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A review by natsilene
Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century by Andreas Malm
3.0
Malm's book aged very fast, as it was obvious. It was finished in April 2020, not even two months since the start of the Covid pandemic, since then the virus eventually started to relief its toll from the first victims, whealty, white, older inhabitants of the global north, the ones who will be the last to bear the brunt of global warming or that do it in the mildest way and start tearing up throug the global south, in India, Brazil, Peru, Indonesia. Now, in august 2021 the key expression codifying the uneven balance of this pandemic is vaccine apartheid.
But we know all of this already, this is just to say that this book already aged...and not so well
It is all very clearly argued and the dots connected in crystal clear ways, the coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis display similarities as many noted more than a year ago but also many differences and not acknowledging this differences can work against us. The author could however displayed some more intellectual humility between an enthusiastic willingness to engage in petty leftist infighting, of which he shows plenty in his goofy doing away with anarchist thought(s) and the brief sterile and juvenile provocation of "latourians, postumanists, neomaterialists and other hybridizers" and a quite eerily naive championing of the state "hard power".
While well outlining wat can be done with the power of a state contrasting the climate crisis that mimicks what states have done to contrast covid but are not willing to do regarding a threat way more colossal he goes too far at forcing parallels between what has to be done in the future to prevent this crisis that can only get worse getting to a civilization threatening levels and implications that, just like in the past, just like for solving other issues (that won't get solved anyways) it's just about who controls the state's hard power
And do we really need, after decades of red scare, these continuous referring to Lenin, Marx, Luxembourg? Because no, life on Earth is not Russian Empire 1917
But we know all of this already, this is just to say that this book already aged...and not so well
It is all very clearly argued and the dots connected in crystal clear ways, the coronavirus pandemic and climate crisis display similarities as many noted more than a year ago but also many differences and not acknowledging this differences can work against us. The author could however displayed some more intellectual humility between an enthusiastic willingness to engage in petty leftist infighting, of which he shows plenty in his goofy doing away with anarchist thought(s) and the brief sterile and juvenile provocation of "latourians, postumanists, neomaterialists and other hybridizers" and a quite eerily naive championing of the state "hard power".
While well outlining wat can be done with the power of a state contrasting the climate crisis that mimicks what states have done to contrast covid but are not willing to do regarding a threat way more colossal he goes too far at forcing parallels between what has to be done in the future to prevent this crisis that can only get worse getting to a civilization threatening levels and implications that, just like in the past, just like for solving other issues (that won't get solved anyways) it's just about who controls the state's hard power
And do we really need, after decades of red scare, these continuous referring to Lenin, Marx, Luxembourg? Because no, life on Earth is not Russian Empire 1917