Upstream - Climate Leviathan with Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

It’s probably safe to say that at this point, most people recognize that it’s not a question of whether climate change will have devastating impacts on humans and our environment — but more, just what the political fallout of inevitable climate collapse will look like… In this Conversation, we’re exploring just that: the political consequences of climate collapse. We’ve brought two guests to help explore this, co-authors of the book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, published by Verso Books. Geoff Mann is the Director of the Centre for Global Political Economy at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and Joel Wainwright is a human geographer who teaches political economy and social theory at Ohio State University.  Thank you to Matt Kish for the cover art. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

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if you can, go there to donate. Thank you. I simply do not see how it's possible that we could live in a world defined by capital with its inherent dynamism and growth orientation, with its inherently expansionary tendencies, with its persistent tendency to increase inequality, both of wealth and income, but also power, and it's also its tendencies to go into periodic crisis, including both depression and war. I don't see how to square all of that with a just response to climate change, but it's not enough to recognize that. That's an important step.

But even when a lot of people recognize the truth of this incompatibility, we are left with the challenge of organizing ourselves to produce an effective counter-response. And in a sense, you could say dismantling capitalism is only half of the problem. The other half of the problem would be constructing a better world. You are listening. To upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Dela Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. It's safe to say that at this point most people recognize that it's not a question of whether climate change will have devastating impacts on humans and our environment, but more so just how devastating these impacts will be.

And then also importantly, there's the question of what the political fallout of climate change will look like. Well, in this conversation, we are exploring just that, the political consequences of climate change, and we've brought on two guests to help us explore this. Both co-authors of the book, Climate Leviathan, a political theory of our planetary future, published by VersoBooks.

Jeff Mann, who will hear from in the first half of the episode, is the director of the Center for Global Political Economy at Simon Frazier University in British Columbia. In the second half of the episode, we'll hear from Joel Wainwright, a human geographer who teaches political economy and social theory at Ohio State University. But first, here's Robert speaking with Jeff Mann.

Music Hi Jeff, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. Okay, so climate Leviathan. In the introduction, you write that the book is not just another Marxist critique of capitalism's ecological consequences, but that you were more interested in sort of the political effects of those consequences. So on that note, maybe, yeah, if you could just sort of describe what you and your co-author Joel set out to do in climate Leviathan. Sure. I think that you're right. We were really dedicated to not just reproducing what I think

is an important, but is now I think reasonably obvious Marxist critique of capitalism, and that it kind of comes out of that sort of discussions in the 70s and 80s around what was called then the second contradiction of capitalism. So the first one was between workers and capital, and it produced the struggles and crises that animate capitalism across history. But then there was a whole discussion around that time about something called the second contradiction, which was capitalism's contradiction with the nature upon which all of our societies depend, and it seemed to eat it up. Of course, eat up its own basis, and therefore, leading toward crisis constantly. And while, of course, that's a super important point, and

getting more and more important by the day. The goal and climate of the virus, and I'm speaking for Joel, even though I probably shouldn't, but I think we both were dedicated to thinking through Speaking for Joel, even though I probably shouldn't, but I think we both were dedicated to thinking through not those somewhat obvious natural limits kinds of arguments and thinking more about what happens to capitalist society when it runs into those natural limits. Like what are the political consequences? How do we organize ourselves or how do we get organized by others? What sort of shape of history do we see or could we anticipate appearing if the climate scientists are right and everything suggests that they are, that we're heading into a

harder and harder time to define and a more and more precarious relationship with the world that supports our communities. So we were wanting to ask ourselves, okay, so this is all prognostication for sure and we could be totally wrong, but if we look at the world through, you know, three or four big variables, as the nation's date going to last is capitalism going to persist. And it's say yes or no to those questions. Then what are the political consequences look like? What are regimes, what, or lack there of emerging in that kind of future? So I was really trying to use the tools of some Marxist political theory, but also lots of other kinds of thinking to think about the futures that might be headed our way.

And we might be totally wrong, but the exercise itself is, I think, really important. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think that just speculating on these things in and of itself can be very productive and helpful. And yeah, I found the book very helpful and sort of imagining, as you say, like the political fallout, the political effects of the things that we are currently sort of all have swimming around in our minds, I think, of the different possibilities. And so speaking of those possibilities, I'm wondering maybe if you could just outline the four scenarios that you cover in the book and then I do want to really spend most of the time exploring this idea of the Leviathan, but maybe just to start if you could just give us a picture of those four different scenarios that you outline in the book. walk very quickly through them all. And in some ways it begins with what I think both Joel and I would be comfortable admitting is a rather clunky two by two table that sort of describes, you know, as I said earlier,

the possible futures according to effectively two variables. And that is capitalist or non-capitalist, you know, in one variable, if you want to call it that. And the other one is a planetary kind of form of sovereignty or a non-planetary form of sovereignty. In other words, a kind of persistence of, in some cases, maybe the nation state, but something other than a kind of global organized governance model. And so if you think about it that way, then there's a capitalist planetary sovereign, a non-capitalist planetary sovereign, in terms of these possible trajectories, a capitalist but non-planetary form of sovereignty or rule, and then a non-capitalist non-sovereign form

of social organization. So those are the four scenarios. And we give them kind of clunky names, but they work in terms of conjuring up the images, I think, that we want to conjure. And the capitalist planetary sovereign form is the one that we think is the most likely, and we call it climate Leviathan. And it describes, basically, I think what we're seeing unfolding now

without, in any way, saying we were right, but an attempt on the part of global capital and the states that organized the infrastructure that enabled it, and so far, the effort is failing, but to face up to climate change in a way, and to organize the planet such that capitalism can keep going just as it has, but in a way that takes account of in some way or other climate change. And I wouldn't necessarily say that the answer is mitigation or something like that,

though of course we talk a lot about that, but it might just be managing adaptive strategies if you wanna call it that. And we would imagine that unfolding in some way, if it did, you know, via potentially a global hegemony or a shared hegemony, it's perceived between Europe and the United States, something like that. But the emphasis would really be on capitalism trying to keep things business as usual as much as possible. So that's

the first scenario. And the one that we think is at least in the medium term most likely. The non-capitalist planetary sovereign model we call climate Mao, not because we want to conjure up China specifically, though of course China plays a key role in whatever future we're headed toward, but it was an attempt to grasp the possibility of a revolutionary attempt which we think most likely would take a Maoist model to think about global sovereignty and managing or coming to grips with climate change. And because we really emphasize the sort of revolutionary

histories and trajectories and possibilities of Asia, you know, which is still not entirely, of course, but still very rural in some cases. And there's a massive amount of people there, just like there's a massive amount of people ever. But obviously the point is And there's a massive amount of people there, just like there's a massive amount of people everywhere. But obviously, the point is that there's a massive amount of people there who have not only lived through revolutionary tradition, but also are most at risk of the immediate consequences of climate change. So if you look at those maps of the distribution of people at risk of immediate emergency, the majority are in

the poorer parts of the world and a huge proportion of them are concentrated in Asia, where we, it's hard to imagine that if climate change reached a series of tipping points, there wouldn't be massive social reaction. And that social reaction would look quite different, obviously, than it would in North America or Europe. So that's what we describe with climate now. The capitalist, but non- or anti-planetary sovereignty, we call climate behemoth. And in the book, which we wrote mostly even the period between say 2012 and 2016,

we use Sarah Palin as sort of the icon of it. You know, this sort of drill, baby drill. We're going to keep doing it. The nation states the most powerful. Let's be racists and save ourselves. We'll get wealthy, fuck the world kind of thing. And of course, then Trump came along, which we didn't anticipate. But he sort of fit the bill even better in a way. I don't want to say that we anticipated him in any way, but he is very close to what we were trying to describe as the possibilities, particularly in the American political economic conditions. We didn't, and I hope this is true, in the book we argue it's if climate behemoth arises, it's a short-term fix for capital that will not last precisely because climate won't

let it last. I hope we're wrong about that. There's a new book out by Andreas Malam and many of his co-workers called White Skin Black Fuel. It's a very compelling and unsettling book, but it argues that, in fact, you know, the death wish, the death drive may be central to some of these movements, and we might see a situation in which it could persist long past its ecological deadline. I don't know if that's true.

And then the final and most hopeful scenario we argue we call climate X partly, because we don't really know what it's going to look like, so it's X, it's a variable. And that is the non-capitalist, non-sauverin. In some ways, you might, without trying to romanticize the term at all, think of it as the ground up community response, emphasizing the fact that both the solidarities required to manage the future. Even if we stop committing tomorrow, we're still on a tough trajectory, as you know. We imagine those emerging from people's lives, the lives that they live. Most likely likely the state is going to be at best to help, at best, but it won't be the answer.

And partly that's because, as you know, you have mentioned in a couple of our communications beforehand, the problem is unfolding in an extraordinarily uneven way. People will have their own challenges and they'll need to dub their own mechanisms and institutions and solidarities and plans to manage the world as it unfolds before them. And the key to climate X, as far as we understand it, is that vast plethora of responses that are emphasized both justice and as much as possible, a joyous, full life for those who are living in this world as it changes is a sort of intercommunity support. We need to like basically encourage those movements to support each other and not to turn inward, which of course is a significant risk all the time. Yeah, thanks so much for outlining those. And just a quick note on the climate X, it's

interesting sort of seeing in real time these things. Well, I guess all of them, all the scenarios, sort of like, but in terms of these sort of smaller community based responses, I do another podcast called The Response and we look at how communities respond to natural disasters, focusing a lot of the time on mutual aid, and it is heartening a lot of the times. A lot of the times the folks that are involved in this kind of stuff are not just like you're saying inward facing, they're sort of a transnationalism to a lot of these sort of spontaneous uprisings of people.

And then at the same time though, you do see how small they are and like just thinking about the scale of the problem, just it's heartening and disheartening sort of at the same time. But speaking of the disheartening side, maybe we could get a little bit more into climate Leviathan, like you mentioned, you think it's the most likely scenario, I would tend to agree with that, unfortunately. So you've described climate Leviathan as sort of like capital responding to climate catastrophes. And yeah, I mean, you did a pretty thorough job of outlining it, but maybe if you could get into a little bit more detail of what you think that might look like, like what the climate Leviathan scenario could look like. Right.

I mean, I guess I should begin by saying that even though Joel and I think both still feel like it is the most likely, or perhaps it is already emergent in a way in existing arrangements, but it also, it is the one scenario that appears to meet a popular call. And I wouldn't say that that call is universal or that everyone wants climate of I think. But the sense of quasi desperation that leads up to each cop meeting, that sense of sort of collective desperation, kind of yearning in some senses for someone to take leadership and take this on, you know, and get us on the road to dealing with climate change and coordinating global

arrangements that'll make that happen. That urge, I think I would say at least, that's really an urge for what we call climate of Iatham. And it's not entirely substantiated, of course, because it's not like everyone wants the world to stay the same as it is right now. Lots of people, as you know, the whole discussion around just transition is the opportunity to use a transition right now to make the world a better place for a lot of people that's not very good for right now. But that urge for a kind of overall powers that be management system is very much, I think, a part of the conversation and is part of the anxiety that sort of suffuses at least the capitalist part of the world right now.

And so climate Leviathan really is our way of trying to describe capital answering that call. I mean, if we look at the powers that be, as I said, the most influential nation states in the global political economy, the corporate power that saturates the cost process, the NGOs that have the biggest voice, these are all part of an interlocking, if not entirely coordinated system that is interested in the persistence of life as it exists right now.

And to that extent, the recognition that climate change might make that impossible, disrupting global trade, ruining production systems, increasing social unrest so that the whole profit accumulation system is destabilized. That's not in capital's interest at all. A breakdown is not in the interest of the biggest players on the planet. And so we

just can't imagine them sitting and watching it happen. And that's, I think, what we're trying to get at in the most straightforward possible way. I sometimes say, as a way of trying to describe what I have in mind at least, the moment when an international agency emerges, perhaps at the level of the UN UN to manage climate migration Which I don't think is at all impossible. We can say climate Leviathan has arrived How do you square that with the idea of sort of like disaster capitalism and the fact that a lot of these disasters are Capitalized they're they're made profitable and in fact encouraged and yeah, it's that sort of Naomi Klein's thesis of disaster capitalism. Mm-hmm. That's a really good question by which I mean I don't necessarily have an answer at all.

I do think though that what she has in mind is bounded by what we might call limits or the disaster can only be so disastrous to be capitalized. The complete disintegration or debilitation of the food system, for example, there are elements of that bits and pieces that will clearly be capitalized, but overall, the negative impact far outweighs the capacity to do so. And so I guess I would say that in some ways, where we're at right now, it's kind of a perfect opportunity for the disaster capitalists, but at the same time, doesn't diminish the need for, in the eyes of existing structures, it doesn't diminish the need for larger fixes, if that makes

any sense. I think the two can coexist. So, and this kind of goes into the idea that societal collapse, like it's not really an accurate way of looking at how climate change will impact us to think about it as like an apocalypse, right? Like I recently rewatched the road, the film based on Kormick McCarthy's novel and you know it's this like idea of like apocalypse and we're so accustomed to thinking about collapse in terms of these all-encompassing apocalyes. And you know, it sort of feels like the apocalypse might be a little bit more mundane than we think. Maybe that's not the right word, but like slow, you know, patchy, and if the pandemic is any indication, who knows? Well, probably still I'll be going to

like our shitty nine to fives and waste any way in traffic and like going to the mall throughout any of these apocalypse is right. So I'm just yeah I'm wondering does that resonate at all and like how do you sort of envision? I mean you've you've alluded it to it already but collapse versus this idea of sort of slow moving patchy collapses. I would agree entirely with pretty much everything you said. I do think that that's the way, assuming we continue on the business as usual mode, or something close to it, that is the way it's happening and will continue to happen. I think you're right. I mean, the world is already extraordinarily uneven. Perhaps even too, we're attracted to the kind of apocalyptic imagery,

not just because it's part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and that's how we tend to think things end, but also because, you know, we live in the most fortunate, most powerful and in some ways most devastatingly bad for the rest of the planet, part of the world. And if we lived in Syria or Mozambique where life is much harder to put together on a day-to-day basis, we might not think in terms of apocalypse. We might just think of the breakdown of institutions faced with colonial power or environmental degradation, most kinds of things. And maybe we wouldn't think it's all just going to go kaboom.

I don't know if that's true. But I think you're absolutely right. I think the challenges posed themselves, at least thus far, in really kind of immediate and local ways. For example, as you know, we had what they're calling a month's reign in one day three weeks ago here, and it washed away a significant portion of the provincial infrastructure. No one thought that could happen, and then it did. But from where I live in Vancouver, which is now hard to get to by road from anywhere on the continent,

except from the states, you'd hardly know. And I think that that's a really good analogy for the larger processes. And that's both less intimidating, perhaps, but at the same time, really positive, some really significant political challenges, because this is when it's really easy to turn inward. It's happening elsewhere. Look how we've treated the rest of the world for so long. It's actually kind of, you know, it's obviously shameful,

but also kind of crazy to think that we just watch this happen elsewhere every all the time. I don't know why we don't think we have to do a lot of work to make sure that won't happen now. Yeah, it's like we see all of these smartphone videos of crazy shit happening all over the world. And we all kind of know somewhere in the back of our heads is when they that might be our video

that we took but it's hard to sort of think in those terms. Zooming out a little bit, I want to kind of explore some of the foundational ideas that you express in the book quite early on in the preface of climate Leviathan, you write, quote, the vast proportion of historical greenhouse gases have been emitted as byproducts of the choices and activities, not of the masses of ordinary people, but rather of the wealthy minority of the world's population. And you all write that the term anthropocene is unhelpful in so far as it assumes a sort of universal human agent. And we've actually had Jason W. Moore on the show to talk

about this idea of the capital of scene, which I think is such an important way to frame things. But yeah, I'm curious. Can you talk about why you felt it was important to sort of state all of those things up front at the beginning of the book. Well, I guess I would say that the easiest and in some ways most honest answer to that is probably what Jason told you. I mean, in the sense that we were concerned about a lot of the same stuff that he was concerned about. This idea that the Anthropocene talks about humanity and its relationship to the planet, where it's not that's not the problem. It's a very specific part of humanity that has generated the problems that we now face. And not just in climate change clearly. Imperialism broadly spoken has also benefited

at a planetary level a very small fraction of the human population. So I think that was partly what we were just trying to get at. Just trying to population. So I think that was partly what we were just trying to get at, just trying to disinterer any chance that this might seem like we were impugning humanity, which is the last thing we would want to do. We also wanted, and I hope in the book we do this well, but you know, sometimes again, because of our own provincialisms, and I include myself in this as much as anyone, we can sometimes think of that small fraction of people as being someone other than us, because neither you or I,

