The progress of this shit storm

Labuan today

Andreas Malm is a Swedish left-wing intellectual and eco-socialist. I´m old enough to remember Malm as a rookie activist about 20 years ago, when he expressed support for Hizbollah, brawled with a group of exotic Trotskyists in the Palestinian solidarity movement, and called on the Swedish right-wing government to aid NATO in its bombing campaign against Gaddafi in Libya. Yes, you read that right. Andreas Malm *supported* the bombing of Libya. At the time, I rechristened him Andre-jas Malm, JAS being a highly advanced Swedish fighter plane. After reading his more recent thought products on the greener spectrum of things, I have to ask whether Malm still supports Western imperialist bombing campaigns against economically advanced Arab nations, or whether he simply wants the JAS bomber to be powered by biofuels and the bombs with solar cells? Or did he simply switch his allegience from Hizbollah (pro-Iran, pro-Russia) to Hamas (anti-Iran, anti-Russia and therefore anti-Gaddafi)? 

It´s really a pity that I´m not a revolutionary Marxist, since writing a criticism of Malm´s works on the climate crisis from such a perspective would be great fun, if for no other reason that Malm claims to be, well, a Marxist. It´s a very strange form of Marxism, to be sure, with the working class strangely absent, replaced by the usual panoply of middle-class identity politics, petty bourgeois Greens and (supposedly) the huddled poor masses in the Third World (the migratory behavior of which strikes me as decidedly anti-Green). That capitalism can use fossil fuels and steam engines to move production wherever they feel like (a state of affairs usually known as "modern civilization") is seen as *negative* in this curious version of Marxism, while Marx himself would of course see it as capitalism being historically progressive, creating its own grave-diggers as it goes. But then, Marx wanted workers´ management of fossil fuels and, I suppose, engines. Malm wants...what?

In "Fossil Capital", he envisages a situation in which capital is *tied down* to a limited number of hubs around the world, due to the intermittent character of solar and wind power. This will force the employers to stay put (no globalization!) in the same places where they originally built the power plants, and somehow Malm believes that this will also increase the bargaining power of the workers in the green energy hubs. Note the dramatic difference with Marx, who regarded the free and therefore *mobile* character of the worker as a historically progressive gain. That being said, I admit that Malm´s scenario could work - unless, of course, the employers employ thousands of militarized praetorians to suppress the workers at their immobile solar power plants. And what if the workers start acting as Zionist colonial-settlers, forming a privileged labor aristocracy, forcing the workers outside the hubs to pay dearly for the energy only the solar and wind plants can provide? The only *material basis* for a revolution in this system seems to be for the impoverished peripheral workers to form war-bands, encircle the intermittently energetic hubs from the countryside, and simply destroy them - or take them over, and then the circle starts again. A situation remarkably similar to the pre-modern state of affairs! 

In "The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World" (the book I was really intending to review), Malm offers up two contradictory perspectives on the post-Greta state of affairs. On the one hand, Malm goes full primitivism - no JAS fighter planes here! When discussing the island of Labuan in the South China Sea (with which he seems to have a strange obsession), he reaches the conclusion that the best solution would be to simply cordon off the island (and by implication, all pristine wilderness areas with noble savages) from any outside interference whatsoever, and most specifically Western imperialist and high tech interference. There is such a place already. It´s called the Andaman islands, and seems to play a prominent part in the hagiography of Western middle class liberals, the defense of the right of the Andamanese to live as they please on their own little atolls being the only known example of anti-immigration policy supported within this particular social stratum. If the present inhabitants of Labuan (the most important finanical center of Muslim Malaysia) would like to live on Andamanese level is, alas, less clear. 

The other perspective offered by our stormy petrel is somewhat more surprising. Yes, he calls for high tech solutions. One of the points of the book is that the storm is already upon us due to certain decisions made in the past, decisions which can´t be undone (not even by the multi-identitarian soviet or the savages). For this reason, "negative emissions" are necessary to save the world. The author doesn´t tell us what this entails, CCS apparently being the n-word of honest eco-socialists, nor does he tell his readers how the CCS facilities should be powered, if not by fossil fuels. Intermittent storm power, perhaps? Malm also makes a rather oblique call for geo-engineering on a massive scale, being gradually phased out by the revolutionary world government, until nature can take over the weather systems again, without undue interference by our unfortunate species. Once again, we wonder how the geo-engineering gadgets should be powered if not by fossil fuels or electricity made in nuclear facilities. And who, pray tell, should pay for it? American pension funds? And what makes Malm think that the technocratic elite and their labor-aristocratic supplements will *phase out* a highly succesful program of weather control in favor of Mam Gaia´s decidedly more spontaneous take on things climatic?

Andreas Malm also has a blind spot for the overpopulation problem. How many Third World peoples could possibly survive if by some strange stroke of luck, say a comet or a coronavirus, the global population would be forced to live on Labuan (pre-Malaysia) or Andamanese levels forthwith? The population of North Sentinel Island is 400. To the usual Green conceit that somehow, in some way, we can all keep our high standard of living even if we completely replace fossil fuels with sun, wind and clean country livin´ (and, I suppose, Monégasque yachts), the author has simply added a new Red conceit: that somehow we can use high technology to save the world, and then simply abolish it, without anyone ever noting the difference... 

I´m not sure if that counts for progress. I am pretty sure it can´t pass for Marxism.