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Title: Imperiled life
Author: Javier Sethness-Castro
Date: 2012
Language: en
Topics: revolution, green anarchism, climate change

Javier Sethness-Castro

Imperiled life

Foreword

The basic structure of capitalism is at the heart of the climate crisis.

Carbon emissions, the primary source of our changing climate, are the

by-product of industrial production. Capitalism is literally changing

the weather. Often, industry is blamed for climate change. People

frequently talk about burning oil and coal, or fault cars and factories,

but this misses the underlying dynamic that ties all these things

together: industry is an expression of a system. Ascending over the last

four hundred years, capitalism continues to be the dominant organizing

force in the world, shaping life as we know it. All attempts at

slowing—much less stopping—its growth have failed. The emission of

climate-changing gases is intrinsic to the capitalist logic. Every day

that this continues, the climate will continue to change. The year 2010

saw the highest emission of greenhouse gases in history.

Capitalism is based on a philosophy of “grow or die” and ruthless

competition; companies need to continually expand and grow, or they will

not survive. It is a system that seeks to maximize profit by exploiting

labor as well as treating nature as both a “resource” and garbage dump.

Despite all the warning signs—such as news of drought, heat waves, and

new species being threatened by changing habitat—and what scientists

say, the system marches on, with absolutely no sign of letting up. That

is because it cannot change its fundamental nature. It is a form of

economic and social organization at odds with nature and human community

that has come to shape nearly everything in life, such that we can

hardly imagine the possibility of life outside capitalism. It promotes

qualities like greed and selfishness, and creates us in its image.

Capitalism is more than an economic system; it is a way of life.

Maximizing profit at the expense of all else is its very metabolism. To

stop catastrophic climate change, we must stop capitalism.

So what is capitalism? At its core, it is based on only paying a worker

the worth of a portion of their work. The owner keeps the remaining

worth, or value. This “surplus value” is one of the sources of profit.

Thus capitalism is an organized system of theft, wherein those who

actually do the work are not paid the full value of their effort. The

owners keep as profit the difference between the value that is created

by the worker and that which the worker is paid as a wage. Because it is

a system designed by and for capitalists, workers are necessarily

exploited and mistreated. It is this same focus on profit that sees

nature as a place where materials are found and then converted into

commodities, with an emphasis on doing this as cheaply as possible. The

way in which materials are obtained from nature is guided not by any

thought about the integrity of nature itself, or the delicate balance of

natural processes. It is guided by making money, pure and simple. The

same is true at the other end of the productive process, when toxic

chemicals and by-products are dumped as cheaply as possible. Hence

owners fight attempts to regulate their ability to pollute. Not

polluting costs money. It costs money to buy filters and scrubbers to

limit toxic emissions, or to research and develop alternative sources of

energy, and all this cuts into profits. Generally the fines for

polluting are so insignificant that owners calculate that it is more

worthwhile to pollute and pay the fines rather than, for example,

upgrading their machinery to satisfy clean air or water regulations.

This is a system ruled by the bottom line.

To stop capitalism, we need a social and political movement. This past

year, 2011, marked the emergence of just such a movement. The Arab

Spring saw millions of people rise up in opposition to long-standing

tyrannical regimes. Some of these governments fell. Millions of people

occupied prominent squares and did not back down against the power of

states. This inspired people in the United States to launch their own

movement—an occupation movement at Wall Street, the symbolic heart of

global capitalism. Occupy Wall Street (OWS), which spread around the

United States, Canada, and the world, is a populist movement that

challenges the economic control of what they call the 1 percent. OWS

champions the 99 percent, or those without great sources of wealth. This

is significant because it points to the machinations of the 1 percent,

or ruling class, and suggests the possibility of creating what Antonio

Gramsci calls a “counterhegemonic” movement. For Gramsci, ruling-class

ideas are the dominant ones. They are so widely propagated that they

become “common sense.” An example is the belief that the sign of a

healthy economy is vigorous growth. Or that to be a productive member of

society, you have to have a job, which basically discounts stay-at-home

parents, many artists, self-sufficient farmers, and others, while

valuing only those who are enmeshed in the dominant economy. It is this

common sense that serves the interests of the capitalist class. The OWS

protests represent the development of an ideological alternative that

puts the interests of everyday, working people ahead of those of the

rulers. OWS has successfully changed the nature of discussion in the

United States, forcing issues of economic equality and social justice

onto the agenda. It signals a good beginning.

In addition to challenging ruling-class economic ideas, or those held by

the 1 percent, OWS has put ideals of direct democracy, long championed

by anarchists and other antiauthoritarians, into practice. The use of

general assemblies as policymaking bodies and the reliance on modified

forms of consensus decision making, however problematic consensus may be

in certain situations, both have long histories within antiauthoritarian

leftist movements. This new movement hopes to unite the majority against

the minority currently running the show.

The historic development of capitalism is intertwined with colonialism,

and later, neocolonialism. The economy, in its never-ending need to

expand and accumulate, resolved early crises by going to the so-called

third world to seek resources for production and sources of cheap—or in

the case of slavery, free—labor. By waging war and asserting its

military dominance, Europe was able to control vast territory from which

raw materials could be obtained. European colonialism, the North

American slave trade, and later neocolonial domination such as the

Algerian and Vietnam wars all represent the attempted dominance of what

was once called the first world over the peoples of the so-called third

world. This is a racist dynamic in which the largely white, European

people of the North dominate and exploit the people of the South. And it

is exactly these people, the poor of the Southern Hemisphere, who will

suffer the most from the changing climate. They already are suffering,

as attested to by the recent floods that devastated Pakistan and

Thailand along with the droughts that ravaged Mexico and Africa.

It will take a sustained movement to fundamentally transform society and

stop climate change. Such revolutionary change will require a

democratically controlled economy that puts human needs and ecological

integrity ahead of short-term profit. It will require instituting

directly democratic ways of making political decisions, so that the

people affected by the outcomes are the ones with the power to determine

solutions.

OWS began at Zuccotti Park, once called Liberty Plaza. It was at this

same Liberty Plaza twenty years earlier that an organization called the

Youth Greens met in the chilly, predawn hours the day after the

twentieth Earth Day anniversary to challenge what it saw as the primary

cause of the ecological crisis: capitalism, as symbolized by the

institution of Wall Street. In solidarity with the Wall Street

Action—which was endorsed by over fifty social and political groups, and

turned out two thousand people organized into affinity groups, with

close to three hundred arrested—actions were held in San Francisco,

Eugene (Oregon), Minneapolis, and St. Louis. In San Francisco, six

hundred people marched on the Pacific Stock Exchange at 6:00 a.m., with

fifty of those later arrested.

The Youth Greens was largely an ecological anarchist organization,

working with the Green movement of the 1980s and 1990s. It had active

chapters in five U.S. cities, with annual decision-making conferences,

and infused antiauthoritarian ideas and practices into the emerging

Green movement, arguing against reformists. The Youth Greens asserted

that the ecological crisis was a result of social forms of domination,

and that humans dominating and exploiting other humans extended into the

natural world in the attempt to dominate nature. Thus, for the Youth

Greens and its allies in the Left Green Network, resolving the social

crisis, by addressing and overturning all forms of social hierarchy and

domination, was the only way to solve the ecological crisis.

We can learn from the ideas and practices of the Youth Greens. At the

Earth Day Wall Street Action, Youth Greens assembled the first black

bloc in the United States—inspired by the German autonomen, or “those

who are autonomous.” Dozens of young people dressed in all black and

covered their faces with black bandanas as a way to avoid being

identified and surveilled by police. Nine years later, this tactic would

gain worldwide visibility at the World Trade Organization protests in

Seattle. The Youth Greens also developed political principles covering

almost every aspect of contemporary life, from gay and lesbian

liberation to antiracism to the practice of direct democracy, viewing

all this as interrelated and part of a larger global movement.

As new movements continue, we need to incorporate an ecological

sensibility and understanding of how capitalism—which is responsible for

most of the social ills being protested—is also responsible for changing

the climate. We will need to fundamentally reorganize society to not

only ensure social and economic justice but also preserve humanity. For

humanity to thrive, capitalism must die. Climate change is racist.

Whether dubbed the 1 percent or the ruling class, the people who control

the countries of the Northern Hemisphere are sacrificing the lives of

largely poor people of color to maintain their rule and accumulate

wealth. The most privileged people on the planet are letting millions of

the less fortunate suffer and die. Three hundred thousand people a year

are dying, mostly the poor of the Southern Hemisphere, due to the

climate catastrophe. This number will only increase every year that

things do not change.

Instead of acting to stop the emission of greenhouse gases, the

so-called 1 percent is reorienting its military to adapt to changing

climate conditions. The military is the part of the U.S. government that

actually takes climate change seriously. The Pentagon, taking climate

change as a given, is planning on fighting all the wars that will be

necessitated by imperialism within the emerging context of drought,

famine, mass death, and millions of refugees. Whereas recent U.S. wars

have been in part over the control of oil, future wars will be in

response to the destabilizing effects of climate change. It is a vicious

dialectic in which oil and coal continue to propel the economy, then

wars are fought to maintain control over those resources, and further

wars are fought to respond to the results of climate change that stem

from relying on those forms of energy.

To be most profitable, capitalism seeks the cheapest sources of energy.

These happen to be oil and coal. Control of these “resources” is also

highly profitable. The entire capitalist apparatus is built on the

exploitation of oil and coal. Despite all the warning signs and reports

from scientists, the dominant economic system is pushing irrationally to

exploit the remaining reserves of oil and coal through the ecologically

disastrous tar sands mining operations in Canada, fracking and mountain

top removal in Appalachia, and oil drilling in pristine areas of Alaska

and along the ocean shores. Capitalism has become an obsessive, hungry

ghost, wanting more and more, despite its inevitable doom.

My child will be born this year. If our society does not change

fundamentally in his lifetime, the world will be a very different place

by the time he reaches old age. In 2112, life on Earth may be

unrecognizable. He and his generation will likely ask us what we did to

stop this madness when we still had time. Some scientists say we need to

reduce carbon output by 90 percent by 2020, and others assert we need to

drastically cut emissions by 2015. What is inarguable is that the time

to act is now. We know what is happening and what we must do. What stops

us? If our children and our children’s children are to have a life worth

living, we must act.

This book is an impassioned plea for sanity, reason, and justice. It

breaks through the collective denial we indulge in to call attention to

the perilous nature of life. The weather is changing—that is clear.

Crucially, though, the climate is changing. This is the long-term,

underlying reality behind the changes in the weather. Severe weather

events are becoming common, such as floods, storms, and extremes of hot

and cold. We all know something is not right. Matters will only get

worse unless we act. But to act, we need to know what to do. We need to

understand what is happening. Imperiled Life is a critical reflection on

what is going on, and why. It contains diagnosis, prognosis, and

remedies. The diagnosis is clear, the prognosis is not good, and the

remedies are extreme and radical. These are the times in which we live.

Javier Sethness-Castro, like the critical theorists of the Frankfurt

school in whose tradition he writes, invites the reader to come and

think with him. This book is an invitation to an honest reflection on

our changing climate. It is thoughtful, angry, pessimistic, but

ultimately hopeful. It asks us to be bold, remake the world, overthrow

capitalism, and create a directly democratic, ecological society, in

which we live in harmony with nature and each other. We need a society

that does not change the weather or exploit humans, and one that leaves

the world a better place for future generations. Enjoy reading and, as

importantly, act to change the world.

—Paul Messersmith-Glavin

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my primary editor Paul Messersmith-Glavin for his

solidarity, patience, and kindness over the course of this work. I also

am indebted to Cindy Milstein for the copyediting, Josh MacPhee for his

book design, Zach Blue for the layout and proofreading, and Santiago

Armengod for sharing his wondrous art. Moreover, I would like to

recognize and thank everyone with the Institute for Anarchist Studies

and AK Press for agreeing to include Imperiled Life in the Anarchist

Interventions series in the first place.

In addition, I am grateful to my mother and father for their support

over the years. I would also like to acknowledge my past formal

instructors Peter Wright, Michael Mason, David Goldfrank, Robert Bruce

Douglass, and Raymundo Sánchez for their enlightenment and aid, along

with Binu Mathew and Ian Angus, who kindly served as editors for some of

the writings that predate and foreshadow this work. Beyond these

individuals, I would like particularly to thank Clark Donley, Brian

Lynch, and Daniela McBane, who served as informal editors and advisers

on the developing manuscript. I greatly appreciate all those who agreed

to provide review blurbs for the book as well. Lastly, I would like to

thank the following comrades and colleagues for their love and

friendship: Liz López, Jakob Rieken, Aris Chatzinikoloau, Costas

Stratilatis, Nancy Moreno, Allen Kim, Marcus Benigno, Sierra Lapoint,

Andrew Stefan, Philippe Goute, Cristian Guerrero, Max Hoiland, Jonathan

Carl Vogel, Andrew Enciso, Nate Pitts, and Alexei Hong.

As regards this work’s title, I am indebted to feminist queer theorist

Judith Butler’s 2004 work Precarious Life, and the call posited by

antinuclear thinker and activist Günther Anders in his 1955 work

Hiroshima ist Überall (Hiroshima Is Everywhere): “Imperiled of all

lands, unite!”

I dedicate this work to Bety Cariño, Jyri Jaakkola, the children of

Nablus, Betsy Boyd, Vittorio Arrigoni, Javier Torres Cruz, and many

others.

—Javier Sethness-Castro

Prologue: Cancún and Catastrophe

We turn a blind eye to what surrounds us and a deaf ear to humanity’s

never-ending cry.

—Alain Resnais, Nuit et Broillard

The survival of humanity is imperiled. Whereas the prospect of

humanity’s collective suicide through nuclear war seemed a plausible

threat during much of the twentieth century, today the specter of

catastrophic climate change has eclipsed nuclear annihilation in this

horrifying role. The dangerous human interference with Earth’s climate

systems that has been driven by the historical rise of capitalism stands

within the near future to destroy the very material conditions on which

much of life—humanity as well as other beings—depends for its

reproduction and sustenance. Basic reflection bears this out.

Average global temperatures in 2010 were tied with those of 2005, when

Earth experienced the hottest temperatures observed since people started

keeping records in 1880.[1] The average global temperature of the planet

has risen 0.8°C (1.4°F) since the beginning of industrialization.

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from an

estimated preindustrial level of 280 parts per million (ppm) to 394

ppm—the level found in May 2011.[2] The rate of annual percentage

increase in carbon emissions has in fact accelerated in recent years,

exceeding the worst-case scenarios considered by the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2007 Fourth Annual Report, the

most recent of its periodic assessments of the state of the planet’s

climate.[3] Carbon emissions in 2010 were the highest ever recorded,

despite the ongoing recession.[4] As the International Energy Agency

notes, the continued reproduction of such trends in the foreseeable

future would entirely jeopardize hopes for limiting climate change to a

2°C (3.6°F) rise in average global temperatures, the warming threshold

considered “safe.” Worse, a climatological study released just before

the 2010 Copenhagen climate negotiations found the world to be on course

for a 6°C (10.5°F) rise in average global temperatures by the end of the

present century.[5] Change on such a destructive scale would undoubtedly

result in mass death among humans as agriculture generally fails, water

supplies significantly diminish, and diseases spread. Billions of people

would be expected to die under such conditions, as British Earth

scientist James Lovelock has warned.[6] British climatologist Kevin

Anderson estimates that a mere 10 percent of the present human

population—around a half-billion people—would survive a 4°C–6°C (7°F

–10.5°F) increase.[7]

Plainly stated, much of humanity, together with future generations, is

being sacrificed in the interest of what Marxist U.S. geographer David

Harvey terms “the two primary systemic agents in our time”: capital and

the state.[8] This consideration is readily observed in the behavior

engaged in by the world’s states at the November–December 2010

Conference of Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Framework Convention

on Climate Change held in Cancún, Mexico, as in other exercises in

absurdist theater that pass for climate negotiations. That Cancún’s Moon

Palace, the forum for the talks, is located less than two hundred miles

from the Chicxulub site—the location of the impact crater of the

infamous asteroid that, striking Earth 65 million years ago, is believed

to have induced the mass-extinction event that destroyed the dinosaurs

and approximately half of all other existing species—seems fitting, for

a similar mass-extinction event is currently being enacted by global

capitalism, with present extinction rates having been estimated in 2004

to be a hundred to a thousand times the “background” or average

extinction rate observed in Earth’s fossil record.[9] Indeed, of the 8.7

million species estimated in August 2011 to exist on Earth, many are

expected to go extinct well before being discovered by science.[10]

Whether the present extinction crisis will be as near terminal as that

experienced during the Great Dying visited on Earth 251 million years

ago in the Permian Age, when over 90 percent of all existing species

perished, remains to be seen. It bears noting that the Permian Age,

unlike the end-Cretaceous extinction event that began at Chicxulub, is

thought to have been caused not by asteroid impact but rather by

catastrophic climate change induced by intense volcanic activity that

was accelerated through positive-feedback mechanisms that ultimately

synergized in dismantling the planet’s protective ozone layer. Unless

radically interrupted, the life destruction currently being prosecuted

by global capitalism will be similarly catastrophic.

Such reflections militate sharply against German idealist George Wilhelm

Friedrich Hegel’s interpretation of human history—the dubious notion

that “the Real is the rational, and the rational is the Real”—as well as

other manners of understanding and relating to the world denounced by

antiauthoritarian French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari as being

“sedative”—that is, ones that render invisible the acute suffering

perpetrated by the profoundly wrong nature of existing society.[11] In

place of this, reflection on the present climate predicament, taken

alongside consideration of the threat of imperial war and other

potential relapses, could come close to German Marxists Max Horkheimer

and Theodor W. Adorno’s assertion in the mid-1940s that the “dialectic

of Enlightenment” as well as the chance for human progress generally

have failed to bring about an emancipated humanity that does not

dominate nature, and have instead ushered in a “world radiant with

calamity.”[12] Guattari was in this sense far too optimistic in his 1989

warning that “there is at least a risk that there will be no more human

history unless humanity undertakes a radical reconsideration of

itself.”[13] It instead now seems to be the case that the chance for

“continued progress” necessitates the “radical subversion of the

prevailing direction and organization of progress,” as German critical

theorist Herbert Marcuse recommends, together with the institution of

the categorical imperative identified by Karl Marx in his early

reflections on religion: that humanity “overthrow all relations in which

man [sic] is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being.”[14]

The world has long been calamitous, of course. Before the threat posed

by climate change came to be understood, the destructions of Vietnam and

Iraq were prosecuted, just decades after the attempted extermination of

European Jewry along with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. Before these world-historical regressions occurred were the

myriad horrors of the First World War. Preceding this mindless conflict

were European colonialism and genocides as practiced against southern

peoples. The year 1492 CE, when the European powers began destroying the

peoples indigenous to what would later be referred to as North and South

America, was the same year in which chauvinist Spaniards defeated the

Moors, and expelled large swathes of Jews and Muslims from the lands

subsequently claimed by the Catholic monarchy. The Crusades as well as

the Roman Empire mimicked the ethnocide and slavery engaged in by

centralized power since the historical rise of empires in Mesopotamia

and later Egypt. The reign of czars, kings, and emperors mirrors the

regression that overthrew original nonhierarchical societies. Hannah

Arendt, a compelling twentieth-century critic of authority and

totalitarianism, rightly notes that “any long-range view of history”—or

at least recorded human history—“is not very encouraging.”[15] Hegel’s

“history as slaughter-bench” is too accurate a characterization of a

great deal of human history to justify faith in the present and the

likely future, as demonstrated most fundamentally in the prospect of

catastrophic climate change.[16]

Reflection on this question, however, can also bring one to advocate and

promote the cause of revolution—revolution, as French syndicalist and

playwright Albert Camus has it, “for the sake of life,” to “give life a

chance.”[17] A resolution of the climate crisis might be possible

through popular disruption of the operations of presently concentrated

power.

COP Mindlessness in Cancún

The COP16 negotiations held in the Moon Palace continued the same

disastrous pattern of the nearly twenty years of UN-sponsored talks

dedicated to addressing the problem of climate change. In an astounding

dismissal of recommendations made by the IPCC for avoiding a 2°C (3.6°F)

increase in average global temperatures beyond those that prevailed in

preindustrial times—the end toward which the Cancún Accord itself

ineffectually claims to strive—no binding world carbon-reduction

trajectory was agreed to at the Cancún COP, nor was any date set for a

global peak in carbon emissions. Instead, representatives of powerful

states defended existing power and privilege, following the established

pattern.

The site of Cancún provided an appropriate backdrop for COP’s

absurdities. The city, the product of the imagination of Mexican

planners some forty years ago, is notable relative to other Mexican

cities for the degree to which its lifeworld has been colonized by

capital, both national and transnational: installations belonging to

Walmart, OXXO, Chedraui, Soriana, and Office Depot blight the built

environment in the city center, while a seemingly endless number of

hotel monstrosities line the beach of Cancún’s zona hotelera. Most of

these sites have been granted either four- or five-star awards, and

hence are completely unaffordable to everyone other than the very

privileged. The scale of these installations is gigantic; one hotel in

particular models itself after the pyramids of Giza. Located on the

supposedly public beaches to which their administrators consciously

block off access, these stunning testaments to the social inequality

created and overseen by global capitalism stand to be destroyed, like

Jimi Hendrix’s castles made of sand, by the sea-level rise induced by

the melting of the polar ice caps. This sea-level rise is naturally one

of the most serious future risks entailed by climate catastrophe. While

the destruction of these temples might represent a justified response to

the concentration of power and dismissal of human concerns that is

practiced by the wealthy and powerful, this sort of resolution could not

be had without devastation for large swathes of humanity, two-thirds of

which resides in coastal settlements threatened by rising sea

levels.[18]

The maintenance and operation of Cancún’s luxury hotels and massive

corporations is the work of Mexican proletarians. The living conditions

of many of these workers—like their counterparts the world over—are

lamentable, especially given the contrast of the concentration of wealth

exhibited in their places of work. The lot of hotel workers in Cancún

calls to mind Marx’s comments on capital accumulation: “Accumulation of

wealth at one pole is therefore at the same time the accumulation of

misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, [and] mental

degradation at the other pole.”[19] Whether or not Cancún’s proletarians

will rise up in defiance, as famously predicted by Marx, is an open

question. The seeming lack of participation on the part of locals in

mobilizations, discussions, and other events against COP16 proved to be

disconcerting, notwithstanding the organizational efforts taken up by

various climate activists against this trend.

The master of ceremonies at COP16 was Mexican president Felipe Calderón

Hinojosa, from the far-right National Action Party. At one point during

COP’s two weeks, Calderón was seen literally dressed in green; his major

proposal as presented in Cancún was to mandate that the Mexican federal

government phase out incandescent bulbs within the country over the next

three years.[20] This decidedly minimalist move—one, it should be said,

in keeping with the more general trend among the world’s states in light

of the climate crisis—also was reflected in Calderón’s inauguration of a

lone wind-energy plant near Cancún on the eve of the summit; the Villa

Climática, a space located next to a McDonald’s south of the city in

which the federal government held exhibits sponsored by Coca-Cola that

purportedly examined climate change and hosted a “cultural exhibition”

where Nextel, Symantec, Oracle, and other telecommunications

corporations were afforded space. The Villa Climática was catered by,

among others, Domino’s and Señor Frog’s; it also featured a section

dedicated to the commemoration of Mexico’s bicentennial of formal

independence, bearing the title “200 Years of Being Proudly Mexican.” No

similar space could be found in memory of the Mexican Revolution, the

centennial of which was also celebrated in 2010.

COP16 featured a heavy Mexican military and police presence too. One

estimate claims there were six thousand units in total at the beginning

of the talks.[21] Military patrols in Hummers with machine guns trained

on crowds of Cancunenses and outsiders alike were regular events, as was

movement by police trucks carrying masked officers with assault rifles.

Local news reports in Cancún suggest that the Mexican government

acquired a crowd-monitoring drone from the Israeli military.[22] Police

and military helicopters originating from the United States could be

seen surveilling mobilizations.

In spite of the repressive powers projected in Cancún, though,

resistance was also practiced. The international organization Via

Campesina put together the Global Forum for Environmental and Social

Justice in Cancún’s San Jacinto Canek Park to coincide with the second

week of COP16. The forum brought six caravans of Mexicans from several

regions of the country to report on the socioenvironmental situations

experienced around the republic, at the end of a year that saw

unprecedented rains and attendant flooding in much of southeastern

Mexico—a reality for which climate change likely bears responsibility.

Via Campesina also invited a number of journalists and other public

intellectuals to speak on the climate and socioenvironmental crises, and

helped organize a march of approximately three thousand people from

central Cancún toward the site of the Moon Palace during COP’s second

week. The forum was even addressed by Bolivian president Evo Morales,

who spoke of the need for a “neosocialism” that incorporates a defense

of ecology with class struggle and called for the third millennium to be

a “people’s millennium,” one in which “oligarchy, hierarchy, and

monarchy” are overcome as historical residues—however lacking his own

leadership has been in these terms for Bolivia itself, particularly in

light of the violence exercised by his police in September 2011 against

indigenous protesters opposed to the construction of a highway through

the highly biodiverse Isiboro Secure National Park.[23]

Apart from Via Campesina’s event, Klimaforum10, the successor to

Klimaforum09, which at COP15 in Copenhagen released a rather sensible

antisystemic analysis of the climate predicament, held an alternative

summit on the site of a polo club near Puerto Morelos, a town south of

Cancún. Polo players on horseback could be seen some distance from the

Klimaforum campus. The summit’s site was mirrored in its mainstream

politics, which in contrast to those of Klimaforum09, seemed to revolve

around inadequate reforms and approaches stressing lifestyle changes to

address the environmental crisis. This current was perhaps best

symbolized by the talk given at Klimaforum10 by Polly Higgins, a former

corporate lawyer from the United Kingdom who argued that what must be

done in light of the climate and environmental crises is to codify the

crime of ecocide into international law—as though capital respected such

law in any sense.[24]

Against approaches that defend existing society through reforms were the

perspectives and actions of the revolutionary association known as

Anti-C@p in Cancún. An explicitly anticapitalist grouping, Anti-C@p was

comprised of autonomous youths hailing largely from Mexico City and

connected to Marea Creciente México (Rising Tide Mexico). Anti-C@p’s

vegetable-oil-powered bus, which also had appeared at the Encounter for

Autonomous Life in Oaxaca de Juárez eight months previously, was

decorated with murals commemorating the life of Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean

agriculturalist who committed suicide in protest of neoliberal

capitalism during the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancún in

2003. While tied in ways to Via Campesina’s forum against COP, Anti-C@p

carried out autonomous actions separate from it. One march organized

without a permit by Anti-C@p in the streets of downtown Cancún saw

scores of Mexican youths donning Zapatista-style masks and mobilizing

with the goal of reaching the local branch of PROFEPA, the Mexican

federal government’s environmental prosecution agency. Anti-C@p had also

planned to disrupt a conference at which Calderón, World Bank president

Robert Zoellick, and Walmart CEO Robson Walton were to speak—but it was

prevented from doing so due to the police checkpoints erected between

the city center and the zona hotelera. Indeed, in a spirit of

internationalism, during the mobilization called for by Via Campesina

during COP’s second week, the Anti-C@p bus carried a banner

commemorating the two-year anniversary of the murder in Athens of

fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos by police. At these and other

demonstrations, Anti-C@p presented a spirit of passionate rage against

the cruelties of constituted power and the system it upholds—“outbursts

of anger in memory of the suffering of [humanity],” as Christos

Filippidis characterizes the December 2008 riots in Greece.[25] Similar

in this sense to their Greek comrades, and in marked contrast to the

other critical currents to be found in Cancún, those associated with

Anti-C@p also expressed a degree of sadness with regard to the state of

the world. It is unclear whether this intermixing of passions can be

considered an expression of the “hopeless sorrow” of which Hegel warns,

but it was undoubtedly informed by what Arendt finds to be “the most

powerful and perhaps the most devastating passion motivating

revolutionaries”: “the passion of compassion.”[26]

Above all else, human-induced climate change constitutes a brutal

assault on humanity and life itself—but with regard to the former, its

effects are to be borne overwhelmingly by peoples of the Global South.

The drought, famine, flooding, extreme weather events, increased

susceptibility to disease, and sea-level rise that follow from climate

change will affect human populations residing in southern societies far

more severely than those who find themselves in the northern latitudes.

While crop yields may well decline some 50 percent over the next ten

years on much of the African continent and about 25 percent in Pakistan

and Mexico by 2080, parts of Europe and North America stand to enjoy

more favorable conditions for agriculture on average under moderate

warming scenarios.[27] In the dry language of McGill doctoral candidate

Jason Samson and company, global warming can be expected soon to cause

“climate conditions currently associated with high population densities”

to “shift towards climate conditions associated with low population

densities,” in regions determined by Samson and his colleagues’ findings

to suffer from high vulnerability to projected climate change: central

South America, eastern and southern Africa, the Middle East, and

Southeast Asia.[28] In their study of possible future drought scenarios,

geographers Justin Sheffield and Eric Wood similarly find that southern

Africa, West Africa, Central America, and the Tibetan plateau would be

the regions worst affected by unchecked climate change.[29] Of the three

hundred thousand annual deaths that have been attributed to human

interference with Earth’s climate systems to date, all take place within

the “developing world”; 98 percent of those “seriously affected” by

climate change live in such regions, and an estimated 90 percent of the

total economic losses resulting from climate change are borne by

southern societies.[30] Over 99 percent of the five million who may well

be killed by climate catastrophe in the next decade reside within

societies called “third world.”[31]

What is currently occurring, then, is the mass murder of the Global

South by much of the Global North. This trend in world affairs is sadly

not without precedent, given neoliberalism, formal colonization, the

Atlantic slave trade, and the process known as the Columbian Exchange.

Under prevailing assumptions, humanity is little more than an instrument

or object by which to advance capital accumulation, or else “unpeople”

whose interests are to be dismissed entirely.[32] Individuals in general

are afforded the same regard as that shown to K. by his murderers at the

close of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, when the protagonist is simply

murdered “like a dog.”

