Russians revolt against Putin’s war

The stream of protest against Russia’s war on Ukraine has turned into a river. Demonstrations in every major Russian city have been broken up by the police, with more than 4000 arrests, but people have returned to the streets again and again. There were anti-war demonstrations in the Belarussian capital, Minsk, yesterday, the first street actions since the 2020 crackdown.

Trafalgar Square, London, Sunday: “Russians against war” at a demonstration called by the Ukrainian community

Tens of thousands of Russians have signed letters against the war by professional and civic associations – that’s what this post focuses on. There is a list, summarised from an article yesterday on The Insider, and the texts of letters by medical staff, teachers and local government officials.

The Insider’s introduction stated: “Professional associations in Russia, and also representatives of civil society – municipal deputies, NGOs, human rights defenders – are publishing open letters and petitions against the war in Ukraine. Some of them have been signed by dozens of people, some by thousands.

“The examples included here have been signed by more than 60,000 people – and that does not include the anti-war petition started by the human rights defender Lev Ponomarev on Change.org, which was signed by 880,000 people in three days.” [English text of petition here.]

If you are reading this in the UK, or wherever, and you believe in building international solidarity against war, and you work in any of the professions mentioned – you know what to do. Get in touch with your Russian colleagues today.

Professional associations

□ Animators. “We are convinced, that war can bring nothing but death, hurt and destruction.” Signed by more than 390.

□ Architects and town planners. “War can not be an instrument of politics in the 21st century.” Signed by more than 5000.

Russia sacrifices economic goals for military aggression

I wrote this last week, and this morning it already looks out of date. Very broad sanctions are being imposed on Russia; Germany and the EU are rushing arms to Ukraine; and Belarus appears to be joining the attack on Ukraine. Nevertheless, the comments about Putinism may be of interest. SP.

Russia’s war in Ukraine will capsize its relations with Europe now, and for the long term. Its valuable trading partnership with Germany has been disrupted; by freezing certification for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Germany has opened a rift that could widen further.

Whatever the Kremlin’s war aims are – and at time of writing they are unclear – it has decided they are worth the sacrifice of Russian capital’s short-term economic interests.

Young Russians demonstrating in London on Sunday. The poster on the left quotes the Ukrainian sailors who told a Russian warship “fuck you” before being killed

Nord Stream 2, a 1,200-kilometre pipeline running from north-west Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany, alongside the existing Nord Stream 1 line, is completed, but will perhaps never be used. Both pipelines are owned and operated by Gazprom, Russia’s state-backed energy giant.

For years, German politicians defended the new pipeline in the face of calls from Ukraine to sanction it. Indeed, the chair of Nord Stream’s shareholder committee is the former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. In July last year, towards the end of Angela Merkel’s term as chancellor, Germany struck a deal with the US – which had previously imposed some sanctions on the project – that allowed it to go ahead.

But on Tuesday, within hours of Russian president Vladimir Putin recognising the separatist self-proclaimed ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, and approving open military support for them, the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced that his government had withdrawn an impact report on the pipeline, meaning that the German regulatory authority cannot approve it.

Russian and Ukrainian voices against Putin’s war

This post was published this morning, on the Russian Socialist Movement’s facebook feed

For revolutionary defeatism

I hope that the armed forces of the Russian Federation are defeated in the war that has started. My hopes grow not out of hatred, but out of love. The Putin regime’s military victories will bring nothing to Russia’s citizens, except deaths of loved ones, the final collapse of the economy and the strengthening of the regime. These victories can produce only short-term euphoria, the narcotic effect of which just diverts attention from Russia’s endless problems and from the recognition of the need to solve them.

Every town that is seized, every village that is occupied – that is more people whose future will be stolen from them. Because for the Putin regime there is no room for the future, there is only the rotten present and the effort to drive us all back to the even more miserable past. This regime strains every muscle to turn the wheels of history backwards, to return the economy, culture and society back to a more primitive state. Defeat in war would give the people of Russia a future, open their eyes to the essential character of the Putin regime and give them the strength to struggle for democracy and social justice.

Danya P., activist of the Russian Socialist Movement.

Kyiv, this morning. Parts of what appears to be a rocket in a residential area

These comments by Serhi Guz, a Ukrainian journalist and trade union activist based in Dnipropetrovsk region, were published on the Union News site this morning.

I am very sad at the moment. Sadly, the Russian people never got the chance to change their history and their place in history. Sadly, Putin’s ambition took the upper hand over common sense. It is sad that instead of friendship with Russia, we will have to go to war with them.

Roads to an Energy Commons: a pamphlet

Today I am publishing Roads to an Energy Commons, a pamphlet (free to download here). It brings together articles that appeared on peoplenature.org about the role of fossil fuels in capitalist society, and the meaning of “energy” and related concepts. The discussion covered issues about the transition away from fossil fuels, and away from capitalism.

The first article, by Simon Pirani, discussed the way that energy has been turned into a commodity under capitalism, and asked whether and how it could be decommodified. The second article, by Larry Lohmann, argued that the very concept of “energy” had to be challenged more robustly. Further contributions followed, from Larry, Simon and David Schwartzman, who writes on solar energy. The last two articles have been published today, here and here.

While none of us think the last word has been said on these issues, we hope that the discussion will be taken up, and maybe taken in other directions, by others. With the pamphlet we hope to make our conversation accessible to a wider readership. If you wish to contribute, please email peoplenature[at]protonmail.com. 17 February 2022.

Demonstrators for climate justice in Berlin

The class struggle inside energy

LARRY LOHMANN continues a discussion about energy and social justice, responding to earlier contributions on People & Nature by Simon Pirani and David Schwartzman, both published on 5 January. You can read the whole discussion, which started on People & Nature last year, in a free pamphlet, Roads to an Energy Commons, downloadable here 

Reply to Simon (Disentangling capitalism and physics, energy and electricity, 5 January)

I don’t want to overemphasize any differences Simon and I may turn out to have. From the perspective of capital, the two of us probably look like the same person. On the other hand, developing our mutual (mis)understandings as they play off each other is surely at least one tiny part of our own common project of helping organize for the future.

A Carnot landscape of energy conversion devices. A more complete map of this landscape would have to display the network of borders through which the entropy gradients needed by such devices are maintained, including colonial structures of waste expulsion as well as patriarchal, racial, and class structures of exploitation and appropriation – not to mention other entropy landscapes that this landscape overlays and overlaps

I don’t think that Simon and I differ on the place of the modern energy concept developed during 19th-century industrialism[i] in understanding history. Simon suspects that the concept would not “cover water wheels, windmills, dams and coal-fuelled metalworking in precapitalist societies.” But actually it would and it does. More than that: it’s commonly used even in popular depictions of prehistory (as in the declaration “since humans were humans, we’ve used energy”, from a graphic novel detailing possible low-carbon futures).

There’s nothing wrong with this use of latter-day concepts in examining the past. That’s how the art of history-writing goes forward. Nobody in their right mind would want to talk about another time using only the concepts current among the people who lived in that time. Including, I would argue, those people themselves – if only they had the chance to enter into dialogue with us. My suspicion is that the more curious, open-minded denizens of the 18th century would be challenged, fascinated and perhaps delighted to hear of our (to them) bizarre view that a “horse pulling a treadmill and a coal fire heating a lime kiln [a]re in some sense doing the same thing.” They would want to discuss this more, to find out what the hell we – seemingly reasonable people – were talking about.

The question is the class politics of such translational encounters, hypothetical or actual.

When we in industrialized societies face the 18th-century person, it is not just as people for whom the First Law of Thermodynamics became common sense because we learned it in the science classroom. It is also as inhabitants of a world in which, as a result of two centuries of class struggle, that law is bodied forth in countless ways in which it was not in those earlier times.

Climate mitigation and adaptation will require incremental energy from renewables

As part of a discussion about energy and social justice, DAVID SCHWARTZMAN responds to points made by Larry Lohmann in his article The class struggle inside energy, also published today. And you can read the whole discussion, which started on People & Nature last year, in a free pamphlet, Roads to an Energy Commons, downloadable here.

On the use of metaphor, I said in my post Thermodynamics: a metaphor or a science?, that Larry is now responding to:

While entropy as a metaphor has its positive value, in Lohmann’s case highlighting the destruction accompanying the creation of renewable energy supplies, and likewise for Robert Biel’s The Entropy of Capitalism (2011), not going beyond this metaphor with an analysis relying on the science of thermodynamics will not make clear the critical implications of the second law to a renewable energy transition.

Metals recycling is part of the answer

Yes, of course I recognize the essential role of metaphors in the generation of scientific theories, as well as their use in more general discourse (for another example see the section “Other Uses of Entropy”  in my 2009 paper “Ecosocialism or Ecocatastrophe?”).  

I am puzzled by Larry’s claim that I defended by implication an unrestrained capital-driven renewable energy transition.  I clearly advocated that this energy transition should be informed by an ecosocialist agenda, not relying on “green” capital to deliver a just process, rather strongly supporting the goals of decommodification and a global solar commons.