Stories and Resistance in the Age of Crises Benjamin Gready

Telling the story of crisis

As climate systems breakdown accelerates, the world as we know it begins to collapse around us. The ways in which people have become used to thinking and acting no longer seem to function adequately. People become unanchored from the surety of the prior world and seek new ways of making sense of their predicament. This is a space not just of material decay but of social reconfiguration.

This is not the collapse of all human systems. Human life will go on, in many forms through and beyond the climate crisis. This collapse is the disintegration of particular human systems which are ecologically disembedded, built on colonial and capitalist relationships of othering, exploitation, appropriation, and the imposition of their norms and values as an unquestionable reality. It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We have had the story of the Hollywood or biblical apocalypse saturate our lives and culture, but the story of the end of coloniality/capitalism usually remains untold.^{^[1]} Our task is difficult: to imagine and articulate new worlds beyond these totalising structures. However, the breakdown of 20th Century social and economic norms and the search for a viable future presents us with an imperfect opportunity.

Who gets to tell the story of our collective predicament is of the utmost importance. Competing stories are being constructed by authoritarians, ecofascists, religious zealots, lifeboat survivalists and the various segments of capital seeking to build or maintain their grip. If their stories take hold, their worlds get built and one disaster becomes another. This is one of the key tasks of the ecological left in the 21st Century: to clearly articulate a narrative that makes sense of the unfolding crises, disasters and disruption, that locates responsibility and lays the path towards the new world we must build in the shell of the old.

Discourse as a terrain of struggle

Discourses are the way we talk about the world and the vehicle by which we give and share meaning. Discourse is how we collectively give structure to lived experience and make sense of its vast complexity. The possibilities for action and agency are contained within the spectrum of discourse that we have access to.

Our story can shape what is knowable, thinkable and, importantly, doable. Who determines the boundaries of the knowable and the thinkable holds tremendous power. This is a struggle for discursive hegemony—to have particular explanations and solutions seen by the majority of people as beneficial, inevitable and natural. For now, hegemony lies with a particular cohort of people who present the institutions of coloniality/capitalism (and in particular, currently, its neoliberal form) as unshakable and perpetual. According to Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard, settler colonialism isn’t reproduced only through violence or repression, but also through the production of life in such ways as to make the hierarchies inherent to settler colonialism appear durable and natural. These institutions are not just imposed by the obvious repressive functions of the state and capital, but also operate as a normalisation and acceptance of hierarchies at the level in which we think, talk and act together. These are socially constructed forms of dominance whereby ordinary people have come to internalise, identify and play along with the logics of coloniality/capitalism despite them serving the interests of a small and powerful class of people.^{^[2]} The maintenance of existing hegemony and the struggle against it are made possible in the stories used to explain the world.

The fight is to undermine this hegemony, prevent other harmful narratives from expanding, and perpetuate our story—one that constructs the conditions for our collective liberation. If we don’t, somebody else will tell theirs, and they will set the parameters of possibility. Our story of an event or process contains the prospect of adequately recognising our predicament and highlighting what we believe to be viable responses. Our agency to alter the world for the better is made possible in these stories.

This focus on discourse is not to downplay the highly unequal material structure of the world or the struggles that do and will take place within it. These are fundamental to destroying our negative inheritances from coloniality/capitalism. But in order to recognise that this material inequality is neither natural or inevitable and that we have the agency to change things, we need to have a story that contains adequate analysis of our conditions and empowers us with the possibilities of changing them. Without cultivating this aspect of struggle we are at the whim of capitalists, authoritarians and other reactionaries.

An example of this is the way powerful business interests (Capital) and their supporters have utilised discourse to hold back the potential of organised working classes to free themselves from exploitation. By controlling discourse, capitalists have effectively, for now, triumphed in the class struggle. The working class still exists, its labour exploited for profit by the parasitic capitalists. But by seizing control of the discourse, capital has been able to broadly dissolve people’s sense of their working classness and close off the potential for them to come together and change the conditions of their exploitation. The condition of exploitation endures and the potential for radical agency and change (temporarily) collapses.

