How can climate justice
activists stop capitalism’s drive to catastrophe? The author of Fossil
Capital considers lessons from past revolutions and proposes an action
program for today.
Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author of Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, and The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World.
Reprinted from Socialist Register 2017: Rethinking Revolution (Merlin Press and Monthly Review Press, 2016).
REVOLUTION IN A WARMING WORLD
Lessons from the Russian to the Syrian Revolutions
by Andreas Malm
It doesn’t take much imagination to
associate climate change with revolution. If the planetary order upon
which all societies are built starts breaking down, how can they
possibly remain stable? Various more or less horrifying scenarios of
upheaval have long been extrapolated from soaring temperatures. In his
novel The Drowned World from 1962, today often considered the
first prophetic work of climate fiction, J. G. Ballard conjured up
melting icecaps, an English capital submerged under tropical marshes and
populations fleeing the unbearable heat towards polar redoubts. The UN
directorate seeking to manage the migration flows assumed that ‘within
the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life
would continue much as before, with the same social and domestic
relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions’ — but
that assumption ‘was obviously fallacious.’[1] A drowned world would be
nothing like the one hitherto known.
In more recent years, the American
military establishment has dominated this subgenre of climate
projection. Extreme weather events, the Senate learned from the 2013
edition of the ‘worldwide threat assessment’ compiled by the US
intelligence community, will put food markets under serious strain,
‘triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.’[2] If the armed
forces are firefighters tasked with suppressing outbreaks of rebellion,
their workload will increase in a warming world. Pursuing its consistent
and candid interest in the issue, in such stark contrast to the
denialism of the American right, the Pentagon submitted a report to
Congress in July 2015 detailing how all combatant commands are now
integrating climate change into their planning. The ‘threat multiplier’
is already at work, undermining fragile governments, turning populations
against rulers unable to meet their needs: and it will only get
worse.[3] Most of it will play out in overcrowded littorals. In Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla,
David Kilcullen, perhaps the most astute mandarin of the military wing
of the empire, predicts a near future of megacities in the Global South
filled to the brim with restless masses, mostly on low-lying coastal
land; not only cutting into their food and water supplies, climate
change will threaten to directly drown those masses. How can they not
pick up whatever arms they have and start marching? Mixing lessons from
the second intifada, Central Asian jihads, the Arab Spring and the
Occupy movement, Kilcullen envisions a century of permanent
counterinsurgency in hot slums sliding into the sea.[4]
So far, the sworn enemies of revolution
have dominated this frenzy of speculation. Little input has come from
the other side: from the partisans of the idea that the present order
needs to be overthrown or else things will turn out very badly. But if
the strategic environment of counterinsurgency is shifting, so is — by
definition — that of revolutionaries, who then have just as compelling a
reason to analyze what lies in store. The imbalance in the amount of
preparation is glaring. Those who pledge allegiance to the revolutionary
tradition — in whose collective mind the experience of 1917 will
probably always loom large — should dare to use their imagination as
productively as any writer of intelligence reports or works of fiction.
One might begin by distinguishing between four possible configurations
of revolution and heat.
Revolution As Symptom
How can rising temperatures translate
into social turbulence? In a pair of papers which have caused a stir in
the research community, Solomon M. Hsiang and his colleagues collect
some fifty data sets covering 10,000 years of world history, feed
numbers into their computer models and distil a straight link from heat
to various forms of confrontation. On all scales and in all cultures,
anomalously hot weather induces hostile honking, police brutality,
baseball pitchers hitting batters, urban riots and, at the end of the
spectrum, ‘the forcible removal of rulers.’ Somehow exceptional warmth
incites more contentious behaviour in individuals, and the effect is
three times larger for ‘intergroup conflict,’ the box in which the
spectre of revolution appears.[5] Claiming robust quantitative proof of
causation, Hsiang et al. proceed to conclude that if the past is
anything to go by, a hotter twenty-first century will see all manner of
strife — ‘the future holds nothing else but confrontation,’ they could
have quoted the opening lines of Public Enemy’s Apocalypse 91.
Naturally, critics have taken aim at the
deceptive simplicity of this thesis. By placing all other variables
within brackets — a prerequisite for isolating the climate factor —
Hsiang and his colleagues effectively invent a unilinear, monocausal
mechanism: bad weather—conflict.[6] That criticism could be taken one
step further. If there is any link between climate change and the kind
of unrest that may issue in a full-fledged revolution, it cannot possibly be immediate. No
matter how hot it gets, no one will ever go on strike or attack a
police station just for feeling over-heated. There has to be a
pre-existing score to settle, some sort of simmering rage brought
towards a boiling-point, for otherwise the aggression would be
completely random, and so unable to feed into collective action of any
significance (hostile honking here excluded). The statistical
methodology of Hsiang et al., in which everything but climate is
relegated to the dead category of ceteris paribus, should be
inverted: if the aim is to understand how global warming may set off
discord, it must not be posited as acting on its own.[7]
That criticism, however, also curves back
on some of the critics of the thesis. Laying all emphasis on the
variables omitted by Hsiang et al., one team of researchers argues that
‘it is probably more critical to understand “the nature of the state”
than the “state of nature.”’[8] Given that climate never operates in
isolation — this is the logic of the argument — it cannot really be that
important. But that is to jump to the mirror error. That the violent
repercussions of global warming must have travelled along social
pathways does not make the process any less powerful. Unmediated,
exclusive causation cannot be posited as a criterion for the efficacy of
climate change in calling forth something like a revolution, for that
would presuppose an empty planet, the non-existence of human societies
on earth. Since there are societies — in whose absence we would not have
had fossil fuel combustion in the first place, nor contentious politics
in streets or squares — any climatic spark will always burn
through relations between people on its way to an explosion. Even
societies crumbling under four degrees of warming will be shot through
with inequalities of power. The critical state of nature is mediated —
in no way negated — by the nature of the state. Or, in short, it is a
matter of articulation. That is what needs to be understood and acted upon.
This academic debate now has a testing
ground where the stakes count in millions of human lives: Syria. In the
years leading up to the outbreak of the 2011 revolution, that country
reeled under an epochal drought. Sustaining the agriculture of the
Mediterranean basin since time immemorial, a relatively stable regime of
rainfall coming in from the sea between November and April abruptly
gave way, in the 1970s, to a trend of ever more fickle precipitation and
persistent drying.[9] The worst effected corner was the Levant,
particularly the area known as the Fertile Crescent, and particularly
the part of it located in Syria. 1998 marked another shift towards
semi-permanent Syrian drought, the severity of which, tree rings reveal,
has no equivalent in the past 900 years.[10] Not only have the winter
rains failed, but the higher temperatures have also sped up evaporation
in summertime, depleting groundwater and streams and parching the
soil.[11] There is no natural explanation for the trend. It can only be
ascribed to the emissions of greenhouse gases.
