harder to reflect on the rapid ruining of the past, present, and future all at once. Talking of ecological disaster offers a way to enfold these different times of ruination.
This enfolding capacity is evident in Neil Smith’s understanding of disaster as a composite of risk, result, and response. His writing also offers another shaping element in what it means to think of ecological crisis as disaster:
It is generally accepted among environmental geographers that there is no such thing as a natural disaster. In every phase and aspect of a disaster—(physical) causes, vulnerability, preparedness, results and response, and reconstruction—the contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus. Hurricane Katrina provides the most startling confirmation of that axiom.12
In line with our claim that ecological crisis is group-differentiated, Smith notes that “disasters don’t simply flatten landscapes, washing them smooth,” but instead “deepen and erode the ruts of social difference they encounter.”13 Clyde Woods, importantly, extends this rut further into the history of “plantation capitalism,” noting that “activists in New Orleans were very insistent that there was not just a disaster and people were taking advantage of it, there was a disaster before Katrina.”14 While disaster collapses the distinction between the process of ruining and the ruins it creates, it simultaneously deepens the differentiation between who and what bears the brunt of disaster and who and what does not.
What we call “disaster communism” is an immediately ethical and eminently practical response to this differentiated disaster. Such a statement is anathema to the liberal devotees of establishment responses to catastrophe. To them, disaster communism could only be a perverse and antipragmatic faith in things that don’t yet exist, or a dangerous romanticization of practices that have already failed. Such critiques indicate not only an obvious detachment from the lived reality of disaster communities, but also a determined ignorance of the inefficacy of supposed liberal “solutions.” While liberal critics will claim disaster communism is based on promises not practices, they will also maintain a strange silence about the fact the IPCC’s own solutions depend on as-yet-uninvented technofixes. This can only be the fantasy of that which claims to be nonideological, and therein sits the most pernicious ideology. Disaster communism already exists—indeed, some components have existed for hundreds of years—but is criticized as a radical fantasy, while the as-yet-uninvented technologies of carbon sequestration and geo-engineering are taken as matters of scientific fact.
Not content with things that don’t yet exist, leftist critics of disaster communism might supplement these technofixes with spatial fixes or displacements of the climate disaster. In this vision of the future, nature is not to be mourned but managed. In our view, the imaginations of assorted Keynesians, Green New Dealers, and accelerationists tend to be constrained by a romanticization of labor-saving technologies and automation. We do not want to be mistaken for defending work, yet what these architects of the future cannot admit is that automation does not save labor-time as much as displace it. The automation of production only changes the form and composition of labor and the places in which labor is performed. In terms of form and composition, automation merely reorganizes labor-time so that a greater proportion is devoted to the intellectual labor of innovation. Such knowledge is eventually embodied in machines, which of course have to be built as well. As Marx convincingly showed in the longest chapter of Capital, “It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working-class revolt.”15 This shift is undertaken, whether consciously or unconsciously, in pursuit of crushing the power of workers. By reducing the portion of “living labor” enrolled in capital (thus reducing the number of laborers who can go on strike, blockade the factory or abduct their boss), the “dead labor” of machines (who can be relied upon not to blockade or sabotage anything) compose the value of a product or energy system.
Just as it changes the form and composition of labor, automation also changes the places of labor. All technology requires energy but energy itself is harnessed through work.16 Even renewable energy systems require new or recycled raw materials such as rare-earth metals, lithium, and copper to be extracted. The cheapest way of doing this is through the appropriation of raw materials and exploitation of labor, most likely in the Global South. Under capitalism, mining is an inescapably violent and toxic practice. Separating raw materials from waste increasingly requires chemical and biological “work” (in addition to human and nonhuman labor) to recover harder-to-extract reserves. Costs can be driven down if environmental protections are circumvented outright through bribery or, more commonly, structural adjustment policies. Mined materials are circulated along hypersecuritized global supply chains. International maritime shipping is said to compose up to three percent of global carbon emissions. Yet such maritime transport is specifically excluded from the transnational Paris Agreement, demonstrating the absurdity of contemporary international climate politics (albeit the International Maritime Organization has recently tried to mandate for cleaner fuels). Globally transported raw materials must, of course, be coordinated with one another in order to be transformed and assembled in factories. The latter, more conventional, sites of exploitation ultimately rely upon directly productive labor as well as social infrastructures of cheap food, clean water and care, all of which maintain workers’ bodies. Finally, products shipped to their points of consumption are used for increasingly short periods of time before being discarded into landfills or recirculated as e-waste for one last gasp of value extraction.
Automation has already failed the vast majority of the population of the planet. While it has undoubtedly benefitted white colonial capital, the effects of automation on racialized, colonized proletarians have always been disastrous. The form, composition, and places of human and nonhuman exploitation, capitalization, and appropriation continue to produce what Marx called “surplus populations” or the “industrial reserve army”—massive groups of unemployed laborers whose existence serves to keep the cost of labor down.17
It is worth considering a visceral example of the consequences of this system. Foxconn, the electronics giant infamous for its exploitation of workers in China, cut more than 400,000 jobs between 2012 and 2016 through the introduction of tens of thousands of robots.18 By 2020, the company plans to fully automate thirty percent of its production. While Foxconn’s jobs are rapidly disappearing, its ecological destructiveness persists. In 2013, Foxconn was accused of releasing vast quantities of heavy metals into tributaries that feed the Yangtze and Huangpu—the two rivers that supply most of Shanghai’s water. Locals told reporters of high incidences of cancer. They had stopped eating cuttlefish from the rivers or vegetables from the fields for fear of the health consequences. The central government had already relocated one entire community away from the area, apparently because of its unnaturally high incidence of cancer.19
This is part of a much greater problem in China. In 2013, researchers estimated that “between 8 percent and 20 percent of China’s arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals.”20 China’s surplus populations thus face a double disaster: there are no jobs in the newly automated factories and they cannot return to live on the land because pollution has made agricultural subsistence nearly impossible. Automation is not a solution to the ecological crisis. It merely intensifies the vulnerability of the surplus populations it creates, making them ever more dependent on resources that capital has already ruined.
Faced with the impossibility of surviving on land where nothing can grow, amidst factories where no one can work, in housing where no one is safe, it is not surprising that surplus populations are forced into migration. Under global capitalism, it is impossible to escape the processes that produce local ruins. Racialized proletarians who move from one country to another may find work and thus survival but they will still be exposed to the differentiated disasters of the ecological crisis. After Hurricane Irma in 2017, for example, most reports focused on the damage to Florida’s agriculture. The sugarcane harvest was destroyed as was much
