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The Tragedy of the Worker: Communism in the Age of Climate Catastrophe

Facing irreversible climate change, the planet is en route to apocalypse.

To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren’t we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?

What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?

Annie Olaloku-Teriba and Barnaby Raine will be joined by Richard Seymour and Rosie Warren, two members of the Salvage Collective, for a discussion of capitalism’s death drive, the left’s complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, the rising tide of fascism, and other themes related to the newly published Tragedy of the Worker.

Amidst the ruins and future wreckage of climate catastrophe they argue that Salvage Communism is our only path toward a liberated future on a habitable planet.

This discussion will be part of the ongoing Salvage Live events series, hosted by Haymarket Books.

The Tragedy of the Worker is available from Verso Books.

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Richard Seymour is the author of numerous works of non-fiction, most recently The Twittering Machine. His writing appears in the New York TimesLondon Review of BooksGuardianProspectJacobin, and innumerable other places, including his own Patreon.

Rosie Warren is an Editor at Verso and the Editor-in-Chief of Salvage.

Annie Olaloku-Teriba is a writer and podcaster whose research focuses on how neoliberalism has transformed the theory and practice of ‘race.’

Barnaby Raine is writing his PhD at Columbia University on visions of ending capitalism. He teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

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