Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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of their everyday life is based on something bigger than that. People tend to start looking for a pattern, and I think that’s the point at which disaster communism has to intervene and say that we can operate on the basis of a destruction of the things that are destroying us.
D: Yes. To say “yes” to what we want—and what is already created in cramped spaces—necessitates saying “no” to the world that dominates save for those cracks or openings. I actually have a slight concern about the phrase “disaster communism” though, which is partly to do with it being such a snappy phrase. I worry that it can travel without the meaning we’re trying to outline here, because when you hear “disaster communism” it can bring to mind a communist take on Wyndham’s “cozy catastrophism.” Like, “hey, if the world ends, we can build a kind of communism.”
A: I would agree. I’d probably also go as far as to say that we should try to develop something else because I’m not even sure “disaster” is quite the right kind of word for encapsulating what we are really trying to resist and survive given that it’s not one disaster or even a series of disasters, it’s a particularly potent mix of catastrophe and normality in which both are murderous. Perhaps the problem of coupling “disaster” and “communism” is that it implies a unified response to a unified crisis, when in fact we have different resistances, necessitated by a group-differentiated schism of normality and catastrophes.
I think the undercurrent to this conversation is the specter of what is now quite openly and explicitly called fascism. We have talked about the potentialities of such fascism in the works of Paul Kingsnorth, and early on in relation to Garrett Hardin’s “Lifeboat Ethics,”19 and how it would be quite easy to imagine a response to climate change in which those at the top of systems of oppressive power, those empowered by capital, the state, gender, class, race, sexuality, basically live out a sort of super-privileged version of what Rebecca Solnit is talking about. The core vision of dystopian films recently has been that either the rich people go and live in the sky or a magic island, etc., but that doesn’t seem realistic. Actually, what’s more likely to happen is that the city breaks up into increasingly small fragments in which extreme privilege and protected privilege are surrounded by a mass of those who don’t have the power to defend themselves, and that plays out around moments of disasters as well. There’s several accounts I remember reading after Hurricane Sandy of people watching the streets of New York, just as the hurricane was about to hit, filled with carloads of rich white New Yorkers going to the countryside or to stay in hotels—they were being filmed by Black and Latinx workers who had to stay at work. There’s something strong there about the nature of the disaster—some people literally in the absurd, nightmarish situation of not being able to escape the disaster because their boss wouldn’t let them.
BASE Magazine: As well as signing a raft of Presidential Memoranda and Executive Orders which reduce the scope of environmental protection oversight for “high-priority” infrastructure and energy projects, the Trump administration also imposed a gag order on offices within the US Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stop them from releasing public-facing documents. In response to the order, and freezes on resources, we’ve seen dissenting voices from authorities previously in alignment with the state—the National Park Service (@NotAltWorld), the EPA (@UngaggedEPA), and NASA (@RogueNASA) calling for people to #resist. In terms of media dissemination, do these alt formulations present any hint towards a valuable affordance or is the gesture, at best, a populist gimmick? Is there some unrealized application for the alternative channel from the authoritative (peer-reviewed) voice when it comes to information around climate change?
A: I think the reaction to these accounts, and the supposedly “dissenting” elements of the US state they represent, is dangerous to be honest. Celebrating these accounts overlooks a lot of the fundamental problematics we have to engage with, and creates a fictional division between some form of rational, proper, scientific state and an irrational, improper, populist perversion of the state.
I think that’s dangerous because it occludes a lot of the actual features of the American state which make it so lethal and which are responsible for the current series of differentiated catastrophes which people are experiencing. For example, it’s weird to see the National Park Service (NPS) become this embodiment of American liberalism given that the NPS is literally a protracted celebration of a form of wilderness made possible by genocide against Indigenous people. Then again, perhaps it’s a good icon for the liberal resistance, because the NPS sets out to preserve a certain kind of pristine purity from the devastation of modernity embodied by urban life (and its associations with blackness). It’s actually a colonial myth very similar to American liberalism itself.
I think you can also say related things about the Rogue NASA (@RogueNASA) Twitter account. As part of the military-industrial complex, NASA’s history and its self-mythologizing as a colonial “explorer” makes it a depressing, if unsurprising, hero for the liberal #resistance. I guess that’s what I felt was dangerous about that particular moment in which people started fetishizing a certain form of civil-service resistance. It occludes the nature of the American state and I think we should be careful not to allow populism, or Trump’s form of populism, to distract us from the nature of the American state as an organization of forces of heteropatriarchal, settler colonial, capitalist domination—that whole murderous configuration shouldn’t be overlooked just because some civil service people don’t like Trump.
D: The one thing I would say is that it remains to be seen what kind of forms these movements will take, and certainly in the March for Science there was a lot of very unhelpful exceptionalism—“we are scientists, we produce truth”—which kind of suggests that as scientists they should be protected. In this sense, they failed to join up with already existing struggles and with other movements because they even exceptionalize themselves in relation to other movements. That’s worrying, but I’m sure there are elements that do want to connect and do want to join up and are doing so. The NPS, of course, is massively colonial: it has literally forced people off their land and continues to do so. But there may be people who work for the NPS who would like to address this, are aware of this, and would like to remedy it in some way. Just because they are struggling at the moment as rogue employees of the NPS doesn’t necessarily mean that they are struggling for a return to what was—you can struggle against your own history as well. Whether that is happening or not, I don’t know. We certainly saw it in the student movement around tuition fees and privatization of higher education in the UK—that wasn’t just a struggle for the return of the university as a space where relatively privileged people could have a free education or even be paid to have an education, at its best it was a struggle for a fundamentally different kind of education. So perhaps those struggles will take that kind of direction. I’m sure elements of those struggles will and they are the ones I guess that will potentially have the most interest for radical politics, against and beyond the world as it is.
A: And I guess this is the point where it might be important to talk about a certain form of “treachery” against the manifestation of power that one is willingly and/or unwillingly incorporated into. I have been thinking a lot about treachery in the context of recent discussions around the term “ally.” I mean, I think a lot of people have come to realize that the term ally is problematic, but there seems to have been an easy shift towards “accomplice” instead and I don’t think that has actually resolved the fundamental problem: both imply that there is some form of easy movement that one can make towards someone in quite a different structural position, which means that you can then unilaterally declare “okay, I am an accomplice now.”
I think what this often means, especially for people like myself who are in a particularly privileged position, is that I have to actually think about what it means to be traitorous or treacherous. I think the interesting thing about the figure of the traitor is that you never fully escape the thing that you are betraying. The traitor is always an ambiguous figure who can never be fully trusted because they can always be drawn back into the form they are betraying. So, I guess there is something interesting to think about in terms of these state workers. You know, whenever the police commit another atrocity, they usually pull out some policeman who has a critique of the