Capitalocene and History
The Capitalocene narrative is a welcome revision to the one implicitly espoused by earth scientists. Yet, at the same time, it has a limited horizon.
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
by Andreas Malm, Verso Books, March 2016
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
by Jason Moore, Verso Books, November 2015
Global warming is a phenomenon with a particular kind of spatiotemporal profile. It is a global phenomenon occurring at the spatial scale of our entire globe, and it is a slow-motion phenomenon occurring at a time scale far slower than the perceptible flow of everyday events. Actually, both the spatial and the temporal aspects of it are mostly beyond direct human perception. Fortunately, the development of increasingly precise natural sciences permit its measurement and scientific explanation. For multiple centuries now, greenhouse gas emissions in general, and carbon dioxide emissions in particular, have been rising, pushing global average temperatures well over 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Increasingly strong hurricanes, more widespread, damaging forest fires, rising sea-levels, and a host of other acute natural events in various regions of the world are in part the expression of the global accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the past few centuries.
A warming world is of course not the only earth-shattering problem we face, and it is not the only expression of the vast impact of human activity on the various spheres that make up our earth system—the hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere. Irrigation systems, canals, dams, and reservoirs were constructed as early as 5000 years ago to aid in the production of food, altering the flow of water towards the ocean. Deforestation had long been occurring on a large scale before the Industrial Revolution, and freshwater fishing before the Neolithic Revolution drove many species extinct. Yet the year 2020 marks the first year, within a margin of error, that all of our collectively manufactured stuff—the materials for which come primarily from the earth’s ground, its lithosphere—weighs more than all living things combined.1
All of these activities together express the impact of human activity on our earth system—an impact so profound that natural scientists have gathered, largely in consensus, around the idea that we are living in a new geological epoch deserving of the name the Anthropocene: the time of humans. The weight of such a designation is immense. The scientists who study with unassailable rigor the earth’s multi-billion-year history have decided that the changes we humans have set into motion are monumental enough that they deserve a designation operating on the time-scale of thousands, even millions, of years.
In so doing, it is often argued, earth scientists have sought to become the Anthropocene’s historians, providing a narrative for the origin and trajectory of our epoch. Those in the humanities and the social sciences, long skeptical of narratives that universalize the human subject across time and space, have sought to foreground contingent social processes that could rightfully be seen as alternative origins—or if not origins then essential characteristics—of our planetary impasse. A debate has long been taking place between the many disciplines of the modern academy about which significant events in human history could occasion such mind-boggling phenomena as the many crises associated with the Anthropocene.
It is perhaps notable, then, that two significant reformulations of the Anthropocene narrative have come from scholars trained in historical geography, a sort of bridge field between the earth and social sciences, concerned with historical time as much as geographic space. Preferring to make capital and the social class that owns and represents it the primary driver of the Anthropocene, Jason Moore, in Capitalism in the Web of Life, and Andreas Malm, in Fossil Capital, present two versions of the alternative narrative now most often referred to as the “Capitalocene.”
The Capitalocene narrative is a welcome revision to the one implicitly espoused by earth scientists. Yet, at the same time, it has a limited historical horizon. On the one hand, it looks back to the early dynamics of capitalism for an explanatory foothold on the origins of the Anthropocene, and contains immense affordances for explaining how the actions of only a few particular people, in particular places, laid the groundwork for wide-ranging changes, the effects of which we are only beginning to experience. On the other hand, its narrow focus on particular class-bound dynamics and worldviews obscures important historical developments that have occurred more recently in the 20th and 21st centuries—developments that are essential for anyone trying to understand what could conceivably be done to address the problem of climate change today.
It is not an accident that most books addressing the problems of the Anthropocene end up focusing on the problem of climate change. Of all of the problems of the Anthropocene, it would seem that climate change is the one most centrally connected to all of the others. The temperature of the earth, causally connected to the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, has effects that reach deep into each of the earth’s other spheres. Most importantly for us, a rising global average temperature in the medium to long term is what would make the earth uninhabitable for the human species.
