders rallied citizens by drawing comparisons to the collective efforts of the Second World War. Indeed, states intervened massively in their economies – subsidising wages, crushing demand through ‘stay at home’ orders, and, in some cases, nationalising industries to produce medical supplies. Some argued that, having shown what they can do to combat disease, states ought to use the same means to fight climate change. However, as Malm makes clear, capitalist states are only able to provide palliative care to crises rather than tackle their root causes. They can provide vaccines and put out bush fires but they can’t confront the causes of Zoonotic spillover and climate change because that would mean confronting the powerful classes that profit from those practices.
With a subject as depressing as this, it would be easy to fall into a dispiriting fatalism that we are all inevitably doomed. Malm’s book, on the other hand, provides an unashamedly radical solution to our current crisis. For one, Malm thinks that political leaders citing WW2 are looking to the wrong war. Instead, they ought to look at the Russian Civil War. The fledgling Bolshevik government unleashed the power of the state and economic planning to win a war against the capitalist classes. In fact, due to territorial losses, the Reds were deprived almost entirely of coal and oil so that the war effort was powered without burning fossil fuels! Malm makes the case for an ecological Leninism along the lines of War Communism. The state should flex its muscles and wage an ecological class war against powerful interests. It should nationalise the entire fossil fuel industry and expropriate capital to deploy direct air carbon capture technologies on a mass scale.
Malm is under no illusion. He readily admits that, much like under War Communism, many sacrifices would have to be made. Some environmentalists naively believe that individuals can prevent catastrophe by changing their consumption habits. Malm argues that the state should be unapologetically draconian and direct peoples’ behaviour much like they did during the pandemic. Environmentally damaging goods like meat and chocolate as well as soy would be banned. Malm also recognises that endowing the state with so much power could, as in the 1920s, bring about a Stalinist dictatorship with bureaucrats directing the course of society and trampling over civil liberties.
Here is the dilemma. Any realistic action to protect our planet would have to be rapid and transformational but what if we came out on the other side with a state of affairs worse than the present? We seemingly have little time to mull over our decisions. It is clear that capitalist states can only fight fires with half measures for so long. Will we end up, as Marx wrote, with a ‘revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in common ruin’? -
Una interesante reflexión sobre la pandemia que estamos viviendo. Entre tanta conspiranonia, tanto virus artificial de laboratorio, el autor rastrea el origen del virus en una transmisión zoonótica, pasada de animales a humanos. Esta ha sido, desde el primer momento, una de las hipótesis más creíbles y aceptadas. No obstante, Andreas Malm va un paso más allá, al buscar las causas que facilitan esa transmisión. Y las encuentra en la acción del ser humano sobre la naturaleza: la deforestación, el calentamiento global, el comercio de animales salvajes y exóticos... Nuestro abuso de la naturaleza acaba cobrándose un precio. Todo un aviso a navegantes...
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Joining some of the dots between climate change, capitalism and Covid-19. Very readable.
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A powerful argument for the revolutionary ending of a capitalist system that breeds climate chaos and pandemic. All hail ecological Leninism.
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A good premise squandered by a rush to be as topical and trendy as humanly possible.
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Clearly written and hopelessly naive. Malm would benefit from some intellectual humility. Keep guys like him away from real power...
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Malm's analysis is among the best I have read about the on-going pandemic. (I'm waiting for my copy of Grace Blakeley's Corona Crash to arrive, the sibling pamphlet by Verso on the topic, and honestly, I think these will be formative for my take on Covid-19.)
Malm continues the strong conceptualisation of capitalism and climate that he is known for from Fossil Capitalism and The Progress of this Storm. To reduce a complex argument to its barebones, the expansive nature of capitalism can be discerned on many layers. One of them is the way in which wild life is conquered by commerce and broken into commodities. The spillover event of Covid-19 is one of those occasions. Without going into the scientific details, which are hairy and will be debated for a long time, the beauty of this argument is quite precise. In the manner of Adorno's "negative dialectics", Malm is arguing for a link between commercial destruction of objective nature (cutting down forests, destroying habitats, trafficking wild animals) with the destruction of subjective realities (economic, health and existential threats of corona virus for the humankind) with the class component as a driver (as well as the generational factor).
