Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene

by McKenzie Wark

Radical new critical theory for the twenty-first century

In Molecular Red , McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other.

Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the Russian revolution, Wark unearths the work of Alexander Bogdanov—Lenin’s rival—as well as the great Proletkult writer and engineer Andrey Platonov.

The Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for the new organizational challenges of our time. From deep within the Californian military-entertainment complex, Wark retrieves Donna Haraway’s cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian utopia as powerful resources for rethinking and remaking the world that climate change has wrought. Molecular Red proposes an alternative realism, where hope is found in what remains and endures.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Science, History, Ecology

304 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

About the author

McKenzie Wark (she/her) is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, and The Beach Beneath the Street, among other books. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

Reviews

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We all know this civilization can't last. Let's make another."

Wark's Molecular Red has been a gratifying if not exactly straightforward read. The book's chief merit, for me, is that it initiated me into the life and work of Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), a polymath and political activist who appears to have been a major pioneer in the field that fifty years later would come to be labelled cybernetics or systems science.

McKenzie Wark aims to outline a theory for the Anthropocene, i.e. that contemporaneous watershed epoch "when planetary constraints start really coming to bear on the ever-expanding universe of the commodification of everything." That theory has to be critical and provide an alternative for the 'melancholy paralysis' triggered by ecological doomsayers and apostles of growth alike.

The author's analytic strategy rests on two pillars. First, she wants to counter the delusions of masterplanners with a more modest approach that seeks out "forgotten histories, neglected concepts and minor stories". A molar epistemology - that sees the world in terms of identifiable big-bodied entities that clash and compete - has to make way for knowledge of a molecular order of flows, becomings, phase transitions and intensities. The modernist bird's eye view is swapped for a postmodern worm's eye perspective.

The second key element is the wish to construct a "labor perspective on the historical tasks of our time". This has to ground a realism that sticks close to the collaborative labors of knowing and doing. It moves away from fixed schemata to explain 'reality' to plural and emergent narratives about how history can work out otherwise. In sum, peeling away Wark's neo-Marxist jargon reveals an approach that situates itself at the intersection of a critical materialist and a social constructionist line of thought.

The book falls into two parts, each further subdivided in two chapters, one of which has a theoretical bent and one of which takes a novelistic body of work as a starting point. The first part is titled 'Labor and Nature' and zooms in on the philosophical contribution of Bogdanov and the literary experiments of Andrey Platonov.

McKenzie Wark's outline of Bogdanov's work pivots around three key concepts: monism (which is an ontological position that holds that there is only one substance), tektology (a new way of organising knowledge), and proletkult (a new practice of culture). In his monism Bogdanov followed the line of Ernst Mach who wanted to overcome the duality of things and physical facts to push philosophical thought towards the lived experience from which it had been separated. Sensation is the 'substance', the undecidable assemblage that results from fusing the object (material forms) and subject of knowledge (sense impressions). Bogdanov then connected sensation back to 'labor', understood as the collective experience of resisting nature or experimenting with nature, finding new uses for it. The social production of human existence in confrontation with nature is the fundamental purpose of labor. This is always situated and concrete. The sensation of matter is a product of social activity, not a thing-in-itself. Furthermore, there is no reality (God, or whatever) that limits social labor in advance. Its limits are discovered in practice. We can't speak of the nature of the world in advance of practices in and against it. So our worldview is always partial and bound by the labor practices of our time.

Substitution is the core epistemological lever then to systematize labor's experiences and organize it into knowledge. This is an experimental process of codification and transposition to generalize discoveries and inventions of labor. Tektology then is this practice of knowledge that seeks to understand organizational principles via metaphorical substitution. It is a pedagogy of how forms emerge, evolve, interact and decay, independent of scale. For instance, the transposition of the concept of 'metabolism' from minute animate bodies to vast and inanimate cities is an example of such an experimental and heuristic strategy to find ways for labor to wrest more effective ways of communal living from nature. In this sense, tektology can be seen as a precursor to cybernetics. Both seek invariant structures and transpose them to other contexts. (Here, of course, we need to be mindful of the rift between hard and soft systems science. The hard, objectivist approach sees these invariants as universally applicable laws. Causality becomes abstract again. A soft, constructivist systems approach is essentially a process of social learning and that is what Bogdanov wanted his tektology to be.)