The Syrian drought reached its highest
peak of intensity so far in the years 2006-2010, when the sky stayed
blue for longer than anyone could remember. The breadbasket of the
northeastern provinces collapsed. Wheat and barley crops more than
halved; by February 2010, nearly all livestock herds had been
obliterated. In October of that year, the calamity reached the pages of
the New York Times, whose reporter described how ‘hundreds of
villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and
grazing animals die off. Sandstorms have become far more common, and
vast tent cities of dispossessed farmers and their families have risen
up around the larger towns and cities of Syria.’[12] Estimates range
between one and two million displaced farmers and herders. Fleeing the
wastelands, they hunkered down on the outskirts of Damascus, Aleppo,
Homs, Hama, joining the ranks of proletarians seeking to find a living
from construction work, taxi-driving, or any other, mostly unavailable,
job. But they were not alone in feeling the heat. Due to the drought,
the marketplaces of the country exhibited one of the central vectors of
climatic influence on popular livelihoods: doubling, tripling,
uncontrollably spiking food prices.[13]
What did the regime of Bashar al-Assad do
when the people ate dust? The onset of the peak drought coincided
almost exactly with a concerted push to renovate the foundation of the
Syrian ruling class. After years of sclerosis, Assad and his closest
accomplices resolved to nurture a fresh clique of private businessmen,
encourage them to seize hold of large swathes of the economy and task
them with launching a bonanza of accumulation. While the crops withered,
real estate markets underwent fabulous booms, free trade zones opened
up, investments poured in from the Gulf and Iran, luxury boutiques and
fancy cafes sprang up in the centres of Damascus and Aleppo, a first car
factory was constructed, plans were tabled for rebuilding the entire
centre of Homs into a model of Dubai complete with golf courses and
residential towers. One individual, Rami Makhlouf, owner of mobile phone
operator SyriaTel and king of the crony capitalists, reputedly extended
his tentacles into 60 per cent of the economy.[14] In the countryside,
the regime matched the dust bowl with a new law allowing landowners to
expel their tenants. Subsidies on fuel and food were slashed. State
farmlands ended up in the pockets of private entrepreneurs, water in the
thirsty cotton plantations and other vain agribusiness
projects.[15] In Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War,
Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami capture the scene after four
years of extreme drought: ‘water shortages plagued the cities too —
during the hot summer months the taps sometimes only flowed once a week
in poorer areas, while the lawns of the rich remained lush and
green.’[16]
And then Syria exploded. Starting in
Dera’a — a town in the southern outpost of the agricultural heartland,
nearly as heavily impacted by the drought as the northeast — the Syrian
revolution stood out in the Arab Spring for having its basis outside the
main city centres.[17] The people who first dared to march, chanting
against Assad and smashing the windows of SyriaTel, lived either in
rural regions or in neighbourhoods on the peripheries of the cities,
where large numbers of migrants had taken up residence. When the
demonstrations morphed into civil war in 2012, the armed rebels
streaming into the cities from their liberated villages found the most
avid support precisely in those neighbourhoods, in a geographical
pattern that has persisted ever since (witness eastern Ghouta or
northern and eastern Aleppo). Looking back on one year of revolution in Jadaliyya,
Suzanne Saleeby summed up the lingering effects of the drought: ‘In
these recent months, Syrian cities have served as junctures where the
grievances of displaced rural migrants and disenfranchised urban
residents meet and come to question the very nature and distribution of
power.’[18] Combined with a host of other sparks, climate change, it
seems, had ignited the fuse.
But to some activists and scholars, that
thought is obnoxious. Francesca De Châtel has argued against ascribing
any role in the Syrian crisis to the climate. To make her case, she must
first brush aside all the signs that the pre-revolution drought was
unprecedented and anthropogenic. Instead, she claims, it was but a
routine episode in a country accustomed to dry weather, with no
demonstrated ties to rising temperatures.[19] Global warming poses no
serious threat to Syria’s water resources — any scarcity is the regime’s
own doing. Blaming fossil fuel combustion is to chime in with the Assad
propaganda. The ‘role of climate change in this chain of events is not
only irrelevant; it is also an unhelpful distraction,’ lending credence
to the efforts of the regime to ‘blame external factors for its own
failings.’[20] It remains to be investigated how revolutionaries on the
ground perceive the situation, but it is not inconceivable that many of
them would agree. We are fighting Assad and Makhlouf, not ExxonMobil or
Chinese coal!
And yet De Châtel’s argument is flawed in
several respects. Firstly, it is premised on a sort of local climate
denialism that cannot stand up against the overwhelming scientific
evidence. Secondly, if we were to follow the principle that global
warming should not be attributed any responsibility for miseries to
which provincial exploiters and oppressors have also made contributions,
then that planetary fire — and more precisely, the people who have lit
it, maintained it, and pour fuel on it on a daily basis — would be very
successfully exonerated. Thirdly, and most importantly, the marks of
climate change on Syria’s fate by no means wipes Assad’s slate clean.
Had the country been a perfect democracy, in which households shared
resources equally and made sure to distribute water and food to those
who suffered losses, the drought might still have caused stress and even
widespread hunger, but it could not possibly have contributed to a revolution. That
could only happen because the climatic impact was articulated through
the social formation over which Assad presided — or more simply put, the
drought could only push people towards rebellion because some lawns
were perversely lush and green. Climate change does not take away any of the iniquities of the regime: it is constituted as a destabilizing force in relation to them.[21]
The Levant has seen a similar logic play out before. In The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,
Sam White tells the story of how that empire came close to falling
apart in the early seventeenth century when a series of extraordinarily
severe droughts crippled what is today eastern Turkey and Syria.[22] The
droughts were the result not of global warming, but of global cooling
caused by the natural drop in solar radiation known as the Little Ice
Age. Freezing dry winters killed off the crops and cattle of Anatolian
and Levantine peasants — and how did the sultan respond? By levying
heavier taxes on those peasants, forcing them to deliver greater
quantities of grain, sheep and other provisions to the imperial capital
and its armies. Just as famine spread on the plains, the centre moved to
squeeze them ever harder, and it was this additional curse, White
stresses, that tipped the hungry peasants into open revolt. Starting
around the turn of the century, they attacked tax collectors, raided
stores and set up military units, coalescing into the great armies of
the Celali rebellion, whose territories at one point stretched from
Ankara to Aleppo. The sultan eventually defeated the Celalis, but a
cycle of drought—higher taxes—rebellion—greater deficits in
provisioning—even higher taxes continued to roll through the Empire in
the seventeenth century. In 1648, the sultan and his detested grand
vizier were killed in a rare uprising in the heart of Istanbul, whose
chronic problems of food supply, public health and low wages had been
exacerbated by the massive influx of refugees from the desolated
countryside: ‘when the people saw that the sultan’s favorites still had
water while the mosques and fountains went dry, they rose up and forced
out the grand vizier.’[23]
We can thus propose a first hypothesis
for a Marxist theory of climate-induced social confrontation. ‘The
specific economic form,’ Marx writes in the third volume of Capital,
‘in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers
determines the relationship of domination and servitude.’[24] Now if the
direct producers experience a climatic shock that reduces their
capacity to reproduce themselves, and if the pump continues to operate
or even accelerates, sending ever more resources towards the top,
chances are that the former will rise up. If they cannot command the
clouds to open, at least they can break the pump that takes away what
little they have left. These are the relations of domination and
servitude through which the impact of climate change is fundamentally
articulated. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, they ran along the axis
of taxes pumped out of peasants and into the imperial capital, and the
shock was of an entirely natural character. What can we expect in a
capitalist world rapidly heating up because of fossil fuel combustion?
