The Politics of Life

In early November 2024, something historic happened in Spain.

The story starts with the violence of climate change. We all saw the scenes of sudden apocalyptic inundation in Valencia: the streets turned into roaring rivers, the people floating away, the piles of automobile carcasses. More than two hundred people died in the disaster. Then, on 9 November, more than 100,000 locals marched through Valencia in protest against the authorities, and the most enraged bloc clashed with the police. This was the first climate change riot in the global North, the first time an episode of destruction fuelled by fossil fuel combustion directly precipitated militant confrontations in the streets – the first time, but not the last.

Protesters accused the authorities of having killed the flood victims. There is substance to this allegation, because the first thing the coalition of the right and the far-right did when it came to power in Valencia last year was to close down an emergency response unit, formed by the previous red-green coalition to coordinate relief efforts in the event of a flood or heatwave, or other extreme weather event. The climate denialist right considered that a waste of money.

There will be more protests of this nature: against governments that fail to protect their citizens against the blows from climate breakdown.

But at some point, such protests must also make the leap to a higher level: the next riots, in a country like Spain, should target Repsol, the Spanish oil and gas giant, one of the world’s most aggressive investors in fossil fuels. Because renewables generate so little profit, Repsol continues to pour capital back into the expanded reproduction of oil and gas fields around the globe. As long as companies like Repsol remain in business, disasters of the kind we saw in Valencia will multiply – this is an immutable iron law. It follows that as long as protests stay on the frontline of adaptation, as long as they do not also cross over into the field of mitigation, we are destined to experience ever-worsening catastrophe. As Wim Carton and I argue in our forthcoming book, The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, challenging the dominant classes for maladaptation as we saw in Valencia is henceforth an inevitable part of our struggle, but there can be no fair and just and meaningful adaptation if fossil fuel combustion does not stop. No cities, however well-governed, will be safe from inundation if the likes of Repsol keep pumping oil and gas out of the ground. No shields will be strong enough to withstand the ever-stronger blows from business-as-usual.

For that necessary hope, we must shift our gaze from Valencia to Colombia. For the first time in its history, Colombia has a left-wing government. The country has long been utterly dependent on producing and exporting fossil fuels, which account for more than half of its exports. Colombia is the third largest producer of such fuels in Latin America. When Gustavo Petro ran for president in 2022, he posited what he called a ‘politics of life’ against the prevailing ‘politics of death’: he promised to end all exploration for fossil fuels if he won, and in the two years of his presidency, not a single new exploration deal has been signed for any of the three fossil fuels.

Oil and gas production can be sustained only if new fields are located and opened, once the old have been depleted; if drilling is banned, the business will naturally come to an end; and so now Colombia is on track to terminate oil and gas extraction in its entirety sometime during the next decade, possibly as early as 2031.

After Petro won the presidency, he took direct control of the state-owned oil company, appointed his campaign manager as its CEO and instructed it to turn down offers of deals with foreign partners (most recently: Occidental Petroleum, one of the most aggressive oil and gas corporations in the US) even if such deals promised massive profits. The CEO of Occidental replied by denouncing Petro as ‘anti-oil, anti-gas, anti-fracking and anti-United States’, as if these were slurs. Coal is going the same way: open-pit mining is slated for shutdown.

None of this is happening because there is no more oil and gas and coal left in the ground: all of it is happening because Colombia is governed by people determined to leave them in the ground untouched. As Petro has said, there is a weapon of mass destruction in the Colombian subsoil.

We should be clear about just how exceptional this is. No other fossil-fuel producing country in the world has a government of anything like this mindset; no one else is actively trying to phase out the fuels of death and destruction and liquidate primitive fossil capital; none is ruled by a president – a former guerilla fighter – who reads contemporary Marxist theory and is himself working on ‘a book that will explore whether capitalism can address the climate crisis.’ In a recent profile in Time, Petro said of addressing the climate crisis: ‘If capitalism cannot, because it lacks planning capacity, then humanity will overcome capitalism on a global scale because the alternative is that humanity will die with capitalism.’ The president of a significant fossil-fuel producing country uttering words such as these is not a situation we are spoiled with often, and so we should appreciate it all the more.

