Risk and Revolution: A specter haunts the climate left - The Baffler
“They’re gonna call us revolutionaries...” [laughter]
—How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023), screenplay by Ariela Barer, Daniel Goldhaber, and Jordan Sjol; directed by Daniel Goldhaber
“The strongest weapon against revolution, or any hankering for it … [is] that capitalist-realist common sense that it’s impossible, even laughable, to struggle or hope for change.”
—China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto (2022)
“Every concrete measure proposed here … may well be brushed aside as utopian. They are exactly as utopian as survival.”
—Andreas Malm, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century (2020)
Dear friends,
My new essay for The Baffler was written back in the spring, but climate catastrophe never goes stale. The piece, which I know you’re all going to love, looks at the “climate left” and the specter of revolution as climate chaos accelerates. It’s a real hoot. Please share it far and wide. You have nothing to lose…
-Wen
P.S. Hang in there, y’all. We’re all we’ve got.