If we want to conceive of how things could be different—of how we might cease to cause the earth’s temperature to rise and therefore threaten our very own continued existence on earth—it follows that we ought to know about how that particular problem came to be. It is this question that Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital seeks to address.2 The vast majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution have originated from the combustion of various fossil fuels. The important historical question for Malm is how and why we became so dependent on burning them for energy.
The answer, Malm thinks, lies in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century, when it gave birth to what he calls the fossil economy—“an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels, and therefore generating a sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide.”3 It was during this period that Britain, the first empire to do so, transitioned from a system of factory production that relied on the energy generated by flowing water, which was harnessed by river-bound watermills, to a system of factory production dependent on steam energy, which was released by burning a stock of coal unearthed from the ground and harnessed by a rotative steam engine. The transition happened despite the fact that water was persistently cheaper and more abundant than coal as a source of energy—a fact that disproves theories of the transition that lean on Ricardo and Malthus, and appeal to the relative scarcity of water power to the abundance of coal, and the resulting costs, as the impetus. And it happened despite the fact that water power retained, Malm claims, technological advantages to steam power up until the 1860s—a fact that in Malm’s view dispels Marx’s theory of productive forces (rather than productive relations) as the determining instance of historical progress, and amounts to “slapping history in the face.”4
Rather, the transition to steam power occurred in Britain in the early 19th century for two reasons. From 1824 to 1848, British capitalism experienced its first long-lasting crisis, which impelled the cotton workers, facing wage cuts and dire conditions, to strike out against their factory owners, notoriously breaking a number of the power-looms making their way into the factories in 1826. The factory owners, seeking to extricate themselves from their dependence on the power of unruly laborers to run the looms in their factories, sought to find alternative sources of “animate power” to spin cotton for sale on the market. One was the power bestowed upon the factory owners by automation: the self-acting mule and the power-loom became much more widely adopted in the cotton factories during this period of crisis. The former tethered the weavers to one source of motion, and the latter required less physical effort than the hand loom—less labor power required to produce greater amounts of cotton.5 This power dynamic between capital and labor, between the cotton factory owners and the weavers and spinners, is the first reason for the transition.
The second is the peculiar “spatiotemporal profile” of coal-fired steam power. Unlike flowing water, a stock of coal is solid and mobile—it is by its “nature” something that can be more easily carved up and moved, relative to water. The fluid and irregular nature of water as a power source meant that reservoirs and dams, the infrastructure made to amass and store water for controlled use, if they were to be employed on a large scale, had to be to held in common by a group of owners and regulated by an entity as powerful as the British state. A bill outlining a spate of initiatives to build such a reservoir system on the river Irwell in the early 1830s, the ideas for which were originally formulated by Robert Thom, did not ultimately make it through Parliament. Though evidence is scant as to precisely why, Malm speculates that it was the opposition of some of the capitalist owners that ultimately led to the bill’s downfall. A similar dynamic played out with the reservoir schemes proposed for the river Tame.
Coal power, on the other hand, lent itself to easy appropriation, private ownership, and, curiously, free wage labor over forced apprenticeship labor. After strikes in the river cotton colonies, where almost every building and tool was owned by the factory owner, and after the Factory Act of 1833, mandating improved conditions for child workers, apprenticeship labor became a drag on the expansion of productivity in the mid-1830s. Shifting to coal power enabled factory owners to seek out a burgeoning labor force residing in the growing urban centers unique to Industrial Britain. Malm: “Class contradictions could only be resolved – or displaced – on a steam footing.” Coal’s properties were not only spatially advantageous, but also temporally so, when later improvements to the steam engine, in the late 1840s and 50s, enabled the harnessing of higher pressures for increased loom speed. Water power, abundant and cheap as it was, could hardly be sped up by force in the same way. As Malm summarizes: “Hence the transition was all about power, in the dual sense. The very same desire for subordinated human labour that animated automation drove cotton capital towards steam … the very same desire for factory discipline first spawned by the water mill eventually caused its demise.” This is the desire of capital as a relation of production to subordinate, and extricate itself from, both labor and nature.6
The fossil economy’s birth was consummated with the expansion of coal-fired power from textiles into general manufacturing and the production of iron and steel, all of which became dependent on the energy from the rock for the self-sustaining growth originally brought about by capitalist property relations in Britain. It is here, for Malm, amongst a tiny and privileged fraction of the human population, who sought, mostly successfully, to employ the steam engine as a prime mover of production on a mass scale, that we find the actual origins of the Anthropocene.
