Mutual Aid Does Nothing Alone: A Rebuttal to Joanna Wuest
In her article ‘Mutual Aid Can’t Do It Alone,’The Nation author Dr. Joanna Wuest alleges that mutual aid is insufficient to support people in (and out of) crisis. She contends that while mutual aid is a useful tool, its efficacy pales in comparison to state programmes. Yet Wuest fails to engage the arguments of mutual aid’s progenitors and proponents. What results is a confused and potentially harmful perspective on a core anarchist principle that has sustained people for generations.
In solidarity, we share a mutual aid story, a video testimonial of the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Richmond, Virginia.
We and You and So Many Others: A Story of MAD RVA and Mutual Aid in Richmond, VA
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WHO ARE WE?
We are a solidarity network of community members and organizations working together in Richmond, Virginia to help each other.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Richmond, or MAD RVA, aims to create a support system in response to COVID-19 and the effects it has had on Richmonders, including supply shortage, job losses and quarantine. We operate collectively and are primarily functioning as a supply delivery for folks who cannot access medicine, food and other vital goods. We have also just launched a mini-grants program and are developing other supports, forming partnerships across community and demanding policy shifts towards equity and social justice while navigating the undetermined timeline of effects on our community.
Use this site to become a part of the network: request supplies and financial support, offer your goods and services, donate needed items and funds, and dedicate your time to community mutual aid.
(From the website of MAD RVA, where donations to the endeavour can also be made).
New Year’s Notes from Greece under Lockdown: December 2020 and January 2021
At this time, we are reminded of our comrades through banners and graffiti, through brief encounters under the guise of getting exercise between curfews, and through the courageous actions of those who turn to the night to act as the day becomes too dangerous.
Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.
There is something which seems to echo as true for all manner of “leftists” in Badiou’s short reflection, “On the current conjuncture” (Verso 21/12/2021): that the wave of protest-insurrectionist movements of the last decade have been largely negative – reactive and opposed to what is -, without a positive conception or vision of what is to follow, without any affirmative demands and political-social goals to be struggled for.
… I believe that everything today turns around the need for negative slogans and defensive actions finally to be subordinated to a clear and synthetic vision of our own objectives. And I am convinced that in order to achieve this, we must in any case recall that which Marx declared to be the kernel of his thought. A kernel that is of course negative in its turn, but at a scale such that it can only be supported by a grandiose affirmation. I am referring to the slogan ‘the abolition of private property’.
If we share the initial observation, we are not entirely convinced by the “slogan” as sufficient for the creation of a “synthetic vision” of a politics-society beyond capitalism.
The fragility of the many movements that Badiou cites (and perhaps the fact that they are conceived of as “movements” impedes us from seeing their limitations or possibilities – Giorgio Agamben) would seem to defy any simple slogan, especially one that lends itself to narrow political-economic interpretations, and thus susceptible to alienating political appropriation.
We would suggest that a step further is necessary, a step that will appear to many as paradoxical, impossible even. What such movements call for are myths, myths which as “precious stones of memory” (Marcel Detienne, L’invention de la mythologie) weave a present to a past powerful enough to project a future, myths which fracture the eternal present of capitalist utility generating profaned spaces and times of collective play, of common joyful expenditure (Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism), myths which bind us to our shared ancestors, to the telluric or chthonic dimension of our lives which are not reducible to the managed and cultivated topoi of Gaia. (Giorgio Agamben, Gaia e Ctonia)
Bataille was to describe fascism as an affectivepolitical movement, a movement of powerful emotions and passions sustained by myth. To then call for myth again would be to possibly repeat the risk of totalitarianism. And what myth could conceivably arise in the time of the “absence of myth”?
