Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

21st Century Crisis Theory: A Sketch...

Preamble:
--2024 Update: the author mentioned in an interview that this book was a rushed effort, and looking back it was an engaging leap with many loose-ends...
--Since author’s PhD thesis became the revelatory Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, Malm seems determined to release academic papers into the reading public.
--I first read Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline comparing/contrasting Extinction Rebellion with the role of sabotage by radical flanks in the censored history of social struggle.
--Next, this book sketches out 21st century crises by combining the best of:
i) critical epidemiology
ii) Fossil Capital
iii) wartime economy
...All of this haunts so much of my attention, so it was a treat to read Malm's brainstorming.

Highlights:

1) COVID, Climate, Capitalism:
--We start with unpacking the capitalist response to COVID. The distinction of essential vs. nonessential production is quite striking as some halted automobile production were temporarily transitioned to ventilator production, distillers to sanitizers, fashion brands to medical supplies, etc., as well as some nationalization of utilities.
…This is precisely a pivotal demand of climate change activism as part of a “Just Transition� from fossil capital to public green energy/public transportation/care economy. Indeed, a care economy includes less working hours (so much toil and environmental degradation just to pay off private debts, which are passive income for elites: Why Can't You Afford a Home?) and more free time to build socio-ecological communities.
--A capitalist state (prioritizing bailing out capitalism) will always try to push the costs of crises onto the public, with the public fighting for scraps from the table. So many social needs can technically be fulfilled in egalitarian manners, but it comes down to bargaining power.
--So why did capitalism react so differently to COVID vs. climate change? One useful tidbit is COVID’s reversed “timeline of victimhood�, where COVID immediately spread to major cities (centers of capital) and key capitalist countries (esp. in Europe/US) which happen to be the lead importers in “unequal ecological exchange� (draining poorer countries: polluting production/raw materials extraction/waste disposal). Luxury cruise ships, celebrities, etc. fell in short order.
--While the capitalist response to COVID seems drastic, it is still much more a militaristic reaction rather than long-term mitigation. Even liberal/progressive epidemiology technocrats (ex. Laurie Garrett's 1994 The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance) were well aware of the mounting inevitability of pandemics due to some vague liberal notion of “globalization� and “Neoliberalism's� lack of social preventive measures.
--The radicals in the field (critical epidemiology; see Rob Wallace's Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19) are much clearer in connecting capitalism’s viral growth-as-survival in industrial agriculture (mono cash crops, esp. beef/soy bean/palm oil/wood products) to rampant deforestation/land-use disruptions/mass concentrated factory farming that decimate biodiversity’s buffers to zoonotic spillovers.
...Malm also highlights the capitalist marketing of “bush meat� beyond local subsistence consumption, especially the troubling luxury marketing. I’d like to see more synthesis with Max Ajl’s focus on Global South small farmers/pastoralists regarding ecological land-use (A People’s Green New Deal).
--Critical Epidemiology relates to Critical Vulnerability Theory, which looks beyond liberal notions of “natural disasters� as primarily geophysical issues. Instead, such disasters are a release to the mounting pressures of social vulnerability + natural hazards. I first dived into this for addressing the social factors of famines (Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World) as well as Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. We see this social vulnerability described in Engel’s Conditions of the Working Class in England, and Rosa Luxemburg:

‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called � capitalist society, in its purest culture.�

...Malm advances Critical Vulnerability Theory to climate change by stressing the interactions where social forces alter natural hazards, thus the “dialectics of disaster�.
--The capitalist roots need to be highlighted: “Capitalâ€� is the process of accumulating money. Capitalist property rights (John Locke) treats the “wild Common of Natureâ€� as “w²¹²õ³Ù±ðâ€� unless it can be converted to exchange-value (sell on market) by enclosing it (privatizing, followed by a linear production/distribution/consumption/waste process that violates the recycling processes of life).
...This is a tragedy of capitalism, a reversal of the ; this relates to James O'Connor’s 2nd contradiction of capitalism, as well as market “externalities� (The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power) etc. For the next steps, see degrowth (Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World).

Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer.

-Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1

2) Chronic Emergencies and War Communism:
--Regarding chronic emergencies, Malm distinguishes the existential crisis of climate change (we should call it Earth Systems crises given the additional crises of biodiversity integrity, chemical pollution, nitrogen/phosphorus cycles, land-use soil fertility etc.: Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System) from prior historical “collapses� (i.e. collapses of empires, since those can benefit the masses on the periphery written out of status quo history since they are now freed from needless exploitation.
--I’ve been inspired to explore wartime economies primarily from taking an economic development class by Jim Glassman (author of US Military Industrial Complex’s role in South East Asia capitalist development: Drums of War, Drums of Development: The Formation of a Pacific Ruling Class and Industrial Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, 1945-1980) and Steven Keen’s pragmatic assessment of climate change response mimicking nationalist wartime rationing.
--Malm takes a more radical step than these capitalist wartime analyses to consider the “war communism� of Lenin-era USSR, battered by WWI’s lingering famines, foreign invasion by the major capitalist powers, plagues (including the 1918 Great Influenza pandemic; need to read more on USSR’s pioneering public health efforts here), etc. Lenin diagnosed the systemic roots of the “impending catastrophe� as capitalism/imperialism, and emphasized speed targeting elite privileges and using State power to break business-as-usual.
--Malm applies this to climate change, where State surveillance/data collection can be redirected from targeting citizens to targeting corporations via input/output analysis on ecological footprint (ex. tropical land appropriated) to plan cuts/redirections and to reverse unequal exchange: for more on decolonization, see:
-A People’s Green New Deal
-The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth
--USSR’s rapid industrialization and “siege socialism� war production (vs. capitalist invasion, Nazi invasion, US/NATO Cold War) has overwhelmed “Ecological Leninism� (the state set laws for conservation, where ecological studies contributed to land-use planning and rehabilitation, citing Douglas R. Weiner. Anti-capitalist ecological sciences also flourished. So much to synthesize with agroecology, agroforestry, etc.).
--Malm rushed the “war communism� section, lacking in both historical analysis and today's applicability (i.e. how do we build bargaining power?).