On the Danger of Fossil Fascism

Show notes

Guests are Andreas Malm and Lise Benoist from the Zetkin Collective.

We are talking about their recently published book “White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism”, which came out with Verso in 2021.

The history of fossil capital has been one of the central concerns of Andreas Malm’s work. In his book entitled “Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming”, which was published in 2016, Andreas Malm traces the historical rise of steam power and shows that the development of this technology can only be understood by taking into consideration the dynamics of class struggle.

One of Andreas Malm’s other most recent books is entitled: “Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century”, translated into German as: “Klima|x”. Rahel Jaeggi talked about the main theses of this book in an online event we hosted in 2020 “Corona Capitalism: Struggles over Nature”.

The ecological crisis has also been the topic of the first episode of our podcast series on "Climates of Capital", a conversation between Rahel Jaeggi and Nancy Fraser about the structural relation between ecological destruction and capitalism

We recently published two videos from our Summer School on “Foundations of Solidarity”: Our Roundtable on Foundations of Solidarity, with Hauke Brunkhorst, Stefan Gosepath, Asad Haider, Sabine Hark, Serene Khader, Stefan Lessenich, and Frederick Neuhouser; and the résumé with excellent summaries by Lillian Cicerchia, Noemí Ancí Paredes and Marianna Poyares.

We also continued our series „Conversations on Socialism“ with Christine Berry, Axel Honneth und Bhaskar Sunkara who discussed the contours of "A New Socialism for a New Century?" in another online event.

We will present the three German online panels of the Global Forum on Democratizing Work. The online panels will take place on 5-7 October 2021.

The campaign “#DemocratizingWork” was launched in May 2020 with the publication of the Manifesto: “WORK: DEMOCRATIZE, DECOMMODIFY, DECARBONIZE”. We hosted a conversation between Rahel Jaeggi, Neera Chandhoke, Isabelle Ferreras, Lisa Herzog on the initiative in November 2020.

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For more information: www.criticaltheoryinberlin.de

Original music composed by Anne Wellmer. Produced by Jonathan Klein.