book reviews

By Tom Wetzel and James Tracy - Firestorm Coop, July 7, 2022

By Timothée Parrique - Timothée Parrique, July 3, 2022

The best the degrowth literature has to offer served on a silver platter. That’s how I would describe The Future is Degrowth: A Guide to a World beyond Capitalism(June 2022) by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan.[1] Reading it, I felt like Neo in The Matrix learning everything there is to know about Kung Fu all at once – “I know degrowth.” 

This kind of synthesis was long overdue. The degrowth literature has grown rather large and I cannot think of a single text that maps it all. Research on degrowth used to be my favourite guide to degrowth but there is only so much you can do in a 20-page article (plus, the literature has more than doubled since it was published in 2018). Degrowth: A vocabulary for a new era (2014) is a good pot luck of perspectives but lacks coherence and depth due to its multi-author, short-entry format. I tried my best in The political economy of degrowth (2019) but the end result is rather cumbersome. 

In The Future is Degrowth, the authors have achieved a colossal Spring cleaning of the field. Sufficiency, dépense, commoning, pluriverse, unequal exchange, conviviality, self-determination, and many more (I have counted more than sixty concepts throughout the book). With such an exhaustive span, this book is to degrowth what the IPCC is to climate science: the best available literature review on the topic. 

But warning: this book is not for the academically faint hearted. If you’re looking for a wide-audience introduction to degrowth, this is not one of them, and I would rather recommend The Case for Degrowth[G. Kallis, S. Paulson, G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria], a shorter, less demanding way of covering the basics. If you’ve never heard of the topic at all, Less is more[Jason Hickel], Post Growth: Life after capitalism[Tim Jackson], and Degrowth [Giorgos Kallis] are also good places to start. 

The Future is Degrowth is rather long (more than 100,000 words) but neatly organised. The literature is chiselled into six tidy lists: 3 dimensions and 7 critiques of growth, 5 currents and 3 principles of degrowth, 6 clusters of proposals, and 3 strategies for change. The book itself is divided in seven chapters. After a long introduction (12% of the total book length), the first two chapters deal with understanding economic growth and its critics (that’s about half of the book). The remaining chapters follow Erik Olin Wright’s famous triad: Chapter 4 is about the desirability of degrowth (11%), Chapter 5 about its viability (13%), and Chapter 6 about its achievability (11%). This leaves us with a short concluding chapter (5%) titled “The future of degrowth.” 

With such a monumental piece of work, I could not resolve myself to write a short review, which would feel like summarising all seasons of Game of Thrones in a single tweet. This book deserves a proper dissection, and so I will here process chapter by chapter, taking all the space needed to summarise its content and, in the end, analyse its (many) strengths and (very few) weaknesses.

By Graeme Goossens - Candian Dimension, April 18, 2022

I can’t forget those crisp November mornings. I’d stand respectfully still, a Scout’s red sash across my shoulder. I remember the veteran steadying himself with his cane, standing as straight as he still could, crying silently as the “Last Post” rang out.

“How many of you would have fought?” Ms. Allen had asked our class.

Every tiny hand was raised.

The heroism of the Second World War was etched into my memory.

For the left, there are few national myths fit for duty, but author, activist and organizer Seth Klein has called up the the greatest conflict in history to serve as the key parable in the fight against global warming. Just as Canada mobilized for the war, it must now mobilize for climate change. Klein’s recent book, A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, published by ECW Press in September 2020, makes a powerful case against defeatism and timidity.

Yet despite his impressive call to action (A Good War spent 12 weeks on the CBC Books non-fiction bestseller list), Klein misinterprets Canada’s wartime history and misunderstands the capitalist state. Ultimately, his cross-class strategy cannot deliver climate justice.

Klein’s vision of climate politics is unapologetically state-centric. The stunning wartime transformation of the Canadian economy, vigorously directed by the federal government, proves what is possible. Such a transformation can simultaneously create a more equal society, a development good in itself, while winning public support for a difficult program. And if this seems unimaginable in today’s political climate, Klein argues the war teaches us that public opinion can be shifted through bold leadership from actors primarily, but not exclusively, in the state.

A Good War is written for political impact and as such, Klein gets quickly to the point. The book is structured as a series of lessons we can learn from the wartime experience, introduced in boldface for those too busy to read to the end.

His central argument is a historical comparison: Canada’s success during the Second World War demonstrates what is possible and necessary in our fight against climate change today. So why has such a mobilization not yet been repeated in our contemporary struggle against runaway global warming? Here Klein casts a villain in his story. Though he considers picking the fossil fuel industry, he instead settles on what he terms the “new climate denialism” as the key impediment.