"Before a tektology of organizing the material world can apply, a proletkult has to emerge within which workers acquire for themselves the confidence to organize the world." This proletarian culture had to develop out of the experience of organized labor. 'The ethos of bourgeois individualism had grown out of competitive market relations; the ethos of proletarian collaboration would grow out of the sophisticated self-organization of labor in the most advanced industries." Hence, "Proletkult was a movement with a mission: to change labor, by merging art and work; to change everyday life, by developing the collaborative life within the city and changing gender role and norms; and to change affect, to create new structures of feeling, to overcome the emotional friction of organizing the labor that in turn organizes nature around its appetites."

This is just a thumbnail sketch of the first chapter. McKenzie Wark's treatment is much richer, and all this is presented in the first 60 pages of the book and against the riotous background of political and intellectual life in the early Soviet Union. I find Bogdanov's legacy fascinating in the bold movement of his thinking and in its conceptual sophistication. It feels utterly contemporary and seems like it would be able to guide us in working through our contemporary challenges. As the author puts it: "It is a way of organizing knowledge for difficult times, such as times of total war, revolution and civil war that Bogdanov experienced, and perhaps also for the strange times likely to come in the twenty-first century ... "

I'm going to be very brief in my discussion about the chapter on Andrey Platonov, because, honestly, I couldn't make much of it. I understand Wark inserted it because of its didactic potential, providing as it does an example of a particular kind of tektology in the way Platonov constructed proletarian prose. But it feels very outlandish. (And yet, as a photographer, I feel oddly attracted to some of the things that I read in this chapter, as it provides striking, molecular-scale images of everyday proletarian life in all its wildness and incongruity). To be revisited.

In Part II the vista shifts, from early twentieth-century Soviet Union to late twentieth-century California, and further, to Mars. There's a conceptual chapter that meshes the work of a quartet of thinkers - Paul Feyerabend, Donna Haraway, Karan Barad en Paul Edwards - to demonstrate how late 20th century forms of tektology might work. The basic Bogdanovian framework remains in place, but it becomes more nuanced through the insertion of translational devices derived from feminist techno-science, quantum physics, and global climate science.

In the final chapter McKenzie Wark foregrounds Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy as a narrative that explores the collaborative, 'comradely' character of the unfolding labor that transforms (Martian) nature:

"The problem here is the invention of forms of organization and belief for a post-bourgeois world. Robinson's ambition is the invention of a grammar that might come after that of capitalist realism. (...) As in Platonov, characters each bear out a certain concept of what praxis could be. Over the course of the three books, which are in effect one big novel, these positions will evolve, clash, collaborate, and of their matrix form the structure not just of a new polity but of a new economy, culture and even nature. (...) The emphasis in Robinson is (...) on the accumulation of minor, even molecular, elements of a new way of life and their negotiations with each other. (...) It's not that there's a synthesis to be had. Rather it's that each mode of knowing, and hence each layer of possible reading of the Mars Trilogy itself, can be usefully framed by another, which contains within it the positive, functional, working ideology of some component of the labor process as a whole. In this respect the Mars Trilogy is a work about tektology. (...) Or perhaps it is a twenty-first-century version of proletkult, an organic ideological product of self-organizing labor, learning from experience how to work with both objective and subjective resistances."

I must say that this chapter resonates very much with my own experience of working in a loosely coupled collective. It's an open-ended search process that picks up and amplifies tremors and signals from exogenous transitions and internal psychodynamics. It's self-organizing, but not homeostatic.

"There is no invisible hand at work in either natural or human affairs. (...) The emphasis is rather on the instability of the relations of the new Martian species to each other and their world (...). There may be patches of relative ecological stability, but they are local and temporary. To dispense with the invisible hand, and with homeostatic ecology as a basic metaphor, is to live again after God is dead."

This book offered a lot of food for thought ...

[Adam McPhee · Rating 1 out of 5]

The scientific recognition that collective human labor is causing climate change could well be one of those great discontinuities in perspective such as the heliocentric universe of Copernicus and Galileo, the evolution of species in Darwin and Wallace, and what Althusser rather problematically calls Marx’s opening up of the “continent of history.” In the Anthropocene, some neutral, pre-given planetary nature is no longer available as a fiction of the real. We fucked it up.


The author looks at the life and works of four very different writers (Bogdanov, Platonov, Donna Haraway and Kim Stanley Robinson) for theories we can use in the anthropocene.

