In a world careening towards climate chaos, nature is dead. It can no longer be separated from society. Everything is a blur of hybrids, where humans possess no exceptional agency that sets them apart from dead matter. But is it really so? In this blistering polemic and theoretical manifesto, Andreas Malm develops a contrary argument: in a warming world, nature comes roaring back, and it is more important than ever to distinguish between the natural and the social. Only with a unique agency attributed to humans can resistance become conceivable. Deflating several prominent currents in contemporary theory-constructionism, hybridism, new materialism, posthumanism-and submitting the influential work of Bruno Latour to particularly biting critique, Malm shows that action against fossil fuels is best served by a theory that takes nature, society and the dialectics between them very seriously indeed.

Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, and of Fossil Capital, which has recently won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize.