OURS IS AN EPOCH OF CATASTROPHE. NEAR-BIBLICAL FLOODS, HURRIcanes, and fires grow ever more ferocious and frequent, most lethally between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer. Financial havoc roils the North—likewise epic in nature, if not quite evoking Revelation—caught in the jaws of one of the most momentous crises of the capitalist system. An endless preoccupation with the end times, replete with the undead, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. It would seem that only a correspondingly apocalyptic politics could measure up to the moment—driven by the urgent and warranted need, following Walter Benjamin, to sever the lit fuse before the spark ignites the dynamite—and prevent greater catastrophe. Yet in a world beset by calamity, might catastrophic politics end disastrously?
This book revolves around that most pressing question. In it, we explore the perils of what we term catastrophism within the environmental movement, the left, and the right, as well as examining the macabre visage of quotidian catastrophe.1 Catastrophism presumes that society is headed for a collapse, whether economic, ecological, social, or spiritual. This collapse is frequently, but not always, regarded as a great cleansing, out of which a new society will be born. Catastrophists tend to believe that an ever-intensified rhetoric of disaster will awaken the masses from their long slumber—if the mechanical failure of the system does not make such struggles superfluous. On the left, catastrophism veers between the expectation that the worse things become, the better they will be for radical fortunes, and the prediction that capitalism will collapse under its own weight. For parts of the right, worsening conditions are welcomed, with the hope they will trigger divine intervention or allow the settling of scores for any modicum of social advance over the last century. Not for nothing has the phoenix, rising muscularly from the ashes, been the far right’s emblem. The environmental movement, by contrast, regards impending catastrophe with acute trepidation—and with good reason. But it tends not to grasp the crux of the ecological calamity and misses how fear can hinder, rather than help, its attempts to halt the disaster.
By its very nature, capitalism is catastrophic. There should be no doubt that the multiple social, and especially ecological, crises of our time are genuine and cataclysmic. We are suggesting, however, that politics embedded within the logic of catastrophe—that catastrophe will deliver a new world, or that it will create the conditions under which people automatically take action—do not serve the left and the environmental movement. An awareness of the scale or severity of catastrophe does not ineluctably steer one down the path of radical politics, in spite of received wisdom on the left and many great—albeit frequently dashed—expectations. Those who believe that the system will crumble from crises and disasters lose sight of the ways that capitalism uses crises for its own regeneration and expansion. Likewise, a focus on spectacular catastrophes typically overlooks the prosaic catastrophes of everyday life that are the sediment upon which capitalism is constructed.
The left has long held that a crisis can cause a rupture with the existing order, allowing people to throw off blinders and accreted prejudices that result from lifelong socialization. A cherished example is that of one of Pavlov’s dogs, conditioned to salivate at the ring of a bell, who unlearned all training when its kennel flooded. But worse is not always better. Worse can just be worse. As partisans of the radical left, we are particularly concerned with how catastrophic politics can backfire on leftists and radical environmentalists. We also take a keen interest in catastrophism on the right, but for quite different reasons. While it short-circuits the left, right-wing catastrophism frequently helps shape the agenda of those in power.
Catastrophic politics within the left, right, and environmental movement are undoubtedly driven by disparate motivations. The left and right, after all, are not each other’s doppelgängers, but antagonists, and the environmental movement straddles both. Yet fear binds them all together. Whether green, radical, or reactionary, catastrophists tend to believe fear will stir the populace to action. They emphasize panic and powerlessness, and conversely the vanguardist politics of the few. The politics of fear, however, play to the strengths of the right, not the left. Writers in this book argue that on the terrain of catastrophic fear, the left is not likely to win.
