Revolution in a Warming World

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 1594 ... April 23, 2018
_____________________________________________________________

Revolution in a Warming World:
Lessons from the Russian to the Syrian Revolutions

Andreas Malm

It doesn’t take much imagination to associate climate change with revolution. If the planetary order upon which all societies are built starts breaking down, how can they possibly remain stable? Various more or less horrifying scenarios of upheaval have long been extrapolated from soaring temperatures. In his novel The Drowned World from 1962, today often considered the first prophetic work of climate fiction, J. G. Ballard conjured up melting icecaps, an English capital submerged under tropical marshes and populations fleeing the unbearable heat toward polar redoubts. The UN directorate seeking to manage the migration flows assumed that ‘within the new perimeters described by the Arctic and Antarctic Circles life would... continue much as before, with the same social and domestic relationships, by and large the same ambitions and satisfactions’ -- but that assumption ‘was obviously fallacious.’ A drowned world would be nothing like the one hitherto known.

In more recent years, the American military establishment has dominated this subgenre of climate projection. Extreme weather events, the Senate learned from the 2013 edition of the ‘worldwide threat assessment’ compiled by the U.S. intelligence community, will put food markets under serious strain, ‘triggering riots, civil disobedience, and vandalism.’ If the armed forces are firefighters tasked with suppressing outbreaks of rebellion, their workload will increase in a warming world. Pursuing its consistent and candid interest in the issue, in such stark contrast to the denialism of the American right, the Pentagon submitted a report to Congress in July 2015 detailing how all combatant commands are now integrating climate change into their planning.

The ‘threat multiplier’ is already at work, undermining fragile governments, turning populations against rulers unable to meet their needs: and it will only get worse. Most of it will play out in overcrowded littorals. In Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla, David Kilcullen, perhaps the most astute mandarin of the military wing of the empire, predicts a near future of megacities in the Global South filled to the brim with restless masses, mostly on low-lying coastal land; not only cutting into their food and water supplies, climate change will threaten to directly drown those masses. How can they not pick up whatever arms they have and start marching? Mixing lessons from the second intifada, Central Asian jihads, the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, Kilcullen envisions a century of permanent counterinsurgency in hot slums sliding into the sea.

So far, the sworn enemies of revolution have dominated this frenzy of speculation. Little input has come from the other side: from the partisans of the idea that the present order needs to be overthrown or else things will turn out very badly. But if the strategic environment of counterinsurgency is shifting, so is -- by definition -- that of revolutionaries, who then have just as compelling a reason to analyze what lies in store. The imbalance in the amount of preparation is glaring. Those who pledge allegiance to the revolutionary tradition -- in whose collective mind the experience of 1917 will probably always loom large -- should dare to use their imagination as productively as any writer of intelligence reports or works of fiction. One might begin by distinguishing between four possible configurations of revolution and heat.

Continue reading

Share on Facebook

Follow us onr0

Forward to a friend: this link

r39
powered by phpList

Login Form