There are many actors who wish to tell other stories, to make the world seem inevitable or to close off liberatory possibilities in order to maintain their power and privilege. This is especially the case as escalating crises threaten the stability of contemporary coloniality/capitalism. This public space of discourse is a wide field open to contestation, but its resources and opportunities are unevenly distributed. Many of these actors have vast and powerful communication tools to proliferate their story that exceed our current capacities and make it difficult to see how we can successfully resist. But the seeming immovability of this power imbalance obscures our actually existing agency to create change. By pursuing the discursive struggle now, we set the foundations for radical change when opportunities arise and cracks appear in these seemingly unshakable relations of power. This process will grow our collective understanding and our power, and provide the basis on which we build a liberatory movement to engage in material struggle to challenge these diverse and powerful interests.

Who gets to determine the frameworks of thought, the language, the possibilities available to us in any moment holds immense power. But if the powerful have the tools to control discourse and close off the possibilities of change, what chance do we have to counter this? Fortunately, it is crises themselves, through shining a light on the untenable present and prompting a mass questioning of hegemonic norms, that provide opportunities for making substantial advances towards our collective liberation. Crises highlight the inherent vulnerabilities of coloniality/capitalism and help shatter the illusion of its totalising permanence, opening the possibilities for radical alternatives.

Collapse as intersecting and escalating crises

The collapse of the world as we know it is unlikely to be experienced as some form of biblical apocalypse. It will happen at different speeds, in different ways, in different geographies. It will be slow and steady at times, at others punctuated by disastrous events. Predictable only in its unpredictability. It will likely be felt as a series of crises, interlinking, overlapping, and escalating. As inherently unstable sets of social and economic relations, crises are embedded within coloniality/capitalism. Many of these crises are always already existing features of coloniality/capitalism, inherent to its functioning but often contained by spatial and temporal fixes.^{^[3]} These fixes displace crises to the social and ecological margins or into the future in order to try to shield the current powerful minority from the effects. Other crises will be newly felt as climate systems breakdown affects our economic and social infrastructures, as spatial and temporal displacement comes crashing back to earth. Already these crises are everywhere in public discourse: health crisis, debt crisis, housing crisis, migrant crisis, fiscal crisis, crisis of democracy… Cutting across all of these is the totalising spectre of climate systems breakdown and ecological collapse.

What are crises? They are periods in which shocks shake the foundations of existing social relations of domination. They are calls to action, rallying cries for change in an untenable present. They are periods of confusion and uncertainty. They are also periods of opportunity, agency and change. Disasters and crises can suspend the normalised sets of totalising social relations of actually existing coloniality/capitalism that condition our existence. They unsettle hegemony; neoliberalism already seems less stable. This shift in these dynamics provides the potential for the public to see that things aren’t actually as they have believed them to be and that the rules that they have deferred to don’t apply so strictly anymore. This opens space for new ways of understanding the world and for the growth of counter-hegemonic narratives.

It has been said that crises are a necessary condition for the questioning of the assumptions that underpin ‘normal’ life. Necessary, perhaps, but sufficient to shift those assumptions to something more egalitarian and ecological? Not so much. Feelings of fear and uncertainty can leave people clinging to now redundant understandings, conspiracy theories or searching for a return to a disappearing ‘normality’. Frameworks for understanding crises can be normalised into ongoing social structures that can make the required critical thought and action seem dangerous and unpatriotic. Indeed, crises can be, rather than a decisive moment, an enduring state that reinforces particular political and economic paradigms and prevents ordinary people from enacting the possibilities of agency and change. It is perhaps not surprising then that, given our current predicament, the Collins dictionary 2022 word of the year was ‘permacrisis’.

Competing stories and the misrecognition of crisis origins

A significant part of the difference between seizing the opportunities presented by crises for liberatory ends and succumbing to further profoundly unequal sets of social relations lies in how people understand the crises and their solutions. How people, at scale, recognise problems and what they see as a viable path to solving the crisis or minimising its effects. As we have seen this is dependent on the field of discourse that is available; the stories that people have access to that help them determine what is an achievable path beyond crises.

Those who have benefited greatly from the current system, the system that has delivered us these crises, do not want people to accurately identify the causes, nor see liberatory change as viable. They seek to shield themselves from responsibility and perpetuate a mass misrecognition of crisis origins and obscure liberatory possibilities. There are also actors from the political fringes such as fascists, conspiracists and religious zealots who do not come from a position of hegemony within the current system, who seek to reframe discourse and build other highly unequal worlds in which they are the beneficiaries.

Who else will be competing to tell the story of collapse?

The institutions of religion, adept over millennia at proselytising apocalyptic visions of collapse and predicting the end, will attempt to find renewed appeal. Readied to blame our predicament on transgressions against god, our inherent sinfulness and the inevitability of our situation as a fact of religious revelation. This is crisis as pre-ordained outcome, with little hope or agency in the actually existing world.

Conspiracists peddling woo-woo, bleach and snake oil have already proved adept at shamelessly grifting off others’ fear and desperation. Leaving behind basic reason they attempt to draw others towards new age mysticisms, convoluted irrationality and paranoid witch hunts.

Liberals will continue to pretend they are somehow a sensible centre of politics, a steady hand steering the ship of society through troubled waters. But, of course, they helped steer us here in the first place. Busy convincing us we are individualised subjects, with power only within our isolated worlds, they separate us from each other and our collective power. Their story is as false a promise as their economic fetish for letting the market fix everything.

Those with the most economic power within the current social reality will seek to maintain it. Capitalists will attempt to reconstruct favourable conditions for capital accumulation. As crises layer upon each other in the grind towards collapse, different segments of capital will tell different stories, shifting the blame, promising Solutions™ and relentlessly greenwashing their every move. They will use crises to stifle the ability of workers to challenge their exploitation and demand states protect their access to natural resources and profitability. Disaster capitalists will promise false solutions to the acute effects of crises as they continue the drive to privatise, enclose public assets and communal spaces, and deprive us of any commons.

Authoritarianism will be framed as necessary. Those who believe a small group are entitled to control and dominate everyone else see opportunity in constructing themselves as our saviours. Authoritarians and nationalists of various stripes will grasp the brutal tools of statecraft to promise solutions and false utopias. Eco-bordering, the process of controlling the movement of people for supposed environmental reasons is already underway. The tools, techniques and racist logics of its implementation are already in place, the story that this will save us is becoming more pervasive in the service of contemporary reactionaries on the borders of Australia, the US, Europe and elsewhere.

But isolation via borders or otherwise is no solution. There are those (some of whom seem to be comrades in the ecological struggle) whose stories give up hope of collective solutions to our social and ecological problems, and who instead collapse possibilities down to a libertarian survivalism at the scale of the family or the village. Effectively abandoning large swathes of people to the chaos, this is in fact a continuation of the privileges of contemporary coloniality/capitalism—pushing crisis to the periphery, those with the means (and the guns) survive.

It is not a stretch for these kinds of survivalism in practice to end up reinforcing the continuation and escalation of racist social structures. The visions can look similar. The ecofascist utopia is the sustainable (white) village. The nurturing woman in her place in the home, the martial man governing and defending the village (and the race) from the outsiders. Their story constructs these frameworks of racial and gendered hierarchies as natural and therefore timeless, innate and inescapable. This is a story that imprisons us to a misrecognised and reductionist biology and ends in genocide.

The broader far right is both a response to and a product of crises. It is adept at utilising crises, attempting to move itself from the fringe to challenge the mainstream. It has done this before with disastrous consequences. The far right is also beginning to rediscover its environmental history: one of colonial expansion, eugenics and ethnic cleansing, and the entrenchment of supposedly natural hierarchies. We should never forget these green legacies and the future possibilities they inspire. Projecting the story of themselves as a legitimate alternative to liberal democracy, they are busy finding opportunities in the environmental crisis to pursue their white supremacist agenda. At its fringe, the accelerationist tendency on the extreme right tells the story that total collapse is the goal. Groups and individuals seek to accelerate the collapse through the proliferation of generalised violence and chaos from which the strong white ethnostate will survive and prosper. Deeds speak as words and the figure of the mass shooter is their storyteller. For them the death of millions of people of colour in the developing world via climate catastrophe is the ultimate solution. Collapse is reimagined and retold as the race war of their desires.

