Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
of any nation in the world—only Saudi Arabia was richer.23
When the phosphate was finally exhausted in the late nineties, the country fell into a deep crisis: the central bank went broke, unemployment hit ninety percent, and the school system collapsed. After decades of strip-mining, the very foundations of the island were in ruins. Geographer Anja Kanngieser writes, “the mine area, called ‘topside’ by Nauruans, is like a moonscape. Huge limestone pinnacles reach skywards, punctuated by steep gullies into which, I was warned, people have fallen to their deaths. It is unbearably hot, humid, and inhospitable.”24 Eighty percent of Nauru’s surface was now not only infertile but utterly uninhabitable.25
Faced with catastrophe, Nauru’s government made a series of increasingly desperate attempts at self-preservation—alternating between laundering money for the Russian mafia and recognizing breakaway states in return for cash. Eventually, in 2001, Nauru’s options ran out and it agreed to become part of Australia’s “Pacific Solution.” The consequence of this was a stream of aid but its price was hosting a massive migrant-detention facility. By using Nauru as an offshore prison, Australia avoids its responsibilities under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Since 2013, Australia has used its offshore prisons on Nauru and Manus Island to prevent anyone who seeks asylum in Australia by boat from landing on its sovereign shores. Nauru, not a signatory to the convention, provides the perfect alibi for the detention, deprivation, abuse, and torture of thousands of racialized migrants.26
Nauru is an object lesson between the extractive colonialism and the violence of the border. The island was stripped of its resources because of colonial contempt for the Indigenous islanders. The poverty of those same islanders could then be weaponized to use the island as a site of racialized violence. The population of Nauru, rendered surplus, is forced to deputize the oppression of migrants from other surplus populations. The island sustains itself on the destruction of the lives of others, because all other means of sustenance have been ruined. Nauru’s experience encapsulates the breadth and depth of the disaster’s destructiveness: an example of what is happening, what has happened, and what is going to happen.
Reading of this breadth and depth, you, like us, might feel the pull of despair. But to despair over Nauru is to return to the same problem we found above—where an understandable despair at the reality of destruction becomes confused with an unacceptable hopelessness at the inevitability of cruelty. In the face of such calamity, do not doubt the capacity for kindness. Even amid the horror of the camps on Nauru, the prisoners gather together and organize for their collective survival. Despite years of police repression, 2016 saw protracted protests by those detained on Nauru and with solidarity from Nauruans.27
In these protests we glimpse the beginnings of disaster communism. We are aware that the word “communist” risks conjuring up images of authoritarian statism. Yet there is no name other than “communism,” that Out of the Woods knows of, adequate to describe collective world-building beyond the state and capital. For us, communism is precisely the process which simultaneously undoes “business-as-usual” and builds a new world. Communism, in short, is the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Like ecological crisis, communism cannot be understood as yet-to-come. Communism, too, has existed, still exists, and will continue to exist. This is what provides hope against grief and replaces acceptance with struggle.
Like disaster, communist struggle is differentiated. Those undertaking it are more often than not already feeling the sharp end of ecological crisis: Indigenous peoples, migrants, racialized people, women, prisoners, “queers,” workers, the poor, and the disabled. Isolated, their struggles can appear reactive, as if they provide only temporary local reliefs. Capital is all too eager to offset the costs of its ecological crisis onto those who suffer from it, attempting to turn coterminous struggles into self-ingesting infighting. When viewed together, the acts of these groups appear the prime motor of social change. We know not yet what we might do, and this unknowable togetherness, we call communism.
It is this which makes us hopeful, which wards off that damaging and self-fulfilling despair. Hope is our word for the grave but positive emotion which collectively emerges within the disastrous present, pushes against it, and expands beyond it. With Ernst Bloch, we insist that this hope is not expectation, nor even optimism.28 Rather, it is always against itself; warding off its tendency to become a fetish, sundered from solidarity and struggle. This is hope against hope.
The importance of being together and becoming together is one we feel strongly about as a collective. Through the simple repetition of talking and writing online, Out of the Woods has become an important part of all our lives, with shared study evolving into real care and solidarity. It has been a wonderful thing to write together: typing over each other in sprawling online documents, not remembering or caring which parts any individual wrote, piecing together our knowledges on things we already knew, teasing out from each other things we didn’t know we knew, and collectively addressing those things we did not and do not yet know. As a collection of essays-thus-far written, this book is by no means the culmination of our thought but a series of snapshots of thought-in-gestation. Any kind of conclusive finality is impossible for us. As in the struggles we advocate, this process of becoming together can have no destination at which it settles once and for all. We frequently disagree with each other about what we wrote yesterday, about what we are writing today. This too prevents any sense of finality, as does the fact that, come tomorrow, we want to be writing with each other again. Our thinking together is not complete because it can’t be completed, and even if it could, we wouldn’t want it to end anyway.
Writing as a collective under a shared name solidifies this becoming together. Yet we recognize that it can also play an obfuscatory role, allowing us to escape accountability for our histories and positions, and eliding our relationships to those power structures which reproduce the ecological crisis. Out of the Woods started from a call circulated online in English, predominantly shared in a communist milieu concentrated in the UK. The founding members were all loose acquaintances and largely affiliated with UK universities, whether as staff or students. At this point, we were all white and all men. This probably reflected the nature of the call—a (perhaps uninviting) invitation to do unpaid theoretical work, with all the imbrications of privilege that inherently involves. The original composition of the collective was reflected in the readership we appealed to: a certain left-theory audience was implicit in our writing. In the years since, new people have joined Out of the Woods—primarily through Twitter. Others have stepped back. The collective is now spread across the United Kingdom and the United States, and while it is no longer all men and certainly not heterosexual, we are still all white—and several of us settlers in North America. We are undoubtedly beneficiaries of the nexus of raciality, capital, and colonialism. We take responsibility for and fight against being determined by that inheritance. Several of us still work on the margins of universities, as tenuous students, temporary lecturers, and administrators. It is important to keep in mind these situated perspectives as you read this book—not to invalidate our thought but to better specify it. What has (not) been written undoubtedly reflects those who have (not) written it. With this book complete, Out of the Woods will transform yet again, with the intention of further multiplying our positions against homogeneity. We invite you to contact us, and to think, write, and struggle with us.
When we formed Out of the Woods, we wanted to intervene against the consistent inadequacy of many existing narratives around the ecological crisis. We profoundly disagreed with mainstream environmentalism’s call for a unified humanity that might stand against a yet-to-come cataclysmic event. Simultaneously, we were appalled by the ways this homogenous conception of humanity coexists with moralizing critiques blaming cataclysm on an excess of humanity. Through such a process, cataclysm becomes too easily pinned on “dirty” developing countries, with their “rapidly” reproducing populations, and their “floods” of migrants.
Oppositions between the polluted and the pure, the populating and the controlled, and the migrating and the placebound all ultimately depend on another organizational divide: between white “civilization” and racialized “disorder.” The concept of “nature” serves as an avatar for white anxiety, making manifest fears around the loss of purity and control. Such fears can supposedly be overcome only