cars—and people have long clung to predictions about the imminent collapse of the global population. But they’re just wrong and I think damaging to any attempt to challenge climate change.
I think extrapolation is different; it’s the mode of a lot of science fiction. Here, I’m reminded of the claim made by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha in their introduction to Octavia’s Brood—a collection of short stories from people of color involved in social justice movements in North America/Turtle Island—that all organizing is science fiction.8 Perhaps we could think about dystopian fiction here. It’s had quite a bit of press recently, but the way much of this is framed is unhelpful, I think. Dystopian fiction is positioned as something that can help us “understand” the present in a narrowly empirical way (which denies agency), and the novels celebrated—Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid’s Tale—are limited even in that sense because they disavow the role that race, in particular, plays in structuring our present. And, in the first three of these, the “victim” is understood to be the abstract individual rather than collective subjects co-constituted by race, class, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability.9
So, instead, I think we need to engage with dystopian fiction that extrapolates from the white supremacist, able-bodied, colonial, heteropatriarchy that structures our world—here I’m thinking of writers like Octavia Butler, Stephen Graham Jones, and Marge Piercy. This isn’t just a descriptive process—extrapolation doesn’t simply describe our world or even where it’s going, but at its best gives us the opportunity to intervene in that through collective struggle. It tells readers that acting in the present can make a difference to the future. The science fiction scholar Tom Moylan talks about what he calls “critical dystopias,” and I think they’re particularly useful here, because they present collective organization and struggle within the dystopian society being depicted as well. Even if things continue to get worse, this won’t be the end; there is always room for collective struggle.10
Having said that, I am a little skeptical about the power of literature, partly because we don’t generally read it together anymore—unless you’re part of a reading group or reading at a university, you probably read fiction as an isolated individual. I think the popularity of Octavia’s Brood is interesting: it’s got a large social media following, has been used by reading groups, and seems to have opened up a space for collective discussion about the future and how acting now can alter it.11 It doesn’t necessarily have to be literary fiction that plays this role: “design fiction” is a potentially powerful tool too, for example.
BASE Magazine: In an older issue of The Occupied Times, we asked Silvia Federici about surviving apocalypse(s). She told us:
The prospect of annihilation is a relative one. For many communities in the US—Black communities whose children are murdered by the police in the street, Indigenous communities like the Navajo that have to coexist with uranium mining, communities where unemployment is skyrocketing and the list goes on—apocalypse is now. In this context, we struggle for justice by refusing to separate the struggle against the destruction of the environment from the struggle against prisons, war, exploitation. You cannot worry about climate change if your life’s in danger every day, as is the case for so many people in this country.12
What do you recognize in these descriptions as possible points of engagement to building our capabilities to survive?
A: I think it’s very interesting how Federici responds to that, and I think part it is in the way that you worded the question: “The consequences of climate change are forcing humanity to contemplate its own destruction in ways it hasn’t since the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War.” I think what that comes back to is what we were saying earlier about these images of universal catastrophe. Because that question very much sums up the way climate change is depicted in terms of this global, universal threat to the species and a particular framing of the human, but I think it’s very important to then pose the questions that Black studies has insisted on: Who is the human? Who gets to be human? Sylvia Wynter’s work here is incredibly important.13
I think what climate change 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