Previous denialism dismissed the science on climate change, but today, our primary enemy is a “way of thinking and practice” that accepts the science while obfuscating its implications. This must be overcome through bold leadership. For Klein, Canada demonstrated such leadership in its fight against fascism. Now, he argues, we must wield it again.

Bold leadership, in his view, must seek to rally the public onside. As in the Second World War, this will involve propaganda, but also efforts to combat the inequality which corrodes a sense of common cause. Wartime plans for post-war social democracy must be echoed by today’s Green New Deal. Klein believes economic barriers can be overcome through a massive expansion of state planning. The government should spend whatever it requires and tax as necessary, but also intervene directly through regulation and the creation of new Crown corporations. Concrete ideas such as a jobs guarantee, a federal high-speed rail network and an inheritance tax add texture, but Klein’s argument does not hang on policy specifics.

In part, his text reads as a direct plea to progressive lawmakers. “This book is an invitation to our political leaders,” he writes in the preface, “to reflect on the leaders who saw us through the Second World War and consider who they want to be, and how they wish to be remembered.” The work was researched through a series of interviews with Canadian politicians, activists and academics. He questions parliamentarians and ministers from various parties on the barriers they face, quotes their responses, and replies in good faith. Central to his rebuttal is a poll commissioned for the book demonstrating strong support for emissions mitigation. “The public,” he argues, “is ahead of our politics.” His role for social movements is ultimately to shift our politicians.

A Good War stands at the cutting edge of progressive climate politics. Along with closely related proposals for a Green New Deal, the climate movement has finally identified a program both adequate for the scale of the challenge and capable of assembling a coalition to achieve it. The book should be lauded for making clear that only the state can coordinate transformation at the speed and scale required.

Yet while A Good War is correct that only the state can bring emissions to zero, Klein is wrong to assume that the state can show the markets who’s boss. And because he misunderstands the capitalist state, he proposes a cross-class coalition aiming to inspire “bold leadership” in our elites. Klein’s program is solid, but this strategy cannot win. Capitalists will fight a just transition tooth and nail, and we cannot overcome their resistance in alliance with them.

By Martin Empson - Climate & Capitalism, March 26, 2022

Understanding the growing combination of racism, climate science denial, and fossil fuel promotion.

Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective
WHITE SKIN, BLACK FUEL
On the Danger of Fossil Fascism
Verso Books, 2021

As regular readers of my blog will be aware, I think that Andreas Malm, even where I disagree with key points of his argument, is one of the most stimulating Marxist authors on environmental politics. So it was with eager anticipation that I looked forward to this new publication “one the dangers of fossil fascism” that Malm has co-authored with the network the Zetkin Collective, a group of scholars and activists “working on the political ecology of the far right.”

The book does multiple things. It opens with a study of the far-right and fascist movements and looks at their “anti-climate politics” and asks “what would it mean to live in a world both hotter and further to the right” than it is today. It argues that the far-right’s fixation with anti-climate views is closely tied to its anti-immigration perspective and the way that developing capitalism associated technology (and particularly fossil fuel technologies) with white supremacy. The authors argue in the introduction:

“[The book] traces lineages of resurfacing ideas and contends that white skin and black fuel have been coupled for long time — indeed, machines powered by fossil fuels were infused with racism from the very first moment of their global deployment. The European incubator for skin and fuel was an empire… It is out contention that one cannot understand recent developments [of the far right] or their possible continuation and aggravation, without such a longer view.”

Much of the first part of White Skin, Black Fuel is a study of the reality of far-right politics. This links various aspects of conspiracy theory (white replacement) and Islamic takeover, with wider hatreds of immigrants and Muslims with anti-scientific and views that can only be described as pro-fossil fuel industry on climate change. The discussion of the specifics of these ideas are detailed and for anti-fascist readers they are at times depressing ∞ detailing the extent to which they have become mainstream. Shockingly the growth of the far right and the mainstreaming of their arguments around climate and immigration have pulled the center left towards them. The authors note, for instance, that in Denmark, the social democrats “came close to another line of reasoning: in a warming world, it is even more imperative to patrol borders and send people home” as a result of the growth of the far-right.

By Wayne Price - Anarkismo, February 14, 2022

This book is popular on the right. Its thesis is that there is a Marxist movement (or set of movements) which is taking over much of U.S. society. Marxists supposedly dominate public schools, universities, the media, teacher unions and other unions, the anti-racist movement, the ecological movement, business boardrooms (!), and the Democratic Party—and therefore the presidency and Congress. This is mad on the face of it, yet American Marxism has been a best seller for weeks. Its author is a Fox tv performer, a former part of the Reagan administration, and the author of a series of books. Personally I find the book poorly written and illogical, stuffed with lengthy quotations from friends and foes, yet obviously many people like it. Therefore it is worth looking at.

