Review of "Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action" by Rhiannon Firth

First up - we read this in the Stroud Radical Reading Group, and my friend and comrade Mar Florence wrote a really good summary, which I have pasted just below.

"Here's the longer version of my book summary of Disaster Anarchy by Rhiannon Firth (5-10 min read).

Capitalism and neoliberalism make disasters more likely to happen because they prioritise profit and maintaining power.

Mainstream disaster management is focused on restoring order, maintaining capitalism, and keeping power in the hands of the existing governments.

The human cost in every sense - lives lost, suffering, negative and traumatic experiences - only matter to the extent to which they impact the capitalist system.

She describes non anarchist critiques of mainstream disaster relief, such as ones that point out that existing systems contribute to and unevenly distribute the impacts of disasters.

She says these don't go far enough because they often posit a state led solution, when the state will always prioritise it's own power, and so will fail at prioritising the experience and safety of its citizens.

She then describes an anarchist theoretical approach where rather than asking for help from a state, people help each other through horizontal organising (between peers) and in the form of mutual aid (in which everyone is a helper and everyone is helped).

She describes some ways capitalism stops or reduces the effectiveness of these social movements -

Recuperation - which is when anarchist organising gets absorbed back into the system, eg by becoming part of an ngo or the state or a private company. This imposes hierarchies, reduces the energy of a movement, limits what the movement can do and who can be part of it (she gives the example of excluding immigrants from helping if official papers are required, which would push them into the role of only receiving help, removing the mutual aspect), and prevents more radical action against the status quo like resisting evictions.

Repression - when anarchist action is clamped down on directly by the state. She gives the example of mutual aid after hurricane Katrina.

She describes how some people criticise anarchist ideas as unrealistic because they think people are fundamentally selfish, she calls this Hobbesian.

Terminology.

She uses the words prefiguration, post-Fordist and cybernetic a lot.

I think prefiguration means creating something with an idea that it is part of the future.

Post-Fordist seemed to mean neoliberal capitalism, maybe post industrial?

Cybernetic seems to mean feeding back into the current system in a loop - I always thought it meant something to do with robots.

She then has two chapters of case studies, the first about occupy sandy, a mutual aid movement in new York after superstorm sandy, which was modelled on the occupy wall street movement and involved some of the same people. And covid mutual aid groups in London during the early pandemic.

In the examples she talks about how the different disasters are tackled differently but there are some similarities. In both cases mutual aid groups are faster and more effective at meeting people's needs than the official groups. In both cases the state and ngos try to piggyback on the grassroots efforts, impose rules, and take credit for their successes.

She talks about difficulties such as people joining with different politics who disagree with how things are done or want to impose rules or hierarchies on the groups. She also talked a bit about inclusion and how to solve problems of making sure everyone has the opportunity to help as well as be helped.

Occupy sandy used more in person organising, turned up at people homes to clean out their basements and used community centres and churches to distribute food, blankets and medical supplies. They received a lot of financial donations from the public to do this work and she talks a bit about the difficulties when managing money in this sort of movement. I read in hot money (naomi klein) that they used a shop front as a makeshift medical centre where volunteer doctors and nurses could help people. Occupy sandy used amazon wishlists so people could buy and donate supplies directly. Occupy sandy used bike couriers and bike powered generators so people could charge their phones.

Covid mutual aid groups organised mostly online but had some social centres, and she says where they had some physical space that really helped the organising and distribution of help. Covid mutual aid groups organised people to do shopping for other people and collect their medications, as well as giving individuals money from donations when they applied for financial help. There was a similar discussion about transparency and the difficulties and ethical concerns of managing money.

She talks a lot about the social principle vs the political principle and how they are mutually exclusive. As far as I understand it, the social principle is about helping one another as equals and the political principle always prioritises retaining power in some form between a smaller group."

Such a brilliant summary that there's no need for me to write any more...but I would like to say a bit about my feelings about the book. From the first sentence the language is academic and difficult. Being charitable, I suppose that's inevitable. Leftist thinkers are mainly academics these days - there's not much of an economic base for "organic intellectuals" in the Gramscian sense, so they have to write to the style of their community and their job expectations. And probably much of the market for this kind of book is students who want to learn to write in that sort of language so that they pick up the credentials of academic social science. It's just too bad for activists who are interested in the subject matter but don't have the academic hinterland.

Also, I wasn't all that taken with the actual arguments in the book, once I had decoded them. Yeah, there's a tension between wanting to advance your politics in a mutual aid group which includes others who don't share your outlook, and wanting the group to be effective. And yeah there is something problematic about using tools (especially technology ones with built-in surveillance) developed by exploitative capitalist corporations...though I suspect that the FAI-CNT militias in revolutionary Barcelona didn't worry too much about the provenance of the guns that used to fight fascism. There are great big gaps in the book too...very little about the actual working class history of permanent mutual aid groups, some of which were anarchist-inspired. She seems committed to the idea of spontaneous informal organisation, as if there were no other traditions or ways of organising on the left. Which, I think, is part of the reason why we are in the pitiful, disorganised, ineffective place that we are. We won't get anywhere, we won't involve more people, we won't achieve anything at all, without building permanent organisation that are here today, here tomorrow, and don't burn people out in a couple of years because everything is urgent.

One last thing...the discussion about whether mutual aid provided a sticking plaster for capitalism and actually helped prop it up reminded me of this poem by Brecht, which I will also paste in full.

Bertolt Brecht: A Bed for the Night I hear that in New York At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway A man stands every evening during the winter months And gets beds for the homeless there By appealing to passers-by. It won’t change the world It won’t improve relations among men It will not shorten the age of exploitation But a few men have a bed for the night For a night the wind is kept from them The snow meant for them falls on the roadway. Don’t put down the book on reading this, man. A few people have a bed for the night For a night the wind is kept from them The snow meant for them falls on the roadway But it won’t change the world It won’t improve relations among men It will not shorten the age of exploitation.