In a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency that sets them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a contrary argument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable. Deflating several prominent currents in contemporary theory—constructionism, hybridism, new materialism, posthumanism—and submitting the influential work of Bruno Latour to particularly biting critique, Malm shows that action against fossil fuels is best served by a theory that takes nature, society and the dialectics between them very seriously indeed.
About the Author :
Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, and of Fossil Capital, which has recently won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.
Review :
In praise of Fossil Capital:
Fossil Capital presents, with impressive detail and theoretical clarity, how the fossil fuel economy has come into being. Malm does not reiterate commonplaces about climate change, but looks closely at its origins. This extremely well-written book is radical without being dogmatic. Malm does not take his audience for granted at any point; there are no short cuts.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
Has Andreas Malm written the crime story of the yearwith his book Fossil Capital? Or submitted the fossil world order to psychoanalysis? Both. The depth of his inquiry into how our economic system created the climate crisis is impressive. Very concrete, very beautiful, and perfectly reasonable.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
Malm's thorough account of the switch to steam shows quite convincingly that coal did not make Britain great for everyone, and the transition was rooted not in technological superiority or environmental scarcity but in good old fashioned class conflict.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
A major and important revision of Marxist theory. A singularly important work, pointing the way for future work in economics, politics, theories of time, space and energy.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
The birth of the fossil economy, avers human ecologist Andreas Malm, arrived when steam eclipsed water power in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Around that, Malm builds a deep, insight-packed history of how society came to be in thrall to the twin engines of combustion and capital.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
Will climate change make us evaluate differently the achievements of George Stevenson and James Watt, Industrial Age pioneers? For it was in Britain, which accounted for 80 per cent of fossil fuel combustion in 1825, that “the fossil economy” began. Malm’s history is expansive and detailed, and often quite terrifying in its analysis. Essential reading.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
A unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature, capitalism, and Marxism.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again—and take notes.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming.
In praise of Fossil Capital:
Anyone with an interest in ecology, and anyone opposed to capitalism, must read Malm’s crucial contribution to understand how and why capitalism makes war on planet Earth.