There are a number of ways such a theory of the history of the Anthropocene could be critiqued. One particularly powerful critique would point to the fact that cotton production in 19th century Britain was already part of a global system dependent on the import of raw cotton from British colonies. The vast majority of the cotton spun in Britain in the late 18th century originated from West Indies cotton plantations; in the early 19th century, US plantations. Both were planted and harvested by slaves from West Africa. It was the system of plantation slave labor that procured the raw cotton for the British cotton mills in the early 19th century years before steam power was widely adopted for use in the British factories, during which time the British cotton industry grew more explosively than any other empire’s. One could justifiably point to the slave plantation and its particularly violent, brutal organization of production as an origin point for the Anthropocene.7
Another critique would push the origin point back even further, and point not to capitalist property relations in Britain as the fundament of steam power and thus present-day global warming, but to the particular ideas that emerged in Western Europe around the time of the Renaissance that were brought to bear on nature and the environment. A critique that does so and yet is also in keeping with capitalism as an historical analytic is Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life, where what is at issue is the “Cartesian” worldview that imposes a separation between two slightly different dyads: nature and society, and nature and capital.8
Naturalist dualisms, Moore argues, are most visible beginning in the 17th century Dutch Republic, where Descartes produced his major philosophical works, and where merchant capitalism was first coming to prominence. Though Descartes’ fundamental dualism was between the body and the mind, it symbolizes the inauguration of a larger dualistic worldview between the substances of nature and the ideas of man. “Clearly falsifying and confused,” Moore writes of the worldview embodied in Descartes’ philosophy, it nevertheless has “real historical force.”9 It reorganized, Moore argues, the relation between capital, labor, and nature in the ensuing centuries, and can be educed from various global projects of capitalist development as early as colonial times all the way up to the present.
Long before James Watt first drew the designs of what became the steam engine, European colonial empires had expanded their networks of trade and production across the Atlantic and around the globe. As important as local agricultural production was for the nourishment of their populations, they also depended on various processes that were made to exist outside the core cycles of capitalist production—an “external nature” kept at an appropriate distance. The Spanish officials, for example, in the years after Francisco de Toledo stamped out the last remains of the Incan Empire in 1572, reorganized the relations between capital, labor, and nature by restructuring the existing Peruvian mit’a system of mandatory labor surrounding the mine on Cerro Rico (“Rich Mountain”), in order to appropriate silver from it at costs that would have otherwise been much steeper. When that system of organizing labor and nature no longer yielded enough quality silver, the Spanish reorganized around the mines at Potosí. The silver mined in the Spanish colonies became the bedrock of the Spanish (and later Dutch) Empire’s wealth and power.
For the Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires, though it was originally sugar from plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil that fed the rise of their capitalist centers, the general process of organizing nature was not altogether much different for Moore. The process of keeping natural resources at a distance, labor subordinate, and capital accumulation always in view, was the essence of the project that Rosa Luxemburg once called ongoing primitive accumulation—primitive accumulation “still going on,” in her book’s English translation.10 For Moore, this project was ultimately successful only because it was able to make nature “cheap” in a dual sense: capitalists were able to appropriate resources at low cost relative to their ‘true’ value, and to degrade nature of its ecological worth and wonder. So long as the cost of appropriating nature and exploiting labor remained low, profits remained high—or at least higher, Moore speculates, than they would have otherwise been.
