Ajay Singh Chaudhary “The Exhausted of the Earth”

Chaudhary, Ajay Singh 2024. The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. London: Repeater.

Chapter 1. We’re not in this together

One of the most common misconceptions concerning climate change is that it produces or even requires a united humanity. In that tale, the crisis in the abstract is a “common enemy,” and a perfectly universal subject is finally possible in coming to “experience” ourselves “as a geological agent,” through which a universal “we” is constituted in a “shared sense of catastrophe.”⁷ The story I am telling you is different. In this story, there is no universal “we.”

The divide is not, as many still argue, between those who accept and those who reject the overwhelming evidence of climate science.⁸ It is about those who stand to gain — both in this moment and in the future as traditionally conceived — from fundamental system preservation or other modes of right-wing climate realism, and those whose current exhaustion is part of the fuel for that system as much as any petrochemical or industrial agricultural process. Climate change is not the apocalypse and it does not fall on all equally or, in at least a few senses, on everyone at all.

Right-wing climate realism then, in its simplest form, is a political-ecological scenario of the concentration, preservation, and enhancement of existing political and economic power.

Far more interesting than the simple denial that is largely long past, climate denialism takes on at least two further configurations. Norgaard’s second category is “interpretative denial,” in which facts are acknowledged but “euphemisms” and “technical jargon” are employed to obscure any meaning to be found in them. She cites the example of military officials calling civilian deaths in war “collateral damage.” In more contemporary climate terms, one might think of the phrase “net zero.” As Kate Aronoff pithily puts it, “everyone, it seems, wants to get to ‘net-zero.’ What exactly that means for companies that have only ever revolved around producing oil and gas is anyone’s guess. For now, it’s one-part creative accounting and many parts a P.R. strategy of waving around shiny objects like biofuels, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage.” Net zero, in other words, is often not zero; it is continued emissions and “magic.” Or think of “carbon offsets,” which don’t actually offset carbon. (Recall Fanon’s “magic wand.”) Norgaard’s third category is “implicatory denial,” in which “information” about “climate change” is not rejected “per se” but implications in social terms — from the systemic to the subjective — are simply set aside, ignored, or not integrated into any kind of proportionate social action. Implicatory climate denial might be thought of here as a kind of (dis)functional climate denialism — acknowledging the reality of climate change but remaining unwilling to consider related socioeconomic and political questions. In Norgaard’s terms, there is a “double reality”: in one reality, a relatively non-obfuscated understanding of climate change is acknowledged, while at the same time, in another reality, the structures of everyday life are assumed immutable, integrating the two is “unrealistic.”³²

Realism here is not about reality. Rather, this kind of realism sets limits about what is deemed officially realistic, without regard to reality. It lies beneath what is broadcast as politically “possible.”

What we start to see is that the Paris Climate Accords embody a generic problem in that there is no way to square climate mitigation and adaptation goals with the premise of fundamental system preservation, of a world constituted by capitalism-as-we-know-it. This is not simply the view of eco-Marxists and others already predisposed to such a position. The plain reading of climate science findings — coupled with a roughly utilitarian understanding of maximizing sustainability for the largest number of people possible — increasingly produces its own critique of capitalism. In their 2018 “Hothouse Earth” paper for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (actual title: “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” one of the most cited papers in the climate literature), the late atmospheric chemist Will Steffen, alongside 18 others, wrote, in the generally cautious mode of the natural sciences: “The present dominant socioeconomic system […] is based on high-carbon economic growth and exploitative resource use. Attempts to modify this system have met with some success locally but little success globally in reducing greenhouse gas emissions or building more effective stewardship of the biosphere.”⁴³ This is quiet, climate science speak for capitalism, or at least capitalism-as-we-know-it.

All plausible portraits for mitigation and adaptation in the interests of the vast majority of people on Earth involve some turn — whether one considers it Marxist or not, ecosocialism or managed capitalism — to planning and decommodifying vast sectors of economic life. There really is a red interior to that lush green exterior.

