“Are you exhausted today?” political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary asks over video chat on a dark Friday afternoon. This is a question he is posing not just to me, but to you, too – and it’s one he already knows the answer to. Most of us, the indicators suggest, would suggest we are. But Chaudhary argues this isn’t just an individual problem: “Our ecological life is exhausting, our social and economic lives are exhausting, even our individual lives are exhausting.”
This is one of the central arguments of his first book The Exhausted of the Earth: how you feel and the state of the world are connected. And, he argues, it doesn’t have to be this way. “Your exhaustion is not some random byproduct […] There is a class of people out there who cause your exhaustion, [and] it’s not just Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.” Under capitalism, we are not all in it together.
Executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, an educational organisation for adult learners, Chaudhary’s book is an accessible analysis of how climate and politics interact. Writing it was “like a return to home”, he says; his parents are natural scientists and it was drilled into him from a young age that the climate crisis was not being approached politically.
Climate change is political but it’s “not the imaginary politics of universal consensus,” he writes in the book’s pithy prologue, nor the “anti-politics of miraculous technological salvation”. It’s also “not the end of the world”. Instead, it’s a struggle between “actually existing people over actually existing crises with actually existing differences, interests, and prospects. Climate change is about power.”
Politicians in the global north rarely talk this way. They think of climate as an “on/off switch”. “‘We’re doing some climate’”, says Chaudhary, mimicking them, “‘would you prefer we do nothing?’”. But there are two large clusters of “doing something”, both of which Chaudhary examines.
The first is what he calls “rightwing climate realism”. This encompasses a “broad spectrum”, from those who favour “slower climate mitigation and adaptation” to climate barbarism, but it’s ultimately about concentrating, preserving and enhancing existing political and economic power. That is why Chaudhary is insistent that, when we think of climate policies, we must pay attention to plans for borders and policing, too.
He considers Joe Biden a type of rightwing climate realist. Among the US president’s most important climate policies is not just the Inflation Reduction Act but the US National Security Strategy, Chaudhary argues. “It is insanely jingoistic,” he says. It describes, for instance, out-competing China. If that’s the framework, he argues, we’re doomed, “because US-China cooperation is vital”. Ultimately, rightwing climate realists know there will be “instability” and “they are preparing for it”. That they will be successful is not only “plausible and possible, but probable,” he says.
That is why the second avenue of “doing something”, composed of “the rest of us”, is so important. Chaudhary advocates for “leftwing climate realism”, which accepts the science, not because it’s a discipline “beyond impugning” but because it’s quite clear that there are ecological limits on this planet. We need a slower life, he argues; a circular economic system, where firms compete for the same amount of finite profit and the state dominates certain sectors. This will be good for the planet and for people, producing “a world relieved from social, economic, and ecological despair and exhaustion”.
So how do we get on this “faster […] track to a slower life?” Answering this question is one of the other main aims of Exhausted of the Earth. Chaudhary deploys a version of realism informed by thinkers such as Franzt Fanon (the title pays homage to Fanon’s classic, The Wretched of the Earth, on the trauma of colonisation), Audre Lorde and philosopher Raymond Geuss. Each of them examine how to build up power and what methods of outreach will be most effective.
The usual mechanisms alone – elections and demonstrations – are not enough, Chaudhary argues. If Keir Starmer’s Labour wins the next UK general election, Chaudhary has “very little hope” this will mean “any appreciable change for climate issues”, he says. Leftwing climate realists must think outside of the box, “not only to influence major parties” but to build networks of people and groups beyond these traditional political spaces.
Emotions can help with this because they are how people “relate to the world”, he says. But aside from ecoanxiety (an overwhelming disquiet about environmental crisis) and solastalgia (the distress caused by the environmental changes where you live, causing a kind of homesickness), how we feel, a more “inchoate” sense of exhaustion, is missing from a lot of climate texts, he says.