Beyond the emission of unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the regime of “Cheap Nature” exhausts what Moore calls the “world-ecological surplus” on which capitalist development and economic growth has depended, and has led to a correlative “world-ecological crisis” of epochal proportions.11 Nature and capitalism are so knotted together that a crisis of the former engenders a crisis for the latter. (Though one could say the same about any other historical, actually-existing socioeconomic system.) Capitalism only survives for long, in Moore’s framework, if it can secure its labor force and its natural resources, its work and its energy, on the cheap. If global capitalism depends on cheap reserves of natural resources and labor power for its continued expansion, what happens when we reach the end of that regime?
It’s a question raised at the conclusion of the book, but never answered in any satisfying detail. There is an inkling of Malthusianism in the question, but the fact that Moore leaves it open saves him from such a charge. The implication is that we are fast approaching the ends of the earth. Capitalism, so embedded within the natural substrate of the planet, will die out by virtue of the fact that it has run out of earth to draw into its circuit. Here is where Moore’s account faces its limits. Moore fails to notice, on one hand, the rapidly falling price of solar energy—the so-called “Swanson Effect,” which has been taking place since the late 1970s—and on the other hand, the steadily falling price of wind turbines, which has fallen almost 50% since 2010.12 Presumably, if advanced capitalist economies were to move towards renewable energy as it becomes cheaper, as it seems they are doing, a capitalist system of organizing production and agriculture could continue to thrive on cheap energy—for better or worse.
Still, the benefit of such an expansive historical framework as the one Moore offers is that it enables one to tell a story that, in a search for the origins of our time, reaches back farther and wider than the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Additionally, ideas, rather than mere epiphenomena of property relations between classes, become active movers of economic development, and a constitutive part of the history of the crisis of the Anthropocene. But such a wide-ranging view faces acute limitations (beyond just those of the contemporary energy transition) in explaining a number of important events in the time since the Europeans turned much of the colonial world into plantations and pioneered the carbon-intensive factory system. And those limitations start to matter if we want to bring both of these historical narratives to bear on the more recent past and indeed on the present.
The obvious one, relevant to both of the accounts here, is the historical period during which the Soviet Union—no less reliant on coal, oil, and gas, from its very own Eastern European and Middle Eastern periphery for energy—industrialized rapidly at the cost of many human lives and not a small amount of carbon.13 Moore dismisses the Soviet Union as a country that learned mechanized farming from its capitalist adversaries; Malm dismisses it as a historical “parenthesis” of much less relevance than Western capitalism, which he claims today dominates global production and emissions. Neither, however, sees the fact that actually-existing socialism was compatible with immense environmental degradation as something that calls into question their reduction of the Anthropocene crisis to a problem of, in Malm’s case, capitalist relations of production, and, in Moore’s case, capitalist philosophical dualisms.14
Of the two accounts, Moore’s is the only one that avowedly ventures to fit the 20th century in to its wide frame, but Malm’s account, likewise, is an attempt at an intervention in the present. In an effort to argue that not only were the origins of the climate crisis capitalist at their core, but that it has continued to be so ever since, Malm is equally fitting a theory of history—an inversion of Marx’s theory of history—to the time between Britain’s 19th century Industrial Revolution and today. Both, I think, struggle to account for a few more critically important developments in the 20th century.
Beyond merely the rise of Soviet socialism, the early part of the 20th century was also the time of the rise of “big business” in America and the modern liberal state system and its institutions that remain with the West today. Though the welfare state in Europe and the New Deal in the United States never quite nixed capitalism altogether (indeed the New Deal is often seen as a vindication of liberal capitalism), they did institute a period of sustained economic growth for approximately two decades after the Second World War, during which time capitalism as conventionally understood was controlled by what might be called macroeconomic Keynesianism. The US, owing to the conflictual and somewhat disorderly agreement at Bretton Woods over the post-war world monetary order, emerged as the financial hegemon during the period, with the UK vying to make London a second pole. Capital controls were put in place, and then removed.15 The prosperity of domestic economies became increasingly tied to national spending programs and foreign direct investment. Labor union membership was rising, the share of income (but not necessarily wealth) flowing to the top 1% of earners was declining, and capitalists, in their most stereotypically brutal, competitive form, were relegated to their industrial corners. The automobile made its way into increasingly many American suburbs, and air travel went from a luxury to a mass consumer service.
