Political Imaginary of a Postcapitalist Climate

Abstract

Fredric Jameson’s oft-repeated remark that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” captures the mentality of the present conjuncture. The climate crisis is accompanied by a crisis of imagination in which it is difficult to conceive an alternative to carbon-emitting capitalism. In Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann envision the planetary future by examining the possible ways political and economic institutions may respond to climate change. For Wainwright and Mann, addressing climate change requires replacing liberal capitalism with a critical conception of the world that they label as Climate X, a postcapitalist, nonplanetary sovereign social formation.