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Posted on March 28, 2025 | 41 Comments
To start with two news snippets. First, more developments in the world of manufactured food, as detailed here and in following comments by the attentive Steve L. I aim to write an update on this topic later in the year covering what’s emerged since my 2023 book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future – some interesting points of detail, but in general pretty much the story arc you’d expect from a technology over-hyped by journalists committed to easy techno-fixes rather than hard social change.
Second, the small farm future blog has just gone multilingual, with a Portuguese translation of this blog post of mine from back in 2015.
As it happens, both these snippets are somewhat relevant to the present post, which involves some thoughts on Andreas Malm and Wim Carton’s recent book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso, 2024). And then I will probably be silent again for a couple of weeks while I do the final edits on my book.
So, commenters here have been discussing the idea of ecological overshoot recently while I’ve been away. Thanks for that – another topic for a forthcoming post. But Malm and Carton mean something different by ‘overshoot’, namely the idea within international climate negotiation and analysis that it’s okay for global average temperatures to overshoot the 1.5oC or 2oC limits for global warming over preindustrial levels set by the 2015 Paris Agreement in the short term. The idea being that in the longer term, with greater wealth and technical know-how in the future, we’ll get this wild horse back under control.
The first half of Overshoot is a deep dive into the stupidity of this idea, and more specifically into the flaws of what Malm and Carton call the ‘bourgeois economics’ underlying it (I’ll come back to that phrase). I’m going to skip over that part of their book and just say that I found it convincing, and eye-opening. The ‘let’s pay later’ approach is a staple of contemporary economic thought that’s spectacularly inappropriate for dealing with climate change. Before reading Overshoot I had a rough general familiarity with the way that international climate negotiating worked and how unequal it is to the task before us, but the book brings home in impressive detail the full insanity of it all – a bit like a moribund medieval court obsessed with the minutiae of its obscure rituals and decorum, while the world outside the castle walls disintegrates.
Malm and Carton point up a tricky problem though. An awful lot of the capital circulating in the present global economy is tied directly or indirectly to fossil fuels, so if we ‘leave it in the ground’ or strand fossil assets, we basically tank the economy as we know it. Better than tanking the climate though, right? Yes, of course. But it does suggest that hand-wavy notions about a quick and economically smooth transition to low-carbon energy – no problem, nothing to see here, business as usual – are problematic in directly economic terms, quite apart from any technological or engineering issues.
Yet it’s around those technological and engineering issues, and their social correlates, where I found that Malm and Carton’s book started to get quite weird. In the lengthy Chapter 6, entitled ‘We are going to be driven by value’, they make a play for the idea that a quick transition to a fully renewable global energy system is readily possible. Nothing too unusual about that – many people embrace that notion. But the weakness and strangeness of some of the book’s arguments on this front made me wonder what was going on, especially because the authors are obviously otherwise smart and well-informed.
I’m not going to go too far into the renewables ‘transition’ issue, though I’ll be saying a little more about it in yet another forthcoming post. But Malm and Carton go to town on the idea that energy from the sun and the wind is free, and so can’t be turned into a profit stream, and so in turn is not selected over fossil energy in a profit-based capitalist system. At times, their argument waxes mystical: “Fossil fuels impose a zero-sum game on the land. The strange commodity exacts zones and corridors exclusively for itself. In the helio-aeolian flow, the land rather unfolds its leaves like a sunflower” (pp.179-80).
I’ve got no problem with mysticism as such. In fact, I think we could do with more of it. But not really in the sphere of energy economics. There are various non-mystical reasons why fossil fuels remain more profitable than renewables. Many of these are laid out in detail in Brett Christophers’ book The Price Is Wrong, which Malm and Carton refer to but don’t really engage with intellectually. These reasons encompass things like merit price and merchant risk in wholesale electricity markets, the difficulties of hedging renewable energy prices, the price of land, the price of electricity grids, the price of minerals, and the price of economic growth, the relative price of oil and gas as chemical feedstocks compared to power-to-X options, the economic rent associated with monopoly oil and gas supply, and a bunch of other things.
Not all these things are necessarily set in stone for all time in such a way that it’s inconceivable renewables will ever compete with fossil fuels. But you’d expect an in-depth academic treatment of climate and energy futures to engage with them properly, rather than unfurling strange arguments about free energy and sunflowers. When they do pick up on such issues, usually as brief asides or in footnotes, Malm and Carton tend to the airily dismissive, or to superficial talking points. An example is the bizarre argument that because renewable electricity is used as a source of power on drilling rigs, this somehow undermines the case for the fossil energy that’s extracted.
My point is not, of course, to justify fossil energy. It’s simply to dispute the notion we could easily transition from fossils to renewables if it wasn’t for those dang capitalists who insist on ‘being driven by value’.
So, what’s this strange turn in Malm and Carton’s argument about? It seems to me it’s about politics – more specifically, about some politics they don’t want to look at … and also some politics they look at a bit too much.