[…] few would claim that the world is “decolonized” today. If anything, it is less that the world has decolonized than that colonial relations have become more omnipresent. Anti-colonial struggles are not automatically, inevitably, or historically bound to fail. There have been many real victories achieved in the struggle for decolonization. And the politics of a left-wing climate realism is, in many ways, a broadened mode of anti-colonial struggle — Fanon’s “stretched” Marxism, stretched and transposed further, as much in the metropole as in the periphery. It is, in its simplest form, the very real, very possible mitigation and adaptation scenario for a quasi-utopian flourishing for the vast majority of people on Earth. Put differently, left-wing climate realism is the politics of a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion.

Nordhaus advocated, as increasingly “mainstream” and even “liberal” voices are normalizing today, a Δ3 world or so, right in the business-as-usual range.⁷⁰ This is well in line with many of the right-wing climate realism scenarios we’ve explored. This is the Rex Position. Although so seemingly technical or distant from the kind of theoretical ideas Benjamin was exploring in the late 1930s, the discount rate turns out to be an exquisite illustration of Benjamin’s arguments about time, history, and power. Just as “we” are all the beneficiaries of growth, as the dominant story goes, “we” are all better off with a high discount rate. The idea that some universal “we” is better off not only in a Δ3 world but along that trajectory belies literally everything we’ve learned about current ecological realities, let alone projected ones. The idea that profit maximization actually benefits “everyone” belies a world of stark and growing inequality. Whether it promises doom, salvation, or even just modest improvements, the universal story truly does serve only the powerful.

2. The Extractive Circuit

In other words, the logic of the extractive circuit is one of the most vicious cycles imaginable: at every turn, an increase in energy inputs from both ecological and social sources, and, with every increase in energy inputs, an increase in overall inclemency for a global human ecological niche that stretches from rising ocean temperatures and acidification to overall warming, each of which drives a further demand for energy inputs, and so on. The increased consumption demands in the service of accumulation require further fossil fuel extraction, further migration into low-wage, high-risk, precarious or informal labor, and even the geo-strategic necessity of different kinds of post-colonial states.

At every node in the circuit, there are two simultaneous and related phenomena: value extraction and nodal exhaustion.

The one-day or one-hour delivery, the expedited shipping, the synthesis of business and “leisure” hours: all of this is a lifesaver to the single parent, the double-shift employee in a food-desert, the downwardly mobile 12-hours-a-day professional, the hustling informal or aspirational employee, hoping to claw their way out of generalized precarity. All of these, in the understanding of contemporary law and neoclassical economics, are “services” provided for consumers.

We should see these “services” instead as facilitating the frenzy of these lives, as shifting literal time and energy not to these individual consumers, but rather to the needs of an “always-on” capitalism, creating the very crises to which these services respond. They don’t strictly fulfill consumption ends; they are also part of production. Every moment of life is integrated, profitable, from literal labor hours to the production of micro-units of digital value (via social media and other avenues) in the hours-for-what-we-will.

Whether a logger in Indonesia or a delivery-person in the United States, TNCs rely on similar methods if not to the same degree. At both nodes in the value chain, human and ecological destruction are rampant.

The “privatization of stress” is a particularly apt phrase: just as one can mine fossil capital to boost petro-farming outputs, one can squeeze the standard “labor power” of a hyper-employed worker while also exhausting her “mind.” These are some of the latest frontiers in the long history of transforming ecological inputs (for what is labor but an extension of nature working on itself, as Marx says) into abstract value. The “mental health plague” is the expression of this condition — perhaps, again, in normative economic terms, an externality — but the “privatization of stress,” of stressors, is a method by which an individual’s exhaustion can lower the cost of capitalism’s apparent functioning.

Cut costs, exploit socially or ecologically, increase market share, or die.

