THE PROGRESS OF THIS STORM
Nature and Society in a Warming World
Andreas Malm
First published by Verso 2018
© Andreas Malm 2018
The illustration titled ‘View of a Coal Seam on the Island of Labuan’, drawn by L. C.
Heath, appeared in James Augustus St John, Views in the Eastern Archipelago: Borneo,Sarawak, Labuan (London: Thos. Maclean, 1847)
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
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US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-415-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-416-0 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-414-6 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Malm, Andreas, 1977– author.
Title: The progress of this storm : on society and nature in a warming world / Andreas Malm.
Description: London ; New York : Verso, 2018. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017036839 (print) | LCCN 2017045085 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786634160 (US e-book) | ISBN 9781786634153 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology. | Global warming – Social aspects. | Climatic changes – Social aspects. | Nature. | Capitalism – Environmental aspects. | BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory. | PHILOSOPHY / Political. | NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection.
Classification: LCC GF50 (ebook) | LCC GF50 .M345 2018 (print) | DDC 304.2/5 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036839
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays
Contents
Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition
1.On the Building of Nature: Against Constructionism
2.On Combined Development: Against Hybridism
3.On What Matter Does: Against New Materialism
4.On Unicorns and Baboons: For Climate Realism
5.On the Perils of Property: Sketches for Tracking the Storm
6.On the Use of Opposites: In Praise of Polarisation
7.On Unruly Nature: An Experiment in Ecological Autonomism
8.Conclusion: One Step Back, Two Steps Forwards
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
The two heads had already fused to one
and features from each flowed and blended into
one face where two were lost in one another
…
Each former likeness now was blotted out;
both, and neither one it seemed – this picture
of deformity.
Dante, in the eighth circle of hell
Nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1
The sky’s changing.
A roaring storm is coming.
A howling mist,
a growling downpour.
…
All the money men who close their eyes
and pretend
that this rumble
must be low planes.
Kate Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos
Introduction: Theory for the Warming Condition
NEVER IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT
Is there any time left in this world? In an essay published in New Left Review in 2015, Fredric Jameson restated his thirty-year-old diagnosis of postmodernity as the ‘predominance of space over time’.1 We continue to live on a stage where there is nothing but the present. Past and future alike have dissolved into a perpetual now, leaving us imprisoned in a moment without links backwards or forwards: only the dimension of space extends in all directions, across the seamless surface of a globalised world, in which everyone is connected to everyone else through uncountable threads – but time has ceased flowing. Or, as Jameson originally put it in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: ‘We
