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Jan 05, 2021 | ISBN 9781839760259 Pre-Order
Jan 05, 2021 | ISBN 9781839760266 Pre-Order
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Jan 05, 2021 | ISBN 9781839760259
Jan 05, 2021 | ISBN 9781839760266
Property will cost us the earthThe science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest?In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop–with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women’s suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.
“If a livable world requires an all-over transformation, where and when and how do we start? Perhaps with this book, a provocative manifesto from the pioneering theorist of the climate age.”—David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth Praise for Fossil Capital:“The best book written about the origins of global warming … Like Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, Fossil Capital trenchantly demonstrated that capitalism and capitalists are responsible for climate change.”– Michael Robbins, Bookforum“Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global warming.”– Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of Fear“Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will return to again and again—and take notes.”– John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx’s Ecology“The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject.”– Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine“A unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature, capitalism, and Marxism.”– Jacobin
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