Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency Quotes

“In his airport bestseller from 2018, Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker, the leading voice in the choir of bourgeois optimism, revelled in the ‘conquest of infectious disease’ all over the globe – Europe, America, but above all the developing countries – as proof that ‘a rich world is a healthier world’, or, in transparent terms, that a world under the thumb of capital is the best of all possible worlds. ‘ “Smallpox was an infectious disease” ’, Pinker read on Wikipedia – ‘yes, “smallpox was” ’; it exists no more, and the diseases not yet obliterated are being rapidly decimated. Pinker closed the book on the subject by confidently predicting that no pandemic would strike the world in the foreseeable future. Had he cared to read the science, he would have known that waves from a rising tide were already crashing against the fortress he so dearly wished to defend.

He could, for instance, have opened the pages of Nature, where a team of scientists in 2008 analysed 335 outbreaks of ‘emerging infectious diseases’ since 1940 and found that their number had ‘risen significantly over time’.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Social democracy works on the assumption that time is on our side. There must be plenty of it. Then one can move slowly towards the good society, step after incremental step, without having to clash head-on with the class enemy and break up its power; it will rather leak away in drips. But if catastrophe strikes, and if it is the status quo that produces it, then the reformist calendar is shredded. Social democracy can now do one of two things. It can continue to flow with the time, deeper into catastrophe - the choice from August 1914 - or it can become something else, another taxon of socialism, one that recognises that time is up and another decade or even year of this status quo is intolerable.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“To be 'radical', after all, means aiming at the roots of troubles; to be radical in the chronic emergency is to aim at the ecological roots of perpetual disasters.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“It should now be abundantly clear that the comparison between the climate crisis and Covid-19 rests on a category mistake. It's a bit like comparing a war with a bullet. Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“No road map, no manifesto, no vision from the climate movement - and it has its fair share of radicals - ever sketched anything like the meteor storm of state interventions that hit the planet in March 2020, and yet we were always told that we were being unrealistic, unpragmatic, dreamers or alarmists. Never again should such lies be given a hearing.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“If there is something the corona crisis has taught, it should be that nudging consumers to voluntarily mend their ways is a thing of the past.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“The epoch of the Capitalocene is characterized by uncontrolled speed-up in the production of hazardous nature.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Self-isolation in a slum is a contradiction in terms.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“The research is still in its infancy, as we have seen, but, in early March 2020, Nature Communications published a model study that followed the link all the way from shelf to sickbed in one case: malaria, one of those beneath-the-radar diseases, affecting some 230 million and killing 400,000 per year, the vast majority in rainforest biomes. Deforestation is a boost for the mosquito vectors. More sunlight reaches the soil where the larvae develop; when biodiversity retreats, fewer animals prey on them. Nigeria suffers most from malaria due to deforestation. It is largely caused by the export of timber and cocoa. Such commodities end up in the north: consumers with the greatest malaria footprint are the cocoa-guzzling Dutch and Belgians, Swiss and Germans. 'In this unequal value chain, ecosystem degradation and malaria risk are borne by low-income producers' - or, in plainer terms: the Europeans get the chocolate and the profits, the Africans the mosquitos.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“It has taken the science some time to catch up and connect the dots, but, in 2012, one pathbreaking study derived one third of all existential threats to animal species straight from the sale of goods like coffee, beef, tea, sugar and palm oil to countries of the North.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“If it weren't for the economy operated by humans constantly assailing the wild, encroaching upon it, tearing into it, chopping it up, destroying it with a zeal bordering on lust for extermination, these things wouldn't happen. The pathogens would not come leaping towards us. They would be secure among their natural hosts. But when those hosts are cornered, stressed, expelled and killed, they have two options: go extinct or jump.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“In the same year as the original Disaster article, Meredeth Turshen attacked the paradigm of clinical medicine as excessively preoccupied with how the individual body reacts to disease, missing the bigger picture of class and other collectivities. She cited Engels’s descriptions of how polluted air, poorly ventilated houses, overcrowded slums and omnipresent sewage predisposed the workers of Manchester to become ill. She could have also quoted Rosa Luxemburg: ‘The doctors can trace the fatal infection in the intestines of the poisoned victims as long as they look through their microscopes; but the real germ which caused the death of the people in the asylum is called – capitalist society, in its purest culture.’ Since the 1970s, critical epidemiology has agreed with critical vulnerability theory on emphasising the social over the natural: disease and disaster as produced through processes internal to society.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“It's already too hot on earth, and it's getting hotter by the year, and there's no end in sight to the heating unless emissions are cut to zero - but even then, it will still be too hot plus residual, potentially self-reinforcing heating in the atmospheric pipeline (the more of it, the longer mitigation waits), and so a worldwide cessation of fossil fuel combustion would not be enough. CO2 would also have to be drawn out of the air. This has been apparent for at least a decade: everybody says this. Everybody admits it. Everybody has decided it is so. Yet nothing is being done.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Society, not nature: this is the death sentence for multitudes. Vulnerability, Wisner et al. contended, is really a function of unequal ownership of resources. Instead of viewing disasters as chance events or 'acts of God' that irrupt into ordinary life, they should be seen as the starkest truth about that life, whose inner structure they bring to life. This is the cardinal idea of critical vulnerability theory, elaborated in countless case studies: during a drought in northern Nigeria, to take one classic example, rich households stood the test thanks to the large size of their cattle herds and other assets, whereas the poorer ones bit the dust, meaning that the drought itself was at most 'a catalyst' of selective pressure inhering in the property relations. Some owned the means for survival, others did not.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Corona can be an effect of climate; not the other way around. More importantly, the two are interlaced aspects, on different scale of time and space, of what is now one chronic emergency.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Biodiversity decline can certainly be self-reinforcing, with inbuilt tipping points and deadlines: the Pike paper estimates that business-as-usual closes the 'window of opportunity to deal with pandemics' in 2041.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“The alarm signals have echoed without being heard, as in a forgotten cave. Already in 1994, the eminent dialectical biologist Richard Levins and his colleagues warned that 'creating new habitats - for example, by bulldozing forests - permit rare or remote microorganisms to become abundant and gain access to people.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“On a slightly lower level of abstraction, we can propose the following theorem: time-space appropriation plus time-space compression equals high risk of zoonotic pandemics. Capital grows by dilating its material throughput. The more biophysical resources that can be processed into commodities and sold, the greater the profits; the greater the profits, the more resources can be acquired and so on. Capital takes hold of land where the resources sprout - a law of a tendency with few countervailing forces that can be read off from aggregate data: in the year 1700, 95 percent of the planet's ice-free land was either wild or modified and used so lightly as to be categorised as 'semi-natural.' By 2000, the proportions has been reversed.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“More to the point, however, is that China could become the cradle of this disease only because global tendencies were present in the concentrated form.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century

“Perhaps humanity should thank Covid-19 for taking the early route through Europe.”
― Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century