‘You can’t shoot climate change’: Richard Seymour on how far right exploits environmental crisis

In his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, the Marxist thinker explores how extremist movements around the world seek to blame fictional enemies for real disasters

Like a lot of people, Richard Seymour, 47, was trying to quietly ignore the climate crisis and get on with his life. As a prolific Marxist intellectual, this meant industriously writing about a range of subjects: the Iraq war, neoliberalism, the class struggle. The climate crisis could wait until after the revolution. Besides, he didn’t have the expertise or emotional capacity for it.

But in 2015 that changed. Walking in a local park on Christmas Day, he couldn’t ignore how noticeably warm it was. He started to think about not just what has already been lost but what global heating means for the losses to come. “Some sort of defence just went down,” he says, “and I experienced a preliminary bit of climate mourning.”