35 THE RADICAL Vol 2, No 1, January 2021 of massive opposition from the dominant classes. A green transition will also require a degree of coercive authority to be imposed on fossil fuel companies that have so far done everything in their power to pospone and obsruct climate change mitigation. DM: You build on this by calling for an “ecological Leninism” in the book. Can you explain what you mean by this? AM: Given that capitalism will need to be challenged for any meaningful transition to occur, the socialis legacy ofers a set of resources to draw upon. The problem with social democracy is that it has no concept of catasrophe — rather, it is premised on the opposite, namely the notion that we have time at our disposal and hisory on our side, meaning that we can move by incremental seps toward a socialis society. Whatever its hisorical veracity, this is certainly not the case now. We fnd ourselves in a situation of chronic emergency, with crises sriking at an accelerated rate and thereby imposing a completely diferent timeline than that faced by, for example, Swedish social democracy during the 1950s and 1960s. It is therefore necessary to look to part of the socialis legacy that has an idea of catasrophe. Anarchism is also insufcient to this task, given that it is, by defnition, hosile to the sate. It is incredibly difcult to see how anything other than sate power could accomplish the transition required, given that it will be necessary to exert coercive authority agains those who want to maintain the satus quo. The obvious choice when looking for a tradition that has a concept of using sate power in a situation of chronic emergency is the anti-Stalinis Leninis tradition. Built into this tradition is also an insight into the dangers and contradictions of sate power that arises from the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution. The whole srategic direction of Lenin after 1914 was to turn World War I into a fatal blow agains capitalism. This is precisely the same srategic orientation we mus embrace today — and this is what I mean by ecological Leninism. We mus fnd a way of turning the environmental crisis into a crisis for fossil capital itself. Published at: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/andreas- malm-coronavirus-covid-climate-changeEconomy Capitalism and its New Hisorians- A Marxis Critique Shubham Sharma Book Review - Sven Beckert- Empire of Cotton: A New Hisory of Global Capitalism, 2014, Penguin, 640 pp., £28 (Hb). Walter Johnson- River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, 2013, Harvard University Press, 515 pp., £15 (Hb) Edward Baptis- The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of Capitalism, 2014, Basic Books, 560 pp., £44 (Hb). In a ft of revolutionary youthfulness Karl Marx and Frederick Engels declared in The Communis Manifeso that ‘the hisory of all hitherto exising society is the hisory of class sruggles’ (Marx and Engels, 1848: 01). They were making a general point about hisorical development whose motor was the sruggle between classes undersood through their property and other relations to the means of production available in society. The social sysem which made them write