El murciélago y el capital: coronavirus, cambio climático y guerra social

by Andreas Malm

Tras nueve meses y más de un millón de muertos, la investigación sobre el origen de la pandemia de la covid-19 sigue abierta. Los murciélagos son el sospechoso número uno para los virólogos: es muy probable que uno de estos animales fuera el vector de contagio del virus hasta los seres humanos. Sin embargo, sus factores desencadenantes y sus causas profundas tienen un carácter estrictamente humano: la deforestación acelerada, el crecimiento de las minas a cielo abierto, el comercio (legal e ilegal) de fauna salvaje y, por supuesto, el calentamiento global. En otras palabras: la acción depredadora del capitalismo sobre cada ecosistema y casi cada vida. Estamos por tanto ante una crisis sanitaria que es, ante todo, una crisis ecológica.

Andreas Malm —uno de los pensadores fundamentales del ecologismo político actual— nos propone un libro revelador, dotado de una prosa que ruge. Con la combinación necesaria de calma y urgencia que ostenta el auténtico pensamiento crítico, analiza los mecanismos por los cuales el capital, en su búsqueda ilimitada de beneficios, nos ha conducido a una situación que, desde la escala microbiana a la atmosférica, impone un riesgo crónico y letal. Desentrañando en detalle la experiencia sin precedentes que hemos vivido todos en los últimos meses, Malm propone implementar una serie de políticas ecológicas radicales y a gran escala. Y nos recuerda que, al menos en el frente climático, no habrá «nueva normalidad», pues las medidas cosméticas y burocráticas que proponen nuestros actuales representantes políticos no serán suficientes. Si no queremos vivir en «un planeta febril habitado por gente febril», necesitamos una perspectiva revolucionaria.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Environment, Science, Economics, History, Climate Change

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

About the author

Andreas Malm teaches Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War and of Fossil Capital, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.

Reviews

[The Conspiracy is Capitalism · Rating 4 out of 5]

21st Century Crisis Theory: A Sketch...

Preamble:
--2024 Update: the author mentioned in an interview that this book was a rushed effort, and looking back it was an engaging leap with many loose-ends...
--Since author’s PhD thesis became the revelatory Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Malm seems determined to release academic papers into the reading public.
--I first read Malm's 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 sketches out 21st century crises by combining the best of:
i) critical epidemiology
ii) Fossil Capital
iii) wartime economy
...All of this haunts so much of my attention, so it was a treat to read Malm's brainstorming.

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, a care economy includes less working hours (so much toil and environmental degradation just to pay off private debts, which are passive income for elites: Why Can't You Afford a Home?) and more free time to build socio-ecological communities.
--A capitalist state (prioritizing bailing out capitalism) will always try to push the costs of crises onto the public, with the public fighting for scraps from the table. So many social needs can technically be fulfilled in egalitarian manners, but it comes down to bargaining power.
--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 poorer countries: 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 (critical epidemiology; see Rob Wallace's 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; this relates to James O'Connor’s 2nd contradiction of capitalism, as well as market “externalities” (The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power) etc. For the next steps, see 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.: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System) 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.
--I’ve been inspired to explore wartime economies primarily from taking an economic development class by Jim Glassman (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 Steven Keen’s pragmatic 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 privileges 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:
-A People’s Green New Deal
-The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth
--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.).
--Malm rushed the “war communism” section, lacking in both historical analysis and today's applicability (i.e. how do we build bargaining power?).

[Allie French · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the end of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century, Malm dates it 29th April 2020. It must therefore have been written in just over two months, presumably (like Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze) as a copying mechanism for lockdown. Malm's writing speed is impressive. I initially tried to read this book in October 2020, but it made me feel ill so I put it aside for three years. Despite climate change only intensifying, my anxiety isn't as bad these days so it was time to have another go. Given when it was written, Malm inevitably focuses on how COVID-19 emerged (although this is still a matter of debate more than three years later) and immediate policy responses. He then considers the connections with and implications for climate change.

Throughout the book Malm assumes that the covid pandemic is the result of zoonotic spillover due to human proximity with wild animals, most likely bats. Diseases are jumping from animals to humans more often due to habitat loss. He points out that dealing with the root causes of covid, to reduce the frequency of such pandemics, would require stopping deforestation and other habitat destruction, rewilding, and severely penalising trade in wild creatures. This has not happened, of course. With covid as with climate change, Malm emphasises, we are treating the symptoms (to some extent) rather than the causes. Moreover, climate change will increase the likelihood of zoonotic spillovers by forcing wild species to move as their habitats heat up.