The prosperity that a booming population of Americans was enjoying required cheap fuel: oil and gas. Moore is right in that the growth of oil and gas consumption was premised on its cheapness. Malm is right in that the spatiotemporal profile of oil and gas lends itself to acute control and mobility. But it was the modern state that secured the substances.16 There is no better evidence of that than the events that occurred in the 1970s. When American postwar prosperity was threatened by the oil embargo (amongst other things) in the early 70s, this sparked a political shift in the US of historic proportions that primed the US for its dependence on oil by means of war, while at the very same time disabused its citizenry of their trust in the government to secure its petroleum-based products.17 That shift was not only political, but also financial, as the US government decided to outsource acquisition and distribution to not only the military but also the market, the twin pillars on which American power depends.18 A booming population, increased production and consumption, more frequent, faster, and sky-high transportation—all of this meant a Great Acceleration in the quantity of carbon emissions pumped into the atmosphere, in addition to the acres of farmland and forest razed over for agricultural and other purposes during the Green Revolution.19 In quantitative terms, compared to the Great Acceleration, Britain’s Industrial Revolution is a blip on the absolute hockey-stick curve.
Then came the Chinese Communist Party and the industrialization of China, India, and much of the Southeast Asia and other regions of the Global South. No single nation on earth burns more coal than the one run by the CCP today. And no single regime has ever industrialized at the rate and scale that the CCP did in the second half of the 20th century. One striking fact about the results of China’s industrial ascendency captures its scale better than any other statistic. Since 2003, China has poured more cement—the primary ingredient of concrete, one of the most environmentally destructive materials on earth for how much it contributes to global emissions in the process of its production, transportation, and use—every two years than the United States did during the entirety of the 20th century.20 If China is now a capitalist nation, it is not at all capitalist in the way that Malm or Moore, not to mention Marx, would ever conceive of such a system with its well-defined relations of production or processes of capital accumulation.
The problem with reducing the history of the Anthropocene to capitalism is that it elides two important 20th century historical developments. The first of these developments is the formation of a global order of liberal nation-states in the West and the state regimes of socialism and communism in the Soviet Union and China. The second of these developments is the formation of the North-Atlantic financial system as a partial product of the former. The traditional Marxist solutions for grappling with the first of these developments—the state—are twofold. One is to conclude that, in a Western capitalist society, the modern state is a mere functionary of the capitalist class—its executives make up a committee for “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” in Marx’s manifesto—and sidestep the problems of a nuanced historical exposition of much of the 20th century. The other is to argue, following Lenin, that what follows from this is that the proletariat must, in carrying out a revolution, abolish the state—it must not only seize it but smash it.21
The first solution fails to grasp the changing institutional structure of states and their relation to the global financial system as it developed out of the crises of the early and mid-century—the second major development of the 20th century. Though the influence of the banks weighed heavily on the minds of policymakers, the global financial system wasn’t designed in some backroom by a cabal of capitalists, but in an intensely political process of international conflict and deliberation about who should have access to different forms of credit and resources, how exchange-rates should be governed or controlled, and how the central banks should respond to acute financial crises. The emergence of the shadow-banking system has further complicated that process, with its control over much of the world’s assets and its ability to create private money on a large scale. The fact that the crucial political fight in the US and in parts of Europe is now about how to divest from fossil fuels and invest in cleaner energy might even suggest that the roadblock is not so much capitalist property relations tout court, as Malm often professes, but the political process. Nevertheless, it’s difficult to square all of these rather unprecedented institutions, with their data-based financial power and their fiats from modern states, with the grand industrial capitalism story of revolution told by Malm.22
