Revolutionary Subject

In a review of Andreas Malm's Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, (Open Democracy Oct.2020) Cihan Tugal asks who Malm is referring to when he uses "we". Who is the subject that will foment radical change, or what Malm calls "war communism"? Tugal criticizes Malm for not including "one mention of organizing or mobilizing the workers of these (fossil fuel) companies to carry out the necessary nationalizations." Those in the climate justice movement are constantly being called on to identify the revolutionary agent or subject that will form a base. It is orthodox socialist/Marxist theory to point to "the working class" and then move on but do these "workers" Tugal and others point to actually interpellate as workers? Are they in any sense a class for themselves, sharing a common understanding or "class belonging"? Does the climate movement wait for this class to rise up and lead and if yes, for how long? Tugal is willing to entertain the possibility "that workers are so complicit in pollutant capitalism that they can't be counted on." But then he asks Malm to name an "effective social replacement...or whatever the social equivalent of workers might be." I would ask: why is it deemed so necessary to name this agent? Any suggestion the reified "working class" won't lead is labelled "petty-borgeoise substitutionism". Hense the dead-lock. Waiting for Godot. Waiting for the "rational" abandoment of fossil fuels and a "Just Transition" led by Capital and it's clients in government. Good luck with that plan. This is the critique of "spontaneity". I would argue the existential nature of the current crises changes the calculus, that you can indeed initiate a rupture using whatever available social agents and the struggle will radicalize them. The process creates the subject when the future is on the line. Tugal goes on to blame "disorganization of the working class" but I would suggest a re-organization does not fit into the timeframe we face for salvaging the biosphere. Lots and lots of workers would join an energized mass movement once things got going. But if Leninism is proletarian leadership of "the people" I would say that in our time, in the current conjuncture, this formula needs to be reversed. If that is substitutionism, so be it.