Reading a little between the lines, Malm and Carton basically divide contemporary political positions into four categories. First, ecomodernism – which, rightly I think, they view as a tall tale of nuclear power, radical decoupling of humanity from earth systems and overly technological solutionism. Second, left-wing politics and specifically Marxism, to which their colours are firmly nailed (non-Marxist forms of leftism don’t get much of a look-in in the book). Third, a suite of positions they variously call conservative, reactionary or business-as-usual, and which they’re none too keen on. Fourth and finally, what they call ‘anarcho-primitivism’. They say little about what this means to them – their lengthiest remarks coming, I think, on page 188 where they say “the two principal submissions from the anarcho-primitivist camp” are (1) that a transition from fossils to renewables would be ethically bad and (2) that it would be more desirable to have “generalised puritanism/privation or 7 billion people ‘or so’ removed from the planet”.
Trying to place myself within their scheme … well, I’m not an ecomodernist, and while I lean left on a lot of issues, I can’t really identify straightforwardly as a socialist, still less a Marxist. Likewise with conservative, reactionary or business-as-usual politics. So I guess I must be an anarcho-primitivist. I’m pretty sure that’s where Malm and Carton would pigeonhole my kind of thinking.
However, my kind of thinking isn’t really anarchist, or primitivist – not by their rubrics anyway. I don’t think using renewables instead of fossils is ethically bad, I don’t favour ‘generalised puritanism/privation’ and I certainly don’t want 7 billion people ‘or so’ to be removed from the planet.
It’s not my aim in this post to lay out in detail my own positions. In a nutshell, I’d say I draw principally from civic republicanism, agrarian populism and distributism, with a side of Luddism (albeit not the caricatured ‘anti-technology’ version) – neither left nor right in any simple sense, and not anarchist or primitivist either. But certainly a belief that we (by which I mostly mean we richer people in the richer countries) need to consume less stuff and less energy, to rethink what it means to live within limits (which, please, is not a ‘Malthusian’ position nor about privation and puritanism) and to rethink what it means to live as protagonists within a surrounding renewable ecology.
These are the kind of issues that I believe demand our attention. Instead ‘anarcho-primitivism’ basically serves Malm and Carton as a dismissive catchall category for any position that doesn’t embrace a high-energy status quo, justified by neo-Malthusian arguments about mass death in the absence of techno-fixes.
Just as Malm and Carton tend to lump everyone who doesn’t embrace high-energy techno-fixes into the anarcho-primitivist slot, so I must confess to having an increasingly hard time these days distinguishing between ecomodernism, most forms of leftism and most forms of ‘reactionary’ or business-as-usual thinking. All of these embrace a kind of sociological ‘things can only get better’ modernism which inevitably has to invoke heroic techno-salvation to keep it afloat.
Three points about this creeping ecomodernisation of mainstream politics by way of conclusion.
First, while techno-salvation narratives like to invoke groundbreaking new material technics, their political technics are shopworn. Government power, market forces … or, for Malm and Carton, a simple matter of “a bit of Marxism and common sense”. When they look for political thinkers to inform the present extraordinary moment in human history, Malm and Carton’s go-to choices are Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxembourg and Adorno. I daresay there are some useful nuggets within the voluminous writings of that bunch to guide present thinking, but … well, no – the question of how revolutionary leftwing politics could seize the reins of a modernising, industrialising and energetically growing world that occupied those twentieth-century thinkers really isn’t the fundamental question today.
Hence my ‘overshoot, meet undershoot’ title – we’re seriously undershooting the level of political rethinking needed via an overshot faith in techno-salvation. Malm and Carton’s term ‘bourgeois economics’ to describe mainstream economic orthodoxy is revealing in this respect. Implicitly, this sees the problem as merely the dominance of economic thought by a particular class perspective that can be overcome by more accurate scientific analysis. That’s a really old kind of social science thinking that I don’t think is at all equal to present problems, and in fact is a part of them – the slippage from the idea of scientific truth to the idea of a scientific understanding of human society that generates the correct political prescriptions for it.
Second, where does the scorn for a caricatured ‘anarcho-primitivism’ come from? To some degree, I think it’s stitched deep into the fabric of our (eco)modernist historical culture, right across the political spectrum, as discussed often enough on this site over the years and as touched on in that ‘small farm romance’ article recently translated into Portuguese. Perhaps I’ll come back to it again sometime. A lot of people have a peculiar horror for the idea of a lower energy and more local world, necessarily involving more people working the land – whereas the idea of living in a suburb and working in an office tends to get a free pass. I think there will be more of the former and less of the latter in the future whether we like it or not, but it’s a bit odd that our culture is so resistant to the possibility that the former might have its plus points.
I’m not going to dwell on the reasons for that here, except to say that maybe one of them is the fact that so much of our public narrative about the future is in the hands of academics, journalists and politicos – basically wordsmiths, aka symbolic capitalists or the professional managerial class, who like to write and model on paper or on the computer, and for whom the idea of doing practical work instead typically evinces sheer horror. It wouldn’t hurt if a bit more of the public narrative was commanded by people who don’t write, analyse or model for a living.