The second solution—the Lenin solution—fails to acknowledge the particular character of the political-economic system ruled over by the Chinese Communist Party, about which little is actually known in the West, and which in fact may hold the fate of the earth in its hands. Though it may be satisfying to imagine a revolutionary takeover of the US government, long-divided on the issue of climate change, it’s more plausible that a certain kind of industrial policy might take shape from the political compromises that the current design of the US electoral system requires. Unfathomable, however, is the idea of smashing the Chinese Communist Party and the state it commands. More likely, it is the Chinese Communist Party that controls the earth’s thermostat. One could conjure an image, as Adam Tooze has, of the party agreeing in 2020, just before Xi Jinping’s September announcement pledging carbon neutrality by 2060, that “the future is Xi Jinping Thought plus electrification.”23
In a nutshell, when we zoom in on the events of the last century, the lessons from the Capitalocene reformulation of the Anthropocene narrative become helpful only in a very limited sense for our understanding of its history. What may have begun in earnest with capitalism in its industrial or merchant forms has certainly not always remained so. Other prime political movers have emerged into the climate, and now control the direction and speed of the planetary engine. So too, the drawn-out crisis of the Anthropocene is something that will, in time, affect humanity in its entirety, if in very unequal fits and disastrous starts. To their credit, the advocates of the Capitalocene narrative highlight the highly unequal nature of the problem at both its origins and in its current progression. Where they come up short, however, is where we might need them to help most—in our search for historical precedent and political-economic alternatives upon which to build a more habitable future.
Erik Stokstad, “Human ‘stuff’ now outweighs all life on Earth,” Science Magazine, December 9, 2020, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/human-stuff-now-outweighs-all-life-earth.
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016). Malm thinks historians ought to move from writing about “climate-in-history” to writing “history-in-climate.” See Andreas Malm, “Who Lit This Fire? Approaching the History of the Fossil Economy,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 215-248, publicly available at: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3438-who-lit-this-fire-approaching-the-history-of-the-fossil-economy.
Malm, Fossil Capital, Apple epub, 23.
Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1913), 145.
In Marx’s vernacular, this amounts to an increase in relative surplus value.
Malm, Fossil Capital, Apple epub, 214 and 218.
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (New York: Vintage Books, 2015); Donna Haraway, Noboru Ishikawa, Scott F. Gilbert, Kenneth Olwig, Anna L. Tsing & Nils Bubandt, “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 535-564. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838.
Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015).
Ibid., 21.
Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2013), 350.
Jason Moore, 125-128.
Jon Moore and Nat Bullard, “BNEF Executive Factbook,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance Limited, April 22, 2020, https://data.bloomberglp.com/promo/sites/12/678001-BNEF_2020-04-22-ExecutiveFactbook.pdf.
Lenin’s words for the GOELRO plan, which became a model for the subsequent five-year plans, were “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country, since industry cannot be developed without electrification.” Lightbulbs were commonly called “Illyich’s Lamps,” after Lenin’s middle name.
See Vladimir Lenin, “Our Foreign and Domestic Position and Party Tasks,” Speech Delivered to The Moscow Gubernia Conference of The R.C.P.(B.), November 21, 1920, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/21.htm.
Malm, “Who Lit This Fire?,” contains a section that addresses a classic problem of writing a Marxist history of the 20th century, which is how to account for why Soviet socialism degenerated into state capitalism—or, for Malm, “Fossil Stalinism.”
Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Peter Schulman, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
Meg Jacobs, Panic at the Pump: The Energy Crisis and the Transformation of American Politics in the 1970s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).
Gretta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); John H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat, Genes, and the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Amy Hawkins, “The grey wall of China: inside the world's concrete superpower,” The Guardian, February 28, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/28/the-grey-wall-of-china-inside-the-worlds-concrete-superpower.
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, Lenin Internet Archive, 1993, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm; Andreas Malm, The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso, 2018) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (New York: Verso, 2020) both contain Malm’s answer to the question “What is to be done?”
Perry Mehrling, The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became Dealer of Last Resort (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
Adam Tooze, “After Escape: The New Climate Power Politics,” e-flux journal 114, December 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/114/367062/after-escape-the-new-climate-power-politics/.