Abstract: Critically discussing Malm’s (2018) The Progress of this Storm, this review article directly relates to a recent discussion inHistorical Materialism concerning a major epistemic rift in the eco-Marxist debate (Cox vs Hornborg). The article provides an overview of Malm’s argument to subsequently refute his definition of historical materialism in terms of an abstract ‘substance monist property dualism’ as a relapse into a traditional materialism, the critique of which defines historical materialism since theFeuerbach Theses. This relapse is expressed in a false equation of nature and environment, a ‘fossil fixation’ of sorts that is criticised on the basis ofNegative Dialectics (Adorno 2004) uncovering, furthermore, an authoritarian streak that leads to problematic political consequences. Malm’s book does not have it all wrong, however; its insistence on urgency as well as on the difference of nature and society are also valid. Even its misunderstandings correctly, if unintendedly, call for more prudence and precision in using terms like nature, construction or dialectics. Further on, collaboration of leftist theory-activists is favoured over their division into opposing intellectual camps – a division that is potentially deepened by the imbalance in the book between strong rhetoric and comparably weak content.
Keywords: climate change, critical theory, historical materialism, metabolic rift, negative dialectics, world-ecology
Author: Dr. Michael Kleinod
Affiliation: Department of Southeast Asian Studies, Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies, University of Bonn
Research interests: critical theory, Marxist sociology, postcapitalist transformation, praxeology, societal nature relations
It is eminently possible to be Marxist and mistaken. (A. Malm)
Only the will’s a priori ontical nature, which is extant like a quality, permits us, without being absurd, to make the judgment that the will creates its objects, the actions. It belongs to the world it works in. (T.W. Adorno)
Impending climate collapse testifies to capitalism’s metabolic rift, and it produces a rift in current eco-Marxist thinking. Definite identifications with either the oneor the other side of this latter rift obstruct the view on a meaningful overcoming of the former. This review essay concerns one recent and rather extreme case of such dogmatic partisanship, Andreas Malm’sThe Progress of this Storm (2018; henceforthStorm), which has received praise
In a first step, the general argument of the book is presented, followed by a brief dissection of some of its central claims in order to subsequently delve into central epistemological flaws and resulting political conclusions. Some of the book’s positive teachings are appreciated further on in order to conclude on a less divisive style of eco-Marxist debate-in-action.
Storm
As the climate heats up and thoughts turn feverish, Malm rolls up his sleeves to declutter the fundaments of social theory. The overall argument is as straight as it is principal: ‘[…] any theory for the warming condition should have the struggle to stabilise climate – with the demolition of the fossil economy the necessary first step – as its practical, if only ideal, point of reference. It should clear up space for action and resistance’ (p. 18). Theory has a role either in prolonging and deepening or in overcoming ‘the warming condition’, and Storm is to set our heads straight. As climate change proves that nature and society are ‘colliding forces’ (p. 16), any claims which blur the distinction, such as on the social constructedness of nature, are blatantly false. Rather, ‘the more problems of environmental degradation we confront, the more imperative to pick the unities apart in their poles’ (p. 61; emphasis original) in order to inform ‘revolutionary ecological practice’ (p. 174). Siding with the metabolic rift camp against Bruno Latour, Jason W. Moore and others, the theoretical stance most conducive to the central target of ‘taking down the fossil fuel economy’ (p. 175) is climate realism based on a ‘substance monist property dualism’ (p. 59). Malm is consequently credited by metabolic rift proponents as saviour of ‘historical materialism as the only credible alternative’ from ‘those fashionable ecological philosophies clouding our understanding’.
