‘Delay is fatal’: Interview with Andreas Malm
By Diana O’Dwyer & Diarmuid Flood
The following is an excerpt from a Rupture Radio interview with Andreas Malm in which he discusses his last two books ‘Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency’, and ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’.
Andreas begins by outlining the relationship and similarities in origin of the Coronavirus and climate change:
Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
This relationship is multifaceted and exists on many different levels. There are links going in both directions and at different levels of abstraction as well. But most concretely, deforestation is the second most important driver of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. So, after fossil fuel combustion, deforestation is the main cause of anthropogenic climate change. Deforestation is also the main cause of the rise in zoonotic diseases like coronavirus being transferred to humans. Because when you cut down forests or intersect them with roads or build plantations deep inside them, you wreak havoc on the natural habitats of wild animals which carry with them various naturally occurring pathogens. So, for instance, bats carry with them coronaviruses. That's nothing strange. It's part of their ecology. This only becomes a problem when humans destroy the homes of these animals and force them to travel elsewhere and therefore come into contact with human beings.
The Science is totally agreed on this - the single most important driver of the tendency for us to see more and more infectious diseases jumping from animals to human beings is the destruction of the world's forests. Primarily the tropical forests, which not only hold an enormous amount of sequestered carbon, which is released when you destroy those forests, but which also has the greatest biodiversity, including the biodiversity of pathogens which can cause infectious diseases such as coronavirus.
I don't know what the debate looks like in Ireland, but in Sweden and in Germany as well, discussion about the ecological drivers of this problem is non-existent. The entire debate is about; when do we get the vaccine? How do we distribute the vaccine with optimum efficiency? And what kind of restrictions should be in place? Is it the right amount of lockdown or not?
““The Science is totally agreed on this - the single most important driver of the tendency for us to see more and more infectious diseases jumping from animals to human beings is the destruction of the world’s forests.”
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It's only about treating the symptoms. You would imagine that more than one year into this crisis, people would really want to discuss how do we make sure this doesn't happen again? How do we avoid this kind of pandemic in the first place? It’s really strange, but that discussion is just completely absent in my own country and internationally. I'm not aware of any initiative so far to address the cause of this problem, even though we are now more than one year into this crisis.
I cannot think of any concerted attempts from any political actor of any importance to try to mitigate and reverse deforestation. There’s details in all sorts of UN reports about how bad deforestation is and how it's causing this problem, but I have yet to hear of any initiative from any government or any kind of international body that's supposedly representing the collective rationality of the ruling classes to do anything about it.
Diarmuid: You highlight how the response to the pandemic and climate change has actually been quite different. Whereas the outbreak of Covid-19 at least prompted some action from the capitalist states of the world, we still see the same dismissive attitude when it comes to climate change. What causes the difference in response?
There is a difference. In order to respond to the pandemic, capitalist governments have been prepared to intervene into the day-to-day workings of the markets and business life in precisely the fashion that they've said is impossible for climate change. No one from the climate movement has ever suggested anything as intrusive as locking people in their homes and closing down businesses. We've always been told, no, we can't do anything even half as drastic as that. There is a contrast there and it has, I think, a number of different explanations.
One of the reasons is that the coronavirus pandemic from the start afflicted affluent people in the global north. At that point, governments in Europe started freaking out. I'm not saying that was wrong, it's just an interesting contrast to how the climate crisis has been allowed to fester for years, if not decades, because those that have suffered most grievously from global heating have always been and still are people of colour in the global south.
It's not that there’s no impact in the global north where white people live. Of course, there is. But the effects tend to be much more cataclysmic and lethal for people far away from the metropolitan centres of capitalism.
I think that is part of the explanation for the difference in response. There are many other factors as well, including the obvious fact that all these measures taken to combat the pandemic were advertised as temporary discomforts, whereas a transition away from fossil fuels would have to be permanent.
It wouldn't be a matter of stopping the combustion of fossil fuels for a year or two but terminating this process forever. The transition away from fossil fuels is about fundamentally liquidating a whole branch of capital accumulation, namely that which profits from the production of fossil fuels. We can't have any more oil, gas, or coal companies. That alone challenges very powerful, entrenched interests on a more existential level than measures announced as just temporary ones.
However, what I have argued in my book is that if you look more closely, the contrast isn't that big because what states have done is that they have only combated the symptoms that are manifested in this pandemic. Capitalist states have in the same way proven themselves somewhat capable of combating the symptoms of climate disaster, as in evacuating people from a hurricane zone or sending in firefighters to combat wildfires in Australia or in the Pacific Northwest.
That's roughly equivalent to the action that these states have taken in responding to the pandemic while leaving the causes and drivers completely unaddressed so business can return to normal.
Diana: In Climate, Corona, Chronic Emergency you outline the linked ideas of salvage communism and ecological Leninism. What are these concepts and how do they apply in the struggle against climate breakdown?
First of all, I should say that the discussion of ecological war communism and ecological Leninism is a rough and crude sketch in this book. However, I'm happy to say that conversation around ecological communism is emerging.
What I emphasised in my sketch here and in the book is, first of all, that the task for the left in this chronic emergency is logically similar to the task Lenin and other revolutionary Marxists faced when the First World War broke out and that task was and is to transform the acute crisis they faced into a political crisis.
The way that Lenin and Luxemburg put it was that the ruling capitalist classes have thrown humanity into a catastrophic war that sends millions of people to die on the battlefields for no good reason. If we want to end this war and make sure it doesn't happen again, we have to topple those classes and remove them from power. The crisis of the symptoms has to be turned into a crisis for the drivers.
And it's the same thing today. The task when we face disasters like this pandemic or whatever extreme weather event that's coming next, is to try to use those moments of crisis to shift the political focus onto the drivers which are the cause in the first place, and to challenge the class interests that keep business as usual going.
I think this is a virtually uncontroversial statement. If we don't do this, we are condemned to an ever-rising trend of disasters. I don't see how it could be otherwise, and that ties in very well with what was the thrust, the core of Leninist politics in the years of the original catastrophe of the 20th century, namely the First World War.
There are two other principles that are perhaps a little bit less central to my sketch. The first is that we can't avoid such catastrophe without some form of state and without certain forms of coercive intervention if we are to combat these crises.
The second is that we are very short of time. Lenin himself was a politician of impatience and restlessness who stressed again and again in the build-up to the revolution in 1917 that delay is fatal. He did the same in early 1918 when the Bolshevik Party was faced with the extremely difficult question of whether to sign a peace with Germany.
Again, in this scenario he emphasized that there could be no delay, because if there was they would face an even worse scenario. That viewpoint, which emphasizes time is short, is completely foreign to social democracy, which is premised on having ample time at our disposal to move gradually, slowly, incrementally towards socialist change. That's the temporality of reformist politics, at least traditionally conceived. And that is no longer a possibility.
The full interview can be found by searching Rupture Radio on your podcast provider or at the following link