Abolition Demands

#ResistCapitalism to #FundBlackFutures: Black Youth, Political Economy, and the 21st Century Black Radical Imagination

“Critical Black Youth Politics takes all forms of resistance into account, & suggests that riots are just as important for democratic repair as nonviolent civil disobedience. … Black youth are engaging in forms of activism that deeply connect systems of oppression, especially how these systems are monetized, and no singular theoretical analysis can possibly capture all of it. Our youth are giving us new ways to re-imagine and think about the world: it’s about time we pay attention.”

by David C. Turner III

from Abolishing Carceral Society

Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics (Volume One)

Originally written December 9, 2016

“Stop the cops, and FUND BLACK FUTURES!” “NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE! DIVEST FROM POLICE!”  These chants echoed through the hall of a Chicago-based credit union for police officers from the counter, where organizers from the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100) took over the main lobby of the bank in protest of state-sanctioned violence in Chicago, the most notable in recent memory being the release of the tape of the murder of Laquan McDonald. McDonald was allegedly armed with a knife, and was gunned down with 16 shots by Jason Van Dyke, a white Chicago police officer who was bailed out of jail through the fundraising efforts of that same credit union. Wearing black sweaters with the phrase, “Fund Black Futures” emblazed across their chests in red and green letters, the organizers made explicit connections to the financial investment in the policing of Black communities, and the divestment from social services and education that had plagued the city of Chicago. Speaking about urban decay and what Soss et. al (2011) refers to as neoliberal paternalism, in other words, the ways that poor Black people in urban cities across America are forced to be governed in a series of racialized policies and practices that shape a deficit oriented framework for their proximity to poverty, members of BYP 100, who were largely femme presenting and young, made connections to the political economy and racialized state-sanctioned violence. They used direct action to make their grievances explicit during MLK weekend in a tactful series of events to combat the ahistorical narratives of Dr. King that domesticate his views.[1]

Charlene Carruthers, national director of BYP 100 (center) with other activists protesting the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference in Chicago in October of 2015. Photo Credit – BYP 100 Twitter Page

The 21st Century Black Radical Imagination – Engaging A Critical Black Youth Politics        

As an undergraduate, one of my Africana Studies professors had us read Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D.G. Kelley for an Africana Political Thought class in the spring of 2012. Trayvon Martin had just been murdered, the Marissa Alexander case was slowly gaining national recognition, and I was closing my second year out as the president of the Organization of Africana Studies, the student arm of the Department of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. We also had to read Michael Dawson’s Black Visions: Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies. In both of these works, Dawson (2003) and Kelley (2002) call for activists to move beyond one mode of analysis and mode of being, and adopt a multiplicity of political ideologies to gain freedom, with a center on complete social transformation. They encouraged us to dream, and that we should work towards a radical future, not just to fight against white supremacy, but to fight for something: to fight for us, our futures, our lives. This would become my introduction to the ideological framing of our current movement: The Movement for Black Lives.

I did not know it yet, but three years later, I would be a doctoral student at UC Berkeley and knee deep in the Movement for Black Lives. The example that BYP 100 set for us during MLK Weekend reminds us of the radical potential of Black youth politics. Here you have folks, who are guided by a Black queer feminist lens, organize for redistribution with a thorough critique of the political economy and its connections to state sanctioned violence. They see the connections to the investment in carceral technologies of violence (Shabazz, 2015) and the divestment in their lives through the neoliberal marriage between the state and public services (Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). I participated in BlackXMas actions, which were a series of events across six cities nationwide to disrupt the consumerist culture of capitalism and private complicity in the assault on Black lives. Members of the Afrikan Black Coalition, a Black youth-led organization made up of students from California’s institutions of higher education, pressured the University of California system to divest 25 million dollars from the private prison industry, which represents the worst of racialized neoliberal capitalism (Williams, 2015). In August of 2016, over 50 organizations came together to put forward an M4BL (Movement For Black Lives) Policy Platform. In this platform, the common thread was a focus on state sanctioned AND funded models of violence, and they all became targets. Within the social movement repertoire of this new generation, the digital literacy of young activists was activated in order to spread a coherent message about the need to divest monies from oppressive entities and invest them in the growth of our communities, which can be seen in Figure 3 (Davis, 2015; Dumas, 2011).   In conjunction with the assault that Black students took on their universities across the country, we are witnessing something that is otherwise unprecedented: the radical potential of Black youth organizing and politics.

A photo of the leaflet that members of Black Lives Matter – Los Angeles passed out during a Black themed “Christmas Carol” event planned at the Grove, an affluent shopping center in Los Angeles in December of 2015. Photo Credit – Author

Photo of a Black girl in a group of other children, juxtaposed to a police officer with the words “Invest-Divest” implying that we need to invest in youth, particularly Black girls. Photo credit – M4BL policy team

I call this moment, and the general frame for the movement “Critical Black Youth Politics.” Critical Black Youth Politics serves three major purposes, which are situated in, 1) intersectional analyses of power, oppression, and hegemony; 2) radical participatory praxis; and 3) collective resistance and healing. I do not pose these as tenets of a new theoretical model. I do, however, offer these as a way to engage the types of politics that Black youth are engaged in and committed to practicing.