Finally, Malm and Carton’s apparent inability to understand the difference between sunlight, which you don’t have to pay for, and electricity, which you do, is a bit ironic in view of strictures against ‘anarcho-primitivism’ as agrarian practice. The free availability of sunlight, and the costliness of electricity and other forms of energy, is basically why the future will most likely be more rural and agrarian, and why we will not be using electricity to split water to feed bacteria to make protein but instead will be using sunlight to feed plants to make protein, and other necessary nutrients. So the land will not be unfolding its leaves like a sunflower. It may, however, be producing sunflowers. And if it is, this will involve human work. That is, agrarian work. Local work. Practical work.
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Thank you Chris. These people seem to think that solar panels and wind turbines grow on trees or something. Have they never actually looked at what it takes to turn sunlight and wind into electricity? And transport that electricity to where it’s needed? And store it for times when it’s dark and the wind isn’t blowing? It boggles the mind that people talk so blithely about these things without doing even a modicum of research on the mining, refining, supply chains, and vast quantities of fossil fuels used to build technologies like these (specifically solar panels, wind turbines, grid lines, and batteries, in this case).
They also seem to have dismissed our in-depth knowledge of how electricity cannot replace fossil fuels in many industrial processes. Without reading the book, I don’t know that for sure, but even a basic understanding of, say, the Haber-Bosch Process or the Czochralski Process or the many other industrial processes that require fossil fuels would preclude a utopian fantasy of so-called renewables powering anything like “modern civilization.”
I look forward to reading more on these topics should you post them.
The dismissal of any discussion of any lower energy living as ‘anarcho-primitivism’ is so tiring. First of all, I don’t think it has anything to do with deprivation in the puritanical sense, and in fact puritanism long ago hitched itself to capitalism which is relevant (I think) to whether established religions can guide us forward, but I don’t see it fitting into their argument. And even if their idea is that the only other political position is the common trope of “everyone lives in the woods and eats berries”, I don’t know I think maybe a lot of people would like that!
Maybe the academic world is different, but I don’t know any workers who appreciate the corporate office. (Managers, different story). There is a certain privilege to being able to secure a stable job that pays regularly and doesn’t (as quickly) break your body for sure, but I don’t think many people dream of the office or the suburbs. It’s just the only really accessible way to secure enough luxury for yourself to be able to do the things humans want to do: raise children, art, hobby, garden, travel, whatever, etc. Maybe my sample selection is biased though, the only people who’ve outright dismissed my farming are older folks who view success as leaving the farm, and a few younger people who are into imitating capitalists and trying to hit it rich as fast as possible. But perhaps a deeper problem here, as long as the narrative is shaped by words then those that are professional at that craft will have an advantage in controlling it. So maybe more mysticism? I hesitate at that, but as long as it comes in the form of paying attention before acting and not in the form of gurus or declarations it might be of use.
I’m sure it’s partly projection but the lack of new ideas(?) has been in my mind lately, brought into focus here by the choice of thinkers the authors present for this moment. Yes, capitalism brought in an age of abundance, no we never really got around to sharing it equally, but now it’s imperiled anyway, so what does freedom look like going forward? Sure, more material equality yes, but I don’t think the old project of just make everyone (well enough people to be convincing) richer each year and hope that substitutes for a functioning society has a lot of roadway left.
This feels spot on, Chris: “so much of our public narrative about the future is in the hands of academics, journalists and politicos – basically wordsmiths, aka symbolic capitalists or the professional managerial class, who like to write and model on paper or on the computer”. So help me understand: why write another book which will be read by – well, that same group? (Asking for all us anarcho-primitivist writers out here)
“But Malm and Carton go to town on the idea that energy from the sun and the wind is free, and so can’t be turned into a profit stream, and so in turn is not selected over fossil energy in a profit-based capitalist system.”
That sounds a lot like Malm’s “Fossil Capital”, which basically posits that during the 19th century, industrialist capitalists went over to coal-powered steam from water power not because water power was scarce or couldn’t deliver enough power. According to him they did it because steam power made it easier to control the workers. I thought it was an interesting book, but also perhaps…an attempt to yoke together politically two things he thinks are bad (fossil fuels and capitalism) and also two things he thinks are good (renewables and worker power). I also remember him saying something like “Renewable energy is not attractive to the big power companies precisely because sun and wind are free and the costs of e g solar panels are dropping” which I think is bullshit. The problem with getting enough renewable energy is not that there is some conspiracy keeping us from it because it’s so cheap!
(I have now lived on the small farm I bought last year for half a year, and I am loving it! Really enjoying working outside and looking forward to enjoying the fruits of my labor.)
Congrats on buying a farm!