I mean, I'm certainly very fortunate, but neither you or I make up that wealthy few, the 1% to whatever you wanna call it. And they are and have been for a very long time, obviously, an enormous problem for the planet and everyone else who lives on it. But the average middle-class North American is part of that wealthy minority of the world's population that we're talking about.

And we do mean to impume that, the politics of that community, of which we are both part. So I mean, I think in some ways we did it right at the beginning, we talked about stuff like that because we're trying to lay the groundwork for where we're coming from, which is to say it's an imminent critique, while at the same time being, I think, hopefully, a very effective vilification of a set of processes and the people that benefit from it that are pushing us toward again, I don't want to use the word precipice because that tends to suggest the same thing we're talking about just a second ago, like one big fall, but pushing us in a direction that is literally disastrous and at worst suicidal.

A really sort of grotesque example that illustrates the point you're making. I think I read that Jeff Bezos' excursion into the sort of the edges of outer space released the same amount of carbon as 1 billion people would in a year. Something like that, which I think that's sort of, yeah, just a very uncomfortable and sort of disgusting illustration of that. I want to also talk to you about this idea that I've heard some other folks talk about this, such as Naomi Klein, like we mentioned earlier. I guess she's going to come up quite a few times. So if you're going to have a conversation

around climate change and capitalism, but you have also talked about this idea of the new climate denialism. So it seems like the outright denial of climate change isn't so much of a thing anymore. I mean, it's still there, but it's not really the same as it was. I don't know, 10 or even five years ago. It's kind of hard to deny it when its effects are like taking place on a daily basis all over around the world in very dramatic ways. So can you talk about what you see as like this new form of climate denialism? Sure. You're right. I think that the outright denial that has been so well documented by folks like Naomi or Eskies, even though as you say it does persist. But most people

I think even shell and the rest of them who've been funding climate denial for so long are admitting it, if that makes any sense. There are certainly sending lots of people to the COP meetings to make sure that the arrangements are good for them. So I think people coined this term the new denialism to describe someone like who I see as sort of the epitome of new denialism is our prime minister Justin Trudeau, who talks the game all the time, climates, you know, it's an existential risk. We have to take it seriously. The government is standing up in the interests of the future and our children. And then, you know, funding pipelines.

Like it's just basically lies. It's false promises, fake performances, and lies. And in that book I referred to earlier, the White Skins Black Fuel that Malaman, his colleagues wrote, which is a great book, as I said, they characterize the new denialism as you meet and Davos to save global capitalism and then you invite Greta Tunbury to stand up and berate you for 15 minutes. And then you're like, oh, yes, she's so brilliant that she makes so many good points. And you just keep doing whatever the hell you were doing. Like that's the new denialism. And I think what I've been trying to struggle with lately, actually, I've just written a tiny bit about it, is to get beyond my own conceptual limits of thinking

in these as just lies. Because they are lies. Like these people are lying to our face. They have no intention. You know, we're building massive pipelines across Canada for corporate benefit only effectively. And we're telling everyone that we need to do this because that's the way we'll fund our transition to clean energy or something like that. It's a complete and other joke, but there's got to be more to it. It can't just be plain lies.

So I'm trying to think of how these lies have become kind of structurally necessary. Like in some ways, the only way that you can manage the chaos conceptually, this juncture is to lie because the chasm is so huge between promise and performance that it's impossible to manage otherwise. You have to lie to yourself otherwise. You just crawl up and underneath the table or something.

I don't know what it is, but I've been wanting to think about these kinds of lies that we tell to each other too, you know. Yeah, that's fascinating. So I guess I'm going to ask you the sort of upstream question that we ask all of our guests. It's kind of the theme of the podcast is sort of like, I'm not sure if you're familiar with the whole upstream metaphor, but essentially it's really just about going to root causes. And so I'm wondering like if you were to just go upstream

to the root of a lot of the things that we've been talking about, and also just sort of like any examples of places where you're optimistic, maybe places where you see some hope. Are there any movements or organizations or anything like that that you might want to share that so we don't end on a totally depressing note. If you go upstream, you find capitalism. It's not the only cause by any means and I don't mean to kind of reduce all those other dimensions to it, including the gendered one and racism and the legacies of imperialism,

which predate at least modern capitalism. All of these things there, it's an massive entanglement. But if you had to pick one right now, I would say it's a profit-driven, individualistic, competitive, vindictive set of social relations that have become naturalized. So, you know, its ideological power is enormous, at least in the most powerful parts of the world. I think that's what you'd find if you were looking for the switch that you wanted to flick off to help things go. Given that, it can be really easy to kind of,

as I said earlier, like curl up in a ball, crawl into your table. And some days it's probably worth doing that, you know, just to get your head out of it. But I do think that there's hope not only in sort of increasingly mass movements, which are of course they've been troubled by COVID, but hopefully they will return to make us think differently about climate. The fact that so many of those people are young people, like a huge proportion of those people are young people, is a very, very hopeful thing.