This is interesting enough without being hugely original or thought-provoking. I found the latter third more arresting, as Malm comes to the conclusion that capitalism, social democracy, and/or anarchism will never be able to deal with the chronic emergency of climate change, nor prevent further zoonotic spillovers. Emissions have been increasing for decades when they needed to fall, so there is no carbon budget space left for a gentle transition. Instead, he takes up the example of Lenin's 1917 war communism. Although this section isn't long enough to develop the ideas in much detail, the broad points are powerful:

The future, then, is ecological war communism, in a figurative sense, this being 'only an analogy - but one rich in content'. It means learning to live without fossil fuels in no time, breaking the resistance of dominant classes, transforming the economy for the duration, refusing to give up even if all the worst-case scenarios come true, rising out of the ruins with the force and the compromises required, organising the transitional period of restoration, staying with the dilemma. It does not mean cosplay reinactments of the Russian Civil War.

This final section also contains an excellent critique of carbon capture and storage:

A capitalist solution to a problem caused by capitalism? If only.
[...] This is the contradiction every direct air capture must run into: if it stays inside the commodity form, it cannot make good on its promise of negative emissions. It will recycle CO2 not tuck it away.
To scale up these machines to the level where they would make their designated difference - supplementing zero emissions with drawdown - they would have to function as vacuum cleaners, sucking up carbon and putting it out of circulation, as a non- or even anti-commodity. How could such a decontamination of the biosphere run on profit? Where would be increment in exchange-value come from, in amounts sufficient to keep the clean-up going like any other department of accumulation? No one has yet come up with a plausible answer.

Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century is inevitably brief and hurried, without the breadth and depth of analysis to be found in Malm's subsequent book with the Zetkin collective, White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. Nonetheless, it is a swift and striking response to COVID-19 that remains highly relevant.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written and published in April, 2020, Malm frames the Coronavirus pandemic as a predictable result of intersecting aspects of anthropogenic climate change, capitalist development, zoonotic virus transmission, and the pull of labor and commodities from global south to north.

The first section of the book is a mostly explanatory discussion of the ways in which the coronavirus crisis can and can't be compared to the accelerating climate crises, with a special emphasis on how and why different communities have responded to the threats posed by each. I was particularly interested in the discussion of zoonotic transmission as a product of capitalistic interference with previously "unimproved" nature and the idea that disease, climate and capitalism should be analyzed as overlapping systems. One of the big takeaways was the argument that Malm presented for understanding issues of pandemics, climatological disasters, and environmental collapse as the material products of capitalist ideology inflicted on nature. Throughout the whole section, Malm provided excellent examples of concepts and histories for both illustrating the problems that we're dealing with, and highlighting the ways in which our current situation is meaningfully different from past events.

The second section of the book is an analysis of the material and ideological examples offered by a Leninist inspired model of War Communism, including strong exhortations to realize that the present moment being so desperate, unorganized, and precarious is evidence of the need to aggressively reject the systems and actions that have brought us to this place. This section, which is more theory heavy, is Malm's attempt to answer the question of what we should do. The program he lays out is as broad, ambitious, and impossible as it is necessary. But as the powerful concluding discussion points out, any plans for truly addressing the confluence of devastating forces we have brought down upon ourselves are, at this point, "exactly as utopian as survival."

I would absolutely recommend the book as a tool for helping the layperson wrap their head around the enormity of the problems we face today. It is somewhat academic and jargon-y in places, but we've got to learn the vocabulary at some point if we hope to educate ourselves, right?

[Mickey Dubs · Rating 4 out of 5]

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’?

[Jaime Valero · Rating 4 out of 5]

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...

[Yoann Negre · Rating 5 out of 5]

L'ouvrage traite de la crise du Covid-19 et la relie de manière plus générale à la crise écologique et au dénominateur commun entre les deux : le capitalisme. Malm explique comment l'essor de l'industrie carbonée a provoqué une augmentation des risques d'épidémie et, surtout, de pandémie. Il développe beaucoup autour de la réaction sur l'épidémie, c'est à dire comment elle a été abordée par les pays riches, en comparaison avec le changement climatique, et surtout pourquoi un tel écart. Spoilers : il s'agit d'intérêts de classe.