Now the central pump would seem to be the extraction of surplus-value
from productive labour. Is the shock felt at the bottom here, too?
There are indications that a new bone of contention between classes is being formed. In the report Climate Change and Labour: Impacts of Heat in the Workplace, several union federations and UN branches draw attention to what might be the most universal and the
most widely ignored experience of global warming: it’s getting hotter
at work.[25] Physical labour makes the body warm. If it takes place
under the sun or inside facilities without advanced air-conditioning
systems, excessively high temperatures will make the sweat flow more
profusely and the bodily powers sag, until the worker suffers heat
exhaustion or worse. This will not be an ordeal for the average software
developer or financial adviser. But for people who pick vegetables,
build skyscrapers, pave roads, drive buses, sew clothes in poorly
ventilated factories or mend cars in slum workshops, it already is; and
the bulk of exceptionally hot working days are now anthropogenic in
nature. With every little rise in average temperatures on Earth, thermal
conditions in millions of workplaces around the world shift further,
primarily in the tropical and subtropical regions where the majority of
the working population — some four billion people — live their days. For
every degree, a greater chunk of output will be lost, estimated to
reach more than a third of total production after four degrees: in this
heat, workers simply cannot keep up the same pace. Or can they? Here is a
source of any number of clashes, since workers will have to slow down
and take long breaks, while capitalists and their representatives — if
their entire past is anything to go by — will demand that production be
maintained (and preferably sped up). In a hotter capitalist world, the
pump can only extract the same amount of surplus-value by squeezing the
last drop of sweat out of workers, but on the other side of some locally
determined tipping point, that might not be sustainable.
A workers’ revolution to win rest in the
shade? Probably not. If the conflict between the victims of drought and
the insatiable sultan of the Ottoman Empire was straightforward enough,
the equivalents in the twenty-first century look set to be rather more
complex. Extraction of surplus-value may still be the central pump, but
the most explosive impacts of climate change will scarcely be
transmitted in any straight line along its axis. If there is one
overarching logic of the capitalist mode of production through which
rising temperatures will be articulated, it is probably rather that of
uneven and combined development.[26] Capital expands by pulling other
relations into its orbit; as it continues to accumulate, people stuck in
those external-but-internalized relations — think of herders in
north-eastern Syria — will enjoy few if any of the benefits, and might
not even come close to the threshold of wage-labour. Some amass
resources, while others, outside the pump but inside the orbit, struggle
to get a chance to produce them. If a catastrophe descends on such a
society — deeply divided and deeply integrated — chances are
that it starts breaking apart along some of the cracks. The Syrian
revolution might indeed be a template in this regard.
Incidentally, uneven and combined
development plus catastrophe was also the equation that touched off the
Russian revolution. The catastrophe in question was, of course, the
First World War, which caused the entire food supply system of Tsarist
Russia to crash. To make matters worse, heavy floods in the spring of
1917 washed away roads and railway lines and blocked further
procurements.[27] On 8 March — the story is well-known, but now casts a
new light on the future — the women workers of Petrograd went on strike
and marched through the streets, demanding bread from a duma incapable
of delivering it. Soon they called for the fall of the Tsar. The crisis
took a new plunge in August 1917, when grain prices suddenly doubled and
Petrograd faced the challenge of surviving without any flour. ‘Famine,
genuine famine,’ one government official described the situation, ‘has
seized a series of towns and provinces — famines vividly expressed by an
absolute insufficiency of objects of nutrition already leading to
death.’[28] It was at this moment that Lenin penned what is arguably his
key text from 1917, The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, in
which he made the case for a second revolution as the only way to avert
total nationwide famine. In his internal and external agitation, this
was his stock argument for striking the October blow:
“There is no escaping the famine, and there can be none except
by an uprising of the peasants against the landowners in the
countryside, and by a victory of the workers over the capitalists in the
cities. … ‘In insurrection delay is fatal’ — this is our answer to
those having the sad ‘courage’ to look at the growing economic ruin, at
the approaching famine, and still dissuade the workers from the uprising.”[29]
The Pentagon refers to climate change as a
‘threat multiplier.’ Lenin spoke of the catastrophe of his time as a
‘mighty accelerator’ bringing all contradictions to a head, ‘engendering
world-wide crises of unparalleled intensity,’ driving nations ‘to the
brink of doom.’[30] His wager was, of course, to seize the unique
opportunity thereby opened up. That did not diminish his hostility to
the war — it had no more implacable enemies than the Bolsheviks — but he
saw in all its miseries the most compelling reasons to take power, and
nothing worked as effectively to rally the workers behind him. Climate
change is likely to be the accelerator of the twenty-first century,
speeding up the contradictions of late capitalism — above all the
growing chasm between the evergreen lawns of the rich and the
precariousness of propertyless existence — and expedite one local
catastrophe after another. What should revolutionaries do when it hits
their turf? Seize the opportunity to depose any exploiters and
oppressors they can get their hands on. But there is, needless to say,
no guarantee of a happy outcome.
Counter-Revolution and Chaos as Symptoms
Acute shortages of food and water are
poised to become some of the most tangible effects of global warming. In
the run-up to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, rising food prices
partly caused by extreme weather intensified the latent tensions, and
the Middle East — so far the revolutionary cauldron of the century — can
expect more to come. No region is as prone to water scarcity, and none
as vulnerable to ‘tele-connected food supply shocks,’ or harvest
failures in distant breadbaskets driving up prices of the imports on
which the population depends.[31] In revolutionary Russia, the supply
shock originally stemmed from the blockades and demands of the First
World War and then multiplied across the vast territory; for the
Bolsheviks, it was as much a curse as a blessing. In his remarkable
study, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914—1921, Lars
T. Lih shows how the dearth of food not only propelled them to power,
but prompted them to develop the authoritarian tendencies that would
later devour them.
Moreover, those tendencies were in full
swing already before October. The Tsarist state itself took the first
steps towards a ‘food-supply dictatorship,’ in which the state applies
coercion to enforce the delivery of food to starving citizens. ‘The
food-supply question has swallowed up all other questions,’ one
government employee observed in the autumn of 1916, and ‘as economic
anarchy has spread, all the deeper is the process of penetration of the
state principle into all aspects of the economic existence of the
country.’[32] The Provisional Government continued on the same track —
all political currents save the anarchists agreed on the necessity of
strict centralised control to bring forth the grain — but proved utterly
unequal to the task. The Bolsheviks turned out to be the sole party
disciplined and hard-hitting enough to reconstitute the centre and reign
in the centrifugal forces. But to succeed in their efforts, they had to
ditch any ideological doubts about the state and make maximum use of
the remaining scaffoldings of the Tsarist bureaucracy. The problem was
that they had promised ‘all power to the Soviets.’ According to a logic
Lih reconstructs in painful detail, genuinely self-governing soviets
(and communes and factory committees) had the interests of their own
constituencies closest to heart: in the countryside, they held back
grain from the cities; in the cities, they sent volunteers to the
countryside to collect whatever could be found and distribute it to
their members. The experiment in direct democracy the Bolsheviks had
done so much to encourage merely deepened the chaos in the food system —
the one plague they had vowed to eradicate. Locked into this
contradiction, they opted for subjugating the soviets to the party,
shooting suspected hoarders, stationing agents in the villages to
surveil the peasants, setting the whole train of bureaucratic control in
motion.