I want to read Platonov now (his writing method was interesting, and same with his idea for a literature factory), and Bogdanov (or at least his science fiction). And of course KSR has always been one of my favourites.

Powerful interests still deny the existence of the Carbon Liberation Front.12 Those authorities attentive to the evidence of this metabolic rift usually imagine four ways of mitigating its effects. One is that the market will take care of everything. Another proposes that all we need is new technology. A third imagines a social change in which we all become individually accountable for quantifying and limiting our own carbon “footprint.” A fourth is a romantic turn away from the modern, from technology, as if the rift is made whole when a privileged few shop at the farmer’s market for artisanal cheese.13 None of these four solutions seems quite the thing.
In the age of the Carbon Liberation Front, even sunny California can seem like a vision haunted in advance by its own ruins.
The basic metaphor, the one which posits an image of causality, is just a special instance of a broader practice of thought. All philosophies explain the world by metaphorical substitution.51 A great example in which Marx himself participates would be the way metabolism moves between fields, from respiration in mammals to agricultural science to social-historical metabolism. Substitution extends from the experience of either nature or labor as resistance (materialism or idealism). But in either case, progress in knowledge is limited. The result tends to be the thought of activity without matter or of matter without activity. This is the problem which “dialectical materialism” imagines itself to have solved, although it has done so only abstractly.

Here Bogdanov retains a rather authoritarian worldview, but imposed on nature, rather than on a subordinate class. That there can be unintended effects of such interventions on a resistant nature has not quite occurred to him as a concept, even though he intuits it, as shown in the peak energy and climate change problems confronting his Commie Martians in Red Star. Bogdanov has not entirely overcome the authoritarian streak in his own activity. He may not be a Leninist, but he still thinks like a Bolshevik. His thought is marked by the organizational limits of his times. But then, as good Bogdanovites, we know all philosophies are bound to their era and do not touch the eternal. Or as Guy Debord once put it: “Theories are made to die in the war of time.”
Bogdanov did not anticipate deskilling, or the counter-attack via which capital used technology to prevent the accumulation of knowledge by workers in the workplace. He did not anticipate that the ruling class would so effectively co-opt the surpluses of time and information, let alone of life.
Proletkult was a movement with a mission: to change labor, by merging art and work; to change everyday life, by developing the collaborative life within the city and changing gender roles and norms; and to change affect, to create new structures of feeling, to overcome the emotional friction of organizing the labor that in turn organizes nature around its appetites.
Realizing Proletkult’s mission was the aim of a threefold practice:
Creativity—to overturn the fetish of the individual creator; to reveal the role of the unconscious in creation. The newspaper was the model of a collective creativity. One might note that all significant Marxists were also great journalists, and often editors and publishers as well, starting with Marx himself.84
Collectivity—to work in groups and express the sensations of group life. Bogdanov did not however want to submerge singularities. His is rather the community those who have nothing in common.85 His Martians, for example, were far from indistinguishable numbers, and their cooperation is imperfect.
Universalism—to break down the division of labor. This raised the problem of professionalism: should Proletkult have professional artists? When the going gets weird, as it did in the civil war, even as weird a writer as Andrey Platonov could turn pro, although in the end his professional success was meager. Professional specialization remained a conceptual problem for the whole life of the movement.
Proletarian culture is not an end in itself, and in this regard Proletkult is different to most flavors of workerism. It can tend to a certain fetishism of its limited perspective, rather than trying to expand out toward the most general account of the experience of the world. The violent rejection of bourgeois culture is no better than naive atheism. It is not able to put up anything as an alternative. The proletariat need Proletarian culture is not an end in itself, and in this regard Proletkult is different to most flavors of workerism. It can tend to a certain fetishism of its limited perspective, rather than trying to expand out toward the most general account of the experience of the world. The violent rejection of bourgeois culture is no better than naive atheism. It is not able to put up anything as an alternative. The proletariat needs a point of view through which to assimilate the past. Proletarian détournement is not then a matter of picking out the bits that seem “revolutionary.” The proletariat should be self-developing rather than self-mythologizing.86

The word organ, from the Greek via the Latin organum, can mean a tool, but also a part of the body. The seed of Bogdanov’s thought is contained within the metaphorical leap of this primary term. A tool is an external organ of a body; an organ is an internal tool of a body.101 And as to what then defines a body, when its organs can be outside and tools can be inside—that then gets rather interesting. “If several workers work at one machine, then as far as their system of collaboration is concerned, their relation to this machine, which binds them together, is an internal connection of the system, although this is a relation to a spatially external object.”102 What is inside and outside a system can be different to what is inside and outside an object or body. As we shall see, troubling kinds of fetishism can arise out of perceiving the body and not what organizes behind its appearance.

