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Reminder: June Reading Club (Patreon)

Published:
2022-06-28 13:05:56
Imported:
2024-07

Content

Just to let you all know that the recording of the June RC has been delayed till 5 July, so you have until then to send in your questions regarding Andreas Malm's Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency and Adam Tooze's review.

Comments

Ran Heilbrunn

Malm’s evocation of a “global subject” at the end of the text reminded me of Christopher Lasch’s critique of environmentalism in his 1985 book "The Minimal Self." Lasch talks about how survivalist modes of discourse generate social and psychological paralysis rather than “constructive political action,” and argues that the global key of environmentalist politics is one of the reasons for the movement’s failure. Too often, he writes, environmentalists “substitute an abstract interest in the future for the kind of palpable, emotional interest that enables people to make sacrifices on its behalf … Emphasis on the global dimensions of the survival issue – on the need for global control or the development of a ‘global mind’ – probably helps to undermine attachment to a particular place and thus weaken still further the emotional basis on which any real interest in the future has to rest.” Applied to contemporary climate politics, Lasch’s point provides an answer to the question that Malm asks in his next book, and that Tooze mentions in his review – namely, how do we explain the mismatch between, on the one hand, the gravity of the climate crisis and the justness of the climate cause, and on the other, the apathy of the general public and the inability of climate activism to seriously take off? Lasch, I think, would have directed our attention to the psychic structures of our political culture, and to the way in which the climate movement reproduces these structures by formulating its project in planetary terms. Popular politics, he would have said, stems from concrete experiences and a sense of place, from social ties and communal roots. Global capitalism, by dint of being global, undermines the conditions that political commitments and collective agency rely on. Hence, the tragedy of the climate movement is that it reflects the very conditions of the problem it purports to solve. When Malm conjures up Adorno’s “global subject” he does not counter global capitalism but merely expresses one of its symptoms. The fact that there is nothing hyperbolic about the climate discourse – that the scale of the crisis is objectively global – does nothing to invalidate this critique of the movement’s planetary outlook. Rather, it adds another layer of complexity to this politico-ecological paradox.

Ran Heilbrunn
>>87005483

Sorry I accidently posted that comment several times... my patreon app has gone a little mad

Eli S

Forgive me being a shitty Reading Club patron: I'm working entirely from Tooze's review here, plus some very quick searches through a Z-lib PDF of the essay. I will therefore have to be unfortunately charitable to Malm. Now, that said, let me get my questions and comments in. Simply put, is it just me or does Malm sound like he wants to be the Ted Kaczynski or Osama bin Laden of the climate movement as he writes "Better to die blowing up a pipeline than to burn impassively"? He comes across more with the insidious middle-class moralism of someone who indoctrinates suicide bombers for a living than a supposed ghetto fighter. In a related matter to middle-class moralism, my fundamental question towards Malm's body of work is: why does he not even suggest any possible form of decarbonization that doesn't amount to energy austerity? On looking through the book/essay, the 29 mentions of "labour" mainly divide into documenting the exploitation of the Global South to shore up profit-rates, and describing the regimentation of labor under War Communism when the Bolsheviks... suffered energy shortages! The term "working class" occurs only twice. In no case whatsoever, in the book, does Malm seem to consider the working class as a political subject or agent with its own desire for and interest in an ecologically livable world. It's as if Malm is trying to tie himself up in a Gordian Knot. Who the hell does he think he's commanding? Where the hell is his program for efficient, eco-friendly industry? What kind of emergency politics does he think can possibly drape enough Red banners over a mass reversion to low-tech, low-output manual labor to make this a viable political economy for workers? Hell, why is there not even the barest effort to show how War Communist-style economic planning can actually get carbon emissions down and carbon out of the atmosphere into reforestation?