Analyze

I published this news article about a hunger strike against Formosa Plastics that occurred in Texas this fall. Despite the extremity of a 30-day hunger strike, the protesting tactic has not gained attention from national media outlets. At the time I published this article, two small environmental organizations had announced the beginning of the strike, but none continued to cover the event in the unfolding weeks. While activists are driven to take on dangerous protest tactics, little communication of these tactics has carried across mass media.

The article itself introduces Formosa Plastics through its reputation as a "serial offender" of environmental and workplace safety regulations. I list several statistics on legal fines that Formosa Plastics has accumulated overtime, using these quantities to demonstrate the scale of their harm to environmental and human health. An important limitation of this storytelling strategy, however, is that many of Formosa Plastics' actions go undocumented, and even when documented, do not lead to legal consequences. Furthermore, we should still strive to acknowledge the harms committed by Formosa Plastics that are technically within legal limits.

While I found the article illuminating (I did not read the book), I am frustrated by, what I found, to be the hegemonic visions of political theory and climate change. Is there no space for feminist epistemological stances when imagining future forms of governance? Even their presentation of Climate X--what seemed to me like a quest for a unifying theory of opposition that is neither realistic nor reflects the how resistence movements however stuttering they may be are also a source of possibility and hope.

Page 157: ".. it is much easier to develop an anticapitalist critique of climate change than it is to develop a theoretical and practical vision of postcapitalist social relations that might be adequate to the warmer planet on which we will have no choice but to live."

Page 158: "Similarly, our contradictory yes-but-no stance regarding global climate politics—structured entirely on the basis of sovereign territorial nation-states, which are taken as the natural and only viable building block for the struggle— has prevented us from taking on the nation-state, both analytically and practically. Of course, movements for climate justice all over the world have bravely confronted particular nation-states’ elites and institutions of governance. But the question of the legitimacy and naturalness of the modern nation-state as the base unit of global political life is rarely raised, at least way to sustain a livable planet. Beyond some “realist” argument based in path dependency, however, there is no reason to think so, and many more reasons to suggest that the state is likely one of our biggest obstacles…. “But the question of the legitimacy and naturalness of the modern nation-state as the base unit of global political life is rarely raised, at least partly because we too are convinced that (at least at present) interstate “global cooperation” is the only way to sustain a livable planet.”

Page 162-3: "In other words, as Horkheimer says, we cannot leave open the question of what we believe in with the mute hope that it will get worked out as the movement progresses. Neither, as Adorno cautions, can we paint a picture of a positive utopia, the unworldliness of which is no more helpful than when Marx and Engels admonished against it in the original manifesto more than a century and a half ago. Adorno suggests that what is required is not an account of a perfect world we can hold in our minds like a dream that can be realized merely because we can dream it, but instead an account of the possible (futures we can come to identify as potential outcomes of our present) in which things can (not will) “come right in the end.” Adorno seems to think this will entail the emergence of a radically new form of political authority, for which we might attempt to “formulate some guiding political principles.” We propose at least three such principles as fundamental to any presently emergent or future Climate X. The first is equality….  This leads to the second guiding political principle: the inclusion and dignity of all. This is a critique of capitalist sovereignty and the thin form of democracy upon which it has come to rely. Democracy is not majority rule and has little to do with the vote. Rather, democracy exists in a society to the extent that anyone and everyone could rule, could shape collective answers to collective questions. No nation-state today meets this criterion. This demands a struggle for inclusion The third principle is solidarity in composing a world of many worlds. Against planetary sovereignty, we need a planetary vision without sovereignty.”

Climate Leviathan is largely a critical discussion of various ways of envisioning and organizing the Macro level including sovereignty, the nation-state, capitalisms, geopolitics, the world system, geo-engineering, etc. However, by rooting the discussion in “the political,” besides the obvious recognition of carbon emissions (and a few others) as toxic, the primary toxin discussed in this text is all the way down at the Nano level of ideology. The main problem isn’t fossil fuels, our dependency on them, or the corruption of the politicians in their pockets, it is in our incapacity to recognize how the tools we resort to (capitalism and the nation-state) are fully incapable of addressing the problem at hand. Indeed, they argue that addressing climate change without a critical theory of both capitalism and the state “would be like trying to model hurricanes without a theory of thermodynamics or an understanding of the effects of changing ocean temperatures on cyclone dynamics” (2018, 66).