Prevailing society’s relationship to the climate predicament can be

described as upholding a sort of climate barbarism reminiscent of

fascism. Fascism—the violent defense of authoritarian social structures,

maintained by the silencing of suffering—is hardly the exclusive mantle

of the Nazis, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, or imperial Japan. In

the view of Tunisian anticolonial theorist Alberto Memmi, fascism refers

to “a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few.”[33] On Arendt’s

account, totalitarianism originated precisely from imperialist

liberalism; for Marcuse, the “total-authoritarian state” is the form

that corresponds to the monopoly stage of capitalism, to which liberal

capitalism inevitably gives rise.[34] As Horkheimer argues, “They have

nothing to say about fascism who do not want to mention capitalism.”[35]

The stubborn refusal by those in power to commit to mitigating future

climate change and making resources available for humanity’s materially

impoverished societies to attempt to adapt to the destruction wrought by

climate change amounts to collaboration with the future death of a

decidedly overwhelming number of human beings on a scale far greater

than any other in human history. In this is seen the irrationality and

barbarism of capitalism—its total authoritarianism. Given that present

climate change has been observed to be contingent on the rise and

perpetuation of the capitalist system, deaths due to climate

destabilization would result not from “natural” causes but rather

human-induced ones, and should be considered homicides. Humanity thus

“waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been

lost”—principally, the three hundred thousand individuals currently

killed each year by capital-induced climate change, and a sum that could

well rise to a million annual deaths within the near future if matters

are not radically changed.[36]

As Marx insists, shame can be a revolutionary virtue.[37] Shame

regarding humanity’s marked failures to protect itself along with the

other forms of life with which it shares Earth could help contribute to

the radical reconstruction of global society—for this society, though

ruled over by the repressive order of statist militarism, is “after all

constituted out of us,” Adorno observes, “made up of us ourselves.”[38]

The response of the world’s peoples to the massive suffering brought

about by climate change—dramatically illustrated, for example, in the

extreme devastation seen in the 2011 “children’s famine” in the Horn of

Africa, which has caused tens of thousands of deaths and imperiled the

lives of millions, mainly in Somalia—must not ape that of the old

manservant at the close of the The Misunderstanding by Camus. In Camus’s

work, the character Maria, having just learned of her husband’s murder

at the hands of the servant’s managers, desperately asks him to aid her,

to “be kind and say that you will help me”: his response is a rather

pointed “No.”[39]

Among many other considerations, the problem of climate change raises

serious questions about the place of progress in history. “However

passionately we may desire the elimination of fascism,” asserts German

Marxist Franz Neumann, “we cannot close our eyes to the possibility that

it may not be wiped out.”[40] The many horrors promised by climate

change, with their potentially fascist implications, may well not be

prevented and averted. It is hardly inconceivable that the present

course toward a climate-devastated Earth will not be arrested and

radically redirected. While human history would have likely fared far

better were it not subjected to events such as European colonialism,

World War I, or the invention and proliferation of nuclear weapons, the

fact of the matter is that such horrors did in fact come about. The

“astonishment” Walter Benjamin notes in the realization that “the things

we are experiencing in the 20^(th) [or 21^(st)] century are still

possible” is tenable only if one subscribes to philosophical

orientations that see, like Hegel, the steady march of progress in the

passage of historical time.[41] In words written by journalist Ulrike

Meinhof before her questionable collaboration with the Red Army Faction,

“Recognizing that something is unreasonable does not necessarily mean it

will not happen. There has already been a time in Germany when people

thought ‘This can’t be true,’ and it was true, and cost millions of them

their lives.”[42]

Adorno writes that “there is horror because there is no freedom

yet.”[43] The Chinese Marxist economist Minqi Li is correct to note that

“there is no hope whatsoever to achieve climate stabilization so long as

the world is organized as a system that is based on production for

profit and structured to pursue endless capital accumulation.”[44]

Against this radical lack that characterizes the forms in which humanity

is at present entrapped nonetheless stands the chance for what French

aesthetician Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “advent of humanity,” or

what Adorno terms “a rational establishment of overall society as

humankind”—a possibility that in the latter’s view “opens in the face of

extinction.”[45] Global human society must come to “abandon blood and

horror,” both as an intrinsic and instrumental end, for the

“debarbarization of humanity is the immediate prerequisite for

survival.”[46]

Fortunately for our prospects, humanity has long resisted. The revolt of

the Helots against Sparta as well as the slave rebellions led by

Spartacus and Toussaint L’Ouverture are in ways continued in modern

times by the efforts of the Spanish anarchists, the anti-Nazi

resistance, the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), the

Naxalites of eastern and central India, and the Movement for the

Emancipation of the Niger Delta, among other groups and collectives.

This tradition, advanced in Cancún by Anti-C@p, involves “resistance of

the eye that does not want the colors of the world to fade.”[47] It has

been continued by activists in recent years through, for example, the

attempted shutdown of the city of San Francisco the day after the

commencement of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the blockading of an

Israeli air base during the July 2006 war on southern Lebanon, the

“decommissioning” of an EDO MBM weapons production plant in the United

Kingdom in January 2009, the direct actions to defend and liberate

oppressed nonhuman animals, the antagonistic fury expressed in Greece

against the state and capital in December 2008, the destruction of

police stations in Egypt and popular storming of the Israeli embassy in

Cairo, and the peoples’ rebellions that have gripped much of the Arab

world since December 2010, in addition to the popular occupations of

public space that have followed in many Western societies.

As can readily be seen through reflection on the fate to date of these

revolts, though—and generally on the “failed culture” that has allowed

for genocide, the possibility of nuclear warfare, and potentially

catastrophic climate change—the specter of despair is far from illusory.

While it is to be hoped, as Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin suggests, that

the recent waves of popular revolt against oligarchy and tyranny will

amount to the “autumn for capitalism and the springtime for the peoples

of the South”—or that, as world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein

writes, the global protest movement of 2011 will carry the revolutionary

“1968 current” into the future—the outcome remains uncertain.[48] An

orthodox Marxist faith that the subordinated necessarily will be

victorious in history—that the abolition of capitalism follows from “the

premises now in existence”—cannot itself be justified.[49] On the

contrary, the fear Adorno observes in Marx regarding a “relapse into

barbarism” is a rational one, considering that “the relapse has already

occurred.”[50]

In light of the problems posed by the threat of capital-induced climate

destabilization, it remains clear that if humanity does not “determine

itself,” it will “bring about terrestrial catastrophe.”[51] The dark

choice presently faced by humankind, in the prognosis of Belgian

Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, is that of suicide or revolution.[52]

Contemplation of this choice is the task of the remainder of this work,

which investigates past catastrophes, synthesizes current climatological

findings, and considers the question of hope for a “progress that leads

out and away” from total negation.[53]

Against the dominion of death, it is to be the position expressed in

this book, as Arendt declares beautifully in a repudiation of the

philosophy advanced by her mentor Martin Heidegger, that humans, “though

they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”[54]

The Death of Life?

One wants to break free from the past: rightly, because nothing at all

can live in its shadow ... ; wrongly, because the past that one would

like to evade is still very much alive.

—Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past”

Reflecting in Remnants of Auschwitz, Italian political theorist Giorgio

Agamben notes that “human beings are human insofar as they bear witness

to the inhuman.”[55] Besides the value of such a perspective as regards

the particularity of the Nazi genocide of European Jews as well as other

serious historical crimes, such a consideration could be helpful in

terms of the current predicament, for an examination of the degree of

inhumanity threatened by prevailing society could perhaps aid humanity

in protecting itself against a general lapse into barbarism.

In what follows, climate catastrophe is compared with the horror posed

by nuclear conflagration—a horror that is hardly a mere historical one.

U.S. antinuclear writer Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth (1982)

and The Abolition (1984) are used to navigate this exploration. While

world-renowned anarchist philosopher Noam Chomsky is right to state that

it is “not pleasant to speculate about the likely consequences if

concentrated power continues on its present course,” it is also true

that the chance for overcoming brutality and unreason can be helped

along by critical inquiry, as Chomsky often stresses.[56]

The central question examined in Schell’s The Fate of the Earth and The

Abolition is the implications raised by the existence of nuclear weapons

in relation to Earth’s very habitability. The mere existence of such

weapons threatens the “murder of the future,” in Schell’s words.[57] In

a world imperiled by the factual existence of nuclear arms, the primary

responsibility is to reverse the conditions that threaten human

survival, because there can self-evidently be no value without human

existence, as Schell rightly argues. Just as the right to food is “the

first right,” as utopian socialist Charles Fourier asserts—one that

underpins all others—human survival is a precondition for all aspects of

human social life, not least of these the very “self reflection” Adorno

finds to be necessary for the protection of survival itself.[58]

Schell’s harrowing account of nuclear annihilation places future

generations, whose potential existence would quite simply be canceled by

the death of humanity resulting from nuclear holocaust, at the center of

concern. Voiceless and disregarded, future generations thus share much

with the nonhuman world and ecosphere, generally understood. Schell

movingly expresses the gravity of the situation faced by a nuclear-armed

humanity in his reflections on Arendt’s notion of natality—the various

beginnings made possible by life. He writes that the annihilation risked

by nuclear weapons threatens the “root of life, the spring from which

life arises”: birth, or the “power of communities composed of mortal

beings to regenerate and preserve themselves in history.” Clearly, such

a predicament is far more serious than that posed by individual death,

for extinction, in threatening natality, jeopardizes “the continuation

of the world in which all our common enterprises occur and have their

meaning.”[59]

The threat of extinction for Schell is a systemic evil. It follows the

legacy of terror and genocide as practiced by the Nazis and other

fascist forces—including as a matter of course the U.S. government, the

first and only force to have directly employed nuclear weapons against

human populations. The existence of these weapons jeopardizes, in the

first place, the lives of billions of human beings and the very

underpinnings of global human society, but their being also threatens a

total assault on Earth’s systems taken as a whole. Nuclear arms in this

sense amount to the single most advanced weapon in humanity’s general

assault on nature. Given that the support systems allowing for the

biological existence of the millions of species on Earth would

essentially be dismantled by a war involving nuclear arms—that is, a

possibility that follows from the very existence of such arms—a

nuclear-devastated planet Earth would be capable of supporting only

radically simplified life-forms, if any life at all is to survive such

an event. Indeed, the extent of human knowledge regarding the effects

that can be expected from the hypothetical future event of nuclear war

is both vast and alarming, says Schell.[60]

In light of the knowledge available to humans regarding the risks

implied by the development and possession of nuclear weapons, the lack

of conscious action on humanity’s part designed to resolve the problem

of nuclear weapons—abolition—is to Schell a manifestation of social

insanity. At times mirroring the critiques of social democracy and other

reformist political philosophies raised by Benjamin and others, Schell

writes with concern on the tendency to repress reflection on the

existence of nuclear weapons. The “normality” sought by ideologies and

practices that distract from as well as actively subvert the project of

resolving the nuclear threat is in this sense “mass insanity,” since it

defends the iron cage that has “quietly grown up around the earth,

imprisoning every person on it.” Statist nuclear policy, which seeks to

prevent the employment of nuclear weapons by threatening total

destruction of a would-be nuclear aggressor by means of nuclear weapons,

is drastically bereft of reason, as its effectiveness results precisely

from its stated commitment to bringing about nuclear hostilities—an

eventuality that could well end in nuclear annihilation. Such a

development would be self-evidently absurd and totally unjust. As the

destruction of humanity can never be an ethical act—for the drowning of

“all human purposes” for “all time” would be the supreme negation of

ethical action—it follows that no justification can be had for postures

and acts that threaten humanity’s collective suicide by means of nuclear

annihilation—conditions that rationally can be expected to “transform

the world into a desert,” as Arendt fears, and thus deliver what German

philosopher Günther Anders terms “sheer nothingness”: a “rotating globe

without any life on it.”[61] That humanity in fact came to endanger

itself through the invention, development, and maintenance of nuclear

arms constitutes, in Schell’s view, the “greatest collective failure of

responsibility by any generation in history.” Under such conditions,

“self-congratulation is certainly out of order,” however much people in

general may seem to have adjusted to and accepted the monstrousness

implied in the threat nuclear weapons hold for life.[62]

The political arrangements Schell analyzes, then, threaten the

institution of what he terms the “absolute and eternal darkness” of

human extinction.[63] Were there to be a nuclear war, no escape would be

possible; that a given society were consciously to have elected to ban

nuclear weapons within its territory, for example, would matter little

for its fate in light of the possibility of nuclear annihilation

originating elsewhere. Under such conditions, writes Schell, there is

within the corridors of power “no one to speak for man [sic] and for the

earth,” even if both are threatened with destruction.[64] As P. D. James

has her character Theo in The Children of Men lament, it would seem that

there exists “no security or home for [our] endangered species anywhere

under the uncaring sky.”[65]

For Schell, the prospect of resolving the terminal threat posed by

nuclear destruction can begin only through reflection on this very

question—a process likely serving as the basis for his The Fate of the

Earth and The Abolition. A means to “salvation” could be made possible

if humanity were to “permit [itself] to recognize clearly the breadth

and depth of the peril—to assure [itself] once and for all of its

boundlessness and durability,” for if the profundity of the threat were

to be generally acknowledged, consideration of the “peril of

self-extinction” could take the place Schell claims it deserves within

our conceptions of being—that is to say, central. Humans may of course

choose to “ignore the peril,” though such a position would be patently

absurd and grossly irresponsible, writes Schell, given the “danger of

imminent self-destruction.” Echoing Marcuse, Schell notes that it is

necessary for the possibility of nuclear annihilation to repress any

contemplation of the “magnitude and significance of the peril,” since

the means that threaten this end can persist only if humanity in general

fails to understand the nuclear predicament and act accordingly. The

possibility of extinction, then, arises through the dominance of modes

of thinking about the problem that “at least partly deflec[t] our

attention from what it is.”[66]

Far from subscribing to philosophical idealism, Schell hardly considers

the threat of humanity’s collective suicide at the hands of nuclear

weapons just “something to contemplate.” He emphasizes that it is

instead “something to rebel against” and ultimately defeat. On his

account, recognition of the peril posed by nuclear weapons could in

concrete terms lead first to the development of a subject that could

carry out the abolition of nuclear weapons and second to the

reorganization of global human society along lines that would minimize

the chance that they be constructed again. Humanity in this sense is

called to break with the “resignation and acceptance” with which many

persons approach individual death, and come to engage in “arousal,

rejection, indignation, and action” aimed at overthrowing the threat of

the death of the species by means of nuclear self-destruction.[67]

Despite the enormity of the problem, overthrowing existing social

relations is in fact a possibility, claims Schell. It is still possible

for humanity to prevail in this sense, on Schell’s account, though the

abolition of the threat of nuclear annihilation would demand

thoroughgoing sociopolitical change of an unprecedented scale. The

chance for such change could begin only through recognizing that the

world’s prevailing modes of political organization, in failing to

resolve the very real threat posed to life by nuclear weapons, are in

“drastic need of replacement.”[68] In place of the exercise of

statecraft, people would “reinvent” politics and “reinvent” the

world.[69] The action of a self-conscious humanity would institute the

principle whereby humans have no right to destroy the “earthly creation

on which everyone depends for survival” and would overturn the despair

that prevails under conditions in which hope for survival is itself

jeopardized. Against the remarkable lack of action on the part of

constituted power to ensure survival, then, humanity in general could

counterpose a “worldwide program of action for preserving the species.”

Such an end demands that the “politics of the earth” be

“revolutionize[d],” for only a “revolution in thought and in action”

will allow for survival. The choice for Schell is quite simply

“extinction” or “global political revolution”: “Our present system and

the institutions that make it up are the debris of history. They have

become inimical to life, and must be swept away. They constitute a noose

around the neck of mankind [sic], threatening to choke off the human

future, but we can cut the noose and break free.” Humans in this sense

are called to become “partners in the protection of life itself” rather

than the “allies of death.” Schell envisions “all human beings” coming

together to “join in a defensive alliance, with nuclear weapons as their

common enemy.”[70]

Schell’s concern in The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition is not

exactly to explore the possible nature of such a conscious political

movement, but he does at times make fragmentary comments regarding it.

For him, the imperative of survival demands that each person take on a

“share of the responsibility for guaranteeing the existence of all

future generations.” The institution of action motivated by such maxims

would establish a “new relationship among human beings”—one basing

itself in a sociable responsibility for others. Indeed, Schell writes

that the “first principle” of the movement on the part of a conscious

humanity in defense of life would be “respect for human beings, born and

unborn, based on our common love of life and our common jeopardy in the

face of our own destructive powers and inclinations.”[71]

In Kantian terms, no human being, whether currently existing or

rationally expected to come into life in the future, would be “regarded

as an auxiliary” within the new political world to be fashioned by

conscious opponents of extinction. Radical exclusion, that is, would be

a reality to overcome in the bringing about of an Earth liberated from

nuclear weapons. This point is particularly relevant to a consideration

of the fate of potential future generations, whose very future birth is

imperiled by nuclear weapons. “Love,” in Schell’s view, “can enable them

to be,” by resolving the arrangements that threaten to “shut [them] up

in nothingness” forever.[72]

According to Schell, the abolition of the state form is central to the

task of resisting the total darkness of nuclear annihilation. Those

societies that possess nuclear weapons have placed a “higher value on

national sovereignty” than on human survival, writes Schell, as they are

“ultimately prepared to bring an end to [humanity] in their attempt to

protect their own countries.” In a real way, the threat of extinction

follows from the division of the world’s peoples and territories into

sovereign states, for the state and its war-making capacities have been

preserved even following the advent of nuclear arms, at the cost of all

human life. The alternative to such death as proposed by Schell is that

the world’s states relinquish their sovereignty, destroy nuclear

weapons, dismantle offensive military capabilities, and establish a

global political system in which violence has ceased to be the final

arbiter.[73]

Prior to a look at current climatological findings, some commentary on

Schell’s views as presented here is in order. The similarities between

Schell’s account of the threat of nuclear annihilation and the present

climate predicament should be fairly clear, since they are “two of a

kind,” as Schell himself recognizes in a January 2010 interview.[74] The

perpetuation of dangerous human interference with Earth’s climate

systems, like the prospect of nuclear war, would be “irredeemably

senseless,” and may even threaten oblivion for humanity.[75] If we are

to attempt to even begin resolving the threats posed by climate change

and nuclear arms—if we are to avoid becoming “the allies of death” and

“underwriters of the slaughter of billions of innocent people”—we must

rebel with the aim of overthrowing that which exists, as Schell and

other commentators rightly note—and as our own reason and conscience

would demand.[76]

Besides the justified urgency that motivates Schell’s works, much of the

commentary he makes on the sociopolitical implications of the nuclear

arms problem bears consideration. It is the historical division of the

world into sovereign states that raises the threat of nuclear

annihilation in the first place, and it is the perpetuation of this

state system that defends the capitalist mode of production threatening

climate catastrophe. “The state of death is identical to that of

sovereignty,” Benjamin writes—or at least it threatens to be so.[77] The

nuclear danger continues to exist as long as nuclear weapons and the

states that protect them exist too; as Chomsky observes, it has

effectively been a “miracle” that nuclear arms have not again been

directly employed against persons since their first use in August

1945.[78] Similarly, the threat of irradiation of the biosphere that

would follow from the related problem of a full-blown meltdown at any

one of the hundreds of the world’s nuclear energy plants lives on, as

the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima-Daichi site reminds us. This risk

persists insofar as such technologies are generally found to be

acceptable.

Considerations regarding human vulnerability to these various threats

have guided popular mobilizations in opposition to technological madness

in antinuclear movements past and present. This movement from

below—desde abajo y a la izquierda (“from below and to the left”), as

the neo-Zapatistas put it—would do well to heed Schell’s call for an

association to overthrow social exclusion, both for the presently

suffering social majorities and the expected future generations, and in

so doing, institute a political act of love and respect. Particularly

important for this end, as Schell contends, is the task of examining the

depth of the peril and the darkness it promises. To contemplate recent

climatological findings on the current and possible future state of

Earth’s climate systems is to confirm Benjamin’s diagnosis of the

prevailing state of affairs as amounting to an emergency that demands

revolutionary resolution.

The Breadth of Climate Barbarism

The need to lend suffering a voice is a condition for all truth.

—Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

In the estimation of world-renowned NASA climatologist James Hansen,

“Planet Earth ... is in imminent peril,” is “in imminent danger of

crashing,” precisely because of the dangerous interference since the

rise of industrial capitalism by the West and its followers with Earth’s

climate systems.[79] This interference—driven primarily by the use of

fossil fuels, which in turn have driven economic expansion and attendant

explosions of social inequality since the origins of modernity—has

caused the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to rise from a

preindustrial level of 280 ppm to the present 394 ppm. Due to the

heat-trapping characteristics of atmospheric CO2, average global

temperatures have risen an estimated 0.8°C (1.4°F) since preindustrial

times. Because a time lapse of some decades exists between the point at

which hydrocarbons are released into the environment and the point at

which they in fact contribute to global warming, a great deal more

warming can be expected based solely on the emissions that have been

caused to date—at least 1.4°C (2.45°F) over preindustrial average global

temperature levels, according to one estimate.[80] The Nobel

Prize–winning IPCC estimates in its 2007 Fourth Annual Report that

global average temperatures could rise by a total of between 1.1°C and

6.4°C (1.93°F–11.2°F) by the end of this century—though as some

commentators disconcertingly note, such predictions may constitute

significant underestimates, considering that the various feedback

mechanisms that might turn climate change into a self-perpetuating

phenomenon—discussed below—are still unquantified and hence excluded

from the data on which the IPCC bases its conclusions.[81] Hansen, for

one, insists that the global atmospheric carbon concentration must be

reduced to no more than 350 ppm, “if humanity wishes to preserve a

planet similar to that on which civilization is based.”[82] Australian

environmentalists David Spratt and Philip Sutton recommend an even more

radical target of 315 ppm, which they associate with an average increase

of only 0.5°C (0.88°F) over the temperature that prevailed in

preindustrial human history—a goal similar to that endorsed at the April

2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of

Mother Earth held by the Morales government in Cochabamba.[83]

The average global temperature increase of 0.8°C (1.4°F) observed to

date has already profoundly affected many of Earth’s peoples and much of

the planet itself. While mainstream U.S. media has frantically sought to

cast doubt on the responsibility that the warming experienced until now

has had for the marked increase in the frequency and destructiveness of

recent extreme weather events, a number of climatologists are alleging

that such skepticism is unwarranted, in a marked reversal of the

reluctance with which many climate researchers have so far approached

this question.[84]

Turning to the devastation for which capital-induced climate catastrophe

is responsible, some 20 million residents of Pakistan, for instance,

were displaced by the unprecedented flooding in summer 2010 that

destroyed some 1.2 million homes, killed 1,600 people, and injured over

2,300 others, leaving between one-fifth and one-third of the state’s

cultivated farmland temporarily submerged.[85] When the floodwaters

receded from Pakistan’s central province of Punjab, silt deposits were

left behind, covering large swathes of land previously dedicated to

agricultural production.[86] A United Nations Children’s Fund report

from September 2010 warned that more than 100,000 Pakistani children

were at risk of dying of malnutrition over the subsequent six months

because of the floods.[87] A follow-up report in early 2011 found that

about one-quarter of the children in the Sindh Province were

malnourished, with 6 percent “severely underfed”—rates analogous to

those observed in African famines.[88] Flooding in Pakistan in summer

2011, while less apocalyptically disastrous than the preceding year,

nonetheless destroyed 100,000 homes, inundated 900 villages, and

displaced an estimated 5 million people.[89]

Climate change has been deemed directly responsible, because local

scientists have found that warming has steadily shifted monsoon rains to

the northwestern regions of Pakistan over the past four decades, away

from the larger rivers more capable of absorbing significant rains.[90]

Everything else being equal, moreover, a warmer atmosphere can also be

expected to produce more violent precipitation events such as these, as

warmer air holds more water vapor than does colder air.[91] That

constituted power has failed to provide the resources needed for some

sort of adequate reconstruction of Pakistan after the floods—that some 8

million affected people lacked basic health care, food, shelter, and

schooling a year after the disaster—is entirely unsurprising, however

grave the implications for human welfare.[92]

Shifting to the continent of Africa, 2010 also saw the emergence of

famine conditions that jeopardized the lives of approximately 10 million

residents of Africa’s Sahel region—principally the countries of Niger,

Chad, Mali, and Mauritania—as rains failed for a second consecutive

year, causing the annual “lean season” between the running down of food

stocks and harvest season to come three months earlier than usual.[93]

Oxfam representative Caroline Gluck compared the social devastation

induced by the famine conditions in Niger to suffering caused by the

1984–85 famine in Ethiopia, which killed 1 million people.[94] As was

the case with a similarly severe food crisis that gripped the Sahel in

2005, it is unknown precisely how many actually lost their lives, but an

estimated 400,000 children were expected to die from starvation in the

months following June 2010 without an appropriate relief response.[95]

Fire conflagrations experienced in much of central Russia in 2010 led to

the death of an estimated 56,000 people and destroyed an estimated

one-fourth of the country’s arable land, leading Prime Minister Vladimir

Putin to declare an indefinite moratorium on grain exportation from

Russia, the world’s fourth-largest grain exporter, with serious

consequences for food prices—and hence, people’s ability to feed

themselves—in importer countries.[96] Those worst affected in this sense

reside in Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan,

Eritrea, and Ethiopia, among other impoverished states.[97] Heat waves

were to blame for unprecedented temperatures in South Asia in May and

June 2010—53.7°C (128.6°F) at the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan in

early June—that killed thousands, though it is unclear if the death toll

from these events approached that of Europe in summer 2003, when some

35,000 people succumbed to heat-induced death.[98] The UN Global

Disaster Alert and Coordination System dubbed the flooding caused by

torrential rains in Sri Lanka in late 2010 and early 2011 a

once-in-a-century event; the rains washed away 80 percent of the rice

crop on the island country’s eastern Batticaloa district.[99]

Additionally, 2010 saw a drought in Amazonia the likes of which had not

been experienced for some forty years, with the Rio Negro, one of the

Amazon’s largest tributaries, reduced to its lowest levels since records

began in 1902 and an estimated eight gigatons of CO2 emitted by dying

trees—a greater total amount, it should be added, than the estimated

present annual carbon emissions of China, the greatest current emitter

of all.[100] In the Arctic, an ice island four times the size of

Manhattan broke off Greenland’s Petermann glacier in August of the same

year; indeed, the 2010 Arctic summer ice extent was the third-lowest

ever recorded, and the same data for 2011 may well match the all-time

low observed in 2007—reflections of the “death spiral” into which the

Arctic ice has been forced.[101]

Climate change likely also bears responsibility for the disastrous

flooding experienced in the U.S. South in mid-2011 and Hurricane Irene

that same summer as well as the dry spring in northern Europe and the

southwestern United States—the former having brought about the driest

April observed since people started keeping records in England in the

seventeenth century, and the latter the driest spring in more than a

century.[102] Climate overheating is also the likely culprit for the

spectacular drought suffered in China in 2011, which drove Chinese

authorities to release some five billion cubic meters of water from

behind the infamous Three Gorges Dam for irrigation and personal

use.[103] Anthropogenic interference with Earth’s climate systems is

clearly seen as well in the catastrophic failure of rains in the Horn of

Africa in 2011 and the attendant drought, found by the United Nations to

be the worst in six decades.[104] This devastating event left some 13

million individuals at risk of dying from starvation—a number that

included millions of children, thousands of whom have perished to

date.[105] It is this event, together with the ongoing torturous civil

conflict in the region, that has seen thousands of desperate Somalis

arriving daily at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, a settlement

originally established two decades ago to house 90,000 persons, but now

populated by some 500,000; it is this event that has brought about the

conditions for the emergence of malnutrition rates of 58 percent among

children in Somalia’s Bay region, and thus the potential death of

three-quarters of a million people, as the United Nations warns.[106]

These disconcerting events have taken place in just the past two years.

In addition to the 2003 heat waves in Europe, episodes of drought in

western North America (1994–2004) and Central and Southwest Asia

(1998–2003) along with flooding in Europe (2002) are “consistent,” in

the IPCC’s words, with “physically based expectations arising from

climate change.”[107] It is estimated that China loses 965 square miles

to desertification annually; increased sea levels have already begun to

sterilize the soils of Tuvalu and the Solomon Islands, hampering the

cultivation of taro in both island groups.[108] In Kiribati, rising sea

levels are salinizing the water supplies; on Vietnam’s Mekong Delta

rivers, they are forcing agriculturists to abandon rice cultivation en

masse.[109] Lake Chad in the Sahel has been reduced to 10 percent of its

size only forty years ago, and Lake Tanganyika was observed in mid-2010

to have higher temperatures than at any other time in the past fifteen

hundred years and is warming at an unprecedented rate.[110] The world’s

oceans are 30 percent more acidic now than a century ago.[111] Glaciers

across the globe are in steady retreat, with 75 percent of the Himalayan

glaciers now classified this way according to a March 2011 study.[112]

Temperatures observed in Tibet in 2010 reached highs not previously seen

in the past five decades of record keeping.[113] Peru’s glaciers have

lost 22 percent of their surface area over the past few decades.[114]

Oxfam reports that flooding and extreme storm disaster events have

tripled in impoverished southern societies since the 1980s.[115] As

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson note, the genocidal conflict in

Darfur may have found some of its basis in the climate change that has

already occurred.[116] A recent Columbia University study found that

historical conflict in southern societies were twice as likely in years

with an active El Niño Southern Oscillation, which in drastically

decreasing rainfall patterns over much of the tropics—Africa, the Middle

East, India, and Southeast Asia—simulate the conditions that further

climate destabilization can be expected to bring about.[117] Mike

Davis’s findings that the historical synergy between late

nineteenth-century El Niño events and the onset of capitalist

colonialism in India, China, and much of Africa produced the worst

famines recorded in human history—ones that killed between 30 and 60

million people—take on new meaning in light of today’s climate

change.[118]

To date, then, climate change has proven disastrous, yet the threats

posed by climate destabilization will likely be far more severe in the

near future. The following examines some of the climatological findings

regarding our downward spiral toward climate catastrophe—an eventuality

that is promised without a rational and revolutionary intervention to

check it.

In its 2007 Fourth Annual Report, the IPCC offers its worst-case

scenario of a 6.4ºC (11.2°F) increase in average temperatures by the end

of the twenty-first century as being based on the lack of any sort of

sensible mitigating policies and the reproduction of

fossil-fuel-intensive capitalist growth. The report states that a 2ºC

(3.6ºF) increase in average temperatures is associated with an

atmospheric carbon concentration of about 500 ppm, a 3ºC (5.25ºF) rise

with 600 ppm, and a 5ºC–6ºC (8.75–11.2ºF) increase with 900–1,000

ppm.[119] As has already been noted, humanity presently finds itself

tied to a trajectory that would see the realization of this 6ºC increase

by the century’s end. The UK Met Office maintains that a 4ºC (7ºF)

increase by the year 2060 is entirely possible. Anderson’s predictions

for life in a world warmer by 4ºC, mentioned above, is relevant here, as

is Hansen and his colleagues’ determination that the current warming

rate is progressing between ten and a thousand times more rapidly than

the nearly terminal extinction rate at the end of the end of the Permian

era.[120]

At lower levels of climate change (1ºC–2ºC), say climatological reports,

much of the world’s oceans will be rendered dangerously acidic due to

the mass dissolving of CO2 in water, the subtropical arid belt that

currently rests where the Sahara lies will likely move into southern

Europe, India’s wheat-producing northern states will be devastated, the

Andes’ glacial ice could well disappear altogether, and the critical

melt threshold for the Greenland ice sheet will have been

surpassed.[121] Regions of China face significantly higher vulnerability

to parasitic disease given a 2ºC (3.6ºF) global temperature increase,

and the general incidence of diarrheal diseases will likely increase

significantly under such conditions.[122] Drought and desertification

from such warming levels will increase the probability that little food

will be available on the international markets; mass starvation is thus

to be expected.[123] With a 3ºC (5.25ºF) increase, the sand seas of the

Kalahari Desert are expected to begin expanding, thereby rendering

Botswana and much of the rest of southern Africa uninhabitable by

humans; much of Central America and Australia will no longer be able to

support agricultural production; Amazonia will likely collapse into a

desert of Saharan proportions; and a permanent El Niño would be

instituted.[124] Citing his colleague David Archer, German climatologist

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber asserts that a 2ºC–3ºC increase in average

global temperatures could provoke a sea-level rise of 164 feet (50

meters).[125] With a 4ºC–5ºC temperature increase, agriculture would be

abandoned throughout much of the world, with devastating increases in

mortality. This destruction of agriculture would result not just from

overheating, increased evaporation rates, and decreased rainfall rates,

but also by the intrusion of saltwater into aquifers used for

agricultural purposes, as follows from rising sea levels.[126] The

terrestrial conflagration seen even in a world 2ºC warmer than

preindustrial levels would itself be accelerated and exacerbated by the

release of the estimated 1.5 trillion tons of carbon presently trapped

in the Arctic permafrost. A mid-2011 study found that the catastrophic,

entirely irreversible potential mass release of permafrost could well

transpire within two decades.[127] Russian authorities have recently

announced that their country’s permafrost regions could well shrink by

30 percent before midcentury.[128]

Of perhaps all climatological findings, research on the positive

feedback loops that are being induced by warming is the most

frightening: the increased absorption of solar radiation that results

from reduced deflection by disappearing glacial white surfaces, higher

frequency and intensity of forest fires, worsening oceanic

acidification, and permafrost and methane release unleashed by

overheating would cause warming trends to generate their own momentum

toward even hotter states. A 2009 study on climate change performed at

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—less optimistic and thus

perhaps more realistic, for example, than the IPCC’s reports to date

regarding the prospect of achieving significant carbon emission

reductions in the near future—finds there indeed to be a chance that

temperatures will increase 7.4°C (13°F) over preindustrial temperatures

by the century’s end, with a 90 percent chance that the temperature

increase would range between 3.5°C and 7.4°C (4.8°F–13°F).[129] The

study’s authors are quick to clarify that even their decidedly bleak

conclusions might be underestimates, as they, like the IPCC, do not

fully account for the various feedback mechanisms that could arise given

catastrophic climate change. NASA’s Dennis Bushnell, for his part,

estimates that the average global temperature increase expected during

this century once these feedbacks have been accounted for would amount

to between 6°C and 12°C (10.5°F–21°F).[130] Warming of such apocalyptic

proportions would be entirely horrific: it should be remembered that it

was a 6ºC (10.5°F) increase that triggered the end-Permian mass

extinction.[131]

Though a matter of controversy among climatologists, there is reason to

fear that overheating beyond these levels could induce a runaway

greenhouse effect that would give rise to what Hansen terms “the Venus

syndrome,” whereby climatic change abruptly delivers Earth to a state

resembling that of Venus, where life simply cannot exist.[132]

Fragmentary Critique

Nature as Possibility

The beauty that is to be found throughout much of the lifeworld points

to a “beyond,” a radically other lived experience. The experience of

beauty thus displaces the everyday world, similar in this sense to the

experience of interpersonal love. Nature can also be seen as “a subject

with which to live.”[133] As Adorno writes, natural beauty “recollects a

world without domination.”[134] It militates radically against the world

that has been reduced to “a gigantic gasoline station” in favor of a

totality that overthrows “the evil senselessly visited” on “all the

persecuted, whether animals or human beings.”[135]

Against Forgetting

Reflecting on nature can help people remember their origins, for

humanity itself arose from nature. Humans are not aliens that chanced on

Earth; they came about through coevolution with other beings, however

destructive their present relationships. Anyone familiar with the

genetic similarity between humans and particular apes, or who has ever

observed a chimpanzee infant, is familiar with the continuum of

evolution of which humans are a part—a point rightly stressed by animal

rights theorist Steven Best.[136] These commonalities might be a

potential basis for solidarity among species, and particularly for the

human abolition of the practice of speciesism.