Intersectional analyses of power, oppression, and hegemony. The term “Critical” in Critical Black Youth Politics serves a specific function, and that function is rooted in an analysis of the ways that hegemony, dominance, and social stratification shape our everyday lives. This particular segment of Critical Black Youth Politics is predicated on the idea that power has an influence in our collective life outcomes, and that by naming the ways that this power operates, one can work to transform the context where power is situated. Without that analysis, specifically of race, class, and gender, one can be motivated by social justice to try and create change, but not have a critique of social oppression, which Solozano and Bernal (2001) call “conformist resistance.” Without being critical of oppression, one can potentially reinforce respectability, and reinforce the standards of “who” gets to be advocated for and who gets to be a political actor.

Radical Participatory Praxis. The Ella Baker model of leadership (Ransby, 2003), even though it can be difficult and long, has become the central model for organizing amongst Black youth. This is rooted in the notion that the people who are the most impacted by interlocking systems of oppression are the experts in their own experiences, that they have the knowledge to liberate themselves. This tradition of participation and inclusion fueled the Mississippi freedom movement and organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (Payne, 2007), which are being adopted today by organizations such as the Black Liberation Collective, the national organization that helped to coordinate the #StudentBlackout movement.[2]

Collective Resistance and Healing. In a memoir with Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Pedro Noguera (2014) recounts his personal connections to youth resistance and activism. Through a critical reflection on youth studies and his own growth as an activist, Noguera recalls how he learned to organize, the methods used to organize, the campaigns he either launched or took part in, and the state of youth resistance studies now. Noguera warns young scholars not to conflate all forms of opposition with “resistance,” or what Solorzano and Bernal will call “self defeating resistance.” Noguera suggests that agency should not be that, “My school is bad, so I’m going to cut school,” Noguera asserts that if we are to think about resistance as a precursor to building social movements and as agency, it should be a student, “organizing a walk out.” The tension point, in this case is what we actually count as agency, and what gets to be resistance. Collective resistance and healing is dedicated to two aims. First, it is dedicated to resistance that seeks to build movements that can change the material conditions for everyone in their respective communities. Second, it posits that resistance to systems of domination and oppression are learned skills that can help one heal from the impact of systemic oppression (Ginwright, 2010). Critical Black Youth Politics takes all forms of resistance into account, and suggests that riots are just as important for democratic repair as nonviolent civil disobedience (Hooker, 2016)

Against The Neoliberal Turn In Black (Youth) Politics

Even though Black youth are positioned in civil society as amoral, deviant, and in need of state intervention, Black young people across the country are engaging in a new wave of intersectional Black organizing that has not been seen on such a popular scale in this country. These young people, my generation, are currently providing a counter to the cultural matrix that some scholars use to examine the plight of young Black people (Patterson, 2015) without seeking the transformation of the context that caused said plight. This deficit model of understanding Black youth fails not only to see their agency, but also how they attempt to transform their material conditions which influence cultural patterns. However, for some scholars, engaged Black youth are not enough. Technologies of control are the only interventions that come from scholarship that focuses on our “decisions” to buy fast food and not catch the bus, without questioning the structural conditions that lead to such decisions.

The political and intellectual left, even with claims to social justice and social change, still cannot reconcile the call of Black people to make their lives matter to a state that is literally invested in their demise (see Williams, 2015). The unsettling notion of Black lives matter highlights a fundamental flaw in racial equity reform logic: that Blackness cannot be reconciled in an anti-Black state with a political economy built on their backs and indigenous land (Baptist, 2014). This is why claims to “reform” are largely absent from the rhetoric of Black youth organizers in this movement. We recognize the failures of attempting to be incorporated into a state dependent on our suffering, and that is why we are calling for abolition, redistribution, and intervention into the settler colonial project of expendable Blackness (Sexton, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2012). We also recognize what Lester Spence (2013) refers to as the neoliberal turn in Black politics. As corporations and the privatization of activism have invested interests in our continued racialized suffering (Dumas, 2013), we have largely rejected the calls of “efficiency” and “participation” in a polity where marginalization is its only frame of reference (Mills, 1997).

Moving Forward: Engaging Critical Black Youth Politics And The Political Economy

            While a critique of capitalism is not new at all to radical Black organizing (see Bloom and Martin, 2012), it certainly is not one of the most popular frames of reference when thinking about racial justice. Yet, even with a slew of Black activists who have been influenced by radical leftist thought such as Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Huey P. Newton, and others, somehow liberal racial integrationism finds its way to the center of analysis for scholars who are interested in justice, either through critique or through endorsement. While the conflating of Black power with Black capitalism has been analyzed as a point of departure for radical Black movements (Allen, 1992; Rooks, 2006), our new generation of activists are well aware of the mistakes of their predecessors. Young Black people, who have lived through events such as Hurricane Katrina (Adams, 2013), the “Great Black Depression,” and America’s first Black president, have all but abandoned traditional social movement frames of political participation and incorporation. As Eddie Glaude (2016) writes in his new work, Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves America’s Soul, he states, “They came of age politically with President Barack Obama in office and now they bathed in the intense rage of Ferguson. In so many ways, these young people were unprecedented (Glaude 2016, p. 4).” Black youth are engaging in forms of activism that deeply connect systems of oppression, especially how these systems are monetized, and no singular theoretical analysis can possibly capture all of it. Our youth are giving us new ways to re-imagine and think about the world: it’s about time we pay attention.

About the author: David C. Turner III is a PhD student in Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of California, Berkeley.

This intervention essay is part of the Abolition journal’s first issue. 

ABOLISHING CARCERAL SOCIETY

ABOLITION:
A JOURNAL OF INSURGENT POLITICS

Abolition Collective

THE BOLD VOICES AND INSPIRING VISIONS OF TODAY’S REVOLUTIONARY ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT

In a time of mass incarceration, immigration detention and deportation, rising forms of radicalized, gendered, and sexualized violence, and deep ecological and economic crises, abolitionists everywhere seek to understand and dismantle interlocking institutions of domination and transform the world in which we find ourselves. This collection of essays, poems, artwork, and interventions are brought together to incite articulation and collaboration across communities, movements, and experiences embattled in liberators struggle.

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References

Adams, V. (2013). Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in thr wake of Katrina. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Allen, R. L. (1992). Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Davis, C. H. F. (2015). Dream Defending , On-Campus and Beyond: A Multi-sited Ethnography of Contemporary Student Organizing, the Social Movement Repertoire, and Social Movement Organization in College. The University of Arizona.

Dawson, M. J. (2003). Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Dumas, M. J. (2011). A Cultural Political Economy of School Desegregation in Seattle, 113(4), 703–734.

Dumas, M. J. (2013). “Losing an arm”: schooling as a site of black suffering. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(1), 1–29. http://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2013.850412

Ginwright, S. A. (2010). Black Youth Rising: Activism and Radical Healing in Urban America. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books.

Mills, C. W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Patterson, O. (2015). The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth. (O. Patterson, Ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Payne, C. M. (2007). I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition of the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Rooks, N. C. (2006). White Money/Black Power: The Suprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books.

Sexton, J. (2015). Unbearable Blackness, 178(90), 159–178.

Solorzano, D. G., & Bernal, D. D. (2001). Examining Transformational Resistance Through a Critical Race and Latcrit Theory Framework: Chicana and Chicano Students in an Urban Context. Urban Education, 36(3), 308–342. http://doi.org/10.1177/0042085901363002

Soss, J., Fording, R. C., & Schram, S. F. (2011). Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Spence, L. (2013). The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 14(3–4), 139–159. http://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2012.763682

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 1(1), 1–40.

Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change. (E. Tuck & K. W. Yang, Eds.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Notes: 

[1] This story was in part assembled through a combination of corporate media accounts (the Chicago Tribune) and of Twitter accounts of the day, mainly from the twitter page of BYP 100: https://twitter.com/BYP_100.

[2] Black Liberation Collective, “On Urgency, Frustration, and Love: A Love Letter to Black Students. Blavity, Date last edited, December 10th, 2015, Date accessed April 19th, 2016 http://blavity.com/on-urgency-frustration-and-love-a-love-letter-to-black-students-from-the-black-liberation-collective/

Hope Against Hope: An Interview with Out of the Woods on COVID-19, Climate Crisis, and Disaster Communism

Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis is the first book from Out of the Woods, a transnational political research and theory collective whose approach to the twinned nightmares of capitalism and climate change rejects both “romantic naturalism” and “pragmatic green capitalism.” Instead, Out of the Woods seek a revolutionary alternative that begins from the working-class social movements of our time. In the face of what seems like insurmountable despair, they insist that “we must not forget our existing relations with others. Amongst the working class, the racialized, the gendered, the colonized, disaster is met with self-organization, solidarity, and care.” In this interview with Common Notions editor Andy Battle, Out of the Woods outline their perspectives on disease, capitalism, technology, eco-fascism, and the radical alternative they dub “disaster communism.”

Hope Against Hope is available now with a 25% pre-order discount from Common Notions.

Andy Battle: The ongoing pandemic has produced a kind of ad hoc experiment in degrowth, albeit one that is rooted less in any left political initiative than in the contradictions of capitalism themselves. What are we to make of this politically?