The message is simple: global capitalism is killing the environment in a way that has severe re-percussions for the humanity. The boomerang has returned in a form of a pandemic, but this, argues Malm, is neither an isolated incident, nor even exceptional in its inception. Much more likely, it is to be viewed together with droughts, forest fires and hurricanes, on the rise for many consecutive years. These are on the agenda of disaster capitalism, which will destroy both objective and subjective nature, unless a resilient action is taken. A banner that was hanged outside a balcony in Bourdeaux, France, related by the author, read "on est tous des pangolins" ("we are all pangolins"), one of the most trafficked mammals on the planet that was linked to the outbreak of corona virus. But, as Malm forcefully argued against Latourians in The Progress of This Storm, we humans differ from pangolins, as only humans can take to the rational action that is needed in order to bring an end to the rise of CO2 emissions, currently causing the warming of the planet and thus the disaster of contemporary environmental change.
The last part of the book, "War Communism", argues for Climate Leninism as an urgent call to take over state in order to combat the climate change. Apart from the lively glosses on Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, the section seems mostly to be aimed against the anarchist-environmentalist imagery, according to which political background doesn't matter when building a populist movement to fight climate change. I am mostly thinking of Extinction Rebellion while reading this section, and clearly Malm is frustrated with some fringe of the unpolitical climate movement; whether it can to be so conveniently named or not, is another issue (he does not name it). His critique is mostly against the idea that political and state power is as such are to be avoided lest the revolution to be turned into its Thermidor (counterrevolutionary backlash). This, obviously is a classic case of a Marxist/anarchist dispute on party organising, or on strategy and tactics.
While I think that Malm's criticism is surely valid in that it points to an important factor - it makes great difference, whether the people in climate change movements at least provisionally have words and ideas to conceptualise capitalism as well as the importance of state power in controlling the systems of production as well as destruction. However, it might be that his Bolshevik/Leninist accent on militant overthrow of the old regime and taking power partly misses the mark. At the moment there probably is no way that the climate movement can situate itself completely outside the question of state power following the tradition of the mutual aid/anarchist/non-violent anti-globalisation protest movements of the 90s/00s. The vortex of the state is looming, and the way the movements will fight it remains to be seen.
The example of Lenin is surely a powerful one, but one that raises the question of the concrete basis for comparison. First question, I would pose, concerns the form of party/organisation in the age of post-truth politics. Both the power and the weakness of XR has in my view been its subordination to the "society of spectacle", that is, using media to get their message across. While the attention provided by the spectacular performances is ample, a centralist organisation behind such actions is exactly what "the silent majority" is waiting to be revealed and what the conservative politicians always suspect, since this would corroborate the organisation as a simile to a terrorist group. XR has to my knowledge been successful in frustrating such exposures thus far. I think their rejection of Leninist model of a revolutionary party has been key to their success. The sharp difference of the spearhead of intellectuals/leaders and the body of rank-and-file members that (whether historically adequate or not) is the public perception of any centralist movement, which will target the leaders with the double inquiry: "are you not really terrorist? are you not really politician?". This pressure can at the moment be endured by stepping away from the forms of the party organisation model. On the other hand, XR's political vagueness stems from exactly this feature, and the exact message behind their actions has been difficult to pinpoint, except of the perennial: "WAKE UP!"
In conclusion, while I have some misgivings on the utilitarian value of Malm's call for War Communism, I do think the analysis behind is pretty much as on-point as anyone has suggested. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the explosive combination of pandemic, capitalism, and climate change. There will be more on this line in the future, I hope. -
Mmm…10 palabras muy pero que muy interesantes
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no ha estat problema esborrar-lo de la meva ment pq tmpoc era massa remarkable <3
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Depends where you look. Some say Malm’s a Trot. Others he’s a Marxist. Yet others, he’s an anarchist. Whatever label, he’s on the left – and that’s right by me. Whatever he is, Andreas is definitely an activist. This book was clearly rushed out to catch the Corona interest wave in April 2020. The three chapters here are basically a polemic comparing anti-Covid measures against measures adopted against Climate Change coming to the conclusion that what is needed is a Leninist style War Communism for survival in the face of global warming and Climate Change.
