Writing in Jacobin earlier this
year, Andreas Malm launched a broadside attack on “the Anthropocene narrative”
about climate change. In this polemical
essay, Malm makes some essential points about the distortions, evasions, and
hidden complacency in the most “serious” and urgent-sounding climate talk. What he is describing, though, is only one
strand of Anthropocene thinking, the neo-liberal one. There’s also a left Anthropocene that is
essential to engaging planetary crisis in a way that doesn’t give up on
egalitarian and emancipatory aims.
“Anthropocene,” a portmanteau word
meaning roughly “the age of humanity,” refers to the fact that human impacts on
the earth now amount to a geological force.
Exhibit One is that the global atmosphere, and so all the weather and
the regional climates, are now parts of a Frankenstein hybrid. Mass extinction, toxicity, synthetic hormones
in marine environments, and the agricultural-urban-suburban surface of a
densely inhabited planet are all supporting details.
Malm slams the Anthropocene for
what he calls “species-level thinking.”
He means two things by this, and he’s right about both. For one, simply talking about “humanity” as
the agent of global change conceals difference and conflict among people. It wasn’t humanity that put most of the
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the last couple-few centuries, but
the industrial economies of the rich countries.
There are still vast differences between the richest and poorest populations
in carbon impacts. And the effects of
climate change and other environmental disruptions will intensify inequality:
they promise, at least for the first couple of centuries, intensifying
inconvenience for the rich, accelerating catastrophe for the poor.
Second, some scientists have
treated the Anthropocene as part of natural history in very dubious sense: by
tracing it to allegedly permanent human qualities. These, conveniently, are often the same
qualities that are often used to prove that there is no alternative to a
certain style of market capitalism, including infinite acquisitiveness. Malm objects to these in particular, and he
also to the idea that any invariant human nature can account for, hence
naturalize, the economic order that is driving the present crisis.
Universalizing the Anthropocene as
simply a “human problem” encourages two kinds of pernicious response. One, which Malm emphasizes, is moralizing
about how “we” caused this crisis and now “we” have to overcome it. Since there isn’t a “we” that caused it, this
simply adds symbolic insult to structural injury for the world’s poor and
exploited. Moreover, being willfully
blind to actual avenues of cause and potential response, this universalizing
approach fosters a spuriously individualistic kind of lesson: “we” must improve
our consumer behavior. Besides ignoring
inequality, this kind of non-program vastly exaggerates the autonomy of
individuals living within systems of energy production, transport, shelter,
food provision, and relations of production that all presuppose cheap,
profitable fossil energy and an extractive relation to the planet (and, often
enough, to other people). Only a
democratic engagement with these systems themselves can provide the pivot to
shift to an economy that does less damage – off all kinds. And that implies conflict, since some people
are doing very well in the present economy.
But there is no room for conflict in a moralized “we.”
There’s also another neoliberal
response to the Anthropocene, which Malm doesn’t really address, but which is
just as inadequate as the first and probably more influential. This is the managerial attitude that proposes
that a certain kind of market-minded technocracy needs to take over the
problem. On the one hand, this means
geo-engineering measures such as changing the atmospheric mix or limiting the
amount of sunlight that reaches the earth (and so reducing warming from the
greenhouse effect). On the other hand,
it means the “green bottom line” approach of economists, corporate
sustainability officials, and business-oriented conservationists such as the
Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist, Peter Kareiva. They propose to build a higher valuation of
“natural capital,” or “ecosystem services” into corporate accounting so that
profits, at least, will be sustainable in a thoroughly monetized and privatized
world. This, approach too, embeds the
current economic order more deeply than ever and hurries political alternatives
off the table. Its practical effect is a
market-based confirmation of inequality – for instance, in the contracts
committing decades of agricultural production in parts of Africa to Chinese
consumers (at least as long as the Chinese can pay). This response uses the Anthropocene story to
say, in effect, If we are remaking the world in our image anyway, then we might
as well be intentional about it.
Malm does not distinguish between
these neoliberal uses of the Anthropocene and its democratic potential. He writes as if there were only one
Anthropocene. But that is not so. Calling this age the Anthropocene means
recognizing that the shape of what used to be called the natural world is,
increasingly, a product of political economy.
This fact expands and gives an ecological dimension to the process that
Marx described in the Communist Manifesto:
global capital involves all of humanity for the first time in a single system,
with rules and relations that span the planet.
The point of the famous exhortation – “Workers of the world, unite” –
was to turn a new material reality into a basis of self-conscious political
activity. It was present people’s new
reality to their minds so they could reclaim it as theirs by remaking it. This remaking was, of course, ultimately
concrete material work, but a critical step was an insight into how the world
had changed, in the ways that it bound people and in the ways it bound them
together. To borrow a somewhat clunky
distinction, Marx presented workers with the reality that the world economy had
made them into a class in themselves – they objectively had the same relation
to capital, wherever they were – so that they might become a class for
themselves, aware of their situation and able to act without illusion.
The Anthropocene idea does the same
kind of work. It points to a condition
that binds every region and people of the world – not so much in a common
humanity as in relations of unequal contribution to the planet’s changes and
unequal vulnerability to those changes.
In this respect, invoking the Anthropocene issues a challenge to
construct a political humanity that is commensurate to the scale of our unequal
and often terrible material commonality.
This is “species thinking” – hence that anthropo- - in the sense of what it points toward trying to build,
not for sentimental reasons or because “humanity” sounds heroic, but because
the global material scale of unequal interdependence requires a global
political scale for any reconstruction of interdependence along egalitarian
lines. This ambition marks the
difference between a neoliberal Anthropocene, which naturalizes and reinscribes
inequality in a global material order, and a democratic Anthropocene, which aims
at making the future of a shared condition into a question for common decision
among equals. Nothing in the idea of
Anthropocene requires the neoliberal version, or fosters sentimental blindness
to the real conflicts present in a transition to a democratic approach to
global ecology as a problem of political economy, emphasis on political.
This is all frustratingly imprecise,
but so is the “environmentally responsible socialism” that Malm cites as his
alternative to today’s capitalism. That
is the condition of alternatives now.
And making the political economy of the Anthropocene a democratic
question – is certainly a precondition of Malm’s alternative. For now, a democratic Anthropocene is mostly
likely to begin, like the labor movements Marx was addressing, in local,
national, and regional politics, the self-organizing of hopeful – and just
desperate – protest and alternative that Naomi Klein calls Blockadia. Even with a blend of local motives and
internationalist vision, such movements are still likely to have their most
important forum in national governments, because these, for all their failings,
are still the best institutional approximations of anchoring real political
power to some kind of popular will.
One of the most important political
projects is to press against austerity, neoliberal changes to labor law and
social provision, and economic inequality and insecurity. The effectively limitless appetite for
material things that has become a strut of political stability from the US to
China is one of the major barriers to the plausibility of a democratic
transition to a fairer and greener world.
But this appetite is a political artifact of economies that produce
insecurity at every point in the human life-cycle, and so force human appetites
into ever-more intrusive (and profitable) incursions on all the other
life-cycles that are entangled with ours.
It’s true: talk of the “global” and
the “human” can be soporific and hazardous all at once, and that the impulses
to conceal inequality while naturalizing market capitalism are so pervasive
that those who do it are often quite unaware.
Malm’s frustration with all of this is well taken. But a democratic politics, aimed at a
democratic political economy, now has to include humanity and the globe among
its problems. This isn’t about a choice
among narratives, but about how to begin making history in circumstances that
we didn’t choose.
