Hell is Truth Seen Too Late

An Interview with Joel Wainwright about Climate Leviathan and COP26

We’re excited to share an interview with Joel Wainwright, whose work covers a wide variety of topics ranging from climate change to surveillance to place-based resistance. With Geoff Mann, he is the co-author of Climate Leviathan, an influential book published in 2018 that outlines potential political futures amid climate change. We talked about what’s changed and what hasn’t in the three years since the book’s publication and five years since the COP21 Paris summit, and what the recently concluded COP26 signifies for the world to come.

This interview was conducted on November 11, 2021 by James Murphy. The transcript has been lightly modified for clarity and edited for length.

This article features artwork by Jacinda Russell. Thanks to Jacinda for generously sharing it with us.

We've all read about the new spirit of collaboration between China and the US, what folks now call the “G2,” to reduce carbon emissions. This brings to mind this line from your book Climate Leviathan: “[T]he greatest source of uncertainty in the future climate struggle lies in the complex geopolitical economic relations between the United States and China.” How have these relations changed with COP26?

We're speaking on November 11, as COP26 is underway in Glasgow. The big news in the last 24 hours is that China and the United States, the world's largest two emitters of carbon, came forward yesterday with a statement indicating they're going to work together to decrease carbon emissions more quickly. Now, there's a lot we don't know about this deal. We don't know exactly what the agreement will look like. And we don't know whether the two countries will actually follow through.

But the mere fact that this occurred is absolutely crucial, for the following reason: the whole world is looking at China and the United States. The United States is still the acting hegemon, although its hegemony has been in decline for some time. China has been the largest beneficiary of this process, gaining ground and power in the world system with the decline of US hegemony. But China clearly isn’t poised to take over as a new organizing hegemon in the world system anytime soon.

This means we're entering a very dangerous period of world history, a period of interregnum in which there is no one clear hegemon, but two or more competing powers. This means it’s a particularly difficult time to produce some kind of global agreement to totally change the nature of the economy—which is what will be required if we are to keep fossil fuels in the ground. So the first reason this announcement by the US and China is important is because it could become a kind of interregnum agreement to set aside the conflicts they have on all sorts of other issues—for example trade-related issues with Taiwan, Hong Kong, and so forth—and agree on how to bring about a significant degree of decarbonization.

But let's think forward about what this could mean. I suppose a positive version of the scenario could go like this: over the next year the US and China develop a firm agreement on carbon. Since they're the biggest carbon emitters and also the most powerful states in the world, any agreement they make would not just reinforce the Paris Agreement, but could totally rewrite it and their decisions could ramify throughout the whole world system. If they wish, they could set up a kind of new form of global governance, where by working together they could effectively decide how much carbon different states could emit in the future. This could be enforced through a combination of military, diplomatic, and economic measures. In effect, we would see the emergence of a new kind of global governance around carbon. This scenario may seem like a long shot, and it is. But if you think about it, it reflects what a lot of people on the Left have been cheering for implicitly for some time: a re-regulation of global capitalism, backed up by the world's most powerful states, in order to save life on Earth.

In our book, Geoff and I described the emergence of such a scenario as “Climate Leviathan,” which we think is the most logical and likely pathway for global capitalism to take in confronting climate change. This potential COP26 deal unifying Chinese and US interests is the most immediate element pointing in that direction.

Let's talk about what this global sovereign would actually look like. A lot of us became more familiar with surveillance and the growing threat to individuals’ (and groups’) right to privacy during the protests last summer—a clear example of liberalism’s notorious “fear of the mob” that you mention towards the end of the book. How do you imagine surveillance strategies might change if, say, everyday practices of consumption become eligible for surveillance and potentially subject to the same exceptional treatment we see around protest?

There are two parts to your question. The first concerns patterns of global surveillance in the event of the emergence of a Climate Leviathan-type scenario. Then there's the specific issue of the US versus China in a global geopolitical conflict. So let's take it in two steps.

On the first point: there's a famous graph in the 1.5°C report where scientists essentially model what we would need to do on a global scale in order to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, which is absolutely necessary for the sake of life on Earth. The graph essentially shows global carbon emissions increasing until about 2021 and then very sharply dropping to zero before 2050. In reality we’re a long, long way from seeing that kind of rapid decarbonization. But for sake of conversation, let’s imagine that the elite of the world form an agreement to rapidly decarbonize global capitalism, more or less along the lines of what the IPCC scientists have been calling for some time. 