It should be said that critics of left- or right-wing catastrophism risk a certain smugness. It takes little effort to condescend to catastrophists as wild-eyed zealots, frantically hoping to upend the world, when simple reforms should presumably suffice.2 Such is the typical reflex of liberalism, which regards catastrophism as the morbid symptom of left and right extremism, the politics of the fanatical outer edges. Yet liberals have their own brand of catastrophism.3 The habitual reflex of liberal catastrophism is that if a right-wing candidate is not defeated in an election—usually by a center-right candidate—it will spell catastrophe. Hence, every four years, progressives in the United States put aside their misgivings with the choices on offer and canvass door to door to keep disaster at bay. Such fear-mongering in the service of the status quo reaches its apex with perennial liberal scares about impending fascism, with ceaseless invocations of the last days of Weimar Germany.4 Such scares reached a fever pitch after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, when various liberals decided that the Constitution had been ripped up, replaced by a dictatorship. More recently, disaffected liberal Chris Hedges, never a shrinking violet when it comes to summoning the apocalypse, has argued that there is a “yearning for fascism” in the United States. While opposing both major parties, he warns that we may soon be “swept aside for an age of terror and blood,” signaled by the violent rhetoric of Republicans.5
In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explores the political uses to which disasters have been put under neoliberalism. One could extend that timeline back to the beginning of capitalism. The state uses disasters and, furthermore, conjures up disasters—from war to fiscal crises—to drive through changes that otherwise would be untenable. Other radical writers have focused on the Kropotkinian moments of solidarity that can emerge after natural disasters.6 In the wake of the Mexico City earthquake, Harry Cleaver wrote of the dialectic between the ways that those in power used catastrophe and the ways that the downtrodden organized themselves collectively in its aftermath.7 In contrast, this book does not focus primarily on how catastrophes are used by the state and capital (although James Davis’s chapter touches on this question as it relates to the catastrophic right). Instead we look at the role that catastrophe plays in the political rhetorics, and political choices, of the left, greens, and the extraparliamentary right. Our focus is on ideologies that are generated from outside of the state, even if they can be closely intertwined in the case of the right.
This book is a political intervention, designed to spur debate among radicals. We should be clear, however, what this volume is not. It is not an exhaustive or encyclopedic study of catastrophism or a set of instructions about what the left and environmental movement should do to politicize the apathetic and revitalize a broad anticapitalist project. While we point to the importance of mass radical organizing, it is beyond the scope of the book to explore where such movements have succeeded and failed in the past, and how that history relates to the appeal of catastrophic politics. We flag, instead, what we believe will not work—and what works at great cost. Catastrophic politics have a lengthy track record of failure. It is an approach destined for the blind alley.
The reach of this work is largely limited to North America and Europe. To be sure, the Global South has been at the receiving end of the most serious of catastrophes—from colonial plunder and empire to neoliberal structural adjustment, as well as the most severe effects of the ecological crises. It is our hope that others will explore catastrophism in the Global South.
Of all the alarming catastrophes at the beginning of the new millennium, the ecological catastrophe is without doubt the greatest and most serious: mass extinctions, ocean acidification, widespread and cataclysmic deforestation, the destruction of the coral reefs, number among many other horrors. Yet, as Eddie Yuen argues, the politics of catastrophe—expecting that knowledge of worsening catastrophe will arouse people to action—has foundered. In “The Politics of Failure Have Failed,” Yuen draws on David Harvey’s observation that mainstream Western conceptions of nature swing between cornucopian triumphalism about the power of science to master nature, and doom-laden pessimism over natural limits. Catastrophism inhabits the latter half of the binary, steeped in Malthusianism.
At the crux of environmental catastrophism, Yuen argues, are deeply held convictions about politicization. Most environmentalists operate under the assumption that if they are able to disseminate enough information about the dire state of the environment, the people will take action. The evidence suggests, however, that this assumption is wrong, and that increasingly urgent appeals about fixed ecological tipping points typically fall on deaf ears or result in greater apathy. Numerous apocalyptic scenarios that never came to pass have heightened the ineffectiveness of environmental rhetorics of catastrophe. One need only think of Paul Ehrlich’s “population bomb” theories from the 1960s, in which horrible famine awaited the Global North, destroying England by the end of the twentieth century. Such false prophecies have inured some to the very real ecological crises of the present. A more recent example of false prophesy can be found with the millennium bug, or Y2K, scare, in which prominent greens like Helen Caldicott warned of impending nuclear meltdown and accidental war when the clocks struck midnight in the year 2000.
