More Rupture and Slime

"there needs to be a qualitative moment of rupture, to break with its treaties and the austerity measures, the privatization, the Semester process [European Commission checks on national budgets] they impose" Peter Merten, leader of the Belgian PTB Party (Marxist-Leninist)

Andreas Malm uses the term "induced implosion" and quotes Benjamin 'The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong...What exists he reduces to rubble- not for the sake of the rubble but for that of the way leading through it....It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself."

The title of Malm's book; "The Progress of This Storm", refers to Benjamin's thesis around Angelus Novalis,and it is mostly a broadside aimed at Bruno Latour and other "Hybrid" philosophers (most I had never heard of). Instead he re-enforces the ecosocialist arguments put forth by Bellamy-Foster, Clark and York. My only knowledge of Latour comes from TRYING to read Timothy Morton and understand his OOO Object Oriented Ontology and I now feel better about my confusion.

Malm's text is far more accessible' "Devolution in ecosystems- say,'the rise of slime' in the oceans: the ascent of jellyfish and toxic algae, the descent of coral reefs and apex species- has a fitting counterpart in the current state of Western politics."

He quotes Donna Orange: "Blindness to our ancestor's (colonial) crimes, and the way we 'whites' continue to live from these crimes, keeps the suffering of those already exposed to the devestation of climate crisis impossible for us to see or feel".