Green desperation fuels red fascism

It’s time again to confront the authoritarian turn brewing on the fringes of the climate movement, and here Klokkeblomst reminds us why. The essay’s subject – the academic Andreas Malm, who blows hot air about why pipelines should be blown up but also about the need for a new ‘War Communism’ of harsh State interventions in the face of the ecological (or, in his reductive terms, ‘climate’) crisis – can serve as an initial target, but we publish this contribution we received in the hope that it will also speak to the tendency that is latent in the current atmosphere of desperation, which we should expect to grow regardless of the influence of this particular figure. (While seeming less influential as yet in radical circles, Malm is wooed by certain establishment media in his native Sweden where he cuts the figure of the militant parading his support for Hamas and other authoritarian groups for a bourgeois audience; suggesting, as with his fellow academic – and fellow apologist for the atrocities of State communism – Slavoj Zizek, he seeks his main recognition in an arena that is not involved in the complicated dynamics of actually trying to effect revolutionary action.) In Malm’s take, the anti-nuclear movement is ‘naïve’; yet his model rests on technologies that don’t even exist yet in forms that have shown results, and he ignores efforts like re-vitalisation of indigenous lifeways, restorative agro-ecology, commoning, etc. This isn’t surprising for the legacy he likes to see himself as representing: the Leftist project of seizing the reins of a global industrial order, the results of which he hypocritically decries; yet remains utterly attached to its world. While we disagree that the struggles Malm should support instead should be “non-violent (but not pacifist)” because we do not find it to be a useful conception or restriction, as we’ve made clear since our very first chapter, and we’re not sure exactly what “climate justice” would mean in this context, we find it important to extend the reach of this piece as much as possible; including, to the degree we can, to the youth and others recently becoming active in the fight for a dignified life and a flourishing ecology we could call home.