Headwind
(i) Empty abstractions
Contrary to what one would expect from an update of historical materialism, and for an acknowledged historian of capitalism
Nature is a soil for society, the fold out of which it grew and the envelope it can never break out of, but just as a tree can be told from its soil, society can be differentiated from nature, because it has shot up from the ground and branched off in untold directions over the course of what we refer to as history. (p. 58, emphasis original)
This quote goes along with the dialectical idea that humans are nature and, as far as creating society is in their nature, society is natural too. But this very general and abstract dialectic should not be the point where the undermining of the ‘envelope’ by a specific social formation is concerned. This kind of materialism conceals rather than clarifies the role of history in separating nature and society. In fact, this quote frustrates its own intention to establish society as qualitatively different from and antagonistic to nature: it grows like a tree, naturally it seems, out of nature (or is it ‘material substance’…?). So where is the problem, then? A tree certainly does not undermine the soil like capitalism does (or feudalism, for that matter). The argument thus produces judgements like:
Exactly as material, the tree and the chainsaw inhabit the same forest: that is why one can fell the other. But they also follow different laws of motion. That is also why one can fell the other. (p. 59)
This is as far as a ‘substance monist property dualism’ gets us: it explains neither the presence of the chainsaw in particular, nor the use it is put to, nor the difference between this chainsaw and, for example, Amerindian hunters or post-religious tree-huggers. It inadequately frames the historical separation between man and nature in terms of an abstract ahistorical unity.
But wait! The concept of emergence shall explain how society springs from the same substance as nature: ‘[…] an emergent property is a property of the system resulting from the organisation of its parts’ (p. 67). Out of combinations, that is, new properties arise. Alas, as foundational as this idea is to a sociological understanding of society (see for example Durkheim’s faits sociaux), it emphatically does notexplain how, why or when ‘emergence’ actually happens, it only registers. Furthermore, it can only account for the coming about ofdifferent properties – but, again, not of utterlyantagonistic ones, which seems necessary however to account for capitalist society’s ‘singular ability to affect aspects of nature so as to touch off a crisis’ (p. 70, emphasis added). Malm is consequently unable to convincingly rebut criticisms of this stance, such as that a property dualism merely shifts the problem of dualistic thinking, and we are left with mere assertions that there is ‘reason to believe’ that ‘some sort of solution must exist’ (p. 64).
The poverty of such a notion of historical materialism is compounded by the scarcity of references to anything specifically social, be it norms, roles, institutions, social structure, division of labour, domination, class, habitus, etc. In the same vein, although reference is of course made to capital or capitalism, specification is also sorely missed in this regard (see below). Instead, Storm leaves us with empty abstractions and a declarative, apodictic style of argument.
(ii) False equation
Storm maintains that nature and society can be told apart. The analyst needs to ‘sift out’ (p. 60) in particular cases to see ‘what we can change, in relation to what must be taken as given’ (p. 173). This should be a procedure ‘easy to conduct’ by ‘a crude test: have humans constructed the component, or have they not’ (p. 60)? Against the argument of Latour, Malm’s favourite punching ball, that there may be no case where the nature/society distinction is analytically applicable or useful, the example of the ozone layer (exactly a ‘favourite case of Latour’s’) is to make a point to the contrary: to Malm, ‘the manufacturing of chlorofluorocarbons’ is ‘[o]ne obviously social component’, while ‘the way the chlorine atoms of those substances react with ozone molecules’ should be a ‘no less obvious natural component’ (p. 60). Yet, in addition to problems such as whether atoms, apart from being first of all social concepts (below), are not concepts about ‘nature’; whether ozone is not also produced by ‘society’; or why we have a problem if the reaction between both is purely ‘natural’ – the most important question here is: How does the nature/society distinction really help in this case? In fact, it appears superfluous – if not utterly mistaken on this level of analysis. For if, following Marx’s central definition of labour in general,
If we subtract the total amount of useful labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat, the linen, etc., a material substratum is always left. This substratum is furnished by nature without human intervention. When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself; i.e. he can only change the form of the materials.
Marx 1982, p. 133.