These are people who are politicized far younger than I was. I mean, in some ways, it's a terrible thing to look at the world being in such bad shape that these people have to walk out of high school to go try and encourage the adults to fix things a little bit. It's also very hopeful, in the sense that these are people who are politicized early. They're comfortable taking a position. They're ready to be in and face the conflict that much of it might require. Those are enormously hopeful things. The sooner my children are in charge, the better off will be. That's the way I look at it right now. And I don't mean my children specifically. I mean, the younger generations

of the planet. So that, I think, is enormously hopeful. children specifically. I mean, the younger generations of the planet. So that, I think, is enormously hopeful. The other thing I think actually, and I get this because I do a lot of work here with a really wonderful organization called the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives. And the organization does fantastic work on a variety of fronts here in BC, on the provincial level, but also across the country at the national office and other offices. That focus on everything from childcare costs to long-term care for elderly folks, to fighting the pipeline construction through Vancouver proper that people maybe know about, you know, just a lot of a full range of what you might think of, sort of, standard social democratic projects.

And I would say that if given the opportunity, virtually every one of them is more radical than the organization is itself. And that is a constraint imposed by the existing political structures. But if those shift, then a lot of what we think of as sort of like centrist folks won't be centrist any longer. These are a pragmatic approaches to a politics that looks so-called reformist. I'm not a big fan of that term, but that's a good used law. But these are folks who don't oppose radical change.

They just see the reformism as being the only option or the lower-hanging fruit at this moment. But when we take that step, then something else entirely becomes visible. And many of those people will be on board. And I think there's a huge hope in that when we look at the so-called mainstream social democratic left, we think, oh, you know, they're too willing to buddy up to the existing institutions. Many of them are not. They're just being pragmatic in their view, but if given

the chance, they'll come right along for the ride. I really believe that. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jeff Mann, co-author of the book, Climate Leviathan. We'll be right back for the second half of our show with Jeff's co-author, Joel Wayne Wright. I'm a little bit more of a little bit more of a little, it's a little too heavy, all for my size, honey for my size, I'm going up on the mountain, I'm gonna see my baby And I ain't coming back I ain't coming back We're all alone buddy Don't you roll so slow

How can I roll When the wheels won't go? We're rollin' on buddy, pullin' low to go How can I pull when the wheels won't roll? I'm so happy. I'm so happy. Well, it's a long way to Harlem, and it's a long way to hazard, just to get a little brew, just to get a little brew. Where when I'm long gone, you can make my tombstone At a number nine code, at a number nine code Where roll on buddy, don't you roll so slow?

How can I roll, when the how can I roll? When the wheels won't go, we'll roll on buddy. Pull a load, cold, how can I pull? When the wheels won't roll. When are we as war row? Applause That was 9-pound hammer written by Murl Travis and performed here in 1977 by Towns Vanzant at the Old Quarter in Houston, Texas. Now here's our conversation with Joel Wainwright, co-author of the book, Climate Leviathan. Hi, Joel. It's great to have you on the show.

Thanks so much for coming on. My pleasure, Robbie. Thanks for having me on. So, Jeff and I already explored your thesis in Climate Leviathan and what you both set out to do. We also went over the four scenarios in a lot of depth. So what I'm envisioning for this conversation is maybe to broaden things out a little bit. And so I'd like to start, I guess, I don't know if it was just me,

but it really seemed like the lid was ripped off of the giant fraud, which has been the cops or the conference of parties, climate change conferences. At the last one, COP26, it almost feels like the events and processes that are leading to climate change are almost algorithmic at this point and that the algorithm isn't going to destroy itself, that capital is not going to stop capitalism and that we're probably heading into a world that's going to contain a lot of suffering. And so you see a path in terms of like it really does feel like in order to address this,

we are going to have to, if not completely dismantle, but the whole idea behind capitalism is this idea of endless growth. And I don't really know how we would be able to sustain a capitalist world and just not have the planet over, you know, may take centuries, but at some point it would probably become unenhabitable. So you put a lot on the table there, Robbie, and in a way, your question ends up answering itself because I think that many of the problems that we associate with the cop meetings can be explained quite simply by the fact that they reflect an underlying contradiction within the logic of liberal capitalism. But before I try and elaborate on that claim, let me just say a word

in defense of the cup meetings because you called them a fraud and I've heard that word thrown around a bit among my left-wing friends lately. And I know where that's coming from and I can respect why you're saying that, but I would prefer to use a different language to describe what's happening inside these meetings because I don't think they're fraudulent in the sense that I don't think that the elites who are present are trying to pass them off as a certain solution. In fact, I've had the privilege of attending to the COP meetings. And my impression is that many of the participants, if not most of them, in the meetings, are quite aware that what has been coming out of the process falls far short of what is

needed. So then the question becomes why do they keep meeting? And one answer is, which I think is the correct one, is that this is how liberal capitalist nation states work towards solutions on difficult problems. They keep talking. And all things being equal, Robbie, you and I are definitely better off that those states keep talking about climate change. It's far and away better than the alternative, which is that they simply stop talking to

one another. Let me just give two reasons why I think that's true. One is that the very fact that the cop meetings occur allows people who are not official delegates to go to the meetings, meet one another, and organize protests around and inside sometimes the COP meetings. And so, for instance, when I attended those two COP meetings, I participated in protest marches around them. And when I did so, I met people from other parts of the world who shared a climate justice

agenda. And in small but significant ways, we can see through the years that the persistent actions of the climate justice movement have changed on the margins admittedly, but sometimes in important ways, how people inside the climate meetings talk about what's happening. In addition, occasionally there are conflicts between states over what should be done, and occasionally those conflicts kind of boil over, and it means that the lid comes off, so to speak, these real conflicts in international affairs. And so that can be quite useful as well.

