This book’s authors won’t stand any longer for the immense chasm between the scientific consensus pointing towards dire outcomes and the lack of concerted official action to prevent them. It’s time, they argue, for us to take that action ourselves.
For many of us, the contrast between what is known about the climate crisis and how we go about our daily lives creates a disorienting cognitive dissonance. How does one reconcile the immense chasm between the scientific consensus pointing towards dire outcomes and the lack of concerted action to prevent them? Much less the lack of concern amongst the general population? Or the false solutions and equivocation put forth by those who do seem to understand the situation?
It is not unreasonable to suggest the anxiety provoked by this dissonance is now manifesting in all manner of grotesqueries; ascendance of the far right, geopolitical brinkmanship, the very barbarism Rosa Luxemburg warned of. It is a “time of monsters,” as Antonio Gramsci put it.
This is the “irrational rationality” that structures our feelings, our experience of the world, our daily existence. As we get ready for work, put the kids on the bus, try to relax, the vast majority of humans and the ecosystems upon which we depend are being sacrificed for the profit of a tiny few. As we brush our teeth, say our prayers, and crawl into bed, the inexorable machine grinds on and the runaway train rushes towards the abyss. Yet reaching the brake feels as distant as ever.
In place of resistance, disavowal has become the dominant strategy for avoiding today’s onslaught of indignities: I know full well … but act as if I don’t. Let’s call this acute disconnect, this ecological-breakdown-induced form of alienation and estrangement, climate surrealism.
On top of this profound anxiety and trauma we add the cynicism of our age. Nothing will change because nothing can change. We lost. They won. End of history and all that. Best to put the grand narratives behind us and do what we can to tweak the system: perhaps an “abundance agenda,” a green new deal, investment in renewables, or what the authors of the book All In: A Revolutionary Theory to Stop Climate Collapse describe as the “four-point-four-is-better-than-four-point-five movement.” Mark Fisher eulogized the defeat in a piece for k-punk: “‘revolution’ is — and has been for a long time — a malignant ghost for the left.”
Read the full review HERE.
Dave Jones is a retired fishing guide and autodidact living in western Montana. He is the father of three amazing women and husband to a fourth. He is a founding member of the Zootown Zapatistas and is active with DSA as well as with System Change Not Climate Change.
Editors’ note: The authors of All In and their allies have raised a clarion call for others to join them in rapidly shaping the global revolution they urge us to create together. You can purchase the book, find the chapter that came after its printing, and learn more about taking part in desperately needed next steps at their website, https://all-in.now/. To ground yourself further in the ideas of the book, watch the conversation Mariana Rodrigues and her colleague Alice Gato had with System Change Not Climate Change in July 2025 here.