Chapter 3. Climate Lysenkoism; Or, How I Learned to Stopped Worrying and Rescue Class Analysis

It Is not that labor action is now irrelevant or that violence is the principal mode of struggle. It is rather that something like a left-wing climate realism will work across a host of terrains ranging from social protest and movement to labor action to electoral and state politics to violence and more. Logistical weak points in global value chains are susceptible to sabotage by organized social forces including but not limited to labor movements. One of the most powerful levers in a world of frictionless capital flows is denying it a place to land. This can involve everything from novel experimentation to complex transnational coordination. We will return to strategy and tactics, but the idea that fossil capital will bargain away its existence in a legally ordained agreement, or even submit to a legislative or administrative edict without bringing the weight of state and private violence to bear, is absolutely insane.

A left-wing climate politics must take seriously how those conjunctural formations are always riven — not only by already-given, material, non-class identifications, structural locations or social positions, segmentations, and fractions, but also by equally material affects, feelings, passions, and emotions all vital to political possibility. It is not “positive” messages about social gains; it’s “social desire” for the world to be otherwise. “Negative” affect doesn’t have to be fear-mongering or eschatological apocalypticism. Where is the hatred for the class enemy? Where is the joy in collective action? Where is the anger or disgust with contemporary conditions? Where are the “infrastructures of feeling” (Gilmore), the “affective infrastructures” (Anderson, Dean, Bosworth), the “structures of feeling” (Williams, Thompson)?

However, the transient, semi-spontaneous eruptions of “the people” do not confirm concepts like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s transient “chain-of-equivalence” or “collective wills,” but rather point toward the need to understand how affect can inform and be differently organized into a heterodox Marxist class subject composed (following Gramsci, Hall, and Marx) of myriad relations and social groupings and blocs produced by capital in this moment.

Across significant conceptual differences, all these classic and contemporary understandings of materially grounded affect — often calamitously ignored on the left — require heightened attention in the case of climate politics. Affect is not crucial because, as some theorists posit, the free flow of affect is liberation in itself.¹⁵⁰ Nor does affect, any more than social structure, organize or produce political subjectivity on its own. “Grievances” and “aspirations” are fundamental to any understanding of class. Rather, as with Fanon’s analysis of decolonization or Du Bois’ of the Civil War, the particular temporal intensity of our moment cuts across those clean theoretical lines of social division; it fractures actual social life within them. “Class,” “classes,” “hostile camps,” “historical blocs,” provide a rubric for “stretched” mass political subjectivity in the socioecological conjuncture — its “who, whom?”; its strategic capacities and agencies.

In the simplest formulation, the project of a left-wing climate realism is to carve out a sustainable global human ecological niche capable of supporting the flourishing of some 7–9 billion humans. An ecological niche “is a term for the position of a species within an ecosystem, describing both the range of conditions necessary for persistence of the species, and its ecological role in the ecosystem.”¹⁵⁴ The term delimits the project. Jason Moore’s argument that capitalism “organizes nature” is helpfully translated here. What capitalism organizes is this ecological niche; Malm’s fossil capital crucially underwrites the “Great Acceleration” of our niche. The niche helps us understand that climate mitigation and adaptation is not about “all of nature,” but rather about promoting and securing a specific set of “conditions necessary” which are always simultaneously also about the broader niche ecosystem.

I have borrowed the phrase “minor paradise” from my longtime colleague Rebecca Ariel Porte. A minor paradise is not a utopia; it stands in contrast to Arcadian and Golden Age fantasies (one of many places in which the “degrowth” and “techno-mystic” views converge) and even with “paradise” as an ordinary concept. It is not Milton’s “lost paradise”; it is rather an “earthly paradise” always imperfect in contrast to its imaginary prelapsarian Christian cousin. “An image of earthly paradise discards perfection for the more limited — and the more dangerous — proposition — that the world might be differently arranged and more vibrantly […] to make the best of flawed materials,” writes Porte. The imperfection is the mark of its non-utopian nature; the limits are definitional: there may yet still be realms of absolute freedom (or as Benjamin reminds us, the hell on Earth that we call status quo), but the minor paradise is not any end. It is where history is always beginning, in multiple voices. Minor paradise is a splinter in the eye separating “the way things are” from “other courses history might have taken,” and “things as they might be.” To think of a minor paradise is to take account of “missed opportunities, failed potential, counterfactuals, what could have been and wasn’t, what might be and isn’t.”¹⁶⁵ The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass, as Adorno remarked. Boundaries, limits, walls — paradise is not always good (think national borders and colonies vs. gardens), but it can be the overflowing abundance, rummaged from histories and imaginations, technologies and practices, within enabling constraints.

