Andreas Malm Q&A: “Sweden is the sickest country in the Global North”
Andreas Malm was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1977 and is associate professor in human ecology at Lund University. His research includes the role of the extreme right in the climate crisis.
What is your earliest memory?
My father slams the door behind him and my mother sinks to the floor crying.
Who are your heroes?
My first real hero, even though I was 14 at the time, was Malcolm X. Thirty years later it would be Adorno.
What was the last book that changed your thinking?
Not one, but many: the older I get, the longer I work on the climate issue, the more I am drawn into psychoanalytic literature to understand how people live in denial. It has changed my thinking completely. But when you read Freud, unlike Marx, you are also fed with insights into how you function as a person. During an ongoing period of private turmoil, this literature has become a lifeline for me, and the other day attachment theory offered just the keys I needed to make sense of an episode. I regretted not delving into John Bowlby long ago and immediately ordered his works. Life can only be lived through books.
Which political figure do you look up to?
Let me greet Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Benjamin, Mandel, Bensaïd.
In what time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
Between 1917 and 1939, somewhere between Petrograd and Barcelona, when the end of capitalism was a real prospect.
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What TV show could you not live without?
I admit that I enjoy watching The Rings of Power with my children. Although at eight and three they are quite young for that.
Who would paint your portrait?
Joe Sacco. It would be an honour.
What is your theme song?
I put my son to bed humming “My Queen Is Albertina Sisulu” by Sons of Kemet, so maybe that one.
What is the best advice you ever received?
To leave the madhouse that is Swedish media and move into academia. I followed it. I can be physically in Sweden while having minimal contact with this disgusting, rotten, deeply proto-fascist nation. For a self-hating Swede like myself, English academia is freedom.
What is bothering you right now?
That I remain shackled to what must now be the sickest country in the Global North: the only one where the dominant far-right party is the direct offspring of Nazism; the only thing where such a party always increases its vote share. It is unbearable.
What one thing would make your life better?
The Sweden Democrats are dying out.
When were you happiest?
In the womb I guess. Then, in the Jenin refugee camp during the battle in April 2002, in the Beddawi refugee camp during the 2007 war, in Cairo and Alexandria during the glorious days of the revolution in 2011-12. Nothing makes me forget my woes like a high-stakes fight.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
Would I have to go back to journalism? How horrible.
Are we all doomed?
If it continues as it is now, yes. Business-as-usual is exactly business as usual, giving us more and more pipelines, oil fields, gas terminals, propelling us headlong into 1.5, 2, 3°C of global warming. Every second is the narrow gate through which the Messiah can enter.
“How To Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire” by Andreas Malm is published by Verso
[See also: Orhan Pamuk Q&A: “My frustrations and angers have made my life richer”]