Disaster Communism
Discussion
Out of the Woods (collective) :
"Any coherent response to such continuous disaster will likewise have to be widespread and durable in order to succeed. Building paradise in hell is not enough: we must work against hell and go beyond it. More than disaster communities, we need disaster communism.
Assuredly, in calling for disaster communism, we are not suggesting that the occurrence of more and more frequent eco-social nightmares will somehow inevitably produce ever riper conditions for communism. We cannot adopt the perverse fatalism of “the worse, the better,” nor wait for some final hurricane to blow away the old order. Rather, we are noting that even the largest-scale and most terrifying of these extraordinary disasters can interrupt the ordinary disaster that is, most of the time, too large to fully comprehend. These are moments of interruption that, while horrific for human life, might also spell disaster for capitalism.
Disaster communism is not divorced from existing struggles. Rather, it emphasizes the revolutionary process of developing our collective capacity to endure and flourish: a movement within, against, and beyond this ongoing capitalist disaster. How can the numerous projects creating mini-paradises in hell cohere into something more than ephemeral communities? “Disaster communism” adds a clarifying epithet to the already long-ongoing political project that pits itself against the state and capital and overflows their bounds. It orients the movement of a collective power that, while rendered palpable during extraordinary disasters, was there all along, especially in places and among groups who have been experiencing the situation of ordinary disaster for hundreds of years. Climate change throws the skills central to those struggles into stark relief."