Most, but not all, ecological false prophecies originate in Malthusian premises, that absolute scarcity will cause various catastrophes. Yuen points out that their staying power has no correlation to their rate of predictability. Peak oil is the most prevalent form that this Malthusian current tends to take. Adherents posit that easily accessible petroleum reserves will soon peak—if they have not already—and that industrial society will unravel. Peak oilers wait with bated breath for TEOTWAWKI: the end of the world as we know it. Out of the collapse, a new sustainable, small-is-beautiful society may be born. As Yuen points out, such Malthusian notions about scarcity overlook the ways that capitalism has historically overcome obstacles and flourished from doing so. These crises fuel the system, opening up new rounds of capital accumulation.
Yuen notes, “The worst aspect of Malthusian scenarios however, is not that they are usually wrong, but that they tilt right. In fact, the predictable outcome of the Y2K and peak oil scenarios (were they accurate) is Hobbesian—’the war of each against all’ and the legitimation of a militarized lifeboat ethics.” He argues that unless environmentalists ground their politics in an awareness of class and geographical divisions, along with the ways that race and fear of those beyond one’s frontiers are deployed, their catastrophic rhetoric may reinforce draconian environmental politics of elites who are less interested in stopping climate disasters than creating a lifeboat, or reinforcing borders, for the privileged. “Environmental catastrophism, unless it simultaneously argues that inequality, war, and imperialism compound the ecological crisis, is likely to encourage the most authoritarian solutions at the state level.”
In “Great Chaos Under Heaven,” Sasha Lilley traces the convoluted histories of catastrophic hopes on the left, looking at an interlinked, but seemingly contradictory, couplet of catastrophist ideas—one determinist, the other voluntarist. One half imagines that capitalism will hit absolute and insuperable limits and collapse under its own weight. The other presumes that worsening economic conditions or increased state repression will snap the somnambulant masses out of their slumber. Both sides have led to repeated predictions of impending massive crisis at every turn—sometimes borne out by reality and other times not. Both also have damaging political consequences, leading to quietism—the notion that there is little need for protracted organizing, or that deep-seated change will unfold mechanically—and adventurism—the idea that a small number of people can trigger revolutionary change. Not infrequently, the two are combined.
Marxism has been particularly bedeviled by the expectation of an automatic collapse of capitalism, dating back to influential debates within the Second International. Those who believed that capitalism was doomed trusted it would be brought down by inner imbalances, rather than class struggle. More recently, Immanuel Wallerstein has expounded the notion that capitalism is due for a collapse within the next twenty to fifty years. Although a collapsarian impulse runs through some of the left still—witness the triumphalism at the start of the so-called Great Recession that the system was crumbling—it has mainly fallen out of favor, done in by four decades of neoliberalism and the widespread view that there is no alternative to capitalism.
More prevalent now is the idea that worsening conditions are more auspicious for radicalization, whether through economic immiseration or the iron fist of the state. At its most notorious, it led to the rather overoptimistic notion that fascism’s triumph in Germany would lead to communist revolution. While there is something to the trinity of crisis-war-revolution, the historical record shows that periods of crises, while polarizing, frequently spur people to move right, rather than left. And conversely, moments of relative affluence can, sometimes, enhance social power and the radicalism of demands. The point is that one cannot read the fates of social movements in the tealeaves of economic booms or busts. There is no automatic relationship to be found between the two.
The premise that worsening conditions are more fortuitous for radicalization has begotten a decidedly smaller strain of thought and action that concludes that if worse is better, then radicals should try to make things worse. The Weather Underground in the late 1960s followed this logic in its struggle against what it viewed as a fascist state lurking behind a liberal one. In our times, insurrectionism—both anarchist and antistate communist—attempts to heighten the contradictions of capitalist society through spectacular confrontations with the state. Some hope to trigger widespread insurrection, while others are content with doing the rebelling themselves.
Lastly, straddling both the determinist and voluntarist strains of left catastrophism, are the outlying ideas of radical opponents of civilization—some anarchist, some erstwhile anarchist. These radicals hope to hasten the inevitable collapse of industrial society, which they believe may be unraveling already. Civilization, for them, is catastrophic and only a catastrophe will bring it to an end.
What unifies these seemingly disparate political ideas and movements is an underlying despair at the possibility—and often the desirability—of mass radical or revolutionary movements. In some cases, it is driven by a will to power. The appeal of catastrophism tends to be greatest during periods of weakness, defeat, or organizational disarray of the radical left, when catastrophe is seen as the midwife of radical renewal. Such political despair is understandable. It needs to be resisted nonetheless.
James Davis highlights what he calls the disease-cure binary of catastrophe on the right in “At War with the Future.” He points to the widely held conservative view that the gains of the left-wing social movements of the past have been catastrophic. Simply put, for the right social progress has been a disaster. In addition, distinct sectors of the right have seen an apocalyptic transformation, whether civil war or Armageddon, as the cure for the gains of the left. This binary of catastrophe as disease and cure structures his examination of the history of right-wing catastrophism.
Cure catastrophism, Davis suggests, takes on both religious and secular forms, although the ecclesiastical notion of the rapture is the most spectacular. He traces devout and profane forms, from dispensational premillennialism through to the imaginings of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who believed he was sparking a rebellion to rid the world of the damage caused by cultural Marxism.
Disease catastrophism, he argues, is a much broader category—perhaps universal on the right—that regards social progress as cataclysmic. He notes how a period of immense defeats for the left—the rise of neoliberalism, the crushing of organized labor, the rolling back of the gains of Civil Rights and the women’s movement, the accelerated destruction of the environment—is registered by the right as nevertheless disastrous for reaction. The followers of the right believe they are losing. Right-wing catastrophists fret over cultural permissiveness, immigration, and in the United States and Europe, the presumed threat of Islam. Yet, as Davis argues, what far right catastrophists promote has been embraced by the mainstream; scares about immigration, Muslims, and borders are its standard fare. The tactics may differ, but the ends frequently do not.
Davis relates right-wing disease catastrophism to the actions of the state, which date back at least to Hobbes, and examines how such politics carve out space for the state to implement draconian policies—whether about foreigners, fiscal crises, or domestic terrorism. And, of course, the government can create its own states of emergency or use existing crises to its own benefit. “By framing questions like immigration as catastrophic problems, the state is able to respond with harsh and previously off-limits policies. Anti-immigrant sentiment is promoted throughout the European and American center right, and in both places border ‘protection’ and surveillance are expanding fiefdoms of the security state.” As with environmental catastrophism, alarming rhetoric tends to bolster, not diminish, draconian state responses.
One might ask why right-wing catastrophism does not have the same paralyzing effects that Yuen flags in the environmental movement. Why do the foot soldiers of the right not burn out on false prophecy and the rhetoric of fear? Davis’s answer is that catastrophism is not an ambivalent strategy for the right as it is for the left and among environmentalists. “From a rhetorical standpoint, catastrophism is a win/win for the right, as there is no accountability for false prophecy. On the one hand, it rallies the troops and creates a sense of urgency. On the other hand, though, fear and paranoia serve a rightist political predisposition more than a left or liberal one.” Right-wing fear-mongering typically comes with scapegoats to blame, so the remedy is easily imaginable. Whereas the left frequently has a harder time identifying simple enemies and hence the route to a political solution of those fears is murkier. Davis notes that part of the success of the right is in filling the void vacated by those leftists who moved rightward and embraced neoliberalism. He posits that in a time of particularly pronounced economic insecurity, right-wing catastrophic politics can gain great traction.