This is not a matter of Petro alone: at least as important is the Minister of the Environment, Susana Muhamad. She recently unveiled a public investment plan worth $40 billion to get the transition going. Like so many other countries in the global South, Colombia has enormous potentials for producing solar and wind that remain untapped; the plan is to massively expand their production. Colombia is now on track to generate all its electricity by renewable means – going further, it aims to export such electricity. Muhamed and Petro want to shift from sending fossil fuels around the world to dispatching electricity from solar and wind through a pan-American grid. This, of course, is the essence of an energy transition: shutting down fossil fuels and replacing them with fully scaled-up solar and wind.

Colombia demonstrates that such a transition is possible, it is eminently feasible, and the obstacles to it are not technological but political. What determines whether such a transition takes place or not is exclusively the political balance of forces. This balance seems nowhere and never to be to our advantage, and in Colombia itself, powerful forces are stacked against the transitional project. Against that backdrop, the Colombian experiment is a model of what should be done. It is a model of the kind of heterodox ecological Leninism some of us on the left have wanted for years. A mass uprising on the streets – the revolt of 2019–20, with its mixture of student rallies, indigenous protests, workers’ strikes and militant confrontations with the police – was converted into an electoral campaign that won control over part of the state apparatus and targeted fossil capitalists as enemies of subaltern life.

Colombia is also a model of the contradictions such a project encounters. The country is facing a foreign investment strike. It has a deep state at one with the dominant class, both working to obstruct the Marxists in nominal charge at every step. The opposition has made strides recently, in parliament and elsewhere. Some promises remain unfulfilled: the expansion of wind-power has not been sufficiently enforced, for example. Perhaps most importantly, Colombia illustrates not only the impossibility of socialism – ecological or otherwise – in one country, but also the futility of attempts at energy transition in one country. The uniqueness of the Colombian experiment is its greatest weakness: all other major energy producers in Latin America – Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana, Mexico – are throwing themselves into the global frenzy for fossil fuels and accelerating production as fast as possible, even if governed by parties and presidents nominally of the left. As long as this remains the case, as long as Colombia is an isolated anomaly, there will be no progress, and Colombia itself is likely to slide back into business-as-usual. The left might then struggle to justify forgoing fossil profits as the planet heats regardless, while the right targets electoral gains by opposing climate action pursued alone. Such is the prisoners’ dilemma of our time. Capital and the nation form are twin obstacles to a politics of life, now as in Lenin’s 1914.

Nonetheless, we are so starved of positive examples, we are so unfamiliar with the living experience of a left seizing power that we should savour even the evanescent taste of it. We should talk about the Colombian experiment, learn more about it, see what could be done to internationalise it, because the politics of death and destruction rules supreme in this world. The darkness is nearly total, and so we should cherish even the smallest sparks of light.

The darkness is nowhere as concentrated as in Palestine. One is here tempted to see it as more than a coincidence that the foremost attempt at a politics of life, on the other side of the world, is spearheaded by a Palestinian woman: Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad is of Palestinian descent. It is certainly not a coincidence that the Colombian government has also pursued a consistent policy of boycott: on 1 May, Petro announced the termination of all diplomatic ties with the Zionist entity. In August, he banned all export of coal to that state. Before this decree, Colombia was the number one supplier of coal to the occupation: now it sends nothing. Keep the coal in the ground, and start by not selling anything to the state of Israel – this is the politics of life in the twenty-first century. Netanyahu consequently denounced Petro as an ‘antisemitic supporter of Hamas’, while actually existing Hamas published another of its brilliant statements praising Colombia as a model for the rest of the world to follow. ‘We call on all countries to sever the relations with this fascist entity and to work by all means to boycott, isolate, impose sanctions on it, and prosecute its leaders’, said Hamas – as with the transition, an option that can be pursued. What everyone knows is to be done can be done.

On the ground in Palestine, the political situation is qualitatively different from the one in Colombia, or anywhere else, because the forces of destruction are unleashed in Palestine without any inhibitions, with an intensity that consummates the unity of genocide and ecocide: a systematic shattering and levelling of all possibilities for life in Gaza, and beyond. But Palestine is exceptional only because it crystallises the general forces in motion in this world. Among other spectres, Palestine prefigures the endpoint of global warming: a world with nothing left but ashes and smoking rubble. This is already the case from Jabaliya to Rafah, but it will also ultimately be the case on Earth as a whole, if the politics of death is not defeated and the forces of destruction are not themselves destroyed.