But the choice — this is Lih’s main point
— was forced upon the Bolsheviks by the situation. Exacerbated by first
civil war and then drought, the scarcities seemed to allow for no other
general course of action than a food-supply dictatorship, to which the
vast majority of Russians eventually resigned themselves, preferring
some stability and food on the table to the endless deprivation and
uncertainty of the revolutionary years. Here the seeds of Stalinist
counter-revolution were sown. Paradoxically, in Lih’s analysis, they
sprang from a remarkable feat: precisely because they were so ruthless
and consistent in their centralization of the food system, the
Bolsheviks did avert total breakdown. In a formulation now
pregnant with meaning, Lih sums up his view of their young state: ‘a
Noah hastily constructing a small ark against imminent disaster.’[33]
Now if very many more disasters are imminent, and if they will trigger revolutions, will they also trigger counter-revolutions
in the shape of rough beasts and bloated bureaucracies (claiming to be)
indispensable for containing the hardships? It is too early to tell, of
course. One hint at such a scenario, however, may be abstracted from
the military coup that ended the Egyptian revolution. In the final days
of the Morsi regime, the ‘deep state’ orchestrated massive shortages of
fuel and food and rolling blackouts, sapping the support for the
democratically elected president and prodding millions to take to the
streets against him.[34] After the coup of 3 July 2013, those
deficiencies miraculously disappeared overnight; the Sisi junta took
full credit and won stomachs and minds across the country. This episode
obviously has no link to any impacts of climate change, but it points to
a political logic that might conceivably reappear when they bite
deeper: a strong leader poses as the sole guarantor of a minimum of
stable supplies and monopolizes power. That would not necessarily have
to wait for a revolution to materialize; it could be stimulated by the
scarcities as such.
The broader danger lurking here might be labelled ecological fascism. It has few adherents so far, but they do exist: in The Climate Challenge and the Failure of Democracy,
Australian scholars David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith reject the
Marxist contention that capitalism is the source of global warming and
assigns all the blame to democracy. Now is the time to realise that
‘freedom is not the most fundamental value and is merely one value among
others. Survival strikes us as a much more basic value.’[35] As climate
change puts the survival of the human species in question, it has to
rediscover its true nature: rigid hierarchy. ‘The human brain is
hard-wired for authoritarianism, for dominance, and submission’ (just
look at the apes).[36] More precisely, Shearman and Smith advocate a
fusion of feudalism and the one-party state — but without any planned
economy — headed by ‘an altruistic, able, authoritarian leader, versed
in science and personal skills,’ backed up by a class of ‘philosopher
kings or ecoelites’ trained since childhood — ‘as in Sparta’ — to steer
the world through the heat.[37] (We also learn that female brains are
geared towards children, that ‘black rap songs’ expressing ‘desires to
murder white people’ should be banned, and that Islam is demographically
torpedoing the Western world.)[38] Such lunacy has not yet found much
of an audience. But when survival really starts hanging in the
balance, one cannot exclude the scenario that it gains traction; indeed,
climate change has already brought some lunatic ideas of once-despised
mavericks to the fore (notably geoengineering).
If ecological fascism could be an
explicit ideological trend for a very warm future, another possibility
is nihilistic, opportunistic, even racist violence: in the drying
Ottoman Empire, Sam White records, the Celalis professed no particular
political or religious conviction. They merely plundered their way
through the ruined landscape. A particular stronghold of theirs was the
city of Raqqa: epicentre of the recent drought, capital of the faux
caliphate of Daesh. White reports that the droughts fanned the flames of
fundamentalist revivals among the various sects of the Empire.[39] In
the endless bread queues of revolutionary Russia, rumours of Jews
stockpiling and speculating on grain spread like wildfire; the step from
the closed bakery to the pogrom remained short.[40] In 1917, Lenin
measured the ‘mood of despair among the broad masses’ and prophesied
that ‘the hungry will “smash everything, destroy everything, even
anarchically.” if the Bolsheviks are not able to lead them in a
decisive battle.’[41] The anti-Semitic Black Hundreds waited for the
Russians to swing behind them, and Lenin saw objective tendencies
working in their favour. ‘Can one imagine a capitalist society on the
eve of collapse in which the oppressed masses are not desperate? Is there any doubt that the desperation of the masses, a large part of whom are still ignorant, will express itself in the increased consumption of all sorts of poison?’[42]
Celalis, Daesh, Black Hundreds: Christian Parenti has offered a similar prognosis in his Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.
‘Damaged societies, like damaged people, often respond to new crisis in
ways that are irrational, shortsighted, and self-destructive,’ and the
societies of this world — particularly those ravaged by colonialism,
Cold War counterinsurgency, wars against terror, neoliberal
restructuring — are nothing if not damaged.[43] We can anticipate a
‘slide toward entropy and chaos,’ ‘intercommunal strife, brigandry,’ the
undoing of the modern state — which might, of course, flip over into
its opposite and resurrect some green-brown Sparta. What about those who
can insulate themselves against the heat with any amount of air
conditioning? As the most likely protection of their material interests,
Parenti foresees a ‘politics of the armed lifeboat’ or ‘climate
fascism,’ by which the ruling classes continue on their present course
and mercilessly keep their victims at bay with walls, drones and
detention centers.[44] One genocide scholar has recently gone one step
further and warned that the expected flows of climate refugees towards
the North will revive ‘the genocidal impulse,’ a scenario possibly
gaining some plausibility from the circumstance that one of the greatest
flows will likely consist of people from Muslim-majority countries
heading towards a European continent thoroughly infected with
Islamophobia.[45] That could be another form of articulation. As such,
however, it would be the outcome of relations shaped in struggle.
Revolutionaries in a warmer world would then have to be as much vigilant
and militant anti-fascists. We might be living not right after, but at
the very dawn of the age of extremes.
Revolution for Treating the Symptoms
So far we have two configurations, then,
although the line between them may be difficult to draw: revolution
and/or counter-revolution/chaos as symptoms of climate change.
One might take a leaf from meteorology to conceptualize this
symptomaticity. Climate scientists often speak of how rising
temperatures ‘load the dice’ in favor of extreme weather events: a
superstorm could have happened in the eighteenth century, but all the
carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere since then has filled the
weather systems with material, such as hot and high sea surfaces, that
works like an extra weight at number six, making a deadly hurricane
dramatically more likely. The type of extreme social events on
which we have speculated here can evidently also happen without
anthropogenic climate change, but that novel mega-weight inside all
planetary systems now seem to push things in such directions. If all of
this sounds surreally extreme, consult state-of-the-art climate science.
The shattering of the material foundations on which human existence
stands really will be fatal if global warming rolls on, it
tells us, and it reports on a monthly basis on how much faster the
process unfolds than first predicted.
In January 2016, the average temperature
on Earth was 1.15°C higher than for the period 1951-1980. It was a
record jump instantly beaten by February, which reached 1.35°C.[46] By
then the planet stood right on the threshold to a 1.5°C warming above
pre-industrial levels, identified by world leaders congregating in Paris
for COP21 in December 2015 as the limit that should not be crossed
(although a more common marker for the shift from already dangerous to
extremely dangerous climate change is still 2°C).[47] When might that be
attained? Fresh results suggest it could happen sooner rather than
later: in clouds, for instance, ice crystals reflect more sunlight back
to space than do liquid droplets, but climate models have vastly
underestimated the share of the latter, missing a considerable extra
warming effect already in the pipelines.[48] Others have revised the
estimate of how much temperatures would increase if all proven fossil
fuel reserves were burnt. Using conservative figures, excluding any
future discoveries and deposits made available by new technologies,
Katarzyna Takorska and her colleagues place the effect in the ballpark
of 8°C — hitting 17°C in the Arctic — rather than the previously
believed 5°C. Converted into actual conditions for life on Earth, those
average eight degrees would, of course, spell the end of all
stories.[49] This will not happen tomorrow, but it now marks the general direction of late capitalist history. Anyone
who wishes to dispute the forecast that the ensuing dislocations will
usher in an age of political extremes would need to build a case for the
astounding stoicism of the human species, or for its utter detachment
from what happens inside ecosystems. However that case might look, it
would certainly not be materialist.
But there is the possibility for
cushioning against some impacts. Consider the case of Syria. Most
agriculture in that country still relies on flood irrigation — peasants
opening channels and flushing water through their fields — which might
have been an adequate method in the days of old, but not in this dry
era.[50] Shifting to drip irrigation is imperative, so as to save or
make optimal use of every valuable drop of water. A state attuned to the
needs of poor farmers and willing to provide them with the basic
productive forces could make it happen, but the Assad regime has
instituted water policies sucking the land dry. In Egypt, the rising
Mediterranean pushes saltwater ever deeper into the clayey soil of the
Nile Delta. To save their crops from being killed, farmers try to
‘elevate’ fields by applying enormous amounts of sand and fertilisers,
but only the richest farmers can afford such measures of
adaptation.[51] Along the coastlines, storm surges are growing in
frequency and strength, but sea walls and other buffer systems are
primarily built in front of resort towns, while communities of
fisherfolk and farmers are left unprotected.[52] The Egyptian revolution
represented an opportunity to fill such cracks in the armour and move
towards comprehensive, popular adaptation to climate change. It would be
an understatement to say that it was missed.
Here, then, can be discerned the contours of a third hypothetical configuration: revolution to treat the
symptoms of global warming. The Syrian and Egyptian cases are no
outliers. Surveys have found that the day-to-day processes of capital
accumulation — enclosures, commodification, planning for real estate,
centralization of resources — heavily distort most adaptation projects
around the world, leaving precisely the most vulnerable people without
cushions.[53] But ‘in revolutionary times the limits of what is possible
expand a thousandfold,’ recalling Lenin.[54] If social relations block
the way to effective pro-poor adaptation, they ought to be overhauled.
Here is one more reason to seize every opportunity catastrophes open up.
Unlike the two previous configurations, this one would presuppose
revolutionaries who consciously act against the impacts of
climate change on the terrain over which they can wield influence. But
that influence will by nature be constrained.
Revolution Against the Causes
Adaptation to three, four, not to speak
of eight degrees is bound to be a futile endeavour. No matter how
advanced the sprinklers Syrian farmers install, irrigation requires
water. No walls can save the Nile Delta from the underground
infiltration of the sea. No one can perform any kind of physical labour
when temperatures settle above a certain level, and so on. But the
proven fossil fuel reserves can be kept in the ground. Emissions can be
slashed to zero. ‘Everybody says this. Everybody admits this. Everybody
has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done,’ and this is the
rationale for the most exigent type of revolution, the one that, in full
consciousness of the roots of the problem, wages a full-scale onslaught
on fossil capital, just as the Bolsheviks set themselves the task of
putting ‘an immediate end to the war,’ insisting that ‘it is clear to
everybody that in order to end this war, which is closely bound up with
the present capitalist system, capital itself must be fought.’[55] This is the moment to read the Lenin of 1917 anew and salvage the kernel of the Bolshevik project:
“We can draw, perhaps, the most striking
comparison of all between reactionary-bureaucratic methods of combating a
catastrophe, which are confined to minimum reforms, and
revolutionary-democratic methods, which, to justify their name, must
directly aim at a violent rupture with the old, obsolete system and at
the achievement of the speediest possible progress …”[56]
— speed here being the critical dimension. The dawdling bourgeoisie, meanwhile, ‘as always, are guided by the rule: “Après nous le deluge.”’[57] Policies
that would save millions or even billions of lives could be put in
place, if only the obstructing interests were removed. ‘The ways of
combating catastrophe and famine are available, the measures required to
combat them are quite clear, simple, perfectly feasible, and fully
within reach of the people’s forces.’ We could begin by updating the Communist Manifesto and list ten:[58]
- Enforce a complete moratorium on all new facilities for extracting coal, oil or natural gas.
- Close down all power-plants running on such fuels.
- Draw 100 per cent of electricity from non-fossil sources, primarily wind and solar.
- Terminate the expansion of air, sea and road travel; convert road
and sea travel to electricity and wind; ration remaining air travel to
ensure a fair distribution until it can be completely replaced with
other means of transport. - Expand mass transit systems on all scales, from subways to intercontinental high-speed trains.
- Limit the shipping and flying of food and systematically promote local supplies.
- End the burning of tropical forests and initiate massive programmes for reforestation.
- Refurbish old buildings with insulation and require all new ones to generate their own zero-carbon power.
- Dismantle the meat industry and move human protein requirements towards vegetable sources.
- Pour public investment into the development and diffusion of the
most efficient and sustainable renewable energy technologies, as well as
technologies for carbon dioxide removal.[59]
That would be a start — nothing more —
yet it would probably amount to a revolution, not only in the forces of
production but also in the social relations in which they are so deeply
enmeshed. Just how thoroughly the phenomenon of CO2 emissions is bound
up with class society has recently been highlighted by two striking
reports. One tenth of the human species accounts for half of all present
emissions from consumption, half of the species for one tenth. The
richest 1 per cent have a carbon footprint some 175 times that of the
poorest 10 per cent; the emissions of the richest 1 per cent of
Americans, Luxembourgians and Saudi Arabians are two thousand times
larger than those of the poorest Hondurans, Mozambicans or Rwandans.
Shares of the CO2 accumulated since 1820 are similarly skewed.[60] Some
ecological class hatred is certainly warranted, and then we have not
even mentioned the hard inner core of fossil capital, the Rex Tillersons
of this world, the billionaires who swim in money from pulling fossil
fuels out of the ground and selling the fuel for the fires.[61] Make no
mistake: this revolution would have its fair share of enemies.
Who shall execute it? Who are the
Petrograd metalworkers and the Kronstadt sailors of the climate
revolution? Look at the country that tops a survey of the populations
most worried about global warming: Burkina Faso, currently devastated by
declining rains and magnified sandstorms, topping the list of African
nations suffering from excessively hot working days.[62] Can a farmer
from Burkina Faso storm the Winter Palaces of fossil capital — can she
even catch sight of them in her lifetime, or are the headquarters of
ExxonMobil in Texas and the glittering towers of Dubai so distant as to
be utterly beyond her reach, let alone her and her peers’ capacity for
effective revolutionary action? It would probably be as easy to gain
mass support for the above program in Burkina Faso as it would be hard
to implement it from there.
