Hope Against Hope

Writings on Ecological Crisis

Out of the Woods

• Publisher: Common Notions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781942173366
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

We are told we are living in the middle of a climate crisis of unprecedented proportions. As doomsday scenarios mount, hope collapses. Even as more and more people around the planet experience climate disaster as immediate and urgent, our imagination and programs for transformation lag. The disasters are already here, and the crises, longstanding, are ongoing.

In Hope Against Hope, the Out of the Woods collective investigates the critical relation between climate change and capitalism and calls for the expansion of our conceptual toolbox to organize within and against ecological crisis characterized by deepening inequality, rising far-right movements, and—relatedly—more frequent and devastating disasters. While much of environmentalist and leftist discourse in this political moment remain oriented toward horizons that repeat and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions, Out of the Woods charts a revolutionary course adequate to our times.

At the center of the renewed political orientation Hope Against Hope expounds is an abolitionist approach to border imperialism, reactionary ecology, and state violence that underpins many green solutions and modes of understanding nature. It reminds us of the frequent moments and movements of solidarity emerging in the ruins all around us. Their stunning conclusion to the disarray of politics in our seemingly end times is the urgency of creating what Out of the Woods calls “disaster communism”—the collective power to transform our future political horizons from the ruins and establish a climate future based in common life.

II

NATURES

NATURES

INTRODUCTION

CYBORG ECOLOGY

It is impossible to read—and difficult to write—about the ecological crisis without encountering “nature,” a word harboring manifold overlapping political meanings. Two political approaches to nature are particularly apparent in contemporary politics, each of which has supposedly liberatory and clearly reactionary uses. The first is a Promethean approach, in which nature represents an outside wilderness that must be subordinated or tamed. With this approach, nature has an immutability and scarcity to be overcome and very often a colonial frontier which men, nation-states or firms construct and must grapple with to produce order and value. Pitting itself in opposition to the Promethean conquest of nature, the primary counterhegemonic nature is romantic. No less modern than the Promethean, the romantic approach describes a nature of purity, scarcity, and untamability in need of protection. This nature too can be colonial or racist. Its heteropatriarchical politics are as apparent and reprehensible as the Promethean approach, and its local scale of action can serve reactionary as much as revolutionary ends.¹ In sum, Promethean and romantic approaches are two sides of the same coin, mutually bound together in a hegemony of contradiction.

Promethean approaches to nature are readily apparent in everyday life. This is the vision of natural resources taken by energy and mining firms, states, and agriculturalists. A new leftist defense of such an approach has come from the authors of “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics” (2013), who “declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over capital.”² In 2016, the authors of “The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation” contend that “if nature is unjust, change nature,” and position themselves as technomaterialist and antinaturalist.³ Some aspects of the Promethean approach might seem appealing to the Left: if we use our intellect in common, could we not invent labor-saving machines and organizational practices that conserve maximal amounts of human freedom and ecological life? It isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but such abstraction relies on a fundamental forgetting of the productive and reproductive labor required to sustain the supply chains of resource extraction central to contemporary technology.

Many on the Left negate such techno-optimist visions through an inversion of the moral economy of technology and nature, sometimes through the same texts. Noted ecological Marxist John Bellamy Foster argues against technomodernist readings of Marx, that anticapitalist approaches must accept ecological limits and defend a localist “sense of place” against globalizing capitalism.⁴ In direct contrast to the xenofeminist (XF) position which takes alienation as foundational, he argues alienation is historically specific: “capitalism leads to a loss of connection with nature, fellow humans, and community.”⁵ In short, the problem is that we are alienated from nature by capital.

Such a position seems acceptable at face value. And yet, the same story of nostalgia and loss of purity is central to an equally modern romantic tradition fully consistent with reactionary ideology. Like Iyko Day’s diagnosis of North American settler politics of landscape, we see such a position as a form of “romantic anti-capitalism.” Such aesthetics and politics frequently rely on reductive European accounts of Indigenous peoples as well as anti-Semitic or xenophobic demonizations of rootless abstract migrants.⁶ It is too easy to fall into essentialist understandings of race, gender, labor, and nation that reproduce our dystopia. To say that romantics can fall into such reactionary articulations of nature does not mean that all do. Yet we frequently see such narratives at work within tendencies and orientations of the Green Left. Why might this be the case?

Some of the connections between visions of nature and reactionary thought are surprisingly easy to trace. In the mid-1960s, Garrett Hardin coined the ubiquitous environmental concept “the tragedy of the commons.” This thought experiment posits that without strict controls, population growth will outstrip natural resources. Consequently, Hardin argued that to avoid such a crisis, we must limit immigration, increase privatization, and remove support for food aid. Shockingly, this reductive scientific standpoint and its reactionary conclusions have become environmentalist common sense. Hardin’s white nationalist assumptions, smuggled into popular science essays through his scientific credibility as a microbiologist, equate nature and nation to rationalize coercive state violence aimed at reproductive autonomy and nonwhite immigration. His metaphor of the crowded lifeboat rationalizes triage as a necessity of survival. These ideas have had influence far beyond the far right: we have encountered attenuated forms of them in the Green Party of England and Wales and direct-action eco-activist circles. One cannot attend a lecture on the state of the global climate in the US or UK without an audience member handwringing about the dangers of overpopulation.

Indeed, without clear class and antiracist politics, reactionary ideas of nature easily circulate within the Green Left. Climate activist, novelist, and poet Paul Kingsnorth calls for an environmentalism grounded in what he takes to be a timeless relation to place: the nation. Kingsnorth understands the nation as organically rooted in the natural landscape, and thus in conflict with “rootless ideology of the fossil fuel age,” which he locates emerging from metropolitan individuals who align themselves with immigrants. Such an understanding of “rootless globalists” draws on familiar anti-Semitic tropes which can only benefit the far right’s call for more stringent border controls. Indeed, Kingsnorth’s claims about a longstanding identity rooted in national place are wildly ahistorical. His position is completely unmoored from even a cursory understanding of the history of borders and nations, which would demonstrate their relative recency as European and Euro-American institutions, and their rare coincidence with the transition zones between ecologies. The facile comparison Kingsnorth frequently draws between European and Indigenous understandings of “nation” fails to recognize Indigenous internationalisms central to the fight against empire. In “Lies of the Land: Against and Beyond Paul Kingsnorth’s Völkisch Environmentalism,” we argue that instead of equating nature with pristine wilderness encroached upon by foreigners and urban elites, only a relational notion of place makes possible another environmentalism. This politics would not reify borders and nation-states, but rather build solidarity in order to abolish them.

Surely, however, we must accept that the planet’s resources are increasingly scarce and this poses limits to the conditions for human and nonhuman flourishing, right? In “The Political Economy of Hunger,” we explore such questions by dispelling the Malthusian myth that world hunger results from a scarcity of food, and by implication, that feeding a larger population would necessitate the production of more food. Engaging the work of development economist Amartya Sen, we debunk this trope and explore the political possibilities it forecloses.

Developing food systems that can sustain healthy human and nonhuman systems beyond capitalist maldistribution will require new technical and organizational forms and new politics. In “Contemporary Agriculture: Climate, Capital, and Cyborg Agroecology,” we discuss the polarization of recent movements into an anticorporate, pro-organic, peasant-agriculture camp and a corporate, pro-GMO, capitalist agriculture camp. We propose Donna Haraway’s “cyborg agroecology” as a way to think through questions of dispossession, biotechnology, centralization of capital, and agrarian commons. While opposed to any simple tech-fix, we see no reason to throw the technobaby out with the capitalist bathwater. It is our view that many of the concerns with GMOs have more to do with capitalist restructuring of agriculture than biotech per se. Under the aegis of synthetic biology, recent biotech has adopted some commons-based practices such as open source libraries of biological “parts.” This has been partly a result of anti-GMO struggles’ hostility to corporate power.⁷ And while capital can thrive on open source principles, we stand by our call to refuse conflations of scientific technique with capitalism on the one hand, and environmentalism with protection of a nature imagined as “untampered” on the other. We hope that our critiques of ahistorical principles of “modernity” upheld by Prometheans dispels concerns and accusations of “ecomodernism.”

The final three essays engage the ideas of some thinkers who have taken up the problem of understanding the simultaneity of capitalist exploitation and production of nature. In “James O’Connor’s Second Contradiction of Capitalism,” we discuss an influential eco-Marxist account that brings “the conditions of production,” including ecosystems, within the scope of Marxist analysis. “Murray Bookchin’s Liberatory Technics” engages the ideas of the Marxist-turned-anarchist-turned-communalist. Bookchin was an early critic of agrochemical pollution who also advanced a post-scarcity politics open to liberating technologies. Bookchin’s philosophy of technology offers us a clear alternative to either the Promethean domination of nature or the conservative localism of the romantics. “Organizing Nature in the Midst of Crisis” is a critical review of historian Jason W. Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015). While affinities might be drawn between our approach and Moore’s, our “messy cyborg politics” results in a different response to ecological catastrophe.

Though we hope our critiques are generatively expansive, we acknowledge these three essays give only a limited sense of the possibilities of contemporary ecological praxis. They are, after all, the ideas of three white men from the United States. Another charge might be lodged against us at this point: does our “cyborg ecology” leave us unable to distinguish among different political responses to ecological crisis? This would likely be the position of the Marxist polemicist Andreas Malm, whose book, The Progress of This Storm (2018), attempts to produce a historical materialist theory for a warming world.

Malm does not believe that any communist or revolutionary politics capable of explaining and confronting the climate crisis can be found in Neil Smith’s “production of nature” thesis nor Haraway’s “cyborg manifesto.” He argues that any reference to the intertwined complexity of sociotechnological and ecological systems is simply postmodern “dissolutionism.” Without a firm binary between nature and humanity, Malm fears, it is all mud. His political argument is that without an easily definable understanding of nature (e.g., as separate from humanity) it is not possible to develop a political program adequate to confronting the climate crisis. We cannot, Malm argues, distinguish between better or worse accounts of political struggle.

There is much we agree with in The Progress of This Storm. Malm argues that the tinkering of networks and signifiers is an apolitical dead end and urges us towards a revolutionary materialist approach to ecological catastrophe. Malm grasps the uneveness and depth of the ecological crisis within which we find ourselves. Yet we contest his argument that to posit nature as “constructed” or “produced” works against a revolutionary project, feeding into the moorless project of capitalism. Developing a more complicated and complex (and indeed, historically situated) account of nature and society does not in and of itself preclude ecological class struggle. This book, we hope, serves as some indication of that. If, as part of the climate crisis, “immigrants and other others can be framed as external enemies,”⁸ it is in fact crucial to examine how concepts and constructions of nature have helped accomplish that externalization. To us, it is necessary to meaningfully engage with antiracist and anti-imperialist approaches to this multifaceted crisis.

1. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I. Borders
• II. Natures
• III. Futures
• IV. Strategies
• Bibliography
• Index
• About Out of the Woods Collective