Now having said all that, no, I don't put great hope in the COP meetings. As they stand, they are clearly in the quadrat that Jeff and I call climate Leviathan, and it stands as evidence that the logic of the elites of the world tends to point the direction of something like a planetary sovereign. So to flesh that out, if you take a look at the Paris Agreement, which is only partly an agreement on mitigating carbon emissions,

but also includes some measures for finance and adaptation, if that agreement were to be fully realized in the world, it would require new forms of governance, new institutional powers, and ultimately, if you really think it through to bring about the decarbonization that would that would fall out of all that, it would require some kind of planetary sovereign. Now that doesn't mean that the cop is the sovereign, but it means that it points to the creation of such a phenomenon at some point in the future. So that is to say

liberals who are hopeful that the cop meetings will produce outcomes that will lead to effective mitigation and just forms of adaptation are essentially encouraging and promoting the creation of climate Leviathan. So having said this now, let me remind those who are listening that although Jeff and I are cheering for climate X, we also recognize that most of our colleagues, friends, comrades, and so forth who are out there fighting for climate justice are probably at some level if they're honest with themselves cheering for the creation of a climate of Iathen. I mean, we do want there to be agreements that will bring about rapid decarbonization,

and we certainly don't want the BAMF force in the world to win. So that puts those of us on the left in a complicated relationship with the COP meetings. We can see its internal contradictions, but we ourselves have a contradictory relationship to them. Now, to the second part of your question about dismantling capitalism I agree with you Robbie. I simply do not see how it's possible that we could live in a world defined by capital With its inherent dynamism and growth orientation with its inherently expansionary tendencies with its persistent

Tendency to increase inequality both of wealth and income, but also power, and it's also its tendencies to go into periodic crisis, including both depression and war. I don't see how to square all of that with a just response to climate change. And I know I'm not alone in that. I think more and more people are coming to that realization. But the challenge for us, Robbie, is that it's not enough to recognize that.

That's an important step. But even when a lot of people recognize the truth of this incompatibility, we are left with the challenge of organizing ourselves to produce an effective counter-response. And in a sense, you could say dismantling capitalism is only half of the problem. The other half of the problem would be constructing a better world that was, say, eco-socialist or to use the terms that Jeff and I used in the book, based on a path of climate X. We really have a great deal more work to do in this area. And now I'll share a brief anecdote with you, Robbie, that I think will give you a sense

of where we are today. We're speaking in December 2021, I just taught two courses in climate politics, again, at Ohio State University, which I've been doing now for 15 or 16 years, and I've had the pleasure then of watching over the years to see how students respond differently to thinking about climate politics by teaching the same, more or less, the same class. I mean, it's changed quite a bit over the years, but same ideas, basically. And I find that, as recently as a decade ago, many undergraduates who I taught really resisted

what I would call like the recognition of the fundamental challenge that we face, squaring capitalism and adjust world because of climate change. It's like that era is gone now, Robbie, it's so interesting. Under graduates, I would say in general today are far more amenable to the idea that there's something like what they consider to be socialism, however they understand it, which would be needed to address climate change in a just

fashion. The problem we have now, Robbie, is that in the last couple of years, it seems that many young people, perhaps as a result of COVID, perhaps because they have figured out that the COP meetings aren't moving nearly fast enough, and the world's elite are not actually decarbonizing. They've reached a point now of kind of moral and imaginative desperation, where they just simply can't imagine how we build a socialist world. And therefore, they've kind of fallen into a kind of doom-like state where they feel like we're already doomed. And now, of course, that was true before,

but at least previously, you could really talk with people about what we could do, the steps we could take politically, I mean, not just in terms of energy conservation, to address the fundamental problems. And I feel that it's getting to be more difficult. And I'm not sure exactly what's the cause of this. You know, we could speculate whether it has something to do with, since I'm here in the

United States, I'm thinking about the consequences of the Trump presidency, or of COVID, or the social mediatization of their lives, et cetera. But what is clear now is that there is a real serious challenge ahead for the left to organize people on a psychological terrain in which frankly people are psyched out and people feel defeated and where they feel that the opportunity to create structural change has already passed. These are in a word conditions for failure and we have to somehow find a way to speak to people that inspires them because at the end of the day climate change presents itself

to us as this enormous challenge of imagination. We have to be able to imagine that we could actually transform the world to become simultaneously just and democratic, but also while addressing the climate change challenge. And if no one can think about what that means, then it's not going to happen. So it simply must be done. And this isn't the sort of imagination, active imagination that we associate with the individual lone thinker who sits alone in a room and comes up with some new idea. It's the sort of active imagination that requires an inherently collective and social response.

