Another masterpiece from Andreas Malm and Wim Calton. I am hosting a book launch for this at bookhaus this evening, which is why I read Fossil CapitalAnother masterpiece from Andreas Malm and Wim Calton. I am hosting a book launch for this at bookhaus this evening, which is why I read Fossil Capital and White Skin, Black Fuel over the past few months in preparation.
Fossil Capital is a work of materialist history that showed how interlinked the roots of Capitalism, manufacturing and fossil fuels are, and how they became inextricably linked through imperialism and class war. White Skin, Black Fuel is an explortion of the deep connections between far right and racist ideology and fossil fuels. A work of history exploring the recent past, it showed how and why politicians and companies have shifted from accepting the reality of climate change and offering greenwashed capitalist solutions to it a few years ago, to returning towards climate denial, because there really isn't any way of squaring the circle of maintaining Racial Capitalism and addressing the climate crisis. The book explores the psychology of the far right and climate denial, and has given me a lot of food for thought.
This book feels like a natural successor to the previous two books. It shows that the ruling class have decided that they would prefer to maintain business as usual and allow the temperature of the climate to rise by 3 degrees, or maybe more, and allow global devastation and a genocide of the poor to take place. This is so that profits can continue to flow into the pockets of the ruling elite. They are banking everything on the projected development, at some point in the decades to come, of carbon capture and storage technology which will be able to reverse the consequences of this temperature rise. By adopting an economic model from classical, bourgeois economics, they have decided that it is too expensive to address the climate crisis now, but that as the global economy will continue to grow exponentially in the future, it will be much cheaper for our descendants to deal with the problem with all the extra money at their disposal. This is absolute lunacy, and it is literally what the global elite have decided. As I read this book the Labour Party announced that, after abandoning the Green New Deal pledge in favour of investing £28 billion a year in climate mitigation during their five year term, then reducing that to £28 billion across the entire five years, they have now announced that the core of their climate policy would be investing £22 billion into carbon capture technology. Every climate commentator was furious about this, explaining that this is nothing more than a licence for fossil fuel companies to be able to continue business as usual without doing any of the work necessary to keep the world at a rise of 1.5 degrees or less. Instead of throwing money at insulating our housing, rolling out a first rate public transport network, a massive increase in renewable energy sources, and investment in developing new green technologies that could address the problem and enrich the public purse, they are giving billions of pounds of public money to the richest private corporations in the world. A month ago Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, said in an interview that our climate goals will not be met and we should abandon them and let rip to develop AI technology, in the expectation that AI would find a way to solve the problem in the future.
Like White Skin, Black Fuel, this book explores the psychology of our insane status quo. I now feel like I need to dive into reading a lot more psychoanalytic works, because I am persuaded that our situation is so irrational. The authors conclude by showing that the only way out of this is a revolutionary solution. Green Capitalism is not going to work. Reformism isn't going to work. It is revolution or nothing. ...more
This is a great little book that I really recommend everyone vaguely on the Left reads. Erik Olin Wright was a very influential Marxist Sociologist foThis is a great little book that I really recommend everyone vaguely on the Left reads. Erik Olin Wright was a very influential Marxist Sociologist for decades, and he compressed the breadth of his learning and experience into this brief book, designed for a popular readership and for use by activists, before discovering he had terminal leukaemia and dying as he finished it. It is meant as a theoretical and practical guide for activists from across the broad Left for strategies to help to mitigate, resist and overcome Capitalism.
Although he comes from the Marxist tradition, Marxists would find lots to disagree with him about. He presents a series of ways of being an anticapitalist, including a Marxist revolution, Democratic Socialism, Social Democracy, Anarchism, and building Cooperatives, and he rules Revolution out as a strategy worth pursuing because it ends up causing too much damage. He comes from the Analytical Marxist tradition, and apparently many of the people who were part of this tradition ended up leaving Marxism behind altogether. I was in a pub with a group of Anarchists a couple of days ago, and they claimed Wright as an Anarchist.
I think your reaction to this book depends heavily on what your background is, and what reading you have done before. I was reading this in Liverpool at The World Transformed, and Wendy Liu (author of Abolish Silicon Valley) saw it poking out of my pocket, and remarked on me reading it. I asked if it was good, and she said it was but it was pretty basic, but would be a good book to recommend to someone just learning about the Left. Having come to this book after reading lots of books by Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Miliband and others, I could see lots of objections to the content that he just passes over without mentioning. Wright is advocating Reformism, and dismissing Revolution. But this is a debate that's been going on for over 150 years, and many people have very clear ideas about why Reformism is impossible. Wright doesn't deal with these critiques. However, as a Marxist I do have to accept that a Revolution doesn't appear to be on the horizon under present conditions, and Marx's schematic of a society increasingly polarised between two classes isn't exactly how history has developed.
Wright is making arguments about how we challenge and overcome Capitalism in the here and now. However, it is obvious that he is talking about how we deal with it in the advanced economies of the West, and doesn't have much to say about the situation elsewhere in the world. When he dismisses the Russian and Chinese revolutions as authoritarian, he ignores the fact that they have provided an alternative to the Capitalist West which has provided intellectual and material support for Socialist, Revolutionary and Decolonial movements across the world, and the fact that anticapitalist and anticolonial struggles are infinitely weaker now. When he describes the success of the postwar Social Democratic order in Europe, he ignores the fact that, for example, the 1945 Labour government that built the NHS, social housing, radically improved educational opportunities and social mobility, did so on the basis of ongoing support for Imperialism, and by robbing the global South.
I know that Wright obviously knows all of this, and I assume that he is leaving it all out because he was writing a simplified book aimed mainly at activists in the USA and Europe. I also think that his focus upon gradual, evolutionary change leaves aside the question of immanent climate collapse. Regardless of my reservations I do think this is a book very well worth reading for anyone on the left, whatever your level of background knowledge and experience is. ...more
A masterful work of history that is essential reading for those seeking to understand the past 15 years. Tooze is an economic historian who has been wA masterful work of history that is essential reading for those seeking to understand the past 15 years. Tooze is an economic historian who has been winning a wide audience and has become a very influential public intellectual, respected by people across the political spectrum from Marxists to Right Wing intellectuals like Nial Ferguson and Peter Hitchens. I paid a lot of attention to many of the events analysed in this book. Reading about the economic crash of 2008 during a period of unemployment is the beginning of my political radicalisation, which then escalated when Bernie Sanders ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination and Jeremy Corbyn ran for the Labour Party leadership in 2015. But, I learned a lot from this book. The chapters on Germany were particularly eye opening and covered information I wasn't aware of. There are two major take aways to be gleaned from reading this book. It shows that the West provoked the war in the Ukraine. This book was published in the Summer of 2018, almost four years before the current war in Ukraine, and it clearly illustrates the ways in which the United States, NATO and the EU provoked Russia through trying to expand their sphere of influence Eastward. Tooze is not a Putin apologist at all. Secondly, it shows over and over again that Democracy and Capitalism are not compatible, and that there is an international consensus among an integrated political and economic elite to do everything possible to suppress Democracy in order to facilitate the stability of Capitalism. It is a broadly accepted truism in the West at least, that Democracy and Capitalism go hand in hand, and it simply isn't true at all. In order to have democracy we have to overthrow capitalism. ...more
I have finally read this book, which is central to the corpus of Marxist, Decolonial and Black Radical thinking. It is a sober, sombre, serious work oI have finally read this book, which is central to the corpus of Marxist, Decolonial and Black Radical thinking. It is a sober, sombre, serious work of history that filled me with a gradually increasing level of rage as I read it. The version of history that is broadly understood in the West is so ridiculously untrue that it is absurd. This book should be mandatory reading in schools. Instead the reactionaries in the West are trying to prevent people from learning this history, and are boasting of their own ignorance. ...more
It's hard to assign a rating to a book like Capital. On the one had it is one of the greatest expressions of human genius ever written, by one of the It's hard to assign a rating to a book like Capital. On the one had it is one of the greatest expressions of human genius ever written, by one of the greatest genius' of all time. Capital is surely the most influential book since the Bible. On the other the book can be an agonisingly slow, boring and difficult read. Volume 1 is a lot more readable, mixing complex economic formulae and equations with some brilliant sociological and historical analysis that is easier for a lay reader to engage with. Volume 2 is just the complex economics. Volume 3 is between the two. This volume focuses a lot on the place of rent and landlords in a Capitalilst economic system, and also explains Marx' theory of the tendancy for profit to fall (a key concept). I am proud to have finished the whole series. I intend to read David Harvey's companion to Capital soon to help me digest and interpret it all....more
Grace Blakely is one of the most impressive of the new wave of young Left Wing public intellectuals to have emerged over the past few years of intelleGrace Blakely is one of the most impressive of the new wave of young Left Wing public intellectuals to have emerged over the past few years of intellectual ferment in the UK. It makes a change for the UK to actually be at the cutting edge of ideas and events again after years of torpor. She writes clearly and well about the financialization of the UK and the world economy, clearly illustrating how it was planned and engineered by a coalition of right wing interests to benefit a small, wealthy elite. She also has some clear prescriptions for how we fight back and reverse this process. As she is a Marxist she understands and shows how this is rooted in power and class dynamics, unlike many liberal economists. Some of the economics is hard to grasp if you are a layperson like me but I encourage everyone to read this book. We have to understand economics if we want to change the world for the better and change the balance of power. ...more
A pretty agonizing read. Volume 1 is tough going, but there are some really gripping sections of narrative. Volume 2 is just hardcore economics withouA pretty agonizing read. Volume 1 is tough going, but there are some really gripping sections of narrative. Volume 2 is just hardcore economics without letup. It's far less accessible. I'm going to have to read the David Harvey companion to better understood what I've read. ...more
A good introduction to many of the leading figures on the Marxist Left today. Kunkel was a celebrated young novelist who was hyped as one of the best A good introduction to many of the leading figures on the Marxist Left today. Kunkel was a celebrated young novelist who was hyped as one of the best up and coming writers in America when he published Indecision in 2005. He seems to have abandoned literature in favor of politics, a bit like Arundhati Roy. I'd be interested to follow up on some of the figures he discusses here, though politics is moving so quickly it feels a little bit out of date already. ...more
A good argument in favour of economic planning, and against the ideology of letting markets run the economy. I've been meaning to read this for years,A good argument in favour of economic planning, and against the ideology of letting markets run the economy. I've been meaning to read this for years, and the only thing that counts against it is that by the time I finally did I was already pretty familiar with all the arguments. It's a great introductory text though. ...more
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