Andreas malm boktips stormens utvec
Andreas Malm’s new masterpiece The Progress of This Storm fills an urgent need, as did his seminal Fossil Capital in In his earlier book, he demonstrated that the fossil capitalism was not preordained by God or Nature or Technology, and that the answer is system change not climate change. Anyone who reads contemporary green literature has seen books with titles like The End of Nature , and statements such as these:. In contrast to environmentalists who want to protect nature, in some circles it has become common, even fashionable, to assert that nature no longer exists , that humans have taken over and it is impossible to distinguish between what is natural and what is social.
Proponents of this viewpoint fall into three camps. Ecomodernists see the end of nature as cause for celebration.
We should expand and deepen the process, to free humanity from dependence on nature and use whatever of it remains for our benefit. Others mourn the loss of nature but see no way out.
Stormens utveckling
Since society and nature are inseparable, only small reforms are possible. Activists are often tempted to avoid philosophical discussions as a waste of our limited time, but as Malm writes, theory can help or hinder effective action. Action remains best served by conceptual maps that mark out the colliding forces with some accuracy, not by blurry charts and foggy thinking, of which there is, as we shall see, no shortage.
Both approaches are promoted in the influential work of Bruno Latour, whose devotees hail him as the most important French philosopher of our time. Others are surprised that anyone takes Latour seriously. After all, neutrons simply have more and better animate and inanimate allies testifying to their existence. And Jason W. If all science is subjective, why should we accept the conclusions of climate scientists and not those of science deniers?
If it is impossible to distinguish between society and the natural world, how can we possibly identify the social drivers of global warming, let alone determine what social and economic measures might slow or reverse the damage? Sad to say, the great divide between natural science and the humanities has made room for such nonsense in academic circles. In a survey found that Latour was the 10th most frequently cited writer in the humanities, ahead of Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx.
If three hikers come down from a mountain with discrepant impressions — the first found it an easy trip; the second is heavily pregnant and could barely make it; the third is mostly struck by the novelty of snow — we do not thereby infer that they must have climbed three different mountains. The Progress of This Storm would be a valuable resource if all it did was expose pretentiousness in academic environmental writing, but Malm does much more than that.
In doing this, he provides a theoretical framework for effective radical action that is must reading, not just for ecosocialists but for every serious environmental activist. Human society arose within and is part of the natural world, but it has distinctive characteristics — emergent properties — that are found nowhere else in nature and that enable its uniquely constructive and destructive role.
That does not mean that humans totally dominate nature. This relation — between water in its solid state and temperature — is utterly anterior and exterior to humans and what they do to one another…. Far from receding out of view, thousands of natural relations — between the Arctic sea ice and the jet stream, between the salinity of the water and the deep currents of the ocean, between monsoons and moisture, storm surges and sea levels, habitats and heat, drought and evapotranspiration, corals and acidity, precipitation and oscillation — define the phenomenon in all its bewildering complexity.
For the problem of climate change is constituted precisely by how social relations combine with natural ones that are not of their making. Without the primacy of the totalities of nature, emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases would present no problem.
The progress of this storm: Nature and society in a warming
When humans decide whether to extract fossil fuels or not, subsidise the industry or not, slash emissions worldwide or not, they take decisions on the material bridge that connects them to all the factors of the earth system, which then pull off the consequences. If the bridge did not span two sides, the decisions would have no meaning. Nature is not reducible to humans, who are part of it; humans are not reducible to nature, which is part of them; it is precisely in the interstices of that unity-in-difference that something like global warming can develop.
Any countermeasures will occupy the same precarious place of inception. Rejecting hybridism and its two branches, then, is not a matter of staking out some bland third way or middle course. It is about recovering the theoretical basis for ecological militancy. On that basis, Malm proposes ten points of c limate realism as a clear and unequivocal alternative to hybridism and constructivism, and three tenets of socialist climate realism as clues to the social dynamics behind global warming.
Then choose between the two main options: commit to the most militant and unwavering opposition to this system, or sit watching as it all goes down the drain. The Progress of This Storm is at once a devastating critique of current intellectual fads, an explanation and defense of historical materialism and metabolic rift theory as indispensable tools for understanding the global crisis, and a call for a science-based mass movement to prevent global catastrophe.
It is a major contribution to ecological Marxism, and, more broadly, to the development of a climate map that shows both the direction of the storm and the paths we must take to escape it. Emphasis in original. One example: he completely mis-cites Keith Jenkins on p. Malm performs similar hatchet work on a number of thinkers who discuss the social characteristics of nature, setting up silly little strawmen on the way and trotting out more caricatures that prompt chortling on the part of the already converted who read his book.
I know the guy is an ally in the overall struggle for the environment, and in no way would I defend Latour and his acolytes and apologists, but his scholarship can be fast and loose and downright bad. This is a deliciously polemical book, reminiscent of E. It is nonetheless a very scholarly book that covers a large literature, accurately in the cases with which I am familiar. Given the hatchet-job that Latour does on Marx, Hegel, phenomenology and many other adversaries throughout his work it is hard to sympathize with these defensive reactions.
I would have liked Malm to engage more fully with the nature-culture question in Marx, since he is so much more worthwhile than Latour et. Latour is actually brilliant.