There are some things which Mark Levin gets right. Marx’s theories have been used as rationalizations and ideologies justifying “the enslavement, impoverishment, torture, and death of untold millions” (p. 243). It may be argued that this was not Marx’s intention, and that his world view was originally based in radical democracy and the emancipation of the working class—and that there has always been a minority of Marxists who have held to this vision. It may be claimed that his analysis of how capitalism works is highly useful (I agree but Levin strongly dissents). However this may be, Marxism has repeatedly led to bureaucratic-totalitarian states which oppressed and murdered millions of workers, peasants, and others.

Many on the Left have admired and even worshipped these repressive regimes and their Marxist leaders. For example, recently, on July 11th, thousands of Cubans nationwide demonstrated and the Communist state repressed their protests. Yet part of the Left offered its support to the Cuban state (as did the leadership of Black Lives Matter). Some Leftists, such as Bernie Sanders, opposed that state’s crackdown, but many others were silent at best. They “changed the topic” to the evils of the U.S. quarantine. This is an important issue, but the reason Cuba was in the news was the popular demonstrations.To focus solely on the crimes of U.S. imperialism, and not offer solidarity to the Cuban protestors, was shameful. However, this does not justify Levin lumping all oppositional movements together as “Marxist” and authoritarian.

By Aragorn Eloff - New Frame, October 5, 2021

A radical collective committed to change in the face of climate collapse calls for global solidarity and a turn to the worker to revolutionise how we relate to the world.

The tone of The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene is set in the opening paragraph with a sobering addendum to the Communist Manifesto’s most well-known sentences: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win. What if the world is already lost?”

This important new book, written by the Salvage Collective – of which well-known science fiction author China Miéville is a member – is a manifesto-like cry to countenance the state of our social and ecological lifeworlds, and to grapple with the question of how “we imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable planet”. Herein, for Salvage, lies the titular concern of the book, which unashamedly wears its politics on its sleeve: the tragedy of the worker is that “she was put to work for the accumulation of capital, from capitalism’s youth, amid means of production not of her choosing, and with a telos of ecological catastrophe”.

How do we think about progressive – even revolutionary – forms of politics when we live “at a point of history where the full horror of the methods of fossil capitalism is becoming clear”, and where, even if capitalism were overthrown tomorrow, we would “inherit productive forces inextricable from mass, trans-species death”?

As we are relentlessly reminded throughout the text, the situation is not good. The current confluence of accelerating ecological crises, most popularly termed the “Anthropocene” or the “sixth mass extinction crisis” is, as Salvage describes, “a megaphase change taking place in microphase time”.

By Sarah Ensor - International Socialism, July 26, 2021

A review of Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World by Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás

Capitalism and the Sea is an engaging new study of capitalism’s transformation of the human relationship to the sea. It uses a Marxist approach to understand how capitalism constantly reinvents itself to maximise profit and, in the process, intensifies exploitation, privatises vast areas of the sea and commodifies the species that inhabit them. The book is divided into sections on “circulation”, “order”, “exploitation”, “appropriation”, “logistics” and “offshore”. However, it is the excellent chapter on appropriation that offers the pivotal argument, detailing how changing capitalism remodels and reshapes how society interacts with the seas and oceans. These reflections demonstrate how capitalists have been able to extend property relations created on land into all those parts of maritime space that modern technology allows them to reach.

Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás carefully describe how capitalism transformed the conventional forms of trade that went before it. Before plantation slavery formed new markets based on the commodification of human beings and their transportation on slave ships, it was necessary to develop the fundaments of a capitalist credit system such as stock exchanges and “bills of exchange”, an early credit instrument that acted as “a store of universal value” (p42). The sea became the subject of centuries of intense legislative activity designed to reproduce the land-based property relations at sea. By the early 17th century, the struggle over maritime law had become whether the sea was to be free, “mare liberum”, or closed, “mare clausum”? Did territorial sovereignty extend into the sea? Could states control which ships went where and what the ships’ masters and owners did when they got there?

For the British state, the dominant imperial power in the 19th century, “freedom of the seas” meant the right to enforce its own economic interests. Thus the British navy attacked China in 1839 to force it to accept imports of opium, despite Chinese attempts to fight an epidemic of addiction. There were legalistic sleights of hand that removed hindrances to trade during wartime such as the Declaration of Paris in 1856, which allowed “enemy goods” to be transported under “neutral flags”.