Vitally, this kind of possibility is not limited to some pure urbanization theory of sustainability. It can be part of what Max Ajl calls a “planet of fields.”¹⁷⁵ However, for the moment, what is more important than statistics and examples is the vision, the very real possibility, of a far better life, a richer one. The aesthetics of the spaces in the classical sense of aisthetikos, the sense perception, the feeling they generate.¹⁷⁶ They [e.g., “Farming Kindergarten” in Đồng Nai.] begin to outline the idea of a varied socioecological project which not only comports with actual ecological need using actually existing technologies, but does so in line with a social flourishing that transcends desperate attempts to maintain the exhausting status quo. Without romanticizing the past or projecting “civilizational cones,” we can say that these kinds of spaces draw on roads not taken or quashed in the march of capitalist progress.

Red Vienna is hardly alone in its partially actualized or theoretical projects. One could look to a seemingly opposite case like Balkrishna Doshi’s celebrated 1980s housing projects for India’s “Economically Weaker Sectors” — i.e., peasants, workers, the poor in general. “Aranya Low-Cost Housing,” for example, provided a set of materials and an integrated urban plan and infrastructure for basic needs (water, electricity, etc.). The plan minimized solar heat exposure and relied out of necessity on extreme material and resource efficiency, but without sacrificing aesthetic and other pleasures. The plots cluster densely around a central “spine” for social and cultural spaces, workshops and industries, parks and shops, “connected by green pedestrian pathways.”¹⁷⁸ Instead of trying to tear down and replace the improvised slums that surround many South Asian cities, Aranya counted on the improvised and impressive ingenuity with which slum-dwellers could use local and reclaimed materials. Doshi provided further plans for balconies, terraces, and more that could be built with the materials available, but these were left for the residents to adopt, adapt, or reject. The project was neither slum nor suburb; the hope was that residents would turn the connected plots into rich, vibrant houses, while the broader lineaments would provide the space for social conviviality. And this is precisely what happened: residents from nearby Indore slums quickly realized the initial experimental examples into a dazzling variety of homes, wildly colorful, with integrated functional and ornamental greenery, alongside parks and social centers.

In spite of its promise, Aranya — originally planned for some 8,000 units — was never completed. As India liberalized, the once vast state support for large-scale planning vanished and was replaced by financialized private and public-private development. Funding dried up and was replaced with loan instruments. Suddenly, many residents found themselves saddled with debt for basic services and material banks.

In both these cases, need structured desire, necessity educated desire. Necessary restraint did not translate to asceticism or simply less but provoked a far more exciting — dare I say, dynamic — imagination. This is not only the case with these examples.

The broad contours of an agenda for mitigation and adaptation are clear: rapid, planned decarbonization and transition to renewables concomitant with as swift and total restrictions on fossil fuel extraction as possible.¹⁹⁴ Decommodification of basic social goods that we already know are more efficient and effective when publicly provisioned. A vast shift of resources — and sovereign power — to the Global South, not simply out of moral duty, but out of rational necessity concomitant with a move away from economic-growth paradigms and toward “growth agnosticism,” human development, and redistribution. An end to further dispossession and enclosure, and a turn to sustainable, agroecological food production. Greater restrictions and popular guidance of capital flows, and greater freedom and facilitation for human migrations. And, underneath all, a release from the vicious cycle described before; a world of greater individual, social, and political security, greater temporal luxury, greater if different material freedoms, and greater human flourishing. This is the world we begin to glimpse in the minor paradise. It offers an end to dogmatic debates about more or less, growth or degrowth, or scholastic investigations into “real socialism” or “managing capitalism” (when the real conversation is about socioecological relations, distribution, wealth, and profit). The sustainable niche speaks to the exhaustion found at every node of the extractive circuit and to the heterogenous desires expressed in its quasi-utopian, very possible fragments; the better, even luxurious terms of addressing socioecological necessity.