Immediately pre-Covid there were all the signs that the effects of Climate Change were rampant and increasing in their virulence – fire, flood, colossal storms – and riding in with the other equestrians came Pestilence. (If the bold Andreas had held out for a while, he might have got the grandaddy and Ukraine and more string to his bow about the emphasis switching from Climate Change to whatever was the flavour of the month). The Wuhan Corona virus outbreak in February 2020 was exactly what had been predicted for some time – a virus inherent in one species (Bats) making the zoonotic jump to humans via an intermediate agent, thought in this case to be the oddly imbricate Pangolin, where, in humans, it proved to be particularly virulent to cause pandemic which had not affected the world since the great Spanish ‘Flu pandemic.
As the virus was firstly underestimated and then with clear expressions of its virulence and rapidity of spread, it became apparent that serious measures needed to be taken by Western / Northern governments (rather than the missing of five COBRA meetings by the inept leader that IS Boris Johnson). Of prime importance here is the sheer transmissibility of the virus and its use of modern transport lanes, particularly airline travel to spread world-wide and its novel spike-protein nature. By mid-March most countries world-wide were either in lockdown, with the enforcement of severe restrictions on citizens movements and activities, or contemplating lockdown. What the immediate lockdown showed was that, in the face of global existential threat to human life, governments and states world-wide ARE capable to imposing fiercely restrictive measures on their citizens. Malm essentially wants us to understand that it is possible to make and accept hard decisions which impact us all and restrict everyday liberal freedoms. So if we can do this for zoonotic viral threat, why do we seem so reluctant to take similar expansive measures to impact on Climate Change and global warming which holds an existential threat to all life on Earth? Too often now what we appear to see is promises and undertakings made at successive COP conferences as simply lip service in the regnum of business-as-usual to such an extent that we appear to be lemming-like running towards the cliff edge where climate change will be irrevocable pitching the Earth towards a Venusian – like situation which will extinguish all life.
What the serious measure undertaken to counteract Covid showed was that it was possible to determine, to make clear choice about what was Essential and non-Essential functions within Western life. Implicit in this is that some things should be produced whilst others are superfluous, that we have been living a life of charm and luxury whilst literally burning up resources. It has also laid out clear to see the power and corruption of modern-day late Capitalism. The profit-at-all-expense, the ever-increasing demand for profit against everything, the just-in-time supply chains, the rape-and-pillage of someone else’s environment for profit-based elsewhere. One of the major changes was the cessation of mass flying (but not soon enough to stop the spread of the virus). It became apparent that people did not need to go on low-cost foreign flight-based holidays, or when they were told that they could not, that this was accepted. All-in-all we are talking about the focus on one enemy and compiling resources to defeat that enemy, that governments worldwide could come together to face and overcome that enemy invoking tough measures, switching manufacture, making decisions on essential against non-essential, impose hard acting rules to change the way modern life is lived. If this could be done for pandemic then why can we not take seriously the threat of Global Warming and Climate Change?It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims, ironically, are those that have done least to cause the crisis. But it’s a world war aimed at us all.
Even the idea that Coronavirus is more of an existential threat is cock-eyed as a majority will not recover from the effects of Global Warming and there is no vaccine! ‘Comparing Climate Crisis and Covid is like comparing war with a bullet’. The science of Coronavirus was unknown at the beginning whereas the science of Global Warming is based on years of research and the proof is that the predictions are now coming true. The future threat from pandemic is uncertain but climate change WILL happen unless we take severe actions NOW. The later we leave it, the more stringent the actions required will be. It is all seemingly about Perception. In climate change, the poor and the weak and ‘those over there’ will suffer first; in Covid it is the affluent white north that suffered first, the moment of crisis occurring in northern Italy. Europe became an epicentre. Global warming however is a problem for ‘the other half of the planet’. It is the identity of the victims in the decision of governments. It is about Class and Race.