Metaphor is the tektology of the everyday, a movement in language that recognizes the connection and relation of all things, but it has to be subject to verifiable experiment. While more positive about metaphor than Mach, Bogdanov is aware of the possibility that the substitution of ideas from one scale of organization to another that abounds in tektology might be no more than metaphorical.111 Old habits of thought can lead to false analogies. A bee hive is not presided over by a “queen,” for instance. Nevertheless, language arises out of communal labor, and reason arises out of language. Language is where reason works.112 So one of the methods of tektology is to trace metaphor back to the process of its production.

There is a pessimism in Bogdanov that is sometimes lacking in his Proletkult followers. Full organization is not possible, and “there is no absolutely harmonious combination.”120 While organizational forms can be improved with conscious study and practice, they are not perfectible. Red Mars has in the end to face up to extinction (and does so in high-phallic style by sending the “seeds” of its culture off on rockets into space). There’s a note that pervades Bogdanov’s writing where he appears as a detached observer of his own fallibility: “Sometimes it is possible in the same system to observe factually all the transitional steps from the higher organization to the deepest disorganization; as happens, for example, with the gradually unfolding quarrel between close collaborators or between spouses.”121

Marx: “Capitalist production … only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original source of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”129 Bogdanov might add two things to this. First, the undermining of the wealth of the soil is obscured for a time by the undermining of the worker. The depletion of the soil—the Phosphorous Liberation Front—emerges only belatedly as a problem for capitalist organization. The solution came firstly by way of “guano imperialism,” and then through the development of the chemical industry.130 The molecular elements stripped from the soil are replenished from elsewhere, at least for a time, and yet the metabolic rift continues.

By 1924 Bogdanov was conducting experiments in which blood transfusions were simultaneous exchanges between two parties. The idea was that blood was a collective resource of the body, which could in turn be collectivized between bodies. The physiological basis of this was shaky. Nor did Bogdanov know modern scientific method. The lack of control conditions rendered his results meaningless. Yet it appears that he really did help Krasin recover from a case of anemia in 1925.

Bogdanov thought the great task for collective labor was the organizing of the world. That meant finding methods of coordinating across the division of labor other than commodity exchange. What he came up with is a model for a kind of experimental practice where the concepts developed in one labor process can be metaphorically substituted into others, and tested there in practice.

There is an ascetic side to Platonov, much more characteristic of a certain strain of Russian intellectual of his time than of our own. There is a distaste for sexual love in particular, and hence a queasiness about women, whom he takes as tokens of it. But in Happy Moscow he is onto something that still speaks to our time: that the obsession with the couple, and the sexual love mixed with romance that legitimates it, are at best stand-ins and at worst obstacles for shared life. Moscow’s dérives, wandering the city, and her serial trysts, are attempts to find both the uses and the limits of love. Marriage is not the answer. She “began to love just one sly man who kept a tight hold on her, as if she were some inalienable asset.”105

The special virtue of Robinson’s post-Bogdanovite science fiction is that it is no longer about just one worldview, but about the negotiation between worldviews that result from different kinds of labor, scientific, technical, political, and cultural. For perhaps we need a more plural conception of utopian possibility to match the plurality of sensations and the worldviews of the times. Rather than the endless competition between different visions of changing life, the challenge might be rather to organize between them. Here a utopian, or perhaps meta-utopian mode of writing might point the way forward.

Haraway tells two archetypal California stories about food. On arriving in Santa Cruz in 1980, she is plunged into a debate about what to do with the placenta after a “natural” childbirth. Should it be eaten? How should it be cooked? Who should eat it? Can vegans eat human placenta? Maybe vegans ought to be obliged to eat it: not only was no animal killed in its making, one was brought into the world of the living. In the second story, a religious studies professor prepares a meal for the department party, the centerpiece of which is a feral pig he shot with an arrow. Complex debates ensue about ritual, ethics, impossible ecologies, and so on.
Interestingly, some of the new modes of substitution producing both ideology and knowledge might no longer be metaphorical so much as algorithmic.