Out of the Woods: First off, we must point out that COVID-19 emerges not as a shock from “outside” capital, but rather one that is produced by capitalist ecological contradictions themselves. This argument has been most powerfully made by Marxist epidemiologist Rob Wallace and colleagues (see here, here, and here) and elaborated brilliantly by Chuang. Though details of the novel coronavirus’s emergence are still being debated, it seems clear that capitalist agricultural pressures are central to the relationships that precipitate zoonotic diseases. These might include deforestation, concentrated animal feed lots, and the class dynamics which have led to status-seeking through rare animal consumption. Following the chains of capitalist ecological contradictions is crucial to understanding, diagnosing, and addressing the root causes of the virus’s emergence.

To your question: a banal but clear takeaway from the social effects of the planetary spread of the virus is that at an aggregate level, ecological destruction is closely tied to economic growth. The pandemic is not, however, realizing a transition to a less ecologically destructive world. It merely represents a pause in global production (and in many ecologically destructive industries, such as construction, the pause has been minimal). Of course, ecologically destructive growth also relies on exploitative labor practices and appropriations of land, livelihoods, culture, and knowledges to produce surplus. So when vast swaths of labor are compelled to not produce (for capital), some aspects of that destruction will not take place. Thankfully, the bullshit interpretation of this situation—that“nature is healing”—was quickly shut down (and turned into a meme). More on that below. 

The less amusing side of the coin is that this “unmanaged” contraction scenario entails all kinds of new and different forms of ecological destruction. As advocates of a just degrowth transition point out, this “sudden, un-planned, and chaotic downscaling of social and economic activity due to covid-19” is not “degrowth” in any meaningful sense. To reiterate: despite emissions reductions, this kind of emergency brake is in no way uniformly ecologically benign. Moreover, this five-percent emissions reduction is nowhere close to the seven to eight percent reduction we need to see every year. 

So, the effects on the natural world from the COVID-19 induced economic slowdown—much like those on social formations—are unevenly distributed and socially mediated. The oil and meat industries in the United States are cases in point. Though demand for oil is almost catastrophically low (from an industry standpoint), the result is not necessarily less oil being extracted, refined, and burned. It can also mean more orphaned wells, less adherence to basic environmental regulations (many of which the Trump Administration has also put on pause), more bankruptcies and thus fewer bond payments for environmental remediation, and so on. Low oil prices are also hammering parts of the Global South, where they account for significant portions of state revenue, which mediates important aspects of social existence. 

Similarly, with meat production, we are seeing slaughterhouses and packing plants be forced to kill off and dispose of animal bodies that they cannot turn into edible meat (due to market oversupply, labor shortages, and supply chain disruption). This mass euthanasia conducted by already-destructive concentrated animal production facilities will likely affect air, water, and workers (most of whom are immigrants and/or people of color, though this too is uneven as plants try to reinforce and exacerbate divisions within the labor force). This is, of course, at the same time that more and more poor people experience food insecurity. The situation is a clear example of the political-ecological origins of hunger in maldistribution and the lack of entitlements produced by capitalism, which we discuss in several sections of Hope Against Hope. Furthermore, along with prisons, it is in meatpacking plants that many of the most concentrated outbreaks in the United States have emerged. We should not take these spaces to be entirely unrelated, given both have connections to the ongoing production of a (neo)plantation mode of social organization. 

The broader point is this: capital’s approach to auguring the response to any ecological breakdown will be to reinforce and deepen the partitions built through race, class, and coloniality. To the extent that we cannot channel the contradictions into just transformations, they will be displaced. Anyone interested in building a more ecologically stable and just communism should prepare with this in mind. 

AB: Your approach to climate politics emphasizes what you call “disaster communism.” Can you unpack that phrase? What does each term signify? And what do they mean when you put them together? How does this perspective differ from other approaches to the ecological crisis?

OOTW: We might first draw some contrasts. Disaster communism is not a position that celebrates or creates disaster as a way of hastening communism. It is neither an inversion of disaster capitalism nor a (neo)primitivism. We do not think there is anything inevitable about disaster leading to communism, nor even making it more likely; we are, in any case, opposed to such a separation of means and ends. 

In its simplest sense, disaster communism is a communism of and against disaster. In understanding disaster, we draw upon an analytical tradition that insists on the social origins of disasters. Disasters have pernicious and debilitating effects because of social failings. Under capitalism, they tend to entrench inequalities because those social failings are themselves unequal. 

With a particular focus on ecological politics, we have developed this position in a few ways. Firstly, we try to drill down into precisely what these inequalities are and the ways that they intersect. Secondly, we argue that the state’s immediate and long-term responses to disastrous events often intensify these inequalities, and indeed are often designed to. Thirdly, we push this position to its logical conclusion: that disaster is a broader category which encompasses the interaction between disastrous events (a hurricane, a flood) and the disastrous lifeworlds of colonial and racial capitalism. We thus distinguish between but stress the co-dependency of disastrous conditions (or disaster-as-structure) and disastrous events. Ecological crisis is precisely such an imbrication: an ongoing condition which produces and is reproduced by specific climactic events. 

