Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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actually requires us to do is to recognize that it’s not one apocalypse. What’s more terrifying to think about, but is perhaps more useful, is to realize that catastrophe and normality can coexist quite happily; that it’s not about some apocalyptic future but a catastrophic present. This seems especially pertinent in the situation where we had 5,000 migrants drowning in the Mediterranean last year, yet the current discussion is around the fiscal effects of Brexit. There is no squaring of that circle. In reality, Europe is experiencing a form of normality at the moment which is in complete contradiction to these catastrophes. I think what that question requires us to do, and what Federici starts to approach in her answer, is a differentiated vulnerability and the fact that catastrophe has always existed for some people.
However, I don’t think I can agree with her saying you cannot worry about climate change if your life’s in danger every day, because I think the people who’ve been historically struggling against that vulnerability were the first people to experience climate change. The people who’ve been displaced in Bangladesh, the Navajo Nation, the Standing Rock Sioux (who’re fighting the development of the Keystone Pipeline), I think those people have historical experiences, perhaps not always of climate change, but certainly of environmental destruction. When we think about the systematic and organized destruction of the ecosystems of the American Plains and the effect that had on the Indigenous peoples living there, you could say the Standing Rock Sioux have a historical experience of the destruction of the means to survive, not unconsciously as is happening with climate change but very deliberately and consciously.14 I think what’s important to say is that climate change is not unique in its destruction of one’s means for survival. To frame it in terms Federici might do herself, it’s all about the means by which we reproduce our daily lives. Climate change is the group-differentiated destruction of the means of our survival. Sometimes, for some people, that’s going to be catastrophic—meaning the complete obliteration of the means to reproduce yourself—but for others it will be minimal.
That’s exactly what we speak to when we talk of these false images of London underwater. One of the things that’s so cloying and disgusting about those images is the idea that climate change is a universal problem. What is perhaps more nightmarish about climate change is that it’s not; it’s a very particularized series of problems that will very differently affect a rich white man who owns a house in Primrose Hill and a Black working-class mother who lives on the floodplains of the Thames.15 I think there is an important distinction to embrace there. I think that’s almost the moment when we must begin to talk of building our capabilities to survive against group-differentiated vulnerabilities. What that forces us to comprehend is the capacity to organize ways to survive.
What I think Federici mentions is the fact that people have always been surviving catastrophes. Here, Out of the Woods would probably talk about disaster communism. Historically, after earthquakes, volcanoes or other moments of instability and damage, people will often exhibit mutual aid, social care, an elaboration of reproductive labor towards liberation. These actions are not contained in, or constrained by, the boundaries of colonial capital or heteropatriarchal individualism. I guess what I’m trying to say is, what Federici gestures towards when she talks of those things like the struggle of Black communities against the police, the struggle of the Navajo against uranium mining, is what Fanon would describe as a program of “total disorder.”16 I guess what we have to think about in terms of resisting climate change, is resistance not just to that but also to the systems of order that differentiate violences.
So, we have to think about organizing against climate change as mediated through a world dominated by colonial, heteropatriarchal capital. The violence is organized and differentiated by these structures and it is in the struggle to destroy those structures that we might also survive. It seems quite evident to me that we can realize a particular imagination that has always been practiced in struggles against catastrophe—struggles founded on care, reproduction, and warmth.17 Those have always been the things which have made it possible to survive every catastrophe of the past 2,000 years. People will still be fighting those battles even if white environmentalism does nothing about it—that’s another thing to insist on. This resistance will happen anyway, no matter what transpires in the corridors of power. It’s to what extent we can help each other to go beyond the survival of a few people and emerge from the current series of catastrophes into a world in which we would hope no one experiences them. A world beyond catastrophe is possible.
BASE Magazine: Disaster communism is a concept we’ve featured in older publications and we’ve been talking about here again, but it seems that the manner in which it is evoked often relies on the kind of grand “event” which was warned against earlier—for instance, the organizing in the wake of Hurricane Sandy is often brought up as an example of disaster communism in action. The description of care and survival just mentioned now seems to be a far neater deployment of the idea—and that feels a very comfortable fit to the organizing many of us who produce this publication are familiar with (for example, the struggles against the housing crisis and abusive components of our own social movements). Could we talk more about how if the catastrophe is now, how we may survive it?
A: I’ve been thinking about disaster communism in terms of what Fred Moten writes about as “fugitive planning”: this operation that’s always going on beneath the surface of social life because it’s the precondition of social life; it’s the means of a certain form of collective living.18 This is familiar for anyone who has had any experience with childcare—there are certain points when someone else looks after your kid whilst you go to the shops or something, and it’s a moment which has to happen to make it possible for you to carry out any basic tasks. I guess what’s confusing about the way we’ve been thinking about disaster communism is that there’s an uncertainty or vagueness about whether we are calling for something to come into being, or whether we are observing something that’s already happening and merely recognizing a certain way of extrapolating it. I think the complexity is that we do kind of use it both ways.
D: There’s a distinction between the two modes. There’s the “communizing” stuff that’s already happening that we can observe, like the kinds of communities that form around disasters, collective relations of care, mutual aid, etc. Then, there’s the idea that the term “communism” also names the linking of those struggles on a much larger scale. So communism-as-movement connects these otherwise isolated communizing practices that can actually help reinforce capitalism because capitalism will coopt the common: thanks for self-organizing all this, now we don’t have to pay anyone to do it! Also, you’ve helped increase property values in the area!
A: I guess that’s why I was thinking about Moten and planning because, as Moten is saying, against planning there is always policy—the attempt to extract value from planning, to strip-mine the social commons. So all those forms of reproductive labor can easily be exploited by an increasingly desperate state or state-capital formation. This is really notable in frontline care in terms of people being discharged from the NHS early on the expectation that their family will look after them. The policy formation of the state has turned towards care in the NHS being home-based rather than hospital-based, which is in no small part a cloak for the incorporation of planning into policy, and the subsumption of a certain form of social life into the antithesis of that—state and capital. So, I guess this is the ambiguity; what already exists wouldn’t necessarily destroy the thing that we want to destroy, that’s the problem. And this is always the ambiguity of survival as well, you know, survival in a world that depends on your reproduction and your destruction or in holding you in some kind of ground between the two, and that’s massively differentiated by race, gender, class, and sexuality. I suppose what we have to do is survive in a way that’s antithetical to the survival of the forms of power that oppress us. I guess this is the ambiguity at the heart of disaster communism: how do we survive the disaster whilst also destroying the things that make it a disaster in the first place? How do we become potent whilst rendering the threats to our lives impotent? This kind of constant contradiction or ambiguity is very hard to resolve in theory, but I think can often play itself out in practice.
To bring all of this back to climate change, I think this is what I disagree with fundamentally about Federici saying “you can’t