Storm emphasises the second sentence as this seems to drive home Malm’s point of Marx’s supposed insistence on ‘a sharp line between nature and society’ (p. 160). This is questionable because although a difference between nature and society is indicated here, it is also made clear that it is one in abstraction, not in the empirical world: the ‘subtracting’ of labour can only be hypothetical, and the ‘material substratum’ is thus, rather than an empirical datum, ‘the utmost abstraction’ (see below). But if the social metabolism and its crisis are concerned we can, by definition, not abstract from labour. It is therefore inconclusive to argue that if we ‘[…] “can dispense with the notion that something like climate change can be analyzed in its quasi-independent social and natural dimensions” […] we can dispense with the notion of analysing it all’ (p. 181, quoting Moore). Indeed, why should abstract categories like nature and society be more fruitful in analysing certain observations than elaborate concepts of, say, use-value and exchange-value; labour and capital; or chemical formulas?
Storm is therefore correct in claiming that ‘nature is real’ (p. 156) but wrong in suggesting it as empirically discernible. Its fixation on fossil fuels and climate, and their mostly implicit, yet false, equation with nature per se are based on a flawed epistemology that is bound to make for problematic politics.
Eye of the Storm
(i) Epistemological relapse
The relation of materialism and constructionism can be seen as the book’s main concern. And this relation is framed, according to the central claim of a nature/society (‘property’) dualism, in terms of an undialectical either/or: a good materialism is non-constructionist. This is bought with an unfortunate relapse into the traditional materialism prior to Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. The underlying epistemology is well captured in the following statement:
The fact that all sorts of ideas about nature whirl in and around human minds does not justify the conclusion that these cannot be distinguished from that which they are about: […] conceptions of nature are culturally determined, but the referent is not thereby similarly constituted. […] We believe that the mountain […] has certain features […] that exist in themselves regardless of how the hikers have perceived them. (pp. 26—27; emphasis original)
According to the false equation just mentioned, nature is equated here with mountains while hikers represent society, or culture – whereas the positionality of the thinking subject, the author himself and his own cultural determination, i.e. his ‘belief’ in independent ‘features […] in themselves’ etc., fall out of the picture. The subject appears as being of a different ontological order, somehow external to the nature/culture distinction and with some direct wire to the object. Like the subject’s own cultural mediation, the historicity of the object is not reflected and turns into a sheer given. This speaks of an intellectual attitude of contemplation that is outdated at least since the Feuerbach Theses.
Consequently, any thing grasped as ‘nature’ is never immediately given but rather ‘theutmost abstraction of the subject-matter that is not identical with thinking.
In other words, the claims of constructionism against traditional materialism need to be taken seriously without doing away with materialism. Even though there is no getting around the fact that nature is always given only as mediated by culture, or society: that which thought or categories refer to is never, and can never be, socially produced in its entirety. Bluntly, materialism must be thought through constructionism – not: either/or, but: as-well-as. Therefore, Malm is again right that a difference must be maintained between thought and thing, society and nature; but ‘[b]ecause entity is not immediate, because it is only through the concept, we should begin with the concept, not with the mere datum’.
(ii) Authoritarian streak
Malm’s theory and politics of “the warming condition” are expressly rooted in extreme states of affection that call for haste and hurry in the face of imminent ecocide. We are advised to ‘dare to feel the panic’ (p. 224), and ‘ecological class hatred’ is suggested as ‘perhaps the emotion most dearly needed’ (p. 195); it appears that we should quit ‘extraordinary lengths of sophistry’ (p. 36) and ‘swing into action’ (p. 76). This affective base plus a fossil fixation that includes empty abstractions in place of sociological specification translates into a blurry and problematic political outlook. Storm talks, of course, about ‘revolutionary ecological practice’ aiming at ‘the total expropriation of the top one to ten percent’ (p. 190), and it calls for a ‘militantly and efficiently anti-fascist’ attitude (p. 140). However, it does not seem to follow from anywhere in the overall argument that or why such political practiceneeds to be anti-fascist or democratic since, ‘[t]he first precondition […] is the destruction of business as usual – a matter of political content, which might very well require a certain democratic form but cannot be reduced to it’ (p. 152, emphasis original). How is this to be understood exactly? In fact, given the urgency and hugeness of the task, combined with the lack of any elaborate notion of class and capital, it is difficult to see why democracy should be truly necessary. In this situation some kind of ‘ecocracy’ might be more efficient. Nothing inStorm – least of all the refashioning of historical materialism as emergent ‘property dualism’ – appears to prevent such a conclusion. Thea priori fixation on environmental impact mentioned earlier side-lines the actual nub of the matter – class – and remains spellbound by the central political aporia of our times, class vs. environment.