Commodity fetishism occurs when relations between people take on the features of relations between things.
What kind of critical agency is possible in the world of OncoMouse? Do lab rats belong to the working class? Should battery hens be unionized? Should one have the right to share in the surplus produced by one’s cells, even when those cells are not in one’s body? Consider the case of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American tobacco worker who died of cervical cancer. Cells taken from her body, without her knowledge or consent, were cultured and used in all kinds of research long after her death, from the polio vaccine to AIDS treatments and gene mapping. Those cells proved not only useful for research but profitable for medical business, while her descendants could not even afford health insurance.68 How is one to think the molecular agencies of such a story?

The figure which Haraway famously proposed as a point of view is the cyborg. “Like any important technology, a cyborg is simultaneously a myth and a tool …”73 It is not the labor point of view, as if labor existed independently of the apparatus with which it is entangled. It is not women’s point of view, as if one could speak of it as a universal subjective perspective, existing prior to the social and technical relations in which it meshes. Cyborgs are affinities rather than identities, hybrids of human and other organics, information systems, ergonomic laboring, producing and desiring. Cyborgs are monsters, or rather demonstrations, in the double sense of to show and to warn, of possible worlds. “As monsters, can we demonstrate another order of signification? Cyborgs for earthly survival!” ... In place of the “God-trick” of speaking as if one had access to a portal to the absolute, the cyborg is a kind of ironic myth, a heretical counter-story to the human as pre-given. “Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community.”75 Like the Marxist-feminist critic inside the research university, the cyborg is always an insider and outsider to techno-science, which after all is pretty much the case now for all of us. “I think the way I work is to take my own polluted inheritance—cyborg is one of them—and try to rework it.”

The monstrous omens Haraway detected in the late twentieth century came to pass:
A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of color, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance … The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable.84
And so it came to pass, only it came to be called precarity.
The vast panoptic machine Ruskin imagined did not come to pass, even in the era of big data. More data seems always to mean more data resistance.
There are many actually existing, contemporary or historical societies that for Robinson exude hints of utopian possibility: the Mondragon Co-ops, Yugoslav self-management, Red Bologna, the Israeli kibbutz, Sufi nomads, Swiss cantons, Minoan or Hopi matriarchies, Keralan matrilineal land tenure. One of the more surprising is the Antarctic science station. This he experienced first-hand in 1995 on the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writer’s Program.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

I couldn't make it. Verso fortunately has a 90% off sale and I bought this with a number of other very weak titles that Verso specializes in (in addition to classic works of serious theory). Otherwise I would have been angry at the expense.

This reads like a series of book reports on a few authors. The process of stitching 4 people together into a reconstituted cybernetic body of thought is agonizingly slow and too comprehensive. It reads as almost a history of a submerged idea but you lose the thread, the kitchen sink is included. The "theory" part could have been stitched together in a really interesting *essay* but as a book, this is too long for very little payoff.

It did get me interested in going back and reading some people I knew very little about, so there's that. 

But aside from the paucity of analysis in the book, Wark's language is insufferably academic and seems a forced use of Deleuzian concepts. The terms molar, molecular, and flow seem to be used to convey the "brand" of Deleuzian thought, just frozen patties left over not freshly cooked. Then there are terms like "low" theory (which just seems to be anything that doesn't aspire to the systems thinking of a, say, Hegel) is just a cheap academic trick of ironic self-effacement: I am not asserting this or that, I am hedging here, I'm not going for the gusto. Which is good because it telegraphs exactly what is lacking here. There's no reason you can't reappropriate erased writers into a high-flown critique with clear analysis. This is just plain boring. Oh and Bogdanov, by having strange misguided theories about blood transfusion, is taking a "queer" approach. Again, I think this is an appropriation of terms meant to convey postmodern academic gloss, to convey a brand of radical thought.

Instead of this book, read the author's review of Mad Max: Fury Road and you will see Wark in a more interesting mode conveying roughly similar ideas in a suggestive way that will leave you thinking for yourself.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a big disappointment. It seemed promising. I was drawn to the idea of reinventing Marxism for a modern era of technology and climate change because I think that Marx was brilliant but in many ways has been misread and because I often see Marxist ideas playing themselves out in odd sideways ways in modern society. I also liked the idea of getting to the reinvention by way the thinking of Bogdanov, a discredited Bolshevik, and Platonov, a Russian modern novelist suppressed by the Soviets. And I liked the idea of basing the whole project on a bottom up "labor point of view". Unfortunately, the promise ends with the basic idea, and the book collapses in a pile of jargon, muddy thinking and boring explication of ideas that don't quite hang together.