“I might feel exhaustion in a particular way – like burnout, that’s very common for someone in my social position in a place like the United States,” Chaudhary explains, “but someone else might be feeling it as pure bodily fatigue [and] someone else might be feeling it as ‘my people have never had a chance to express ourselves’.” Tapping into this can unite people, he says.
This makes a lot of sense. But halfway through reading Exhausted of the Earth, I wonder whether it could also be demobilising? If we’re uniting over how exhausted we are, might we end up deciding we’re too exhausted to do anything about it?
No, Chaudhary argues – exhaustion is just the stage for action, and then we have to coordinate and build from this shared feeling. In the global north, the right understands this far better than the left, organising in churches or radical right cells that are deeply emotional. But the left can learn alternative strategies of organising by looking around the world for inspiration.
Chaudhary cites examples including the Muslim Brotherhood, who he says create support and connection by building clinics, fixing people’s phones or helping when they’re behind on rent. Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia, which is “less a classic, formal party than a sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely bound set of social movements”. Socialists, indigenous groups and intellectuals are all involved and they have radically transformed society, including providing the conditions for the Cochabamba Agreement, “probably the most radical official transnational climate politics document ever produced,” he says.
Too often in places such as the UK and US, the left have an idealised vision of an industrial worker who will be the agent of change and a rosy vision of returning to the postwar welfare state model. Chaudhary cites the work of eco-modernists Leigh Phillips and Matt Huber, whom he critiques among other things for “treating 2024 as 1924’. Now production is flung all over the world and climate is inherently a cross-border issue – so we must think and organise internationally, he argues.
Born in the Bronx, living in New York’s most diverse borough, Queens, and from a Jewish and Indian background (he describes himself as a “red diaper grandchild” of sorts), he knows international solidarity not only feels good but is necessary.
And this requires another kind of realism – understanding what might appeal to the greatest number of people globally, from peasants in the global south to farmers in the global north. It’s unlikely, he says, that we’ll get communism or socialism in the next 10 years – a small farmer in Iowa “doesn’t want to obliterate private property”. But we can get “some pretty good stuff” through “decommodifying many of the key pillars of socioeconomic life and creatively working within ecological constraints”, even if “we’ll probably still have basic market mechanisms for some things”.
If some of this sounds like triangulation, he insists it isn’t. “In between meaningless reform and impossible revolution,” he writes, “we find mixed existing and historical models of formal state, civil, and guerrilla strategies.” Knowing what will appeal to the greatest number of people, then, doesn’t just amount to watering down your approach. Realism moves politics from the realm of morality to efficacy, not in the sense of just working in “the system” but figuring out “where the power is going to come from to get these changes through”. What, we should ask, is strategically necessary to achieve this different world.
This includes, Chaudhary argues, refusing to shy away from violence – from the interpersonal through to the destruction of property. We are already living in a capitalist world that is violent in all kinds of ways, he says: communities destroyed by the changing climate and people eking out a living in endless precarity. And it would be ridiculous to believe that “fossil capital” will simply give in, he says – instead, it will inevitably deploy state and private violence to ensure its interests are protected.
Steeped in critical theory, Chaudhary is wary of instrumentalism. But with the climate crisis, he realises there is now no other option: “I am forced into self-defence”; “sabotage”, “blockades”, and “yes, just straight up violence”. He points to precedents such as the suffragettes in the UK, Martin Luther King’s movement in the US and Gandhi in India, all of which involved both planned and spontaneous acts of violence.
But he is not arguing violence should be the “principal mode of struggle” – rather, that leftwing climate realism has to “work across a host of terrains” to be successful, including sports clubs, art movements or government.
Much of what he’s talking about might be “quite radical”, he admits, but it should not be “verboten”. The climate crisis is “not the apocalypse’, he says. Billions will die but the world will not end. “There is not going to be a moment that it clicks and fire falls from the sky and you realise, ‘Ah, the climate has changed’. It’s already happening.” And what we do about it is up for grabs.
The Exhausted of Earth by Ajay Singh Chaudhary (Repeater Books, £14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