Ethology, the study of different ape species, has been seminal to the

human understanding of self and other. While its demonstration of the

similarities among the different species of the primate order should

lend itself to concern for and sensitivity among humans toward other

animals, it does not follow that primate ethology necessarily advances

liberatory perspectives—just as considerations of the even higher rates

of genetic similarity among humans themselves has hardly put an end to

interhuman oppression. Through highlighting the violent, hierarchical

behavior engaged in by given chimpanzee groupings, anthropologist

Christopher Boehm, for one, attempts to show that the human race is

doomed to a similar fate precisely due to the biological similarities

between the two species.[137] For commentator Elise Boulding, though,

humans have the capacity to behave less like chimpanzees and baboons,

and more like the “unaggressive, vegetarian, food-sharing” gibbon, who

also has fathers “as much involved in child-rearing as mother[s].”[138]

It is perhaps heartening that Friedrich Engels claims that the first

humans—those at the “lower stage” of “savagery,” or the first of three

historical-developmental stages identified by Engels and Lewis Henry

Morgan before him—consumed nothing more than “fruits, nuts, and

roots.”[139] Such considerations, taken together with many others, may

give credence to Marcuse’s claim that only at a later, contingent point

of humanity’s historical development does “an essentially aggressive,

offensive subject, whose thoughts and actions [are] designed for

mastering objects,” emerge.[140] And in this we may perhaps discover a

sense of the importance of Adorno and Horkheimer’s injunction to

remember nature, the very origin of humankind.[141]

For Cooperation

Adorno is somewhat mistaken in his assertion that human history

“continues the unconscious history of nature, of devouring and being

devoured.”[142] While human society surely apes the thoughtless violence

experienced throughout much of the nonhuman world, it cannot so quickly

be said that all of nature itself perpetuates this dynamic. Adorno’s

claim overlooks the numerous herbivore species that have arisen through

the processes of evolution. In addition, it ignores the very real

cooperation engaged in by members of species with species members, as

well as members of other species. This factor has shaped evolution at

least as much as Darwinian struggle, as anarchist biologist Peter

Kropotkin’s work Mutual Aid shows.[143]

On Climate Refugees

The French Collectif Argos’s 2007 volume Réfugiés climatiques (Climate

Refugees) is a series of essays and sets of photographs that examine the

lives of a number of social groups of people from around the globe who

have been or likely soon will be victimized by climate change. The work

itself is proof of massive human rights violations, whether past or

possible future, as well as the stunning destruction of ethnodiversity

that climate catastrophe threatens to bring about. Though much of its

textual argumentation is allied to reformism, its coverage of a number

of regions in which individuals are menaced by climate change—the

Arctic, Bangladesh, Chad, the Maldives Islands, the U.S. Gulf Coast,

northern Germany, Tuvalu, northern China, and Nepal—is crucial;

moreover, many of its photos are certainly worthy of reflection.

Yet Réfugiés climatiques’s written reflections on the prospect of

climate catastrophe are disappointingly tame—perhaps the product of a

reliance on the now-outdated climatological reports available when the

work was written. One of the book’s introductory essays, by Jean Jouzel,

a high-ranking IPCC official, alleges that while “stabilizing our

climate is a huge challenge,” the world’s “political leaders deserve

credit for making this issue a centrepiece of their discussions at the

international level.” In Collectif Argos’s account, global warming

constitutes the “last straw” for the impoverished of the world, and not,

as seems to be the case, their death sentence. The work, in addition,

rather dramatically underestimates the possible number of climate

refugees—that is, those who have survived and been displaced by the

effects of climate change—as two hundred million by century’s end,

despite the fact that some twenty million were displaced by

unprecedented flooding in Pakistan within a matter of weeks in recent

memory. Sadly, the already-horrifying numbers pointed to by the authors

regarding the recession of the Himalayan glaciers—that two billion

people could be affected by water shortages within fifty to a hundred

years—also seem unjustifiably optimistic.[144]

Despite such drawbacks, however, much of the material in Réfugiés

climatiques is quite good as well as critically important. An Inupiaq

woman residing on an island threatened by warming seas in northern

Alaska is quoted as saying that she has “trouble imagining a future for

[herself].” In Bangladesh, Collectif Argos demonstrates the undeniable

dangers posed by rising sea levels, including the penetration of

saltwater into bodies of groundwater—a development that quite simply

renders agricultural production impossible. Writing honestly, Donatien

Garnier, the author of the Bangladesh section, states that the

“prospects for survival seem grim.” Réfugiés climatiques examines the

life of Chadians who reside by the ever-retreating shores of Lake Chad

and depend on it. As has been mentioned, Lake Chad has undergone a 90

percent reduction in size in the last four decades; Aude Raux, the

author of the article on Chad, quotes the United Nations Educational,

Scientific, and Cultural Organization as asserting that Lake Chad’s fate

constitutes “the most spectacular example of the effects of climate

change in tropical Africa.”[145]

Réfugiés climatiques also explores the phenomenon of the outburst floods

of Nepali glacial lakes, formed through the marked retreat in recent

years of the Himalayan glaciers; these outburst floods undoubtedly

jeopardize the existence of underlying human populations. Raux’s article

on China at points constitutes a particularly compelling look at migrant

labor refugees who, abandoned by capitalists and government, remind one

of the masses of humanity dispossessed and proletarianized around the

world with the introduction of capitalist social relations. The work’s

treatment of the expanding Gobi Desert also illustrates the general trap

that capitalism has imposed on Chinese society, as on global society as

a whole: destroying itself environmentally, in addition to practically

enslaving its working class, so as to promote “development.” This

dynamic, naturally, has surely been advanced historically by northern

industrial societies before China, as is certainly reflected in the

work’s sections on New Orleans, devastated in 2005 by extreme weather,

and on islands threatened by rising sea levels in Germany’s north. But

the juxtaposition of the example of northern China with the threats that

warmer oceans pose to the coral that currently protects the Maldives

Islands, or the disrupted climatic patterns that promote greater rates

of dengue fever on these same islands, serves as commentary on the

pronounced lack of solidarity among southern societies on climate

change—a dynamic already experienced at the 2009 talks in Copenhagen.

In essence, Réfugiés climatiques constitutes a stark warning regarding

the “endangered paradise[s]” it studies—all of them metaphors for the

totality of Earth, itself a potential paradise imperiled by climate

catastrophe. In its focus on southern peoples and marginalized

northerners, the work certainly functions as a reminder of the

unmitigated brutality currently being enacted by the contributions of

industrial-capitalist societies to climate change as well. Of course,

many of the world’s regions not discussed in Réfugiés climatiques could

today be examined similarly, and hopefully in a fruitful fashion; the

Sahel, Bolivia and Peru, Mozambique, Russia, and the South Asian

subcontinent all come to mind.

The book’s value is perhaps best encapsulated in its closing image:

Rames Rai, a Nepalese yak-herding boy, is shown running in the mountains

with a large grin on his face. It is precisely toward this end—securing

the happiness of the world’s children, and its peoples as a whole—that

radical action must soon be taken to avert the disaster promised by

climate change.

Counter-Degradation

The intentional refusal of food products that demand massacre is

naturally to be applauded and carried forward, as is the rejection of

commodities produced by those who have been effectively enslaved. The

mere adoption of individual lifestyle choices, though, clearly fails to

prevent the totality of animal slaughter for consumption by humans and

nonhuman animals. While it is undeniable that nonhuman animals resist

their subjugation by humanity—as is seen in the attacks performed by

circus elephants and captive orcas against their trainers—it is obvious

that they cannot defend themselves effectively against human violence.

Hence, the need for solidarity from among humans themselves.

World Colors

Turtle beaches and whale migrations are manifestations of life that

should be cherished rather than destroyed.

Contemplation of the acute failures of human history—the defense of

nonhuman life being one central failure—grants ever more reason to the

project of “reactivat[ing] the revolutionary fight,” as James D.

Cockcroft notes on the present-day relevance of the Mexican

Revolution.[146] As Adorno writes metaphorically, the mind could not

despair over the color gray were it not for its cognizance of different

colors altogether.[147]

Toward Home

Approaches that attempt to glean ecological insights from Marx are

questionable. As leftist sociologist John Bellamy Foster often stresses,

even though Marx expresses concern about the effects of capitalist

agriculture on soil nutrient quality and argues that Earth should be

handed down to successive generations in a better state than before,

there is little sense in Marx that the nonhuman, considered of no

instrumental use to humanity, should be valued.[148] Such failures

likely follow from Marx’s assertion that humanity represents the

“sovereign of nature” as well as his call for the “humanization of

nature.”[149]

These perspectives on nature are not as developed or sympathetic as

those of Rosa Luxemburg, who writes of the suffering of a buffalo she

encountered as a political prisoner during the First World War: the

animal, having been violently exploited for conscription, was then

subjected to merciless flogging by its handler. Regarding the animal,

Luxemburg observes the “expression on its black face and in its soft

black eyes [to be] like that of a weeping child—one that has been

severely thrashed and does not know why, nor how to escape from the

torment of ill-treatment.” When the beast looked at her observing the

scene, she writes, “The tears welled from my eyes.” She is also pained

by the “silent, irresistible extinction” of the “defenseless” warblers

whose habitats are decimated by German capitalism. For Luxemburg,

concern for the nonhuman should not be separated from a regard for

humanity. As she remarks, “I am at home wherever in the world there are

clouds, birds and human tears.”[150]

Fellow German Marxist Ernst Bloch’s vision is similarly compelling: a

“socialized humanity” that is “allied” with nature, or “the

reconstruction of the world into homeland.”[151]

For Novelty

The radical displacement induced by the experience of nature can

likewise be communicated in the experience of the negation of beauty.

The destruction of rainforests to make way for the raising of cattle,

later to be slaughtered, joins the observation of mass collections of

refuse in rivers, canyons, and entire oceans as well as the presence in

azure shallows of patrol boats, cruise liners, and Jet Skis. This is

also found in urban areas, where automobiles, airplanes, police

helicopters, and gas-powered lawn mowers, among other things, come into

conflict with nature and humanity.

The reduction of the world to private property and advertising space

represses orientations sensitive to the vulnerability and fragility of

terrestrial life. The system that exterminated many of the indigenous

peoples of what is now known as North and South America and relegated

many of the descendants of the survivors to reservations has also

radically imperiled the biological diversity of life on Earth, beyond

having destroyed millions of lives and entire societies outside the

Western hemisphere. When people reflect on nature, historical crimes,

and possible alternatives, then “consciousness of freedom and anxiety

fuse.”[152]

Toward Radical Interruption

According to North American environmental activist Bill McKibben, planet

Earth has died. Earth’s replacement, however, does not constitute

progress toward a higher or better state. The newborn planet, named

Eaarth by McKibben in his book of the same title, instead develops from

the brutality and thoughtlessness engaged in by much of humanity. In

McKibben’s estimation, the Holocene geological epoch—one that,

characterized by a narrow range of fluctuation in average global

temperatures, has allowed for humanity’s rise and development on Earth

over the past twelve thousand years—can no longer be said to exist, due

to interference with planetary climate systems as well as human-induced

environmental destruction overall.

As an academic concerned with environmental studies, McKibben is aware

of the dire nature of the present state of affairs. On the new Eaarth,

he mentions that the flow of the Euphrates and Nile rivers could well

decline significantly in the near future, and that glacier retreat in

the Himalayas and Andes could cause the water supplies of billions of

people to dwindle within decades. In light of the various horrors that

climate catastrophe could visit on history, McKibben suggests that

humanity recognize biophysical limits and jettison “the consumer

lifestyle” altogether, instead adopting a “Plan B” characterized by the

sharing of resources between northern and southern societies within the

context of a joint effort to thoroughly rearrange global society on

rational, ecological grounds. Toward the end of attaining an atmospheric

carbon concentration of 350 ppm, McKibben endorses what he labels a

“clean-tech Apollo mission” and “ecological New Deal,” arguing that such

thoroughgoing changes be accompanied by a return to small-scale organic

agriculture on humanity’s part.[153]

Despite the critical perspectives advanced in McKibben’s contributions

in Eaarth, much of the book’s argument unfortunately serves present

power arrangements, in keeping with McKibben’s reformist project. For

one, the author blames “modernity,” which he defines as “the sudden

availability” of “cheap fossil fuel” in the eighteenth century, for the

regression to Eaarth and the various possible future scenarios, given

climate catastrophe.[154] There is no recognition here, or at any point

in the work, of the processes sparked by the onset of the capitalist

mode of production during this period of human history; similarly, there

is no explicit critique of the highly destructive nature of capitalism

in general. It should not be surprising, then, that McKibben’s

recommendations do not include a call for the abolition of capitalism.

McKibben presents these inadequate reflections while engaging in a

tendency to attribute responsibility for the current socioenvironmental

predicament to an amorphous “we”—as though the impoverished, the young,

and other excluded groups have had any sort of choice on climate policy,

let alone the course of history. This line of thought contrasts

significantly with views advanced by Chomsky, who in June 2009 suggested

the following thought experiment: that North Americans fifty years ago

had been given the choice of directing resources toward either the

development of “iPods and the internet” or the creation of “a livable

and sustainable socioeconomic order”—a false choice, as Chomsky points

out, for no such option has ever been on offer.[155] That McKibben

claims at one point in Eaarth that “we don’t pay much attention to poor

people” should need little comment, however much this side note says

about U.S. liberalism.[156]

Given his recognition of the dire situation today, it is perhaps strange

that he does not come to conclusions more substantive than his call for

a return to small-scale agriculture coupled with an ominous “green

Manhattan project.”[157] Eaarth, for example, includes little reflection

on the terrifyingly repressive actions that capitalists and their

defenders may well take to attempt to maintain their privileges within

the context of a climate-destabilized world, as examined in Gwynne

Dyer’s Climate Wars (2008). Remarkably, McKibben fails to systematically

explore the alarming possible impacts that climate change could have on

future agricultural production—considerations that may well prove

important for the viability of his “back to the land” project.

McKibben’s perspectives are surely far from those advanced by Benjamin.

Yet hope for the present predicament may lie in the possibility that

contemplation of the profundity of the climate crisis can help move

humanity toward adopting Benjamin’s concept of revolution—the “attempt

by the passengers” on a metaphoric train “to activate the emergency

brake” rather than being propelled into the abyss.[158]

Free Nature

For his part, Marcuse sketches a clearer vision of the radically

different relationship between humanity and external nature he favors

than what can be deduced from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of

Enlightenment. Marcuse sees the institution of what he calls a socialist

rationality—that is, one “free from [the rationality] of

exploitation”—as putting an end to the former experience of self and

other as mediated by “aggressive acquisition, competition, and defensive

possession.”[159] Under these new conditions, external nature would lose

“its mere utility,” judged not “in terms of its usefulness” or

“according to any purpose it may possibly serve,” but instead seen as a

“life force in its own right.”[160] This new, “nonviolent,

nondestructive” human-nature relationship, which Marcuse views as a

precondition for the self-realization of humanity, is to be

characterized by a “letting be” and “acceptance” of the nonhuman

other.[161] Where external nature was formerly “mastered and

controlled,” Marcuse believes it can come to be “liberated” and hence

“freely [be] itself.”[162]

Love of Life

Politically speaking, James Lovelock’s contributions are highly

problematic. He states that he believes humanity has not yet evolved to

the point at which it could “handle” climate change.[163] Following from

this, he urges people to suspend democratic governance, at least

temporarily—thereby joining environmental journalist Mark Lynas in

calling for a green movement that is “happy with capitalism” and openly

promotes the use of nuclear energy.[164] Lovelock’s famous Gaia

hypothesis may have some explanatory power, and his ongoing advocacy for

biodiversity and terrestrial life generally is decidedly important, but

his political prescriptions are unpalatable, in addition to being

unfounded. Humanity can consciously and anarchically choose to put an

end to the social structures as well as ideologies that perpetuate

social and environmental devastation. In place of continuing the

prevailing catastrophe, it can act differently.

On Hope and Reason Today

What is not can still become.

—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

If the climatological reports synthesized here are remotely accurate—and

there seems to be little reason to doubt their integrity, considering

the degree to which climatologists’ predictions regarding the effects of

climate change have been borne out by a number of disastrous occurrences

in recent memory—it would seem that humanity’s future existence is

indeed imperiled. This problematic raises the question of hope today:

whether, in Yale anthropologist James C. Scott’s words, “the world is

heading [our] way.”[165]

Initial reflections on this question should emphasize the rather obvious

point that the mere existence of hope for social progress—the

overthrowing of humanity’s oppressors, in Bertolt Brecht’s

formulation—reflects what Bloch calls the “enduring problem” of the

nonrealization of the very conditions sought by hope.[166] Simply put,

such conditions are possibilities. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

put it, “[If] evil were primary, we would be helpless against it.”[167]

Furthermore, Arendt seems entirely correct to claim that the prevention

of “evil”—at its most extreme, the “total destruction” that Adorno sees

as being the “objective potential” of “bourgeois society”—requires the

“exercise of reason as the faculty of thought.”[168] Against the twin

catastrophes of war and climate destabilization, reason would minimally

demand the “preservation of humanity” as a species, in Adorno’s words,

so as to allow for the possibility of that “self-reflection” that could

“transcend” egotistical drives and thus allow humanity to realize

revolution.[169] In light of such potentialities, Arendt writes,

“thinking itself is dangerous,” for it can be employed toward the

withdrawal of consent and obedience “to laws, to rulers, to

institutions,” and a generalized movement to delegitimize a given social

regime—one that could under ideal conditions overturn the superior means

of violence employed by capital and the state. “This superiority lasts

only as long as the power structure of the government is intact—that is,

as long as commands are obeyed,” observes Arendt. “When this is no

longer the case, the situation changes abruptly.”[170]

Toward the promotion of abrupt changes in the prevailing state of

affairs, this section explores the question of hope and human progress

as examined by a selection of thoughtful public intellectuals whose work

has contemplated the profound crises of modernity: anarcho-syndicalist

Chomsky, critical theorist Adorno, democratic socialist Robert L.

Heilbroner, and antiauthoritarian leftist Ronald Aronson. Chomsky’s work

is the most contemporary account of the present predicament among the

four, although the perspectives advanced by the others are hardly

invalidated by their age—a comment on the fact that the “oft-invoked

working through of the past has to this day been unsuccessful,” that the

“causes of what happened” in past catastrophes have failed to date to be

“eliminated.”[171]

Chomsky: Anarcho-syndicalism qua Progress

For Chomsky, the “primary challenge” faced by the world’s peoples today

is “decent survival.”[172] Human survival, in Chomsky’s view, is

presently being jeopardized by the specters of war, nuclear

annihilation, and environmental collapse. His reflections on these

questions dovetail with his concerns regarding evolutionary biologist

Ernst Mayr’s assertion that the emergence in evolution of the “higher

intelligence” afforded humans is little more than a “biological error”

that could soon cease to exist, with humans thus joining the billions of

other species that have been relegated to extinction since the origins

of life.[173] Chomsky shares Mayr’s sentiments on the human prospect,

for he has variously referred to the present situation as being “the

possibly terminal phase of human existence” and, borrowing from Indian

journalist Arundhati Roy, the potential “endgame for the human

race.”[174]

Some of the most serious threats to decent survival are, for Chomsky,

those posed by a militarized humanity, especially the increasingly

advanced death technologies maintained and developed by dominant power

groups. Critical for Chomsky in this sense is consideration of U.S.

nuclear weapons policy, which asserts the right to strike first even

against nonnuclear states, and recent U.S. efforts to develop tactical

nuclear weapons for offensive rather than deterrence use.[175] In

addition, U.S. plans to develop ballistic-missile defense programs—begun

under George W. Bush and advanced by Barack Obama—are highly

disconcerting to Chomsky, for such putatively defensive capabilities

could well be used offensively, since they provide their possessors with

total defense from retaliatory missile strikes.[176] Because a ballistic

missile defense program would be directed from satellite installations

in space, such systems are in fact vulnerable to antisatellite attack by

means of technologies “readily available” even to those societies

Chomsky terms “lesser powers.”[177] The furtherance of ballistic missile

defense may, then, demand the implementation of a military doctrine of

“total spectrum dominance,” implying the subjection of terrestrial

matters to “overwhelming control” and the advancement of the

militarization of space—itself a “major threat to survival.”[178] Among

other considerations, such policies would likely demand the institution

of a “prompt global strike” capability, which would allow its handler

(the United States) to attack any target on Earth within a matter of

hours or even minutes; it bears mentioning that development of the

prompt global strike system has been promoted by the Obama

administration, particularly with the August 2011 attempted flight of

the Falcon HV-2, a remotely controlled military aircraft that could have

traveled at speeds of thirteen thousand miles per hour.[179] Though the

test flight of the Falcon HV-2 thankfully failed, Chomsky is right to

note that the advent of such projects has “no remote historical

parallel.”[180] They follow from the present organization of the world,

threatened with calamity as it is by the policy orientations of the

United States—a state with historically unprecedented repressive

capacities.

Beyond potentially terminal imperial war, Chomsky has also identified

the severity of the climate predicament as a threat to survival. Noting

the question to be of “transcendent importance,” he writes that the

environmental crisis “threatens real catastrophe for everyone.”[181]

“Maybe some humans will survive” unchecked climate catastrophe, he

remarks, “but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent

existence.”[182] Significant changes to avoid such an eventuality are

missing in existing society, and Chomsky sees them as even being

inherently at odds with the ruling maxims of the given order. In

capitalism, he asserts, short-term profits outweigh long-term

considerations, and externalities—the “side effects” or “collateral

damage” of profit-seeking behavior—must be ignored for normal production

to exist, even if, as in the case of climate change, “the externalities

happen to be the fate of the species.”[183] Chomsky also believes that

responsibility for the climate crisis lies in the tendency to dismiss

the interests of those who, possessing little to no economic resources,

are considered in the ill-named democracy of the market to have no

interests at all, particularly the materially impoverished as well as

future generations. It follows, he writes, that those who accept this

institutional assemblage will work to “destroy the possibility for

decent survival for our grandchildren, if by so doing [they] can

maximize [their] own ‘wealth.’”[184] Within existing arrangements, then,

“profits for the next quarter (leading to huge bonuses for the CEOs)”

are valued more than continued human existence.[185] The “dedicated

efforts” that have been taken to dismantle institutions designed to

“mitigate the harsh consequences of market fundamentalism” are

principally to blame in this sense, along with those efforts launched

against the “culture of sympathy and solidarity.”[186]

The threats that Chomsky identifies to the prospect of decent human

survival are formidable. Despite the grave implications of having

existing technologies be largely controlled by capitalists and state

managers—agents who respond to little other than profit and

power—Chomsky nonetheless stresses that the present predicament should

not be considered a historical aberration. The unprecedented present

“near-monopoly of the means of large-scale violence in the hands of one

state”—the United States—can be said to follow from the conquest of

“most of the world” by Europe and its settler societies—a process

greatly accelerated by the events of 1492, and subsequently carried

forward by the “development” trajectory implied by colonial-capitalist

control of vast foreign territories and labor forces.[187] The Allied

victory in World War II left the United States as the reigning

superpower, and the collapse of the Soviet Union only strengthened the

U.S. position as world ruler. Though it should be uncontroversial to

observe that those with power and privilege act to protect and defend

such power and privilege, an understanding of this dynamic can greatly

help to explain the prevailing situation. In this sense, Chomsky’s

drawing of parallels between the actions of the United States since its

rise to superpower status in the mid-twentieth century and the efforts

of the reactionary Austrian Count Metternich and Russian czars to hold

then-prevailing power relations is instructive.[188] It helps account

for a particularly salient characteristic of global political experience

as subordinated to U.S. power: the fierce repression by the United

States and its various allies of what Oxfam has termed the “threat of a

good example,” or “successful independent development,” as in Cuba,

Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Vietnam, to name only a handful of rebellious

societies that have met with the U.S. “Mafia” doctrine: that

disobedience, a “virus” that “spread[s] contagion,” cannot be

tolerated—that “the idea of taking matters into [one’s] own hands” must

be repressed.[189] “The threat,” as Caribbean scholar Nick Nesbitt

notes, “is one of ideological contamination.”[190] It is reproduced, for

one, in the alternative that highland stateless societies represent to

the captive subjects of Southeast Asian padi states, and in those

alternatives posed to centralized power by the Parisian sections of the

French Revolution of 1789 and the soviets after 1917.[191]

The United States can hardly be said to have a monopoly on the practice

of Chomsky’s Mafia doctrine, in light of similar actions taken by

powerful states from Israel to the Russian Federation. The doctrine is a

practice following from the existence of hierarchical power structures

in the first place and the violent efforts taken by those privileged by

such arrangements to maintain such power relations. Perhaps most

important, though, an understanding of this dynamic may go some way in

explaining the marked absence today of substantive spaces dedicated to

the advancement of social revolution.

Though the correlation of present-day forces is undoubtedly dire,

Chomsky, as an Enlightenment rationalist, holds this reality to be

socially contingent. The policy choices that enhance the threats to

survival posed by militarism and environmental catastrophe are

formulated by elite classes the world over—individuals whom Chomsky

refers to as the “principal architects of policy”—themselves constrained

by their embeddedness within prevailing institutional frameworks

championing capitalist profit along with the maintenance and furtherance

of domination as fundamental ends to be advanced.[192] If these two

aspects of global society can somehow be overcome, Chomsky argues,

rationality and humanity may in fact be allowed to prevail, and the

various threats to human survival be resolved.

Critical for the project of avoiding “severe consequences for the

species” is in Chomsky’s view a radical reconsideration of the “sectors

that are in a position to determine policy.”[193] In the U.S. context,

Chomsky identifies this agent as being the presently dormant “second

superpower,” or the general public, which under normal conditions is

relegated to being little more than a spectator observing the work of

“responsible” functionaries of capital and the state.[194] Mirroring

recommendations made by Jacques Rancière for the “part that has no part”

to intervene in the political world, Chomsky calls for an “aroused

public” to engage in popular mobilizations that seek to disrupt

hegemonic politics and remake society along lines radically different

than those propagated by dominant interests to date.[195] In concrete

terms, he writes of the “authentic hope” to be gleaned from the

grassroots campaigning efforts that propelled Obama to the

presidency—that is, that those who have been “organized to take

instructions from the leader might ‘break free,’” and come to

participate directly in the deliberation on and formulation of

policymaking, which is usually considered to be the reserve of the

political class.[196] The various atrocities engaged in by the United

States and its allies—as well as those advanced by power structures

independent of U.S. influence and power projection—can in Chomsky’s view

only be halted if “inhibited from within,” for only the subjects of

rights-violating states can enforce the demands stipulated by

international law, to say nothing of reason.[197] The employment of

“scrutiny” against “concentrated power” is instrumental toward this

end—a responsibility that in Chomsky’s mind goes together with the

obligation to “enter the moral arena in a serious way” by means of

“help[ing] suffering people as best we can.”[198]

Though Chomsky repeatedly stresses that progress toward such realities

demands radical action above all in the United States, the core of the

global system—and in this sense echoes the conclusions of German

psychologist Wilhelm Reich, who stresses that “masses of working men

[sic] will not be relieved of their social responsibility” but rather

“burdened with it,” along with those of many autonomous Marxist

theorists, who find the problem of capitalism to be not the imposition

of capital on to workers but instead the complicity of workers

themselves in perpetuating capitalism—the contributions of an “informed

and engaged public, worldwide” are hardly unimportant in Chomsky’s

calculus.[199] In particular, Chomsky’s continued endorsement of

anarchism—what he calls the institution of “truly democratic societies”

that “overtur[n] structures of hierarchy and domination,” and are “based

on popular control of social, economic, political, and cultural

institutions”—should be read as advocacy of a political project for the

world instead of only isolated communities.[200] All “students” should

become anarchists, declares Chomsky, just as there should be “democratic

control of every institution.”[201]

Were the normally excluded masses to come to replace the existing

overseers as policymakers, rational alternatives to the threats of war

and climate change could indeed be considered viable options. One means

to this end emphasized by Chomsky is the establishment of a nuclear

weapons free zone or even a weapons of mass destruction free zone in

southwestern Asia, given that such a move could significantly ease

tensions between the United States/Israel and Iran regarding the

question of the latter’s nuclear weapons capabilities.[202] As the

possibility of armed conflict passing beyond the nuclear threshold is

perhaps highest at present in the Middle East, it follows that priority

should be placed on establishing such zones there first, although this

should not be taken to mean that other regions of the world could not be

similarly explosive: one thinks of India and Pakistan, for example.

Given that even a nuclear conflict constrained to a relatively small

region of the globe could well provoke a nuclear winter that would prove

catastrophic to peoples unaffected by the direct impact of a nuclear

weapons exchange and its fallout, as reviewed in recent memory by Fidel

Castro, it follows that the world as a whole should itself become a

nuclear weapon or weapons of mass destruction free zone.[203] As with

wildlife reserves, whether marine or land based, merely declaring

certain regions of Earth free from such weapons would however do little

to protect the world from noncooperating states and regions. Thankfully,

support for disarmament policies has apparently been reported among

large majorities of the U.S. and Iranian publics—hence Chomsky’s

conclusion that “functioning democracy might alleviate severe dangers”

to decent human survival.[204] Were such publics to come to power, the

massive resources dedicated to the military could be redirected to more

productive ends.

Beyond providing alternatives to militarization and war, Chomsky’s

conception of democratic societies could also offer much-needed policy

regarding climate change. Liberated from the strictures of capitalism,

global society could “move with dispatch toward conservation and

renewable energy,” and in particular dedicate “substantial resources”

toward “harnessing solar energy,” though in Chomsky’s view human society

would necessarily have to overturn the “huge state-corporate social

engineering projects of the post–World War II period” based on “wasteful

reliance on fossil fuels” while also “dismantl[ing]” the “entire

sociological, cultural, economic, and ideological structure which is

just driving [humankind] to disaster.”[205] In particular, Chomsky sees

great promise in the prospect of redesigning the U.S. manufacturing base

so as to advance the project of mitigating climate change, as is

commensurate with his anarcho-syndicalism: “One of the things that could

happen is that the workers in [General Motors] plants could simply take

over the factories and say, Okay, we’re going to construct and develop,

we’re going to reconvert, we’re going to develop high-speed rail, which

they have the capacity to do.”[206]

Catastrophe and Redemption in Adorno’s Work

The contemplation of catastrophe and historical regression were primary

questions for Adorno. He asked “whether culture, and whatever culture

has become, permits something like the good life,” whether the “good

life” is possible “within the bad one,” whether the “right form of

politics” lies “within the realm of what can be achieved today,” and

“whether humankind is able to prevent catastrophe.”[207]

For Adorno, speaking after the military defeat of Nazism, “any appeal to

the idea of progress would seem absurd given the scale of the

catastrophe [of the industrial genocide perpetrated by the Nazi

regime].”[208] The “totality” in which Adorno finds himself is for him

“odious and abhorrent,” as it reduces people to the “level of objects,”

thus “radically erod[ing]” the “possibility of the good life.”[209] The

prevailing Weltlauf, or course of the world, “continues to hold a pistol

to the heads of human beings,” and the “dream that humanity would

organize the world humanely” is one that “the actual world of humanity

is resolutely eradicating.”[210] In messianic terms, Adorno claims that

the “name of history may not be spoken,” as “what would truly be

history, the other, has not yet begun.”[211] In his view, the very

chance for freedom has “sunk to such a minimal level” that it calls into

question the possibility of moral action in the world. At the very

least, he says, the nature of existing society would “necessarily lead

almost everyone to protest.”[212] Though it is unclear whether this call

in particular should be taken as equivalent to the Russian “Все на

баррикады!” (“Everyone to the barricades!”), at other points Adorno

finds space for antisystemic violence.[213]

The present, Adorno argues, could give birth to “both utopian and

absolutely destructive possibilities.”[214] In conversation with his

colleague Horkheimer, he claims that “we should talk to mankind [sic]

once again as in the eighteenth century: you are upholding a system that

threatens to destroy you.”[215] In light of such considerations, nothing

less than the “prevention and avoidance of total catastrophe”

constitutes for Adorno “the possibility of progress,” for only if

catastrophe were averted could progress be said to exist.[216] In

Adorno’s view, progress is indelibly linked to “the survival of the

species.” There can be no progress without the realization of the

“happiness of unborn generations”—an idea Adorno takes from the work of

his comrade Benjamin as constituting the very “notion of

redemption.”[217] Progress, moreover, can exist only if humanity “as a

whole can be said to progress,” for progress only in some areas is for

Adorno no progress at all.[218] This position—itself close to Bakunin’s

claim that freedom exists only under conditions in which “all human

beings, men and women, are equally free”—is reiterated elsewhere when

Adorno asserts that there is “no emancipation without that of

society.”[219] Adorno’s account of progress here can also be compared

fruitfully with that of French socialist and feminist Simone de

Beauvoir, who holds that “the existence of others” in “freedom” is the

very “condition of [one’s] own freedom.”[220] For Adorno, indeed, the

prospect of progress presupposes the as yet unfulfilled historical

possibility for the “establishment of humankind,” since insofar as

“humankind remains entrapped by the totality which it itself fashions,”

he writes, “progress has not yet taken place at all.”[221]

Prevailing reality thus allows for the possibility of total regression,

but the chance to both avoid and abolish such a threat is in Adorno’s

view “still not without all hope,” as he “believe[s] that things can

come right in the end.”[222] Adorno contends in Hegelian terms that

“part of the dialectic of progress is that historical setbacks ...

provide the condition needed for humanity to find the means to avert

them in the future.”[223] Like Benjamin, who sees in “every second” of

the future “the door through which the Messiah could enter,” Adorno

suggests that progress can begin “at any instant.”[224] Adorno contrasts

his own position in this sense from that of Hegel and Marx, with the

former finding the realization of reason in the historical emergence of

the state, and the latter maintaining that communism is born out of

capitalism, instead stating that freedom “has been possible at every

moment.”[225]

Expressing claims similar to those made by Chomsky and anarchist social

theorist Murray Bookchin, among others, Adorno argues that the

already-existing “material base” provided by the historical trajectory

taken by the capitalist mode of production—and specifically, its

technologies—could be redirected and reorganized to supply a reasonable

life for all humans.[226] Asserting in rationalist terms that “the

responsibility for the threats that the advancing sciences unleash on

[humanity]” is to be found “not with reason or science” but rather in

the manner in which “reason is entwined with very real social

relations,” Adorno claims that “no one on earth needs to suffer

poverty,” because the state of productive forces could in theory “free

the world from want.”[227] “For the first time,” even “violence might

vanish altogether.”[228] The promising potentialities Adorno sees in

technology, for instance, are expressed in a rare deviation from his

notorious reluctance to positively sketch out social redemption when he

mentions that societies could be organized “far more rationally” in

small, decentralized units from which “all those aggressive and

destructive tendencies would have been banished,” and that could thus

“collaborate peaceably with one another.”[229]

The “philosophy of reflection” is central to the prospect of realizing

the “utopian possibilities” that Adorno envisages.[230] Such a

philosophy would develop out of the promise of a “critical confrontation

with society as it actually exists”—one that would result in the

overhaul of existing reality toward ends other than prevailing

ones.[231]

Adorno sees such critical thought by itself, though, as insufficient,

for “reason’s helpful self-reflection ... would be its transition to

praxis.” He agrees here with his comrade Horkheimer, who claims theory

to be “authentic” only “where it serves practice.”[232] Adorno and

Horkheimer’s emphasis on the need for such action aimed at rearranging

social relations should not be underestimated: human survival itself is

in jeopardy, Adorno states, if a “self-conscious global subject does not

develop and intervene.” The very “possibility of progress,” then, “has

devolved to this subject alone.”[233] In this sense, the “awakening” of

humanity is “the sole potential for a coming of age,” and progress is to

be attained through a “coming out of the spell.” It is only when

“humanity becomes aware of its own indigenousness to nature and brings

to a halt the domination it exacts over nature through which domination

by nature continues” that progress can exist, according to Adorno. The

domination of humanity and of nature must be halted, writes Adorno;

paradoxically, “progress occurs only where it ends.”[234]

As exhilarating as Adorno’s account of the prospect of humanity’s

awakening may be, Adorno himself seems to have long been pessimistic

about the possibility of its actual realization. In “Progress,” he quite

plainly observes that “the idea of a progress which leads out and away

is presently blocked ... because the subjective moments of spontaneity

are beginning to wither in the historical process.”[235] Adorno’s view

here is doubtlessly informed by what he and Horkheimer refer to as the

“culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: the socialization

processes of existing society that work to “ensure that the simple

reproduction of mind does not lead on to the expansion of mind” through

formal education, the mass media, television, and the dominant culture.

In these theorists’ disturbing account, such processes reign within the

existing society, creating a “totally administered world” and hence

fettering humanity in large part to the “gigantic apparatus.”[236]

As serious as Adorno and Horkheimer considered the threat of the culture

industry to freedom and historical progress, the former seems not

necessarily to have believed that the colonization of mind propagated by

existing social relations implies the absolute victory of capitalism and

other authoritarian social relations. “No light falls on [humans] and

things without reflecting transcendence,” Adorno writes toward the end

of Negative Dialectics. “All happiness is but a fragment of the entire

happiness men [sic] are denied.”[237] Though the mindlessness promoted

by the culture industry is to a degree generally accepted by people, it

is at times done so with “a kind of reservation,” Adorno contends, and

it is perhaps even “not quite believed in.”[238] This principle is well

reflected in a 1955 study Adorno authored examining group attitudes

among Germans about the Second World War and the experience of National

Socialism; the close of the study considers those individuals who

expressed reasonable and humane perspectives opposed to war, militarism,

and racism.[239] Adorno’s fundamental position is best described in his

following comments to Horkheimer: “On the one hand, the world contains

opportunities enough for success. On the other hand, everything is

bewitched, as if under a spell. If the spell could be broken, success

would be a possibility.”[240]

Even Horkheimer, perhaps the more resigned of these two theorists,

expresses similar faith in humanity’s potential: “Mutilated as men [sic]

are, in the duration of a brief moment they can become aware that in the

world which has been thoroughly rationalized they can dispense with the

interests of self-preservation which still set them one against the

other.”[241]

Once the uninhibited interest of self-preservation itself is

transcended, humans then can transcend “destruction,” violence, and the

“megaton bomb.”[242] Reason then can be employed, as Horkheimer writes,

to “recognize and denounce the forms of injustice and thus emancipate

itself from them.”[243] Hence the importance Adorno reserves for the

practice of reason, since in his view only reason alone is capable of

abolishing domination—hence and also his hypothetical assertion that

“finally progress can begin, at any instant.”[244]

Heilbroner: To Be Atlas

Also worthy of consideration for the present crisis are Heilbroner’s

reflections in An Inquiry into the Human Prospect—a work that attempts

to answer the question of whether there is hope for humanity.[245]

Heilbroner begins by asking whether the likely future of humanity can be

imagined as something other than a perpetuation of the “darkness,

cruelty, and disorder of the past,” and especially whether a

“catastrophe of fearful proportions” is looming. His answer—after

considering the problems of human population, warfare, ecological

devastation, and technological development—is quite simply that there is

no reason for hope. Against the resignation that could follow from such

a conclusion, though, he comes to moderate this claim by clarifying that

he does not hold the human prospect to be “an irrevocable death

sentence” or that humanity is headed toward an “inevitable doomsday” but

rather that “the risk of enormous catastrophe exist[s],” and that these

serious obstacles must be overcome before human survival can be assured.

These challenges can be resolved by the intervention of human

mindfulness, says Heilbroner, though he stresses that nature, too, could

similarly resolve such problems by means of the collapse of the

ecological conditions that underpin human society.

For Heilbroner, contemplation on the human prospect necessitates an

examination of the “dangers of the knowable external challenges of the

future” as well as an evaluation of humanity’s ability to meet such

challenges. He imagines that the future will bring with it resource

wars, whereby impoverished southern societies develop nuclear weapons so

as to force northern societies into engaging in mass-redistribution

schemes. Heilbroner does not expect future violence to consist

exclusively of such South-on-North conflict, for continued aggression by

rich nations against poor will surely complement it.[246] He mentions

the possibility that industrialized societies will embark on “wars of

‘preemptive seizure’” to secure access to critical natural resources,

even and especially those located in the Global South. Rather strangely,

however, and in sharp contrast to many contemporary commentators,

Heilbroner exerts little energy pondering the threat of nuclear war and

concomitant human annihilation. Yet he does suggest that a voluntary

redistribution of wealth from North to South could help avoid the

large-scale human suffering he sees as likely, in light of population

growth patterns and impending ecological decline—although only if such

redistribution schemes are promoted on a large enough scale. Reviewing

the number of interstate conflicts in the decades since the 1940s,

Heilbroner somewhat helpfully concludes that such wars can be expected

to continue as long as states exist, though he foresees no exit from

this situation.[247]

Another critical challenge Heilbroner sees for the human prospect is the

environmental consequences following from the adoption of industrial

technology. Even if nuclear attacks are somehow avoided, Heilbroner

asserts that human society is rapidly approaching the end point of

Earth’s systems to support “industrial activity,” thus allying himself

with the Club of Rome and other contemporary socioenvironmental

observers. Anticipating that which eco-Marxist James O’Connor terms the

second contradiction of capitalism, Heilbroner maintains that a grave

decline in material living conditions might result from modernity’s

“massive assault against the biosphere.” In particular, he identifies

the threat of “serious climatic problems” due to the ever-increasing

surplus heat emission produced by industrial processes and argues that

this may be the most formidable challenge faced by humanity. He asserts,

rather optimistically, that the climate threat is a distant one—hence

his claim that the climatic limits to industrial activity will become

evident within three or four generations, after which “industrial

growth” will have to be completely halted, for its continuation beyond

this point in time would, on Heilbroner’s account, ensure extinction. He

nonetheless prefers that growth be put to an end some time before this

point is reached, advocating the widespread adoption of solar energy and

other renewable energy sources. For Heilbroner, the environmental crisis

as a whole—the prospect of climate catastrophe, but also the various

other ecological problems induced by modernity—demands that industrial

activity be “drastically curtailed” or even dismantled.[248]

The problem of science and technology is, in Heilbroner’s view,

connected to the environmental crisis. The development of science has

overemphasized “disequilibrating or perilous aspects without giving rise

to enough benign technologies or compensating control measures.”

Claiming that science and technology are the principal forces of the

age, Heilbroner bases the contemporary predicament in “the advent of a

command over natural processes and forces that far exceeds the reach of

our present mechanisms of social control”—reification, in the

terminology of Western Marxists. It follows from this that the horrors

toward which modernity is propelling humanity do not come out of

nowhere, for they are caused by humans, and thus can be changed by

humans. In this sense, Heilbroner argues that the prevailing frameworks

in which much of this human behavior takes place—industrial

civilization, as he calls it—are the main problem. The “socialism”

practiced in the Soviet Union is insufficiently different from

capitalism to merit endorsement from Heilbroner as an alternative, in

light of its endorsement of efficiency, productivism, increased material

consumption, and the domination of nature.[249]

Heilbroner does hold out the possibility that under different

conditions, matters could be made radically different too. He offers the

example of a polity characterized by “extensive decentralization,”

“workers’ control,” and “an atmosphere of political and social freedom,”

but does not dwell on this alternative—instead embarking on a discussion

of whether capitalism could bring about a stationary state, as advocated

by John Stuart Mill and Herman Daly, among others. Heilbroner naturally

observes that no capitalist society has yet to seriously consider the

scale of change needed to achieve something approximating a viable

steady state. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that many of the

thoroughgoing changes in social relations that would need to be realized

if global society were to stave off catastrophe—the “control over the

direction of science, over its rate of incorporation in technology, and

over the pace of industrial production as a whole”—would more easily be

effected under conditions from which considerations of capitalist profit

have been eradicated.[250]

Though Heilbroner devotes relatively little of his Inquiry to

reconstructive political projects, he lays out some of the basic

features of the path he feels would lead away from the prevailing state

of affairs. For one, impoverished southern societies could come to

redefine the term development through stressing the “education and

vitality of their citizens” over the quest for capital accumulation.

Major efforts in northern societies to minimize the “enormous

wastefulness of industrial production as it is used today” could

contribute to the success of this project. Heilbroner also holds out the

prospect of a reduction in scale from “immense nation-states” to human

communities emulating the polis of the ancient Greeks, and suggests that

simplicity and frugality must come to replace prevailing consumerism.

For Heilbroner, the chance that these alternative institutions could

emerge and sustain themselves remains possible, though rather

improbable, as he sees an undeniable need for a centralization of

political power to carry through the myriad social transformations that

are in his view required to uphold the human prospect, especially given

his pessimism regarding the question of whether people will consent to

proposed socioeconomic overhauls. Heilbroner emphatically proclaims that

“no substantial voluntary diminution of growth, much less a planned

reorganization of society, is today even remotely imaginable.” Beyond

structural considerations, Heilbroner claims that this is largely the

case because of the radically limited capacity he sees for humans to

empathize and identify with peoples of other societies as well as future

generations—such empathy and identification being, in Heilbroner’s

account, a necessary prerequisite of popular advocacy of the social

changes he endorses.[251]

On the specific question of whether existing generations can be said to

possess a “collective bond of identity” to future generations,

Heilbroner desperately extrapolates from what he defines as prevailing

attitudes:

When men [sic] can generally acquiesce in, even relish, the destruction

of their living contemporaries, when they can regard with indifference

or irritation the fate of those who live in slums, rot in prison, or

starve in lands that have meaning only insofar as they are vacation

resorts, why should they be expected to take the painful actions needed

to prevent the destruction of future generations whose faces they will

never see?[252]

Such an indictment, perhaps Heilbroner’s most fundamentally challenging

observation, is reminiscent of similar comments made by Horkheimer: “The

human species which devours other animal species, the nations with

bursting granaries that allow others to starve, the decent folk who live

next door to the prisons where the poor vegetate in stench and misery

because they wanted a better life or could not stand it any longer—they

are all criminal if crime means an objective abomination.”[253]

In the end, suggests Heilbroner, little more is left than disjointed

attempts to “preserve the very will to live.” Heilbroner allows for the

possibility that a “survivalist ethic” may somehow emerge among specific

groups of human communities; the stark alternative is for global human

polities to be reduced to “the executioners of [humanity].”[254]

Aronson’s Collective Action against Madness

Writing over twenty-five years ago, Aronson considers much the same

question in his Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope as that

driving Heilbroner’s Inquiry: is there reason for hope? Aronson begins

his exploration by citing Gil Elliot in his claim that the “scale of

man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our

time”—this, in the closing years of the twentieth century, a time period

that has constituted a “charnel house” in which “revolutionary

expectations have been so thwarted.”[255]

Examining some of the various lapses of that century—the Nazi genocide

of European Jewry, the “Soviet Holocaust” prosecuted by Leninism and

Stalinism after 1917, the “bourgeois-democratic holocaust” of the

Vietnam War, the dispossession and oppression visited on the Palestinian

people by Zionism, and the possibility of a “universal holocaust” by

means of nuclear annihilation—Aronson reaches several conclusions about

the reasons for the emergence of such social disasters. One fundamental

commonality is the complicity of social majorities with prevailing

reality—the often-remarkable lack of popular resistance to inhuman

sociopolitical projects. Echoing some of Arendt’s commentary on the

experience of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms at points, Aronson

stresses the importance that repressive ideologies—nationalism, racism,

and corrupted senses of Hegelianism—have had in legitimizing decidedly

illegitimate practices. Distancing himself from accounts of genocide

that find static national cultures responsible for such crimes, Aronson

argues that “no form of society is exempt from becoming genocidal,”

noting that “any contemporary ruling class or national group is capable

of using the modern state’s weapons for catastrophic purposes.” Citing

U.S. psychologist Stanley Milgram’s investigations into authority,

Aronson contends that the tendency to obey within hierarchical apparatus

helps explain the Nazi experience, but he also stresses the active

complicity of many and the “silent acquiescence” of others as important

considerations. Stalinism, Aronson finds, developed directly out of the

October 1917 Bolshevik takeover, and the genocide perpetrated during the

Vietnam War was prosecuted by a “smoothly functioning society at the

peak of its wealth and power.”[256]

Writing of the contemporary world, Aronson notes the limited resistance

to “increasingly mad mainstreams,” lamenting madness as being “ascendant

over the oppositional forces of sanity and humanity it continues to

generate.” With nuclear weapons in mind, Aronson writes that “human life

itself has been put in question by the people and technology who

ostensibly serve it,” making the following crucial point: “To jeopardize

life on any scale without compelling reason, and to do this while

denying that one is doing it, is mad.” Against this, Aronson holds out

the promise of an antiauthoritarian classless society in which “ordinary

people really do exercise collective control over their lives.” He

claims humanity’s inability to institute such a set of social relations

as being at the very root of the threat of nuclear annihilation.[257]

Similar to Arendt and Adorno, Aronson concludes that the social

catastrophes he explores need not occur again, if enough people

thoughtfully reflect on historical terror and engage in action that

seeks to prevent its reoccurrence. Claiming “evil” to “always [be] a

human project,” he declares that its practice therefore is not

necessarily a given. He believes that people will struggle for reason

and justice as long as the human species exists. Aronson thus finds hope

in the prospect of collective human action aimed at “bring[ing] about

survival, peace, and well-being,” at instituting a better world that

will “respect both its source and its ultimate term (people), and will

abolish the conditions that led to Auschwitz, the Gulag, Vietnam.”

Political action is for Aronson the only possible means of resolving

societal madness, since “the commitment to sanity, to truth, to

humanity, to survival, means doing battle.” Considering in particular

the universal holocaust threatened by nuclear weapons, Aronson hopes

that humanity will “awaken from [its] delusions, as the Nazis never did,

to attack the social structures responsible for the impending

disaster.”[258]

Toward a Critical Appraisal

What, then, can be made of this? A fair bit, in fact. Much in the

perspectives advanced by these four authors, as that of other serious

theorists, is critical in light of the present predicament.

The desperate urgency of the accounts presented should not be taken as

exaggerated or unfounded, for the fact of the matter is that the very

survival of humanity is imperiled, as these authors claim. It is rather

unclear how one should act in the face of what Castro terms this

“terribly sad reality” (tristísima realidad).[259] For the victims of

climate change, past and present, there is no hope—only despair. Any

account of the issue of global warming that does not make this concern

central is radically false.

The disorientation accompanying the recognition that the current

situation jeopardizes the future reproduction of human society is

certainly alarming. Reflection on the problem could promote wild

confusion, as Heilbroner notes, for it challenges the very standing of

legitimate action in the world. Certainly one concern is the possibility

that people in general, once having come to reflect on the radically

absurd nature of the prevailing state of affairs, will conclude that the

situation is hopeless, and subsequently further retreat from engaging

with the public sphere and political matters, thereby perpetuating

existing arrangements.[260] Heilbroner raises this worry, which in turn

McKibben has also recently done.[261] Yet Heilbroner himself has little

patience for such a position. Echoing Camus, he writes that “avoidable

evil remains, as it always will, an enemy that can be defeated; and the

fact that the collective destiny of man [sic] portends unavoidable

travail is no reason, and cannot be tolerated as an excuse, for doing

nothing.”[262]

One of the most important contributions made by these authors is the

stress they place on the fact that however catastrophic the designs of

constituted power, humanity’s “global societal constitution” is

contingent; it can be changed, as it is the result of given political

and cultural institutions, social and economic structures, and

ideologies. Such a critical position is the very foundation for hope

today.[263] Revolutionary humanist commitment and action are not traits

that are foreign to humanity, as Chomsky rightly notes; where they are

present, they can be carried forward, and where they are missing, they

can be revitalized.[264] All the authors examined in this section,

except for the ambiguous Heilbroner, hold such faith in humanity’s

potentialities. The confidence that Chomsky, Adorno, and Aronson hold

for the chance to overcome catastrophe and establish something

approximating reason seems far more convincing than Heilbroner’s

pessimism.

Another significant aspect of these authors’ accounts—itself inseparable

from claims about the contingency of prevailing society—is their

anticapitalist perspective. Heilbroner, for one, is certainly justified

in questioning economic growth on environmental grounds, as such

environmental commentators as George Monbiot, James Gustav Speth, and

John Bellamy Foster, among others, have also done. For his part, Chomsky

holds the capitalist mode of production directly responsible for looming

environmental catastrophe, while Aronson sees it as a key component of

the general societal madness that threatens the human prospect.

Capitalism, in Adorno’s view, is part and parcel of the monstrous

apparatus that perpetuates radical human alienation. In his call for

humanity’s “debarbarization,” Adorno would likely agree with Cornelius

Castoriadis’s claim that “the present cris[e]s of humanity will be able

to be resolved only through a socialist revolution.”[265]

Nonetheless, Heilbroner’s critique of “industrial activity”—a position

that seems not terribly far from that of primitivism—seems fairly

mistaken. His concerns regarding the environmental destructiveness of

economic expansion as practiced under both Western capitalism and

Soviet-style state capitalism are justified, for both systems have been

thoroughly discredited on these grounds, as on many others. His mistake

nonetheless begins in seeing these two regimes as the only alternatives

open to humanity. If a society used industrial production to produce

essential medicines or energy from solar or wind power, for example, it

would not necessarily be unsustainable. The more relevant consideration

here regards the nature of social relations, particularly economic ones.

As the three other theorists argue, a reorganization of existing

technologies on a basis different than that dictated by growth

economies, whether capitalist or Soviet, together with efforts dedicated

to further technological innovation aimed at drastically reducing human

suffering as well as minimizing or even reversing human destruction of

the nonhuman world, would be instrumental in improving humanity’s

prospects. Rationality and humanity demand that humans dedicate

themselves, as Horkheimer asserts, to assisting people, caring for the

sick, and aiding the poor, in place of valorizing capital and

perpetuating the prevailing modes of domination, including especially

those that maintain alienated labor and warfare.[266] In light of the

climate predicament, moreover, these demands should definitively include

calling for a radical reduction in greenhouse gas emissions within the

near future. This, in turn, necessitates what Adorno calls a “global

self-conscious subject” or Chomsky dubs a “second superpower,” armed

with a recognition of Neumann’s claim that “the primary fact of modern

civilization is this very antagonism between an economy that can produce

in abundance for welfare but that does so only for destruction.”[267]

Autonomous action exercised by the subordinated could model itself after

the historical experience of the 1871 Paris Commune, the workers’

councils that arose in the general strike wave that gripped Russia in

1905, the soviet-based democracy that briefly flourished in Russia in

the wake of czardom’s collapse, anarchist upheaval in Catalunya in the

1930s, worker and student mobilizations in May 1968, and indeed the

various oppositional developments that emerged in 2011—in addition to

the speculative reflections of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy

(Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars).

To assess the chance of a revolutionary interruption of society’s

prevailing direction, it is crucial to first take account of the various

threats to decent survival. The gravity of the climate crisis has

already been discussed here, but it’s worth restating the urgency of the

situation—to declare, with Horkheimer, that humanity is destroying

itself.[268] Beyond the barbarism promised by climate destabilization,

militarism and the specter of military conflict in the foreseeable

future threaten humanity. The much-celebrated election of Obama as U.S.

president has seen the marked continuation of previously existing

barbarism. His administration has requested “defense” budgets larger

than those overseen by Bush at the end of his time in power and has

advanced the development of a number of alarming weapons-system

programs—the principal ones in this sense being thirteen-ton “massive

ordnance penetrators” designed to be dropped on deeply buried bunkers

from B-52 bombers, arms found by Chomsky to be “the most lethal weapons

in the [U.S] arsenal short of nuclear weapons”; the prompt global strike

system and Falcon HV-2; and the X-37B and X-47B, unstaffed machines to

be launched into space for surveillance purposes and, it is to be

imagined, possible space-to-Earth strikes.[269] Current near-term plans

to utilize agrofuel sources as part of U.S. military operations are

similarly worrying, given the well-known conflict between agrofuel and

food cultivation—and this under conditions in which some one billion

individuals are undernourished, with billions more expected to starve

because of climate change.[270] The sixty billion dollar sale of U.S.

arms to Saudi Arabia in 2010, war preparations against Iran, and Obama’s

drone war over Pakistan, which has killed hundreds of Pakistani

noncombatants, all offer glimpses of what can be expected from

continuing to employ such disconcerting technologies—illustrations of

the wrongly developed nature of a false society, on Horkheimer’s

account.[271] For their part, the millions murdered and displaced in the

aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq would demand that nothing similar

recur in the future.

Such a brief account of some of the more frightening implications of

militarism today necessarily stresses the central role of the United

States in the perpetuation of contemporary problems, but this should in

no way be taken to mean that other existing regimes have overturned the

maxims that govern dominant groups in the United States—for one would be

hard-pressed to find other states that are significantly opposed to

these approaches. This fact has much to do with the realities of U.S.

hegemony, yet this critique should not overlook hegemony exercised

elsewhere—such as Han Chinese over Tibetans, Brahmins over Dalits, men

of all places over women and children, and heterosexuals over

nonheterosexuals. The presupposition of universal human equality should

manifest itself as a universal opposition to oppression.

The central question is whether humanity, or at least a significant part

of it, is preparing for a critical confrontation with prevailing power

structures. Given the gravity of the present crisis, everything depends

on this. Social resistance can be found among several existing political

movements, and opposition to the prevailing state of affairs can be

observed in much of everyday life, as explored by Bloch and John

Holloway, among others.[272] The far more obvious reality, however, is

that the world is radically wrong, and that no existing force seems

capable of overturning the present state of affairs. “Too little that is

good has power in the world for the world to be said to have achieved

progress,” in Adorno’s words, just as “there is [presently] no resolute

and sufficiently unified anti-capitalist movement that can adequately

challenge the reproduction of the capitalist class and the perpetuation

of its power on the world stage,” as Harvey concludes.[273]

While Adorno’s diagnosis of political apathy as “the universal rule in

all countries now” was surely mistaken in 1964, just as it is in 2012,

popular alienation is still strong in the present global system.[274]

Indeed, this remarkable lack of democracy (power of the people, as in

the Greek demos + kratia) seems to be a trend far more present than any

opposing countercurrent, notwithstanding the dramatic impulses expressed

in the recent popular Arab rebellions and occupy/decolonize movements.

Even though Castoriadis’s assertion that “the peoples of the world are

complicit with the world-course” is an unfair exaggeration, it is true

that many individuals and groups of people—say, particularly the middle

classes of industrialized northern societies—identify with as well as

actively support the monstrousness of the present. Heilbroner’s

reservations about the egotistical, aggressive character structure

encouraged by the reign of capital, themselves reflections of concerns

expressed by critical psychoanalyst Erich Fromm throughout his life,

seem well founded. Arendt, for one, is right to stress that one reason

why “totalitarian regimes can get so far” is that people generally

indulge in “wishful thinking” and “shir[k] reality in the face of real

insanity” rather than rebelling.[275] The phenomenon of societal

mimesis—the chameleonlike tendency to adjust to and accept given

reality—is tied into this dynamic, because generalized conformity tends

to induce what U.S. antimilitarist philosopher Henry Giroux terms a

“moral coma.”[276] That everyone en masse should be manifesting a clear

opposition to the status quo is a demand more pressing now than in any

previous era. The lack of conscious opposition among those relatively

privileged in material and political terms speaks to the degree that

many northern residents have been colonized and integrated into the

prevailing reality—a tendency that must be overcome.

The tolerance on the part of Westerners to the inhumanity and barbarism

practiced by and within their societies—as well as the active support of

some for such realities—calls into question the more optimistic

assertions of the commentators examined here. Adorno may well have been

betraying Hegelian-Marxian optimism in his assertion that he “cannot

imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective

oppositional forces being unleashed”—for the world has already descended

into insanity, and resistance can hardly be said to have been entirely

unleashed. “Hell is not something that lies ahead of us, but this very

life, here and now,” observes Benjamin.[277] Sociopathic oligarchs

“ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem

that sustains the human species,” as antiauthoritarian journalist Chris

Hedges puts it, are the current managers of society.[278] Progress under

such conditions can only amount to the “first revolutionary measures

taken,” in Benjamin’s terms, or action that works to bring about the

abolition of presently constituted power.[279]

The task of bringing about a state that allows for freedom is radically

removed from the conformist orientations that allow for the election of

reactionaries like members of the U.S. Republican Party—or for that

matter, the U.S. Democratic Party. That openly barbarous forces are

gaining increased control of government in many locations beyond the

United States—such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the

United Kingdom, and Russia—reflects a rapidly deteriorating world,

although drawing conclusions about given societies from election results

is not a straightforward task, given considerations, for instance,

regarding participation rates or limitations on electoral choices.