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

“ we all know this civilization can’t last. Let’s make another,” writes Wark in her Molecular Red, and she sets out to create a new kind of critical theory, one that goes back to the early Soviet Union and two of its more outside thinkers (Alexander Bogdanov and Andrey Platonov) and uses them as a base to examine 21st century climate science and sci-fi utopias.

She promises a lot in the introduction, but mostly she delivers. It’s a thought-provoking book, one deep on insights, and although it’s a little bogged down by some technical terms, Wark’s prose is sharp and clear (and occasionally witty), and I think even a layperson can find some of use here.

Is it a start? Yeah, I think so. As a I write this, the ocean is on fire and there’s a heat dome over the west coast. A fresh start, and one that looks for new ways, while acknowledging we can’t return to the past, is what we need. Recommended.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought this when it first came out, started reading it but then ended up misplacing it and got distracted by other books in the neverending pile. Having finally returned to it, my regret over having missed out on such fantastic wordplay and absolutely essential theoretical work is balanced out by the sheer delight of discovery and immersion.

[Soph Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had been eyeing this book for a while and finally picked it up when it was on the shelf at one of my local used bookstores. It's denser than I expected it to be, but some of it is very readable - it's a mix of highly referential philosophical interplay, and 'low theory' analyzing pop sci-fi. The idea is basically to jam together a few different theorists/writers/ideas to try and grapple with this big shattering 'thing' called the Anthropocene - and it definitely had me thinking! Especially worth the read if you enjoy 20th century Soviet sci-fi/theory, Donna Haraway, and/or Kim Stanley Robinson (which was the main reason I picked it up, and I was not disappointed!).

[Milan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A representative of that type of academic writing which derives its full body of thought from interpretative effort based on specific authors and their work, and then extrapolated to provide unique philosophical insight, the book, by my opinion, leans too heavily on analytic commentary of the authors in question, thus requiring the reader to be at least tangentially familiar with them in order to grasp the concept of Marx's metabolic rift and the opposition molar-molecular pertracted in the text. Otherwise the decoding struggle is disproportionate to the informative yield.

[Noah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Falls short. Only the 'Conclusion' section advances any form of theory; all other sections focus mainly on the recapitulation of themes from other writers. Those theories are interesting in their own right, but lack a system to relate them all beyond a vague idea of labor. Especially problematic is the end of the 'Cyborg Donna Harraway' section, where Wark throws out philosophical integrity (which he spent the previous pages describing in such detail) because it is used deceptively by climate-deniers.

[Lukáš · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like this. Taking up some rather obscured Soviet theory and confronting it with some contemporary polemics over science, the social, materialism and fiction to highlight some of its insights is rather an interesting take, and Wark does a great job arguing for its relevance. In the end, we have a very well composed labour-based approach to contemporary anthropocenic politics.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muy desparejo. Los capítulos sobre Bogdanov y Haraway, muy interesantes; los capítulos sobre Platonov y Robinson, muy malos.

Al fin y al cabo, el problema es que Wark pasa demasiado tiempo discutiendo otrxs autorxs en lugar de avanzar en su síntesis particular de los temas que trabaja. La propuesta del libro es excelente: la reconstrucción de una teoría política a la altura de los desafíos del Antropoceno buceando en la historia olvidada del marxismo. La rehabilitación de Bogdanov como prehistoria del pensamiento contemporáneo es excelente, y la reconstrucción de la ciencia a partir de reensamblar sus elementos epistemológicos constitutivos está muy bien justificada. Uno termina acordando con la mayoría de las tesis del libro: el pasaje de una teoría alta a una baja, el cuestionamiento al realismo especulativo, el "punto de vista del trabajo", etc.

Pero en los capítulos sobre Platonov y Robinson (el 2 y el 4, respectivamente), lo único que hay son extensos resúmenes de libros de ciencia ficción, con muy poco análisis. Preferiría haber leído directamente esos libros, o, mejor aún, no haberlos leído.