It is a serious political imperative, then, to pay tribute to the resistance: to those who cherish life sufficiently to confront the forces of destruction, treating a politics of life not as the thin pacifism that declaims violence now and to hell with the consequences. Rather, resistance entails understanding the struggles required now to hand life and freedom to those who come after us.

We leftists can start with the left. We should talk much more about the Jabha Shabbiye li-Tahrir Falastin, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, because at this point of intense destruction, the PFLP is present and puts up resistance to the best of its ability. This is not a left in government – this is a left that fights from the position of the most extreme powerlessness and exposure to the most overwhelmingly powerful forces of destruction, and precisely for this reason it deserves special respect and appreciation. When in early November 2024, the occupation carried out a sweep of abductions in the West Bank and Lebanon, the mission specifically targeted the Front and arrested more than 60 of its militants – an index of the threat it is perceived to pose.

The Front has offered martyrs on every Palestinian frontline of Toufan al-Aqsa. Consider the following tiny sample of examples. Abed Tahani, a comrade of the Front, journalist, founder of the independent media network Taqadomy (‘Progressive’) was killed in Jabaliya alongside his brother Abdelfattah, fighter in the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, ten days after October 7. As the Front wrote in a tribute to Abed Tahani: ‘Abed banged on the walls of the tank, as did Gaza’s resistance on October 7’. That phrase banging on the walls of the tank is a reference to Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun. I have argued previously in Salvage that this image paints the most striking picture of resistance in a world on fire.

Suleiman Abdul Karim al-Ahmed, a field commander of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades on the northern battlefield, was martyred a year after October 7 on the border with Palestine while resisting the invasion of Lebanon. Mohammed Abdel Aaal, head of security for the Front, a novelist, organiser, military operative, was assassinated in Beirut in autumn 2024. He was singled out for his role in building cells of the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades in the West Bank – when I visited Beirut in April, his brother Marwan, leader of the PFLP in Beirut, could still receive me openly in party offices in mukhayam Mar Elias; he has since been forced underground but he sent out a communique mourning his martyred brother:

The heart gets lost in the chaos of war. Even the evening news for the whole family is about war – the destruction of homes, missile strikes, the levelling of neighbourhoods, the burning of refugee tents. We cannot remove war from our lives. We didn’t learn its arts; rather, it imposes itself on our daily lives and teaches us its lessons, so that we may survive erasure and extermination, and remain alive for the name that Palestine deserves.

Continuing the resistance against all this destruction is now an affirmation of the very possibility of life itself. Abdaljawad Omar, who has become a major interpreter of the resistance in this moment and who appears in this issue of Salvage, recently captured the point in an interview with Jewish Currents: ‘resistance is less about achieving a specific endpoint and more about affirming a presence, a refusal to be erased’.

We should pay tribute, then, to the comrades of the Front who have given their lives in this resistance; but none of its martyrs – as the Front itself would be the first to recognise – have come close to the epic heroism of Yahiya Sinwar, Abu Ibrahim, the leader of the politburo, who did not keep the captives as human shields; who did not hide behind civilians; who refused the offer of safe passage to exile; whom the enemy could never find – but who found the enemy.

He donned a military vest and a keffiyeh and took up position in a house in Rafah. He threw two hand grenades against the soldiers of the genocidal occupation; making them run for their lives; making them shell the house from a distance and send in a drone like cowards. You have seen the pictures: Yahiya Sinwar, again, as after the war in 2021, sitting like the king of rubble in a chair, only now with one of his hands blown off, and when the drone comes closer, he throws a stick at it – all around him, rubble as far as the eye can see, everything pulverised by the machinery of death and destruction: and yet there he is, resisting, even when it is too late, even after everything is lost, banging on the walls of the tank.

This is the spirit we will need in the years ahead: in the second Trump presidency and in the coming decades of catastrophe.

Andreas Malm is associate professor of human ecology at Lund University. His latest book, with Wim Carton, is Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown.