How About a Bit of War Communism?

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.