Martin Hägglund, who should have been here today, was spontaneously incredibly happy when he heard that Andreas Malm would receive this year’s Lenin Award. No one, he said, could be a more natural laureate. It turned out that Martin had not only read all of Andreas’s books, but he said that in his American left-wing environment it would have been strange if he hadn’t. The books Andreas has written in the last ten years have taken the international environmental movement by storm and he has in a short time become one of the most cited researchers in the climate debate. The fact that Naomi Klein and Sally Rooney have habitually referred to his research reflects that, as Martin said, he is at least ten times as famous internationally as he is in Sweden. While waiting for Martin’s text in next year’s Myrdaliana, you will have to endure the story of how I got hung up on this now 48-year-old man whom I stumbled upon in 2002 when he was 25!
It should be said that his position as a syndicalist who started writing in Arbetaren early on and then eight years and a few books later converting to the Trotskyist International did not make it easier for him to reach an old square Maoist like me, but he did reach me somehow!
In 2002, his shocking report from Palestine Bulldozers against a people – about the occupation of Palestine and the Swedish betrayal, where you can follow how this activist with his own body as a shield against the Israeli oppression sees, feels and reports with his own eyes. As the organizer he is, he had also been a driving force and started the Swedish section of the International Solidarity Movement.
Two years later, in 2004, at the age of 27, he published the completely independent analysis When Capital Takes Up Arms – about imperialism in our time, an astute Marxist essay of a kind rarely seen, written outside of academia and which gave a foretaste of what was to come. During these years, the interest in what would later become his great life’s work, the fight against fossil capital’s destruction of our planet, was founded. He became involved in the action group Klimax in civil disobedience actions similar to those that have now made Palestine Action in the UK classified as a terrorist organization, and already in 2007 his equally scholarly and educationally easy-to-read It is our firm belief that if nothing is done now it will be too late came out in Sweden, and I am forced to admit that this was the book that for the first time made me deeply understand the seriousness of the planet’s situation. At the same time, he also published the first international overview in English of Iran’s modern labour movement and a 500-page award-winning overview of the growing Islamophobia in Europe and Sweden.
In 2009, Andreas entered the academy in Lund under the leadership of Professor Alf Hornborg and then began his work on the emergence and history of fossil capital, where he was able to combine his broad knowledge of the environment with his Marxist method, a work that was published in 2016 by the leading international left-wing publisher Verso under the name Fossil Capital and which immediately made Naomi Klein, for example, understand that it was the internal mechanisms of capitalism that had forced the entire climate crisis. In it, Andreas shows, contrary to previously established beliefs, that the steam from fossil fuels did not offer cheaper or more abundant energy, it offered superior control over subordinate labour. It thus made it possible to concentrate production in the most profitable places during the most convenient time for the employer, which still makes the fossil power industry the most profitable form of production today and therefore also the most tenacious and difficult to defeat, despite all its obvious disadvantages that are hostile to life for all of humanity. Fossil Capital immediately became a modern classic for the international environmental movement.
The year after, 2017, The Progress of This Storm came with the subtitle Nature and Society in a Warming World, which not only describes how capital’s profit interests control the accelerating effects of the climate crisis, but also makes short work of all the postmodernist international theories that have until then dominated academia worldwide and thus delayed the necessary ideological resistance. It was an intellectual clean-up effort and a polemic that in its commitment and brutality reminded me of Karl Marx wildly swinging in the debate in the 1850s. I have rarely had so much fun as during the re-reading of this book just a few weeks ago. This became his second classic for the international environmental movement.
Four years later, the pamphlet came out that was quickly translated from English into several languages, but never into Swedish, even though it was quickly ready for publication on Modernista. There was something about its title How to Blow Up a Pipeline that not only got it read by all of Greta Thunberg’s friends around the world, but it also gave opponents the creeps with its passionate advice to international environmental activism to move from words to action in the face of ecological collapse. We must, the book preached, with our bodies as an input, begin to disarm and destroy the tools of fossil capital. We must create strategic acceptance for property destruction, this rabble-rouser believes, and that, as is well known, is the absolute red line of all capitalists! Anything but don’t touch my property! After the book was found in the pockets of French environmental activists suspected of sabotage in this spirit, Andreas has become something of an international intellectual environmental terrorist and has attracted the attention of all the world’s security services, while at the same time it became his third classic for the international environmental movement. The book’s publication in Swedish has been cancelled for some strange reason!
In the past year, Andreas has released a renewed report on the genocide in Gaza, which is also a full-scale environmental disaster that he places in its historical context, which also provides perspective on the campaign he has personally been subjected to in the name of political correctness after insisting on seeing all parts of the Palestinian resistance in the light of the century-long colonial oppression this tormented people have been subjected to.
Finally, there have been two more doorstoppers in English that I am ashamed to say I have not yet had time to read, but in which I have been able to sense Lenin’s great question about what should be done in a world where the unacceptable has become reality, a phase of capitalism’s climate crisis that will likely last for the rest of our lives. The increasing warming of the earth now officially seems acceptable to the politically ruling circles, while the resistance struggle against this annihilation does not. The responsibility to prevent this destructive order falls on all of us together.
Welcome on stage Andreas Malm and receive your well-deserved 2025 Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award.