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samdalefox 's review for:
The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene
by Richard Seymour, China Miéville, Jamie Allinson, Rosie Warren
challenging
medium-paced
I'm going to go to town on this review, not for the pleasure of it, but I need the authors and the publishers to understand me. Do not publish more drivel like this. It is unecessary and counter-productive to the left climate movement. I understand this is harsh, please let me explain.
The text starts with a gripping opening: "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win. What if the world is already lost? This is the question that vexed us as we set out to write The Tragedy of the Worker.... It is now clear that we will pass what scientists have long warned will be the tipping point of global warming, accelerating the already catastrophic consequences of capitalist emissions. How do we imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable Earth?" This question is genuinely interesting and I want to hear the answers and discussion around it. The thing is.... the essay does not do this.
The text starts with a gripping opening: "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win. What if the world is already lost? This is the question that vexed us as we set out to write The Tragedy of the Worker.... It is now clear that we will pass what scientists have long warned will be the tipping point of global warming, accelerating the already catastrophic consequences of capitalist emissions. How do we imagine emancipation on an at best partially habitable Earth?" This question is genuinely interesting and I want to hear the answers and discussion around it. The thing is.... the essay does not do this.
The authors do not at any point address what we could do as socialists if the world we inherit is not viable/habitable. How we could survive, how we could thrive. They spend the entire text rehashing arguments made elsewhere about the relationship between captial and the climate crisis. Worse still, while rehashing they do not reference specific sources (absolutely unforgivable, and no a list of 'further reading' is not an adequate substitution), and they use pompous rhetorical language that is offputting to readers.
On the last two pages they mention 'salvage communism' but decline to say anything further about it. I assume it's some grandiose thinking underpinning the authors' 'Salavage Collective'. The only other part indicating relevance to the initial question posed is a wild claim that "speculation about a post capitalist future is verboten and necessarily so. [paraphrased]" I have so many issues with this, I don't know where to begin and it would be unfair to spew my unrefined counter points here. One clear criticism is, if speculation is verboten, what the fuck are you doing with this fucking essay then? How are you not participating in 'Nowhilism' and doomerism that you criticise. Who is this for? How is it helpful? The answer is that it's not. I have salvaged a few peices of information of interest from this text, but due to the lack of sources I will need to undertake the leg work myself. Another user's review below sums up my feelings accurately and I have copied my favourite quotes from the text below. I do not recommend reading the full text however. You will not glean anything further beyond what is contained in the quote itself.
frasersimons's review:
"Yet, who is this for. Massive amounts of time is naturally dedicated to codifying the numerous tragedies of the worker. So, why ask a rhetorical question, like why is this book not for the average worker. It crosses into the masturbatory quite often with its diction and insipid references and jargon. Add that to another tragedy."
Quotes:
"Humanity is thus a a symbiotically evolving , globally interconnected, technologically enhanced microbial system." - Margulis
"Ecologists should not waste their time telling the rich to share".
"The real abstraction is the social basis of capitalist implicatory denial: the seemingly evidence-proof conviction of capitalist states that capitalogenic climate change can be remedied by means, and according to systems, that guarantee it's perpetuation."
"All realistic solutions, define by capitalist realism, are inadequate. All adequate solutions, defined by the exigency of the crisis, are unrealistic."
Ideas that are deemed... "Unrealistic, is an indication of how much would have to be achieved,and how quickly consent gained for radical new ideas, coalitions assembled, tactics innovated, the unthinkable realised."
"It is, unfortunately, not impossible for distinctly fascist solutions to climate change to be imposed, along despotic and ultimately genocidal lines. The mise-anthropo-scene presents ample opportunities for various lines of racist, patriachal and militarist policy to be represented as mitigatory, or adaptive - and, from within the predicates of fascism, such policies would in fact be mitigatious and adaptations. The very aspects of ecological disaster which throw capitalism into crisis, and which indicate the need for social mobilisation tantamount to war, are just those which could give rise to a far-right climate leviathan, whith the military organising what the bourgeoisie cannot."
"Pity would be no more. If we did not make somebody poor" - William Blake
"Like most geoengineering proposals, their possible and possible irreversible effects of regional life and remote weather systems are poorly understood, and yet they are vaunted with astonishingly little cognisance of what that means."
"The onrush of catastophe does have a temporality of its own... It imposes tight constraints on those who want to fight." - Andreas Malm
"The language of 'sustainable development' Gareth Dale points out, has become the language of sustained capitalist growth. It has become the language of implicatory denial. Capitalist states proclaiming the objective of 'zero net emissions' while their means entail the massive expansion of emissions. 'Green economies expanding airports and extending motorways. The unsinkable rubber duck of 'green capitalism'."
"The majority of carbon emissions in the entire history of humanity, as David Wallace-Wells starkly reports, have been produced since the Earth Summit in 1992."
"The pivot of imperialism today is not direct political control of territory. It is rather a global, liberal, properly rights regime, policed by everyone from the US Trade Representative to the European Commission, backed by the power of the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and Wall Street, supported by capitalist classes from Paris to Beijing and secured by violence 'in the last instance'.
"Of course it is always and only profit that will be prioritised."
"According to the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) 30 percent of cereals grown for human and animal consumption are wasted, along with almost half of all root crops, fruits and vegetables. To conclude from this grotesque squander that a 'more efficient' capitalism would 'solve the problem' of 'the environment' would be to fail to understand wate, capitalism and ecology: that the first is intrinsic to the second; that the second whatever the degree to which it is inflected by the first, in imicable to the third." (Jeven's paradox is also relevant here).
"In May of 2020, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere het 417 parts per million, the highest ever recorded - and the first breach of 400ppm since the Pliocene."
"To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness" - Ursula K. le Guin