Catastrophism allows us to lose sight, as David McNally argues, of the prosaic yet crucial catastrophes of everyday life that undergird the capitalist system. Capitalism creates spectacular catastrophes, but an emphasis on the spectacular alone—as with a focus on just moments of crises and rupture—only partially reveals how the system functions. McNally suggests in “Land of the Living Dead,” the final chapter and a coda of sorts for the book, that it is precisely through anxieties and fascination with bodysnatching and the living dead that the quotidian workings of capitalism may be illuminated.
In recent years, the preoccupation with monsters, ghouls, and vampires seems to have reached a fever pitch in North America with incessant evocations of the impending zombie apocalypse. McNally connects these fears and fascinations of the past two hundred years with capitalism’s relationship to the bodies of its workers projected onto the living dead, although the recurrent themes of bodysnatching and bloodsucking have become more overtly apocalyptic in our times. He suggests that this persistent fascination with the living dead is tied to the banal horrors of life under capitalism, which are overshadowed by the spectacular atrocities of the system but are no less fundamental to understanding it.
McNally examines the evolution of various incarnations of the living dead, originating in early capitalism. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at a time when the bodies of the poor in England were being turned into commodities in both life and death—as wage labor for the living and, unwittingly, through a trade in body parts for the dead in a “corpse economy.” The zombie took recognizable shape in the popular imagination under slavery on massive plantations in Haiti under French colonial rule—the living dead, toiling without consciousness. McNally traces the bifurcation of the zombie image into zombie-consumer and zombie-worker, the former a flesh-eater and the second an alienated laborer. As McNally shows, the first emerges again in sub-Saharan Africa under the dictates of neoliberalism, telling us a great deal about the system we inhabit. “For, in the picture of the maniacally insatiable flesh-eater, we find the capitalist-zombie, driven to relentlessly consume human beings. Meanwhile, in the image of the zombie-laborer we encounter the reality of the global collective worker reduced to a beast of burden who keeps the machinery of accumulation ticking…. Taken together, they define the zombie-economy of late capitalism, an out-of-control, flesh-eating machinery of manic accumulation and exploitation that has become an end in itself.”
There is a positive utopian element, McNally suggests, embedded in the fleshy depths of the monster preoccupation. While the living dead conjure up the poor’s fears of their literal or figurative dismemberment, they also evoke the fears that the rich have of the creature they have summoned up—the working class and poor rabble. McNally astutely observes that “The truly subversive image of zombie revolt in fact returns us to the everyday—to the idea that revolution grows out of ordinary, prosaic acts of organizing and resistance whose coalescence produces a mass upheaval. However extraordinary a popular uprising may be, it is nonetheless a product of decidedly mundane activities—strikes, demonstrations, meetings, speeches, leaflets, occupations.” He goes on to add, “The apocalyptic scenario, in which a complete collapse of social organization ushers in a tumultuous upheaval, is ultimately a mystical rather than a political one. It is much more helpful to think about revolution as a dramatic convergence of real practices of rebellion and resistance that, in their intersection, acquire a qualitatively new form.”
One might query the relationship between the different forms of catastrophism, especially the binaries of catastrophism on the left, the environmental movement, and the right. Is there a determinist and voluntarist couplet, similar to the one on the left, within the right? Undoubtedly right-wing catastrophism has its fatalists—such as those who believe that the Armageddon is inevitable—and its voluntarists—who believe they can bring on the collapse through concerted action. Likewise, does the fatalism of environmental catastrophism—one half of David Harvey’s pair of Western triumphalism and pessimism—have a parallel on the left? As Raymond Williams noted, the left has its own binary of triumphalism and pessimism, although it would be an understatement to observe that the latter now predominates. However, an overarching logic might be harder to place, since these movements and ideas are driven by different impulses, from above and from below (and in the case of the greens, both). In that sense, it is hard to talk about a catch-all catastrophism, without specifying whether it is of the left, right, green—or liberal—variety.
