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Adam Tooze on Andreas Malm’s post-pandemic climate politics
The carbon clock is ticking…
the historian and climate activist Andreas Malm… now declares himself an ecological Leninist. His co-authors in White Skin, Black Fuel named themselves the Zetkin Collective after the German communist and feminist Clara Zetkin...whose ashes were interred in 1933 beside the Kremlin Wall.
Some will accuse Malm of cosplaying revolution while the planet burns. But…
As Marx and Engels had warned in the Communist Manifesto, the fight between the oppressor and the oppressed would end ‘either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’
… The left calls for a Green New Deal... but we should hardly find it encouraging that the Green New Dealers take the Second World War as their model... the machinery of government itself was at the time increasingly occupied by business interests... Malm suggests, the proper model for a climate activist state is not the New Deal, but a wartime regime that was far more desperate, and more austere? What if the model we need is War Communism?
