International climate diplomacy is hopeless, the author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline has said, as the film adaptation of the radical environmentalist book is released.
As activists around the world take increasingly desperate actions against destructive projects, Andreas Malm told the Guardian he had not “a shred of hope” elites were prepared to take the urgent action needed to avert catastrophic climate change.
“If we let the dominant classes take care of this problem, they’re going to drive at top speed into absolute inferno,” Malm said. “Nothing suggests that they have any capacity of doing anything else of their own accord because of how enmeshed they are with the process of capital accumulation.
His publishers – amusingly – sent me a copy of his previous book. In which he demanded that War Communism be introduced to deal with climate change. No, not some analogy, not some slip of a phrase, he wanted actual Leninist war communism to be the response.
At which point the Tosser can f—k off, obviously.
Nationalization of all industries and the introduction of strict centralized management
State control of foreign trade
Strict discipline for workers, with strikes forbidden
Obligatory labor duty by non-working classes (“militarization of labor”, including an early version of the Gulag)
Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surplus (in excess of an absolute minimum) from peasants for centralized distribution among the remaining population
Rationing of food and most commodities, with centralized distribution in urban centers
Private enterprise banned
Military-style control of the railways
The results?
by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels….a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths
Yes, obviously, some get a hard on by imagining themselves around that Kremlin table determining the fates of tens of millions. But then there are also those who should be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
There’s the reasonable answer here which is that adopting the most inefficient form of economic management known to man probably isn’t the way to solve an economic problem.
There’s an unreasonable answer which is that we shoot those advocating War Communism.
There’s also reality.
Malm has this fantasy of himself as Wolfie. At which point the Tosser gets to f—-off.