Chapter 4. The Exhausted of the Earth

Resilience emphasizes some of the stickiest, socially destructive ideals of our time: the hardy survivor, the endlessly flexible and adaptable worker, the self-reliant community, all of whom continue to function within even the most corrosive socioecological conditions and deprivation. This is part of why resilience is so beloved by policymakers. In a crisis-ridden world, it counsels quiescence and parsimonious austerity. Even in its most generous formulations, it looks for just how little some unit — a body, a region, a population — might need, while avoiding the possibility of significant external change entirely.⁸ Resilience is a management strategy and apology for the status quo, for global capitalism with all its constitutive social and socioecological relations. In resilience thinking, chaos, disease, and stress are omnipresent and often unavoidable — naturally. Resilience thinking teaches the absolute limit of risk or stress that can be shifted onto individuals and communities, like a Victorian viceroy counting calories for coolies. And simultaneously, it sighs that should such a limit prove too much for these poor souls, it is a failure of internal capacities. Nothing could be done; they were perhaps, in the phrasing of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a “disposable population” to begin with.

Exhaustion is not some rhetorical gesture, discursive fiction, or new theoretical fantasy. Exhaustion outlines the historical bloc, the mass political subject of this conjuncture.

Spread out a map of the world and push pins into every location that is figuratively or literally on fire. Just as these are zones of extraction, exploitation, expropriation, these are zones of exhaustion. And like wildfires, they proliferate. Connect each pin with a wire and suddenly you see the outline of the world of exhaustion, the extractive circuit, capitalism in its full socioecological expression. As we’ve seen, the extractive circuit quite literally crisscrosses the world.

today we are only beginning to emerge from an era of mass depoliticization. While left-wing politics has always faced something of a time-bind, an under-examined aspect of neoliberalism is the way it colonizes the time for politics.²⁴ Extending and accelerating productive time as far as possible, well into supposed non-working hours, not only generates profitability but in the process specifically destroys the time for politics.²⁵ This makes the scale of contemporary social upheaval all the more striking and the imperative for organization all the more urgent. Part of the politics of exhaustion is stealing back time, securing space for ever greater intensification and politicization.

As Marx already observed in the mid-nineteenth century, capitalist progress is “the art of not only robbing the worker, but robbing the soil.”²⁹ Exhaustion traces the outline of a politics, of a broad agenda, and a struggle whose goal is the flourishing of a sustainable niche. Exhaustion proliferates; it is ubiquitous and yet it is specific.

exhaustion appears throughout many canonical left literatures, but it’s also unavoidable in contemporary analytic and theoretical research. “Exhaustion,” argues Alberto Toscano is, “a prism through which to connect contemporary debates on the consequences of climate change to theorizations of the multiple crises of social reproduction.”⁴³ In his 2015 book The Burnout Society, Byung-Chun Hal wrote that “every age has its signature afflictions […] From a pathological standpoint, the incipient twenty-first century is determined neither by bacteria nor by viruses, but by neurons. Neurological illnesses such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, and burnout syndrome mark the landscape of pathology at the beginning of the twenty-first century.”

Zeitkrankheit describes a disease particularly characteristic of the times. Exhaustion is our Zeitkrankheit. A literal translation of Zeitkrankheit would be closer to “time-sickness.” Speedup, acceleration, 24/7, always-on, lean, just-in-time; these are integral to the world of business-as-usual. People are sick of the times and sick from the times — “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired,” as Fannie Lou Hamer once said. As with every other aspect of exhaustion, this is a genuinely transnational phenomenon: “a highly prevalent globalized health issue, present in all countries, that causes significant physical and psychological health problems.”

Exhaustion may be the connective tissue between existing ecological and social upheavals across the world. Exhaustion can be the foundation for externalizing what are still too often individualized experiences of the relentlessness of the extractive circuit, for uniting and radicalizing. Exhaustion can be more than a “prism” through which to view debates regarding social and ecological reproduction; it can be a potent point-of-view and starting position for the politics of left-wing climate realism.

