Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene

Of all the liberation movements of the twentieth century, the one that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams did not liberate a class or a gender or a race. It liberated an element- carbon.

Today, the carbon liberation front threatens to crash the entire climate system. In Molecular Red, Wark looks for a way to understand, and perhaps even combat, this implacable force. He revisits the work of Alexander Bogdanov - Lenin's rival - and the great proletkult writer and engineer Andre Platonov.

In this reading, the Soviet experiment emerges from the past as an allegory for our time. Moving toward the present, Wark reads Donna Haraway's cyborg critique and science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian utopia as powerful resources for thinking what the carbon liberation front has wrought.