Abstract

In this article, we address the topic of climate conspiracy using the categories of abstract and concrete used by Marx and other Marxist scholars to account for how the reality of social and natural phenomena (such as the changing climate) finds itself not only contested and denied by minorities and social groups, but also ’objectified’ by attributing to specific actors the role of willing manipulators of the phenomenon itself. Taking advantage of climate scepticism and climate denialism, conspiracism blames specific actors for making climate a weapon to centralise and reinforce the power of governments controlled by liberal elites to manage and change the lives of millions of people. Conspiracism finds its main reason in the presence of a climate Leviathan that constitutes the most abstract form of techno-politics. In this perspective, we argue that conspiracism makes use of the hostile relationship between an abstract and a concrete vision of the climate, an enmity that has to do with the type of capitalist social and economic organisation where concrete abstraction prevails, as Marx had already indicated in various texts. In this split between the abstract and the concrete, and above all in the convergence of scientific abstraction and political-economic abstraction, and in the alleged subsumption of the real by the abstract, the formation process of conspiracy thinking in general, not just climate thinking, can be explained.