If, then, as Adorno says, “anything that we can call morality today

merges into the question of the organization of the world,” serious

questions arise about the possibility of morality under present

conditions.[280] Acceptance of the cultural hegemony promoted by

dominant groups, as in Adorno’s and Antonio Gramsci’s accounts, goes a

long way toward explaining the absence of self-determined societies, as

does the mélange of self-interest, fear, and mindlessness that

perpetuates the status quo.[281] The lack of alternative

societies—disenfranchisement, in Chomsky’s conception—as well as

generalized antisystemic movements aimed at instituting social

alternatives is consistent with the continuation of radical exclusion

and alienation: it condemns humanity to oblivion. In Horkheimer���s words:

“As long as world history follows its logical course, it fails to

fulfill its human destiny.”[282] Or as Holloway remarks: “Put simply,

the tendency of current development is that humanity is

annihilated.”[283]

The task of overthrowing the present material reality and its

ideological support—for humanity to debarbarize itself—is as immense as

it is necessary. Unlike the end sought by Marxian science, humanity’s

chances are hardly ensured. “We can no longer proclaim with confidence

that our victory is inevitable,” writes Holloway; in Marcuse’s words,

“The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge

the gap between the present and its future.”[284] The hope, then—if

there can be hope—is that social passivity and conformism will be

shattered so as to allow for the “generally social democratic

attitudes,” which Chomsky claims are widespread among the U.S. populace,

to be made more profound by means of a transition to more radically

participatory political spaces.

The grounds for the hope that a reasonable and just future can be born

from the present are not entirely baseless, as alarming as the threats

posed to humanity by environmental catastrophe are. It is now imaginable

that inclusive, egalitarian antisystemic movements will develop in core

societies, hand in hand with resistance movements the world over, from

striking Chinese industrial workers to Arab antistatist protesters,

revolutionary Kurds, Indian Marxists, indigenous peoples, and the

victims of global militarism and capitalism everywhere. To continue with

this image, this multitudinous international movement could be of and

for the subordinated peoples of the world—an egalitarian association

that advances solidarity and revolutionary love. This movement would

have to be wide-ranging and diverse, taking account of human plurality

along with the various and multiple factors that perpetuate exclusion,

oppression, and unreason—such as climate catastrophe and war, in

addition to neoliberal global capitalism, patriarchy, and racism.

The point is that the means of production and social relations must be

socialized—decolonized—if barbarism is to be averted. In this way, only

through what Arendt terms a “full experience” of the human capacity for

a “new beginning”—the faculty of interrupting what exists and in its

place “beginning something anew,” like de Beauvoir’s “surpass[ing]” of

“the given toward an open future”—can hope be bestowed on the human

condition.[285]

On Adorno’s New Categorical Imperative

If justice perishes, the life of [humans] on Earth has no value.

—Immanuel Kant, “Justice and Punishment”

Writing in Negative Dialectics, his last major work, Adorno claims to

have identified a “new categorical imperative” beyond that established

by Kant over two centuries ago—one “imposed by [Adolf] Hitler upon

unfree [humanity]”: humans must “arrange their thoughts and actions so

that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will

happen.”[286]

Auschwitz, of course, was one of the major sites erected by Nazi

occupation forces in Poland that, following the institution of the

Endlösung (“Final Solution”) in 1941, served as an extermination camp

for European Jews. It is estimated that approximately a million people

were murdered there by means of mass industrial killing: the infamous

gas chambers and crematoriums.[287] Its genesis apparently found its

basis in the relative “inefficiency” of massacres carried out by the

Einsatzgruppen (“mobile killing units”) and related groups within the

Eastern European territories taken over by the Nazi war machine. This

purported inefficacy arguably had to do in large part with the toll

exacted on the executioners who murdered individual Jews—including women

and children—as openly recognized by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.[288]

Adorno’s stress in his new categorical imperative on Auschwitz, then,

should be taken as a stand-in for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of

European Jewry as a whole: the Holocaust, or HaShoah (“catastrophe”).

In Adorno’s own words, his postulated new imperative has “priority

before any other requirement.”[289] Being categorical, such an

imperative “lay[s] claim to universal validity,” as Kant’s interlocutor

Karl Jaspers explains.[290] It applies to us unconditionally; it is the

“premier demand upon all education.”[291] As a response to the breadth

of the event of Auschwitz, Adorno’s categorical imperative is a

commentary on the centrality of the Shoah as a historical event, an

expression of the “practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony

to which individuals are exposed.”[292] J. M. Bernstein notes in a study

of Adorno’s ethics that such abhorrence is, for Adorno, the “determining

ground for all future action,” a “reorientation” of being aimed at

shaping human behavior in such a way that no one will come to experience

bodily suffering of the type brought about by the Shoah—one comparable

to Horkheimer’s assertion that “suffering is the fact from which all

considerations about human life must set out.”[293] Such a reorientation

would in negative terms demand the abolition of the “aggressive

nationalism” that Adorno sees as birthing Nazism and other genocidal

regimes—for example, that imposed on Armenians during the First World

War—as well as the positive institution of the generalized social

recognition that “the Jew is a human being”: that the oppressed,

excluded other is an end whose interests are to be defended and

promoted. It is a call for a new humanity—one that no longer “inflict[s]

[death] administratively on innumerable people.”[294]

Adorno’s new categorical imperative should be taken as a profound

critique of radical exclusion and dehumanization along with the very

real violence that follows. It is a continuation or even a restatement

of Kant’s original imperative, which calls for humanity to be treated as

an end in itself. As such, Adorno’s demand should not be read as

asserting the singularity of the Shoah, as many apologists for Israel’s

dispossession of the Palestinians hold, for instance, given that his

critique of Auschwitz is related to the task of preventing the future

recurrence of something “similar.” His perspective in this sense is

close to that of Emmanuel Levinas, who dedicates his Otherwise Than

Being, or Beyond Essence to “the memory of those who were closest among

the six million assassinated by the National Socialists” as well as “the

millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the

same hatred of the other man [sic], the same anti-semitism.”[295]

As Levinas’s dedication here intimates, readers of Adorno may be

skeptical about the stress in his imperative on Auschwitz, however

radical an atrocity it was. The millions of Jews killed by the National

Socialist regime were surely “denied the moral regard they deserved,” in

Bernstein’s words, but “such a lack of regard is massively routine in

human history.”[296] The destruction of the European Jews at the Nazis’

hands is for Bernstein “nothing historically or sociologically unique,”

but instead represents the “direction of modern societies as a

consequence of rationalization,” the “horrific instantiation and

intensification of the dominant sociological and reflective trends of

modernity.”[297] It follows from the fact of state sovereignty, under

which states claim the right to commit genocide against those subject to

their dominion; the Shoah cannot be easily dismissed as a “casual

aberration of a Western world essentially sane,” as historians Edmund

Stillman and William Pfaff argue.[298] For Polish sociologist Zygmunt

Bauman, the Shoah “was not an irrational outflow of the

non-yet-fully-eradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity” but rather “a

legitimate resident in the house of modernity,” which brought about the

unchecked rule of statist bureaucracy, efficiency considerations, and

scientific positivism that Bauman finds principally responsible for the

Nazi genocide.[299]

Adorno follows Max Weber’s observation that the “‘objective’ discharge

of business” performed by modern administration is carried out “without

regard for persons.”[300] Such objectivization is evidenced in the

subsumption of Jewish lives to the demands of National Socialism, as in

labor’s subsumption to capital, as Adorno points out. Even in the formal

freedom afforded the individual in liberal capitalist society, persons

are as “replaceable as [they] will be under the liquidators’ boots,”

claims Adorno.[301] Such assertions—glaring, perhaps, to those attracted

to liberal politics—are related to his interpretation of fascism’s

causes, which in his view were born out of “the concentration of

economic and administrative power” by capitalism, on the one hand, and

“complete [societal] impotence on the other.”[302] Bauman also takes

this position, placing the Shoah’s locus in “the emancipation of the

political state ... from social control—following the step-by-step

dismantling of all non-political power resources and institutions of

social self-management.”[303]

With such considerations in mind, one can then ask why Adorno stresses

Auschwitz as that which must not be allowed to recur, and why, for

example, he does not identify the barbaric genocides visited by European

powers on colonized bodies decades and even centuries before the

emergence of National Socialism as focal points of critique, as was done

before Adorno’s time by Luxemburg and contemporarily by Arendt—with the

latter, incidentally, arguing that European colonialism served as an

important model for Hitler and his associates.[304] The world-historical

near extermination of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, or Abya

Yala—the result of the European conquest, estimated by French historian

Pierre Chaunu as resulting in the death of between forty and a hundred

million people—finds little mention in Adorno’s oeuvre.[305] He pays

little heed to European society’s application of fascism to non-European

peoples through imperialism, as Caribbean theorist Aimé Césaire

formulates it.[306] Nowhere does Adorno write or speak of the “bones of

defenseless Herero women ... bleaching in the sun,” as Luxemburg does in

commemoration of the peoples of Namibia victimized by German

imperialism, or “the death cries of martyred [indigenous] women ...

[which] fade away in the rubber plantations of the international

capitalists,” in Colombia as elsewhere.[307]

As is noted by U.S. Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson, Adorno

showed little enthusiasm for contemporary decolonization and

anti-imperialist efforts in southern societies, in contrast, say, to his

colleague Marcuse.[308] While this omission could have to do with a lack

of faith on Adorno’s part as regards the expected progress for southern

peoples by means of formal decolonization, it is true, as Lebanese

Marxist Gilbert Achcar notes, that the history of imperialism is

multiple, such that “colonialist usurpation of a [given] territory” need

not ipso facto entail “the racist extermination of whole

populations.”[309] Foreign domination as practiced by the Ottomans, for

example, was rather different than occupation overseen by the Nazis.

Still, recognition of this distinction should hardly be an excuse for

Adorno’s failure to concern himself centrally with the lived experiences

of those subjected to European imperialism, for the inhumanity of this

project should clearly have been self-evident to any observer. This

tendency to overlook Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth” can indeed

be observed as having been shared by many other contemporary Western

intellectuals, even radical ones—Bookchin and Arendt not the least of

these.

While it may be that Adorno’s rendering invisible of the colonialism

problem amounts to an omission indicative of racism, Adorno generally

does not seem to have been a racist, in keeping with his concerns

regarding social exclusion and authoritarianism. In his view, the atomic

bombing of Hiroshima was an act reminiscent of Auschwitz and the

invention of nuclear weapons “belongs in the same historical context as

genocide.”[310] His further opposition to racist imperial politics is

seen in his denunciation of the “horror of the napalm bombs” used by the

U.S. military in Vietnam and the sympathy that biographer Stefan

Müller-Doohm sees him as having for those protesting the war.[311]

Indeed, in his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno states that his use

of the term Auschwitz should be taken to mean “not only Auschwitz but

the world of torture which has continued to exist after Auschwitz,”

particularly as reflected in the “most horrifying reports [coming] from

Vietnam.”[312] While Adorno’s concrete efforts to resist the Vietnam War

were rather minimal in comparison with those of his more activist

colleague Marcuse, and though his new categorical imperative is not, as

in Anders’s demand, that there be “no more Hiroshima[s],” the

formulation of his imperative should be read as one demanding the total

rejection of social systems responsible for the perpetuation of human

suffering, as follows from Kant’s original imperative.[313]

Serious efforts directed toward preventing the recurrence of Auschwitz

or anything similar should likely take account of the barbarism that did

in fact allow for Auschwitz and the Shoah. Explanations for the rise of

Nazism and institution of the Endlösung are varied, as well as highly

contentious. Neumann, for one, finds Nazism to have been the product of

collaboration among Germany’s industrial capitalists, governmental

bureaucracy, military leadership, and the National Socialist Party. The

Nazi regime in this sense was in Neumann’s view a reality imposed by

dominant power groups as opposed to any expression of the will of

Germany’s subordinated classes, which “merely follow[ed] that leadership

or even resist[ed] it.”[314]

In stark contrast to Neumann’s conclusion here is the questionable

depiction by Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his Hitler’s

Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen

contends that National Socialism and the Shoah reflected widespread,

almost primordial anti-Jewish sentiments on the part of the German

people as a whole—an “eliminationist anti-Semitism” found among

amorphous groups of Christian Europeans in general and particularly

Germans, who are described by Goldhagen as being fundamentally

anti-Semitic.[315] Goldhagen claims that such sentiments took hold of

German society before Nazism, and even and especially gripped the German

industrial proletariat—a rather unconvincing theory on all counts.

Reviewing relevant scholarship on these questions, dissident

ex-professor and activist Norman Finkelstein notes that economic

considerations among Germans served as grounds for support for the

National Socialist Party, and that “most Germans” did not support Nazi

atrocities against Jews before the war years and even expressed outrage

at such.[316] Bauman similarly finds that Germans in general did not

accept the Nazis’ racist propaganda, observing rightly that the

historical legacy of anti-Jewish sentiments was much less extreme in

Germany as compared with other European societies. Even toward the end

of the war, following the hardening of many Germans to the suffering of

others, it was German commoners who provided aid to Jews forced by the

Nazis to engage in death marches, as Goldhagen himself recognizes.

Continuing this line of thought, antifascist researcher Ruth Birn sees

Goldhagen’s voluntarist interpretations of the perpetration of the Shoah

at the hands of “ordinary Germans” as highly problematic, agreeing

instead with historical scholarship that stresses the “mixture of peer

pressure, careerism, and obedience” that Goldhagen dismisses

entirely.[317]

Another way to understand the rise of Nazism is Nicolas Holliman’s claim

in Principia Dialectica that the emergence of racist Nazi sociological

theories, brutal imperialist expansionism, and the Endlösung would

likely have not entered history had the popular revolution attempted in

Germany at the close of World War I been successful rather than

suppressed as it was by the Social Democrats.[318] Indeed, Germany’s

Social Democratic Party and the attendant lack of an autonomous labor

movement must assume a great deal of the responsibility for the Nazi

catastrophe. The party’s hierarchical form of organizing, together with

a generalized internalization of the Hegelian sense of progress

propagated by the Social Democrats, may well have alienated the general

populace from considering a direct confrontation with the emerging Nazi

movement, as was, for instance, practiced contemporarily in Spain among

radical workers. The social programs and economic stimulation provided

by the National Socialist Party in response to the crippling depression

also helps explain popular consent to the regime.

More fundamentally, Richard Koenigsberg’s critique of the state and its

ideology of nationalism is another aid in understanding complicity with

fascism and mass industrial murder. In a discursive move reminiscent of

Adorno and Horkheimer’s assertion that the domination of nature

reproduces itself through domination among humans, Koenigsberg claims

that the sacrifice of millions of people in World War I served as an

example reproduced by Hitler in the case of his own soldiers, on the one

hand, and Jews, on the other.[319] Adorno himself similarly argues that

“horror is potentially already posited” wherever the state’s right is

enshrined over the rights of its members—or whenever perpetrators of

barbarism pass off their crimes as mere “acts of state.”[320] Wilhelm

Reich is similarly correct to find a social institution in the bourgeois

nuclear family that generally prepares new generations for adjustment to

reactionary social relations and hence perpetuates their dominance.[321]

The fascist stress on traditional gender, sexual, and familial roles is

well known.

Another important factor in attempting to make sense of the Nazi

experience is Adorno’s critique of what he terms “bourgeois coldness,”

or a “deficient libidinal relationship to other persons” that can be

observed among “people who cannot love.” He claims that, if “coldness

were not a fundamental trait of anthropology, that is, the constitution

of people as they in fact exist,” if people in general were something

other than “profoundly indifferent toward whatever happens to everyone

else except for a few to whom they are closely bound,” the Shoah “would

not have been possible,” as “people would not have accepted it.” This

coldness, this “indifference to the fate of others,” in turn finds its

basis in antagonistic, egotistical forms of social organization. Adorno

views the “inability to identify with others”—this capitalist,

antihumanist trait—to be “unquestionably the most important

psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could

have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent

people.”[322] The grip that such coldness seems to have held on the

German social imaginary helps explain, according to Arendt, the

remarkable absence of resistance on Germans’ part to the Nazi

regime—this in marked contradistinction to the responses of several

peoples residing in spaces occupied by the Nazis, from Yugoslav and

Greek guerrillas to Jewish Communist female partisans.[323] One must not

forget, though, the courageous and desperate efforts of the youthful

members of the White Rose to denounce fascism as well as those Germans

who gave Jews refuge in their homes, however much bourgeois coldness

likely synergized with popular anti-Jewish sentiments among the general

German population to allow for the Shoah.

This brief review of analyses of the Nazi catastrophe, while partial and

incomplete, leads to the following conclusions regarding Nazi

totalitarianism: it was imposed by dominant groups and met with moderate

opposition, which proved inadequate; its dominance was supported by

preexisting reactionary social institutions; and its world-historical

crimes were allowed to continue in part because of a marked absence of

solidarity with those victimized.

While history cannot simply be said to repeat itself, social structures

of domination, subjugation, and exclusion surely do reproduce

themselves, as attested to by a basic understanding of recorded human

history—Hegel’s slaughter-bench. Many observers have criticized attempts

to draw parallels between happenings since the defeat of National

Socialism in 1945 and what occurred during Nazism’s twelve-year reign

over Germany and much of Europe—for example, the Bush presidency and

particularly his 2003 invasion of Iraq, or Israel’s treatment of the

Palestinians and other Arabs. Many of these same commentators would

likely find Bernstein’s and Bauman’s explorations of the positional

similarity between the Shoah and other dominative practices highly

problematic.

It nonetheless must be “cried out”—á la Jacques Derrida in his

observation that “never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine,

and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the

history of the earth and of humanity” as in the late twentieth

century—that the climate catastrophe currently under way is causing

social exclusion, human suffering, and senseless death on a scale for

which the historical examples of Auschwitz and the Shoah are a useful

analogue.[324] Horkheimer’s assertion in 1956 that humanity is “heading

for a situation compared to which Nazism was a relatively moderate

affair” surely merits consideration, especially in light of Adorno’s

injunction that nothing similar to Auschwitz should be allowed to occur

again.[325] The case of industrial genocide is not dissimilar to that of

nuclear annihilation, as analyzed by Schell and others, including Adorno

himself, for the latter would amount to a “universal holocaust,” to

recall Aronson.[326] It follows that there seems to be no reason not to

likewise consider the various threats posed by climate catastrophe;

there is, in fact, much reason to do so.

Climate change threatens to induce severe, widespread human suffering

the world over, and greatly increase the suffering imposed and overseen

by capitalism. Does the desertification of formerly populated

agricultural lands around the globe—eventualities entirely dependent on

the use of hydrocarbons by industrial societies through their employment

of capitalism and growth economies—not constitute a monstrous crime? Can

the eradication of numerous Pacific island societies due to increased

sea levels ever be justified, or the destruction of coastal human

settlements housing the vast majority of humanity? What can be said

regarding the prospect that some five million people, many of them

children, are expected to die over the coming decade because of climate

change, or the specter of “billion-person famines”—or indeed, the

likelihood that the Andes and Himalayan glaciers, on which billions of

lives depend for water, will be radically diminished by the global

heating induced by capitalism—other than that everything should be done

to attempt to prevent such possibilities from coming to pass?[327] An

Earth that experiences climatic changes that make large

areas—particularly the tropics—uninhabitable would clearly violate

Adorno’s new categorical imperative, as would truly apocalyptic degrees

of warming (6°C–12°C, or 10.5°F–21°F) that would likely amount to what

antiauthoritarian scholar Maia Ramnath terms a “final solution for

humanity as a whole.”[328]

Faced with such horrific possibilities, humanity can turn to the Shoah

experience as a way of illuminating the current climate predicament. As

has been noted, climate catastrophe could well disrupt agricultural

production in much of the world, thus provoking devastating increases in

malnutrition, hunger, and starvation rates, with enormous increases in

human deaths. Such a possible future eventuality can be likened to the

phenomenon of der Musselmänner in the Nazi camps, or inmates who had

reached such a state of acute malnutrition due to their exclusion that

they became little more than “staggering corpse[s],” largely incapable

of expressing emotion or thought—Muslims, in the Orientalist imaginary

of the imprisoned.[329] Though “still nominally alive,” der Musselmänner

attested to the “total triumph of power over the human being,” similar

to those potentially facing starvation induced by climate change.[330]

The total disregard suffered by those who became Musselmänner, alongside

that shown to those who were outright murdered, speaks to the nature of

the concentration camp administration. Similar observations could be

made about currently prevailing administrative processes and

administrators. Indeed, in light of the clearly horrendous toll that

climate change stands to take on human life across the globe, the ease

with which premier U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern dismisses the

historical responsibility of industrial capitalist societies for the

climate crisis, let alone moves toward making resources available to aid

southern societies in adapting to the climate catastrophe, is in ways

reminiscent of Adolf Eichmann’s claim, when facing prosecution by the

Israeli state for his crimes against European Jewry, that “repentance is

for little children.”[331] In similar terms, at the conclusion of the

Copenhagen climate negotiations, Sudanese negotiator Lumumba Stanislaus

Di-Aping observed that the dominant approaches endorsed by the global

powers at COP—approaches radically at odds with recommendations based on

established science—are based on maxims like those that “funneled six

million people in Europe into furnaces.”[332] In naming the accord for

what it is—an agreement “devoid of any sense of responsibility or

morality”—Di-Aping points to the “antireason of totalitarian

capitalism,” which as Horkheimer and Adorno melancholically state,

“makes the satisfaction of needs impossible and tends toward the

extermination of humanity.”[333] Clearly, such trends have been affirmed

rather than overthrown by the subsequent negotiations since Copenhagen,

from Tianjin to Bonn and Cancún to Durban, and can be expected to be

reproduced by policymakers at the COP18 talks to be hosted by the Qatari

dictatorship in 2012 and beyond. The most recent agreement drawn up at

Durban, for example, which envisions a postponement until 2020 of the

institution of a new global accord to regulate carbon emissions, is

nothing if not entirely authoritarian in its implications.

The radical evil represented by climate change—principally, the three

hundred thousand people who die each year due to the dangerous human

interference with the world’s atmosphere that has already taken place as

well as the various horrifying realities that global warming stands to

visit on the peoples of Earth in the future—has it seems become banal,

in the sense that constituted power finds little reason in the prospect

of the mass suffering and death that results from climate change to

recognize the present as an emergency necessitating radical action. This

follows, of course, from the dominant imperatives to maintain and expand

existing power structures and privileges. It represents perhaps the most

extreme expression of the dominant trend within capitalist societies

that valorizes capitalist profit over the interests of people—a

continuation, again, of the decidedly extreme oppression historically

visited on southern peoples by imperialist powers.[334]

Within the framework of a system such as this, it is largely assumed

that the “normal” operation of capitalist society need not be

interrupted by concerns about the continued existence of much of

humanity—it is expected, indeed, that humankind and even life itself

should be subordinated to the demands of capital. Such an arrangement is

undoubtedly totalitarian, for it sacrifices “human freedom” to

“historical development.”[335] While the nameless, foreign others

sacrificed by climate change are not usually referred to as a “plague

bacillus” or an “epidemic” against which one must defend the interests

of the fatherland or state—indeed, the victims of global warming are

conspicuous for their absence in the northern imagination—the end

result, which amounts to massive disregard for the welfare of the other

and mass death, is not terribly different.

Dominant relations can hence be characterized as governed by what

Chomsky calls a “depraved indifference” to human life.[336] Australian

scientist Gideon Polya has termed the current situation “climate

genocide,” while Bangladeshi climatologist Atiq Rahman similarly labels

it “climatic genocide.”[337] These phrases are accurate if the word

genocide is to be understood as murder of persons belonging to

particular classes and social groups, as originally formulated by

Raphael Lemkin, the concept’s inventor.[338] If the definition is

extended to membership or residence in particular geographic regions—a

collective belonging of sorts—the term fits better, even if the question

of intent for such eventualities is left unresolved: under the

internationally accepted definition, acts of genocide occur only if

governed by conscious intent. Against this view, Chomsky is right to

suggest that those concerned with such problems focus “on predictable

outcome as evidence for intent.”[339] Not to work to undermine global

capitalism is effectively to be complicit with the genocide of southern

peoples. Jean-Paul Sartre put it well in a statement that he issued as

president of the International War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam: “The

genocidal intent is implicit in the facts. It is not necessarily

premeditated.”[340]

The enormity of suffering threatened by climate catastrophe returns us

to the most important remaining question. It is certainly the case that

climate policy to date has been shaped almost entirely by power

interests acting in defense of capitalism and sovereign states. It

therefore could not immediately be claimed that the policies that have

been practiced necessarily reflect the popular will on such matters—or

to paraphrase Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, it may be that the

dominant have so far been victorious, but that this victory has failed

to convince those subjected to this domination. The undemocratic

implications of such policy—self-evidently rather clear—lead us to the

question of whether we can envision alternative policies being

instituted within the near term by agents other than those who have thus

far been considered responsible for such matters: Can the nonstate,

which is humanity, take the place of the state in these terms?[341]

Unfortunately, the U.S. public in particular is decidedly unconvinced

that climate change poses serious threats to peoples’ well-being now and

in the foreseeable future.[342] While the attitudes of residents of

other publics on this question is undoubtedly important, those of

residents of the society most responsible for the climate predicament

are of particular significance, for they surely influence the degree

that people would be willing to undertake steps toward the radical

reconstruction of society along humane ecological grounds—a crucial

project that must be realized if humanity is to survive.

A great deal rests on the thought and activity of the subordinated

classes of societies that can be described, like Immanuel Wallerstein

does, as residing within the core of the present world system. It

remains to be seen whether industrial workers who find themselves in the

core will break radically with prevailing ideology and contribute to the

remaking of society, as foreseen by Marx, although considerations of the

observed behavior of large sections of the proletariat leave

considerable room for doubt. The lack of concern and indifference often

expressed for the fate of geographically distant others—such as Iraqis,

Haitians, Mexicans, Bangladeshis, Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Sahelian

residents—is particularly alarming, given the implications this has for

international solidarity as well as the prospect of cooperative global

relations and global climate rationality. The making invisible of others

that is propagated by the dominant forces and accepted by the

nondominant is a worrisome situation—one that must be broken radically.

While Hedges may be exaggerating when he claims U.S. society to have

“lost the capacity for empathy,” it hardly seems to be the case that

Western publics will quite literally take up arms to defend those

imperiled elsewhere, as Catalunyan anarchists and others did when faced

with the prospect of a fascist takeover of Spain in July 1936.[343] “The

disregard for the subject makes things easy for the administration,” as

Adorno and Horkheimer write.[344]

Progress toward the realization of autonomous social relations

presupposes the existence of autonomous individuals “capable of putting

existing laws into question,” as Castoriadis claims, or ones who

practice what Marcuse terms an “autonomous reason.”[345] Movements for

autonomy and reason are alarmingly lacking across much of the globe, but

particularly so in the North. It is at times as though the dominant U.S.

imaginary considered other regions of the world to be a vast East that

merits little investigation. It would indeed be difficult to maintain

that the Western industrial proletariat has distinguished itself in its

historical defense of humanity—hence the present predicament. The

complicity of core publics with the destruction visited on Iraq in

particular during the past quarter century has been monstrous, as has

their resignation in the face of an economic system responsible for the

death of millions of children annually through starvation and material

deprivation. A recognition of and struggle over the “moral character of

action” is missing among many who have the privilege of not personally

confronting today’s acute horrors, many of which are impelled by the

socioeconomic system to which these people have seemingly adjusted;

presumably, such individuals would act differently than they do, were

they concerned about such questions.[346]

Still, such a “trend is not destiny,” as environmental commentator David

Orr puts it.[347] The fate of the future, though potentially

catastrophic, is not yet a fait accompli; “the world’s course is not

absolutely conclusive,” as Adorno claims, and “the horizon of history is

still open,” in Marcuse’s words.[348] As Hardt and Negri observe, and as

has been dramatically demonstrated in, say, the recent wave of popular

revolts in Arab-majority societies, a “metropolis can ignite

overnight”—as can a countryside or an entire region.[349]

There may be value in recalling Horkheimer’s explosive assessment of

Kant’s original imperative as regards the relevance of Adorno’s new

categorical imperative to the present: “In this society of isolated

individuals, the categorical imperative ... runs up against the

impossibility of its own meaningful realization. Consequently, it

necessarily implies the transformation of this society.”[350]

Similar conclusions follow from reflecting on Adorno’s posited

imperative on Auschwitz. Just as the reign of capital and the state

renders impossible the generalized treatment of humans as ends, the

forms of prevailing society threaten fundamentally to violate Adorno’s

formulated imperative. That which exists must be negated and overcome to

give way to a liberated society—one that would neither engage in

genocide, whether climatic or otherwise, nor take actions that would

effectively destroy Earth’s ability to support life. This new society

would reverse the traditional reality that affords capital and the state

unchecked power; instead of merely being spectators subjected to the

prevailing power, participants in the construction of this new world

would seek to abolish these authoritarian forms.[351] To paraphrase

Camus, we must rebel so that we will continue to exist.[352] All rests

on the development of an exit from the monstrous present. As Neumann

declares, the system “can only be overthrown by the conscious political

action of the oppressed masses.”[353]

This conscious political action is seen, among other

geographic-historical spaces, in the efforts of slaves in the French

colony of Saint-Domingue—thereafter Haiti—to liberate themselves from

domination. In Hardt and Negri’s view, “Neither moral arguments at home

nor calculations of profitability abroad could move European capital to

dismantle the slave regimes [in Saint-Domingue and elsewhere]. Only the

revolt and revolution of slaves themselves could provide an adequate

lever.”[354]

“The rights of human beings must be held sacred, however great a

sacrifice this may cost the ruling power,” writes Kant.[355] The

existing system “cannot be adjusted to; like an iron collar, it can only

be broken.”[356]

It is to be hoped that once people reflect on and discuss climate

destabilization, they will respond with sympathy, turning radically

against the institutions and realities that perpetuate suffering. Such

resistance is perhaps prefigured in the often-generous reactions of

ordinary people to the misfortunes experienced by strangers following

storms, earthquakes, landslides, and mine disasters. It is nonetheless

imperative that the opposition to the causes of climate change pass from

being a matter of individual charity to one of systematic resistance.

Without this, the prospect for what Arendt calls a “world fit for human

habitation” is difficult to conceive.[357]

Compassion—consideration of the other as a subject with interests worth

valuing, defending, and promoting—then can be seen as constituting a

potential exit point from the present. As Bernstein notes, compassion is

a prefiguring of political justice and “anticipates the generality that

justice would be.”[358]

Another important consideration regarding Adorno’s new categorical

imperative in relation to the climate predicament is the question of

responsibility—and precisely who bears it. Dyer’s assertion that “nobody

is to blame” is absurd; such apologism has no place here.[359]

Perhaps one of the most radical takes on responsibility for the Nazi

catastrophe is the one advanced by Reich in his The Mass Psychology of

Fascism, in which he quite bluntly states that “the working masses of

men and women, they and they alone, are responsible for everything that

takes place, the good things and the bad things.” “Under the influence

of politicians,” Reich maintains, people in general are led to blame

particular interests for the outbreak of given wars. World War I, for

example, is generally held to be the result of the actions of “munitions

industrialists,” while “psychopathic generals” are in this sense blamed

for World War II within much of popular consciousness. Reich dismisses

such explanations, equating them to a “passing [of] the buck.” He

instead finds the “responsibility for wars” to fall “solely” on the

masses of people, precisely because “they have all the necessary means

to avert war in their own hands.” His analysis is similar for the

problem of imperialism, which he finds to be both tolerated and actively

supported by the masses. Due to this dynamic, however, these same forces

can overthrow such phenomena dialectically. In sum, “at the bottom of

the failure to achieve a genuine social revolution,” asserts Reich,

“lies the failure of the masses of people.” The crucial point is to

“activate the passive majority of the population, which always helps

political reaction to achieve victory” and “eliminate those inhibitions

that run counter to the development of the will to freedom.”[360]

Arendt, in contrast to Reich, claims that the cry “We are all guilty” in

fact serves to “exculpate to a considerable degree those who actually

were guilty,” given, in her view, that “where all are guilty, nobody

is.” As she writes, there clearly were “wrongdoers” within the context

of the experience of Nazism, but these people should not be seen as

equivalent with the German masses as a whole. In her 1963 book Eichmann

in Jerusalem, in particular—a work dedicated to examining Israel’s

prosecution of the mass-murdering Nazi bureaucrat—Arendt emphasizes

thoughtlessness and conformity to hierarchy as conditions that enabled

as well as facilitated the prosecution of the Nazi genocide of European

Jewry. In her words, “great evil” is not necessarily brought about by

the machinations of a “wicked heart,” which she contends is a

“relatively rare phenomenon”; instead “most evil is done by people who

never made up their mind to be either bad or good.”[361] The point for

Arendt is to stress the importance of obedience in any social regime. As

she remarks near the close of her volume on Eichmann, “Politics is not

like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”[362]

The Shoah, like any other collective political effort, was a project

that arose and was sustained “only out of the cooperative action of many

people,” together with the failures of other people consciously and

practically to put an end to such barbarous forms of cooperation.

