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The Baffler
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This is absolutely possible, pace the doom-mongers. But, in the same way, right-wing climate realism is hardly “bound to fail.” It is perfectly imaginable because the world as we know it already absorbs the scaling horrors of the Anthropocene. It is perfectly imaginable because the colonial relation has, necessarily, adapted and spread over time. It is perfectly imaginable that, per Parenti, even a modest amount “of walls, guns, barbed wire, armed aerial drones, or permanently deployed mercenaries will be able to save one half of the planet from the other.” It’s perfectly imaginable because the world we actually know and the one we can observe through the historical record makes the “politics of the armed lifeboat” far from a bad gamble for those whose stake promises a payout.
note: the online version omits the "per Parenti" oddly enough
Based on this discount rate model, Nordhaus suggested a relatively high social cost of carbon that grows at 3 percent per year from approximately now till 2050. In that time, this would suggest a carbon tax starting at approximately $19 per metric ton of CO2 and topping out around $53. This is only a minute difference from his most well-known critics in the Stern Report, whose proposals would differ by as little as a few dollars per metric ton of carbon to about a $150 difference. The recent IPCC special report on staying within a 1.5 world, in contrast, suggests costs as high as $14,300 by the end of this decade. The point isn’t the comical difference between these numbers. Nor how carbon taxing and cap-and-trade systems will never work or are ludicrously inadequate measures. Nor even how the IPCC models incorporate “Negishi weights” and their consequences which, as the economist Elizabeth Stanton notes, “freeze the current distribution of income between world regions,” and without which “IAMs [integrated assessment models] that maximize global welfare would recommend an equalization of income across all regions as part of their policy advice.” But rather how the very idea of “the discount rate” is so perfectly a “victor’s” story; how wonderfully it obfuscates reality. There is no universal “we” whose present benefits are being maximized. Profits, rather, are maximized for the few at extraordinary socioeconomic and ecological costs to the vast majority. Climate change does not negatively affect only prospective “future” generations but is already exacting costs from most people currently alive while benefiting a rather smaller number immensely.
Whenever someone asks me about the effects that sanctions have on Iranians, as an editor at this magazine has, I am reminded of that program. It’s hard to know how to begin answering such a question. I am a forty-four-year-old woman who has lived forty-one years of her life under varying degrees of economic sanctions. I grew up with the sanctions; I went to school with them; I learned to read and write with them hovering over my head; I fell in love, and began my career as a journalist, and have stayed alive, all under sanctions from the United States of America. Sanctions have been a part of my life like the weather. Like the bombs for those children. They are the air that I breathe and the food that I eat.
To this day, my nephews and nieces make fun of me when I put only a meager spread of butter on my slice of bread, an odd habit from childhood. Besides the sanctions, already in place then, there was also war with Iraq, which turned simple goods like butter into luxury items. This alchemy works on all sorts of objects. Just the other day I heard about the troubles of a woman receiving chemotherapy. The doctor told her to get as many of the chemo ports as she can now. Because sooner or later, even the few medical imports that the country is able to get its hands on by dodging the American sanctions are bound to disappear. Unable to sell oil and unable to participate in the international monetary system, the government has no choice but to put an end to most foreign medical equipment and drugs coming into the country.
The awake, all straight-backed
and well-groomed, wait at a table
made of sharp sunlight. I’m late
as usual, but this is the morning
I give in, sign over everything:
pillow-gluttony, sheet-sickness,
the blanket’s wrapper like skin
on my skin, clock meaningless.
This solo has gone on far too long,
this cat’s life, drunk, disappearing,
the bed itself my ravenous lover;
goodbye, we will be acquaintances.
I must be alert to my own dying,
push away dreams’ hot reason.
I must walk on gravel and not hide
in cakey layers. The soft cloth
around me will bristle, hairshirt
an alarm: You’ll miss everything.
Get up, the day is waiting,
that crooked clown.
The premise is that in order to tell the best, richest, fullest stories, or (what amounts to the same thing) in order to offer the best possible interpretations, you have to lay the object you are interpreting next to human history as a whole, or as much of it as you can manage, and stretch it to see what new shapes it assumes. The best story is the most inclusive of other stories, other histories. This principle has a certain persuasiveness even if you are not totally sure that the most inclusive story deserves to be thought of, by analogy with Freud, as society’s political unconscious.
For Jameson, it is the ability to see big stories hidden away in small ones that is Marxism’s secret selling point. Narrative on the usual small or private scale is temporally provincial, comfortable only in or near its own narrow present. And to many readers those are the only stories that feel real. But reality is larger than that. If humankind is going to understand what it is capable of becoming, it needs a better sense of what it has been. Only Marxism, Jameson writes in The Political Unconscious,
can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it. This mystery can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one; only thus . . . can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of such long-dead issues as the seasonal alternation of the economy of a primitive tribe, the passionate disputes about the nature of the Trinity, the conflicting models of the polis or the universal Empire, or, apparently closer to us in time, the dusty parliamentary and journalistic polemics of the nineteenth century nation states. These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.
[...] something Rilke says about poetry in his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Poems are not, he explains, “feelings—those one has early enough—they are experiences.” And from experience, he slips into memories, and launches into a page-long litany of them, and then he says (translator: Burton Pike):
But it is still not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them. . . . For it is not the memories themselves. Only when they become blood in us, glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves, only then can it happen that in a very rare hour the first word of a line arises in their midst and strides out of them.
