States of Emergency
Imagining a politics for an age of accelerated climate change.
writes in THE NATION :
Climate change has been a political issue in America for almost my entire life…recognized as threatening millions of lives, perhaps even the future of human life on Earth...In this context, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s new work of political theory, Climate Leviathan, is a welcome addition to the small but growing body of climate writing on the left…
Climate Leviathan engages a wide range of political thought, from Gramsci to Hegel, Kant to Naomi Klein. But… at the heart of the book is Thomas Hobbes...Their other key resource in thinking about this leviathan is the German political theorist and Nazi sympathizer Carl Schmitt… The left rediscovered Schmitt during the Bush years…
Climate Leviathan imagines how ecological disruption will create the conditions for a new sovereign authority to “seize command, declare an emergency, and bring order to Earth, all in the name of saving life”—and this time on a planetary instead of national scale.
“Climate Leviathan” would be a system of global capitalism governed by a planetary sovereign—…a hegemonic power capable of taking drastic action;
“Climate Mao,” an anti-capitalist system governed by sovereign power at the level of the nation-state or the planet;
“Climate Behemoth,” a capitalist system within the autarchic confines of the nation-state; and
“Climate X,” which rejects both capitalism and sovereignty for something yet to be determined
The most likely victor, the authors think, is Climate Leviathan…epitomized by international pacts like the Paris Agreement and global institutions like the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) …many climate activists have legitimized Climate Leviathan rather than challenging it.
 |
| CARBON-FREE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION CIRCA 1793 |
Climate Leviathan has a rival: Climate Behemoth …a “reactionary populism” that turns away from the global elitism of planetary forums on climate change and toward a nationalist capitalism—a dynamic perfectly encapsulated by Donald Trump ..the backers of Climate Behemoth are a mix of fossil-fuel capitalists, petit-bourgeois reactionaries, and disillusioned working-class people who want to stick it to…ethno-nationalism, religion, masculinity, and scientific denial…
Climate Mao…follows its namesake but also Robespierre and Lenin in suggesting “the necessity of a just terror in the interests of the future of the collective”: It pits the power of the planetary sovereign against that of capital...
The two trajectories that ground Climate X are …the left’s anti-capitalist tradition stemming from Marxist political economy… alternatives to sovereignty found in indigenous and anti-colonial movements, forms of knowledge, and ways of life… “The priority,” Mann and Wainwright argue, “must be to organize for a rapid reduction of carbon emissions by collective boycott and strike..
