“We all know this civilization can’t last. Let’s make another,” writes McKenzie Wark in her 2015 book Molecular Red, which despite being a few years old is still relevant, perhaps more now than ever.
In Molecular Red she sets out to create a new kind of critical theory, one that goes back to the early Soviet Union and two of its more outside thinkers (Alexander Bogdanov and Andrey Platonov) and uses them as a base to examine 21st century climate science and sci-fi utopias, as seen through the work of Donna Haraway and Kim Stanley Robinson. If they seem a little disparate, well, they are. But Wark draws interesting connections between them, not to mention other thinkers, and lays out a theory for approaching climate change and those who cause it, which she cheekily calls The Carbon Liberation Front1.
From Bogdanov, a long-forgotten early Soviet thinker, she takes an approach to labour, particularly from the working class (she calls this “Proletkult”), and his critique of the dialectic. Or as she puts it:
“The starting point is a realistic view of activity and what resists it. The sensation of matter is a product of social activity, not a thing-in-itself. The practice of knowledge is to search for an organization of processes, and it’s aim is nothing less than organizing the world.” (pg 24, emphasis in original)
Another concept she advances, “Tektology,” is a way of organizing knowledge, and of sharing it with others (I think - I’ll admit I got lost in the weeds a little on this one). Both come into play often, especially in the way Wark applies them to American writers.
But it’s an overlooked Soviet writer who comes into play first: Platonov, a novelist and engineer who wrote several books only to see them suppressed in his lifetime2. Wark uses these haunting books as metaphors: the mute metal-working bear, the daughter who watches her mother slowly dying in a factory, the woman who jumps from lover to lover, retaining none. In these, Wark draws conclusions and theories to be applied. of Happy Moscow’s narrative arc, for example, Wark writes:
“Moscow’s line is more a drift… outside the division of labour and it’s partial results, but one which touches on the fragments of what might have to be brought together in a shared life… the only life outside of death.” (pg 96)
After building on these two writers, Wark warps forward in time to California of the late 90s and early 21st century, to Donna Harraway and Paul Feyerabend. From the latter, Wark looks at a novel approach to science, the idea that “there is no royal road to science.” Ie: one doesn’t have to be part of a privileged few to have good ideas (which goes back to Bogdanov). Harraway, meanwhile, has an interesting concept of being like a cyborg: we’re shaped by science, yet try to think we exist apart from it.
Finally, Wark gets to the sci-fi utopia of Robinson and his Mars Trilogy, a series that shows how a utopian society can rise up, and the dangers it faces along the way: factionalism, pressure from without (notably when the life-support systems are used to bend settlers attemptions at revolution), and disenchantment. In this section, arguably the strongest of the book, Wark all but quotes Le Guin, who famously wrote that all science fiction is metaphor. The solutions to the problems we face will have similar trials, and by reading Red Mars et al, we can maybe look for solutions to these potential problems, or others like them.
Wark promises a lot in the introduction, but mostly she delivers, especially in a hard-hitting conclusion where she lays out a series of proposals of perspective changes. It’s a thought-provoking book, one deep on insights, and although it’s a little bogged down by some technical terms, Wark’s prose is sharp and clear (and occasionally witty). although the book is admittedly a little dense3. I think even a layperson can find something of use here. At the same time, this is not a book with any answers for these times: Wark’s point is not to loftily suggest what to do, but of ways to approach a question like “What is to be done?”
Is it a start? Yeah, I think so. Is it a conclusion? No, it’s not. But as I write this, the ocean is on fire and there’s a heat dome over the west coast, sending temperatures past what a human can reasonably expect to live in, let alone think are normal. As Wark writes in the introduction, nobody likes to think about climate change because it just seems so depressing and overwhelming. And it is.
However, Molecular Red is a fresh start, and one that probes for new ways of looking and asking questions, while acknowledging that while we can’t return to the past, the mythical times of our parents or grandparents. It’s optimism is countered somewhat by when it was written - it’s hard to think of something like this coming out after Trump gutted the EPA, pulled out of climate accords and the like - but that’s part of its appeal, too. Recommended.
An aside: this is such a great term, and I don’t know why it hasn’t caught on.
I’ve got a few of Platonov’s books kicking around, but the only one I’ve read is The Foundation Pit, a story about labourers who keep digging and digging a foundation until it becomes apparent it’s more or less their own graves they’re digging. It’s not a lot of fun, but it’s an interesting allegory for Stalinist-era Russia
In other words, it’s easy to read, but I definitely had to go over some passages a few times before I felt like I understood them