Book review – Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future
Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright. London: Verso Books, 2018, 207 pp., £16.99 hardcover, 978-1-78663-429-0
Climate Leviathan is a work of political theory that sets out to provide a strategic roadmap for a climate-changed world and assemble “revolutionary strategies for climate justice”. As a global social democrat, it is easy to find things to disagree with from the very beginning: its lack of appreciation for the Enlightenment legacy, its disdain for political compromise and its simplistic understanding of the drivers behind climate change. But maybe that is the wrong approach to all of this. Perhaps it is better to start where the book ends, with its aspirational vision of an ideal climate response labelled “Climate X”. Undoubtedly, I also want a world in which the political priority is a rapid reduction of carbon emissions, one in which greater psychological maturity means that people are less concerned with the acquisition of wealth, and one without exclusionary boundaries and borders. If that is so, the question rather becomes one of means but also of different lived experiences. Growing up in Sweden in the 1980s, I cannot help but have a comparatively more benign understanding of what sovereignty, capitalism and liberalism might entail. As such, rather than reading Eduard Bernstein or the work of a contemporary historian like Sheri Berman (2006), the authors, like many others on the anti-Enlightenment Left, take their understanding of politics from Carl Schmitt and Antonio Gramsci. Unsurprisingly, this leads them to a world of absolutes with little room for learning or humility.
Consisting of three parts, the book first introduces the notion of “Climate Leviathan” which is defined by the fear of “planetary sovereignty” in response to worsening climate impacts. Taking either a capitalist or a non-capitalist form (“Climate Mao”), its basic intuition is that climate change “demands a fundamental shift in our understanding of the political”. What this emerging Leviathan is actually supposed to do with regard to climate change remains, like much else in the book, unclear but it seems to range from carbon rationing (p. 33) to climate engineering (p. 148). One possible reason for the lack of clarity could be the fact that technology plays a very marginal role in the book. Unlike Peter Frase whose Four Futures at least engages with the possible social implications of intelligent machine labour, Climate Leviathan axiomatically assumes that “any attempt to reduce planetary carbon emission will require sacrifices” (p. 34). While the authors, in the second part of the book, give a lengthy treatment of what they call “green Keynesianism”, they never stop long enough to marvel at what breakthrough innovations could be possible in the century ahead or how much higher the rate of technological change could be in a world with sufficient social investments.
Rather than focusing on making clean energy universally attractive and abundant (Karlsson, 2018), the authors, like much of the so called climate justice movement, believe in stoking political polarization through “collective boycotts and strikes” (p. 173). If climate change was Apartheid, it is perhaps a strategy that could work, but as long as human development remains closely linked to rising carbon emissions, it is a strategy that will always fail. It is also a strategy that will add yet more fuel to the fire in today’s hyperpartisan politics and stymie our collective imagination. That lack of imagination becomes particularly problematic in the third and final part of the book when the authors symptomatically declare that “more of the same is not an option” (p. 173). Given that we are currently living through the greatest alleviation of material poverty in human history, and that the last centuries have seen incredible improvements along basically every measurable metric from gender equality to life expectancy (Pinker, 2018), it takes a certain kind of arrogance and privilege to insist that the whole is false. As such, I may be forgiven for thinking that rather than “strongly endorse this utopian vision of a movement from Blockadia” (p. 10), it would be more productive to focus on making fossil energy uncompetitive – through the kind of state-directed mission oriented innovation advocated by Mariana Mazzucato – and devising ways of accelerating the transition to a world where everyone can live a modern life.
Still, it would be a mistake to think that we can simply fast-forward to the post-racial, post-feminist prosperous future of Star Trek without first fully recognizing the colonial wounds engendered by the making of modernity, the unequal provision of emotional labour that made possible its scientific geniuses, and the brutality with which we have treated the natural world. But to think that the “chasm between liberal norms and liberal practices, between normative ideals and historical realities, disgraces any attempt to call up the former in the defence of the latter” (p. 81) is simply wrong since it is precisely the yardsticks invented by the Enlightenment that allow us to make such qualitative distinctions (Bronner, 2006). Rather than reversing progress, we need to judiciously build on the past. While I wholeheartedly agree with the authors that this calls for more politics rather than less, it is important that we make peace with our fallibility. Far from being some kind of final verdict on the moral failure of humanity, it would have been very strange if something like climate change would not have come along as we emerge as a planetary civilization. Yet, ultimately, like all geophysical problems, its solution calls for more reflexivity and technology, not less.
Finally, the book’s economic thinking deserves comment. Despite how intuitively obvious it should be that the more people who can create things of value, the richer we all are, the authors remain trapped in the tired Marxist idea that capitalism necessitates immiseration. While exploitation offered a shortcut to wealth in the past for some, its value today is quickly diminishing thanks to globalization and automation. Instead, for every Bangladesh that becomes a South Korea, we are all immensely better off. Reaffirming the primacy of politics means recognizing the essential role of social investments in unlocking the imagination and productivity of each individual. Only then will it be possible to defeat the passivity of neoliberalism while offering a forward-looking vision of an open world as an alternative to ethno-nationalist nostalgia.
Dr Rasmus Karlsson is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University, Sweden
References
Berman, S. (2006). The primacy of politics: social democracy and the making of Europe's twentieth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bronner, S. E. (2006). Reclaiming the enlightenment: Toward a politics of radical engagement. New York: Columbia University Press.
Frase, P. (2016). Four futures: Life after capitalism. London: Verso books.
Karlsson, R. (2018). The high-energy planet. Global Change, Peace & Security, 30(1), 77-84.
Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment now: the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. London: Penguin.