Now, there are a number of ways to produce such an agreement—and all of them would involve some serious surveillance that would have ramifications through all of consumer behavior. One way or the other, it's going to lead to a kind of tax on carbon that will show up in everything we consume. Not just transportation, but also a cup of coffee or hamburger you might buy would have the carbon cost priced into that commodity. So firms and governments would be involved in a grand accounting measure to make sure we don't overshoot our carbon limit, that there's no cheaters, and so forth.

It's pretty clear this would require some state-like agency or sovereign to monitor and manage that distribution of carbon. In a way, the whole process of the previous twenty-six COP meetings can be interpreted as a groping attempt by the global capitalist nation states to produce such a sovereign, or what Geoff and I call a form of “planetary sovereignty.”

What does this mean about the US and China? Here’s where things get really interesting and complicated. One of the major weapons that each of these two states is using against the other is surveillance. It's an open secret that the US and Chinese governments are presently spying on one another, with both of them competing in a kind of arms race to know everything about the other and to prevent the other from finding out what it's doing. So far China is the better of the two at playing defense because it's adopted a strategy of locking everything within its borders as much as possible. Today it's very hard for people to find out what's going on inside China.

But of course the United States is better than anyone else in the world at using techniques including satellites and various forms of geospatial intelligence data to find out where things are all the time. It’s not well known, but the US has an entire agglomeration of intelligence agencies specifically devoted to the collection and analysis of geospatial data: the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which is the largest employer of geographers in the world. 

I mention this because if you look at the rhetoric or the arguments within the US intelligence community for why they need to surveil the movement of people and things all around the planet so incessantly, they say that a major part of this is because of the uncertainties coming with climate change. In fact they project the need for enhancing their power precisely in the terms that I was using before to describe the emergence of Climate Leviathan.

Moving to the question of resistance, one of the more difficult problems that you bring up is how climate resistance, which is often very locally focused, can rival the transnational reach of potential planetary sovereigns. It was really inspiring for a lot of us last summer to see the mob the liberals fear so much circulate so many memes and infographics detailing the tactical innovations that could extend and intensify the insurgency, including new forms of opacity, spontaneous divisions of labor, styles of propaganda, means of communication, etc. Some folks have gone so far as to suggest that these gestures represent the emergence of a nascent tactical commons at a quasi-global scale in, for example, the viral spread of the Hong Kong comrades’ creative use of umbrellas and lasers around the globe. Have insurgencies against police violence and covert lockdowns affected the strategic and tactical sensibilities of climate activists or, if not, are there ways in which you're hoping they will?

I think that we have largely failed on the Left in the United States to produce the skills, tactics, and spaces on the scale that we need. In fact I think since 2001 we've actually lost a lot of ground that we’d gained since the 1960s. That is, unfortunately, a general truth. 

But let’s take a closer look at surveillance and communications specifically. Today most people who identify with the Left in the United States communicate through means that are totally insecure and in fact owned by capital. I am thinking of Facebook and other private multinational corporations that we know work closely with US intelligence agencies. For us to build a tactical commons, we'd have to borrow a page from the handbook of the Zapatistas, or their comrades in Oaxaca, who have gone about the difficult work of creating what are effectively publicly managed and privately held systems for communicating, including telecommunications and cyber communications, that are not under the power of a private multinational corporation or the state. Furthermore we'd have to scale those up to an extent where someone could, for example, buy a flip phone and use it for a protest without being tracked by the government. Obviously we're a long way from that.

From conversations with my undergraduate students, who are mostly between 19 and 21 years old, it seems like most of them have more or less always had a smartphone with them since they were about 11. It's very difficult for them to imagine what life would be like without smartphone communication. While it is undoubtedly an incredibly powerful tool for communicating and for expressing one's political views and so forth, the smartphone is also a means of surveillance par excellence. I simply don't see how, in a society where everyone is revealing that information to the state and capital all the time, we can maintain something like the right to privacy and the right to assemble. Since these rights are crucial for democratic life, it follows that what we call democracy is threatened in fundamental ways by the shifts we have seen in the means of communication. Anyone who doubts the veracity of that statement need only look at how effectively the Chinese state has used facial recognition software, combined with cell phone location data, to maintain order in Xinjiang.

If everyone is forced to or chooses to carry a cell phone that reveals all that information all the time, and that's coupled with facial recognition technology in cities and most protest is going to be urban, then the state really doesn't have much work to do to track everyone down. So developing what you're calling a tactical commons, or what I would call a public non-surveillance means of communication, definitely has to be on the agenda. But to be honest, Geoff and I do not address this challenge in the book. Our major concern was to try to provide a coherent political analysis of climate politics and to sketch a radical alternative.

This points to another thing that's really exciting about your book: its realism. As you say, we have a long way to go. Climate X is exciting to many of us because it is in fact so under-constructed. You describe it in the text both in both positive terms as “a world that has defeated the emergent Climate Leviathan and its compulsion towards planetary sovereignty, while also transcending capitalism,” and in negative terms as a broad strategy capable of inducing “a rapid reduction of carbon emissions by collective boycott and strike.” You also mention the history of Marxist anti-capitalist struggle and indigenous experience as crucial points of orientation, and you use this really intriguing term “disruptive counter-sovereignty” at the very end of the last chapter. Tell us a little bit more about how you came to this concept and maybe what changed in your thinking along the way.

First off, I should say that the book has received a good deal of criticism, and most of it has been directed towards that final section on Climate X. The criticisms basically come from two directions. Most people who read our book are coming to it from the right of us, in one way or another, from a liberal or Left-liberal position. To generalize, I think this criticism is that despite the crisis we just discussed—the inability to organize an effective resistance on the terrain of the capitalist state—we simply have no alternative but to organize on the existing terrain and therefore any attempt to dream of something outside of that is hopelessly utopian. They would argue, to take just one example, for something like a radical Green New Deal. Well, that's a fair point and Geoff and I certainly respect it. Many of our good friends, comrades, and allies take that position and we've had many good discussions and debates with them. It's not, in our view, a “wrong” position.

But we would critically respond to that position by pointing out that every species of Green New Deal we've seen so far still adopts a kind of Keynesian framework and proposes regulating capitalism. If we are committed to building an anti-capitalist movement for climate justice, then we have to figure out how to go about building coalitions when one part of the coalition is still operating within the framework of Keynesianism while the other one has adopted an anti-capitalist framework. That's a real thorny issue.

Meanwhile, from the left, there's another criticism from the anti-capitalist camp which claims that the whole argument about Climate X misses the point and that there's only one power in the world capable of standing up to capital right now and that is the state. Therefore, whatever misgivings we might have about Leninism or Maoism, it is time to put those aside and to organize ourselves in something like a Leninist or Maoist fashion. Probably the best known spokesperson today for this position is Andreas Malm. He has written a trio of books in the last year that brilliantly make the case for adopting a much more intense, directed, and indeed violent—at least towards property—approach to building an anti-capitalist and anti-fossil fuel approach to climate justice. But to this position Geoff and I would simply remind everyone that the problems of Leninism and Maoism were not insignificant, especially if our goal is not only to save life on Earth but to level the playing field of global power relations.

What Geoff and I would really cheer for might seem so unlikely to appear to be utopian. Nonetheless, in times like these I think we all need a dose of utopianism, if only to help us get our bearings. We would be most enthusiastic about political moves, strategies, tactics, and alliances that would bring about both a genuinely anti-capitalist politics and that moves against planetary sovereignty. Some have called this a “disruptive counter-sovereignty,” one that would subtract our human communities from this enhanced power of the state as well as any planetary sovereign. Disruptive counter-sovereignty, by the way, is a concept that comes from a very important series of debates that center on Glen Coulthard’s book, Red Skin, White Masks. For those who are interested in the discussion around counter-sovereignty, I really recommend the recent literature and political theory on indigenous claims in Canada and Glenn Coultard’s book in particular.

Let me follow up on some of your remarks about the Zapatistas. The centrality of place, of coming from somewhere, seems really important, because, as you write in the last few pages, “to have power, to have meaning, to understand oneself, one’s communities, and one’s histories” are practices that are “not only inseparable but also ineliminable from reciprocity and the land.” In their book Auroras of the Zapatistas, the Midnight Notes Collective talks about the “heating effect” the Zapatista Revolution has had on struggles elsewhere, the way that the Zapatistas contribute to the intensification and extension of others’ fights. What are some of the ways you see land-based forms of resistance interacting with other kinds of struggle and antagonism? Are there other struggles you’d point to that are accomplishing something similar to the Zapatistas?

I would say that the most important political influence in my life on this question has come from working alongside the movement of Q’eqchi’ and Mopan Maya people in Belize since 1995. There is a very interesting complication that arises when someone is engaged in serious work of solidarity with indigenous struggles: people often look to indigenous peoples as having somehow almost magical answers to puzzles that we on the Left face. This often represents a really misplaced and self-defeating romanticism. It’s as if, since we don't know what to do, we’ll try to imitate indigenous people; or if we don't have answers to the puzzles about what to do with capitalism or the state or racism, we look to the local indigenous people. Much of this sort of energy is misplaced and not particularly helpful for indigenous peoples.

Yet I think there is one specific way in which the long history of indigenous struggles can inform the problems we face today, namely this: all indigenous peoples who have experienced the colonization of the last 500 plus years have had to confront the internal dynamics of colonialism and its manifestation through capitalism. During a period of interregnum where we're seeing the potential emergence of a planetary sovereign, we have to be concerned with the specific combination of an ecological crisis, a political crisis, and a capitalist crisis. And that is more or less a paradigmatic description of what indigenous peoples have been experiencing for a long time. So we shouldn't be surprised that there are many brilliant insights to be gained from many indigenous thinkers and communities who have struggled through those problems.

That is why we turn to people like Zapatistas—not because they're magic people who have perfect answers for things. They are not. Rather it is because out of their experiences with similar problems they've had to produce new insights. I gained something similar, even if it's only a kind of sensibility, from my long experience with my comrades in southern Belize. It's not that they've created some perfect situation, far from it. The situation there is quite dreadful right now and climate change is making things worse. Rather, we can expect to find new insights from people who have had to struggle against certain types of problems.

It might be helpful here to mention a problem we talk about a lot, namely the problem of what we call composition, or how it’s possible to combine what are often incompatible worlds. The problem is how to counter imperial consistencies or hegemonic frames set by the state and capital, precisely what you call Climate Leviathan, and to think about the role of place in overcoming the kind of romanticizing or exoticizing otherness you’re talking about. Some examples of these sorts of struggles would be the NoTAV struggle in Italy or the ZAD in France, where there's a legacy of peasant communes that have their own sort of colonial relationship with the French state. There’s also the Kurds in Rojava and the idea of Green Revolution, and then in North America, we think about Cooperation Jackson or the blockades in Oaxaca alongside the Zapatistas. Inhabit tries to situate itself in relation to these other projects in ways that neither sacrifice the specificity of what we're doing nor fail to see the consistency that cuts across these things. So Climate X is really exciting for us because it helps us think through some other ways to narrate that consistency.

I think you've put it beautifully. The way you call it a problem of composition explains precisely why we called it Climate X. The ‘X’ represents the problem of composition, rather than foreclosing that problem by saying: “Here’s the formula guys, we figured it out!” Can you imagine how ridiculous that would be, as if two white guys in the ivory tower read enough Adorno and figured it out: “Here's the dialectical synthesis!” What we need is precisely that kind of compositional move that has to be finessed again and again if we're going to be faithful to our political commitments. And ‘finessing’ here means constantly doing the work to forge forms of composition that simultaneously show the dignity of different people and the specificity of their struggles, while also maintaining a relationship to the general problem we face globally today.

At the end of the day, one of the fundamental paradoxes we face is that the climate crisis presents itself to us as a problem that the Left everywhere needs to tackle immediately so that we can transform the planet. The challenge is that we have to do so on the existing terrain of the political, which is of course defined by capital and state. So the counter-argument to the standard anarchist position would be to say, “Look, it's about temporality, we simply don't have time to wait for the properly democratic conditions of possibility for us to transform the world, we have to do so on the basis of the political.” And that's a big argument in favor of the kind of Gramscian thinking where your first order of priority is to examine and discern the conjuncture, to try and change those relations of force, etc.

But the counter-argument to all that is this: the one thing we know for sure is that the existing terrain of the political is not conducive to rapid decarbonization. It is totally set against it. That is a justification for an even more radical strategy of exit. 

I think this is actually the fundamental aporia, or paradox, facing the Left today, and it explains why we on the Left feel stuck. To restate it differently, on one hand we know that we must tackle the climate crisis on the existing terrain of the political, but on the other hand we know that that will not work, that we would have to transform that terrain to have any hope of addressing climate in a just fashion. We are oscillating within that aporia and we don't know the way out. In fact, I think we often don't know how to think about it in a way that moves us forward. I would say that our book was written as a contribution towards thinking through that specific aporia. That's what we had felt in the run up to the 2009 COP15 summit in Copenhagen. Today the aporia is just as profound.