Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action - Softcover

Firth, Rhiannon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745340466 ISBN 13: 9780745340463

Publisher: Pluto Press, 2022

Synopsis

Anarchists have been central in helping communities ravaged by disasters, stepping in when governments wash their hands of the victims. Looking at Hurricane Sandy, Covid-19, and the social movements that mobilised relief in their wake, Disaster Anarchy is an inspiring and alarming book about collective solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world. 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. Occupy Sandy was widely acknowledged to have organised relief more effectively than federal agencies or NGOs, and following Covid-19 the term 'mutual aid' entered common parlance. However, anarchist-inspired relief has not gone unnoticed by government agencies. Their responses include surveillance, co-option, extending at times to violent repression involving police brutality. Arguing that disaster anarchy is one of the most important political phenomena to emerge in the twenty-first century, Rhiannon Firth shows through her research on and within these movements that anarchist theory and practice is needed to protect ourselves from the disasters of our unequal and destructive economic system.

About this title

About the Author

Rhiannon Firth is currently a lecturer in Sociology at UCL. She is the author of two books 'Utopian Politics: Citizenship and Practice', and 'Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the UK'. She is active in social movements and popular education projects in London.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0745340466
• ISBN 13: 9780745340463
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256