Within non-radical epidemiological literature, affect is noted as a way in which “social conditions ‘get under the skin.’”⁷³ Contained implicitly therein is the idea that affect also spills over. Affect is not only a way in which the social flows through the individual but also, as Teresa Brennan observed, how affect courses beyond individuals. Brennan asks the rather ordinary question, “is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked in a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?”⁷⁴ As with Fanon’s clinical observations, this is not just speculation; “the transmission of affect,” as Brennan puts it, is observable everywhere from clinical situations to crowds. She notes, for example, the transmission of affect through recognizable, if not fully understood, mechanisms like hormones and pheromones, even while cautioning that these hardly give full expression to “capture a process that is social in origin but biological or physical in effect.”⁷⁵ What Brennan observes, Fanon understood as the “atmosphere” in which “everyday life becomes impossible.”⁷⁶ Just as so many different viewpoints converge analytically — though certainly not prescriptively — on capitalism as central to understanding climate change, we see similarly in so much of the normative and critical literature just how central and widespread an analysis of exhaustion is to understanding human life today.

Exhaustion is pre-political, inchoate, but far from the looseness so often assumed in affective language, exhaustion is more precise. It is socially produced, reflects material realities, and circulates among the vast majority along the extractive circuit.

The concept of the Exhausted does not — as with, say, “the multitude” — erase disparate differences or elevate any particular social dimension as the one prized characteristic. Whether heatwaves in South Asia, or hurricanes so prolific along the Atlantic coasts of the Caribbean and North America that they outstrip naming conventions — affective response to climate, how the social-cum-natural gets “under the skin” — is clearly proliferating.

For Fanon, the colonized are caught between different times, experiencing the direct and “insidious violence” of the modern capitalist world, fighting for their own time. The politics of climate change is the urgent conflict “between two congenitally antagonistic forces.” Ironically, the fight for time, for relief, for the minor paradise, must be conducted on the swiftest and most instrumental timeline.

While today, there are mass uprisings, mass movements, and social upheavals, this is repoliticization out of decades of neoliberal depoliticization. Even with new formations and increasing mass organizations, there is, in the North, little approaching the kinds of organization, the kinds of infrastructure needed to extend “momentary passions” into the intense conflict already at hand in the politics of climate change.

The landscape of today’s left is largely bereft not only of the ambitions of new internationals but in many places of the counter-hegemonic institutions — the spaces from dance halls to clinics to sites of “maroonage” — that are so pivotal towards mass or “stretched” class feeling, from Thompson and Davis to James and Robinson.

t is simply a fact that this much power, this much wealth, as Fanon began his political theory, will not give way without a movement on all fronts, without force, without violence. This does not mean only or even principally violence, but in that gulf between the social democratic fantasy of smooth electoral and legalized strike action and the full-scale armed “war-of-maneuver” of direct revolution, something like “civil war” surfaces as a realistic political model.

These are the modes of “civil war” we should be thinking of in terms of left-wing climate realism; adapted to today, not carbon-copied from the past. “Civil war” becomes the political model beyond the empty liberal admonition to “vote harder” and the quixotic thought that the world revolution will come before ocean acidification reaches levels not seen for 26,000 years.

The MAS case helps answer two of the great riddles of the conjuncture. First, what is the “class capacity” of this “new wretched of the Earth”? What is its power? Here among other cases, we see the answer. Informal workers, from peasants and indigenous activists to the urban precariat — the majority of those engaged by MAS — wield a pivotal power far greater than many traditional theories in this moment: the power to fight, to blockade, to cut off enemy strongholds, to take and hold space. Second, as Edwin Ackerman notes, MAS demonstrates how neoliberalism — which has proved so successful at repressing and dismantling traditional labor parties and institutions like unions — is surprisingly conducive to the rise of new models and modes of mass parties and mass politics.

A “civil war” today would not be the full-scale mass military conflict of yesteryear but something closer to these multifaceted insurgencies already haunting the “crisis of crisis management” today in reports, risk assessments, and surveys. Malm provides many of the initial pieces needed for consideration, but there is much left to do to understand the whole board, at local and transnational levels, even if the rules of the “game” are continually shifting, probabilistic at best.

In concert with other aspects of a left-wing climate realism, this kind of “soft target” helps to begin or build up ever more widespread recognition of the actual enemy. (Note that this is a strategic, not moral or ethical, question.) This destruction (there are only 5,245 superyachts in existence) points at the representative symbols of wealth and power rather than, say, foreign states or minorities. It can also begin to isolate and sow fear among the partisans of right-wing climate realism. One might (depending on specific conditions) soon add the destruction and sabotage of new fossil fuel infrastructure. It will only be under tremendous pressure, across a wide set of “trenches” and “footholds,” across societies and states, that actually dismantling existing fossil fuel infrastructure, stopping its operations, enforcing energetic and material boundaries, and all the finer points of necessary climate mitigation and adaptation will occur. This means far more than just strategic violence. But we might look at even these cautious examples as the tactical equivalent of progressive taxation: incurring costs first to the best off. Only once a transition is occurring, or after large-scale subjective crystallization (or at least mass sympathy), would sabotaging operational fossil fuel infrastructure make any sense. And that might be a strategic tactic if sufficient, credible threat is already achieving swift drawdown.

And yet gendered and racialized lacunae blind us to the practical implications of political militancy and ethical care work as complementary and reinforcing. Historical examples of this complementary and reinforcing concert are not hard to find. We might start with the Black Panthers’ free clinics and breakfast programs. Or the freedom schools and community health centers organized as part of the loose broad coalition — from the Panthers to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — of the American Civil Rights movement. Or we could return to the Keralan case, where those same sites of radical literary production work alongside village-level healthcare; both are praxis in motion, and complement the CPI(M)’s militancy.

Varieties of formal and informal community care, support, and safety can be found in political movements across the world, often from sites that are today zones of “organized abandonment.”

The logic of the politics of exhaustion, even of the idea of a crystalized “stretched” subject of the Exhausted, and any of its organizational structures — call them parties if you want — does precisely the opposite. It captures, works with, organizes, is in constant interaction with structurally produced inchoate affect, expressed in disparate social upheaval or still dormant.

The politics of exhaustion sees amplification, radicalization, escalation, politicization through the recognition of those affects in wildly different social identities and positions, through the recognition of common enmity across difference, through a shared horizon of the minor paradise of the sustainable niche, by solidifying positive affect in shared struggle. Its components come together not in the pieties of liberal individualism, but in a civil war which has already begun, a war whose precise divisions are likely to cut through existing bonds and find power in seeing shared exhaustion, shared desire, shared enmity in difference.

Hell is not something that awaits us; it’s this life, here and now.

Still, the far-right today contains lessons — many learned from the Marxist left — beyond purposeful ruthlessness. The far-right is simply better at affective politics, at helping inchoate affective exhaustion find shape, directing and recapturing it for their specific political projects.

The Exhausted do not require some kind of shared epistemic or metaphysical framework or even a homogenous identification — only praxeological crystallization. Across all those sites, footholds, and trenches, political education and struggle connect feelings of exhaustion with their proximate and ultimate socioecological causes, with the recognition of the enemy already working, with the vision of relief from the relentless acceleration of the extractive circuit.

China Miéville surveys a world which „thrives […] on sadism, despair and disempowerment. Alongside which are thrown up species of authoritarian notional ‘happiness’, an obligatory drab ‘enjoyment’ of life, a ruthless insistence on cheerfulness, such as Barbara Ehrenreich describes in her book Smile or Die. Such mandatory positivity is not the opposite, but the co-constitutive other, of such miseries. This is the bullying of what Lauren Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’, including on the Left: no judicious earned optimism but a browbeating insistence on the necessity of positive thinking, at the cost not only of emotional autonomy but the inevitable crash when the world fails to live up to such strictures.“ (https://salvage.zone/communism-the-manifesto-and-hate/)

But Robinson’s fiction contains more political reality than most radical theories. It thinks in a timescale of the immediate present, it contends with existing institutions and powers. It is highly unlikely that international institutions or major powers like China, the United States, India, or Europe will simply disappear, or that their different state forms will be entirely demolished in the timescale of a left-wing climate realism. In this Robinson produces unlikely echoes of the late Samir Amin, who posited just such a radical transition and transformation of even the most loathed international institutions towards a new emancipatory socioecological world. And not only does Robinson’s novel concord with historical precedents in its “diversity of tactics” situated within concrete situations, it imagines a politics coming not out of the sweeping mass movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather an unprecedented (and unanticipated) emancipatory politics emerging from a long period of widespread depoliticization. We see structurally produced affect at local, national, and transnational levels as well as a loosely coordinated set of struggles across terrains of formal politics, finance, organization, terrorism. We can think of this not as the model for such a politics, but as one way to conceive the actuality, the real possibility of left-wing climate realism at the macro-level.

“Crucially, How to Blow Up a Pipeline shows that environmental activism isn’t just for academics. This is clear from the makeup of the group — most come from working class backgrounds — but it also comes up directly in the characters’ interactions with each other and the world.”²⁰⁵ This is the affective matrix of exhaustion. This is the sharpening of externalization against the enemy and the increasing crystallization in difference.

Disgust, anger, rage, hate — these are instructive in the face of today’s catastrophe — not the fear which petrifies or the anxiety which seeks the flight to safety.

Aren’t you sick and tired of being sick and tired?

5 – The Long Now

Far from tales of market efficiencies, we find a system efficient only at the maintenance of profit, creating institutions and technologies specifically designed to chew through ecological, social, and individual life in pursuit of profitability and the maintenance of existing power structures.

The Long Now is not only a concept for a different way to understand time; it also describes a widespread feeling about time. Social and ecological exhaustion is palpable today. Climate mitigation and adaptation is not about the mythical future or Child. Climate change is driven by already existing exhaustions. The Long Now is as much an affective definition as our actual, immediate political-time.

The recession of temporal horizons in The Long Now is an opening up of political ones, not least the path to a new political imagination that the cruelest optimism tells us we must wait for. Even some who are trying to grasp the possibilities of this remain trapped with not only that ever-present Hegelian “step-ladder,” dancing up that coordinate plane to heaven on Earth, but also mistake the aspiration to modernism with the material fantasies of some “future” as imagined by capitalist modernity. Capitalism-as-we-know-it, as we experience and feel it, is unrealistic. Its fantasy life, far from overabundant, decadent, or free, is stulted, pathetic, and limited. The “concrete utopia” for The Long Now presents not one single answer but an enticing panoply of real possibilities. It’s not air-conditioners vs. asceticism. It’s Green Proletkult. Fantastic visions with Mughal cooling systems. Local knowledges linked and spread. It is the desire for the future realized in creating a truly different world built from the materials and dreams, ecological and cultural, of the world we actually live in.

Milanović, and many of his ecological critics, seem to share a bedrock conviction that it is simply “more” or “less” of this life — of “wealthy” capitalist modernity — that defines the boundaries of the politically possible. Capitalist realism and cruel optimism reinforcing each other in what some social psychologists who study exhaustion would call a “loss spiral”; an ever more hopeless expending of resources on an impossible resolution. On this level, Milanović and Raworth (both of whose core work I deeply respect) are actually in much agreement, Milanović coming down on the side of “more” of this life and Raworth on “tolerably less.”

A far richer aesthetic life is possible within the enabling constraints of an emancipatory ecological niche. Here, again, we might think with Moten (as he says with and against Adorno) not of an accelerated modernity-of-the-new-but-same but of syncopated, punctuated, ever-proliferating modernisms, of acoustic possibilities that are seemingly inexhaustible. Not of the desires that must be withheld to make “the future” possible. But of the desires that are cast out to keep the present the same.

Planetary boundaries are real, but in many ways scarcity is still an ideological fiction.