Nevertheless, political despair and desperation do drive catastrophism. These are despairing times. For the left and for radical environmentalism, they are grimly urgent, despite remarkable acts of resistance—much of it collective—that have flourished of late. That despair is the culmination of decades of defeats and the retreat of a broadly utopian project—meant in the best sense of the word—that is committed to toppling capitalism through mass action. Catastrophism clings to the desire for a better world, while halfheartedly expecting to reach it through shortcuts. Like the zombie, it embodies despair and fear, as well as genuine and deep-seated longing.
Casting off despair, though difficult, is essential. We are now living through a crucial period of reorientation, when the radical movements are emerging once again. These are times to recognize defeats, without being paralyzed by them, and to assess what has—and has not—worked in the past. Catastrophic politics have a very poor track record. For radicals, it is high time to jettison them.
This work evolved out of many conversations within the Retort Collective, shepherded by Iain Boal. Retort is that most unusual of collectives, providing radical antinomian comradeship, but eschewing any party lines or set positions.8 A number of us within Retort have independently set out from similar concerns about catastrophic politics, but arrived at quite far-flung destinations.9 We would like to thank our fellow Retorters for their help in nurturing the project, without expecting any of them to agree with it. We also would like to collectively thank the meticulous staff at PM Press—Romy Ruukel, Brian Layng, Gregory Nipper, Joey Paxman, Craig O’Hara, Ramsey Kanaan, Stephanie Pasvankias, Jonathan Rowland, Dan Fedorenko, and John Yates.
Eddie Yuen would like to thank Azibuike Akaba, Iain Boal, James Brooke, Sean Burns, George Caffentzis, Chris Carlsson, Rosemary Collard, James Davis, Max Elbaum, Barbara Epstein, Silvia Federici, Betsy Hartmann, Ramsey Kanaan, George Katsiaficas, Joel Kovel, Sasha Lilley, David Martinez, Anne McClintock, Rob Nixon, Gene Ray, and all the great folks at Blue Mountain Center.
For having slogged through parts or all of the manuscript, and significantly improving it, Sasha Lilley would like to thank Terry Bisson, Iain Boal, Jim Brook, Jordan Camp, Jim Davis, Chris Dixon, Max Elbaum, Barbara Epstein, Andrej Grubačić, Karl Kersplebedeb, Gabriel Kuhn, Matthew Lyons, Donald Nicholson-Smith, Kay Trimberger, Cal Winslow, Eddie Yuen, and several anonymous readers. She is grateful to Summer Brenner, scott crow, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Laura Fantone, Juliana Fredman, John Gibler, Doug Henwood, Kathleen Lilley, Ted Lilley, Fouad Makki, Joseph Matthews, David McNally, Rick Prelinger, Charlotte Sáenz, Dan Siegel, Joni Spigler, Vanessa Tait, and Tom Wetzel for aiding the project in various ways. Most of all, she would like to thank Ramsey Kanaan for ensuring this book was not a total catastrophe.
James Davis would like to thank William Berkowitz, Tauno Bilsted, Fergal Finnegan, Jordan Camp, Sasha Lilley, Matthew Lyons, Eddie Yuen, Peter Linebaugh, Juliana Fredman, Kevin Coogan, Ramsey Kanaan, Cal Winslow, Peter Rudy, Whitney Freedman, Iain Boal, Ramor Ryan, Shane O’Curry, Scott Fleming, Laura Fantone, Max Elbaum, DMZ, and Alan Toner.
David McNally would like to acknowledge Sue Ferguson—once again.