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BOOKFORUM, FEB/MAR 2018
Unnatural History
How capitalism causes global warming
MICHAEL ROBBINS
With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the highest
it’s been since the Pliocene, there is no dearth of au courant theories
explaining how nature and society do not in any sense compose distinct
spheres. Nature cannot be distinguished from society because the former,
no less than the latter, is “constructed”—a discursive figuration or
trope with no independent external reality. Or they can’t be
distinguished because nature now constitutes a hopelessly blurred hybrid
with society. Or because nature has simply ended. Or because, as French
philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour declares, channeling his
inner Thatcher, society does not exist, and neither does nature.
Andreas Malm is not amused. Malm is the author of Fossil Capital (2016),
the best book written about the origins of global warming. Drawing on
currents of political Marxism, Malm showed that British capitalists
turned from hydropower to industrial coal-fired steam power in response
to class struggle rather than, as mainstream views have it, because coal
proved a cheaper or more efficient energy source. What steam power
enabled was cheaper and more efficient control of labor. It also, as we
now know, empowered capitalists to change the climate of the planet by
releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (a process later
exacerbated by petroleum-based industry).
This argument depends on a common-sense separation of nature and
society. The coal was part of nature until humans ex-tr-ac-ted it from
the ground and put it to use in steam engines, producing goods for
consumers in society. Of course there is a trivial sense in which
everything that exists is natural. Humans are one of many animal species
that evolved on Earth, so Manhattan is no less natural than a beehive or
an anthill. But most people have no trouble understanding what work
“nature” and “society” are doing in the second sentence of this paragraph.
Latour and his followers, on the other hand, want to erase the
distinction “between a society ‘that we create through and through’ and
a nature ‘that is not our doing.’” Against this view, The Progress of
This Storm upholds Kate Soper’s eminently reasonable definition: “Nature
is that which Humanity finds within itself, and to which it in some
sense belongs, but also that from which it seems excluded in the very
moment in which it reflects upon either its otherness or its belonging.”
We are obviously natural beings; we are also the only such beings we
know of capable of understanding ourselves as natural, or of reflecting
on our relation to the rest of nature.
Malm defends a position he wryly calls “socialist climate realism”—a
play on “socialist realism” that urges both a realist account of climate
change and an anti-capitalist stance on behalf of the climate. This
defense mainly takes the form of refutation of arguments so silly as to
beggar the imagination. His polemic is like one of those carnival games
where you knock over milk bottles with a baseball. Faddish academic
philosophies stack up and Malm calmly plunks them down. Constructionism?
Plunk. Hybridism? Plunk. New materialism? Plunk. Poor Latour, whose work
informs all these theories, gets set up and plunked down again and
again, winning Malm roomfuls of oversize teddy bears, which, according
to Latour, don’t exist.
I confess that the stakes of these disputes seem fairly low. When the
new materialists claim that inanimate matter possesses as much agency as
human beings (“What spoons do when they scoop up soup is not very
different from what I do when I talk about spoons,” says Timothy
Morton), or Jason W. Moore suggests that “entropy is reversible and
cyclical,” my inclination would be to refer readers to Humpty Dumpty and
leave it at that: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to
mean—neither more nor less.”
But Malm is interested in how these claims illustrate visions of reality
and power relations that are hardly unique to the withered groves of
academe. It matters for climate activism whether global warming is
something set in motion by capital or in part by carbon dioxide as an
agent in its own right. So Malm proceeds methodically, disentangling the
threads of the natural from those of the social with impassioned clarity
(though I could have done with fewer references to Daenerys Targaryen).
Take the hole in the ozone layer, an example that Latour is fond of. It
is, in one sense, socially constructed: It wouldn’t be there if
corporations like DuPont hadn’t manufactured chlorofluorocarbons for
appliances and aerosol cans. But that means only that society is capable
of affecting nature. Malm drily notes that the chlorine atoms released
by those products still had to break down ozone molecules in the
atmosphere, which is a natural process that society did not engineer.
Thus Malm bulldozes claims like Jedediah Purdy’s: “In every respect, the
world we inhabit will henceforth be the world we have made.”