Bill McGibben, 2016
In ‘Chronic Emergency’ Malm starts off with a discussion on zoonotic crossover, the route by which the virus made its leap from bats to humans. It is not the first virus to have hopped – bubonic plague, rabies, SARS, smallpox, varieties of influenza – and a 2008 study showed the increasing likelihood of pandemic. Why? Mankind is encroaching upon environments which are disease homes. Bats as flying mammals are super-incubators of resistant viruses. They readily shed their disease load. When humans come into contact with wild animal environments then the probability of crossover is raised. Where is this happening? In deforestation at equatorial forest margins through ‘development’ pushed by Capital interests – deforestation for beef and palm oil plantations, mineral extraction in equatorial regions, soya bean farms and the pornography that is wild animal rearing, resourcing, marketing and eating. The commodities required in the North are produced at the expense of the South.
The bottom line for Malm is that Capital is responsible for both pandemic and climate change. His argument is compelling and he elucidates the steps along the way. What has happened is the compression of time and space through speed of global travel which is fossil-fuelled. The world shrinks through Globalism and jet travel. The world is now infinitesimally small in the age of the microprocessor and global communication. What was fantastic yesterday becomes reality today. The frequency of pandemic WILL increase. Pandemic attacks densely populated areas with older, fatter, urban inter-generational living. It is magnified by high levels of inequality and at transport hubs. Thus the North and the West will experience the effects of pandemic faster and deeper. Failure to institute drastic measure simply make the effects deeper and longer-lasting – just like Climate Change. The latter, however, will be felt first and foremost by the South and the East. It is also in the effects of the anti-pandemic measures that Class plays a role. ’The middle-class hide whilst the working class bring them things.’ The rich just get richer. Markets cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. Markets are not based on morality but profit. They need to be governed by States. Response needs to be united and for the good of all – not ‘cost effective’; not reliant on some hopefully espoused technocratic solution. Actions against Climate Change have mainly been palliative. Actions against Covid have been severe combined with technocratic to at least ‘attempt to live with Covid’. The same attitude pervades thinking on Climate Change except that there is no vaccine other than stopping the use of fossil fuels and ceasing pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere. For that to happen requires change to our whole belief system. We are in the era of Chronic Emergency. Because global warming has been gradual, we have come to accept events and tut but then forget. Perhaps if we had successive crop failures leading to worldwide famine, massive dehydration and forest fires we might accept the need for action. Our attitude seems to be summed up by ‘deal with the disaster then back to business-as-usual’. But what we are talking about is not just the death of Capitalism but the Death of Death itself. Extinction.
For Malm the answer lies in the adoption of Leninist principles put to use after the Revolution in War Communism. It is, to be honest, a bit ‘Dave Spart’ at this point in his argumentum. But we should expect this and take the underlying message. DRASTIC MEASURES ARE NEEDED! WE NEED TO TAKE THEM NOW! WE CAN DO THIS – WE HAVE ALREADY PROVED WE CAN IN THE FACE OF CRISIS! Cost-Benefit analysis is not appropriate. Denialism is total ostrich syndrome. We do not need growth. We need Decline. Learn to ask for less. In Global Capital terms this is perhaps impossible. That is why we need System Change to counteract Climate Change.
It has some of the usual gripes – no bibliography, a mass of page numbered notes at the end and no indication in the text that there is note to go with the text. And at times Malm seems like a whining child. But these things need to be said. Only by saying them loudly and often will there ever likely be any change. And the change required is from the probability of extinction to existence. This is MORALITY in action. What we get though is anyone suggesting anything other than liberal laissez-faire is labelled as 'totalitarian'. Malm needs to be understood and taken into the hearts and soul of every government and state on the planet. Perhaps what we need is less Lenin's War Communism but a little more Stalinist compulsion. In the Age of Narcissism which has succeeded the Age of Dumbing Down, people need to be TOLD what to do. Persuasions do not work on the deaf, self-obsessed.
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There appears to be a big difference between many capitalist governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic and their response to the climate emergency. But Andreas Malm's book argues that comparing the current Covid response with climate inaction is not comparing like with like. Rather, “Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating.”
For many years, scientists have warned about the threat posed by rising “zoonotic spillover” — the process by which a virus can leap to humans from another species. Their warnings of potential pandemics have been ignored. Spillover is a higher risk today for several reasons. A major cause is the huge disruptions and encroachments made on natural environments, such as deforestation and urbanization. This brings wild animals in closer contact with human populations than before.
Malm concludes that the response to Covid-19 has a lot in common with how capitalist states respond to other ecological problems — treating the symptoms while ignoring the causes. The likelihood of similar, or even worse, pandemics coinciding with extreme climate change amount to a single “chronic emergency.”
The final part of Malm’s book discusses the political responses and actions needed to truly address the root causes of this chronic emergency. Without decisive action we face a dangerous world of future pandemics colliding with immense ecological disasters. This means that the hope that gradual reforms will tame capitalism is less relevant than ever. Malm calls this project “ecological Leninism". Further, he says the transition to a sustainable, ecologically sane society won’t look much like luxury communism. It will be more like “war communism” — a reference to the emergency policies adopted by the Bolsheviks in early years of the Russian Revolution.
The great strength of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is that it gets the origins and the scale of the cascading ecological crises we face exactly right. Compared with most other books that discuss the crisis, its solutions are more realistic because they are more radical. As Malm concludes, the measures he proposes “are exactly as utopian as survival.” -
Malm really is a remarkable thinker and writer. The only meaningful comparison is Slavoj Zizek, but Malm is more focused, more ferocious.
In this little book he convincingly traces the connections between exploitative, extractive class society and the climate and biodiversity crises, and then between these crises and the imperious emergence of covid-19. No coincidences involved. -
Este es un ensayo, de 3 capítulos, que trata sobre la crisis del coronavirus y el cambio climático, de sus particularidades y de cómo se interrelacionan. Su autor,
Andreas Malm, para explicar ambas crisis sitúa sus causas en las dinámicas del capitalismo (una interpretación tipo marxista) y da cuenta las razones por las cuales, bajo las condiciones actuales, es posible esperar más crisis como la del coronavirus. Las dinámicas del capitalismo basado en colonialismo sobre el espacio, la compresión del espacio (con mayores velocidades de intercambio) y su extractivismo, han generado un intercambio ecológico desigual entre los países del norte y el resto del mundo, que generan las condiciones para esperar mayores crisis similares.
Incluso, realiza una hipótesis de que el capitalismo en un meta-virus controlado por parásitos, dado los efectos que tiene sobre la humanidad y el medio ambiente. Es la causa principal de las crisis actuales.
En este sentido, plantea que la crisis climática por venir es tal (ya mueren miles de personas cada año por sus efectos), que las perspectivas liberales o anarquistas son inútiles para enfrentarla. El cambio climático no es gradual, por lo que el reformismo es inútil, y las intervenciones para atender la emergencia requieren de grandes organizaciones nacionales e internacionales, no de soluciones locales.
Uno de los puntos más importantes a resaltar es que muestra como durante la crisis del coronavirus se han tomado medidas que se consideraban imposibles: nacionalización de hospitales, control de la producción para fines médicos, etc. Incluso habla de la reducción global de emisiones de CO2 durante los primeros meses de la pandemía. Medidas que se consideraban imposibles de realizar en el pasado. Y esto es algo que deberá de ser tomado en cuenta para enfrentar el cambio climático.
Por ello, llama al uso del "comunismo de guerra" para poder superar dicha crisis. Una metáfora basada en la revolución rusa, recordando que los bolcheviques enfrentaron una situación desesperada (invasiones, hambruna, perdida del territorio, colapso industrial), lo que los llevo a tomar medidas radicales para transformar las cusas de raíz y ganar la guerra. Una
reseña de Gareth Dale señala que la visión de ecologismo leninista de Malm y las soluciones que plantea se queda corta con las posiciones radicales del mismo Lenin para confrontar al capitalismo, pero que es necesario tomar inspiración de este libro para llevar a cabo intervenciones leninistas para afrontar el futuro.
