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To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?
What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?
The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future - the Proletarocene - one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.
About the author
Jamie Allinson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at Edinburgh University and author of The Age of Counter-revolution.China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City & The City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker, and has won the Hugo, World Fantasy and Arthur C Clarke Awards; his non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London's Overthrow, and Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. He has a PhD in International Relations from the LSE. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Conjunctions and Granta. He is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage. He has been a fellow of the McDowell Colony, the Lannan Foundation, and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics and The Twittering Machine. His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine.Rosie Warren is a founding editor of Salvage and part of the Salvage Editorial Collective. She is an editor at Verso Books and a member of the National Union of Journalists.
Summary
Facing irreversible climate change, the planet is on route to apocalypse
Report
Salvage is the most exciting journal to appear on the anglophone left over the past decade: avant-garde Marxism with no illusions, perfectly pitched to our dismal times. Here the formidable Salvage Collective tackles the defining question of those times: the ecological crisis. The result is the most beautiful and urgent essay yet written on what climate catastrophe means for the struggle for communism, in the past, present and future. This is one for the ages. Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline