Hope Against Hope

Préface

• Trade coverage in main industry publications (Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal, Choice
• Review coverage in relevant smaller outlets (In These Times, n+1, etc)
• Online and Zoom events around the world
• Podcast appearances on The Dig
• Postcard direct mailing to anchor bookstores (Red Emma’s, Bluestockings, Wooden Shoe, etc)
• Emails to Common Notions email list, relevant newsletters and listservs
• Galleys available
• National TV, radio, and podcast campaign, targeting interviews on Democracy Now!, PRI’s The World, The Dig, This Is Hell, and more
• National print and online campaign, targeting reviews and interviews in The Guardian, The Nation, Mother Jones, Los Angeles Review of Books, In These Times, and more
• Online/social media campaign including giveaways
• Regional Mid-Atlantic and UK tour
• Excerpts in The Nation; Boston Review and n+1; Verso Books blog
• Promotion through the author’s social media: @out_woods (and collective members)
• Bookseller/Library mailing and promotions, including conference giveaways
• Reading group guide
• Promotion through activist newsletters and social media
• Academic marketing campaign
• Bookseller/Library mailing and promotions, including giveaways

Auteur

Out of the Woods is a transnational political research and theory collective, a loose grouping of decolonial, small-c communist, antiracist queer-feminist thinkers working together to think through the problem of ecological crisis.

Texte du rabat

Hope Against Hope investigates the critical relation between climate change and capitalism characterized by deepening inequality, rising far-right movements, and–relatedly–more frequent and devastating disasters.

Out of the Woods Collective charts a revolutionary course in and beyond our perilous times. The journey, they argue, requires an abolitionist approach to border imperialism, reactionary ecology, and state violence that underpin many green solutions to climate change as well as dominant modes of understanding nature. Crucially, they remind us of the frequent moments and movements of solidarity emerging from the ruins that surround us. Their daring response to the disarray of politics in our seemingly end times is the urgent and hopeful project of “disaster communism”–the collective power to transform our political horizons and establish a climate future based in common life.

Hope Against Hope is a devastating critique of the current environmentalist and leftist discourses on climate change that rely upon and renew racist, anti-migrant, nationalist, and capitalist assumptions. It is also a visionary call for the critical expansion of our conceptual toolbox to organize solidarity within and against ecological crisis.

Résumé
Climate disaster is here. Capitalism can't fix it, not even with a Green New Deal. Our only hope against hope is disaster communism.

Échantillon de lecture

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 pro- vide 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. 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 con- clusive 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 ac- countability 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 acquain- tances 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 adminis- trators. 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 m…