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 worry about climate change if you are already struggling with the everyday,” is that it doesn’t actually take someone very long to realize that the destruction 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