El libro esta escrito en un lenguaje ligero y de fácil lectura. Totalmente recomendado para quienes buscan una perspectiva global sobre el coronavirus y el cambio climático. -
Andreas Malm wrote this short book at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic — in my neighborhood of Berlin-Neukölln, no less!
When we try to think about the kind of mobilization that humanity will need to save ourselves from climate catastrophe, we often picture the U.S. War Production Board from World War II. But Malm has a much better analogy: the policies of "war communism" implemented by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. I had never thought about the fact that Trotsky's famous armored train was powered by wood, i.e. renewables!
Malm calls for "ecological Leninism." This is a huge step forward from his previous book, in which he systematically avoided any mention of socialism, Lenin, Trotsky, etc. The sharpening crisis can radicalize people — even intellectuals. Unfortunately, Malm strips Leninism of its political content: a program of proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state and create a workers' state. "Leninism" is reduced to a synonym for a group of people who are very dedicated — Malm could have just as easily called his idea "ecological Jesuitism" or "ecological Scientology."
Specifically, Malm says that today it's impossible to smash the bourgeois state today — so socialists need to force the bourgeois state to implement a policy of "war communism." It is totally contradictory: Malm explains that capitalist states are instruments of the bourgeoisie to guarantee their accumulation — but then he claims these same states could somehow be pressured to become the exact opposite. Malm, even in his "Leninist" phase, remains a reformist.
He even engages in some sleight-of-hand, quoting Lenin from 1917: "We need revolutionary government, we need (for a certain transitional period) a state. This is what distinguishes us from the anarchists." Yes, Lenin said this — but Malm omits what Lenin says immediately afterwards: we need to smash the bourgeois state and create a workers' state.
Hopefully Malm's extremely selective quoting of Lenin and Trotsky will inspire more people to read Lenin and Trotsky. This is a good analogy, but it needs to be taken much further. We need "war communism" — which can be implemented after we break the power of the bourgeoisie by breaking up their states. To dig into these questions, I would recommend the review by Marina Garrisi in Left Voice Magazine: "Pandemics, Climate Crisis, and 'Ecological Leninism'." -
Malm's book aged very fast, as it was obvious. It was finished in April 2020, not even two months since the start of the Covid pandemic, since then the virus eventually started to relief its toll from the first victims, whealty, white, older inhabitants of the global north, the ones who will be the last to bear the brunt of global warming or that do it in the mildest way and start tearing up throug the global south, in India, Brazil, Peru, Indonesia. Now, in august 2021 the key expression codifying the uneven balance of this pandemic is vaccine apartheid.
But we know all of this already, this is just to say that this book already aged...and not so well
It is all very clearly argued and the dots connected in crystal clear ways, the coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis display similarities as many noted more than a year ago but also many differences and not acknowledging this differences can work against us. The author could however displayed some more intellectual humility between an enthusiastic willingness to engage in petty leftist infighting, of which he shows plenty in his goofy doing away with anarchist thought(s) and the brief sterile and juvenile provocation of "latourians, postumanists, neomaterialists and other hybridizers" and a quite eerily naive championing of the state "hard power".
While well outlining wat can be done with the power of a state contrasting the climate crisis that mimicks what states have done to contrast covid but are not willing to do regarding a threat way more colossal he goes too far at forcing parallels between what has to be done in the future to prevent this crisis that can only get worse getting to a civilization threatening levels and implications that, just like in the past, just like for solving other issues (that won't get solved anyways) it's just about who controls the state's hard power
And do we really need, after decades of red scare, these continuous referring to Lenin, Marx, Luxembourg? Because no, life on Earth is not Russian Empire 1917 -
A fascinating book, one of the most thoughtful reflections on the pandemic published shortly after it began, CCCE is actually two essays. The first compares COVID and the climate crisis along many angles, while the second calls for a Leninist state to manage civilization through climate mitigation and adaptation.
The first essay does a good job of offering a Marxist analysis of humanity's response to the coronavirus, locating zoonotic transmission in modern capitalism. Malm reminds us that the climate emergency is a far more important crisis than COVID, and, somewhat counterintuitively, sees the former as imminent as the latter.
The second essay... is very useful. Like all of Malm's writing, it's very well done, passionately argued. It might be the clearest case yet of a left-wing argument for a powerful state in the crisis. And Malm is clear that this is an emergency with massive costs:[T]here is no escaping outlawing wildlife consumption and terminating mass aviation and phasing out meat and other things considered part of the good life, and those elements of the climate movement and the left that pretend that none of this needs to happen, that there will be no sacrifices or discomforts for ordinary people, are not being honest... The ecological crisis is nothing if not tragic. (163-4)
This part of the book is less convincing in treating with alternatives, dismissing anarchist and social democracy too quickly and not very seriously.
Naturally there are some misfires and points I disagree with. Saying that states really took interest in responding to COVID because its main victims were old white men is a cute line, but doesn't actually work. It evades actions taken by any state without a significant white population - notably, China! - and misses the higher casualty rates suffered by some nonwhite populations.
Yet the first essay is excellent and the second both useful and engaging. Recommended. -
Excellent livre qui met en parallèle l’urgence climatique et l’urgence chronique. L’auteur émet que ces deux phénomènes sont directement liés. Il parle entre autre du capitaliste écologique et des injustices climatiques causées par celui-ci (catastrophes naturelles, mobilité et espaces des personnes occidentales en temps de crise, etc.) Aussi, il est question de l’origine de la pandémie. On sait que la Covid19 s’est déclenchée en Chine, suite à une contagion zoonotique, c’est-à-dire; un animal qui contamine l’Homme (ou l’Homme qui contamine l’animal). Il explique que cet événement est inévitablement causé par le capital humain. La déforestation, le commerce d’animaux sauvages, le réchauffement climatique sont les principales causes de la pandémie. De plus, il démontre que si la propagation s’est faite si rapidement, c’est évidemment à cause des circuits économiques mis en place par l’humain (trafic aérien par exemple). Sous une perspective judicieuse, l’auteur nous démontre toutefois que cette analogie a ses limites. Il explique notamment comment les sociétés capitalistes soignent les symptômes, durant la crise, au lieu de s’attaquer aux causes. Un changement radical est de mise sur le plan écologique. Si les gouvernements ont réussi à mettre les sociétés occidentales sur pause pour un confinement, ceux-ci seraient également capable de prendre un tournant écologique drastique. Même si les États réussissent à maitriser le virus, le monde en connaitra toujours plus. Ils doivent cesser de prendre des demies-mesures et agir sérieusement pour ralentir le réchauffement climatique. Il n’y a pas de vaccin pour la planète
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Another 4.5 upgrade rather than down. Briefly Malm looks at how states internationally have responded to the covid pandemic and legislated against the interests of capital and the market to protect populations. He had next to know original research but his macro approach is insightful and important. For example he emphasises the significance of zoonotic infection caused by deforestation and the human attack on nature. There is some thoughtful discussion of how state power needs to be used or forced to be used from below to address the climate crisis. His perspective is very much a Marxist one. He argues that the state response to the pandemic has illustrated what can and should be done in relation to the climate crisis. There's a thoughtful section on leninism versus anarchism. He mentions the failure of the German revolution due to the lack of central coordination of the Marxists. (This is covered very well by Chris Harmon's book on the German Revolution.) His discussion of the problems of centralism shows that he does not underestimate the dangers of war communism. For my money anarchism is totally unable to address the problem of globalisation within the context of a problem and crisis such as that of the climate crisis. Possibly the main problem I have with the book, and it's a small one, is that he invests too much in technological extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. Generally scientists currently think that this cannot be done to any significant scale. However if oil companies are nationalised, preferably without compensation, and issues such as industrial farming and meat eating are addressed then there is a chance that we don't overshoot 1.5° too drastically.