As always under capitalism, appearances are deceiving. Dismantling the globe-spanning processes of extraction, production, distribution, and finance would prove a bewilderingly complex task. These processes are mediated by technologies of transportation (containerization, intermodal transit) and computing (AI, machine learning, robotics); arranged in variegated economic geographies (corridors, gateways, clusters, special economic zones); structured by evolving inter- and intra-firm relationships (outsourcing, sub-contracting, vertical reintegration) and forms of market power (monopolies and monopsonies); and ultimately enabled by state authority, which furnishes the necessary logistical and regulatory infrastructure, and the repressive apparatus to defend the flow of goods at all costs. “Deglobalized capitalism” verges on an oxymoron. Since its dawn in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Indigenous dispossession, the profit logic exerts a centrifugal force; the drive to accumulation is a spatially totalizing one. Whatever might be possible in theory, actually existing capitalism has always relied on the globally uneven cheapening of labor and nature, the sacrifice of far-flung lives and ecosystems at the altar of relentless production, and the constant expulsion of populations alternately surplus and super-exploited.
Nationalist retreat is thus a fantasy. But fantasies can prove politically powerful: in practice, calls to “bring manufacturing back home” portend a grim world of even harsher policing of migrants and supply chains increasingly securitized by state violence. The task of the left today is to grasp the fundamental planetary scale of global capitalism—and the planetary horizons of our transformative projects. It is this planetary interdependency—its brutal reality and emancipatory possibility—that Martín Arboleda depicts with rigor and generosity in Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism (Verso Books, 2020). And, by doing so from the vantage point of the sprawling zones of extraction that stretch from Chile to China—mines, refineries, ports, ships, power plants, data processing centers, and entire cities that serve as capital’s logistical hubs—Arboleda not only centers the periphery but inverts our impoverished spatial vocabulary. The margins of the world system are far from backwards: they are sites of novel techniques of exploitation—and of the vanguard of subaltern futurisms.
love her
It is only in combination with labor, of course, that machines take on their lively powers. Since 1992, 400 million Chinese peasants have been forcefully “depeasantized” and put to work in industrial factories. On the other side of the Pacific, campesinos and Indigenous peoples are also being driven off their land. Marx dubbed this process “primitive accumulation”: the forcible separation of people from their means of subsistence, compelling them into wage labor and the cash nexus. These shifts in class structure aren’t unfolding in parallel; they are internally related. The reproduction of the Chinese working class hinges on the dispossession of Latin American peasants—and the deforestation, contamination, and cancer epidemics that rapacious extraction and mega-agriculture entail. Their shared domination is, for Arboleda, a clue to the shared conditions of their emancipation: Chinese and Chilean workers have more in common with one another than they do with their respective ruling classes. And, in a useful corrective to Sinophobic tropes, China shouldn’t be seen as a conniving, conspiring hegemon bent on world domination. Rather, riffing on Stuart Hall, imperialism is the modality through which global capitalism is lived. In this reading, the role of Chinese banks and firms in expanding the extractive frontier is an expression of a process that is global in scope.
cute
What is the ecosocialist alternative? Arboleda argues forcefully against nationalism in either politics or analysis. It’s convincing. Like the extractive circuits detailed in Planetary Mine, the supply chains for green technologies such as wind turbines and electric vehicles will, and must, cross borders: the resources to make them are unevenly deposited in the earth’s crust, and the left’s commitment should be to global access, which means prioritizing globally equitable distribution. Their far-flung networks of production are strategic nodes to exercise popular power in the twenty-first century. From Indigenous blockades of lithium extraction in Chile to labor organizing at Tesla factories in the United States, communities and workers resist nascent green capitalism and imagine alternative green futures. Such resistance is a necessary but insufficient condition for an ecosocialist transition: with a decade to avert the worst of the climate chaos, the state has the capacities to reorient economic activity in the here and now. Public investment, democratized finance, stringent regulations, public and worker ownership, and trade and industrial policy all have a role to play in building a democratic, low-carbon future. In the hands of social movements, labor unions, and allied state actors, these tools can fashion a new world out of the dying old one.
From the planetary mine to the global factory, the future organization of supply chains is up for grabs. Grassroots struggles alongside, against, and for state power will help shape the coming economic order.
The house passes a bailout for time. Every day
is shortened by two hours. It’s ratified
in the senate; the president, may he die, applauds.
They underpay workers to go around adjusting clocks
so the minute hands can keep up the pace. Watches
go on strike, then grandfather clocks, then phones. We go
back to sundials, and when it rains we hold each other’s
contacts up to our floor lamps (we have so many
floor lamps now) and wherever the spotlight falls
we wait until it turns green. No one assassinates
the president yet. Why depends on where
you’re reading this. There’s a law against spit now.
A city ordinance for limelight. All the op-ed pages
are in agreement about the uselessness of forms,
and in Alabama, we’re told a man had himself declared
legally miraculous. I disagree with the premise.
The alarm clocks have a picket line: they march
in figure eights around city hall, waking everyone up.
Young radicals get tattoos of the hours.
Nothing is done so much lately. There’s talk
of the rich being able to buy themselves another week.
The days are laid off. The seasons tighten their belts.
damn