We know, however, that disastrous social forms have always been met with resistance and organisation. In the midst of disastrous events we find the most incredible examples of mutual aid, solidarity and care: some explicitly and radically political, some less so. Rebecca Solnit calls these “disaster communities.” We’re in awe of them, but wary too. Wary because “community” can easily be a conservative and insular form that bears the risks and costs of social reproduction on behalf of capital in the absence of state provision. So we use “communism” to name two things. First, it refers to the relationships that these communities realize in the face of disastrous events, which prefigure communist society in that private property and the commodity form are put to one side in favour of survival, realizing in the here and now the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” Secondly, the term refers to the need to abolish the disaster-as-structure which prevents the flourishing of these relationships. In this second sense, communism is, as Marx and Engels wrote, “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” 

This second aspect of communism, which points towards the totality of social relations and not just isolated pockets of space and time, is clearly a huge ask. So, disaster communism is both realistic and utopian. Realistic because it takes a look at the world around us and says that if there is to be an equality of survival and flourishing in the face of ecological crisis, abolition is absolutely necessary. Utopian because of the sheer audacity of this project, which does away with borders, prisons, militaries, capital, colonialism, race and gender as hierarchical forces structuring society, and the state. 

Here, disaster communism butts up against approaches to ecological crisis which are “realistic” in a different sense: the latter have more chance of being realised on a large scale in the short to medium term, but would abolish few of the structures that result in the uneven distribution of disaster, even though they may lessen the frequency or intensity of disasters. Though we are utopian, we are also capable of being pragmatic, and in various and differing ways our members might provide critical support to social democratic approaches, which tend towards a focus on jobs and growth on a national level (the Green New Deal); to socialist approaches, which tend to focus on seizing the state to repurpose it more drastically (what Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright call “Climate Maoism”); and to scientific approaches, which focus on the development of new technologies, often with funding from appalling sources. And of course we also think it’s important to work with, and perhaps win over, some advocates of “local” or “slow” responses to ecological crisis, too. In Hope Against Hope, we grapple, not always successfully, with a contradiction that many communists feel: on the one hand, the desire to immediately create more favorable conditions for general survival and flourishing; on the other, the necessity of hanging on to the thesis of abolition at the level of the totality, all the while avoiding the pitfalls of a teleological approach to these questions.

So in addition to distinguishing disaster communism from other approaches, we face the challenge of relating to existing politics. Can it work with them by sometimes working against them? What alliances might it form, and how will they function? One of the essays in Hope Against Hope, “Après moi, le deluge,” argues that halting climate change would require a larger write-off of capital than did the abolition of slavery in the US. Nonetheless, we suggest that the abolitionist movement might provide a useful way for thinking about change at the scale necessary to confront the present crisis. That movement was riddled with contradictory and opposing tendencies, yet achieved formal abolition, though of course it remains an unfinished project. What role might disaster communism play in such an uneasy meta-struggle? Clearly, it would be committed to the seeing-through of struggle, combating its premature abandonment through an uneasy compromise like the one that abolished slavery in the formal sense while preserving exploitation and racial domination.  How do those of us opposed to the state as a solution work with, enable, criticise, or put pressure on those doing genuinely good work within (and sometimes also against) the state? It is clearly “more likely” that, as Holly Jean Buck states, we will “muddle through” ecological crisis than instigate planetary utopia, but it is also true that utopians have historically played a vital role in “muddling through.” And here’s the paradox: by accepting this, we cease to be utopian. So we’ll refuse to accept it. 

Finally: we are mindful that for leftists who publish books (as it would appear we do now!), it can be useful to have a brand. We are happy to be associated with the term “disaster communism,” but it should not be limited to us and should survive only to the extent that it is taken up and modified by others, particularly by those in struggle. Secondly, terms take on lives of their own, which is why we opened by distinguishing our perspective from those who welcome disaster. We hope to be able to correct this, but if we can’t, we shouldn’t remain stubbornly attached to a label.. 

AB: The question of technology is a fraught one in environmental politics. You advocate “cyborg agroecology” as a way to overcome unhelpful dichotomies—technophilic modernism on the one hand and a blanket suspicion of technology on the other. What is “cyborg agroecology” and what are the advantages of this perspective?

