Although scientists have been publishing on the viral consequences of deforestation for decades, Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency is the first publicly accessible book that connects pandemics, climate change, and capitalism. Even more ambitiously, Malm proposes a solution to end all three.
The first two chapters of Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency are dedicated to demonstrating the ignored links between the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. We have read many accounts that draw parallels between the two. After discussing these, Malm insists that we have to go beyond them, since epidemics of the last decades and climate change are not parallel, but interlaced processes. In Malm’s dialectic treatment of the natural and social sciences, business-induced global warming is at the root of Covid-19 and other viral disasters. Just like heat waves and wildfires, the deadly spread of these diseases are human-made. There is much to discuss in these well-researched and beautifully written two chapters. But this review will focus on the second part of the book, where Malm lays out an eco-Leninist plan to end climate crisis.
The preconditions for consent
Risking notoriety, Malm argues that we need war communism to stop global warming and pandemics deadlier than that of 2020. Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency deserves to be applauded for taking on such a very unfashionable, albeit gargantuan mission. It also needs to be sympathetically criticized. In the rest of this essay, I will point out that Malm does not resolve the primary (two-fold) problem of what Malm refers to as eco-Leninism: 1) how to organize and mobilize the working class. 2) What winter palace to storm with which soviets. There is nothing in the book that prevents us from including these two issues. But before we could do that, we need to understand how Lenin’s practice developed before the war communism of 1918-1921.
