Theorizing Climate Change as a Global Problem

• In Event: The “Global” in Political Theory

Abstract

Andreas Malm ends his 2020 book Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency by quoting Theodor Adorno’s 1962 lecture “Progress” as the key for theorizing a politics of climate change. Adorno wrote, “The forms of humanity’s own global societal constitutions threaten its life, if a self-conscious global subject does not develop and intervene. The possibility of progress, of averting the most extreme, total disaster, has migrated to this global subject alone.” That Malm, one of the world’s most prominent activist-theoreticians of climate change, looks to Adorno at this point is striking, not only because Adorno was writing before climate change was widely understood as a major challenge for the world but also because Adorno is often thought of as a pessimist concerning political action and Malm famously advocates direct actions like blowing up pipelines. Yet Malm turns to Adorno’s argument that “global societal constitutions” are destroying the basis of human life, which must be protected by “self-conscious global subject.”

In this paper, I use Adorno and Malm as a fulcrum to evaluate the role of the idea of “the global” in theorizing climate change. On one hand, “the global” seems like an obvious or even unavoidable category for theorizing a political response to climate change. Indeed, much of the political theory literature on global justice makes an untroubled use of the category, defining their subject as an extension of social justice to the global. Many global justice theorists have accordingly applied this approach to climate, arguing about the fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of mitigating and adapting to climate change (see, for example, Caney, Moellendorf, Tan). At the same time, others have warned against this approach and called for decolonizing global justice, arguing that “the global” often functions to conceal the fact that it is fundamentally a discourse of the Global North in which the Global South exists as victim rather as agent (see, for example, Dhaliwal, Valdez, Khader).

Can the use of “the global” by Adorno and Malm escape this critique? Or is the category of “the global” inescapably homogenizing? One might worry that Adorno’s invocation of progress represents just such a homogenizing tendency, tying “the global” to a suspect form of universal history that subsumes difference. Likewise, one might worry that the idea of a single “self-conscious global subject” might flatten intersectional identities. Adorno himself arguably resists this homogenization through a negative dialectic that preserves the possibility of progress by negating the Eurocentric view of progress that has so far sustained the global. Similarly, what makes Malm’s invocation of Adorno striking is that we plainly lack a global subject capable of political action today; the political task of confronting climate change seems to require the construction of such an agent. That means there remains some possibilities to create new understandings of “the global” that incorporate an ecological understanding of its subject, extending beyond the anthropocentrism of the prevailing “global justice” to construct a new materialist and ecosocialist conception of “the global” adequate to averting total disaster.

Author

• Benjamin McKean, Ohio State University