An Abolition Politics for the Climate Crisis: Out of the Woods’ Hope Against Hope
State-centered climate solutions risk putting us on the path to ecofascism. The Out of the Woods collective provides an alternative framework: Disaster communism.
Photo by Steven Kamenar.
After decades of milquetoast promises and non-binding resolutions by governments and international institutions, we face the enormous question of how to tackle the climate crisis with the urgency that it demands. Since its revival by the Sunrise Movement, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey in 2019, the Green New Deal (GND) has dominated discourse in mainstream environmental politics. From liberals to socialists, the envisioned GND takes many forms, ranging from market-based solutions to a Keynesian stimulus and federal jobs program with public ownership of key economic sectors.
With the GND discourse already saturated, the Out of the Woods collective’s (OOTW) recent collection of essays, Hope Against Hope: Writings on the Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020) comes as a breath of fresh air. Hope Against Hope envisions a society liberated from oppressive forces such as borders, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and nascent fascism in the backdrop of the climate crisis. Contrary to conventional GND discourse, OOTW does not talk about policy measures to reduce emissions or provide jobs, but rather focuses on questions which should precede such discussions: who are these jobs for? Who are we building a sustainable future for? Who will get to live a good life in a post-crisis world?
These questions are explored across the four sections that make up the book: Borders, Natures, Futures and Strategies. Each section grapples with concerns overlooked by liberal Green New Deal discourse. “Borders” focuses on nationalism, anti-immigrant politics and their roles in nascent ecofascism; “Natures” explores how our understanding of nature determines our politics; “Futures” envisions an emancipated future for all; “Strategies” proposes how we can get there. The analysis—inspired in part by Black and Indigenous anarchists and communists—warns us that a nation-centric climate solution will likely result in climate apartheid against marginalized people.
OOTW’s proposed strategy, “disaster communism,” advocates for abolishing the existing capitalist social relations and extractivist relation with the environment without relying on the state to do so. Instead, they emphasize the role of mutual aid and collective opposition to state violence within communities affected by disasters. They argue that struggles currently undertaken by those who bear the highest burden of the ecological crisis are examples of disaster communism. The residents of Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’, or post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, often referred to in mainstream environmentalist discourse as “frontline” and “environmental justice communities,” are practitioners of disaster communism. With examples that demonstrate the importance of mutual aid in communities reeling from disasters, such as Mexico City tenants organizing against luxury developments in the wake of the 1985 earthquake, OOTW highlights how mutual aid movements can build new social relations that exist outside capitalism, even if only temporarily.
Despite its historical importance for disaster communities, mutual aid is rarely mentioned in GND discourse. Most GND proposals rely on top-down state intervention, whether through public ventures or private-public partnerships: jobs programs, renewable energy mandates, housing retrofits, universal healthcare, etc. These reforms, while aimed at creating a more egalitarian welfare state, are restricted to national borders and advanced by nostalgic, patriotic rhetoric. With fascism on the rise, this move provides fertile ground for the Right to propagate anti-immigrant and heteronormative ideology under the veneer of a nationalist, national security-oriented climate policy, at the expense of migrants and foreigners. OOTW explores these dangers through Angela Mitropoulous’ concept of “oikonomia,” which refers to the dependence of nationhood on racial (white) supremacy and the maintenance of heterosexual norms. Economic anxiety coupled with oikonomia thus allows right-wing demagogues to attain power by promising to preserve racial and sexual hierarchies, while blaming a stagnating economy and rising unemployment on immigrants.
It’s not just the right-wing: Leftist governments are also perfectly capable of being nativist. Denmark’s current ruling coalition of liberals, social democrats and socialists, for example, recently enacted anti-immigrant policies in an effort to preserve the welfare state. Given that Western European and Scandinavian states are often cited as inspiration for social-democratic reforms, it is crucial to recognize the nativism and chauvinism embedded within their policies, ones that could readily reproduce the features of oikonomia in Green New Deals elsewhere.
OOTW extends oikonomia to the global stage through Harsha Walia’s concept of “border imperialism”—that is, how powerful nations use their borders to secure and extend their dominant position in the international order. Migrants from the Global South are devalued by states of the Global North, seen as undeserving of entrance into — or a better future within — their borders. This individual rejection reinforces international hierarchy. President Trump’s expressed preference for immigrants from Norway over those from “shithole countries” like Somalia and Western European governments’ reluctance to take in Syrian refugees are examples of border imperialism at work. In their analysis, OOTW expands the “border” beyond geographic boundaries to the systems that reproduce exclusion within states. Working-class immigrants are routinely restricted to enclosures with poor living conditions (prisons, refugee camps, ghettoes etc.) or compelled into indentured servitude (for example, early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the US visa restrictions exempted migrant farmworkers). These extended borders haunt immigrants’ everyday lives even when they are permitted into the Global North.
