Traversing the climate deadlock: Embracing the idea of communism

Abstract

Despite widely shared consensus about the truth of climate change and a plethora of activities, the climate high-speed train keeps thundering forward with very little hope for a serious inflection of the history of the future. It is this deadlock, that is, the gap between knowing and acting, that requires traversing if an effective and equitable socio-ecological transition is to be inaugurated. In this contribution, we contend that the idea of communism offers an opening through which the present climate deadlock can be politicized. Mobilizing a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the paper accounts for the ‘fetishic disavowal’ that sutures much of climate discourse and action. Traversing the climate deadlock and the disavowal of its underlying dynamics requires engaging with the Idea of Communism as a political imaginary for a climate-sensible and socially equitable world to be made. This idea is still a potent and possibly necessary one.