Their “cure” to ideology is a Gramscian strain of absolute historicism. Take for example their discussion of progress. They quote Gramsci:

“‘…progress has been a democratic ideology.’ … [However] Progress has lost its democratic aspect because ‘the official ‘standard bearers’ of progress’ (the bourgeoisie) have ‘brought into being in the present destructive forces like crises and unemployment, etc., every bit as dangerous and terrifying as those of the past,’ and it is clear that these forces are as much a result of ‘progress’ as technology and scientific knowledge.” (2018, 94).

In this discussion, progress transforms from ideological tonic to ideological toxin based upon its associated deployments within a new historical context. Under the rule of monarchy, the ideology of progress enabled the establishment of liberal democracies. But under liberal capitalism, this ideology underwrote the “production of a separation in the social world between the political and the rest and a consequent neutralizing onslaught on the political that attempts to proceduralize and depoliticize domination, that is, the continual production of freedom for some and unfreedom for others” (2018, 83). These facts notwithstanding, the authors do not recommend an outright denial of progress: “A blanket rejection of progress confuses the idea and its standard bearers, who are now in fact part of the ‘natural order’ in crisis” (2018, 95). The same goes for the current stand-in for the ideology of progress, adaptation: “adaptation is becoming the “progress” of our time. Adaptation is to the ideology of Climate Leviathan what progress was to bourgeois liberalism in the nineteenth century” (2018, 95). Which, once again, does not mean we are to get rid of the concept of adaptation “as if a revolutionary social movement for climate justice can somehow decide against adaptation. The question, rather, is how—how to reshape a conception of the political in a very hot world.” (2018, 95).

What this discussion suggests is that it is that toxicity, as it pertains to ideology and social structure, is not a simple binary relation. To argue this would amount to “blanket rejection” of the ideology of progress as toxic to democracy. Rather, the authors’ example demonstrates how toxicity entails a triadic relation to a relation. It is how the ideology of progress relates to the historically evolving relationship between the dominant and the dominated that determines whether or not the ideology of progress is toxic to democracy or not.

The political and economic fallout that has emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic fits the criteria of events that Mann and Wainwright specify as likely to engender the planetary Leviathan: “Processes are more likely to drive the creation of Leviathan if [a] they present an existential threat; [b] they are large scale (global); and [c] they pose challenges for the existing political order” (2018., 142). However, the history enfolding before our eyes doesn’t look like the birth of a new global sovereignty. Given that nothing close to either a Leviathan or Climate X alternative to the nation-state presented itself, citizens are left with no choice than but to rely on adapting extant public institutions, infrastructures, and state directives. At the national level, the US government responded by blaming the symbol of global public health, the World Health Organization, among its other political rivals, China and Iran. This is in keeping with the “Western” world’s tactic of pointing the carbon-emission finger elsewhere as well:

“Unfortunately, in discussions of climate politics, China is usually considered only a problem, an amoral polluter. How often are we in North America or western Europe told our efforts to slow climate change are meaningless because whatever ‘good’ we do, ‘China’ will ultimately render it futile? Sometimes this is a product of ignorance, sometimes of racist Eurocentrism, sometimes both” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 116).

Both the Chinese and Iranian governments have returned condemnations along with supporting conspiracies. Thus, rather than leviathan, we seem to be witnessing a Behemoth scenario in which “one or more of these competing powers will continue to compete with the United States” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 143). And perhaps we should take heed the warning that “History would seem to suggest this will lead to war, and it may well” (2018, 143). Currently these Behemoth-like counter hegemonies are merely struggling to win a rhetorical war of self-righteousness and self-preservation. What is uncertain is whether or not these responses to COVID-19 are indicative of a schismogenetic pattern developing in the contemporary geopolitical order. As Wainwright and Mann comment:

“The implication is that the management of the planet would unfold in the context of a world system that is neither democratic (since the vast majority of nation-states and peoples would have no real involvement in the important decisions about the Earth’s management) nor clearly dominated by one hegemonic power. Planetary governance would unroll on a lumpy, conflictual geopolitical terrain upon which elites continue to seek “adaptations” that meet their needs—political stability, continued accumulation, and so on” (2018, 143).