Precisely the abysmal divides within the
species — belying the talk of the ‘Anthropocene,’ of humanity in general
as responsible, of ‘us all’ as the enemy — may prove the greatest
obstacle to attacking the causes of catastrophe: the victims of the
systematic violence known as fossil fuel combustion may simply be too far away from
the perpetrators to topple them. ‘Revolutions-as-symptoms’ target
exploiters and oppressors in the immediate vicinity and so are not hard
to imagine when some lives become unbearable, but
‘revolutions-against-the-causes’ must, if they are to be launched by the
classes most concerned, travel across the globe. Uprisings then seem
likely to continue targeting nearby Makhloufs rather than faraway
Tillersons. Put differently, the spontaneous formation of trade-union
consciousness in a warming world — a basic prerequisite for any kind of
October thrust — looks like a very uncertain prospect. It is otherwise
with, for instance, oil exploration — when a corporation intrudes on a
people’s ancestral homeland to drill for the fuel, the antagonism is in
your face and resistance comes naturally — but global warming as such can slaughter millions from within a castle never seen and, alas, hard to raid.
This appears to be the fundamental
strategic conundrum for the struggle against climate change. The most
promising vision for breaking out of it has been formulated (although
not in such terms) by Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.
Short-circuiting the distance problem, she argues that, since
present-day capitalism is so saturated with fossil energy, more or less
everyone involved in some social movement under its rule is objectively
fighting global warming, whether or not she or he cares about it or
suffers its consequences. Brazilians protesting fare hikes and demanding
free public transit all but raise the banner of the fifth measure in
the list above, while the Ogoni people kicking out Shell are busy
working on the first.[63] Similarly, European auto-workers fighting for
their jobs, in accordance with the kind of trade-union consciousness
they have always possessed, have an interest in converting their
factories to the production of technologies required for the transition
away from fossil fuels — wind turbines, buses — rather than seeing them
disappear to some low-wage destination.[64] All struggles are
struggles against fossil capital: the subjects only need to be made
aware of it. In Klein’s words, ‘the environmental crisis — if conceived
sufficiently broadly — neither trumps nor distracts from our most
pressing political and economic causes: it supercharges each one of them
with existential urgency.’[65] This formula has the added appeal of
making the broadest possible alliance conceivable. Clearly, nothing less
will be needed in this struggle.
It remains to be seen if this is a
solution that can substitute for the absence of immediately victimized
strike forces. So far in a warming world, the position analogous to the
Palestinians fighting Zionist occupation or to factory workers striking
against speed-ups has been vacant — not in-itself (the expelled and
sweated are there) but for-itself (they are not actively combating their
enemies) — and so far, that absence has stifled the outbreak of
explicit climatic unrest on a scale commensurate to the problem. What
we do have is a fledgling climate movement. In any alliance drawing in
the full spectrum of social movements to take down fossil capital, this
one will have to be the linchpin. It has some compelling arguments to
make, along the lines of the slogan ‘there are no jobs on a dead
planet’: whatever else you are clamoring for presupposes a
reasonably stable climate, and even if the desert sands do not encroach
on your doorstep in this particular moment, be sure some impact or other
is on its way. If the German worker shrugs his shoulder at the
condition of the farmer in Burkina Faso, or in optimist fashion comforts
himself with the thought than in Germany things are not nearly so bad,
the climate movement can tell him: ‘De te fabula narratur.’
This movement collects and crystallizes the insights that Syria cannot
survive the disappearance of the Fertile Crescent, or Egypt a three
meter sea level rise, or Burkina Faso four degrees of warming; it
articulates the interests of their most vulnerable masses even if only on behalf of
them. Yes, there is here, for structural reasons yet to be overcome, a
component of what classical Marxists would have called substitutionism
and voluntarism.
This movement has scored a number of
noteworthy victories of late. The shelving of the Keystone XL pipeline,
the retreat of Shell from the Arctic, the spiraling divestment campaign,
the cancellation of coal projects from Oregon to Orissa have been added
in rapid succession to its vita. The movement further raised its
profile with the ‘Break Free’ campaign in May 2016, the largest
coordinated wave of direct action against fossil fuel extraction so far,
stretching from the Philippines to Wales, New Zealand to
Ecuador.[66] The centrepiece of the campaign was the camp known as Ende
Gelände, erected a stone’s throw from Schwarze Pumpe, ‘the black pump,’ a
power-plant in the German region of Lusatia running on lignite coal —
dirtiest of all fossil fuels — extracted from an adjacent mega-mine, and
one of the largest point-sources of CO2 emissions in Europe. The
various quarters of the sprawling tent camp were named after distant
low-lying island nations: Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Maldives. On Friday 13
May 2016, the multi-pronged offensive against Schwarze Pumpe was set off
when some one thousand activists — the camp would attract nearly four
thousand — descended into the mine, seized the gargantuan digging
machines and settled in for the weekend. On Saturday morning, there were
even more occupying the railway lines that bring the coal to the black
pump. A brief incursion into the compound of the power plant itself
provoked the outnumbered police to hit back indiscriminately with pepper
spray, baton wielding and arrests, but the blockades held until on
Sunday morning the owners declared that climate activists had forced
them to suspend all electricity production.[67] That had never before
happened in central Europe.
The background to the action is
instructive. In the parliamentary elections in Sweden in 2014, Gustav
Fridolin, leader of the Green Party, kept a piece of coal in his pocket.
Wherever he went, in every speech and televised debate, he waved that
piece of coal and promised, stern determination in his voice, to take
the hands of the Swedish state off the fuel. Deep inside the pits of
eastern Germany, those hands have long sullied the self-image of Sweden
as a föregångsland or ‘pioneering country’ in climate politics,
since the state-owned corporation Vattenfall owns and operates Schwarze
Pumpe and four other lignite complexes of the same volcanic size. By
the time of the election, the Swedish state produced CO2 emissions from
these assets equal to all emissions from its own territory plus a third.
Now, Fridolin declared, was the time to liquidate them and put a lid on
the coal in the ground. If the Greens entered the government, the
single most important promise of their election campaign would be to
make sure that Vattenfall closed its German mines and plants. Two years
later, they were no longer in Swedish hands. They had been sold to
a consortium of capitalists from the Czech republic — including its
richest man — craving more resources for the lignite renaissance
currently sweeping out from their corner of the continent. The Greens,
in other words, resolved to throw some of the greatest lignite riches
straight into the mouth of fossil capital. That decision contributed to
the worst crisis in the history of the party — probably the most
influential of its kind in the world — and hence one of the worst in the
history of reformist parliamentary environmentalism. To cap the
debasement, Fridolin, on behalf of the Swedish government, denounced the
Ende Gelände action as ‘illegal.’[68]
In any science-based reality, Ende
Gelände is the type of action that should be repeated and scaled up a
thousandfold. Inside the advanced capitalist countries and the most
developed zones of the rest, there is no shortage of appropriate
targets: just look around for the closest coal-fired power plant,
pipeline, SUV, expanding airport, growing suburban shopping mall, and so
many others. That is the terrain on which a revolutionary climate
movement should trespass in one great accelerating surge. Obviously, it
is still very far from such size and capacity. Perhaps some extreme
weather event of truly traumatic proportions could catalyze a leap. Even
then, however, as the Vattenfall story makes clear, direct action in
itself would solve nothing: there have to be decisions and decrees from
the state — or, in other words, the state must be wrested from all the
Tillersons and Fridolins of this world for any transitional program like
the one sketched above to be realized. In the post-1989 ideological
hangover that still affects the activist milieus making up the climate
movement in the North, however, there lingers a fetishization of
horizontal direct action as a self-sufficient tactic and a reluctance to
consider Lenin’s lesson: ‘The key question of every revolution is
undoubtedly the question of state power.’[69] Rarely if ever has it been
more important to heed that lesson than now.
Can the climate movement grow by several orders of magnitude, gather progressive forces around it and develop
some viable strategy for projecting its aims through the state — all
within a relevant time frame in this rapidly warming world? It is a tall
order, to say the least. But in the words of Daniel Bensaïd, perhaps
the most brilliant theorist of revolutionary strategy in the late
twentieth century, ‘any doubt bears on the possibility of succeeding,
not on the necessity of trying.’[70]
Notes
[1] G. Ballard, The Drowned World, New York: Liveright, 2012 [1962], p. 58.
[2] ‘US Intelligence Community Worldwide Threat Assessment, Statement for the Record March 12, 2013,’ in United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Handbook: Strategic Information, Activities and Regulations, Washington, DC: International Business Publications, 2013, p. 40.
[3] Department of Defense, ‘National
Security Implications of Climate-Related Risks and a Changing Climate,’
report submitted to Congress 23 July 2015, available from archive. defense.gov.
The spectre of escalating conflict in a warming world is not the only
one to haunt the Pentagon: a wide range of military installations face
the risk of inundation, including the Norfolk naval base in Virginia,
the largest of its kind in the world. See e.g. Peter Engelke and Daniel
Chiu, Climate Change and US National Security: Past, Present, Future,
The Transatlantic Partnership for the Global Future, Brent Scowcroft
Center and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the Government of Sweden,
2016.
[4] David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, London: C. Hurst & Co., 2013.
[5] Solomon M. Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel, ‘Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,’ Science (2013),
341, p. 4. Cf. Solomon M. Hsiang and Marshall Burke, ‘Climate,
Conflict, and Social Stability: What does the Evidence Say?,’ Climatic Change (2014), 123: 39—55.
[6] Clionadh Raleigh, Andrew Linke and John O’Loughlin, ‘Extreme Temperatures and Violence,’ Nature Climate Change, 4, 2014, pp. 76—7. See further John Bohannon, ‘Study Links Climate Change and Violence, Battle Ensues,’ Science, 341, 2013, pp. 444—5; Mark A. Cane et al., ‘Temperature and Violence,’ Nature Climate Change, 4, 2014, pp. 234—5; H. Buhaug et al., ‘One Effect to Rule them All? A Comment on Climate and Conflict,’ Climatic Change, 127, 2014, pp. 391—7.
[7] Hsiang et al. would perhaps retort
that to study the interaction between climate and other factors, one
first has to know that the former is a factor in its own right,
and that is what their research demonstrates. There is some merit to
that argument. The state of this science seems to be precisely that of
having identified climate as driver of social conflict, but without a
clear idea of how that driving works. Cf. Idean Salahyan, ‘Climate
Change and Conflict: Making Sense of Disparate Findings,’ Political Geography, 43, 2014, pp. 1—5.
[8] Raleigh et al., ‘Extreme temperatures,’ p. 77.
[9] Martin Hoerling, Jon Eischeid, Judith Perlwitz et al., ‘On the Increased Frequency of Mediterranean Drought,’ Journal of Climate, 25, 2012, pp. 2146—61.
[10] Benjamin Cook, Kevin J. Anchukaitis,
Ramzi Touchan et al., ‘Spatiotemporal Drought Variability in the
Mediterranean over the Last 900 Years,’ Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 121, 2016, pp. 2060—74.
[11] Colin P. Kelley, Shahrzad Mohtadi,
Mark A. Cane et al., ‘Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and
Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,’ PNAS, 112, 2015, pp. 3241—6.
[12] Robert F. Worth, ‘Earth is Parched Where Syrian Farms Thrived,’ New York Times,
13 October 2010. See further W. Erian, B. Katlan and B. Ouldbdey,
‘Drought Vulnerability in the Arab Region: Special Case Study: Syria,’ 2011 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, United Nations; OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), Syria Drought Response Plan, 2009—2010: Mid-Term Review;
Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell, ‘Climate Change Before and After
the Arab Awakening: The Cases of Syria and Libya,’ in Caitlin Werrell
and Francesco Femia, eds., The Arab Spring and Climate Change,
Center for American Progress, Stimson, and The Center for Climate and
Security, 2013, pp. 23—32; Peter H. Gleich, ‘Water, Drought, Climate
Change, and Conflict in Syria,’ Weather, Climate & Society,
6, 2014, pp. 331—40; Myriam Ababsa, ‘The End of a World: Drought and
Agrarian Transformation in Northeast Syria (2007—2010),’ in R.
Hinnebusch and T. Zintl, eds., Syria from Reform to Revolt, Vol. 1: Political Economy and International Relations, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015, 199—222.
[13] See e.g. Kelley et al., ‘Climate Change.’
[14] Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012, p. 104; Shamel Azmeh, ‘The
Uprising of the Marginalized: A Socio-Economic Perspective of the Syrian
Uprising,’ LSE Middle East Centre Paper Series, no. 6, 2014; Robin
Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami, Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, London: Pluto, 29-33.
[15] Ababsa, ‘The End of a World,’ pp. 210—17.
[16] Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami, Burning Country, p. 33.
[17] On the drought in Dera’a, see e.g.
Caitlin E. Werrell, Francesco Femia and Troy Sternberg, ‘Did We See it
Coming?: State Fragility, Climate Vulnerability, and the Uprisings in
Syria and Egypt,’ SAIS Review of International Affairs, 35, 2015, p. 31.
[18] Suzanne Saleeby, ‘Sowing the Seeds of Dissent: Economic Grievances and the Syrian Social Contract’s Unraveling,’ Jadaliyya, 16 February 2012.
[19] Francescva De Châtel, ‘The Role of
Drought and Climate Change in the Syrian Uprising: Untangling the
Triggers of the Revolution,’ Middle Eastern Studies, 50, 2014, pp. 521—34.
[20] De Chatel, ‘The Role of Drought,’ p. 532.
[21] Another attempt to downplay the
drought is made in Christiane J. Frölich, ‘Climate Migrants as
Protestors? Dispelling Misconceptions about Global Environmental Change
in Pre-Revolutionary Syria,’ Contemporary Levant, 1, 2016, pp.
38—50. She has interviewed people from Dera’a who say that the refugees
from the countryside living in camps around the town did not orchestrate
the early phase of the uprising; moreover, she claims they lacked the
social networks required for such an adventurous undertaking and could
not possibly have led the charge against the regime. This supposed
disproof of the link rests on an extremely narrow testing procedure. It
is concerned only with Dera’a, and only with directly revolutionary
activities of the migrants sheltering there, ignoring the wider effects
of the drought — including food price hikes and water shortages — as
well as plenty of evidence that the revolutionary process as a whole
took off primarily in the areas where such effects were most strongly
felt (which is not necessarily to say that climate refugees organised
the revolution: few if any have made that claim).
[22] Sam White, The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. For a world-encompassing
narrative (whose treatment of the Ottoman crisis is, naturally,
superficial compared to White’s), see Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
[23] White, Climate of Rebellion, p. 242. In this particular incident, an earthquake had aggravated the water shortages in the capital.
[24] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume III, London: Penguin, 1991, p. 927.
[25] Matthew McKinnon, Elise Buckle, Kamal Gueye et al., Climate Change and Labour: Impacts of Heat in the Workplace, UNDP, ILO, WTO, UNI, ITYUC and others, 29 April 2016, available from e.g. http://www.ilo.org.
[26] For an attempt to further
conceptualise the articulation of climate change through uneven and
combined development, see Andreas Malm, ‘Tahrir Submerged? Five Theses
on Revolution in the Era of Climate Change,’ Capitalism Nature Socialism, 25, 2014, pp. 28—44.
[27] Lars T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914—1921, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, pp. 65—7.
[28] Dolinsky quoted in Lih, Bread and Authority, p. 111.
[29] V.I. Lenin, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, edited and introduced by Slavoj Žižek, London: Verso, 2004, p. 155.
[30] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, pp. 17, 46.
[31] Cristopher Bren d’Amour, Leonie Wenz, Matthias Kalkul et al., ‘Teleconnected Food Supply Shocks,’ Environmental Research Letters, 11, 2016, 035007. On the role of food in the Egyptian revolution, see Malm, ‘Tahrir Submerged?’ and references therein.
[32] Anonymous employee quoted in Lih, Bread and Authority, p. 32.
[33] Lih, Bread and Authority, p. 266.
[34] See e.g. Ben Hubbard and David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi,’ New York Times, 10 July 2013.
[35] David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, Westport: Praeger, 2007, p. 133.
[36] Shearman et al., The Climate Change Challenge, p. 130.
[37] Quotations from Shearman et al., The Climate Change Challenge, pp. 13, 141, 134.
[38] Quotation from Shearman et al., The Climate Change Challenge, p. 111.
[39] On the Celalis and other rebels in Raqqa, see White, Climate of Rebellion, e.g. pp. 179, 234, 237, 244; on fundamentalism see p. 215.
[40] Lih, Bread and Authority, pp. 37, 75, 98, 169.
[41] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, p. 157. Emphasis in original.
[42] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, p. 159. Emphases in original.
[43] Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, New York: Nation Books, 2011, p. 8.
[44] Parenti, Tropic of Chaos, p. 11; cf. e.g. pp. 20, 183, 209, 214—15.
[45] Alex Alvarez, ‘Borderlands, Climate Change, and the Genocidal Impulse,’ Genocide Studies International, 10, 2016, p. 30. Cf. e.g. Rafael Reuveny, ‘Climate Change-Induced Migration and Violent Conflict,’ Political Geography, 26, 2007, pp. 656—73.
[46] Damian Carrington and Michael Slezak, ‘February Breaks Global Temperature by “Shocking” Amount,’ The Guardian, 14 March 2016.
[47] For our position on this threshold
see: Joeri Rogelj, Gunnar Luderer, Robert C. Pietzcker et al., ‘Energy
System Transformations for Limiting End-of-Century Warming to Below
1.5°C,’ Nature Climate Change, 5, 2015, pp. 519—27.
[48] Ivy Tan, Trude Storelvmo and Mark D.
Zelinka, ‘Observational Constraints on Mixed-Phase Clouds Imply Higher
Climate Sensitivity,’ Science, 352, 2016, pp. 224—7. For just
one more, all-too-typical recent identification of underestimated
effects, see Robert M. DeConto and David Pollard, ‘Contribution of
Antarctica to Past and Future Sea-Level Rise,’ Nature, 531, 2016, pp. 591—7.
[49] Katarzyna B. Tokarska, Nathan P.
Gillett, Andrew J. Weaver et al., ‘The Climate Response to Five Trillion
Tonnes of Carbon,’ Nature Climate Change, 2016, online May 23.
[50] Glick, ‘Water, Drought,’ p. 334.
[51] Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian,
‘Ways In and Out of Vulnerability to Climate Change: Abandoning the
Mubarak Project in the Northern Nile Delta, Egypt,’ Antipode, 45, 2013, pp. 474—92.
[52] Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian,
‘Doubly Dispossessed by Accumulation: Egyptian Fishing Communities
between Enclosed Lakes and a Rising Sea,’ Review of African Political Economy,
39, 2012, pp. 408—26; Andreas Malm, ‘Sea Wall Politics: Uneven and
Combined Protection of the Nile Delta Coastline in the Face of Sea Level
Rise,’ Critical Sociology, 39, 2013, pp. 803—32.
[53] Benjamin K. Sovacool, Björn-Ola Linnér and Michael E. Goodsite, ‘The Political Economy of Climate Adaptation,’ Nature Climate Change, 5, 2015, pp. 616—18.
[54] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, p. 40.
[55] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, 69, 163.
[56] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, pp. 88-9.
[57] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, p. 97.
[58] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, p. 70.
[59] This list is inspired by an email
sent by Michael Northcott, professor of theology and ethics at the
University of Edinburgh, to the geoengineering list serve on 17 April
2016.
[60] Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, Carbon and Inequality: From Kyoto to Paris, Paris School of Economics, 3 November 2015; Oxfam, ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality,’ Oxfam Media Briefing, 2 December 2015.
[61] For more on the category of fossil capital, see Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso, 2016.
[62] Ami Sedghi, ‘Climate Change Seen as Greatest Threat by Global Population,’ The Guardian,
17 July 2015; Laetitia van Eeckhout, ‘Winds of Climate Change Blast
Farmers’ Hopes of Sustaining A Livelihood in Burkina Faso,’ The Guardian, 7 July 2015.
[63] Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, London: Penguin, 2014.
[64] See particularly the work of Lars Henriksson: at bilpolitik.wordpress.com; ‘Cars, Crisis, Climate Change and Class Struggle,’ in Nora Rathzel and David Uzzel, eds., Trade Unions in the Green Economy: Working for the Environment, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013, 78—86; ‘Can Autoworkers Save the Climate?,’ Jacobin, 2 October 2015.
[65] Klein, This Changes Everything, p. 153.
[66] See breakfree2016.org.
[67] Marit Sundberg, ‘Miljöaktivister har
stoppat Vattenfalls elproduktion,’ SVT Nyheter, 15 Maj 2016. For a
fuller report on the action, see Andreas Malm, ‘The End of the Road,’ Salvage, salvage.zone, 16 May 2016.
[68] TT, ‘Fridolin tar avstånd från kolprotest,’ Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 16 May 2016.
[69] Lenin, Revolution at the Gates, p. 106.
[70] Daniel Bensaïd, An Impatient Life: A Memoir, London: Verso, 2013, p. 312.
taken from here
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