I was just impugned as “anprim” a few days ago…
Wow, lots to mention on this post. It touches on a central part of my thinking on our future prospects. I guess I’m just getting tired of all the extend and delay games from UNFCCC right on down to neighbors growing GMO corn on sloped ground (It’s hilly here).
There is a lot of information showing that the energy transition can’t happen, and all that effort in the short term will be just that- short term until the panels and blades need replacing the first or second time, and the complex six continent supply chains can no longer do that. Ore body concentrations continue to decline, the ECOE of all these components continue to increase, too bad we won’t read the writing on the wall.
….”An awful lot of the capital circulating in the present global economy”….. If it’s part of the global economy, it’s ALL tied to fossil fuels. Let’s not try too hard to qualify things when urgency is the better reflex.
Reading Hagen’s, Berman, Murphy, Rees, and others will give a good fact based grounding on the inevitable energy descent.
You say undershoot, I say denial/intentional blindness. Acknowledgment that we are at the cusp of a centuries long decline in energy throughput and the economy it enables is the new political thinking that no one wants to champion.
Placing yourself in their scheme- their framing of the sociological spectrum- Don’t! Don’t try to find yourself in their classification system! Time for a new/old system to emerge, and you can define as best you are able.
7 billion people- Try 7.8 billion or so. The main point here is that we are in overshoot, and the default premise should NOT be trying to preserve a population of 7 or 8 billion people, it should be- what is the most equitable and least traumatic way to get to a sustainable population? Not a fun thing to consider, but here we are. One area where you and I might part ways bit is what a realistic carrying capacity is for humans ( only taking their sustainable share) might be in each watershed/biome. I think it’s probably lower than we’d first assume. It won’t be billions- let it go.
“The price is wrong”- The price is immaterial. Too many externalized costs, subsidies, sunk costs, political manipulations to sort through. Please, let’s use (life cycle) energy cost, not price or “cost”. Too much of today’s analysis focusses on the financial token metric, and not the net energy of the various options at hand. Energy analysis is harder to do, but more real world and honest.
And can we quite perseverating on climate change? It is but one symptom of our polycrisis, and is (I think maybe intentionally?) a huge distraction from the root problem.
All the forms of delusion/denial- that is the principle divisor. We have the constructs mentioned in their book on one side, and on the other, the real world acceptance that we can only create societies that can subsist on our share of the annual solar energy absorbed and miraculously transformed by plants. Any social construct you or others might envision should keep this as their long term goal and unbreakable design parameter.
That said, plenty of past societies had a somewhat stable relationship with their environs, for thousands of years, and were quite happy. It can happen again.
(caveat- humans are still humans, there will be war, violence, weird rituals and stuff, but that’s kind of baked into our DNA. Strive for the civic republicanism and the like, but it will require forever diligence to keep it. )
In other news, today we hit a new record high for this date, 84F/ 29C beating the old record by 4 degrees. Was out mulching young fruit trees, and no one can acclimate that quickly, phew!
“it should be- what is the most equitable and least traumatic way to get to a sustainable population?”
Yes, but I am virtually certain that extreme trauma is inevitable, even if there is a “least traumatic” path. Perhaps someone can synthesize a virus that just puts people to sleep permanently and gently, but it’s more likely that getting to a sustainable population will involve lots of violence and a severe lack of food. It doesn’t take much research into the nature of ecological overshoot to see what’s coming.
This fairly obvious prospect of mass premature death scares the shit out of everyone and I think it is the main driver of techno-solutionism. In the face of certain death, just about everyone will clutch at any straw that offers escape, be it renewable energy, precision fermentation, small modular reactors or moving to Mars.
Peasant agrarianism (anarcho-primitivism) is by far the biggest straw available, but it can’t support the billions who now live in cities or who are totally dependent on the fossil-fueled global market economy for their necessities. While there are more than enough people in rich countries who have the wherewithal to finance a new career in subsistence farming, and we can let them trickle out of cities as they will, they won’t make much of a difference in the level of trauma coming for modern cities.
The best way to minimize overall trauma would be to protect the millions of subsistence farmers in the Global South from the distortions and predatory economics of the global market. “Green revolution” methods, as promoted by CGIAR and the Gates Foundation, are just another form of techno-solutionism that will just set up more and more small farmers for failure when the “techno” inputs inevitably disappear. Everyone wants to help those poor farmers, but the best thing we could do is leave them alone.
These guys look like they might be trying to do it right?
https://earnglobal.earth
It is funny though, that even if access to land could be figured out, here in the U.S., there is a large deficit in knowledge of low input agriculture. Maybe some of those East Africans need to send a training mission over here!
Yes, EARN does seem to be doing good work, even better than just leaving small farmers alone.
Andrew Millison has lots of videos about similar work all over the world.
I think there’s something to be said for getting one’s spiritual life in order, and the preparation for death which that entails.
I’m not sure people are really so scared of mass death — as long as they think it will happen to someone else, far away from them. But a lot of people have serious issues around the fact that they cannot, even in areas and eras of unprecedented material wealth, choose not to die; they cannot control the circumstances of their life in such a way as to hold off death forever. And so they are cavalier with other people’s lives and overly protective of their own, when really it ought to be the other way around. And the more power someone holds, the more this appears to be true.
I think there’s quite a bit of difference between anarcho-primitivism and agrarian localism, but I guess if they want to lump all opponents into either extractive capitalism or something else, it’s refreshing to see the something else be anprims rather than agrarians, for once. But I see anprim ideology as rejection of most or all technology *because it is technology* rather than because of its effects. Agrarian localism, on the other hand, has no problem with technology per se, but… well, I’m not an expert here, but I might say that it does interrogate whether a technology is being used to extract value beyond local markets
to the ultimate detriment of the local ecology.
But it sounds like their leftist ideology is similarly bare. No Kropotkin and theories of mutual aid? Or that other guy, whose name I can’t remember, had some ecological ideas, sorry, I’ll come back and make another comment if I can remember. (Murray someone? I know it’s someone I’ve asked about before but not read.)
Short of time recently and I think I still owe you some comments on a previous post but today is about planting spuds and we’ve already overslept so I’ll stop there for now.
I do have a general question, though: if I were to publish a zine or booklet on my lower-input storage crop growing strategy (the one I use at the Far Allotment, though some aspects of it are also in use at the Neat Allotment), would people here be interested in reading it? I don’t really want to start a(nother) book, I’m thinking of 12 or 16 A5 pages.
Murray Bookchin ?
That’s the one, thanks Greg.
Yes, that booklet would be of interest to me. Thanks also for your previous suggestion of other web reading.
“maybe one of them is the fact that so much of our public narrative about the future is in the hands of academics, journalists and politicos – basically wordsmiths, aka symbolic capitalists or the professional managerial class, who like to write and model on paper or on the computer, and for whom the idea of doing practical work instead typically evinces sheer horror. It wouldn’t hurt if a bit more of the public narrative was commanded by people who don’t write, analyse or model for a living.” You hit a nail there!
Those lines made me think about the philosopher Martin Hägglund’s book This life. One of the main themes of the book is “spiritual freedom” and that is typically defined as not having to do any NECESSARY work. such as producing food, cleaning, cooking etc. I believe that is the real spectre of anarcho-primitivism: you would have to do Necessary work.
Interestingly enough the whole economy is also biased in that sense, the more fundamental and necessary the job is the lower the pay. That is really bourgoise thinking..
Yeah, funny how covid introduced us to “essential workers”. Wonder if the implication sunk in to the white collar/ intellectual class?
Sure, a certain amount of specialization is a positive group adaptation strategy, but how many middle mangers does a Dunbar scale collective need?
As Tainter and others have pointed out, complexity exacts a heavy toll, and as energy descent requires shedding complexity, so it will shed roles not directly providing food, fiber, and shelter.
legalinsurrection.com/2025/03/brown-u-upset-after-student-emails-thousands-of-administrators-what-did-you-do-this-week/
“Brown currently boasts 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members on payroll — a staggering number considering Brown currently has 7,229 undergraduate students. ”
Just to reinforce your points !!!
Good point using Tainter to showcase a reduction in complexity. Many people cannot even grasp the idea of less complex regional polities supplanting large centralized states – but that’s what’s coming.
I would also like to suggest that young activists look around for old snaggle-toothed hippies who survived the Nixon era with their backbones intact. Might be useful.
“For the flow [of sunshine and wind] appears without labour. It would be as impossible and redundant to mobilise labour for making the sun shine or the wind blow as for making humans exercise their lungs to breathe: these things come naturally, by themselves… ‘Value is labour,’ Marx spells out; ‘value itself is defined as social labour,’ Adorno reaffirms. It follows that the flow cannot have value.”
(Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, p. 208)
That book’s premise about labour-free flows could actually be used to argue against manufactured foods, since soybeans and other crops are typically grown with free flows of sunlight and water.
And it’s true that the flows of sunlight and wind coming through a window could provide some labour-free light, warmth, and ventilation. But this doesn’t apply to electricity, since a flow of electricity requires generation, which requires human labour (to obtain the required materials, manufacture, install, maintain, and periodically replace the generation and distribution equipment and infrastructure, and to fund the cost of all this). So Malmo and Carton’s conceptual framework breaks down here.
The Marxist idea that “Everything from nature is gratis,” is obviously false; and one of the reasons I generally dismiss Marx as time-stamped by the 1848 Revolutions. Indeed, Marx and most western economists have this in common. If you were to put it to one of these modern economists that they are on the same page as Marx, they would probably have a stroke.
Thanks Chris.
You are spot-on again as usual.
I know it’s hard to pull yourself away from these types of arguments – especially since holding up one corner of the arguing is part of your business – but at some point I think it’s good to remember that there’s nothing to be gained by arguing with children.
Personally, I think it’s much more effective to give up trying to convince anybody of anything, and just start in on building the world we want to live in. Alongside the one or two people we know who we don’t need to convince…
Ha! “Living in a suburb and working in an office…” I’ve done that. True enough, it pays really well for some of us. As bluejay says above “to secure enough luxury for yourself to be able to do the things humans want to do…”
Which brings me back to my friend here in town who lives almost entirely on contemporary sunlight. He raises vegetables and grains by hand, for sale and for his own food. He is actually not poor, though he lives as if he was. And he lives alone. Partly this is because of his personality – he’s an extremist, which is almost a requirement before anyone would actually go through with his way of living. But also he is surrounded by our late-capitalist sea of luxury, so his bare-bones lifestyle only appeals to a very small minority. So far.
Which brings us to Steve C’s “denial/intentional blindness.” Exactly.
As for the renewable revolution, surely many of us have seen the giant truck/trailer convoys hauling those wind turbine blades down the Interstate highways. That’s certainly not renewable. And then the huge pits where they bury the old (non-recyclable) blades when they are at risk of failure. What is their rated life, 20 years?
So maybe what we need is “…weird rituals and stuff…” Something to attract we humans that isn’t money. Something to make a different way of living desirable. I’m advocating dancing. Which is a long hard slog in the post-Puritanical US.
But in any case, for a long time I have wondered at the fact Gunnar Rundgren cites”…the more fundamental and necessary the job is the lower the pay…” Maybe this is a key argument for how money & capital distort our values.
Maybe this is more evidence for what happens when we put higher value on the mental construct that is money over the lowly valued necessary bodily work. Evidence that it is a bad idea to have such a powerful mental lever (money) over our fellow beings. Or maybe a clue that if we want to be sane, we need to start seeing money and the “economy” for the social distortion that it is.
To me, his whole conversation reaffirms the importance of getting out of our heads and back into the real world. Thanks.
Great post, thank you for reading this book – so we don’t have to! I have got some books from Verso, the publishers of Malm et al, and even bought some badges to help them when they ran out of money. They represent a kind vanguard of leftist thought which I’ve found increasingly irksome in its forced abstractions and adherence to theoretical dogma. There is a constellation of these ‘young turks’ of the left vanguard which I followed, which includes Jacobin, Tribune and Novara Media – home to author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism which seems to be a lodestar of the movement generally.
This Jacobin article shows some of the distaste you identify;https://jacobin.com/2025/03/right-wing-ecology-degrowth-nationalism
It is a kind of paint by numbers of the failure of this vanguard to grapple with the material values of al Garbi’s ‘normies’, which George Orwell was brilliantly aware of and called out in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, reviewed by Al Garbi on his substack. The failure here by these Marxist theorists has real world consequences where a smart and we’ll funded far right annex the natural space of a care based local agrarianian culture is harnessed for patriarchal authoritarian capitalism. The adherence to theoretical purity is shocking as there are numerous Marxist writers and thinkers who retrieve the land and commons for life and pleasure, including Marx himself! (I’m thinking of ‘Breaking Things at Work ‘, Kate Sopers ‘Hedonism’, Ian Angus – and the Great Murray Bookchin – as Kathryn pointed out. There are many more. As you say – a vanguard of broadcast media politicos wedded to the status of megabits tech and global networks are not the best people to see this.
A few thoughts on spiritual or mystical relationships to land, which is a position those keen eyed right wingers have taken on. And here I think we have some insight, that embodied practice functions as a kind of data, or knowledge, or narrative beyond words and numbers, this and the somatic and haptic (Tyson works through this well in Sand Talk) spaces within and without the body that are accessed through skills working with materials directly from the land – add up to a ‘mystical’ connection but are not otherworldly but most certainly naturally and inherentally human, we be best placed to approach the mystical nature of connection to land through a knowledge of skills practice to defang romantic or cultish notions of spiritual land connection.
” . . . vanguard of leftist thought which I’ve found increasingly irksome in its forced abstractions and adherence to theoretical dogma.”
As Boris said in Love and Death (1975) after one of Sonja’s rather forced and interminable philosophical ramblings; “Yes, I’ve said that many times.”
Seriously though, the penchant for droning on and on in escalating wordplay has been a feature of many leftists for a long, long time. It is better to just grow potatoes, eat some and give the rest away.
I had some dealings with Malm a few years back and if I had to summarise his way of throwing his weight around, then I’d probably call him a Marxist Monbiot, so your read on this latest book rings true to me.
The bracketing together of everything that doesn’t fit the unstated shared assumptions that link left, right and eco-modernist centre under “anarcho-primitivism” is a bit tiresome. Though it also reflects how small the pool of thinkers writing from this corner of the landscape of ideas has been. I recently read Distant Neighbours, the edited letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, which was fascinating in many ways, not least because of their own sense of close kinship, despite Berry being very much the agrarian and Snyder leaning more towards anarcho-primitivism. What struck me is that Berry comes off as far more grounded, while Snyder is ready to speak for hunter-gathering as the true way of being human at one moment and embrace the virtues of the desktop computer (which Berry famously doesn’t use) at another. We’re all straddling paradoxes, of course – but if your approach starts with the assumption that humanity took a wrong turn when we first started getting involved with cultivation rather than living off the wild, then it’s harder to get a grip on what might be worth doing from here and which choices follow from this.