I actually resonate a lot with a few of the points that you made. I do think, you know, about a decade ago, I was one of those undergrad sitting in a college course hearing about climate change and, and yeah, very, very different time. It's only a decade, but like, it's interesting that as you, you know, sort of you're teaching these students right now, it sounds like you were saying that the dismantling of capitalism or the uplifting of socialism is something that they recognize, but now they see as maybe not a possibility back in, you know, my undergrad years,

no one was even talking about capitalism. Like that wasn't even a thing. It was sort of, we all existed on this plane of like individual action. You know, like what can I do as an individual to solve climate change? And like, which by the way, can I just interject the fact that people would think that way, which of course many people still do, is itself a reflection of what in the book, Jeff and I would call following many, many other people on the left, the hegemony

of liberalism, or more generally the bourgeoisie. Because if everyone thinks of themselves as an individual actor who has their own range of options as an agent, which is limited, and all questions about politics, morality, and economics are filtered through that lens, then you can never imagine a collective structural transformation. And that's how we're trained to think in a capitalist society where liberal hegemony functions. And so what you're describing, Robbie, which is really interesting, and I can confirm that this is happening, is a shift in hegemony in the last 10 years or so in American life. The problem is that politically and concretely on the ground and in the state, most of the gains in the last 10 years have been on the far right. So we have a real problem on the left that we might feel like our ideas are beginning

to permeate through society and I think we're right, but concretely we don't have a vehicle for organizing ourselves right now. We don't have a party that can see state power, et cetera. So in the face of that gap, I find that with respect to climate change at least, as opposed to say racial justice on which feelings, I think, are quite different, but with respect to climate change, I feel that many of my students have intuitively arrived at a point where they feel like we're past a point of no return, and paradoxically, if any action is called for, it's of a rather violent type. And in the midst of this, I should mention that Andres Mom has published a series of books,

which have got a lot of attention quite rightly in my view. They're very important works, and I regard them as major contributions to our time. In one of those books, which is, flies under a very ironical title in a way called How to Blow Up those books, which is, it flies under a very ironical title in a way called How to Blow Up Pipeline, which I read with one of my classes this fall, Mom lays out a vision for strategic use of sabotage, particularly a fossil fuel extraction mechanism. In order to help create the conditions,

the political conditions for a better future. And although I have my criticisms of the book, I was happy to read it with my students. And what I found to be striking, Robbie, is that, and I won't reveal to which about the book, so if anyone's listening, there's no spoilers. The students really found themselves attracted to Mom's argument, and partly that's because Mom is a brilliant writer, but I think partly it spoke to the fact that they really don't have a sense of what else is possible anymore.

And so the idea of blowing things up, or as some of my students advocated, quite openly in the classroom, the idea of putting together an assassination program to start shooting elites, seems to them not just possible to imagine, but almost attractive. And so it's very interesting moment that there's a saying which is often attributed to Frederick Jameson. I'm not sure if he was really the first to say it, but Fred's really smart. So let's give him credit, which is, he said,

it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And I would say the 2021 corollary to Jameson's maximum would be for many young people today, it's easier to imagine going out and blowing up pipelines and shooting at elites than it is to go about the work of actually building eco-socialist relations in their own communities. And that to me is an index of our failure, because whatever the merits of a Mollmian strategy,

and I think that there are some merits, but there's also some serious limitations. If we can't simultaneously build forms of power and community and relationships that are based on something like an eco-socialist alternative, then blowing things up is not going to help. Yeah. I have the Monkey Ranch gang at Edward Abbey's book and Earth First Direct Action Manual sitting on my bookshelf. But I can't say that I've ever actually participated in any of these. Put them in the world where you studied them. Can I ask you Robbie, just out of curiosity, what year did you graduate from high school?

2003. Okay, so because I think of the 1990s as the big years of the debates about Earth First and tree spiking and eco-terrorism tactics. That makes some sense. Most of the students I'm teaching today would have been born in around the year 2000, and therefore they kind of missed that whole debate. So now there's like a new round of it happening, but rather than being about forestry or public

lands as were the major debates of the previous period, now it's all about fossil fuel infrastructure. Right. Yeah, I think it's really, really interesting. I mean, it's a tricky subject, right? I know I mentioned the Monkey Ranch gang earlier, Edward Abbey's famous novel. You know, it's probably one of my favorite novels. And I remember crying when I read it, and just really, really resonating with the characters.

And I guess for anyone who doesn't know it, it's basically a book about this group of, I guess, I don't know, eco-terrorists. I don't know if I love that term, but eco-terrorists who are planning to blow up a dam. But yeah, I mean, these acts of sabotage can really satisfy this urge, the sense of helplessness. We're so powerless to really do anything.

So these individual actions of sabotage are a way for people to exercise some kind of power in a system that's so, so inaccessible and closed off to them otherwise. Well, the idea that by carrying out an act of sabotage or violence against a human being, that that could contribute to social change is a bit of a complicated one that's worth unpacking because it's the sort of idea which in the wrong hands can have disastrous consequences. So let's just try and clarify a few fundamentals. I take it as axiomatic that no major social transformation has ever occurred that didn't involve violence. And that's not a justification for violence.

That's just a simple recognition that, so far as we know from what I know from the historical record, there hasn't been a change of the scale that would be required to deal with climate change well, that wouldn't involve violence. And so then the question becomes, how do we bring about those changes so they can bring about greater forms of justice and liberation while also minimizing the violence? I think that's just sort of a kind of basic moral maxim that we can all, or we should all take as a starting point in the conversation.

Now as regards what then is strategically useful as well as ethically sensible for the current moment, I agree with mom that we have to take seriously the proposition. We have to really seriously strategically consider how damaging fossil fuel infrastructure could help advance the cause of climate justice because clearly we don't have a lot of time. We need to bring down carbon emissions immediately and so forth. And so I'm completely on board with that. The challenge is that mom's book I think does a poor job of strategically discerning between different political situations.