OOTW: So many of our ecological problems seem to be created and exacerbated by technology—energy networks, data farms, supply chains, genetically modified organisms habituated to pesticides, a series of complex infrastructure systems nested in other infrastructure systems. It seems that there are only two responses from the left: either replace these technological systems with new and improved technologies (say, solar farms and wind turbines) or negate the whole lot of them. Many ecological  debates are organized around these wholesale strategies and their related binaries (global versus local, fast versus slow, acceleration versus braking, abundance versus austerity, etc).  We argue that where technology is concerned, both options rest on a misdiagnosis which detaches “technology” from the socio-economic systems in which it is embedded. This is not to say that any given technological system is “neutral”—that is, without politics. Instead, the problem with detaching technology in this manner is it tends to reinforce a moral economy of “good, natural harmony” (whether techno-philic or -phobic) versus “bad technological change.” This dichotomy distracts us from the real divisions in the capitalist social totality: the concentration of power in white heteropatriarchal imperial capital, on the one hand, and the dispossession of the proletariat and, for that matter, the lumpenproletariat of the world, on the other. A long essay in Endnotes 5 called “Error” ends on the following analysis, which we find helpful: “Much of the current technical structuring of the world is profoundly anti-communist, and struggles to come will have to work around such things until they can defeat or subsume them. Building that power will involve the establishment of new technical mediations and the repurposing of old, to the ends of a collective self-reproduction outside of class and an offensive expropriation of those who will attempt to reimpose relations of exploitation.” Here, we find both a recognition that the technologies of the world are not designed for communism, and yet any such movement must “work around” them in the process of building that latter world and its sociotechnics. In the book, we expand on this through the concept of “bricolage.”

Cyborg agroecology is our attempt to think through the problems revolutionary movements face in appropriating, repurposing, or abandoning contemporary agricultural techniques and their related food systems. Following the early writings of socialist-feminist Donna Haraway, we propose a “cyborg” agricultural system as a method of reframing the technological debate outlined above. A cyborg is, for Haraway, a recognition of the relational entanglement of technical systems with bodies, social formations, and ecological systems. It gets us away from thinking about technology only as machines or infrastructures and prompts us to think more broadly in terms of means-oriented activities, from languages and myths to the quite varied tool use by non-human animals. The cyborg perspective also helps us see how standards like “organic” and “natural” food can be completely unhelpful in adjudicating a food system. These standards frequently rely on arbitrary designations influenced by large producers, and require costly permitting, again benefiting capitalist agriculture. The “natural” designation does more work ideologically than it does to help us actually create a just food system.

Now, many anarchists, communists, and other revolutionaries are rightly interested in producing more ecologically benign and socially just food systems. Two tendencies currently dominate the discussion. First, in the Global North, at least, many tend to operate at a kind of quaint scale that precludes thinking through the mass coordination and repurposing of food production and distribution for all. We don’t mean to condemn these movements, which include the Black-led urban farms in many US cities. The people involved are often aware of the limits and contradictions imparted by scale and capital, which remain insoluble at a technical level. On the other hand, anti-work socialists and so-called “eco-modernists” imagine a hyper-industrialized agriculture which purposefully forgets the massive subsidies of materials and inputs (manual and intellectual labor, technology, raw materials, etc.) required to make such a system appear as if it is not labor-intensive. It is not accidental that this forgetting relates to labor and inputs from colonized and imprisoned subjects of the colonial system.. 

Cyborg agroecology thinks with and through global peasant movements like La Via Campesina, not least for the way they highlight the extractive, colonial, and imperial aspects of the current food system. But we also emphasize that these movements take a pragmatic and innovative approach to agroecology that forgoes romantic, pastoral images of pure organicism. Instead, they develop their own situated approach to food provision. Because of the utter carnage the ecological crisis is wreaking—not just in terms of  climate, but of phosphorus and nitrogen cycles as well as biodiversity —we will require new kinds of inquiry and new tools of repair to go along with any new social forms.

Cyborg agroecology is one example of what could be a broader suite of “cyborg ecology” practices, which could include approaches to cities, infrastructure systems, health and medicine, environmental remediation, and so on. At the same time, we should keep in mind that these are never without internal contradictions and political struggles which must be resolved in and through the social formations in which they are embedded. 

AB: Uncritical responses to the pandemic assert, for example, that “humans are the virus.” What are the risks of such a perspective? More broadly, what are the varieties and dimensions of eco-fascism?

OOTW: By itself, the statement “humans are the virus” is not sufficient  to conjure a specifically fascist response to ecological crisis. As Bue Rübner Hansen has pointed out, such statements can be a part of various liberalisms and capitalist governance strategies which might explicitly position themselves “against” fascism. Genuine fascism emerges historically and foundationally, as Aimé Césaire memorably noted, as an “internal” application of European and Euro-American practices developed in colonialism and imperialism. That’s why in Hope Against Hope, we examine these tendencies within/related to ecological ideology as “reactionary,” “proto-fascist” or “völkisch.” They’re a kind of ambient ideological viewpoint  which may or may not be central to the governing logic of the “capitalist death cult” that we see apparent (not unrelatedly) in COVID-19 and ecological crises more broadly.