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Everyone, especially the well-off of the Western world should read this to adjust their consciousness away from the silenced, comfortable acceptance.
Andreas Malm is one of the leading modern thinkers on capitalism and climate change. In this timely book, he walks us through a logical, revealing, and well-argumented journey from the Covid crisis, the human destruction of the natural world, and its dire consequences. Then, Malm pauses to ask: how can we stop this?
The Covid19 outbreak revealed three truths, covertly known to most:
* First, that the human hunger for constant growth and luxuries is driving the decline of biodiversity and thereby creating a more fruitful breeding ground for viruses. The blissful consumers in the US, France, and Germany (and all other EU countries) are accountable for the destruction of natural resources and land in distant, third-world countries.
* Second, the rich Western countries only care about global pandemics and disasters if they bring discomfort to their own, rich, aging population.
* But, maybe even more importantly, Malm notes that in case of an emergency, governments actually are able to limit the production of non-essential commodities. He argues that it's not anarchy we need to save the world, but strong states acting with a long-term vision.
Some terms & theories to look up: zoonotic spillover, dilution effect (in biodiversity), critical vulnerability (Wisen et al), war communism. -
He hecho trampa porque me he leído solo las partes 1 y 3 y me he saltado la 2 que no me apetecía especialmente. En realidad sólo quería la tercera parte, la que habla del Comunismo de Guerra de la revolución rusa (18-21) como modelo de la transición ecológica. Aunque lo que plantea es provocador e interesante me parece que tiene el mismo problema que casi cualquier libro sobre política y cambio climático. Hay demasiado qué hacer y demasiado poco cómo hacerlo. Al situarse en el Comunismo de Guerra, Malm nos plantea un mundo donde buena parte de la catástrofe ya ha ocurrido y lo que deberiamos hacer es sobrevivir o reconstruir desde las ruinas. Creo que es una situación posible, pero lejana. Y, como en otros textos contra el cambio climático escritos desde posiciones supuestamente revolucionarias o radicales (como "Desierto", por ejemplo), creo que en buena parte se posicionan ahí porque no pueden o, más bien, no quieren pensar las posibilidades actuales de transformar el mundo y minimizar la catástrofe. Son posibilidades pequeñas, sin duda, pero que hay que aprovechar y estirar hasta el máximo posible
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An interesting read, that I found myself frequently in disagreement with. Will note I read in the summer/fall of 2021, over a year after publication. I’m wondering if, as time goes by, another edition might be warranted because much of the premise has been undercut by the way the last year has played out. Yes, we proved the gears of global capitalism and international could be ground to a halt by adopting an attitude of war response to the reality of immediate crisis; and all our efforts, national and international, have since been oriented towards setting these gears back on their usual course as efficiently as possible. As we watch governments increasingly frame the climate crisis through a lens of national security, I remain unconvinced that the benefits of a wartime mobilization - swift action, collaboration around a unifying purpose - outweigh the detriments we all see coming - imperialist scramble for resources, the slope of nationalism into xenophobia, relying on military resources in ways that bolster them...master’s tools/master’s house, etc.... Good material to work with here, and hoping to read some critiques along these lines from people smarter than myself!
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This short book is a brilliant book. Many of the books I read are quite predictable, and that is one of the reasons why I read them. If I read a thriller or crime fiction, I have certain expectations. The same when I read history. But this book — well, I guess I didn’t have expectations. Malm wrote the book in the first weeks of the global lock-down in the spring of 1920 and was clearly influenced by what he saw. In a nutshell, the book argues that the climate crisis and the pandemic are the same crisis, and that the cause of both is — capital. At one point, he even builds a convincing argument that capital itself can be viewed as a virus. The ‘war communism’ bit put me off, but Malm makes it clear that he’s not an advocate of the Leninist-Stalinist regime that emerged from the period of Russian history. But he believes strongly in the need for serious government intervention to deal with the ‘chronic emergency’ that is currently manifesting as climate crisis and pandemic. People who won’t wear masks or take the vaccines, or who believe that the climate emergency is a hoax, will hate this book. For the rest of us, I’d call it compulsory reading.