It is, in fact, the interaction of the social and the natural that has
led us to the brink of climate disaster, and so it is analytically vital
to distinguish between them. Indeed, Malm’s bracing argument, for which
his takedowns of careless theorists provide support, is that what we
need at this dire juncture is more polarization. Postmodernist thinkers
(to speak loosely) made a bugbear of binaries, and nothing delights
their contemporary progeny more than the dissolution of dualities. But
some categories cannot simply be collapsed into each other; society
hinges on their difference:
Capital stands on one side and labour on the other, both as independent
forms relative to each other; both hence also alien to one another. The
labour which stands opposite capital is alien labour, and the capital
which stands opposite labour is alien capital. The extremes which stand
opposite one another are specifically different.
Here Marx insists not only that there is an antagonism of opposites, but
that in order to understand how society works—in order to change how
society works—one must correctly grasp the nature of that antagonism in
its specificity. This is not a binary that can be magicked away; it must
be analyzed. And “analysis demands razor blades,” as Malm says. Some
people own stuff; other people produce stuff. The latter must rent
themselves to the former to survive. The former get rich off the deal,
and fuck up the climate in the process. (This is not to mention the
millions who aren’t able even to rent themselves to anyone.)
As it happens, there is a method for thinking of opposites in their
dynamic unity without dissolving their opposition. Unsurprisingly,
Latour disdains dialectics. More than anything else, The Progress of
This Storm is a furious defense of dialectical thought, and of
historical materialism as the theoretical lens appropriate for viewing
global warming in all its social and natural complexity. The fossil
economy is a historical phenomenon that unfolded within a particular set
of social relations.
Malm turns his attention, then, to the mode of production under which
global warming began and under which it thrives. Like Naomi Klein’s This
Changes Everything, Fossil Capital trenchantly demonstrated that
capitalism and capitalists are responsible for climate change—not, as
recent theorists of the Anthropocene would have it, humanity as such
(and yes, both Klein and Malm address the objection “What about the
USSR?”). An elite minority of humanity is to blame for global warming;
the great majority had no say in the matter. We need to distinguish
between human actors—the CEO of ExxonMobil, to take Malm’s examples,
versus a herder ruined by drought in Burkina Faso.
Contra certain theorists, it isn’t clear that global warming, at least
in the short run, threatens capital. Malm observes that a warming
climate, whose social consequences include refugees and urban migration,
adds souls to the developing world’s reserve armies of labor, “leading
to rising rates of exploitation and profit.” And then there is the
bright beacon of geoengineering—massive intervention in the climate
system to offset the effects of global warming. No need to eject fossil
fuels from the economy, we’ll just whip up some tech to mitigate their
pernicious effects, and get richer! No surprise that Bill Gates has
invested in the field, out of the goodness of his heart. It’s easier to
imagine the end of the end of the world than to imagine the end of
capitalism.
Malm has a better idea:
Ecological class hatred [is] perhaps the emotion most dearly needed in
a warming world. Surely the capitalist class deserves a pinch of hatred
for turning forces of nature into mass killers of poor people—and then,
among many other feats, spreading denial of that fact and sabotaging
attempts to defuse the scattered bombs.
This is his advice for the climate movement, tied, obviously, to a
program of “action and resistance.”
Though it should perhaps trouble Malm more that science has often
“served to legitimate the ruling classes,” he’s right that “one branch
has now delivered perhaps the most damning indictment ever to their
rule.” There is no way to stop global warming without threatening
capitalist domination. Climate-change deniers helm the most powerful
state in the history of the world. “Negativity is our only chance now,”
Malm writes. He takes his title from Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the
Concept of History”—the angel of history watches catastrophe pile
wreckage upon wreckage, longing to “make whole what has been smashed”
but powerless before the storm we call “progress.” In the section just
before this, Benjamin writes:
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency”
in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a
conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will
clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of
emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against
fascism.
Benjamin’s disdain for a conception of history that allows its adherents
to be astonished that barbarism is “still” possible in our clearly
enlightened present suffuses Malm’s book, as does Adorno’s recognition
that real progress, in such a world, means “simply the prevention and
avoidance of total catastrophe.” This progress will not be secured
without a struggle.
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