All that said, the obvious risk of uncritical and banal assertions that “humans are the virus” is the conditioning of a social class ready to accept (and perhaps participate in) a broader and more widespread planetary depopulation. Rarely are the political consequences of such a program announced by their promoters as clearly as Garrett Hardin did in his 1970s essay “Lifeboat Ethics: the Case Against Helping the Poor.” In Hope Against Hope, we show how and why Hardin advocates both immigration restriction and mass death in the name of white survival. In the contemporary moment, we more frequently see absurdities like the Michael Moore-produced documentary The Planet of Humans. Released in April 2020, the film purports to expose the fallacy of capitalist organization of green energy to save the planet. Instead, the filmmakers offer the ludicrous proposition that “every expert [they] talked to” agrees that the “same underlying problem” of population growth is to blame. It’s difficult to understate how obscene such a political project is and how forcefully we must reject this reactionary tendency wherever it appears. We must offer instead not a “techno-optimist” or “ecomodernist” quick-fix or defense of green capitalism, but an alternative critique of capitalist maldistribution and an alternative proposition for a world of abundance and commonality.

AB: The title of your book refers to an emotion. Why is your book called Hope Against Hope?

OOTW: In the introduction to the book we talk about the despair and helplessness that can come from confronting the enormity of ecological crisis. This is a perfectly appropriate response: we have all felt it and, indeed, continue to feel it. Yet unchecked despair leads to political quietism or the kind of fatalism that simply accepts the reactionary tendencies outlined above. Despair can be predicated on an ignorance of the struggles that operate within, struggle against, and aim beyond ecological crisis; or a consciousness of their infrequency, insufficiency, or failure. We do not have faith in these struggles, but we do have hope for and from them.

Hope can be dangerous too, though. It can be sundered from struggle, becoming this horrible, vague principle which is itself a quietism. This “bad hope” functions as an ahistorical, essentialised property of human existence which people cling to in the face of a world which gleefully absorbs that hope, all the while refusing to permit that which might be reasonably hoped for. This cartoon and this terrible, widely-circulated text illustrate that perfectly, channelling this hope into the nation-state in ways which resonate with the proto-fascism outlined above.

So we are very much in agreement with writers such as Ernst Bloch and Darren Webb when they insist that a militant, utopian hope needs to be distinguished from this complicit hope. This is one sense that we invoke hope against hope. And with Bloch or José Esteban Muñoz, we’d also contrast our hope to optimism or expectation: those forms disavow the agency and necessity of struggle, and often result in an inability to deal with setbacks. Hope, as Bloch says, is disappointable. Hence “more in hope than expectation” or, more pertinently for us, “hope against hope.”

There’s a famous song in the UK called “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” It was adopted by fans of the football club Liverpool during their search for justice after disastrous structures of the kind we now confront led to the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster. The lyrics of the song implore us to “Walk on, walk on / With hope in your heart / And you'll never walk alone.” We would invert the logic of this statement with a disaster communist future in mind—it’s not that we find ourselves with others because we have hope, but rather that we have hope because we are with others.

The common, in, against, and beyond the pandemic crisis | Stavros Stavrides

Life as commons 

Stavros Stavrides 

The coronavirus pandemic crisis has triggered a new wave of collective practices that gesture towards the same necessity as the “squares movement” (including the Arab Spring, the Indignados and the Occupy movements): another form of social organization is urgently needed. Different neighborhood initiatives, movement organized campaigns, dispersed rhizomatic acts of solidarity, community based management of urban and rural territories: all these processes and acts are spreading throughout the world, under the radar of dominant media, and usually bypassing market based channels as well as directly or indirectly clashing with governmental priorities. 

It seems that within these processes an intensive production of the common develops, the common being neither only a set of products and services to be shared, nor a set of organizational choices to ensure a more just distribution of the crucial means for survival to those in need. The common emerges as both the form and the content of social relations that transcend the limitations and the market worshiping cynicism of contemporary capitalism. 

Three different factors shape the rise of the common, in against and beyond the pandemic crisis. It is not that these factors did not exist before the crisis. And surely they often meet in producing different everyday habits for the most deprived populations of contemporary metropolises. The pandemic crisis, however, has revealed their convergent dynamics and has made it urgently necessary for people to invent collectively by mobilizing experiences related to those factors. 

The first factor has to do with survival. In the peripheries of big cities, in stigmatized ghettos and in indigenous communities, in the trajectories of precarious work and precarious life, people experience exclusion and insecurity. If remnants of welfare state seem still for some to provide a safety net, for most life is at the mercy of the market (and market is merciless), or depends on the contingencies of global arrangements of power (including wars, famine, refugee waves, trade wars etc.). 

The excluded and those who sense that no authorities will ever care for them try in many cases to organize in order to secure the means of their survival. In many neighborhoods of the world networks of care develop from below: food is prepared and distributed to those unable to obtain it, means for hygienic protection are produced and distributed, information and knowledge is gathered and transmitted through diffuse media (social media, community radio stations, community centers etc.). Only to map the networks of collectively organized food distribution (including fruits and vegetables from farmer cooperatives, “just basket” initiatives and clean water provision in informal neighborhoods) one would need to collect a vast amount of globally spread information. 