Instead of colluding with negating ends, humans can in Arendt’s view

impede totalitarian processes by “act[ing] and interact[ing] in

freedom”—by creating new and different realities that “put an end to

what was there before.”[363] Arendt thus calls for the prospect of the

“wind of thought” to be manifest and mindlessness overthrown, for as she

says only this can “prevent catastrophes.”[364]

According to Adorno, the sole force capable of resisting the “principle

of Auschwitz” is “autonomy,” in Kantian terms: “the power of reflection,

of self-determination, of not cooperating.” The “very willingness to

connive with power and to submit outwardly to what is stronger ...

should not arise again,” he writes.[365] The grounds that allow the mind

the chance to “oppose the superior strength of the course of the world”

are similarly found in the simple fact “that in every situation there is

a concrete possibility of doing things differently,” that “rebellion,”

in Holloway’s words, “is always an option, in any situation.”[366]

Naturally, the mere adoption of postures that oppose the course of the

existent—idealism, in philosophical terms—will hardly suffice in light

of the profundity of the current predicament, for that which exists

necessarily must be displaced in actuality. As Horkheimer puts it, “The

revolution is no good” insofar as “it is not victorious.”[367] In

Merleau-Ponty’s words, “victory is defeat wherever it is not the success

of a new humanity.[368]

For an Ecological Anarcho-Communism

The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin the world they live in before exiting

the stage of history, but we carry another world here in our hearts.

—Buenaventura Durruti

From the arguments presented up to this point, it should be clear that

the demands of decency and reason require a radically different world

organization than presently exists. The alternative political project

offered here is an ecological anarcho-communism. While the case for such

a project is compelling, it does not approximate the status of a

Hegelian end state or Platonic Ideal; Marcuse is right to insist that

those fashioning themselves as critical theorists need to be critical of

their projects and selves.[369] In the words of dissident Russian

novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin’s character I-330, there can be no “final”

revolution, for “the number of revolutions is infinite.”[370]

The social transformations that will be necessary to avert total climate

catastrophe cannot emerge from conventional approaches to political

questions. This should be evident to the peoples of the world after

having suffered four years of the Obama administration’s management of

imperialist policies in the United States, for this charlatan—brought to

power by means of a disconcerting degree of popular delusion about

prospects for “hope” and “change”—has more than anything else simply

continued the villainy of his predecessor. His numerous other crimes

aside, that Obama could have nearly single-handedly dashed the hopes

raised by the Copenhagen climate summit in December 2009—Copenhagen

being, next to Cancún and Durban thereafter, one of official society’s

final attempts at pretending to address climate change—just days after

defending the doctrine of imperial aggression in his acceptance speech

for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is a reflection of the utter insanity of

dominant politics. Such political forms must be radically displaced, and

desperately soon, if human life is to be afforded a chance.

The problem today is that of realizing revolution—one made, as Brecht

characterizes the Paris Commune, “for the sake of humanity” and in

defense of life.[371] Revolution should not be taken to mean “torrents

of blood, the storming of the Winter Palace, and so on”; rather, it

should constitute “a radical transformation of society’s institutions,”

as Castoriadis argues.[372] Important as such an end is in light of the

climate crisis, revolution should also be understood as a means to that

end.

As Arendt, Adorno, and many contemporary analysts rightly acknowledge, a

great deal of confusion exists over what constitutes progress toward

revolutionary ends today. In spite of such confusion, though, and in

accordance with Chomsky, humanity is entirely capable of “imagin[ing]

and mov[ing] towards the creation of a better society.”[373] With

Adorno, everyone should outwardly manifest their opposition to the world

as it exists, or as Castoriadis states, “The immense majority of people

who live in present-day society ought to be opposed to the established

form of the institution of society.”[374] While David Harvey claims in

his Enigma of Capital that there is no “obvious way to attack the

bastions of privilege for capitalist élites or to curb their inordinate

money power and military might,” his speculations in Spaces of Hope

regarding the future possibility of a largely female-led “massive

movement of non-violent resistance” that “neutralize[s] and eliminate[s]

all weapons of violence and mass destruction” with the aim of toppling

clerical-military regimes the world over may well represent the very

means he seeks.[375]

Toward Ecological Anarcho-Communism

In terms of the ends served by revolution, one of the more rational ones

would be an ecological anarcho-communist society. The type of social

relations sought by ecological anarcho-communism would in the first

place be communist—that is, a society in which Marx’s principle of “from

each according to ability, to each according to need” would govern

economic questions, with classes and the division of labor abolished—as

well as anarchist, or bereft of authoritarian social practices. Decision

making could be carried out via a series of federated councils affording

residents direct control of their social and economic affairs. As in

Bookchin’s model of libertarian municipalism, communities rather than

orthodox Marxism’s industrial proletarians would control production and

distribution schemes—since to limit decision-making power merely to

workers would be unnecessarily exclusive, marginalizing youths, older

people, nonindustrial workers (such as agriculturalists), and

nonworkers. Decision-making processes under such conditions would allow

for the flowering of humanity’s reason and compassion as well as fairly

represent the interests of voiceless others, such as future generations

and nonhuman animals.

Nothing in the mere existence of participatory democratic social

relations, of course, would ensure such outcomes. Nevertheless, such a

framework could provide the conditions under which reason and sanity

would be afforded the best chance of prevailing. Takis Fotopoulos’s

claim that the development of a culture critical of patriarchal

relations and hierarchy in general would likely “create a new ethos of

non-domination” extending to the human and nonhuman world is both

compelling and encouraging in this regard.[376]

An ecological anarcho-communist politics would be directed toward

realizing Adorno’s demand that “no one shall starve any longer”—that no

one shall be denied the material conditions necessary for a dignified

life. In addition, this anarcho-communism should seek to ensure social

conditions under which “no one [will] fear to be different” and all will

be able to engage in the “free development of each as such.”[377]

Radical exclusion would be overthrown, with human multiplicity and

plurality seen as traits to be cherished and celebrated rather than

suppressed. Patriarchy would be largely eradicated under these

conditions, if not fully abolished, as would racism, ageism, homophobia,

ableism, and all other conditions of unfreedom.

Anarcho-communist social relations should strive to maximize the space

available for the practice of what Marx terms free conscious activity,

or autonomy—a practice that can only be had in the realm of freedom,

away from alienated labor. The generalized exercise of self-defined

conscious inquiry would follow from the dramatic reduction of work,

together with the emancipation of social relations from domination.

Solidarity would serve as the basis for interrelating. Friendliness and

respect would be shown to individuals. People’s capacities for autonomy

and creativity along with their vulnerabilities would be acknowledged.

Social life would recognize the place for what Arthur Schopenhauer calls

“the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance, patience, regard, and

love of neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which,

therefore, every [human] owes to [one’s] fellow.”[378] Individuals

participating in the construction of anarcho-communism hopefully would

institute the “innate repugnance” that Jean-Jacques Rousseau postulates

humans experience in “seeing [their] fellow men [sic] suffer.”[379]

Chomsky’s call to “deepen the emerging global bonds of sympathy and

solidarity” would be similarly welcomed; such bonds, like Rousseau’s

pity, might help facilitate the chance for total liberation.[380]

Given that such means and ends are arguably far removed from much of

what currently prevails, how might progress be made toward revolution?

Barring the rapid development of a revolutionary movement, a series of

thoroughgoing transitional social reforms may be needed. Three primary

revolutionary reforms involve a guaranteed minimum income for all, full

universal access to health care, and the decommodification of basic

goods, such as food and water. Guaranteed income levels would allow

working people to break from their dependence on earning a wage, and

hence have greater opportunities to associate autonomously and help

build social alternatives, as recognized by left-wing French philosopher

André Gorz, while the second two demands would have immediate and

significant impacts on health and happiness the world over.

Such changes would demand that a massive redistribution of resources

from the transnational capitalist class in large part be directed at

reconstructing societies devastated by disasters as well as neoliberal

capitalism and militarization processes. Here one thinks of Iraq,

Pakistan, Haiti, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other

societies. One potentially transitional means toward the specific end of

redistribution would be the institution of high taxes on luxury

consumption, the expropriation of capitalist wealth, and redirecting the

funds that presently underpin global military spending, or simply the

socialization of property and the means of production.[381] Global

nuclear disarmament—the making of the world into a nuclear weapons and

nuclear energy-free zone—could be similarly helpful.

A future anarcho-communist society would abolish the presently

widespread practice of humans consumption of nonhuman animals; the

enslavement of these animals for human purposes should be abandoned as a

social practice as much as possible. Beyond the rather inescapable

cruelty and suffering implied by the raising of animals for slaughter,

the mass consumption of animals must be halted or at least radically

reduced in the near term on environmental grounds. Studies estimate that

the industrial processes facilitating meat consumption account for

between 18 and 51 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions produced

by humanity.[382] Due to the dramatic wastefulness in the production of

animal meats in terms of both the water and grain used—surely the grain

fields currently dedicated to the feeding of cattle and other

domesticated animals, which in the United States reaches three-quarters

of the total, could more sensibly be used to feed the billions of humans

who go without food—it becomes clear that humanity should exercise

conscious reason together with compassion and abolish meat consumption

to the greatest extent possible. Adopting vegetarian or vegan diets can

in part prefigure a liberated future, as could a broader overhaul of the

industrial capitalist food system, which sees southern societies

exporting food for sale to northern consumers while large swathes of the

residents of such societies suffer from food scarcity as their lands are

bought up by transnational firms that seek to cultivate agrofuels crops

there.

These measures are a few examples of action situated within current

realities that would move toward ending the domination of nature—a

demand as thoroughgoing as any other raised by radical, reconstructive

political projects in human history. Like the abolition of patriarchy

sought by feminists, the ecological society or ecological civilization

presupposed here militates radically against the forces that have

controlled much of human history. Without a total revolution, it is to

be expected that the domination of nature would continue in an

otherwise-liberated set of social relations. An anarchist society, for

instance, would likely still engage in deforestation until substitutes

for wood were made available. For solar energy to exist, moreover, there

must also be mining, fossil fuels, and toxic waste, at least as has been

practiced up to this point. Though the domination of nature can be

greatly minimized through the exercise of reason along with the

overturning of dominant social relations, it could live on for some time

regardless of the abolition of capital and the state.

These considerations aside, much is to be gained by insisting on the

critique of the domination of nature. There would be real improvements

for nonhuman nature following the practices that flow from this

critique. This struggle is encapsulated well in the slogan “animal

liberation/human liberation” advanced by animal rights proponents. As it

suggests, the project of human liberation should not exclude that of

animal liberation; humans should not forget that they are animals, and

that other animals have interests to be respected. As Marcuse declares,

“Nature, too, awaits the revolution!”[383]

The call for an end to the domination of nature need not presuppose a

lurking primitivism, whether anarcho or otherwise. That the

anarcho-communism advanced here is called ecological is a reference to

the sociotechnological basis for the social relations to which such a

project could give birth. It would be a type of

civilization—“non-repressive,” in Marcuse’s formulation—run on

renewable, “soft” forms of energy, such as direct solar, wind,

geothermal, wave, and others, that neither produce carbon dioxide, as

with fossil fuels, nor threaten current and future generations with

potentially terminal exposure to radioactivity, as with nuclear

energy.[384] The potential for participatory, nonhierarchical societies

powered along such lines that, for example, practice socialized medicine

demonstrates the thoughtlessness of primitivist critics who denounce

“civilization” and “technology,” instead of critiquing domination and

irrationality. Social ecologist Brian Tokar, for one, offers a

compelling vision of “decentralized, solar-powered communities empowered

to decide both their energy future and their political future.”[385]

In environmental terms, the successful institution of an ecological

anarcho-communism would seem to be imperative. As Hansen argues, coal

emissions must be ended by 2030 if catastrophe is to be averted, with

2020 being the absolute deadline for northern societies to stop using

coal altogether.[386] Li calculates that global economic growth—that is,

the totality of production of capitalist value—would have to be

suppressed indefinitely in the year 2015 to avoid a 2°C (3.6°F) increase

in average global temperatures.[387] Such calculations accord with

German climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber’s call for the present

United States per capita release of twenty tons of carbon to be reduced

to zero tons within a decade, and with Ted Trainer’s advocacy of a 95

percent reduction in consumption rates in the industrialized North.[388]

In practical terms, Hansen advises that hydrocarbons be used consciously

in the near term for the construction of an alternative

energy-production system. Hansen’s suggestion is in accordance with

academics Peter Schwartzman and David Schwartzman’s March 2011 findings,

which suggest that the employment of a mere 1 to 5 percent of the global

total of petroleum consumed annually toward the construction of a wind-

and solar-based alternative renewable energy capacity could entirely

replace existing hydrocarbon-based capacity within a matter of a couple

decades, or even more rapidly with the redirection of greater

proportions of existing capacity toward this end as well as the

institution of significant energy conservation measures, particularly in

overdeveloped northern societies.[389] Traditional U.S. environmentalist

Lester Brown’s plan to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2020

bases itself principally on wind energy production as well as rooftop

photovoltaic energy, solar plants, geothermal stations, and

hydroelectric dams to a lesser degree.[390] His plan excludes nuclear

energy altogether. Writing in the mainstream magazine Scientific

American in 2009, Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi present similar

recommendations, as did the IPCC in a special 2011 report.[391] It is in

these senses that Hansen’s highly questionable calls for the mass

employment of third- and fourth-generation nuclear reactors to serve as

base load energy to replace coal are seen as irrelevant, their

irrationality having been readily confirmed once again by the 2011

disaster at the Fukushima plant, which has according to the Japanese

government emitted a full one-fifth of the total radioactive material

released during the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.[392] Other

estimates claim that the Fukushima plant has released even more

radioactivity into the environment than Chernobyl did.[393]

Against the absurdities of nuclear energy and hydrocarbon combustion,

the technological basis for averting climate catastrophe is readily at

hand, and it is one that should be taken up by an ecological

anarcho-communist project that would work toward the “solarization” of

global society—that is, the replacement of energy resources originating

in geologic solar power, or fossil fuels, with energy presently provided

by the sun, whether directly or indirectly, in mimicry of the light

reactions performed in photosynthesis. This movement toward solarization

would be situated within the context of a more general advocacy of

transition toward a steady state characterized by a closed

production-consumption cycle that centrally features recycling and

waste-free technologies, in accordance with David Schwartzman’s vision

of “solar communism.”[394] A solarized global society, helped along by

the institution of anarcho-communism, would then be able to observe the

heretofore-violated precautionary principle, which advises against

action that would harm future generations.

Assuming humanity’s billions live in materially simple fashion rather

than capitalistically, concentrated solar thermal plants erected in the

world’s deserts could readily provide for a large proportion of energy

needs, as Trainer notes.[395] Alternatively, the potential in launching

photovoltaic-array-laden satellites into outer space that would then

transmit collected energy to Earth could be explored—a possibility

raised in Elizabeth Kolbert’s writings on climate change as well as

Robinson’s novels.[396] Space-based solar power is an intriguing option

due to considerations of efficiency, given that solar collectors placed

above the atmosphere receive many times the solar energy available to

terrestrial solar plants, and the launching of “solar satellites” would

avoid the mass erection of solar plants in Earth’s deserts and thus

avert the further degradation of the world’s ecosystems. Whatever the

potential rationality of this scheme, this project could however

justifiably be met with accusations of gigantism and hence rejected.

Perhaps a combination of terrestrial concentrated and photovoltaic

solar, wind, geothermal, and maybe wave energy sources could instead be

chosen. The newly developing self-legislating global subject will be

tasked with pondering these and other alternatives.

This new constituent power should also be advised that the prospect of

attaining ecologically sound ends within the near term could fruitfully

be linked to the project of a postscarcity anarchism, as identified by

Bookchin in the late 1960s. In postulating the possibility of a

postscarcity anarchism, Bookchin claims—with Horkheimer, Adorno, and

Marcuse, following Marx—that the material basis developed by the

capitalist mode of production by the mid-twentieth century could, if

consciously reappropriated to ends radically different than those

demanded by capital, satisfy the needs of all people and drastically

reduce the amount of time normally dedicated to labor under

capitalism.[397] According to Bookchin, human society has for some time

now been faced with the revolutionary prospect of transcending material

scarcity and thus overcoming what he sees as the rationale for

patriarchy, private property, class society, the state, and even

hierarchy itself.[398]

Radically reorienting the productive forces and existing technologies

has increased in importance since Bookchin and the Frankfurt School

theorists advocated it, as the absurdities toward which production is

directed live on without redress. In a very real sense, the choice

humanity faces is between continuing to dedicate untold billions—even

trillions—to capitalism’s and militarism’s most absurd and life-negating

projects, or carrying out a revolutionary socialization of global

society that eradicates hunger, disease, and material poverty, while

also instituting a radically different energy basis for social life that

does not threaten humanity with destruction. The choice is between

“barbarism or freedom,” observes Horkheimer, similar to the

juxtaposition between socialism and barbarism that Luxemburg pointed to

amid the First World War. It should be uncontroversial to state that the

technological assemblage that can launch and maintain the Hubble

telescope, or invent, produce, and maintain cluster bombs, stealth jet

fighters, nuclear weapons, and predator drones, can also be directed at

the institution of reason.

An ecological anarcho-communist political project, then, is faced with

reorganizing the world—the very reconstruction of society. Though

ecological anarcho-communism would demand the abolition of a great deal

of prevailing practices and the transformation of dominant modes of

being, it probably would not altogether abandon some of the less

irrational technologies developed by capitalism. Secure interregional

travel, for one, likely would not be jettisoned, though it should become

more broadly accessible to the peoples of the world; communization of

resources can promote this end. In place of jet airplanes—which in terms

of contributions to climate change, have proven to be among the most

disastrous inventions to date—a more rational society could perhaps

employ air transport systems using blimps, zeppelins, and other

dirigibles powered by solar energy.[399]

Another crucial infrastructural change would be a general shift toward

electrically powered transportation systems—such as streetcars,

railways, and electric buses—considering that the energy needed for

their operation could be provided by solar or other renewable sources.

Generalized short-distance transportation by bicycle could be advanced

by the conscious redesign of cities. In theory, electric batteries could

power cars and trucks, for if power were provided by renewable sources,

the carbon-emissions problem associated with motorized transport could

theoretically be solved easily. Such a resolution of course would not by

itself do away with the considerable dangers posed by private

automobiles to human life, as attested to by the multitudes killed

annually in traffic accidents. Serious reflection on this problem may

indeed demand the outright abolition of the car.

As regards water-based transportation, a prototype solar-powered vessel

analogous to solar zeppelins and planes is presently under

development.[400] Beyond this, water transport in a potentially

liberated future could see a partial return to the employment of wind

and muscle power—decolonial caravels, for example—in accordance with a

reappropriation of the less destructive practices and sensibilities

instituted by many humans as both individuals and groups before the

historical onset of industrial capitalism—and since then. A compelling

image in this sense is Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s depiction in

his Dreams of life in a riverine village marked by social cooperation

and vast diversity that is run simply on water mills.

A New International

An important means of helping along the social transformation delineated

above would be through the dedicated efforts of an anarcho-communist

international. Such an international—which would obviously be open to

all, unlike the Marxist First International, which was largely made up

of male members of the proletariat—could take as a model similar

institutions, such as those established by European anarchists during

the first half of the twentieth century—in particular, the Iberian

Anarchist Federation (FAI) or National Confederation of Labor of Spain

and Catalonia (CNT)—Koreans residing in Manchuria via the Korean

Anarchist Communist Federation in the late 1920s, and Uruguayans

struggling against the capitalist military dictatorship in the latter

half of the past century through the Uruguayan Anarchist

Federation.[401] This critical political force could become what Chomsky

calls the “first authentic International,” realizing an “era of true

globalization” that serves people’s interests rather than those of

“investors and other concentrations of power.”[402] It could take the

form of Hardt and Negri’s multitude, consisting of an association of the

various multiplicities of subordinated humans united against capital and

domination, or in Negri’s romantic image, “all of being and nature, the

animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and

exploited humans, together against the will of power and

corruption.”[403]

The beginnings of such a movement can be seen, for example, in

contemporary Palestine solidarity efforts—whether expressed through

public protests, direct participation with the International Solidarity

Movement brigades and other organizations in Palestine, or support for

boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns against the Israeli state.

It also can be found in the alter-globalization movement along with

struggles against sweatshop regimes, white supremacy, sexism, police

brutality, whale hunting, the prison-industrial complex, the

criminalization of migration, and imperial wars. It can be discovered

furthermore in campaigns in support of organic and fair trade

production, among many other manifestations of ordinary people’s

anarchistic impulses, which are reflected “as soon as one identifies,

challenges and overcomes illegitimate power,” as Chomsky notes.[404]

Being anarchist, this international would have little to do with the

practices of the official Internationals observed to date. The fate of

the First International, which might have proven politically

consequential had the rift between Marxists and anarchists not been so

disastrous, arguably has much to do with Engels’s redirection of its

course following Marx’s death. That development, in turn, was itself

highly influential for the Second International, which was largely

overtaken by reformist interpretations of Marx, notwithstanding the

efforts of revolutionaries like Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, along

with other members of the Spartakusbund. The Second International

logically collapsed when its various national parliamentary

representatives betrayed internationalism and voted in favor of the

prosecution of the First World War, a social catastrophe that gave rise

to fascism, both of the brown and red varieties. The repetition of all

such experiences is naturally to be avoided, as are the practices of the

International overseen by Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin as well

as in the Trotskyist Fourth International. Doubtless, Leninism has

little place as a political project both today and in the future. It

cannot be said that the Bolsheviks’ historical institution of the Cheka

secret police, imposition of famine-inducing grain requisition regimes,

repression of anarchists, destruction of the popular soviet-based

government, and suppression of the Kronstadt Commune and the libertarian

Makhnovshchina were defensible practices that should be

resurrected.[405]

This international would oppose “the international of death” and eternal

war of neoliberal capitalism, as the EZLN formulates it.[406] It would

serve as the inverse to the transnational alliances made among

tyrannical orders, opposing the relationship seen in the U.S. support

and financing of the “third world fascism” explored by Chomsky and

Herman, as evidenced in, say, Ngo Dinh Diem’s Vietnam, Augusto Pinochet

in Chile, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Pakistan’s Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, or

the Duvalier family in Haiti. The new international’s practices would be

far removed from the collaboration observed between Pakistani and

Bahraini regimes to suppress protests in the latter country, and that

practiced between the Turkish and Iranian states against Kurdish rebels;

it would likely have little to do with the “mutual aid” generally

expressed among highly authoritarian rulers taken in some circles to

serve anti-imperialist ends—Robert Mugabe, Mu‘ammar al-Gadhafi, Mahmoud

Ahmadinejad, and the Chinese Communist Party, to name just a few

examples. Contra Leon Trotsky, this international would never conclude

that humanity is only “right with and by the [Communist] Party,” as

followed from his fanatic (and fantastic) belief that “history has

provided no other way of being in the right”—an authoritarian

self-assuredness that Arendt rightly asserts to have contributed to the

totalitarian development of Bolshevik rule.[407] Instituting Roy’s

suggestion for a “globalization of dissent,” this international would

refuse the installation of rulers and sovereignty, demanding that

presently constituted power fall and thereafter no person again unjustly

exercise power over another.[408]

In Derrida’s words, this new international could resemble

a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet, almost secret

link, as it was around 1848, but more and more visible.... It is an

untimely link, without status, without title, and without name, barely

public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, “out of joint,”

without coordination, without party, without country, without national

community (International before, across, and beyond any national

determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a

class.[409]

Such an institution probably could not function effectively without some

sort of coordination, and this association surely should not be

dominated by persons hailing from privileged backgrounds, as has been

the case in many past oppositional movements, but it should certainly

not be subordinated to a central party or particular national

leadership, as is revealed through the troubling history of

authoritarian socialism. Yet Derrida’s vision here is helpful in many

ways, particularly in terms of basing a movement on “affinity,

suffering, and hope”—a “link” that is becoming “more visible.” In place

of nationalist identities propagated by the statist world system, the

international could base its association on a universal solidarity among

humans. Beyond a concern for human freedom, this international likely

also should extend its solidarity to nonhuman life. In bringing together

currents opposing domination exerted among humans as well as humanity’s

domination of nature, it could take after Schell’s vision of a general

“defensive alliance” working to protect life from the threats to

survival impelled by capitalist barbarism. It could continue the work of

the “mass rising on behalf of reason” that György Lukács sees in the

historical social movements opposed to nuclear weapons, and especially

in the five hundred million signatures to the 1950 Stockholm Appeal for

unconditional nuclear disarmament—the very “protection of reason as

taking the form of a mass movement,” which Lukács views as taking on a

“preventive, averting character.”[410] The 2011 popular uprisings, both

preventive and reactive at once, aimed at reason and sanity must be

carried forward. Inspiration comes from the millions of Egyptians who

mobilized in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and elsewhere in the country to

overthrow the Mubarak regime in early 2011, as from the hundreds of

thousands of Spaniards who assembled publicly to denounce the prevailing

system—including, for instance, playing the Ode to Joy at the close of

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony during one such gathering—and the

many people who mobilized in a coordinated action worldwide on October

15, 2011, to express their support for the presently developing global

antisystemic political movement.

While this oppositional mass movement may not need to turn to fiction to

explore resistance efforts, the new international could consider the

shadowy Human Project from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, itself

nowhere to be found in the eponymous novel by P. D. James on which the

film bases itself: a group of dissident scientists purportedly based out

of the Azores Islands who metaphorically labor to find a cure to the

universal infertility gripping the future dystopian world depicted in

the film. As in this speculative example, territorial autonomy should be

an important goal for an actual movement to attain—that is, independence

from the global capitalist market and state control as well as from

subjection to militarism. Such an end could greatly help efforts to

develop alternative rebel technologies, remake society, and launch

actions against constituted power along with demonstrating the value of

such an alternative. Cuba’s defiance of the United States and its

promotion of a more humane sort of international relations—above all in

its international brigades of medical workers, but also in its material

assistance for movements fighting the South African apartheid regime—has

relevance in this sense, however problematic Castro’s specific support

for Haile Mengistu Mariam’s Leninist regime in Ethiopia, not to mention

the dictatorial nature of his own rule, as manifested, say, in Cuba’s

practice of imprisoning political dissidents as well as its historical

persecution of nonheterosexuals.

The historical fact of Haiti’s independence is also germane to the task

of imagining this new international, given that this event was the first

rebellion by slaves to successfully overthrow the forces enslaving them,

however much a number of European powers (including Napoléon’s France)

attempted to reverse these gains by means of invasions seeking to

reinstate the institution. That the uprising gave rise, as C.L.R. James

reviews, to humanist notions of launching military campaigns against the

slave-processing infrastructure then found in West Africa carries

meaning for the present, constituting as it does a manifestation of the

normally repressed revolutionary dreams of the subordinated.[411] It is

also worth noting the particularly radical decolonization of South Yemen

(later the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen), which brought a

nominally Marxist regime to power that in contradistinction to many

other putatively “socialist” polities in the Middle East and beyond,

engaged in significant redistribution schemes and public health

improvements domestically even as it actively aided groups working to

overthrow reactionary bourgeois Arab governments in the Gulf

region—despite its problematic professed democratic centralism.[412]

In recent years, Wikileaks has done significant work to expose the

madness and brutality of dominant power, and thus is justifiably a

beacon for the disenfranchised everywhere. Its release of documents on

the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia arguably contributed to the outbreak of

popular revolt in that country following Mohammed Bouazizi’s

self-immolation in December 2010, and its publication of a cable

detailing a U.S. military massacre of Iraqi civilians was instrumental

in the Iraqi state’s refusal to allow occupying U.S. troops immunity

from prosecution—a development that catalyzed the general withdrawal of

troops from that country.[413] Through its checks on constituted power,

this regulative anarchic body has contributed immensely to the struggle

against hegemony, generally informing global publics of the myriad

crimes of global capitalism, from the details regarding U.S. military

death squads to intimidation and coercion as practiced by stronger

states against less powerful ones in climate negotiations and the United

States’ opposition to international treaties banning the use of cluster

munitions.[414] It is unfortunate, though unsurprising, that the

authorities have hampered Wikileaks’ work, but it would seem that this

fate follows from the organization’s dependence on its founder and

editor Julian Assange, who for all his importance is readily suppressed

by the state and capital—as his alleged assistant, Private First Class

Bradley Manning, infamously has been. Perhaps more promising in this

sense is the more decentralized model exercised by anarchic hacking

groups such as Anonymous and Anti-Sec, which, like Wikileaks,

collaborate to disrupt the functioning of existing power.

With regard specifically to climate catastrophe, the efforts of this new

international probably should intertwine with those promoted by such

international radical ecological associations as Climate Justice Action,

Rising Tide, the Mobilization for Climate Justice–West, and Climate

S.O.S. Some of the key tasks of this international would overlap with

Climate Justice Action’s primary demands, which include working to

prevent the future exploitation of fossil fuels, massively reducing

northern consumption patterns, recognizing the Global North’s ecological

debt, and concurrently making reparations available to southern

societies for the crimes of colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and

climate destabilization. Against the seemingly “boundless imperialism”

driven by mindless capitalist modes of being, participants in the

international could advance Warner Sachs’s model for a “politics of

sufficiency” by promoting the generalized adoption of simpler, less

materially intensive lifestyles among northern residents.[415] Beyond

this, and more concretely, it could work toward the appropriation of a

federated series of territorial commons in which social and physical

autonomy is to be developed, renewable energy infrastructures

constructed, and mass reforestation and afforestation campaigns

advanced, with this last perhaps following Wangari Maathai’s model. In

its rejection of dominant policy, the new international could reflect

and amplify the radicality of the movements contesting dams that have

organized politically from South Asia to Latin America.

In philosophical terms at least, this new association should avoid the

racist assumptions that have informed a great deal of Western

environmentalism to date. This includes, especially, the Malthusianism

that faults southern high population growth rates rather than capitalism

for human suffering and environmental destruction, as well as the

continued advocacy of nuclear energy, which unavoidably disregards the

oppressed peoples who disproportionately suffer the effects of nuclear

waste, whether Native Americans or Somalis, to say nothing of those

directly exposed to radioactivity emitted by malfunctioning reactors.

Exercising reason and compassion, the builders of this international

would promote the dissemination of antisystemic perspectives on

prevailing society, and generally work to implement the vision of a

global society freed from the reproduction of capitalist value and

social domination.

The new international also would strive to (re)activate the

potenza—potential—of the constituent power represented by the

subordinated human multitudes of the world, working for the counterpower

or dual-power model of humanity against the concentrated power of

capital and the state (potere). This social antagonist model, advocated

by a number of anarchist thinkers, has been observed historically in

forms of directly democratic government as temporarily and partially

realized, for instance, in the events of 1871, 1905, 1936, 1956, and

1968; as prefigured in the U.S.-based Movement for a New Society during

the last quarter of the twentieth century; and arguably as practiced in

the Russian agrarian mir system and perhaps the village councils of

traditional India.[416]

Continuing the examples set in recent memory by the popular rebellions

that have erupted across the world, the international’s constituent

parts would work to simultaneously construct popular participation in

sociopolitical matters and seek to interfere with the institutions and

processes that imperil life. The former end is seen in the task of

devolving power to the global demos, as Arendt, Chomsky, and Bookchin

advocate, and in the project of constructing and appropriating the

commons as well as through broadly communal and sympathetic ways of

interrelating. The work of disrupting prevailing power relations can be

envisioned in direct action against spaces that are especially

destructive in environmental terms, the efforts of international brigade

groups—medical and otherwise—that seek to provide solidarity with and

care for those abandoned as well as destroyed by capitalism, and a

generalized advocacy of and political organizing toward the realization

of a general strike along with popular social revolution to overthrow

capitalism and the state.

The direct action that members of the international could both promote

and engage in would continue the work of Plane Stupid, the Kingsnorth

Six, and other UK-based radical environmental groupings that have

consciously intervened against air travel and coal-based energy

production in recent years as well as the sustained mass protests seen

in 2011 in India’s West Bengal, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu states

against the planned construction of nuclear plants.[417] To turn to

fiction again, the international could look toward the example of the

Central American rebels found in John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up who

actively disable the operations of polluting factories. It could gain

insight from the factual shuttering of the Dalian petrochemical complex

in northeastern China, propelled as it was by popular mobilizations on

the part of hundreds of thousands opposed to its continued operation,

and the concessions made by the German state in its recent pledge to

close all nuclear plants within a decade following mass street protests

in that country in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.[418]

Toward the end of presenting a serious challenge to prevailing power

relations, this new international critically should seek to avoid the

depressingly unproductive squabbling that has long plagued many

interactions among libertarian socialist theorists and actors.

Bookchin’s rather baseless invective directed at the Frankfurt School

theorists comes to mind here—he bizarrely claims these thinkers “in no

sense” to be “resolutely critical of hierarchy and domination”—as does

his irrational denunciations of Takis Fotopoulos and the inclusive

democracy project for their “subjectivism.”[419] Hardly innocent

themselves, proponents of the inclusive democracy project have in fact

perpetuated such infighting, as is seen in the hostility at times

evinced by these to the thought of Castoriadis and Chomsky—directed

toward the latter for the purported statism seen in his open support for

Medicare, Medicaid, and other basic social welfare programs provided by

the U.S. government. This problem, indeed, seems to extend from

anarchist theorists to anarchist actors. One observer of the present

Greek anarchist movement notes that the various differences among

distinctly self-identified Greek libertarians has to an extent

discouraged common revolutionary efforts.[420]

Naturally, dissent is important, and it is arguably more crucial now

than at any other point in human history: human survival is intimately

linked with the prospect of rebellion, as Camus notes. This should not

mean, though, that thinkers and other agents associated with radical

political projects should themselves reproduce much of the fragmentation

that permeates mainstream institutions by either refusing respectfully

to consider the work of theorists and action of activists with whom they

justifiably share a great deal of concern or dismissing them altogether

for not sharing their precise views on every given question. This is not

to say that social anarchists should suspend their opposition to

Leninist politics or desist from critiquing primitivist and

individualist currents that refuse to engage with collective efforts in

search of liberation.[421]

Forward the Global Revolution

Revolutionary transformation has a tradition that must continue.

—Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason”

The miracle that save the world ... from its normal, “natural” ruin is

ultimately the fact of natality.

—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

In general terms, reflection on human history and global society

necessarily reveals a seemingly limitless diversity of sociopolitical

practices among different groups and individuals across both space and

time. This understanding, one of the central points advanced by Karl

Polanyi in his The Great Transformation, is a significant one, echoed by

Arendt’s emphasis on human plurality, “embodied” as it is “in the

absolute difference of all [humans] from one another.”[422]

Contemplation of such plurality, as of art or natural beauty, can serve

as a source of inspiration for revolutionary action in the world,

especially when one considers that this plurality—like art, beauty, or

the world entire—is imperiled as it is by the specter of the

perpetuation of capitalism and domination.

Briefly, then, this final section takes account of a few noteworthy

antisystemic projects and developments, both contemporary and

historical. This examination is necessarily partial and limited.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union along with the attendant

marginalization of leftist thought and action in official circles, the

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) represented one of the

most inspiring political developments at the time. Based in the highly

impoverished state of Chiapas, Mexico, the EZLN began as a guerrilla

group among excluded, largely landless indigenous peoples residing in

the jungles of the eastern part of the state. Its insurrection on

January 1, 1994—the outcome of the democratic exercise of the voice of

EZLN base communities, and a reflection of recognition among the

guerrillas that resorting to conventional political methods could offer

them no solution—was met with fierce repression by the Mexican

authorities, although this was tempered by rapid protest mobilizations

undertaken through much of Mexico and internationally. Since it emerged

on the world stage in 1994, the movement has been targeted by the

Mexican military, state-supported paramilitary groups, and

developmentalist counterinsurgency strategies, as taken up in much of

Chiapas by Mexico’s various governments.

Despite these challenges, the neo-Zapatista movement—“neo” because it

extends the tradition of the largely indigenous Ejército Libertador del

Sur led by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution—has doubtlessly

distinguished itself in its defense of humanity. This is evident in its

efforts since 1994 and before to create spaces promoting autonomy and

dignity, by means of the establishment of educational systems and health

clinics, the stress on women’s liberation campaigns under traditional

indigenous patriarchal settings, physical resistance to global

capitalism in affirmation of humanity and its will to live, advocacy of

a communal effort by all those “from below and to the Left” to remake

Mexican and global society outside electoral politics (La Otra Campaña,

or the Other Campaign), thoughtful intervention and critique regarding

political matters in Mexico, and opposition to Israel’s murderous

assaults on Gazans, among many other advances. The international

meetings held in neo-Zapatista communities in the 1990s are considered

legendary, given such titles as the Intercontinental Meeting for

Humanity and against Neo-Liberalism, considering the righteous

declarations and communiqués that resulted from them. That few such

meetings have been held in recent years is unfortunate, itself perhaps

an expression of the movement’s decline, as arguably was reflected in

the EZLN’s two-year period of silence from 2009 to 2011, as well as the

reported abandonment of the movement by many former members faced with

impoverishment, on the one hand, and statist repression, on the other.

If it is true that the neo-Zapatista movement is in decline, this would

amount to a significant loss for humanity, for the Zapatista emphasis on

direct confrontation with power, opposition to inhumanity, participatory

democracy, social inclusion, and international solidarity certainly all

remain highly relevant for the present and likely future. Dissident

writer Ramor Ryan, echoing his comrade Niels Barmeyer’s criticism of the

movement, is correct to note that many Zapatista adherents are

disappointingly “authoritarian, patriarchal, and conservative” in the

flesh.[423] Whatever the fate of the EZLN and its supporters, its

politics clearly have roused the revolutionary passions of countless

persons, from autonomous youths and proletarians in Mexico, to

privileged Europeans who accompany the movement as international

observers. As with other revolutionary insurgencies, the neo-Zapatista

demand for dignity will not soon be forgotten. Perhaps it can be

synthesized to a more generalized movement, in accordance with the

EZLN’s call to “be a Zapatista wherever you are.”

On Mexico’s national stage, there have been mass protests in opposition

to the violence of Calderón’s drug war, including an April 2011

mobilization in Mexico City titled “Estamos hasta la madre!” (“We are

fucking fed up!”). The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, born

within this moment of upheaval, has rather significantly given a voice

to the countless thousands whose lives have been shattered by the

conflict, via its series of caravans to different regions of the country

affected by the violence. The movement’s proposal for a “citizen’s pact”

among subordinated Mexicans is an encouraging development,

notwithstanding the reformist vision of the movement’s official

leadership and the highly questionable decision to open negotiations

with Calderón in an effort to raise his awareness of the human

implications of his war strategy. This sort of tactic has shown itself

to be absurd on countless occasions, whether during the petitioning by

Saint Petersburg’s urban poor of Czar Nicholas II in January 1905 or in

McKibben’s 2010 “Solar Road Trip” to present Carter-era solar panels to

the Obama White House.

The Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), which arose in the last quarter of the

twentieth century among the Kurds of the Near East—the largest grouping

of stateless people in the world—embodies a quite different approach

from the Gandhian attempts to humanize oppressive power structures. This

Leninist organization, founded by Abdullah Ocalan, emerged in response

to the plight of dispossessed Kurds and the widespread recognition that

even nominally leftist currents in Turkey—the state of residence for the

majority of the Kurds—would not prioritize a just solution to their

exclusion—a position confirmed by the worldwide silence about the

genocidal al-Anfal campaign prosecuted by Saddam Hussein against Kurdish

populations at the end of his war with Iran in 1988. Abandoned, the PKK

initiated armed struggle against the Turkish state and, in turn, met

with fierce repression by the Turkish government, which in the 1990s

destroyed countless villages and forcibly displaced some million Kurds

as part of its counterinsurgency strategy.[424] The struggle continues,

thirteen years after Ocalan’s capture and imprisonment, with little

progress toward the independent state sought by the PKK. Turkey, which

presents itself as a progressive alternative to collaborationist Arab

regimes as regards Israel and the Palestinians, and donates generously

to victims of famine in Somalia, still bombards Kurdish positions

indiscriminately to this day.

Despite the Kurdish people’s suffering, an uncritical celebration of the

PKK would be out of order, given its quasi-Stalinist nature, forced

conscription, and exclusion and even murder of those who disapprove of

its methods. Yet it is undeniable, even in light of the unpalatable

aspects of its praxis, that the PKK’s genesis has to a degree aided in

the struggle against patriarchy in Kurdish society, considering the

honored participation of women in PKK ranks, in addition to the party’s

importance as a source of dignity and self-respect for oppressed

Kurds.[425] As with the Zapatistas of Mexico and the Naxalites of India,

it is in the strength of the PKK’s “No saying” to domination and

abandonment that its significance is apparent.[426] The PKK’s example

hopefully will be developed in the future into a more legitimate model

for the Kurds themselves, not to mention other peoples. Perhaps Ocalan’s

recently expressed interest in Bookchin’s work is indicative of a new

direction for the Kurdish struggle.

In contrast to all Leninist models, the civil unrest in 2011 throughout

much of the Middle East and North Africa seems to hold more promise,

despite the brutal responses of the existing regimes as well as the

discouraging lack of material progress beyond symbolic change. Zine

el-Abidine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, and al-Gadhafi have been deposed.

Radical interventions by masses of people have proven central in the

cases of Tunisia and Egypt; similar interventions aimed at overturning

the status quo have followed in Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Palestine,

Ethiopia, Swaziland, Angola, and many other societies. The millions who

participated in what has been termed the Tahrir Commune in Cairo, in

addition to those other millions who mobilized elsewhere in Egypt

against Mubarak’s rule after the beginning of the revolutionary movement

on January 25, 2011, attest to the collective strength of the human

multitude—its capacity for resisting brutality and instituting different

relations. The recent uprisings draw from the 2007 industrial strikes in

Mahalla and the 2003 mass mobilizations in Tahrir against the impending

U.S. invasion of Iraq, themselves echoes of the Palestinians’ resistance

in general, and the First Intifada in particular. Practices like those

observed in the self-management of Tahrir Square, popular and

neighborhood committees in Tunisia and Egypt, and autonomous

mobilizations in Cairo to protect museums from looting are undoubtedly

anarchistic in nature, whatever the expressed political preferences of

the participants.

The efforts taken by the post-Mubarak Supreme Council of the Armed

Forces in Egypt, themselves backed by imperialism, are aimed at

suppressing dissent and containing the prospects for social change.

Hence the Egyptian military’s ban on strikes, its multiple violent

attacks on protesters assembled in Tahrir Square, its imprisonment of

thousands of dissidents, and its October 2011 massacre in Cairo of

Christian Copts protesting their marginalization. The movement’s

reactivation after January 25 is seen in the ongoing mobilizations

calling for a “second revolution” (thawra al-thania) against the Supreme

Council of the Armed Forces and Field Marshall Mohammed

al-Tantawi—reminiscent in a way of the third revolution sought by

proletarians and peasants in the early years of the Bolshevik

dictatorship. It bears reflection that Mubarak fell just as Egypt’s

industrial workers initiated a general strike; the generals, like the

transnational capitalist class, similarly fear these potentialities.

They do not want to see the Egyptian people’s resolutely

anti-imperialist views manifested in reality through any sort of

autonomous policy determination, and they do not favor the prospect of a

democratic opening that would most likely develop in anticapitalist

directions, given neoliberal capitalism’s responsibility for the mass

privation generally suffered by the Egyptian people and the substantial

increases in food prices that have only added to the grievances.[427]

Such considerations help explain the junta’s effective alliance with the

Wahhabite Muslim Brotherhood, before and after the 2011 elections:

better close ties with known reactionary forces than the promises of

critical democratic praxis realized by the radical youth movement that

has been seminal throughout this revolt. As Samir Amin notes, Egyptian

Wahhabism is likely the influence of twentieth-century Saudi Arabian oil

wealth and the propagation of reactionary views throughout the

countryside by the landowning classes. Amin opposes the practice of

Egyptian Wahhabism—indisputably violent and oppressive, as can be seen

in Wahhabite attacks on Copts in the weeks predating January 25, as in

the Islamist collaboration with the military during its October 2011

attacks on Copts—to the historical tradition of Egyptian Sufism, a less

hierarchical interpretation of the religion.[428] This relationship to

Sufism also seems to exist in Pakistan, another society that has met

with undue Saudi Wahhabite interference in recent decades, thereby

following the pernicious tendency toward fundamentalist Islamization,

which is itself a response to the decline of nationalist and socialist

movements throughout southwestern and South Asia.[429]

In India, the world’s largest country by population, a multitude of

resistance projects have held sway for some time, from the 1857 Sepoy

Mutiny to the decolonization movement and the postcolonial Naxalite

insurrection. The communist revolt in the Telangana region of the state

of Hyderabad shortly after formal independence sought to bring about a

Red India by mobilizing the country’s impoverished mass of

peasants.[430] The land redistribution schemes engaged in by the

Telengana rebels in favor of the peasantry were seminal for the later

development of the Naxalite movement, as were B. R. Ambedkar’s efforts

to organize in favor of India’s Dalits, not to mention that of the Dalit

Panthers themselves.[431] The Communist Party’s rule in the states of

West Bengal and Kerala is perceived as having provided a more

egalitarian, less environmentally destructive approach to development

after independence; women’s rights in particular appear to be more

respected specifically in Kerala than elsewhere in the country, as are

the rights of the poor.

This situation contrasts markedly with that of the country’s center and

east, home to the indigenous adivasi peoples whose very lands and lives

are threatened by unprecedented planned mining projects that seek to

remove the trillions of dollars’ worth of bauxite from the mountains in

which they reside.[432] Binayak Sen, imprisoned in 2007 by the Indian

state for his activism in favor of the adivasis, is not mistaken in

claiming such plans to be genocidal. Qualified support thus should be

given to the Naxalite movement, a Maoist grouping comprised of adivasis

and middle-class Hindus alike that has taken up arms against the Indian

state in defense of the impoverished and marginalized. However

problematic the politics of the movement’s founder, Charu Mazumdar, who

advocated terroristic annihilation campaigns directed against India’s

privileged, its historical ties to Chinese Communism, which resulted in

silence on its part regarding China’s dispossession of Tibet and the

ravaging of Bangladesh by China’s ally Pakistan, and its undeniable

violent excesses, it has established a countersociety within the

Dandakaranya forest in which the landless are afforded land and women

are granted more respect.[433] Beyond this, it is a symbol of dignity

and self-respect for the oppressed of India, quite similar in this sense

to the EZLN or PKK. As Roy writes, the Naxalites have “kept the dream of

revolution real and present in India.”[434] Without that dream, she

implies, matters would be far more bleak than they are—given that there

are more impoverished people in eight of India’s states than in the

twenty-six countries that comprise Africa south of the Sahel, that 1.5

million Indian children die in their first year of life, and that

hundreds of thousands of peasants have committed suicide in recent years

to escape their debts.[435]

Beyond these contemporary and historical examples lies the lived

experience of what Bookchin terms “organic societies,” or those groups

derided by anthropological racism as “primitive.” As anthropologists

Marshall Sahlins, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Pierre Clastres have shown

convincingly, many such societies have instituted maxims radically

different than those that prevail within capitalist societies: acephaly

(the absence of hierarchy), individual autonomy, and substantive time

freed from work. Engels’s exploration of generalized sexual promiscuity

and group marriage before the family’s historical rise is an important

recognition of radical social alternatives within human culture.[436]

Bookchin’s enthusiasm for the ethics of complementarity and an

irreducible minimum identified by Paul Radin as practiced in some

organic societies—the irreducible minimum referring to the inviolable

provisioning of the basic necessities of life to each member of a given

social group without regard to one’s productive contribution, or Marx’s

“primitive communism”—hardly seems misplaced today in light of the

radical mass deprivation overseen by capitalism as well as that which

catastrophic climate change would bring about. That there is little

evidence for the existence of war prior to the rise of agriculture and

states—war being defined in Douglas Fry’s review on the question as

political violence directed against out-groups—is also encouraging.[437]

Albert Einstein is then right to celebrate the socioeconomic practices

exercised by many indigenous and organic social groups as demonstrating

that “human beings are not condemned, because of their biological

constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel,

self-inflicted fate.”[438]

Considered together with the efforts of political resistance groupings,

the historical and contemporary existence of such societies shows, in

Adorno’s words, that “this hell ... cannot be the last word.”[439]

Clastres speculates that stateless humanity prevented the emergence of

the state for hundreds of thousands of years by murdering those

individuals who aspired to hierarchical power. Yet such an approach

likely would be problematic if applied as a means of addressing the

present situation. As Agamben argues, “No ethics can claim to exclude a

part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that humanity is

to see.”[440]

However unpalatable political murder may be, some means of overthrowing

prevailing power arrangements must be taken desperately soon. Borrowing

from Michel Foucault, we must symbolically cut off the king’s head while

also metaphorically destroying the guillotine, as the Parisian

Communards did promptly after taking power in March 1871.[441] Toward

this end, it should be self-evident that a mere exodus from statist

domination on the model of the nonhierarchical societies established by

fugitive state captives fleeing the rice-growing kingdoms of lowland

Southeast Asia for the stateless highlands known as Zomia, or runaway

Brazilian slaves setting up quilombos, are insufficient strategies, for

they erroneously assume that one can escape capitalism without directly

confronting it with the aim of also abolishing it.[442] Whether progress

toward the end of instituting revolution would demand a temporary

withdrawal into an underground—as modeled, for example, historically by

the neo-Zapatistas during the decade of preparation before January 1994

and speculatively by the liberatory resistance movements imagined in

Robinson’s Mars trilogy—is not something that can be resolved here,

other than to note that there likely is not enough time left,

environmentally speaking, for dissident organizers and thinkers to break

ties with the rest of society for any significant period. What can be

said is that presently constituted power must be overthrown. Capital

accumulation, as Harvey declares outrightly, “will have to be stopped,”

and the capitalist class, “which will never willingly surrender its

power,” necessarily will have to be dispossessed of its “property,

wealth, and powers.”[443]

The radical violence, alienation, and destructiveness overseen and

directed by prevailing power is but the continuation of long-standing

social trends that have gone on for millennia—totalitarianism grew out

of imperialism and capitalism, while hierarchy has been sustained by

patriarchy and religion.[444] Most important is the understanding that

the current forms of world alienation, humanity’s “societal

constitution,” jeopardize its very existence. Considering this

situation, openness to historical alternatives becomes a necessity,

given the consequences that will follow without the institution of

social relations radically different than present ones. The impetus to

remake the world along different lines is now the only means by which

total catastrophe can reasonably be avoided.

As this work has examined, though, the prospect that humanity will fail

to radically reconstruct global society on humane ecological grounds

within the near term is entirely within the realm of possibility.

Catastrophic climate change threatens humanity’s well-being in a manner

perhaps even more extreme than that posed by nuclear arms—and the threat

of a synergy between these two forces is decidedly more frightening than

consideration of either of the two alone. Nevertheless, barring

mechanical failures or mistakes, the offensive employment of nuclear

weapons ultimately depends on human choice at a certain point, whereas

the laws of atmospheric physics have no such potential fail-safe

mechanism. The atmosphere, as is correctly observed by Earth scientist

Andrew Glikson, is not “waiting for human decision.”[445] It responds to

humanity’s mutilated forms in keeping with scientific predictions based

on the laws of chemistry and physics; it has been subjected to

destabilization processes graver than those imagined by even the most

pessimistic accounts. While sectors of humanity continue to blind

themselves to the realities of climate change and the relatively

privileged fail radically to act in the interests of well-being, reason,

and survival, “glaciers continue to retreat, new hazards keep emerging,

and water sources dwindle.”[446] In short, world alienation barrels life

on toward the abyss.

This world alienation, a term first used by Arendt to describe

capitalist wealth accumulation processes that demand as a precondition

of their functioning that “the world and the very worldliness of

[humankind] are sacrificed,” follows from the historical rise of the

capitalist mode of production, the division of Earth’s territory into

sovereign states, and the historical failure to date to overturn the

monstrous system that upholds both such interrelated systems.[447] Given

such conditions, one may succumb to overwhelming despair regarding the

human prospect and thus withdraw from engagement with politics entirely.

It has been the argument advanced here—indeed, one of the very bases of

the writing of this book—that such despair should not be total. As

Adorno writes, “The world’s course is not absolutely conclusive, nor is

absolute despair; rather, despair is its conclusiveness.”[448] Human

society after all is the product of its myriad constituent parts, which

are not limited to capital and the state. These barbaric forms do not

have the final word.

The prospect of an exit from social and environmental barbarism depends

critically on the autonomous action of the subordinated. This social

force has a responsibility to resist dominant socialization processes

that would perpetuate existing relations in favor of realizing the

imperative for social revolution—the only means by which humanity as a

whole can come to be treated as an end in itself and by which climate

catastrophe can be averted.

[1] Suzanne Goldenberg, “Last Year Was Joint Warmest on Record, Say

Climatologists,” Guardian, January 12, 2011.

[2] John Vidal, “Carbon Levels Hit New Peak, Research Shows,” Guardian,

May 31, 2011.

[3] Peter D. Ward, The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World without Ice

Caps (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 63.

[4] Fiona Harvey, “Worst Ever Carbon Emissions Leave Climate on the

Brink,” Guardian, May 29, 2011.

[5] Steve Connor and Michael McCarthy, “World on Course for Catastrophic

6° Rise, Reveal Scientists,” Independent, November 18, 2009.

[6] Gaia Vince, “One Last Chance to Save Mankind,” New Scientist,

January 23, 2009.

[7] Jenny Fyall, “Warming Will ‘Wipe Out Billions,’” Scotsman News,

November 29, 2009.

[8] David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009), 185.

[9] Imperial College London, “Asteroid Killed Off the Dinosaurs, Says

International Scientific Panel,” Science Daily, March 4, 2010; Juliette

Jowitt, “Humans Driving Extinction Faster Than Species Can Evolve, Say

Experts,” Guardian, March 7, 2010.

[10] Suzanne Goldenberg, “Planet Earth is Home to 8.7 Million Species,

Scientists Estimate,” Guardian, August 23, 2011.

[11] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World

History: Introduction, trans. Hugh Bar Nisbet (1828; repr., Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1975), 118, 131–40; Félix Guattari, The

Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone,

2000), 28.

[12] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1947; repr., Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii, 1.

[13] Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 45.

[14] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),

16; Karl Marx, introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right, ed. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1982) (translation modified; emphasis in original).

[15] Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New

York: Schocken Books, 2003), 259.

[16] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 69 (translation

modified).

[17] Albert Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert

(New York: Vintage, 1958), 245.

[18] Steve Connor, “Melting Greenland Glacier May Hasten Rise in Sea

Level,” Independent, July 25, 2005.

[19] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1, ed.

Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (1867; repr.,

New York: Modern Library, 1906), 709.

[20] Ciro Pérez Silva, “Anuncia Calderón programa para sustituir los

focos incandescentes por ahorradores,” La Jornada, December 7, 2010.

[21] “No se descuidarán los patrullajes en la ciudad: Seguridad

Pública,” Por Esto! de Quintana Roo, November 27, 2010.

[22] “Equipan a la policía municipal,” Por Esto! de Quintana Roo,

November 28, 2010.

[23] Mike Gonzalez, “Evo Morales’s Defence of Mother Earth Rings Hollow

in Bolivia,” Guardian, October 3, 2011.

[24] Polly Higgins, Eradicating Ecocide (London: Shepheard-Walwyn,

2010); see also Polly Higgins, “Why We Need a Law on Ecocide,” Guardian,

January 5, 2011.

[25] Christos Filippidis, “The Polis-Jungle, Magical Densities, and the

Survival Guide of the Enemy Within,” in Revolt and Crisis in Greece, ed.

Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglu (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 69.

[26] Hegel, Lectures, 69; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; repr., New

York: Penguin, 2006), 62.

[27] John Vidal, “Climate Change Will Devastate Africa, Top UK Scientist

Warns,” Guardian, October 28, 2009; Ward, The Flooded Earth, 106; Mike

Davis, “Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Melt Down,” in The Green

Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, ed. Barry Sanders (Oakland,

CA: AK Press, 2009), 7–17.

[28] Jason Samson, Dominique Berteaux, Brian J. McGill, and Murray M.

Humphries, “Geographic Disparities and Moral Hazards in the Predicted

Impacts of Climate Change on Human Populations,” Global Ecology and

Biogeography 20, no. 4 (July 2011): 537.

[29] Justin Sheffield and Eric F. Wood, Drought: Past Problems and

Future Scenarios (London: Earthscan, 2011), 180–83.

[30] John Vidal, “Global Warming Causes 300,000 Deaths a Year, Says Kofi

Annan Thinktank,” Guardian, May 29, 2009.

[31] Dara and Climate Vulnerable Forum, Climate Vulnerability Report

2010, available at

http://daraint.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/CVM1.pdf

.

[32] Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010),

133.

[33] Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1965), 62.

[34] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., San

Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1968); Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in

Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968),

19.

[35] Max Horkheimer, “Die Juden in Europa,” Zeitschrift für

Sozialforschung 8 (1939): 115 (translation from Fredric Jameson, Late

Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic [London: Verso,

1990], 113).

[36] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life,

trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; repr., London: Verso, 1974), 80; Dara and

Climate Vulnerable Forum, Climate Vulnerability Report 2010.

[37] Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge,” in Karl Marx and

Frederick Engels: Collected Works (Moscow: International Publishers,

1975), 1:393–95.

[38] Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 298.

[39] “Famine Spreads to Sixth Region of Somalia,” Al Jazeera English,

September 5, 2011, available at

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/09/201195104317598222.html;

Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, 134.

[40] Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National

Socialism, 1933–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 167.

[41] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), available at

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

.

[42] Ulrike Meinhof, Everybody Talks about the Weather ... We Don’t, ed.

Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 118.

[43] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton

(London: Routledge, 1973), 218.

[44] Chronis Polychroniou, “Interview with Professor Minqi Li,”

Eleftherotypia 13 (November 2009), available at

http://www.econ.utah.edu/~mli/CV/Interview%20with%20Minqi%20Li_Greece%20111309.pdf

.

[45] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill

(1947; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 156; Theodor W. Adorno,

“Progress,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith

(1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 85–86.

[46] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:

Harcourt, 1968), 38; Adorno, Critical Models, 190.

[47] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 405.

[48] Samir Amin, “An Arab Springtime?” Monthly Review, June 2, 2011,

available at

http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/2011-an-arab-springtime; Immanuel

Wallerstein, “The Contradictions of the Arab Spring,” Al Jazeera

English, November 14, 2011.

[49] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part One, ed.

C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 2004), 57.

[50] Adorno, Critical Models, 267–68.

[51] Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 117.

[52] Raoul Vaneigem, “Basic Banalities,” in Situationist International

Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006),

117–30.

[53] Adorno, “Progress,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History,

ed. Gary Smith (1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1989), 96.

[54] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958), 246.

[55] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the

Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 121.

[56] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global

Dominance (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 216.

[57] Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (1982; repr., Stanford, CA:

Stanford University Press, 2000), 21, 168.

[58] Charles Fourier, Design for Utopia: Selected Works of Charles

Fourier (New York: Schocken Books, 1971); Theodor W. Adorno, Critical

Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press,

2005), 273.

[59] Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 115, xxvi, 118.

[60] Ibid., 110, 148.

[61] Ibid., 130–32, 95; Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed.

Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 191; Günther Anders, “One

World or No World,” in Hiroshima in Memoriam and Today: A Testament of

Peace for the World (Asheville, NC: Biltmore Press, 1971), 210.

[62] Schell, The Abolition, 46.

[63] Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 178.

[64] Ibid., 188.

[65]

P. D. James, The Children of Men (New York: Warner Books, 1992), 308.

[66] Schell, The Abolition, 123; Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 110, 94,

186.

[67] Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 148, 184.

[68] Ibid., 161.

[69] Ibid., 135, 226.

[70] Ibid., 161, 135, 226, 177, 184, 173, 162, 188, 219, 122, 231, 223;

Schell, The Abolition, 74.

[71] Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 136, 173, 174, 177.

[72] Ibid., 170, 225.

[73] Ibid., 210, 218, 186, 219–31.

[74] Bryan Farrell, “The Power of Nonviolent Movements,” Yes Magazine,

January 14, 2010.

[75] Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 196, 169; Schell, The Abolition, 21.

[76] Schell, The Fate of the Earth, 231; Schell, The Abolition, 11.

[77] Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2006), 101.

[78] Noam Chomsky, “Occupy the Future,” In These Times, November 1,

2011.

[79] James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury,

2009), ix, 277.

[80] David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red: The Case for

Emergency Action (Melbourne: Scribe, 2008), 82.

[81] Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009), 87–95;

Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Washington, DC:

National Geographic, 2008), 274–75.

[82] James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha, David Beerling,

Valerie Masson-Delmotte, Mark Pagani, Maureen Raymo, Dana L. Royer, and

James C. Zachos, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?”

available at

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf

.

[83] Spratt and Sutton, Climate Code Red, 120–32.

[84] Steve Connor, “Extreme Weather Link ‘Can No Longer Be Ignored,’”

Independent, July 1, 2011.

[85] “Pakistan Floods in Numbers,” Al Jazeera English, August 30, 2010;

Reena Saeed Khan, “The Floods in Pakistan Show Our Vulnerability to

Climate Chaos,” Guardian, November 10, 2010; Ali Ismail, “Pakistan

Floods Unleash Desperate Economic Crisis,” World Socialist Web Site, 26

August 26, 2010.

[86] Declan Walsh, Shehryar Mufti, Lindsay Poulton, and Ziad Zafar,

“Pakistan Floods: Feudals under Fire in Punjab,” Guardian, October 3,

2010.

[87] Tom Peters, “International Aid for Pakistan Flood Victims Grossly

Inadequate,” World Socialist Web Site, September 24, 2010.

[88] Declan Walsh, “Pakistan Flood Crisis as Bad as African Famines, UN

Says,” Guardian, January 27, 2011.

[89] “Millions Affected by Deadly Pakistan Floods,” Al Jazeera English,

September 9, 2011.

[90] Rob Crilly, “Strong Evidence Climate Change Caused Devastating

Pakistan Floods,” Scotsman News, October 14, 2010.