In fairness to Andreas Mom, I happen to know this is something that he's given a lot of thought to. But it's not really in the book or as one critic wrote about the book. What's striking is that Andreas Mollm has written quite a bit elsewhere about climate-lenonism, but when it came time to write how to blow up a pipeline, he didn't really provide a kind of leninist analysis of different forces, situations, and states that would show where certain types of sabotage might be more or less useful. I just take a concrete example. If you are in a place like, say, Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, in other words, a country where the export of fossil fuel is basically the basis of the economy and where the state is the owner of the fossil fuel infrastructure, as well as the oil or gas itself. If you attack

the fossil fuel infrastructure, you are in effect attacking the state and the elites and fossil fuel production all at the same time. And you can't really separate those out. And so if your goal was to topple the state or to weaken the government or to challenge the elites and also to try to slow exports of fossil fuels, then it would be a sensible thing to do because your tactics and your goals and your interests would all align. But things might look very differently if you were saying Ohio where I am today, because although it is true that the US is one of the world's largest emitters of carbon, and we're also one of the world's largest producers of fossil fuels, still in the top five.

Number two for carbon emissions, almost at the top when it comes to per capita carbon emissions, still number one for historical per capita carbon emissions, etc. Despite all of that, attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure in a place like Ohio would almost certainly bring about a very violent counter-reaction that would be at least at the level of ideology, quote unquote, led by the working class, who would be the representatives of the reaction. And under those circumstances, we could expect that the major beneficiaries of infrastructure attacks under the existing state of the movement would probably be the right wing.

Now that isn't to say that that couldn't change, but there would have to be for instance, as my students pointed out in my class when I read the book with them, you would have to do quite a bit of homework before you started down that path. You'd have to win over a fraction of the working class to your cause. Indeed, you'd probably want to make sure that some of the people who were involved in the actions were themselves, workers or former employees or labor organizers from the sector, you would want to make sure that they were prepared to rebut the reactionaries. You would want to make sure that insofar as it's possible to guarantee it,

that nobody lost their life, and you would have to be well prepared for people to go to jail and prison for a long time, and all that. And those conditions could be met. But if you didn't prepare for such things, and you just sort of hoped that a few acts of violence would bring about the kind of Fanonian cleansing violence spirit, I think you'd be seriously disappointed. So these are the kinds of debates we need to have, and you and I are just chitchatting and speaking through these things quickly.

But to have a serious conversation along these lines requires not just time, but you have to have a certain conversation along these lines requires not just time, but you have to have a certain kind of common set of understanding. And of course, you have to think carefully about where you're talking about them, too. You can't necessarily have all these debates in public. And here, too, I have to say the conditions are difficult in the United States today, because we don't really have a broad and vibrant left-wing revolutionary social culture, nor do we have a revolutionary left-wing political party of much size and standing.

And so I find that a lot of young people are having these conversations in ways that are not necessarily as productive as they could be. So we have a lot of work to do. And in the end, I'm not even sure that answer makes a lot of sense because it's basically hand-wavy. All I'm saying is you have to think carefully about the likely political consequences of specific acts. I mean, you said that you read this stuff about Earth first.

You probably remember hearing about Judy Berry. No, maybe, but it doesn't ring a bell. She was one of the most effective ecological and her co-feminist organizers in the West Coast in the 80s and 90s. And she came out very strongly against tree-spiking. At a time when a lot of kind of ecological anarchists, men were advocating tree-spiking, she came out and said, no. And there was a big debate about her position, and in the midst of all that, she was bombed for her activism. She suffered a terrorist attack by the FBI that nearly killed her and left her physically disabled for the rest of her life. She passed away about 15 years

ago, 20 years ago. And why I mention this now because in the course of this debate, which played out not only in public, but in the pages of the Earth for a journal, bear used to point out the following point. She said, we on the left are not going to win the decisive victories in the battles over the environment unless working-class people agree with us. And the easiest way to get working-class people to hate you is to do something that causes them to get physically injured at work.

So when you put a spike in a tree, you might say, great, now they can't cut it down, but the capitalist can still send his workers out to cut down the trees and send them to the sawmill. And when the saw band breaks and the saw goes flying off and kills someone, because it hits a tree spike, it's not going to be capital that gets killed. It's going to be a comma worker. And if you think about that, that general point applies directly to the question of blowing up pipelines. Right? If you go out, Robbie, and you blow up a pipeline,

are you going to blow up capitalism? No, you're going to blow up a pipeline. Now, who's going to have to go fix the pipeline? Is it the guy who owns the stock? Is it the owner of the means of production? Is it some elite? No. It's going to be some working class men and women who have now to go fix those pipelines. And you know, that doesn't mean that like we can't do anything. It means that we just have to start with some very common sense facts before us, that we need to convince people that we're right. And sometimes just blowing things up is not a very compelling argument for people. But at the same time, I want to repeat that I'm not trying to take the position that

no conversation about sabotage can be had quite the contrary. Neither am I trying to suggest that young people today who feel like that's a sensible past should be silenced. They shouldn't be. I understand their desperation. I recognize that there is no simple path here towards a better and just world. And I recognize that there is no simple path here towards a better and just world. And I recognize that in fact, regardless of where things go, we're going to see greater violence in the future. I'm afraid. And so the question becomes how do we respond to it in a way that opens up greater avenues for equality and liberation as well as basic morality? You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Jeff Mann and Joel Wainwright, authors

of the book Climate Leviathan, a political theory of our planetary future, published by Verso Books. Thank you to Matt Kish for the cover art for this episode. You can check out Matt's work at mat-kish.com or on Instagram at mat- underscore-kish- underscore illustration. Upstream The Music was written by Robert. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to Donate.

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