The second factor has to do with long established experiences of cooperation. Different traditions of mutual help that stem from rural life (as mutirão in Brazil, ayuda mutua in Latin America and the Caribbean , or ubuntu in South Africa) of from indigenous life (as in the context of minga in Colombia and of Sumak Kawsay in Andean countries) gain renewed momentum in face of this crisis. Cooperation has been in many places of the world part of a collective wisdom that keeps on inventing skills and that takes shape in rules developed through negotiations between those who work together. Neoliberal individualism explicitly targeted such traditions not simply by destroying them but also by taking advantage of their productive potentialities. Thus, the neoliberal ideal of the individual “entrepreneurial” self (the self-as-entrepreneur) combines with a renewed appraisal of cooperation considered as “synergy” (a usual euphemism of cooperation under the command of capital). Cooperation has been stripped from the power that gives to those who work the opportunity to choose the scopes, the priorities and the forms of their working together. 

However, cooperation resurfaces as a productive force of the common inventively utilizing all available albeit scarce means. In Mexican autonomous neighborhoods, in many US volunteer communities in the villas miserias of Buenos Aires and the Brazilian favelas people work together to produce masks. Collective kitchens that cook food for those in need emerge in many cities (in Athens in Santiago de Chile, in Rio etc.) In Santa Catarina in Brazil landless movement (MST) militants have modified their cachaca distillery in order to produce alcohol for the Curitibanos public hospital. 

Cooperation escapes capitalist command in a myriad of everyday practices of care organized by urban populations. The network Covid Entraide France is connecting an immense amount of volunteer service providers in the francophone world who offer their help to the pandemic stricken populations, in Greece the Menoume Mazi network organizes solidarity and struggle against unjust policies during the crisis (including issues of refugee support, labor rigths, and information black out). Analogous networks develop in Italy, in the UK and other countries. 

The third factor (already present before the crisis) that has been contributing to the emergence of the common is the spread of concrete ideas for a world of equality and solidarity beyond capitalism. Homeless movements in Latin America and Africa, recuperated and occupied enterprises, informal workers’ organizations, solidarity economy initiatives, indigenous people projects of autonomy and radical unions keep on producing fragments of this world. The common emerges in all those engaged practices not simply as an object of demands but as a plan for organizing life in common. Everydayness becomes both a crucial field of struggles as well as a crucial field of experiments in social organization. Terms to describe those lived experiments may be borrowed from the past, as “popular power” or “autonomy” or may be improvised in the present as “communalidad” or “communization”. 

Lots of such movements got mobilized to face the pandemic crisis. Their acquired experience, along with their grounding in everyday forms of cooperation gives them the power to organize people on a collective basis. Chilean groups of young activists that were providing medical help for the victims of police brutality in the great demonstrations of the recent uprising have developed an initiative called Movimiento Salud en Resistencia (Health in Resistance Movement): their efforts aim at developing self-managed health services (“People take care of the People” campaign). The South African shack dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo strongly fights against evictions happening in the midst of lockdown. Their communities organize to support the poor homeless people who have to suffer from lack of clean water and food in the settlements. The movement also actively expressed its solidarity with the healthcare workers of the country. Similar social movement initiatives unfold in Senegal, in Burkina Faso and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

When engagement in common scopes connects to survival urgencies and mobilizes shared skills of cooperation collective empowerment develops rapidly. Participants in corresponding initiatives see that self-organization and self-management works: people may be fed, people may be supported, people may be given the means to know and to shape opinions. People may take their lives in their hands. 

It is in the context of the pandemic crisis that collective survival efforts, cooperation potentialities (deeply embedded in the everydayness of those who work) and aspirations for a just society converge. Not because anti-capitalist ideologies suddenly became triumphant, neither because consciousness of exploitation develops among those exploited due to exemplary activist acts. But possibly because many people are forced to realize that if they don’t take their lives in their hands they are meant to be expendable. It is this experience-based understanding that opens minds and hearts to the hope of a different future. Maybe today a slogan that seemed almost obvious and apolitical for many, acquires an urgent and inspiring meaning. Zapatistas say often: “Down with death. Long live life” (Viva la vida, muera la muerte). Do they simply mean that life is both the source and the scope of the common in the prospect of an emancipated society? 

Athens 26/42020 

Towards the City of Thresholds

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Stavros Stavrides, author of Towards the City of Thresholds

Celebrate Mumia’s birthday with us this weekend!

Tune into the press conference today 4/23 at 1PM, followed by a massive teach in tomorrow 4/24 at 6PM featuring Angela Davis, Vijay Prashad, Alice Walker, Fred Hampton Jr., Janet Africa, Marc Lamont Hill, Mutulu Shakur, and many more.

End the birthday weekend with a poetry in motion event on 4/26 at 12PM!

Register for these events for free by clicking on any of the images and keep an eye out for 25% off Mumia’s book when you do! Happy birthday Mumia, we can’t wait to celebrate the next one with you out here with us.

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