Border imperialism and environmentalism have a longstanding political and intellectual marriage. OOTW traces their intersection to Garrett Hardin, author of the 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons.” A staple of mainstream environmentalist ethics and economic thought, “Tragedy” contends that ruin is the only possible result if natural resources are free for all to enjoy without exclusion. For Hardin and similarly-minded environmentalists, carefully managed enclosures (either by private enterprises or the state) are the only way to avoid overconsumption in a world of limited resources. This argument was expanded in a later work by Hardin to argue for “lifeboat ethics,” whereby wealthy “lifeboat nations” with limited resources face an imperative to keep out poor migrants. Hardin’s eco-fascism takes capitalism as given and advocates for privatization, enclosures, and market solutions to the climate and environmental crises. Moreover, while liberal environmentalists often use Hardin’s work to justify population control within the racialized global underclass, “Tragedy” also rears its head in global capital’s response to climate-induced economic shocks. Driven by the need to secure future profits and minimize risk, the wealthy Global North, externalizes unthinkable costs onto people in “green sacrifice zones.”
Searching for a leftist response to global capitalism’s lifeboat ethics, OOTW investigates the possibilities of a “climate populism” emerging from the 2014 People’s Climate March in New York City and the 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Both events converged disparate strands of the global climate justice movement to address the failures of international climate treaties from Kyoto and Copenhagen. Despite the quickly solidifying left-populist alignment, radical perspectives offered by Black, Indignenous, anarchist, and communist elements in the fight against climate change in New York and Cochabamba were marginalized by liberal NGOs like 350.org and the Sierra Club as “non-family friendly.” The resulting movement lacked an anticapitalist focus, and instead embraced a broad political agenda committed to what OOTW describes as “green capitalism, overt nationalism and ‘energy independence,’ and urban climate resilience.” The NGOs which asserted control over climate populism then turned a blind eye to Obama’s pro-oil politics of energy independence, which quickly slipped into a more chauvinist ‘energy dominance’ politics under President Trump.
The failures of climate populism threaten to repeat themselves in the contemporary movement fighting for a GND. Though the movement might imagine and represent itself to be diverse and popular, it is constrained by establishment Democrats and predominantly constituted by a white, middle-class, “family-friendly” base located in the Global North. As Kai Bosworth writes, “the best adherents of the GND point towards not an historic or contemporary set of policies associated with the ‘New Deal,’ but instead the mass struggle that forced their passage.” Militant climate populism requires a grassroots approach that prioritizes community well-being through collective struggle, not weak political formations like NGOs and the UNFCCC that protect the liberal status quo. OOTW positions disaster communism as the lens through which we can envision and institutionalize such a struggle.
To be fair, OOTW aren’t the only ones who recognize the limitations of a climate populist agenda presented by the reactionary currents within left-liberal organizing. Proponents of an internationalist and radical Green New Deal share this skepticism. Kate Aronoff et al. argue in A Planet to Win that mass movements are needed to pressure governments—especially the US—into public investments that prioritize frontline communities and provide basic necessities (energy, housing, healthcare, etc.) for all. Drawing on the Geneva Principles for a Global Green New Deal, APTW proposes to build solidarity across supply chains by pursuing multilateral cooperation between the Global South and the Global North centered on shared principles of “aggressive decarbonization and egalitarian social policy.”
In Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency, Andreas Malm echoes APTW’s mass mobilization-based strategy to pressure the state under the banner of “ecological Leninism”. Malm argues that the scope and speed of the climate crisis demand a commensurate response: the Left must take control of the state and implement a “war communism” similar to that of the early Soviet Union. Only central planning—enabled by the nationalization of key industries—will achieve the rapid decarbonization required to keep global warming under 1.5C. Malm’s proposal follows the lineage of actually-existing communist countries, wherein communism manifested as state dominance over the economy. A milder form of these efforts manifested in the social democratic states of Western Europe, Scandinavia, and Latin America, whose successes APTW seems more inclined to replicate than the Soviet Union’s.