As problematic perhaps as such systematic blindness regarding the social core of ecological relations is, the axiomatic, declarative, and dogmatic style of argument does not tolerate much reasoning or consideration where it would be most necessary, such as in: ‘The subalterns of the world are the bearers of truth: such is the springboard for scientific socialism’ (p. 136); or, ‘Today, “science is not the enemy; suppression of science […] is the enemy” […]. Surviving the warming condition requires full alignment with cutting-edge science’ (p. 132). Such dogmas, as seen here, often come in a military lingo (‘victory’, ‘outpost’ etc.) as part of a radical pose rather than of a truly radical argument (i.e. one that gets at the roots).
A related problematic aspect also in terms of politics is an ostensible identification with one camp of the intellectual rift, and its complacent stylisation as the only haven of true radicalism. The manly gesture of ditching the ‘other’ effortlessly further deepens the rift among an intellectual group that should rather be united; even more so where the axiomatic declaration of inconsistent half-truths fails to live up to strong rhetoric. Instead of offering a convincing take on how exactly capital is involved in the warming condition, Storm engages in just the kind of ‘arid semantic quibble’ (p. 181) criticised in authors such as Jason W. Moore, who appear, however, more serious (and more successful, in my opinion) in pursuing a proper conceptualisation of the global predicament. Malm’s style of examining such arguments, as in world-ecology, is that of denouncing his own simplistic misconceptions for the sake of some ‘rhetorical point-scoring’.
Tailwind
Above critique notwithstanding, Malm is still correct about many things. First of all, alarmism is certainly not misplaced, problematic as it surely is. Second, Malm is right to stress that eradicating the category of nature from theory eradicates any chance of explaining and criticising capitalist ecology and its attendant crisis. One can thus partly agree on his criticism of ANT’s collapsing of distinctions between who is able and responsible to politically act, and thus to make a meaningful change in the crisis-ridden social metabolism.
Even major fallacies as well as Malm’s own ‘semantic quibble’ over concepts like construction or agency lead, at the very least, to a legitimate call for more care in our choice of words. To suggest that certain aspects of nature, like fossil fuels, mountains or the cosmos, are ‘literally’ and entirely constructed or socially produced certainly invite avoidable misunderstandings. Aspects of what nature may refer to are certainly socially produced to a higher degree (such as forests, animals etc.) than are others (such as the planet, fossils, the cosmos etc.). It should be made clear how such terms are applied and on what level of analysis and abstraction. In Storm, nature tends to refer to the environment or elements thereof – as if humans weren’t nature, and climate activism was not a way in which ‘nature defends itself’.
Calm
As much as the current situation calls for immediate action, alarmism and panic as bases of theory results in short circuits, as paradigmatically documented in Storm. A major task for left intellectuals is thus indeed to ‘dare to feel the panic’ but not get panicky. This means staying true to historical materialism’s ‘password’ (Bloch), the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. As Bloch cautions, philosophy in service of revolutionary praxis emphatically does not mean to cut back on theory in order to immediately ‘swing into action’. But as much as only a good theory can make for good praxis, theory is itself practice to begin with, and a social one at that: theory as part of good revolutionary action therefore requires that progressives be in productive and open conversation. In contrast, however, ‘the’ left consists, more than in anything else, in an endless internal trench war about who is more correct. The combination inStorm of a polemic and flaws, as well as an all-too-decided siding with one specific ‘trench’, only prolongs and deepens this unproductive way of intellectual dispute. And it brings this book much too close to capitalist narcissistic puffery that hardly ever quite believes itself. By taking climate chaos as its central conceptual and political pivot, it remains fully within the scope of nature domination and its false alternative, promoting the ‘subjugation to nature’ instead of a subjugation of nature,
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