Malm’s supervisor, Alf Hornborg, is a much more interesting thinker, and I remember him drawing up a similar map of the space of politics, but gesturing towards the corner Malm would label “anarcho-primitivism” (Alf had a different label for it) and saying, in effect, “this is where we find an exit from the dead-end”.
Agree totally with this. Hornborg has more interesting views.
Thanks for the comments – an interesting crop, as ever. I’ll aim to respond in a week or so once I’ve got the edits on my book done.
https://www.farminguk.com/news/growers-refuse-to-load-milling-wheat-out-of-stores-in-strike-action_66357.html
Small farms getting closer ?
Some good thoughts here in this review. To crib a famous line from John Mearsheimer; Malm and Carton “are not making a serious argument.” I too would fall into the anarcho-primitivism camp IF, IF, IF their categories were valid. But they are not. As they say in the Tour de France, many of us are Beyond Category.
I am constantly amazed at the unchallenged underlying supposition that state-level society will continue well into the future. People do not see that the rise of gangs, clans, and other non-institutionalized groupings are on the rise. Nor do they look at countries like Libya and Afghanistan and see how clans dominate state structure in some areas. Even somebody as stupid as Donald Trump can see that well-armed gangs and narco-cartels pose a threat to the state’s monopoly on violence. [Whether a challenge to state violence is a good thing or a bad thing is for YOU to decide.] If some of the well-meaning progressive types were able to actually see this, they might make an accommodation to the institutionalized violence of the police, military, courts, prisons and private security firms. But they don’t even question how institutionalized violence keeps them in their cushy white-collar jobs and houses. Asking them to make a change and live with less energy and actually work for a living in a blue-collar job making real products is a real stretch.
I have just started re-reading The Rule of the Clan by Mark S. Weiner (2013). I recommend it. He is coming at it from his perspective as a lawyer, rather than an anthropologist like myself, but he still makes some very good points.
Tribes are usually very good at fighting each other …..
Strouse Howe , “the fourth turning” is also pertinent to today’s conundrum .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory
“I must be an anarcho-primitivist.”
That self-discovery was worth wading through the rest of this delusional book, eh?
Welcome to the club.
When I first saw the title, I glanced at the authors, and read “Carton” as “Catton”, and thought, “Wow, did William have a son who is now carrying the torch?
Sadly, I was very wrong.
I think the idea that gangs and clans are some how mitigated by state violence or centralised government doesn’t add up. Bushes, Kennedies, Clintons? Is there a difference between dynasties and gangs and clans – are Libyan dynasties different to American? There are communities within America that will question the idea that state violence is the least worst – and they are not academics!
And then there is the question of how these parts of the world are destabilised, and then how they’re criminal activities are sustained and funded.
I tend to think of these hierarchies of violent power as interlocking and mutually sustaining. Tyson Yunkaporta makes the case for (re)distributing violence.
I think the idea that gangs and clans are some how mitigated by state violence or centralised government doesn’t add up”
It does if you look at history . Wessex attacked Mercia and finally won , then Attacked Northumberland and finally won , all through English history its been expansionist , Wales , Scotland , what is now the USA , state power ground down opposition ( until the Americans beat them ) . Saxon then Norse used their combined clans to enforce their power to conquer other clans, enforce their rules , though even now the Scotch and Welsh want their freedom from ” overbearing ” England . All around the world the same thing is and has gone on , conquering other tribes ,assimilating , then adding their numbers to overpower and control
others under the ” rule of law ” .
Much of today’s problems are based on weakening the ” others ” tribes , funding plus using lawfare and wars to sow dissent amongst groups .
You make a good point. In my opinion, localized gang/clan/tribe violence is NOT as extensive or as dangerous as institutionalized state violence. I have spent time in jail and been beaten up by police. I have also been threatened with death for refusing to show a Minnesota Highway Patrolman my ID. This was much worse than having my jaw broken in two places by a gang of thugs or sucker-punched by biker wannabees. The beatings I sustained in my callow youth from a violent father and older brother were still not as bad as being put in jail for growing pot in my garden. Then there is the constant pressure of being shuffled about if one has long hair or the wrong color skin, is houseless, etc., etc., ad infinitum.
My point in raising this question over the years is to get people talking about it, which they are now doing. The nuanced view is that the family, tribe, clan and gang memberships not only provide a sense of being but also safety in numbers. What modern people forget is the reciprocal obligation. I have known all kinds of people who wanted to take credit and safety in their family clan structure, but when asked if they were also responsible for the foibles of the rest of their family or clan, the usual response was, “Hell, no!” Sorry, you cannot have it both ways.