Malm prend le temps de décortiquer les aspects parasitaires du capitalisme, notamment vis à vis de l'environnement, où, par exemple, le luxe est par essence un fléau car crée de la valeur sur la rareté donc précipite tout vers l'extinction. Il écrit sur les mécanismes biologiques en jeu sur la mise en place des épidémies et comment elles prennent de l'ampleur.

Dans une dernière partie, Malm, qui je pense est "léniniste écologique", évoque le communisme de guerre comme point de départ pour construire une stratégie contre le changement climatique. Avec tout ce que cela implique comme remise en cause du "business as usual", allant même jusqu'à critiquer la notion de "communisme de luxe" dans la mesure où l'on va devoir faire preuve de retenue pour adopter un point de vue correct pour répondre à la crise écologique. J'ai un peu moins aimé certains passages de cette partie car la critique de l'anarchisme qui y est présente ressemble à quelqu'un qui n'aurait qu'une version biaisée de l'anarchisme, assez typique des léninistes en soit, dans le sens où ce sont des discours que l'on voit régulièrement dans ces organisations là.

Cela n'est que léger et sans grande importance, surtout qu'il relève l'idée d'un léninisme libertaire (j'entends une voix me dire de lire Rubel, c'est bizarre) mais l'ouvrage étant si bon, je me devais au moins de relever ce point là.

L'ouvrage est de taille moyenne (239 pages) pour un prix moyen (15€), je vous le recommande comme je recommande l'ensemble des ouvrages de Malm, que j'ai tous lu d'ailleurs c'est pas souvent que je fais ça.

[Martin Empson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful argument for the revolutionary ending of a capitalist system that breeds climate chaos and pandemic. All hail ecological Leninism.

[Isa:) · Rating 5 out of 5]

mi tfg

Es muy buen libro, lenguaje claro y mezcla política y ciencia muy bien. Magistral

No obstante, le fallan cosillas de la propuesta política

[Fifi Nono · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good premise squandered by a rush to be as topical and trendy as humanly possible.

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clearly written and hopelessly naive. Malm would benefit from some intellectual humility. Keep guys like him away from real power...

[Rohan Crickmar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am increasingly enjoying these Verso-published interventions in the contemporary moment. Although Malm's three-part essay only really gets going in the final third, the section on his anti-Stalinist Leninist idea of 'War Communism', that final third is really essential reading for anyone committed to actively progressing the climate crisis movement and its narratives.

By looking, from the perspective of April 2020, at the ways in which modern states are grappling with the Coronavirus crisis, Malm begins to interrogate that humungous elephant in the room: if we are willing to activate so much societal change to combat a pesky pathogen, then why do we find it so difficult to use the same radical state apparatus to go to war on the climate crisis. As well as this interrogation, Malm then also digs down deeper in to the relationship of the pandemic and the climate crisis to the chronic emergency of rapacious, insatiable capitalism. The pandemic spread is directly related to the capitalist-driven destruction of biodiverse ecosystems, as well as the ravenous consumption mentality that it applies to the exploitation of fossil fuel reserves. When you throw into the mix of this a giddily childlike desire to have everything now and damn the consequences, you have the very worst of worlds.

Malm's riposte to this destructive capitalist ascendancy is to look back at the lessons of the Russian revolutionary moment of 1917 to 1921. Pulling from Leninist thought and praxis, Malm outlines a need to adopt a war footing now against the climate crisis and the societal effects that undergird it, namely unchecked globalised capitalist consumption. There is strong argument for state intervention put forward, but a careful warning against the kind of oppressive authoritarian bureaucracy that subsumed the Soviet project. Perhaps, the most interesting aspect of this latter third of the book is the compromise approaches that Malm looks toward and then radically weaponises, such as the fudged negative-emissions work of Climeworks in Switzerland or the Marine Cloud Brightening project outlined by Kevin Surprise. For Malm these projects are caught in the torturous prison of illogic that is the capitalist exchange value imperative. Nothing can exist in a capitalist system without the idea that it can be sold. So if you are an organisation operating something that deals with removing the possibility of exchange value from the equation - in this case extracting carbon from the atmosphere and depositing it back deep within the ground - then you are finished before you have begun. There is no business model for removing something so that it cannot be used, even waste management is looking for the grift. This then leads to the underlying rationale behind why it is so difficult to preserve or protect current ecosystems, as capitalist society forces all things to be run through the rubric of possible exchange value. Of course the markets will save us from ourselves and make the world a better place, very much in the same way that Stalinism is without fail what communism leads to.

At times I found the curious phrasings of the opening chapter, in particular, to be unnecessarily off-putting, but then I wonder how much of this was primarily to do with the introduction of concepts that at first may be awkward to digest. Yet, Malm's puckish way with a critical barb, not even Terry Eagleton gets off lightly in this regard, does at least enliven these trickier sections of the book.

[Taneli Viitahuhta · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Zéro Janvier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deuxième livre consécutif d'Andreas Malm que je lis, et deuxième lecture à la fois plaisante et enrichissante.

Dans cet essai de deux cent pages, publié en 2020 en pleine pandémie de Covid-19, l'universitaire et écologiste radical suédois dresse d'abord des parallèles entre pandémie de coronavirus et crise climatique, à la fois sur leurs causes et sur les moyens d'y répondre. Il aborde ensuite la problématique d'urgence chronique à laquelle nos sociétés font face et vont de plus en plus devoir faire face, avant d'envisager une stratégie, inspirée du communisme de guerre théorisé et mis en pratique par Lénine.

Je ne sais pas si j'ai été convaincu à 100% par tous les arguments d'Andreas Malm, mais c'est clairement une contribution intéressante aux débats et aux questions qui se posent à nous, citoyens d'un monde sur une pente mortifère.

[Carson Stones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Andreas Malm is one of those thinkers whose brain reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s - some very bizarre and outright bad ideas mixed in with flashes of absolute brilliance. Written in the early days of the pandemic, some of the best ideas of this short book include: adding zoonotic spillover to the list of climate hazards, coupling the root causes of societal vulnerability to the root causes of global heating, and finally doing away with any utopian notions that a just transition to a zero carbon society will be easy or fun.

[#GataLesbiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mmm…10 palabras muy pero que muy interesantes

[Anna]

no ha estat problema esborrar-lo de la meva ment pq tmpoc era massa remarkable <3

[Kevin Tole · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.
Bill McGibben, 2016

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.

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.

[inteanja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Många väldigt intressanta upplysningar och tankar, men med nackdelen att boken är ganska rörig

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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'."

[Simon B · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.”

[J M-B · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author, Andreas Malm, presents strong arguments, derived from wide-ranging sources, for the case that the current corona crisis is inseparable from the global drivers of climate change. He also argues that governments that focus on mitigating the impact of the pandemic have no stomach for addressing its underlying causes because those causes are inherent in the accumulation of capital. By way of strategic response he offers what he refers to as ‘ecological Leninism’ (although he concedes he would be happy with ecological Luxemburgism, Blanquism, Guevarism or Trotskyism) which he defines as: “a lodestar of principles, not party affiliation” and which requires “a predisposition for emergency action and an openness to some degree of hard power from the state (p. 153).

Reflecting on the oft-use metaphors of needing to wage “war” against the virus, Malm proposes that a more fitting metaphor can be constructed from the Russian state policy of “war communism” (a civil war measure in Russia between 1918-21) which involved militarisation of labour and nationalisation of major industries. This metaphor is appropriate to the scale of crisis that Malm judges will require the ‘hard power’ of the state to resolve. He bolsters his endorsement of eco-Leninism by noting the squeamishness of other radical responses to the environmental crisis: “anarchism detests the state; social democracy shrivels in catastrophe” (p. 153). The conflict at the heart of this book, however, is not with Malm’s political opponents on the left, but with his own hollowing out of Leninism; Malm is a lamb in wolf's clothing.

While championing the use of the state’s ‘hard power’, Malm makes it explicit that, unlike the war communism of his preferred metaphor - which was imposed by Russia’s young worker’s state - his own proposals involve relying on “the dreary bourgeois state” - only stronger (p. 151). The author’s vision extends to a future of “ecological war communism” that will require “learning to live without fossil fuels in no time, breaking the resistance of dominant classes, transforming the economy for the duration, refusing to give up even if all the worst case scenarios come true...” (p. 167). All this to be delivered courtesy of the capitalist state. Malm is well aware that such an approach to the bourgeois state is in direct conflict with the Leninism that he claims to promote. He observes, not without justification, that what Leninist organizations remain in existence are weak and incapable of seizing power. He then goes beyond this recognition of how affairs stand, however, to argue that the Leninist attitude toward the bourgeois state (namely that it cannot be used to implement a revolutionary programme) is simply “one of several elements of Leninism that seem ripe (or overripe) for their own obituaries” (p. 152).