While APTW’’s radical GND proposal addresses many of the concerns raised above, its reliance on state power and its inclination towards the Nordic model leaves the door open to nativist and chauvinist policies. Similarly, even ignoring the ecological devastation caused by the USSR, the idea that raw state power can deliver an internationalist Green New Deal is doubtful. In his critique of such an “instrumentalist” view of the state, Michael Heinrich argues that “the state appears as the political manifestation of the nation”, and therefore cannot help but advance a nationalist agenda both in domestic and global arenas. This dynamic explains the history of imperialist foreign policy decisions made by Soviet and social-democratic states in the Global North and highlights the tensions between the benefits of climate action for a nation’s citizens and the rest of the world. The explicitly nationalist industrial policy envisioned by figures such as Elizabeth Warren and New Consensus—a think tank often cited as the intellectual lodestar of the Green New Deal—fuels such a concern.
The nation-state question is also critical when addressing the extractive relationship between states and the environment. The majority of top oil-producing countries’ fossil fuel operations are state-owned and continue to operate without any significant effort towards a managed decline. Resource rents have allowed socialist states such Ecuador and Bolivia to break free of imperialism and develop economically. In the process, however, these regimes have also encountered opposition from Indigenous communities harmed by mining and extraction. Even if the Left does successfully take state power, nationalize and curtail key extractive industries, and build out new welfare schemes, it must still overcome the tensions between the “national” interest and planetary stability. Can a Leftist state implement these radical changes while simultaneously liberating those who suffer the most?
Any solution to the climate crisis must ensure that historical injustices to the Global South and Black, Indigenous, and people of color are redressed. Thus, while OOTW does not claim to have a final answer to the above question, their skepticism towards the state and corresponding emphasis on mutual aid and anti-border activism serve as a useful corrective to APTW and Malm’s proposals. This corrective becomes all the more necessary considering how the climate crisis is increasingly viewed as a “national security priority”, presaging increased border control against future climate refugees.
At the same time, we recognize the limitations of mutual aid as a revolutionary strategy. Mutual aid projects are vulnerable to state repression, often exploited by non-profits, and historically have failed to transform social relations in a durable or scalable manner. While OOTW extolled the virtues of projects like the Common Ground Collective’s relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they failed to address how its transformation into a non-profit made it less accountable to the communities it was based in, and more importantly, how it was always a hot spot for misogyny and informants that destabilized its revolutionary goals.
Attempting to address some of these shortcomings, Yarimar Bonilla and Naomi Klein discuss in Aftershocks of Disaster how long-term organizing in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria could produce a sustainable transformation in social relations on the island. They argue for mutual aid networks across and within communities as a complement to the fight against what OOTW calls the ordinary disasters of austerity: privatization, militarization, policing, and borders. This means building a movement for community self-defense, such as the Black Panthers, in opposition to the violence of the state while also committing through alternative, community-led practices — medic collectives keeping people safe during protests, cooperatives building local economies, and pop-up kitchens and food banks feeding people in times of need. These practices model cooperative social relations in lieu of a top-down GND, showing that grassroots community organizing and defense—not the state—offers the real solutions in the wake of austerity and disaster. While the ecological crisis manifests at many scales, the collective, sustained response to disaster in our communities may provide us with the real tools to abolish the present state of this crisis. ‘Disaster communism’ cannot stop at community resilience amid austerity; it must commit to healing the trauma of systemic racism, neglect, and abuse by the state.
We also recognize that tremendous uncertainty remains as to what constitutes political “success” in the age of climate crisis, while the need to act intensifies. This can lead to forced optimism on one hand or nihilism and inaction on the other. Against both of these impulses, OOTW advances the idea of "hope against hope" — the need to ward off hope's tendency to become a fetish—a means of escape—and instead rooting it in on-the-ground organizing and building relations. This echoes prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba's advice, "hope is a discipline," for climate organizers. Hope is not an emotion that allows us to postpone what needs to be done in the face of adversity, but rather a daily practice that gives us agency to build toward the future we believe in.
As active agents of history, we can participate in building hope against hope. It is present in the mutual aid between the Irish and the Navajo and Hopi peoples, the rising support for grassroots climate action among labor union rank-and-file, the blockage of transnational pipeline construction, the fights to bring utilities under public ownership, the Movement for Black Lives, and the heroic acts of No More Deaths and others to counter border imperialism. There are no one-size fits-all solutions, nor should there be: our struggles are numerous and diverse. Taking in the protracted battle for emancipation, OOTW’s book Hope Against Hope asks the necessary questions, the answers to which can emerge from the movement we build.
Nafis Hasan (@cannafis_) is a climate organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America. Vignesh Ramachandran (@_viggy) is a climate organizer and graduate student at UW Madison.
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