I am still a bit angry about the book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century, which was published by Andreas Malm in September 2020. He signed it off on April 28th 2020: which was pretty good going. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” he obviously thought to himself in his study in Berlin. It was a book published by Verso Books, one of those beautifully – and one might even say, bourgeoishly – copy-edited and printed books which come out of the New Left stable that was built up by Perry Anderson and others in the 1960s. I bought the book because the philosopher Raymond Geuss referred to it in his book Not Thinking Like a Liberal in 2022. I respect Geuss. But Malm’s book is absolute idiocy: the worst sort of Leftist proto-totalitarianism. I was provoked again, a bit more recently, when I saw that in his even more recent book A Philosopher Looks at Work Geuss puts in his very last footnote a reference to Malm’s book. What is the future of work, asks Geuss, and one answer is that we might need a bit of war communism.
Well!
Malm’s point was stupidly simple. He gleefully noticed the rapidity with which the entire world ‘locked down’ over Corona and simply extended the analysis to Climate. The logic was that if we could behave in a justified morally totalitarian way over an existential threat like a pandemic why could we not do the same for the even more existential threat of absolute environmental destruction?
QED, comrades, QED.
Obviously, this genius, who happens to be “scholar of Human Ecology, teaching at Lund University”, has never read the Daily Sceptic. It does not occur to him for a microsecond that it is possible that Corona (as the Europeans call Covid) was what we know it was: ‘misinformation’, ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, and, of course, Neil Ferguson’s ‘models’. It does not occur to him that Climate is what we know it is: yes, once again, misinformation, lies, damned lies and statistics, and models. And, of course, politics.
I dislike Malm’s beliefs, his logic and his style. He writes in a version of the grim and gleeful manner of the witness to the ironies of history: that manner which Marx more or less invented and has been a staple of New Left resentment and seduction since the 1960s. Perry Anderson, glorious master of literature that he is – and apparent reconvert to Westminster politics, judging by his last book on Europe – writes in the highest possible manner using this allusive and despondent and knowledgeable and realistic and godlike style. Listen to this as an exhibit of Malm’s version of the style:
“I want you to panic,” repeated Greta Thunberg, when she toured the halls of world politics in 2019. Leaders of many stripes – though not all – basked in the light of her rectitude and tried to capture her on selfies. But the one thing they did not do was panic. Nor did they take to heart the proposition that the climate crisis constituted an emergency on a par with war.
We could call this babyish late Marxist irony. For Malm agrees with Thunberg. His politics is similarly simple. You have probably broken his dreams too. Listen:
Stop the emissions…
…The enemy is fossil capital…
…Corona and climate share on structural quality that invites comparison: the amount of death is a function of the amount of action or inaction on the part of states…
…wet markets…
…Global heating is everywhere all the time…
…bats have a special facility for migration…
…Some people under lockdown in Bordeaux hung out a banner with the text “on est tous des pangolins“, “We are all pangolins”…
…Nothing could have been better for the planet than Jeremy Corbyn becoming the Prime Minister of the U.K. in 2019 and Bernie Sanders winning the Presidency of the U.S. in 2020…
…Lenin…
…This has been apparent for at least a decade: everybody says this. Everybody admits it. Everybody has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done…
…defending wild nature against parasitic capital is now human self-defence.
In Malm’s tiny politics there are things that happen and then either 1. responsible governments (which do something) and 2. irresponsible governments (which don’t do anything).
He considers COVID-19 was a “bullet” while Climate Crisis is a “war”.
And the only response to war is – “war communism”! The reason? “No capitalist state is likely ever to do anything like this of its own accord.” Anything like what? He means: ground aeroplanes, dismantle ships, mass produce panels and turbines, expand bus and rail lines, refurbish houses, adopt “Lenin’s logic” (he actually says this), and, of course, get rid of the capitalists.
He wants an “ecological Leninism”, an “anti-Stalinist Leninism”. Aye, that old chestnut. Ah, Malm! He likes Adorno, “the greatest thinker of the 20th century”. Adorno, apparently, wrote:
There is a universal feeling, a universal fear, that our progress in controlling nature may increasingly help to weave the very calamity it is supposed to protect us from.
Malm reads this and thinks “controlling nature” = “IG Farben, ICI, US Steel, Nescafé, Shell”. It obviously does not occur to him that “controlling nature” could also = “Net Zero, Wind Turbines, Miliband Brilliancies, Installing Heat Pumps, Allowing Churches To Get Cold”. I don’t know: but consider, Mr. Malm, Professor Malm, whether it is not even slightly possible that your war communism is exactly the “progress in controlling nature” that will “weave the very calamity” it is meant to protect us from.
That would be a very grave Marxist irony indeed.
Incidentally, the editor of the book at Verso is one Sebastian Budgen. I came across him when we studied for the very first MPhil in Cambridge in Political Thought and Intellectual History. He sat in the front row – incidentally, as Raymond Geuss (and also John Dunn) spoke about politics – and seemed aloof: he had his own aura, and did not speak to the rest of us, perhaps because he was on the Left. He blinked, and seemed to understand, and draped himself across the desk like something out of Fougassé. I was not affiliated, sat at the back and scowled in confusion (like one of the men in Robert Bolt’s play who didn’t understand Thomas More). I have just enquired to see what Budgen is up to, and find online what must be one of the remarkable sentences – speaking of style – ever written by a Marxist. Budgen has a higher style than Malm.
It only lasted about an hour, but it was an exhilarating, fluttery, serotinous hour, when anything seemed possible, including an inebriating reversal of fortune that would leave all the overconfident pollsterati, sequacious, subrident and shiny journalists, jabbering, sententiary commentators and imperious editorialists with a thick, yellow slime oozing down their faces.
I detect five unusual words, only one of which doesn’t require a dictionary. If I did not have access to the internet I would swear they were all made up by Budgen. The sentence sounds as if Christopher Hitchens, Stephen Fry, Marcel Proust and Susie Dent were pertrited and then incarsted into an AI’s gulalogium before being erusculated out again.
Forgive the digression. (Budgen appears to have interviewed Malm on YouTube. We encounter yet another small world.)
Anyhow, what was war communism?
There was nothing serotinous, sequacious or subrident about it. Adopted by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, it was a simple and solemn authoritarian imposition of unwanted protocols that were considered necessary by the fanatical book-learnt and Marx-burnt mind of Lenin. Think Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. It was a compromise, as all the good Bolshevik policies are – including the subsequent New Economic Policy – except it was a compromise with the necessity of war rather than a compromise with the necessity of commerce. Good at expedients, Marxists. They have to be. But war communism was all leather jacket and jack boot, all cigarette and summary execution. Not exactly a pin-up for the modern radical.
For what it’s worth, I think Malm’s excited glimpse of the possibilities thrown up by the mistaken science and botched politics of COVID-19 should be remembered. He probably thinks his was a radical, external point of view, an ‘if only’ point of view. Wrong. We know just how much this mindset was lodged very deep inside the Government. The only consolation for those of us who are not infatuated with Lenin or Adorno is that the politicians of the Johnson/Ardern/Drakeford/Sturgeon/Trudeau type were too typically political and hypocritical to panic in exactly the consistent iron-jawed ottosilenian way that Thunberg and Malm and many others hoped they would in 2020.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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Here’s my favourite quote, which in my opinion perfectly summarizes the communist mindset:
“It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. ” – Martin Latsis, writing for the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918
This chap might sincerely believe the planet is boiling or that there was a “deadly pandemic”, then again he may not, or he just doesn’t really care. He seems like someone who gets off on telling other people what to do.
Climate crisis evangelists attitudes appear to predate Marxism in that the cure appears to be likely to kill off the patient.
‘Witch swimming was the practice of tying up and dunking the accused into a body of water to determine whether they sink or float. Sinking to the bottom indicated that the accused was innocent while floating indicated a guilty verdict.’
To sum up: we won’t know whether climate change is false until we’ve destroyed everything.
As the innocent burn on the bonfire, one guy shouts out….”both sided made mistakes” Bob Moran.
Who cares as long as we can destroy Capitalism? /s
When future generations are taught the history of this time, some will say ‘see we’re still here, there was no need to panic’ while another lot will be insisting that ‘we only just did enough’. A majority will be thinking ‘Meh, boring history’.
The trouble is we’ve got far too many currently thinking that nobody will be around to learn history.
No but something with no evidence is likely to be false.
The Climate Scaremongering has been going for a lot longer ofcourse. Actually way back to at least 1988 when the IPCC was set up and going back even further if we include the Club of Rome and it’s “Limits to Growth” and this idea that “we need a new enemy to unite us” Global warming being one of those uniting things. The Climate Change Policies that the UN seek to impose on the world though has made slow progress, with only daft western governments getting onboard since we are the ones that allegedly caused all of the “warming” because we have been burning coal and emitting CO2 for a few hundred years. So our own Political Class have decided to pander to this agenda and restrict fossil fuel use as much as possible and here in the UK we now have legally binding emissions targets. Net Zero was waved through parliament with not even a debate and no vote. It is now enshrined in law.
——-Ofcourse when we had the Covid situation with lockdown and all manner of restrictions, the Climate Industrial Complex have clearly observed how easy we fell for those limits to our activities. They clearly would like to do the same kind of thing, but that is not going to be so easy. You cannot just suddenly lockdown the whole economy by telling people not to drive, not to heat their house, not to switch on their lights and on and on and on.
——So ultimately it is going to be a war of attrition. Endless scaremongering stories not backed up by any observations or empirical science. Government and UN pronouncements about a “climate crisis” that is supported by any evidence and more and more draconian climate policies designed to coerce us into compliance. We are having Global Socialism imposed on us step by step by step.
They were optimistic about a corporate reset/cull because their mode of thinking is severely stunted. There isn’t going to be any reset or new system or even quick conquest. It will be a gradual but nonetheless continually painful descent into penury, violent crime without recourse for the victim, property under threat from the state and all sorts of vagabonds, declining health, rapidly diminishing mental faculties, a culture that you might think can’t possibly decline any firther but it can.. It will indeed be a hell but it will be more like a sewer than a fire.
The problem is that there are unknown unknowns, to paraphrase Rumsveldt’s attempt at philosophy. We don’t know the extent of what we don’t know and thus we carry on with a conceit about our knowledge that is usually a comparison with our peers who are equally ignorant. And so you have all sorts of strident people who are fools and then you have a kingdom of the blind type situation. If you don’t know then the best thing to do is keep your mouth shut and work hard to get to a point where you have at least achieved humility. Otherwise you could damage not only yourself but others.