The fact that a universe without myth is the ruin of the universe — reduced to the nothingness of things — in the process of depriving us equates deprivation with the revelation of the universe. If by abolishing the mythic universe we have lost the universe, the action of a revealing loss is itself connected to the death of myth. And today, because a myth is dead or dying, we see through it more easily than if it were alive: it is the need that perfects the transparency, the suffering which makes the suffering become joyful. (Bataille)
Fascism and State driven communism sought to fill the void of the death of myth with new, foundational myths, an exercise condemned to terrifying violence by the madness of trying to liberate “humanity” (whose etymology takes us back to “earthly beings”) from its ancestors through technical-technological liberation; in both instances, excrescences of capitalist progress and its attendant rituals of accumulation (the highest expression of a passionless, demythologised religion – Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion”).
Our proposed myth is written in the plural – there have only ever been myths -, myths which reveal/create our ties to life, in all of its wildness. If we are condemned to give form to this life, to “teach” it, let it be with the passion and consciousness that all creation rests on destruction.
Why We Need Real Anarchy: Don’t Let Trump’s Minions Gentrify Revolt
Politicians have come together across the aisle to decry the storming of the Capitol on January 6 as “lawless,” “anti-democratic,” and “extremist,” going so far as to misrepresent the result as “anarchy.” But the problem with the invasion of the Capitol was not that it was unlawful, undemocratic, or extremist, per se, but that it was an effort to concentrate oppressive power in the hands of an autocrat—which is precisely the opposite of anarchy. Direct action, militant tactics, and a critique of electoral politics will remain essential to movements against fascism and state violence. We must not let the far right associate them with tyranny, nor permit centrists to muddy the waters.
State and corporate activism to repress those directly and indirectly involved in the assault on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington DC on the last 6th of January risks extending beyond the limits of the country’s “neo-fascist” and white supremacist Right, especially when carried out in the name of a war on “domestic terrorism”.
We share the first of a series of articles on the dangers and the responses that must be sought and struggled for if the security State is not to tightens its grips even further during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, as the Republicans Fracture, a New Political Center Emerges—Further to the Right
As a consequence of Donald Trump’s supporters occupying the Capitol building in Washington, DC after a rally promoting his baseless claims of election fraud, the Republican Party is fracturing, setting the stage for the consolidation of a new bipartisan political center—albeit much further to the right than before. Yet this also paves the way for massive sections of Trump’s base to break away from representative democracy altogether, embracing an explicitly fascist alternative. The events of January 6 offer them martyrs and a revanchist narrative that will serve them for years to come, providing an internal mythos for recruitment and a justification whenever they need to use force.
The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.
James Baldwin
For those who lead a provincial life, life and happiness are always to be found elsewhere, in another city, in another country. But for us provincials, this other place is perpetually out of reach. Cavafy’s wisdom is in the dignity and introspective sensibility with which he approaches this sad truth. And finally, with the same linguistic restraint and philosophical simplicity, he concludes by revealing that we have wasted our lives in that city. We come to realize that we have all been wasting our lives, and that the problem lies not in being provincial, but in the very nature of life itself. Great poets can tell their own stories without once saying “I,” and in doing so, lend their voice to all of humanity.
Orhan Pamuk, “Other Countries, Other Shores”, (New York Times, 19/12/2013)
Why share poetry as well known as Cavafy’s on Autonomies? Because it is the poets who allow us to see, and above all, to see beyond a “provincialism” which blinds us to the violence and tragedy of pandemic politics.
In defence of mutual aid
From The Commoner (21/01/2021), a reflection on mutual aid …
Mutual Aid Does Nothing Alone: A Rebuttal to Joanna Wuest
In her article ‘Mutual Aid Can’t Do It Alone,’ The Nation author Dr. Joanna Wuest alleges that mutual aid is insufficient to support people in (and out of) crisis. She contends that while mutual aid is a useful tool, its efficacy pales in comparison to state programmes. Yet Wuest fails to engage the arguments of mutual aid’s progenitors and proponents. What results is a confused and potentially harmful perspective on a core anarchist principle that has sustained people for generations.
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