I wonder about global corporations and how they might relate to the described US-UN-Western-Elite Climate Leviathan verus Behemoth on the Capitalist side. They already operate beyond nation-state territorial scope. Just from where I'm situated, I've heard a lot of people praising tech companies in the US for being the first to call for work-from-home. Facebook's Data for Good COVID mapping that Tim sent around also looks like a start of a global panopticon that already has the capacity to be monitoring a huge number of people's travel and symptoms, beyond state divisions, in fact explicitly in part because Facebook does not trust state data, and it does not need buy-in at a UN kind of event. People are already consenting in degrees to have Facebook "collect" and aggregate their data for the fun, validation, convenience, etc. of being on social media. As the Western Elite governments go to Behemoth, are the corporations of those elite places the ones to carry on the idea of Leviathan? 

This article also brought to mind a haunting story that I first heard from a fancy robotics professor of a "Noah's Ark" for Elon Musk. I haven't quite figured out how that fits yet with the chart of possibilites offered in the article.

I second Prerna's frustration about citation and writing like one is the first person to think of something. 

“To put it in our terms, Behemoth hates Mao for its faith in secular revolution, Leviathan for its liberal pretension to rational world government, and both for their willingness to sacrifice “liberty” for lower carbon emissions.” (?120)

“In this sense the political is not, strictly speaking, a relational concept. “The political” defines a relation tout court: the relationship between the dominant and the dominated. The political is not an arena in which dominant groups impose their interests and subaltern groups resist; it is, rather, the ground upon which the relation between the dominant and dominated is worked out... How our way of defining the political differs from that common sense is crucial to our analysis of the current conjuncture and the ways in which the political is being shaped by climate change.... That work is usually dismissed by liberals as unfortunate products of the times, as if Locke, Franklin, or de Tocqueville were only ardent supporters of colonialism and racial slavery by historical chance. It cannot have had anything to do with liberalism per se, which, as an unqualified commitment to universal freedom, cannot be responsible for the unfortunate backwardness of the historical communities in which it was born." (?148-150)

“Liberalism is founded upon the production of a separation in the social world between the political and the rest and a consequent neutralizing onslaught on the political that attempts to proceduralize and depoliticize domination, that is, the continual production of freedom for some and unfreedom for others.”

“Consequently, in modern liberal capitalism, the political is not founded in any idea or organizing principle, but always exists as the product of the exercise of sovereign power.”

“Thus, for Gramsci, “nature” and “society” are inseparable, active relations. And these relations are themselves inextricable from the processes through which we forge critical conceptions of the world. These are the result of earlier historical struggles that have laid down, “layer upon layer,” the consciousness of “the right to live independently of the planning and the rights of minorities”—in other words, independently of the “rights” of elites to plunder subaltern social groups.”

"Liberal conceptions of democracy, freedom, politics, and so on remain hegemonic—these particular conceptions stand in for a presumably universal “common sense”—even though their glaring inadequacies to this moment in the planet’s natural history are increasingly evident, even to liberals themselves."

"With the closure of the possibility that the effects of climate change might be subject to a meaningful degree of carbon mitigation, adaptation is becoming the “progress” of our time. Adaptation is to the ideology of Climate Leviathan what progress was to bourgeois liberalism in the nineteenth century."

“The dismantling of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s brought the Keynesian house down, and the floating exchange rate system in place since then has helpfully greased the neoliberal wheels: sovereign debt has skyrocketed, alongside finance capital’s power to “discipline” any polity, at any scale, that does not play by the fiscal rule of austerity.”

“Green Keynesian proposals are accompanied by the suite of institutions and policies associated in the ecological modernization literature with “just transition”—termination and reinvestment of fossil fuel subsidies (which amount to approximately $US 5.3 trillion annually, according to the International Monetary Fund), green investment initiatives, decentralized production and energy systems, green banks, and so on.”

