Review of "White Skin, Black Fuel: On The Danger of Fossil Fascism" by The Zetkin Collective and Andreas Malm

Lots to like about this book. It's clear and to the point (though sometimes slips into unfortunate academic language and uses complex, unfamiliar words where a familiar one would have worked just as well).  It makes some good distinctions between different kinds of climate change denial...though it doesn't always use those distinctions in a consistent way. Still, I appreciate the difference between "fossil fascism" and "capitalist climate governance".

It made me think whether the climate movement, broadly, has focused too much on the latter, and not enough on fascist-tinged denialism. Until recently I've rather thought that actual deniers were a tiny band of nutters - after reading the book I'm more aware of how widespread and powerful their ideas are, and how they serve as a radical flank for the foot-dragging mainstream..."of course this is a very serious problem but we can only do what's possible, and that is limited by all those people who don't even believe this is happening." In its earliest days XR majored on taking the facts about climate change to a much broader audience, with its introductory talk that activists could learn. Perhaps it gave up on that too quickly in favour of stunts that grabbed headlines and felt like action.

It also made me thing about the role of consumption - especially of some particular goods, and especially cars and meat - as the symbols of a limited kind of prosperity, and thus as a substitute for class consciousness. In a demented sort of way having a big car and eating lots of meat is a sign of what "we" have achieved, and what must be defended in the face of "elite" plans to take it away from us. We may not have a decent welfare state or healthcare or education, and our kids might never be able to afford to buy or even rent houses, but we still have our big cars and steaks. 

It's also worth thinking about how anti-car rhetoric is also a class marker. The richest people often don't have cars or drive much; they live in the cool, walkable inner-city areas from which everyone else has been priced out - see Paris, or London, or New York. The poor and the working classes are living out in the outer suburbs, and in the absence of proper public transport a car is a necessity for a decent way of life, including getting to work, shopping cheaply at big supermarkets, and taking the kids to visit grandparents and friends and to activities.

Two more things - first, that the relative absence of green nationalism is surprising. I know the authors have an explanation, but I am still mystified. It's a largely vacant political position, and the attractiveness of it is not hard to see. The far right's hostility to renewable energy is hard to understand. Perhaps it only makes sense in the context of actual cash flowing from fossil fuel companies and owners to the far right parties.

Second, I am still mystified by the pathetic uselessness of capitalist climate governance. Why don't the mainstream right parties do more? After all, it's the role of the capitalist state to protect the overall system against the particularist interests of particular fractions of capital. So why aren't they doing their job here? Is it that they are worried about being unpopular? That seems unlikely, they are prepared to do lots of other unpopular things when it's necessary for even the short term interests of the system. Are they really just short-termists, who don't care about climate change because it won't happen on their watch? Do they really not believe in the science? In which case those of us who have tried to thrust it under their noses have failed. Do they think that they personally, and the ones they care about, will be able to escape to somewhere where this won't happen? Genuine question, if we knew the answers to this we might know better what to do next.