Future of Denial: The ideologies of climate change
By Tad DeLay
Verso Books, 2024
304 pp
Tad DeLay’s new book, Future of Denial: The ideologies of climate change, is a Freudian Marxist take on the climate crisis, touching on how the right, particularly in the United States, is accelerating fossil fuel emissions and attacking minorities.
Adding Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud, in DeLay’s case with a strong dimension from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is not everybody’s cup of tea or cool glass of beer. Many readers might dismiss Lacan as a verbose Parisian fraud, whose sentences are as bright and clear as a plate of spaghetti.
Personally, I find Lacan illuminating, but even if you have no knowledge of his work or dismiss his concepts, I think you will find Future of Denial a provocative, enjoyable and useful read.
DeLay, a philosophy professor in Baltimore, covers some of the same ground as Australian ecosocialist Alan Roberts in his book, The Self-Managing Environment. Both authors suggest that ecological crisis is a product of capitalism and only a socialist society has the potential to arrest the destructive process of accumulation that exploits humanity and the rest of nature.
DeLay focuses specifically on the climate crisis, arguing that denial of climate change — a phenomenon apparent with conspiracy-orientated trolls the world over — is a trivial or, at least secondary form of denial. The real denial — often invisible at least in the mainstream media — is that our capitalist social system is generating catastrophe.
We are all aware of various forms of fraudulent green washing, from carbon capture — which takes little carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere but allows oil producers to keep extracting petroleum — or carbon offsets, with Taylor Swift using such schemes to justify flying in her private jets.
DeLay notes that the secret — which perhaps everybody really knows but most suppress — is that all contemporary attempts to reduce emissions aim to conserve capitalism. This is the real denial.
From my poor understanding of Freud and Lacan, this fits with the open denial where, on one level we know that something is occurring, but to cope with daily life, on another level we suppress our knowledge so we can continue and not be overwhelmed with negative emotions.
DeLay has a very particular writing style. Like Lacan, there is a play on and with words. This can be disconcerting but also illuminating, once understood and digested.
Typically, it is noted that “Capitalism isn’t a roadblock” for reducing climate change. This seems utterly wrong; capitalists are blocking progress on reducing emissions. However, DeLay notes on page 14: “No, capitalism is not a road block. Capitalism is the generator”.
The book looks at forms of capitalist denial and greenwashing and has a very useful brief history of climate change during geological time. It is most interesting, though, when it links insights from Lacan to responses to climate change.
Various attempts have been made to connect Lacan to revolutionary politics and, to my mind, US academic Jodi Dean has done so most successfully and clearly. If you want a quick guide to Lacan’s implications for the left, I would suggest you look at her book, Zizek's Politics.
One insight left Lacanians make use of, including DeLay, is his notion of enjoyment. Politics is driven by enjoyment, and Lacan argues we should be attentive to desire. Right-wing opponents of climate change action, such as rural Trump voters, might fear that climate change mitigation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions might interfere with their enjoyment of driving gas guzzlers or eating meat. Desire is based on lack — we only desire what we don’t feel we have enough of. Fear is another great motivator of behaviour.
In addition, DeLay is illuminating about the way that climate change is leading to floods, forest fires and other extreme events, which are ignored by the right except in regard to fear of the “other”. An armed US society reacts to disaster with a call for higher walls to prevent migration and larger weapons to threaten minorities with.
There is much that is thought provoking and novel here, even if the basic contention — that climate change is generated by capitalism — is one that Green Left readers likely already accept. However, a few criticisms can be made.
Firstly, DeLay discusses Garrett Hardin, the right-wing biologist who came up with the “tragedy of the commons” — the theory that the unregulated use of commonly held resources by self-interested individuals will inevitably lead to the ruin of those resources — without referring to his critic, Elinor Ostrom. This is like mentioning Moriarty without noting the existence of Sherlock Holmes. Ostrom showed that Indigenous people and other commoners could make common ownership the basis of ecological sustainability, rather than the cause of environmental degradation.
Second, the book lacks a more explicit strategic orientation. Capitalism generates climate change, so we need to fight capitalism and create alternatives.
Roberts’ book, by comparison, was published in 1979, is less psychoanalytically sophisticated and does not centre climate change. However, Roberts was an active militant, connected to an ecosocialist movement that fought capitalism in its small way.
The danger is that academics enjoy criticising the theoretical failures of other academics, but fail to make the link to practice. It is all very well to identify capitalism as a cancer on our planet, but what is most important is how we fight it.
Other Lacanian Marxists such as Erik Swyngedouw have attempted to do this, for example, in his article for Environmental Politics journal, “The Unbearable Lightness of Climate Populism”. I don’t necessarily agree with Swyngedouw, but DeLay’s book might have made a more direct link to practical ecological militancy.
From workers’ green bans in Australia to the Rojava Revolution inspired by Murray Bookchin, there is a rich field of militancy worth exploring, to give lessons in creating a future beyond climate catastrophe.