Our taxi stops as close to the presidential palace as possible. We get out and join the queue. We hand our passports to the guards at the first check point. We then have to pass through several security stations, the gravity and solemnity rising with each. At long last, we are inside the halls, close to the innermost sanctum of state power, but we must wait for another hour or two until the time has come — now we also have to give away our phones — and the door to the office is opened and there he is: the president of Colombia.
He is reclining in his chair. Piles of books rise from his desk; one topped by Enzo Traverso’s Revolution. A keffiyeh is draped around a wooden bird. Bolivarian paraphernalia jostles with family photos, but above all, there is a chaos of books, and as soon as the polite greetings conclude, this head of state begins talking about the book he is himself writing: a Marxist analysis of the climate crisis.
During COVID, I started reading Capital for the third time in my life, through the lens of the climate crisis, because you can read it from many perspectives. I got sick with COVID, but I didn’t stop reading, I finished all three volumes and extracted the relevant material for my book. Climate change is just the atmospheric mirror of capital accumulation on Earth. The hurricane of accumulation produces a hurricane of energy flow. And this can lead to the end of humanity. There is an antagonistic contradiction between capital and life itself.
It is rare, to say the least, to hear a head of state speak in such terms. But then, Gustavo Petro is no ordinary president. He comes across as more of an eccentric professor, or a cadre activist unfolding an extended analysis of the world situation before his comrades. He…
Auteur: Andreas Malm