Malm enunciates ‘three principles’ of eco-Leninism: address the causes of the crises rather than the symptoms, act with speed to avert catastrophe and, third, to “leap at any opportunity to wrest the state in this direction, break with business-as-usual as sharply as required and subject the regions of the economy working towards catastrophe to direct public control” (p. 151 - emphasis added). The phrase ‘wrest the state’ is significant here. It is a phrase that, in the standard translations of Marx’s ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1847) appears in connection with seizure of power by the working class: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class”. https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/...

This same passage is quoted by Lenin in the key exposition of his theory of the state (‘State and Revolution’, written 1917, published 1918) and Malm’s use of the phrase, ‘wrest the state’ may suggest to some that he is writing about the state in the tradition of both Marx and Lenin. However, it is not simply Lenin’s theory of the state for which Malm seeks an obituary; it is implicitly, also, that of Marx and the revolutionary tradition of Marxism. Lenin quotes this passage from the Communist Manifesto in elaborating the importance of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, Lenin is critical of this formulation in the first edition of the Communist manifesto, saying that the question of the state is treated “in an extremely abstract manner” (S&R, p. 27). Lenin looks to Marx’s later works, starting with ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, to demonstrate Marx’s fully articulated theory of the bourgeois state, namely that “it must be broken, smashed” (ibid.) In support of this, Lenin then turns to the 1872 edition of the Communist Manifesto in which Marx and Engels acknowledged that it required updating, specifically - from arising from the experience of the French Commune of 1871 - in relation to the bourgeois state: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes’...” (‘Communist Manifesto’, quoted by Lenin ‘State & Revolution’ p. 35 - NB. the words in single quote marks are Marx quoting his own ‘Civil War in France’).

The attitude to the bourgeois state - that is whether it can be used for social transformation or must be broken - is central to the distinction between reformism and revolution. In breaking with the Leninist stance on the bourgeois state, Malm embraces the very social democracy that he warns “shrivels in catastrophe”. Simple question - if you are a social democrat who believes the bourgeois state can be used to "subject the regions of the economy working towards catastrophe to direct public control" - why not just say so?

[Soph Nova · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very poorly written for about 2/3 of the book, it’s all over the place and completely incomprehensible what point Malm is trying to get across because he contradicts himself and uses random points of information to give a sense of “chronic emergency”. The third chapter though on war communism is an interesting and compelling argument and a way to actually look critically at the “wartime” frame of climate change that acknowledges the crisis and urgency necessary without necessarily leaning in to imperialist framing. A very mixed bag though which is disappointing from the author of a book as good as Fossil Capital.

[Morten Greve · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Monica Zambon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrea Malm ci fornisce una chiara immagine, basata su dati ed evidenze empiriche, di come gli interessi capitalistici possano essere messi da parte nella risposta ad un emergenza di livello globale quale è stata il Covid-19 nel 2020, ma che non si arrischiano ad essere minimamente coinvolti nella rivalutazione delle abitudini di vita per combattere una altrettanto se non peggiore crisi globale: la crisi climatica. Malm sottolinea come il carattere evolutivo progressivo della crisi climatica, a differenza dello shock del Covid, ha permesso alla struttura capitalistica di costruire barriere ostruzionistiche ad ogni possibile intervento risolutivo. Inoltre, la comparsa del Covid e la sua forte presenza nei Paesi centrali del liberalismo democratico, ha fatto sì che gli interessi colpiti fossero percepiti come prioritari rispetto a sé esso avesse primariamente colpito Paesi considerati di seconda importanza. Malm, come Slavoj, si rifà alla necessità di un *comunismo di guerra* come unica soluzione per la transizione a un sistema economico che elimini il capitale fossile.

Malm porta l'attenzione del lettore sul link tra crisi climatica e proliferazione ed evoluzione di virus. Infatti la deforestazione non solo riduce la biodiversità, ma è anche uno dei fattori principali dei salti di specie. È la produzione di merci a causare la deforestazione, concentrata in 7 paesi del Sudest asiatico e dell'America Latina. Carne bovina, olio di palma, soia e legno sono i prodotti con il maggior impatto e spiegano il 40% della deforestazione tropicale tra il 2000 e il 2011. 90% dell'olio di palma prodotto a livello mondiale vene da Malaysia e Indonesia - piazzando la Malaysia ai primi posti della deforestazione dove 70% delle terre coltivabili è riservata all'olio di palma.

È chiaro come, citando Wallace, aprire le foreste ai circuiti globali del capitale è di per sé causa fondamentale delle epidemie, dove l'incontrollata accumulazione capitalista degli ecosistemi provochi un effetto diluzione che porta a un aumentata transmissibilita dei virus.

Ritornando alla necessità di un comunismo di guerra per imporre un cambiamento di rotta globale, Malm cita Lenin e alla sua teorizzazione, alla fine della prima guerra mondiale, della necessità di prendere controllo dei mezzi di produzione tramite la rivoluzione “perché è impossibile sfuggire agli artigli del mostro della guerra imperialistica e della fame, partorito dal capitalismo mondiale, senza uscire dall’ambito dei rapporti borghesi, senza realizzare misure rivoluzionarie”. Qualunque governo volesse combattere la catastrofe imminente non dovrebbe fare altro che adottare le misure drastiche necessarie - lanciare una revisione completa delle catene produttive e dei flussi di importazione; aprire i confini alle persone e chiuderli alle merci di natura selvatica; porre fine all’appropriazione e allo scambio ineguale; finanziare la riforestazione e il ripopolamento animale [e aggiungerei io la biodiversità]; coltivare l’informazione e la divulgazione di ciò che la scienza ci dice a gran voce; porre limiti draconiani alle attuali monoculture e agli allevamenti intensivi; e infine il veganesimo obbligatorio a livello mondiale.

Ciò che questo testo ci dice fuori dai denti, finalmente, è che esistono i mezzi per combattere la catastrofe. Le misure da prendere le conoscono tutti. Se il governo volesse realmente applicare un controllo in modo serio e fattivo, non avrebbe che da rimboccarsi le maniche. Il problema sta nel servilismo al capitalismo globale e all'inerzia totale cui le istituzioni si sono vendute. Perciò è del tutto improbable che uno stato capitalista prenda misure simili di sua iniziativa - deve essere obbligato, dalla rivoluzione, dal boicottaggio di massa, dalla pressione popolare.

Parlando di leninismo ecologico Malm trasforma la crisi dei sintomi a crisi delle cause. Il solo modo per sovvertire la crisi è adottare un approccio di *comunismo di guerra* dove lo Stato si impossessa dei mezzi di produzione e adotta provvedimenti di emergenza che garantiscono forme di controllo statale dell'economia per la risoluzione della crisi. Tuttavia, citando Donna Haraway, Malm sostiene che il dilemma da affrontare resta il come mettere in atto misure di emergenza senza calpestare i diritti democratici, ma invece rafforzando, incrementando, traendone forza. Bisogna garantire il rispetto e la salvaguardia di una serie di principi inviolabili quali la libertà di espressione e assemblea.

Pertanto il futuro è il *comunismo di guerra ecologico figurato*: imparare a vivere senza combustibili fossili in-promptu; spezzare la resistenza delle classi dominanti; trasformare l'economia a tempo indeterminato; rifiutare di arrendersi anche nel peggiore degli scenari; organizzare la fase transazionale di risanamento; rimanere col dilemma di una possibile rottura dei sistemi democratici in atto e una possibile deriva autoritaria; estendere i territori naturali protetti dalla presenza umana.

[Salvador Ramírez · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Michele Giacomini · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Bryan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Yassine Atallah · Rating 4 out of 5]

To say the least, this book is a real eye-opener on how deep the sh*t we’re in right now and how it’s still feasible to restore our planet. Malm emphasizes that we should adopt something he calls ecological Leninism, which he argues we can apply and adapt since we already experienced something similar with COVID: draconian measures imposed overnight that people accepted. I don’t think people would tolerate that again, especially since climate change, as discussed in the book, isn’t a direct, first-hand threat in the same way.

Malm says states moved quickly to stop COVID for two reasons: first, because it killed “precious voters,” the elderly in the Global North; second, because suppression of the virus fit perfectly into the nationalist paradigm dominating Western politics, where states have been retreating inward.

While reading, I kept raging at how he doesn’t fully see how disastrous COVID was on all sides:culturally, economically, in health, and politically. It killed more than 6 million people in just two years. Then I reminded myself the book was written in April 2020, so it’s understandable.

Accessing references is also frustrating. The book doesn’t include hyperlinks in the digital edition.

In short, the book succeeds in making the urgency of climate action feel immediate. But it is far from impartial. The author is an extreme leftist who sees socialism in a new form what he calls ecological Leninism as the solution, without much nuance. He spends the whole book laying out the terrible things neoliberal governments have done (which are facts, not a matter of opinion for him or anyone else), yet when it comes to Lenin, all he allows is a single phrase saying Lenin did “some bad things.”