L:Like many people, 47-year-old Richard Seymour tried to quietly ignore the climate crisis and get on with his life. As a prolific Marxist intellectual, this meant writing diligently on a range of topics: the Iraq War, neoliberalism, class struggle. The climate crisis can wait after the revolution. Besides, he didn’t have the expertise or emotional capacity for it.
But in 2015, that changed. On her birthday stroll in the local park, she couldn’t help but notice how noticeably warm she was. He began to think not only about what he had already lost, but about what global warming meant for future losses. “Some protection just fell,” he says, “and I felt a pre-climatic mourning.”
Seymour grew up in a small town in Northern Ireland surrounded by farmland, rivers and forests, but for years he had what he calls a “hyper-urban” attitude; It was in New York and Paris where the labor movement historically flourished, etc. it was in those settings that he felt he and his politics most belonged. But on that winter’s day, he remembered that he “grew up in nature and had an emotional attachment to it,” from the Morne Mountains to the Giant’s Causeway. “It struck me that even though things are going to go on in a way, there’s not going to be anything like that anymore, it’s gone. . . . And the things that I’m enjoying now, you know, they’re going to go, too.”
Seymour began reading everything he could, from oceanography to evolutionary theory. Now he is probably one of the leading thinkers in UK politics climate collapse and loss of nature. In his regular Patreon and podcast appearances, Seymour, who is clearly a polymath, effortlessly weaves together environmental collapse, the rise of the far right, and the role of our desires in a collapsing world while maintaining his Marxist roots. Like a Swedish scientist Andreas Malm Seymour’s Nationalism of Disasters. Decline of Liberal Civilization” asks on the front cover of the new book. You wouldn’t want to leave Richard Seymour at home.’
Seymour is most interested in our emotional responses to the world around us. When we meet at the British Library to talk about his latest work, this is a topic we keep coming back to.
Comparing the far-right’s success in India, Brazil, and the United States (among other places), Seymour argues that most explanations for their rise are insufficient. What we’re seeing is “too consistent over time and too global to be explained by local factors, such as a response to waning white supremacy, or Russian troll farms, or ‘bad actors’ spreading misinformation,” he writes. These movements also do not have the hallmarks of historical fascism. “Their immediate goal is not the overthrow of electoral democracy,” notes Seymour, “a constitutional rupture that violates all human and ‘woke’ constraints on the exercise of power.” As the old establishment crumbles, the far-right conjures up apocalyptic images of “the great replacement,” “Islamization,” “Chinese-style communism” to animate potential supporters. This is still not a clear form of fascism. instead, it is what Seymour calls “disaster nationalism.”
The global far-right’s study of disaster nationalism is not strictly about climate crisis. But they are clearly related. While catastrophic fantasies capture the imagination, the environmental crisis lurks in the background. Seymour wants to question this. why is artistic collapse so attractive, so exciting, when we live in a world of real catastrophes that already exist?
If people are miserable, insecure and humiliated, the far right offers a special remedy for disaster nationalism, Seymour argues. “It offers not just the balm of revenge, but a kind of violent transformation that restores the traditional comforts of family, race, religion, and nationality, including the possibility of humiliating others.”
Applying a psychoanalytic lens, how? American writer Thad DeLay Seymour also eschews the common and often sympathetic characterization of the far right as the cry of the working class (“left behind”). The economy is somewhat important. he says that the trajectory of decline is fueling the radicalization of many middle-class people to the right, but the roots of these movements are often not proletarian.
“All these formations start with a fairly middle-class voter base,” he tells me. “That’s certainly true of Bolsonaro, Duterte and Modi, and after their term in office they’ve started to build a real cross-class coalition, which is incredible.”
Anyone familiar with Seymour’s writing will know that he takes racism, sexism, and transphobia seriously. When we speak, he talks about these forms of bigotry with the same subtlety he brings to his writing, and manages to do so by rejecting other mainstream explanations for the rise of the far right, where voters are the gullible idiots they must be. showed the error of their ways and information sources.
“If I agree to fantasize about horrific, erotically charged scenarios for which I have not been given any good evidence, I do not simply lack ‘critical skills’ or ‘media literacy’; fantasy does something for me. It’s staging something that I want, even if I don’t want it. And if that fancy is then adopted by many others, without any good reason, the desire is clearly not a matter of personal psychopathology, but is rooted in the general social condition,” he writes in “Dister Nationalism.”
And that general social condition is significantly affected and shaped by climate decline. The 2020 Oregon wildfires are illustrative of what has spread across the western US state in the wake of a series of chronic disasters: the credit crunch, rising rural poverty, alcoholism, higher-than-normal suicide rates, and the disruption of local news, moving away from Facebook and On the side fill in the blank But when mostly white, rural, conservative Christians see the fires, it’s not climate change or capitalism they blame.
Spontaneous, orchestrated by no one person or politician, it’s the conspiracies they hear that give so much meaning to something so big and so destructive; blame wanting to kill people like themselves to rebuild America. Such ideas spread like a contagion, and the threshold for their acceptance is not necessarily that high. As the fires rage, people refuse to leave, Seymour notes, so they can physically defend their residences from the arsonists they believe are behind it all.
An ecological disaster is turning into a disaster created by human evil. the climate crisis turns into a crisis of interpersonal competition, aggression and victims. The destruction of the planet creates the structural conditions for these ideas, but it wouldn’t be possible if they weren’t already in circulation, Seymour argues.
And he is clear about why they are so effective. “You can’t shoot climate change, you can’t take it to court, same with capitalism. These are big, abstract forces against which you feel kind of hopeless,” he says. It is much more attractive, even exciting, to “attack a personalized enemy”. We are all subject to it, Seymour argues. “There are jackets for all of us,” he reminds me at the end of our interview, though not equally.
I ask him about attempts by the left to try similar tactics and personify capitalism, such as Bernie Sanders’ crusade against billionaires. He says they’ve had some success, but it’s not easy playing the far right at its own game. The ultra-rich live on another planet. you may see Jeff Bezos on TV, but you’ll never meet him. Meanwhile, people feel like they know immigrants or Muslims, and if you read the news, you’re presented as deviant every day, Seymour notes.
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The left has also moved away from the idea that self-interest exhaustively explains how people behave. “I am not saying that the politics of bread is unnecessary. It will help,” he writes, “we need bread and butter. We even like it. But we don’t love it. And what we love often does not give us any material benefit. You can, for example, love your children, but it is not because they increase your income and free time.’
The doomsayers, as he calls them, miss the point when they warn that greens condemning the state of the world will demotivate people. Recognizing that “the end may be near” can have the opposite effect, he argues. “People can be affected by climate disasters and draw different conclusions from it. But when they find other people who have the same reaction and who want to do something about it, they connect with it,” he explains.
“Too often the left’s talk of ‘organization’ is abstract, it seems like the issue is one of correct ideas and procedures,” he says. Instead, it should mean creating a way of life where people need each other. We already see this in unions, where people may join for better wages, but end up going on strike to protect their fellow workers, even if they lose wages.
Seymour experiences this solidarity when he volunteers at his local church, which supports homeless people, many of whom are refugees. “I’m surrounded by people who do this all the time… they bring things they’ve made, they bring things they’ve bought, they give their free time to other people, no questions asked. The rule is… [you have to show] unconditional love for whoever walks through the door” – no matter who they are or what they have done.
It might all sound a little too ‘universal peace and brotherhood’,” he admits, while retaining his spooky edge. But “if you imagine living on a planet where everything around you is purposeful and has an intentional relationship with you and the rest of the world … I think that motivates better behavior.”
So for Seymour, companionship is not just between humans, but between species and the living world. This is certainly the basis not only of socialism, but of eco-socialism.
To better understand this and what we’re losing, it makes more sense to talk about mass extinctions than just climate change, he tells me. “It refers to the destruction and decay of all life, and all the evidence points to the fact that we are in what some call the end; Holocene mass destruction.” And disappearances reveal all our unrecognized addictions; we need plants and other animals. We humans don’t sit at the top of a grand hierarchy. To continue as we are, exploiting other animals and the rest of nature is unsustainable.
“If you want a less fancy wording, love,” says Seymour. It is not necessary that all Marxists appear here, but he adds: “If we talk about socialism, what else are we talking about?”