BOOKBUSTER REVIEW
Disaster Anarchy
By Rhiannon Firth
Published by Pluto Press, at £19.99, available at Bookbuster
Review by Tim Barton
Naomi Klein, in her The Shock Doctrine is paraphrased in the Guardian (July, 2016) thus: ‘disaster capitalism operates by delivering massive shocks to the system and then using the ensuing period of anarchy, fear and confusion to reassemble the pieces of what it has broken into a new configuration’. Ignoring the typical misuse of ‘anarchy’ in their statement, it is clear that current Tory policy is very much in line with Klein’s warnings. When applied to actual disaster response, neoliberal capitalist extremism naturally seeks to profit even from the worst situations, be it flood, famine, pandemic, economic recession, or war.
Rhiannon Firth’s book takes its title, then, as a riposte to those forces that seek to profit from crises. She also looks at the ways in which grassroots and community responses to crises are often punished, or hijacked and neutered. In essence, there is a war waged by the state and capital against autonomous people-power. In a country like ours, this should give us pause for thought when we suggest we are a ‘functioning democracy’.
Firth’s subtitle gives the flavour of the positive aspects of her work: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. Her case studies are pulled from the responses to Hurricane Sandy in the US, and from Covid in the UK. In both cases she finds various local attempts to address the problems caused by, respectively, flood and pandemic. Both leave many people in peril, for example lacking power, food, medical aid… In both cases neighbourhood schemes often out-performed formal state responses.
WE ARE NOT ‘DAMNED HAIRY APES’
As Firth puts it, ‘neoliberal austerity and the decline of the oil economy, industrial civilisation and associated structures of governance mean we can no longer rely on our governments to save us from catastrophe
(if we ever could)’. Instead, she is concerned to analyse ‘decentralised, anarchist-inspired mutual aid disaster relief efforts’ that ‘have arisen after nearly every major natural disaster in the United States since Katrina’, and similar efforts here in the UK.
A description of what ‘anarchism’ might mean is helpful, as so few seem willing to peek past the state-sponsored cartoon image of a madman hiding a bomb under his cloak, or the canard that the First World War was ‘caused’ by one militant self-described ‘anarchist’ and his bullet. Firth emphasises anarchism’s roots in ancient Greece, and in indigenous societies, and notes its diversity in both practice and theory. Commonalities amongst the various ‘anarchisms’ might include ‘decentralised networks and collectives’, and ‘direct action’, including ‘protests, camps, occupations, blockades, squats, social centres, intent-ional communities, zines and cooperatives’. Anarchism makes the assumption that ‘by nature’, we are not ‘damned hairy apes’ to quote Charlton Heston’s ironic cry in the film Planet of the Apes but, rather, are cooperative with no inherent ‘need for external authority’.
HASTINGS’ ‘RAINED OFF’ OCCUPY MOVEMENT
‘Cooperative work requires mutual consent which may not entail ideological agreement’, and thus allows us to work on common goals flexibly without worrying about most differences of emphasis. This was noticeable in the Occupy movement, including the ‘rained off’ version Hastings tried to develop, and also in on-the-ground activism around climate issues. Occupy were at the core of local disaster relief after Sandy, and whilst not being a monolithically ‘anarchist’ movement was analytically naturally ‘anarchist’ in form. Of course, other groups, such as religious organisations, also worked ‘on the ground’, and many may argue that there is a foundationally ‘socialist/anarchist’ strand to many of the Parables, which are of course at the heart of much positive church activity.
Here in the UK, many towns had small local groups organising the delivery of food, prescriptions, test-kits etc. to those house-bound and in relative poverty throughout the crisis. Formal ‘state’ responses, through for example the NHS, were clearly so under-funded and mismanaged that, by default, community based activity was both necessary and more effective. I was in contact with people in Bolton, Rostock and Westhoughton who were running explicitly ‘anarchist’ mutual aid prog-rammes, for no-strings ‘apolitical’ support, and am aware of numerous other similar groups in the North-East. Most of these people got on with it quietly, their social media presence merely to aid organising and raising awareness for volunteers and those in need of support.
HASTINGS’ ‘LIBERTARIAN’ GROUPINGS
In Hastings we have, for example, ‘Hastings & St Leonards Community Help Project’, as well as less formal local groups. The politics side of those involved was not of specific relevance to the project, and I can’t speak to individual beliefs amongst those involved, but those I know personally are certainly on the left, whilst not necessarily subscribing to particular views. I think other groups were similar, though there are numerous other ‘libertarian’ groupings here as well that were active too.
Firth’s book is revealing and important. In regards to the state response to community-based mutual aid, the examples of repression are eye-opening (some of the US Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA’s repressive activities are well known, especially during the ‘disaster relief’ for Katrina), as are her chapters on what she calls ‘recuperative’ practices, where the state, corporations, or NGOs hijack and absorb local groups, often losing their goodwill in the process.
As to the list of ‘anarchist’ activities above, under Boris Johnson’s ‘Five Acts’ passed in March and April this year most of them will now be illegal, and Rishi Sunak’s intention to increase sentences, to include a wider range of people than just those present at a demo, to expand ‘Prevent’ to mean ‘anti-establishment’ views will make it worse. Our Tory ‘Brexit bonus’ will be fewer civil rights and an expanded prison-industrial complex, comparable to the USA’s privatised slave-factory system. Disaster Anarchy will be a key element in our response to this latest neoliberal infraction on our social cohesion and stability!
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