“By the time his ideas were starting to circulate widely in the 1940s—at the end of more than thirty years of calamity in the heart of liberal capitalism—no small part of their attraction was attributable to the fact that the feeling that the whole of “civilization” was on a precipice was widely shared. This is the fundamental basis of Keynesianism, and today it is the existential precariousness of civilization (and not a general interest in Keynesian political economy) that makes the question of green Keynesianism so urgent.”

"The scale of the problems is so great, it seems impossible to confront them without the state, but it seems just as impossible that the state as currently constituted is going to get the job done. We face a situation in which there is, under current geopolitical and geoeconomic arrangements, no right answer.”

“To restate the political paradox more sharply: to address its contradictions—including the ecological contradiction that capital’s growth is destroying the planet—capitalism needs a planetary manager, a Keynesian world state. But elites have proven reluctant to build it, and it appears unlikely to miraculously realize itself. So, the only apparent capitalist solution to climate change is presently impossible; the only even marginally possible green Keynesianism that could save us is still predicated upon the territorial nation-state."

“This is why the proposals always seem so formulaic and empty, and virtually never involve substantive targets or means and timelines for implementation.58 The diagnosis of the problem continually takes us to the edge of the chasm between what we know is necessary and the common sense judgment that it is totally impossible.”

The authors recognize and relate the critique of the Anthropocene to their critique of both capitalism and sovereignty. “One way or another, however reluctantly, the logic of capital in the Anthropocene points toward planetary sovereignty.” (2018, 122). Later on they remark that “the Anthropocene, the era that now puts all humans on the same geological age” ignores the fact that the “world’s peoples live in a multitude of geo-ecological times despite our planetary ‘simultaneity,’ and the forces that have helped shape those worlds are not reducible to ‘humanity’ in general, but to particular natural-historical social formations.” (2018, 174).

            Crucially, however, Mann and Wainwright do not disagree with the other central claim embedded in the concept of the Anthropocene, the appreciation of social impacts on what are otherwise considered natural or “non-human” systems. Indeed, they pull in Gramsci’s problematization of social and natural history to argue that “‘nature’ and ‘society’ are inseparable, active relations. And these relations are themselves inextricable from the processes through which we forge critical conceptions of the world” (2018, 91).

This picture of the Anthropocene closely aligns with perspective outlined by Elinoff and Vaughan in their discussion of Quotidian Anthropocenes (forthcoming), and reinforces both the analytic and political purchase of ethnographic investigations into the unique cultural and political struggles to respond to the particular configurations of anthropocenics that characterize discrete locales. Such investigations not only problematize top-down or one-size-fits-all policies of climate protection or adaptation, but they also appreciate the potential for keen political insight to develop “organically” (in Gramsci’s sense of the term) in the social formations springing up around local issues.

And, while recognizing a potential disciplinary bias, I believe these insights point to method for answering one of Mann and Wainwright’s questions: “A key question, then, is what the focus of a critical reconstruction of our conception of the world should be. What are the essential common senses we must undo to see the future for which we must struggle?” The focus that I would propose entails ethnographic engagements with place, but ones that are both and simultaneously multi-sited and multi-sighted (Marcus 1995).

Wainwright and Mann are astute macro-political theorists but they seem less reflexive and critical of the way in which they scale their politics.

What is obviously necessary is a means of governance that is not beholden to modern state sovereignty, at the same time that this necessity is denied by some of those very sovereign states. … The scale of the problems is so great, it seems impossible to confront them without the state, but it seems just as impossible that the state as currently constituted is going to get the job done. We face a situation in which there is, under current geopolitical and geoeconomic arrangements, no right answer” (2018, 119-120).

The experimental promise of Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986) lay in the innovative solutions that were being generated in response to the problem of keeping the world system of political economy in the same analytical frame as the cultural and symbolic systems that were unique to the researcher’s object of study (see also Fortun 2003, 2009). In sum, multi-sited fieldwork, enabled through complex objects of study and creative research designs, presents the opportunity to perturb our commonsense politics of scale. And, at another level, collaborations across research projects enables further appreciation of “how to reshape a conception of the political in a very hot [polluted, disease-ridden, etc.] world” (Wainwright and Mann 2018, 95).

The book seems to leave open what kind of collaboration and infrastructure would need to be built to link climate justice activism. It also does not suggest what future research is needed, or more specifically, what the role of universities could be.

I admire Mann and Wainwright for taking on the impossible task of coming up with a political theory for climate justice. Their strength lies in how they inadvertently reveal the stubbornness of Leviathan, or liberal democracy. But I must question when abstractions turn into reifications. Like any political theory, it would of course rouse passions and frustrations, so here are mine.

(1)  The political theory of the state that Mann and Wainwright build on follows the tradition(s) of Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, and Walter Benjamin. If we are to limit ourselves in these traditions, there is a still a lot of space to talk about them that Mann and Wainwright keep open. I am intrigued by the phrases "a world without sovereignty is no world at all", and "democracy undoes the very possibility of rule", which reveal how stubborn our political imaginations are. In the construction of these phrases, a world without sovereignty and democracy is not recognizably a world. I think they are quite right here. I hope to explore in my own project the tensions they point out, that this moment reinforces in such a monstrous way: "Leviathan, whether in the Old Testament or in even oldermyths, was never a captive of its conjurer’s will, and remains at large today, prowling between nature and the supernatural, sovereign and subject." (1)

(2) The most obvious critique I have is their lack of imagination for where learning can come from. Their four climate scenarios assume a bipolar world of Asia and United States. Take for example, this quote: "In contrast to sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, for example, only in Asia—and only with some revolutionary leadership from China—do we find the combination of factors that make climate Mao realizable: massive and marginalized peasantries and proletariats, historical experience and ideology, existing state capacity, and skyrocketing carbon emissions." (10)

The phrase in contrast leaves Africa and Latin America as places without coordinational capacity. We have to remember that the Haitian Revolution  happened in the Caribbean in 1791, a successful proleteriat revolution against a colonial state which had degraded both ecology and humanity. Admittedly the challenges are different in scale and scope today, but we have to be careful about the biases we reveal when we abstract. 

(3) So, where can learning come from? As I write in my annotation on the T-STS COVID project: "The question of political organizing and mobilizing in times of crisis therefore needs to build on movements and organizing that have resulted out of long histories of exclusion. How does movement-building look like to those who have learned to organize in a state that was to them mostly oppressive and withdrawn? Corinna Mullin and Azadeh Shahshahani (2020) reflect on what a transnational perspective on movement-building and organizing looks like. Their excellent article points to early Black radical internationalism and organizations, indigenous internationalism, the international peasant and ecological movement of Via Campesina, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, Black for Palestine and The Red Nation movements, for example. In short, we have much to learn from responses by ongoing anti-imperialist movements during COVID-19 which have called for cancellation of neocolonial debt, land repatriation, reconfiguration of gig and hustle economies, just to give a few examples." Where else can we find examples to build on?

(4) So, the world that I live in is not polar, nor is it confined to territorial nation-states. Does it still make sense to speak of the US as representative of liberal democracy? And does liberal democracy mean rule without terror? Mann and Wainwright contrast "Euro-American liberal hegemony" to the "necessity of a just terror" that climate Mao asserts (9). Further, they distinguish the mechanisms of "neoliberal contagion" from global climate change, as if the two operate on separate floating spheres (3). However, as Inderpal Grewal argues in Saving the Security State (2017) and Jasbir Puar argues in The Right to Maim (2017), the security state cannot be separated from the transnational parastatal humanitarian complex that has emerged to address global climate change, among other things. These parastatal organizations work within the contradictions of neoliberalism: benefiting from withdrawing of the state and the increased capacity of the state to surveil (as the COVID19 pandemic sadly shows too) and make citizens which see themselves as exceptional liberals if they participate in that complex. They maintain the US empire and benefit from it. Is there space to talk about present-day imperial projects in political theory about climate activism?

(5) I wished they would have cited and learned from other people who have been saying these things for a long time. Is my wish for them to "talk about everything"? No, my wish for them is to stop speaking as if they are the first ones to speak about this. A footnote would have sufficed. And that is my frustration.