[melancholinary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very hard to navigate if you are not really familiar with the work of philosopher/scholars in this book. An interesting concept to bring together two different ideologies from both world empires; the Soviet's Proletkult and the offspring of Californian ideology. Two polars that unlikely to be conversed are discussed and theorised as an attempt to reveal their connection with the anthropocene. However, this theorisation only occurred on the (almost personal) conclusion. For more than 200 pages, this book reviews the ideologies in depth with a commentary that entangled with other 21st century philosophy. Wark's writing on Bogdanov is great, on Platonov is ok, on Haraway and other Californian techno-science dissidents is fair, on Robinson is ok. The conclusion is quite good. Though this book is not that recommended for people who seek the hardcore dissection of the overused term anthropocene.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tested me in a lot of ways. Some pieces I loved, others I felt I slogged through. It most likely didn’t help that I picked up and put down this book numerous times, really interrupted any momentum I had going. However, I foresee myself reengaging with the choice insights in this, for they are truly oriented towards thinking otherwise.

[Trace Reddell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most compelling theory book I've read in a while. I'll be using this in an upcoming class on "Speculative Cultures" at DU.

[Annegret · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was great to start off with but then started plodding immensely and I’m not sure the concept entirely paid off. It was certainly very stimulating in places.

[Clare Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting piece combining science, race, feminism and Marxist theory. Trying to build a better world. Some knowledge of the theorists discussed would help

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

deep cap/marx conundrum
1920's russian low theories, merging telekinesis of disciplines/ american academic women theorists analysising these Russian writers of the Revolution--

[Richard · Rating 2 out of 5]

As with some of the other reviewers below, I too found this book to be a thorough disappointment. If, like me, you are interested in the notion of the Anthropocene as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry and are looking for further information and research material on the subject, then this book is probably not going to be a very good place to start.

There is not much more I can add other than to agree with some of the other reviewers in saying that Mr. Wark relies too heavily on the four writers he utilizes to sketch out his theory for surviving the Anthropocene, if indeed that is even what he is intending or proposing - and that is not entirely clear either. In some sense Molecular Red reads like a rather lengthy review or an anthology of these authors' works as opposed to an original work of genuine scholarship and/or insight. It is also not in the least auspicious that at least two of the authors Mr. Wark has chosen are very obscure Soviet era writers barely available in English translation, let alone well-known to even the most well-read of individuals outside of Russia or of a communist persuasion (although I personally do know of Bogdanov as a founding member of the Bolsheviks). The outcome of this is that it lessons the impact of Mr. Wark's descriptions. I would have said arguments, but from what I have read he doesn't really seem to have any.

Molecular Red would have greatly benefited for a basic preface or descriptive introduction outlining what the Anthropocene is and/or entails for the future of humanity, let alone any hypothesized and/or practical solutions for alleviating the worst effects of this proposed epoch, such as climate change and resource scarcity. In summery, it seems to me that Mr. Wark could have picked at random any four writers and used their work as the jumping of point to frame his discussion. For a more accessible and/or scholarly introduction to the Anthropocene, I would heartily recommend reading Jason Moore's "Capitalism in the Web of Life" (also from Verso) as a starting point. "The Sixth Extinction" by Elizabeth Kolbert is also far superior to Mr. Wark's endeavour, containing as it does actual fieldwork and factual information from scientists on how the environment, flora and fauna are being negatively affected by climate change.

[Arlian]

I wish there was a way to make "notes" to myself. Shelfari (which I always loved way more than Goodreads) had a notes section. Oh well, future reader's you'll have to read this private note to myself:

I want to read this book because I listened to a fantastic interview with the author on the "New Books Network: Books in Critical Theory" Podcast. This book starts with the phrase "Working of the world untie! You have a win to world!" A fascinating look at the way Carbon has been engaging in a "self-liberation movement" for quite a while now. Funny, interesting, complex, fascinating, This book seems really engaging and I can't wait to read it.

[Andy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The potential was there but this book did not realize it for me. The inclusion of Anthropocene in the subtitle felt like an afterthefact marketing move not deeply integrated into the work. The concept and structure were excellent, yet it didn't deepen my reading of Bogdanov or Robinson to the extent I expected.

[Ethan Everhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

These four stars are mostly for the final section on Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, which is a tremendous analysis of its political and theoretical themes. I skimmed over most of the rest (although the first section on Alexander Bogdanov was also fascinating).

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant in parts; obscure and self-indulgent in others.

[Lawrence]

recommended by grant williams