Solidarity: the empowering arc of the story

This wide range of narratives are just some of the ways in which regressive forces will attempt to tell the story of crisis and collapse. What they all have in common is they serve to separate social groups who share common interests, destroy the possibilities of radical solidarity and contain the liberatory potential emerging from these crises. These tendencies do not operate in isolation to one another. They interact, borrow and learn from one another in order to construct their desired worlds.

Environmentalism itself is not immune to this, it can be grasped and utilised in the service of almost any politics. It is all too easy to instinctively think of something positively simply because it is framed as ‘environmental’. As an ecological left we must be acutely attuned to this to avoid reinforcing, inadvertently or otherwise, the stories and discourses that enable authoritarianism, fascism, and the continuation of coloniality/capitalism. We must be wise to the misrecognition of crisis origins, harmful false solutions, and perspectives that position ourselves as enlightened activists acting separately from, or on behalf of, passive others. And we must question and adjust how our stories and actions positively contribute to building a broad yet radical solidarity, especially within the urgency and laser focus that committed environmental activism demands.

Our story must locate responsibility for these crises and identify the culprits in the elite hegemonic class of people in business, media and the state. These people and their interests should be the targets of discursive struggle. And whilst much of the general public will, for now, defer to this class and their concepts and values, they are not part of this class. They are instead trying to live viably within the rules of the current hegemonic totality. Pursuing a viable life within these rules is, however, incompatible with living in a society free from racialised and gendered oppression or within our ecological constraints. A key task is to expand the horizons for how the public calculates their interests in line with liberatory goals as a broad future potentiality, alongside a narrower conception of interests as the immediate material things that we have access to. We share the common interest in a liveable planet and a life free from alienation and exploitation. And we need the wider public to successfully resist and to maintain durable social and environmental relations beyond coloniality/capitalism.

It is the notion of solidarity that will form the basis of our collective responses to crises and our ability to build a broad movement capable of challenging coloniality/capitalism and moving beyond the crises. It can cut across the boundaries used to divide and diminish our collective power in the face of regressive forces. It is the essence by which we repair our social relations and beyond that our ecological relations. Solidarity is a practice, but one built on a story of our capacity to fight together. This means that it needs to be central to our discursive struggle.

It is in almost nobody’s interest for climate systems breakdown to precipitate total social and environmental collapse. A story of bottom up solidarity, driven from our common interest, provides a platform for which we can instead resist repression and build a mass movement towards liberatory social reconfiguration. This can challenge the divisive and alienating forms of social organisation manifested in the stories of coloniality/capitalism and other regressive social formations. We can then reset our relationships to each other and to the world we inhabit, effectively confront the diverse suite of crises we face, and build a better, more equal world.

I refer in this article to coloniality/capitalism to capture the ongoing racialized, gendered, and classed systems of power that congeal in myriad ways to form an alienating, exploitative, instrumentalising totality. This terminology deliberately signals to the remarkable and liberatory work we have inherited from Indigenous, anti/post/decolonial, feminist, anti-racist and anti-capitalist (anarchist, socialist, marxist) movements, practitioners and thinkers who provide us with a toolkit for surviving crises and getting out of this mess. ↑
This particular understanding of hegemony draws heavily on the work of Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci and in particular his prison notebooks, written whilst a political prisoner of the Italian fascist regime in the 1920’s and 30’s. ↑
For more on spatial fixes and processes of geographical restructuring to resolve crises of capitalism see the work of Marxist geographer David Harvey. ↑

Benjamin Gready is an activist scholar with a background in direct action activism of an environmental and antifascist nature. He likes football and birdwatching and is currently working on a number of projects both inside and outside the university.