Yes, individualism thrives under a state-level society. But it is a shallow individualism because of the many cultural norms that are enforced in a myriad of ways. Throughout human society, the family or clan or tribe is the underpinning of the state-level structure. Individual liberty is but a tenuous overlay. Many people think the individualistic overlay is the base structure. It is not. The family clan is.
BTW, Diogenes10 makes some good points too. But there are nuances galore in this aspect. For instance, in Viking Age Norway the “drott” was a way to join a non-family clan in a chiefdom-oriented society of petty kings and quasi-anarchic raiders. But when King Harold Fairhair united the country under one overall king, the “drott” became the “hird.” This was more like a paid company of soldiers. (Credit goes to John Lindow from Berkeley for this, who did his Ph.D. thesis on this many years ago.) A person can go on and on about this kind of thing. I am just happy people actually consider the question of localized vs. institutionalized violence. Believe me, it is a wakeup call to get a summons that says, “The State of Minnesota vs. Walter Haugen.” Really? The whole state is against me? Good thing I have a Scandinavian grasp of grim humor.
Agreed !
There is a old saying not heard much nowadays ” Blood is thicker than water “
The trouble with clans and tribes is that, as Diogenese10 notes, they are constructed around relatively close genetic relationships. The atomization of extended families by modernity will make clans hard to reassemble in modern countries. Blood relatives are scattered all over the place.
Gangs and warlord militaries don’t have this problem, so they will probably be the default organizing principle in most anarchic places. After the demise of a modern state, it will be a rare local community that organizes itself into a cohesive organization capable of outcompeting warlords and gangs.
Still, I think it will be worth a try to try and stay out from under the thumb of gangs and warlords by organizing using some kind of republicanism. Everyone should keep a copy of “Robert’s Rules of Order” where they can find it quickly. : )
Yeah, I’m one more example of the “capitalism diaspora”. We all chased a degree and a job, and never found one in the small town we grew up near. I think non-blood group cohesion can form quickly when pressed, both for marauding and pillaging as you point out, but also for collaborative help and protection. Stuff right out of the typical dystopian paperback.
We are reconnecting with the land, but it will take some pressing urgent hardship to forge stronger bonds with the neighbors.
BTW- I highly recommend the simplified summary- the full Roberts is a complex and overly tedious thing, more likely to be a source of argument and tossed in frustration. My ninth edition is 658 pages, NOT including the charts, tables and lists.
Yes, I agree with Steve c here; the corrupted darwinian reading of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ is a deliberate propaganda amplified by an elite whose interest it serves. It has become a component of masculinity and is endlessly repeated and compounded. Anyone who is here on this blog discussion will not have survived infancy if it were not for the undeniable fact that the opposite is true. Peter Kropotkin, like Darwin, wrote a theory of natural history, and as actual science (as opposed to ideology or scientism) deepens our understanding of nature, his theory (Kropotkin’s) begins to emerge as closer to reality.
I think this is where our understanding and acceptance of the cyclical nature of life – that is death, and grief, and the unknowable – begin to emerge in what is sometimes called spirituality. It is a kind craft, which we can build strength in and train in – it will be good to see the men on this discussion practice this way of strength in acceptance that does not take recourse to a masculine apathy that will naturalise and normalise violence as given. We have a duty to model it in one another and this way. You are what you eat.
I’m just emerging from what’s hopefully my almost final round of book-writing. More news on that project soon.
Thanks for keeping things going here with the comments…
I’ll write a new post soon addressing a couple of the themes people have raised here, namely writing and death, which are closely associated in my experience. Maybe warlords too. And another post on ‘overshoot’ in the more conventional sense of the term. Plus posts coming up on Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s excellent history of energy, and ‘strong gods’ in contemporary politics.
Meanwhile, congrats to Elin on the farm and here’s to Kathryn’s zine.
For now, just a couple of points in relation to Steve C’s interesting comments: Agreed, it’s unfortunately necessary to insist endlessly that the true currency of the human economy is energy, in the face of our culture’s remarkable ability to forget this decisive point. Nevertheless, the way that we choose to organise our economies and incentivise certain behaviours or outcomes is not entirely determined by energy, as is evident from Christophers’ ‘The Price Is Wrong’ book. We can’t conjure a renewable energy civilization to seamlessly replace the present fossil energy one in a few decades for various physical and technical reasons over which we have no control, but also for political and economic reasons over which we do at least in theory have some control, and I think it’s worth making the distinction.
Also, re perseverating (what a great word!) on climate change, I agree that it’s but one symptom of the polycrisis and in many ways a distraction from the root problem. However, I think it’s quite decisive in that it’s a huge threat multiplier with a very short timer on it. So it changes the kind of politics and discussions about the polycrisis and its roots that we might otherwise have.
And in other news .
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/04/french-court-shuts-down-wind-farm-over-death-of-golden-eagle/