Disaster anarchy : mutual aid and radical action
Rhiannon Firth (Author)
Looking at Hurricane Sandy, Covid-19, and the social movements that mobilized relief in their wake, this volume is a book about collective solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world. Anarchists have been central in helping communities ravaged by disasters, stepping in when governments wash their hands of the victims. As climate change and neoliberalism converge, mutual aid networks, grassroots direct action, occupations, and brigades have sprung up in response to this crisis with considerable success. This book constitutes an attempt to document the achievements of Occupy Sandy and Covid 19 Mutual Aid, to think through the conditions that led to the state responses, and to offer a knowledge base and recommendation for anarchist praxis in terms of staying radical and avoiding recuperation. In this volume, Firth argues that anarchist relief efforts offer more than simply an effective practical form of relief than can be recuperated back into neoliberal policy. Rather, they operate as an ontological break, and as a mechanism of consciousness-raising and pedagogy against the inequalities that lie at the heart of the ongoing disaster of capitalism. Mutual aid is a highly politicized, prefigurative phenomenon which links non-hierarchical organization to structural critiques of disaster capitalism, climate change and disease, which tend to impact unequally on the most oppressed groups in society. The main aim of this book is to theorize the specificity of anarchist approaches to understanding and mobilizing around disasters. Arguing that disaster anarchy is one of the most important political phenomena to emerge in the 21st century, Firth shows through her research on and within these movements that anarchist theory and practice are needed to protect ourselves from the disasters of our unequal and destructive economic system. --Adapted from introduction and publisher description
ix, 243 pages ; 22 cm
9780745340463, 9780745340456, 0745340466, 0745340458
1288196115
ebook version :
AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsInterviewees 1. Introduction 2. Backdrop: Mainstream Disaster Studies 3. Critical Approaches: Precarity, Securitisation and Disaster Capitalism 4. Towards an Anarchist Approach to Disaster 5. Occupy Sandy Mutual Aid, New York, 2012 6. Covid-19 Mutual Aid, London, 2020 7. Conclusion Notes Index