[91] Bill McKibben, “Why Has Extreme Weather Failed to Heat Up Climate

Debate?” Guardian, August 18, 2010.

[92] Mark Tran, “Global Response to Pakistan Floods Inadequate, Claims

Report,” Guardian, July 24, 2011.

[93] “Niger’s Silent Crisis,” BBC News Online, June 21, 2010; Mike

Pflanz, “Millions of West Africans Need Urgent Food Aid after Failed

Harvests,” Telegraph, June 21, 2010.

[94] Henry Foy, “Millions Face Starvation in West Africa, Aid Agencies

Warn,” Guardian, June 21, 2010.

[95] “Food Crisis Emergency in Niger,” ReliefWeb, June 21, 2010.

[96] Connor, “Extreme Weather”; Tom Parfitt, “Vladimir Putin Bans Grain

Exports as Drought and Wildfires Ravage Crops,” Guardian, August 5,

2010.

[97] Katie Allen, “Afghanistan and African Nations at Greatest Risk from

World Food Shortages,” Guardian, August 19, 2010.

[98] Jason Burke, “Hundreds Die in Indian Heat Wave,” Guardian, May 30,

2010; John Vidal and Declan Walsh, “Temperatures Reach Record High in

Pakistan,” Guardian, June 1, 2010.

[99] Karen McVeigh, “Sri Lankan Floods Could Leave 400,000 Children

without Enough Food,” Guardian, January 20, 2011; “Sri Lanka Floods

Destroy Crops,” Al Jazeera English, January 23, 2011.

[100] Tom Phillips, “Drought Brings Amazon Tributary to Lowest Level in

a Century,” Guardian, October 26, 2010; Damian Carringon, “Mass Tree

Death Prompts Fears of Amazon ‘Climate Tipping Point,’” Guardian,

February 3, 2011.

[101] University of Colorado at Boulder, “Arctic Sea Ice Reaches Lowest

2010 Extent, Third Lowest in Satellite Record,” Science Daily, September

16, 2010; Steve Connor, “Arctic Ice Set to Match All-time Record Low,”

Independent, September 7, 2011; Stephen Leahy, “Arctic Ice in Death

Spiral,” Inter Press Service, September 20, 2010.

[102] John Vidal, “Environment World Review of the Year: ‘2011 Rewrote

the Record Books,’” Guardian, December 22, 2011; Fiona Harvey, “England

Sees Driest Spring in a Century as Drought Hits UK,” Guardian, June 10,

2011.

[103] Jonathan Watts, “China Crisis over Yangtze River Drought Forces

Drastic Dam Measures,” Guardian, May 25, 2011.

[104] David Randall, Simon Murphy, and Daud Yussuf, “Starvation Returns

to the Horn of Africa,” Independent, July 3, 2011.

[105] Emily Dugan, “More Than Half of Somalis Now Face Starvation,”

Independent, September 4, 2011; Emily Dugan, “Two Million East African

Infants Are Now Starving,” Independent, August 7, 2011.

[106] “Somalia Famine: UN Warns of 750,000 Deaths,” BBC News Online,

September 5, 2011.

[107] Susan Solomon, Dahe Qin, Michael Manning, Zhenlin Chen, Melinda

Marquis, Kristen B. Averyt, Melinda Tignor, and Henry L. Miller,

Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007), 310–12.

[108] Collectif Argos, Climate Refugees (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2010), 273; Priestley Habru, “The View from beneath the Waves: Climate

Change in the Solomon Islands,” Guardian, November 9, 2010.

[109] Kathy Marks, “Sinking Pacific Island Kiribati Considers Moving to

a Man-made Alternative,” Independent, September 8, 2011; Kit Gillet,

“Vietnam’s Rice Bowl Threatened by Rising Seas,” Guardian, August 21,

2011.

[110] Collectif Argos, Climate Refugees, 93; Daniel Howden, “Record Heat

Recorded for Africa’s Greatest Lake,” Independent, 18 May 18, 2010.

[111] Robin McKie, “Ocean Acidification Is Latest Manifestation of

Global Warming,” Observer, May 29, 2011.

[112] Jayashree Nandi, “Isro: 75% of Himalayan Glaciers Retreating,”

Times of India, May 16, 2011.

[113] Jonathan Watts, “Tibet Temperature ‘Highest since Records Began’

Say Chinese Climatologists,” Guardian, February 2, 2010.

[114] Nikolas Kozloff, No Rain in the Amazon (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010), 9.

[115] Steve Connor, “Weather Disasters in the Poorest Nations ‘Have

Trebled since 1980s,’” Independent, May 23, 2011.

[116] Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 42.

[117] Michael McCarthy, “Revealed: Climate Quirk That Doubles Risk of

War,” Independent, August 25, 2011.

[118] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the

Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2000), 7.

[119] Solomon, Qin, Manning, Chen, Marquis, Averyt, Tignor, and Miller,

Contribution of Working Group I, 790.

[120] James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Makiko Sato, Paul Epstein, Paul J.

Hearty, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Camille Parmesan, Stefan Rahmstorf, Johan

Rockstrom, Eelco J. Rohling, Jeffrey Sachs, Peter Smith, Konrad Steffen,

Karina von Schuckmann, and James C. Zachos, “The Case for Young People

and Nature: A Path to a Healthy, Natural, Prosperous Future,” available

at http://

www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110505_CaseForYoungPeople.pdf

.

[121] Lynas, Six Degrees, 25–70, 73–119.

[122] Simon Hales, “Estimating Human Population Health Impacts in a 4+°C

World” (paper presented at the Oxford University 4 Degrees and Beyond

International Climate Change Conference, Oxford, September 28, 2009).

[123] Dyer, Climate Wars, 62.

[124] Lynas, Six Degrees, 123–81.

[125] Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Terra Quasi-Incognita: Beyond the 2ºC

Line” (paper presented at the Oxford University 4 Degrees and Beyond

International Climate Change Conference, Oxford, September 28, 2009).

[126] Peter D. Ward, The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without

Ice Caps (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

[127] Steve Connor, “Melting of the Arctic ‘Will Accelerate Climate

Change within Twenty Years,’” Independent, May 30, 2011.

[128] AFP, “Russia May Lose 30% of Permafrost by 2050: Official,”

Independent, July 31, 2011.

[129] David Chandler, “Climate Change Odds Much Worse Than Thought,” MIT

News Office, May 19, 2009.

[130] Dyer, Climate Wars, 90.

[131] Jane B. Reece, Lisa A. Urry, Michael L. Cain, Steven A. Wasserman,

Peter V. Minorsky, and Robert B. Jackson, Campbell Biology (Boston:

Benjamin Cummings, 2011), 521–23.

[132] Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren, 223–36.

[133] Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1972), 60.

[134] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor

(1970; repr., London: Continuum, 2002), 66.

[135] Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone

(1964–65; repr., London: Polity Press, 2006), 45; Max Horkheimer and

Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,

trans. Edmund Jephcott (1947; repr., Stanford, CA: Stanford University

Press, 2002), 165.

[136] Steven Best, “Minding the Animals: Ethology and the Obsolescence

of Left Humanism,” International Journal of Inclusive Democracy 5, no. 2

(Spring 2009), available at

http://www.inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol5/vol5_no2_best_minding_animals_PRINTABLE.htm

.

[137] Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of

Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

[138] Cited in Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (1982; repr.,

Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 93.

[139] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and

the State (1891; repr., New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 54.

[140] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry

into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 109.

[141] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 212.

[142] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton

(London: Routledge, 1973), 355.

[143] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902; repr.,

Westford, MA: Porter Sargent, 1976).

[144] Collectif Argos, Climate Refugees (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

2010), 9, 14.

[145] Ibid., 28, 60, 97.

[146] James D. Cockcroft, Mexico’s Revolution Then and Now (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 2010), 141.

[147] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 377–78.

[148] John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review,

2000); John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly

Review, 2009).

[149] Cited in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works (Moscow:

International Publishers, 1975), 12:132; Karl Marx, Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, ed. Dirk J.

Struik (New York: International Publishers), 112.

[150] Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and

Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 394, 390–91.

[151] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen

Plaice, and Paul Knight (1959; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986),

286.

[152] Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 65.

[153] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New

York: Times Books, 2010), 101, 78, 52.

[154] Ibid., 27.

[155] Noam Chomsky, “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours” (comments at the

Brecht Forum, Riverside Church, New York, June 12, 2009).

[156] McKibben, Eaarth, 35.

[157] Ibid., 52.

[158] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, trans.

Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402.

[159] Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 64.

[160] Ibid., 65, 69.

[161] Ibid., 67; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 178.

[162] Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, 164, 178.

[163] Leo Hickman, “James Lovelock: Humans Are Too Stupid to Prevent

Climate Change” and “James Lovelock on the Value of Sceptics and Why

Copenhagen Was Doomed,” Guardian, March 29, 2010; see also Micah White,

“An Alternative to the New Wave of Ecofascism,” Guardian, September 16,

2010.

[164] Susanna Rustin, “Has the Green Movement Lost Its Way?” Guardian,

July 1, 2011.

[165] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2009), 293.

[166] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen

Plaice, and Paul Knight (1959; repr., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986),

189.

[167] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2009), 198.

[168] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton

(London: Routledge, 1973), 398; Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and

Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), 164.

[169] Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 272–73.

[170] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (San Diego: Harcourt, 1969), 48.

[171] Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical

Reader (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 18.

[172] Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books,

2010), 165.

[173] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global

Dominance (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 1–2; Chomsky, Hopes and

Prospects, 175.

[174] Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, Manufacturing Consent: Noam

Chomsky and the Media (Montreal: Necessary Illusions/National Film Board

of Canada, 1992); Noam Chomsky, “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours”

(comments at the Brecht Forum, Riverside Church, New York, June 12,

2009).

[175] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 218, 222.

[176] Ibid., 225–27.

[177] Ibid., 228.

[178] Ibid., 228; Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 85.

[179] Bill Van Auken, “Obama Administration Spending Billions on New

Global Strike Weapons,” World Socialist Web Site, April 24, 2010; Alok

Jha, “US Military to Launch Fastest-Ever Plane,” Guardian, August 10,

2011, available at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/10/us-military-fastest-plane-falcon.

[180] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 229.

[181] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 27, 108.

[182] Noam Chomsky, “Human Intelligence and the Environment,”

International Socialist Review 76 (May 2011), 45.

[183] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 111–12.

[184] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 234–35.

[185] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 112.

[186] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 235.

[187] Ibid., 36; Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 4–7.

[188] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 97; Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects,

37.

[189] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 55, 116; Noam Chomsky, New World of

Indigenous Resistance, ed. Lois Meyer and Benjamín Maldonado Alvarado

(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 53.

[190] Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and

the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia

Press, 2008), 195.

[191] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

(1963; repr., New York: Penguin, 2006), 237, 256–58.

[192] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 38.

[193] Ibid., 228; Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 29.

[194] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 38; Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects,

121.

[195] Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans.

Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

[196] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 112, 215.

[197] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 182; Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects,

156.

[198] Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, 216.

[199] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1970), xxxi. On autonomous Marxism, see Antonio

Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver

(South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1984); John Holloway,

Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010); Chomsky, Hopes and

Prospects, 167.

[200] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 118.

[201] Noam Chomsky, “All Students Should Become Anarchists,” June 14,

2011, available at http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20110614_en.htm;

Chomsky, New World of Indigenous Resistance, 361.

[202] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 135–36.

[203] Fidel Castro, “El Invierno Nuclear” La Jornada, August 23, 2010.

[204] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 135–36.

[205] Ibid., 166; Chomsky,, “Human Intelligence and the Environment,”

49.

[206] Chomsky, “Human Intelligence and the Environment,” 51.

[207] Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney

Livingstone (1963; repr., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2001), 14; Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged

Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; repr., London: Verso, 1974), 39

(translation modified); Theodor W. Adorno, “Progress,” in Benjamin:

Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (1962; repr., Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1989), 84–85.

[208] Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone

(1964–65; repr., London: Polity Press, 2006), 4.

[209] Ibid., 47, 8; Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 10.

[210] Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? 244, 13.

[211] Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 257.

[212] Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 99, 167.

[213] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto?

trans. Rodney Livingstone (1989; repr., London: Verso, 2011), 37.

[214] Adorno, “Progress,” 84 (translation modified).

[215] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto? 40.

[216] Adorno, History and Freedom, 143.

[217] Adorno, “Progress,” 85.

[218] Adorno, History and Freedom, 145.

[219] Mikhail Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom,” from Bakunin on

Anarchy, trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Knopf, 1972), 237 and Adorno,

Minima Moralia, 173.

[220] Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman

(New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 91.

[221] Adorno, “Progress,” 85.

[222] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto? 48.

[223] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., San

Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1968), xx; Adorno, “Progress,” 94.

[224] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), available at

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

; Adorno, “Progress,” 36.

[225] Adorno, History and Freedom, 181.

[226] Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Oakland, CA: AK Press,

2004).

[227] Adorno, History and Freedom, 62, 182.

[228] Adorno, “Progress,” 94.

[229] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto? 47; Adorno,

History and Freedom, 111.

[230] Adorno, “Progress,” 99–101.

[231] Adorno, History and Freedom, 150; Adorno, Problems of Moral

Philosophy, 103.

[232] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto?, 52.

[233] Adorno, “Progress,” 85 (translation modified).

[234] Ibid., 90–91.

[235] Ibid., 96.

[236] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100, x, 194.

[237] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 404.

[238] Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991),

196.

[239] Adorno, Critical Models, 269; Theodor W. Adorno, Guilt and

Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany,

trans. and ed. Jeffrey K. Olick and Andrew J. Perrin (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2010), 169–84.

[240] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto? 36.

[241] Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in The Essential Frankfurt

School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum,

1997), 48.

[242] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto? 43; Adorno,

Negative Dialectics, 320.

[243] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto? 47.

[244] Adorno, Critical Models, 150 (translation modified).

[245] Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New

York: W. W. Norton, 1980).

[246] Ibid., 43.

[247] Ibid., 22, 42–46, 97.

[248] Ibid., 50–55, 150, 109.

[249] Ibid., 93, 91.

[250] Ibid., 57, 77, 93, 91, 94, 98–104, 109, 153, 109.

[251] Ibid., 130–35.

[252] Ibid., 157, 110, 155, 130–35, 165.

[253] Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes, 1926–1931 and 1959–1969,

trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 202.

[254] Heilbroner, Inquiry, 165–66, 184.

[255] Ronald Aronson, Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to Hope (New

York: Schocken Books, 1984), 3, 191.

[256] Ibid., 35–45, 77, 142, 169, 262.

[257] Ibid., 262, 266, 286, 288, 303.

[258] Ibid., 302, 292, 210, 17, 304, 289.

[259] Fidel Castro, “La Paz con la Paz Se Paga,” September 3, 2010,

available at

http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2010/09/03/fidel-castro-la-paz-con-la-paz-se-paga

.

[260] Rancière, Disagreement, 83.

[261] McKibben, Eaarth, xv.

[262] Heilbroner, Inquiry, 159.

[263] Bloch, Principle of Hope, 232.

[264] Chomsky, New World of Indigenous Resistance, 362.

[265] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. and ed.

David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 107.

[266] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto?, 45, 39, 61.

[267] Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National

Socialism, 1933–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 464.

[268] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto?, 42.

[269] Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, 195; Bill Van Auken, “Obama

Administration Spending Billions on New Global Strike Weapons,” World

Socialist Web Site, April 24, 2010.

[270] George Monbiot, “The Western Appetite for Biofuels Is Causing

Starvation in the Poor World,” Guardian, November 6, 2007.

[271] Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto? 45; Gareth Porter,

“Report Slams Pakistan Drone Attacks,” Al Jazeera English, November 3,

2010.

[272] Bloch, The Principle of Hope; Holloway, Crack Capitalism.

[273] Adorno, History and Freedom, 149; David Harvey, The Enigma of

Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 226–27.

[274] Adorno, History and Freedom, 7.

[275] Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 437.

[276] Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947; repr., London: Continuum,

2004), 115; Henry A. Giroux, “In the Twilight of the Social State:

Rethinking Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History,” Truth-out, January 4,

2011, available at

http://www.truth-out.org/in-twilight-social-state-rethinking-walter-benjamins-angel-history66544.

[277] Walter Benjamin, Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed.

Gary Smith (1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),

64.

[278] Chris Hedges, “Zero Point of Systemic Collapse,” Adbusters,

February 8, 2010.

[279] Benjamin, Benjamin, 66.

[280] Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 176.

[281] Rancière, Disagreement, 14; Adorno and Horkheimer, Towards a New

Manifesto?, 36.

[282] Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” in The Essential Frankfurt

School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum,

1997), 117.

[283] Holloway, Crack Capitalism, 192.

[284] Ibid., 79; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 257.

[285] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958), 247; de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 91.

[286] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton

(London: Routledge, 1973), 365.

[287] Franciszek Piper, “The Number of Victims,” in Anatomy of the

Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yehuda Bauer, Raul Hilberg, and Franciszek

Piper (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 61–62.

[288] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary

Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1996), 157; J. M.

Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), 409.

[289] Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 191.

[290] Karl Jaspers, Kant, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Ralph Manheim (San

Diego: Harcourt, 1962), 65.

[291] Adorno, Critical Models, 191.

[292] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365.

[293] Bernstein, Adorno, 387; quoted in Peter M. R. Stirk, Max

Horkheimer: A New Interpretation (Hertfordshire, UK: Harvester

Wheatsheaf, 1992), 190.

[294] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment:

Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1947; repr., Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 165; Adorno, Minima Moralia, 240.

[295] Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans.

Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998).

[296] Bernstein, Disenchantment and Ethics, 382.

[297] Bernstein, Adorno, 382, 394.

[298] Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, The Politics of Hysteria (New

York: Harper and Row, 1964), 30–31.

[299] Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1989), 17.

[300] Ibid., 384; Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362; Max Weber, From Max

Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 214–15.

[301] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362.

[302] Adorno, Critical Models, 305.

[303] Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, xiii.

[304] Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, ed. Peter Hudis and

Kevin B. Anderson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 242–45; Hannah

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., San Diego, CA:

Harcourt, 1968), 206.

[305] Pierre Clastres, Society against the State (1974; repr., New York:

Zone Books: 1989), 99.

[306] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1955;

repr., New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 36–37.

[307] Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader, 244–45; Mike Davis, Late

Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

(London: Verso, 2000).

[308] Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the

Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 4–5, 7.

[309] Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, trans. G. M.

Goshgarian (New York: Metropolitan, 2009), 132.

[310] Adorno, Critical Models, 192, 268.

[311] Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence on the

German Student Movement,” New Left Review 1, no. 233 (January–February

1999): 127.

[312] Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans.

Edmund Jephcott, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (1965; repr., Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2000), 101.

[313] Claude Eatherly and Günther Anders, Burning Conscience (New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1962), 5.

[314] Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National

Socialism, 1933–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944), 202.

[315] Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 59, 63.

[316] Norman G. Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial:

The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York: Henry Holt, 1998),

18–46.

[317] Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 73–74, 31, 78–79, 107–10.

[318] Nicolas Holliman, “Notes from the Steam Room: On the Origins of

Industrialised Killing during WWII,” Principia Dialectica, September 9,

2011.

[319] Richard A. Koenigsberg, Nations Have the Right to Kill (New York:

Library of Social Science, 2009).

[320] Adorno, Critical Models, 203; Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in

Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; repr., New York:

Penguin, 2006), 21.

[321] Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, 1970), 48–67, 104–14.

[322] Adorno, Critical Models, 201.

[323] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 98; Ingrid Strobl, Partisanas

(1989; repr., Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008).

[324] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of

Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York:

Routledge, 1994), 106.

[325] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto?,

trans. Rodney Livingstone (1989; repr., London: Verso, 2011), 47.

[326] Adorno, Critical Models, 192.

[327] Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New

York: Times Books, 2010), 25.

[328] Maia Ramnath, introduction to Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 12,

no. 2 (Fall 2010): 4.

[329] Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on

Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P.

Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 9; Giorgio

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans.

Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 41–86, 166–71.

[330] Wolfgang Sofsky, quoted in Bernstein, Adorno, 373.

[331] “U.S. Vows Sharp CO2 Cuts, But Will Not Pay Climate

‘Reparations,’” Yale Environment 360, December 9, 2009; quoted in

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 24.

[332] Quoted in Simon McGee, “Anger at Delegate’s Holocaust Jibe against

Climate Deal—as His Country Shares £62bn Bonanza [sic],” Daily Mail,

December 20, 2009.

[333] Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 43.

[334] Noam Chomsky, Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order

(New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999).

[335] Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York:

Schocken Books, 2005), 120.

[336] Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on

Israel’s War against the Palestinians (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010),

101.

[337] See, for example, Gideon Polya, “G8 Failure Means Climate Genocide

for Developing World,” Countercurrents, July 11, 2009; see also

http://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/home

; quoted in Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2009),

59.

[338] Violeta Davoliute and Ugur Ümit Üngör, “Genocides?” Eurozine, July

7, 2011.

[339] Noam Chomsky, “‘The Evil Scourge of Terrorism’: Reality,

Construction, Remedy” (comments at the International Erich Fromm

Society, Stuttgart, March 23, 2010).

[340] Quoted in Ronald Aronson, Dialectics of Disaster: A Preface to

Hope (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 164. The International War Crimes

Tribunal was orgnized by Bertrand Russell and hosted by Sartre.

[341] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 65.

[342] Damian Carrington, “Climate Change Concern Tumbles in US and

China,” Guardian, August 30, 2011; Suzanne Goldenberg, “Most Americans

Don’t Believe Humans Responsible for Climate Change, Study Finds,”

Guardian, July 9, 2009; Suzanne Goldenberg, “Number of Americans Who

Believe in Climate Change Drops, Survey Shows,” Guardian, October 22,

2009.

[343] Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion (New York: Nation Books, 2009),

73.

[344] Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 167.

[345] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. and ed.

David Ames Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 311, 340; Marcuse,

Negations, 14.

[346] Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 24.

[347] David Orr, Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2009), 9.

[348] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 404; Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic

Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1978), 73.

[349] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2009), 212.

[350] Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected

Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer, and John

Torpey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 25.

[351] Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 74–76.

[352] Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred

Knopf, 1956), 22.

[353] Neumann, Behemoth, 476.

[354] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2001), 123.

[355] Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, ed. Leslie White Beck (1795;

repr., Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957), appendix 1.

[356] Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beach

Press, 1965), 128.

[357] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 233.

[358] Bernstein, Adorno, 407.

[359] Dyer, Climate Wars, 46.

[360] Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 326, 345, 282, 216, 32

(emphasis in original).

[361] Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New

York: Schocken Books, 2003), 147, 164, 180.

[362] Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279.

[363] Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 99, 120, 43.

[364] Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 189.

[365] Adorno, Critical Models, 195.

[366] John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 169.

[367] Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline: Notes, 1926–1931 and 1959–1969,

trans. Michael Shaw (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 39.

[368] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill

(1947; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 129.

[369] Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans.

Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 156.

[370] Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Clarence Brown (1924; repr., New

York: Penguin, 1993), 168.

[371] Bertolt Brecht, The Days of the Commune, trans. Clive Barker and

Arno Reinfrank (1955; repr., London: Methuen, 1978), 72.

[372] Walter Benjamin, Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed.

Gary Smith (1962; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989),

66; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big

Sleep), 13, available at

http://www.notbored.org/RTI.pdf

.

[373] Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On

Human Nature (New York: New Press, 2006), 50.

[374] Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone

(1964–65; repr., London: Polity Press, 2006), 149; Cornelius

Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 241.

[375] David Harvey, Enigma of Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2009), 227; David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2000), 260–63.

[376] Takis Fotopoulos, “Direct Democracy and De-Growth,” International

Journal of Inclusive Democracy 6, no. 4 (Fall 2010).

[377] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life,

trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; repr., London: Verso, 1974), 156, 103

(translation modified).

[378] Arthur Schopenhauer, Suffering, Suicide, and Immortality: Eight

Essays from the Parerga, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (Mineola, NY: Dover,

2006), 16–17.

[379] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of

Inequality among Men,” in Modern Political Thought: Readings from

Machiavelli to Nietzsche, ed. David Wootton (1755; repr., Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1996), 426.

[380] Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global

Dominance (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 236.

[381] Renfrey Clark, “The 350 ppm Carbon Dioxide Challenge and How to

Achieve It,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, January

14, 2010.

[382] Poorva Joshipura, “This Earth Day, Go Vegan,” Guardian, April 22,

2010.

[383] Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1972), 265.

[384] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry

into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 5.

[385] Brian Tokar, “Movements for Climate Action: Toward Utopia or

Apocalypse?” in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory 12, no. 2 (Fall 2010):

65.

[386] James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren (New York: Bloomsbury,

2009), 172–222.

[387] Minqi Li, The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World

Economy (New York: Monthly Review, 2008), 171–73.

[388] Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “Terra Quasi-Incognita: Beyond the 2ºC

Line” (paper presented at the Oxford University 4 Degrees and Beyond

International Climate Change Conference, Oxford, September 28, 2009);

Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society

(Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 126.

[389] Peter D. Schwartzman and David D. Schwartzman, A Solar Transition

Is Possible (London: Institute for Policy Research and Development,

2011).

[390] Lester Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and

Economic Collapse (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 116–35.

[391] Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, “A Plan to Power 100 Percent of

the Planet with Renewables,” Scientific American, October 26, 2009;

Fiona Harvey, “Renewable Energy Can Power the World, Says Landmark IPCC

Study,” Guardian, May 9, 2011.

[392] Justin McCurry, “Japan Doubles Fukushima Radiation Leak Estimate,”

Guardian, June 7, 2011.

[393] Dahr Jamail, “Fukushima: It’s Much Worse Than You Think,” Al

Jazeera English, June 16, 2011.

[394] David Schwartzman, “Solar Communism,” Science and Society 60, no.

3 (Fall 1996): 307–31.

[395] Trainer, Renewable Energy.

[396] Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature,

and Climate Change (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); Kim Stanley Robinson,

Red Mars (New York: Bantam Spectra, 1993).

[397] Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (1982; repr., Oakland, CA:

AK Press, 2005), 349.

[398] Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Oakland, CA: AK Press,

2004), iii, ix; Murray Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal:

Black Rose, 1980), 67.

[399] George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning

(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2009), 170–88; “Solar-Powered Blimp Set

to Fly across Channel,” Guardian, July 8, 2009; “Solar Impulse Completes

24-Hour Flight,” Guardian, July 8, 2010.

[400] “Solar-Powered Boat Türanor Raises Hopes of a Sun-Fuelled Future,”

Guardian, April 1, 2010.

[401] Jason Adams, “Non-Western Anarchisms: Rethinking the Global

Context” (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books), 118; Paul Sharkey, The

Federacion Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU): Crisis, Armed Struggle and

Dictatorship, 1967–1985 (Berkeley, CA: Kate Sharpley Library, 2009).

[402] Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects (Chicago: Haymarket Books,

2010), 118.

[403] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2000), 413.

[404] Noam Chomsky, “Students Should Become Anarchists,” June 14, 2011,

available at http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20110614_en.htm.

[405] On grain requisition, see Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The

Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996), 775–80. On the

repression of anarchists, see Emma Goldman, My Two Years in Russia

(Saint Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 1924), 199–209; Paul

Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (1967; repr., Oakland, CA: AK Press,

2005), 222–25. On the fate of the soviets, see Figes, A People’s

Tragedy, 684–90. On Kronstadt and the Makhnovshchina, see Paul Avrich,

Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Paul

Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 220–21;

Alexandre Skirda, Nestor Makhno—Anarchy’s Cossack: The Struggle for Free

Soviets in the Ukraine, 1917–1921 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003).

[406] Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, Nuestra Arma es Nuestra Palabra,

ed. Juana Ponce de León (New York: Siete Cuentos Editorial, 2001), 103.

[407] Quoted in Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr.,

San Diego: Harcourt, 1968), 473.

[408] Arundhati Roy and David Barsamian, The Checkbook and the Cruise

Missile (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 156.

[409] Derrida, Specters of Marx, 106–7.

[410] Georg Lukács, Destruction of Reason (Torfaen, Wales: Merlin Press,

1980), 850–52.

[411] C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938; repr., London: Penguin,

2001), 215.

[412] Robert W. Stookey, South Yemen: A Marxist Republic in Arabia

(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982); Fred Halliday, Revolution and

Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967–1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1990).

[413] Glenn Greenwald, “Wikileaks Cables and the Iraq War,” Salon,

October 23, 2011.

[414] Nick Davies, “Afghanistan War Logs: Task Force 373—Special Forces

Hunting Top Taliban,” Guardian, July 25, 2010; Damian Carrington,

“WikiLeaks Cables Reveal How US Manipulated Climate Accord,” Guardian,

December 3, 2010; “WikiLeaks Cables Reveal U.S. Efforts to Defend

Cluster Bombs around the World,” Democracy Now! September 19, 2011.

[415] Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947; repr., London: Continuum,

2004), 108; see also Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, 251; Warner

Sachs, “Global Ecology and the Shadow of ‘Development,’” in Global

Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (London: Zed, 1993), 3–21.

[416] Andrew Cornell, Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement for a

New Society (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011).

[417] “India Anti-nuclear Protest Turns Violent,” Al Jazeera English,

April 20, 2011; “Protest against Koodankulam Nuclear Plant in Pictures,”

Countercurrents, September 19, 2011; Nirmala Ganapathy, “Anti-nuclear

Protests Gain Strength in India,” Asia News Network, November 14, 2011.

[418] Helen Pidd, “Germany to Shut All Nuclear Reactors,” Guardian, May

30, 2011.

[419] Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on

Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose, 1990), 132; Murray

Bookchin and Janet Biehl, “Advisory Board Resignation Letter,” Democracy

and Nature 3, no. 3 (1997).

[420] A.G. Schwarz, Tasos Sagris, and Void Network, eds., We Are an

Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008 (Oakland, CA:

AK Press, 2010), 334.

[421] Adorno, Minima Moralia, 60.

[422] Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York:

Schocken Books, 2005), 96.

[423] Ramor Ryan, Zapatista Spring (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 48,

208–11; Niels Barmeyer, Developing Zapatista Autonomy (Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Press, 2009).

[424] Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for

Independence (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 222.

[425] Ibid., 89–96, 111, 172–74, 301–5.

[426] Rabindra Ray, The Naxalites and Their Ideology (Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 1988), 230.

[427] Samir Amin, “2011: An Arab Springtime?” Monthly Review, June 2,

2011, available at

http://monthlyreview.org/commentary/2011-an-arab-springtime.

[428] Ibid.

[429] Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, trans. G. M.

Goshgarian (New York: Metropolitan, 2009), 244–45.

[430] Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s

Largest Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 108–10.

[431] Ibid., 423–27.

[432] Samarendra Das and Felix Patel, Out of This Earth: East India

Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2010).

[433] Ray, The Naxalites; Arundhati Roy, Broken Republic (New Delhi:

Penguin, 2011).

[434] Roy, Broken Republic, 121.

[435] Jason Burke, “More of World’s Poor Live in India Than in All

Sub-Saharan Africa, Says Study,” Guardian, July 26, 2010.

[436] Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and

the State (1891; repr., New York: Pathfinder, 1972), 61–83.

[437] Douglas Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007).

[438] Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review, May 1949.

[439] Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney

Livingstone (1963; repr., Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2001), 150.

[440] Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence, trans. Jeanine Herman

(1980; repr., New York: Semiotext[e], 1994); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants

of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen

(New York: Zone Books, 2002), 63–64.

[441] Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other

Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980),

121.

[442] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 2009).

[443] Harvey, Enigma of Capital, 260, 248.

[444] Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism; Wilhelm Reich, Mass Psychology

of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970).

[445] Andrew Glikson, “The Atmosphere Is Not Waiting for Human

Decision,” Countercurrents, November 30, 2009.

[446] Mark Carey, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and

Andean Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 18.

[447] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958), 256.

[448] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton

(London: Routledge, 1973), 404.