Maybe you’ve heard of disaster capitalism. How about disaster anti-capitalism?
I’m just back from a few days in Florida, reporting on Hurricanes Irma and Maria and how anarchists, socialist, and other activists have seized the moment. One big takeaway:
“I don’t know if I think mutual aid is all that different from what people do for each other in disasters anyhow: when someone in your community is in need, you help. People have lived like that for eons.
But what mutual aid seems to get at is that many of us struggle to actually have a community. Storms and poverty displace people; segregation divides people; competitive consumer culture and work alienate people; bigotry pushes people out of families. And so it is also true that for eons, people have taken it a step further, set up places of refuge and solidarity beyond the family, kin, neighborhood model.”
Here’s a little more of what I wrote for Scalawag Magazine, or jump to the full article here.
1. Orlando
I arrive in Orlando on a turbulent flight, descending toward a flat, green expanse, a horizon that’s empty except for the twin towers of a power plant. This piece of the grid that recently left millions in Florida without power for days looks tranquil through the humid air. I turn on my phone to the news from Puerto Rico: body bags and a president who is tossing paper towels into a crowd, bragging about numbers of people dead (they are lower than Katrina, he says, and the people of Puerto Rico should be proud). There’s a soft rain coming down and it feels like the edge of the world, the end.
Later, driving, I see power lines by the highway strung up on a metal pole the shape of a Mickey Mouse head, piles of debris in front of Mediterranean-style mansions, trailer parks built on the shimmering coasts of manmade lakes. I’ve come to Florida weeks after Hurricanes Irma and Maria not to write a post-mortem, but because I heard that here and in the Caribbean, lots of folks are talking about how storms and disaster can lead to new forms of organizing and resistance.
2. Tampa
I go west into endless strips of shops over filled-in swamps, and I see billowing blue tarps on rooftops, then billboards advertising hurricanelawyers.com. I’m headed to Tampa, where some anarchists set up a recovery center, days before the federal government showed its face. The group, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, has been preparing for a moment like this one.
Jimmy Dunson and Dezeray Lyn welcome me into a brick ranch house loaned to MAD Relief by the Lutheran church next door. The space is simple: a greeting room with a large fold-out table and plastic chairs, anarchist and socialist pamphlets by the entrance. In the back, a couple rooms deemed the “Really Really Free Market,” are full of dried and canned foods, tea, toys, clothes all for the taking, for anyone in need.
Dez wears all black, showing tattoos under a tank top, and has an air of urgency, edginess. She walks around barefoot as we talk, and when she does sit still her feet keep moving. Jimmy feels like Dez’s opposite: His shoulders are relaxed, and he speaks confidently, but softly. He’s in baggy pink pants, nerd glasses, and a Muhammad Ali t-shirt.
Jimmy and Dez both traveled to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Jimmy was part of a grassroots aid group that showed up just days after the storm and started dispatching through the flooding to areas where people were still trapped. They are both White, from Florida originally, and both say New Orleans changed them.
“Everywhere we went, people would say we were the first people that came there,” Jimmy says. “That was eye-opening.”
Dez and Jimmy say they began to see how top-down relief organizations like the Red Cross and the FEMA created bottlenecks, making it harder for people to connect with resources that were already available.
“About three years ago we started crafting and envisioning a permanent network to respond from below to these disasters, and to also connect the dots between movements for climate justice and disaster response,” Jimmy says.
So, they were already organized when they heard Irma was headed their way. Tampa got lucky and didn’t suffer flooding, just the usual wind and mess of a storm.
“As soon as the storm passed, we went out in the streets, cleared debris, set up the free market,” Jimmy says. Since then, the group has been sending aid convoys around the state. They took a canoe to Jacksonville to do search and rescue, took food and water to Immokalee and the Keys.
A windowy room at the end of the hall is set up as a wellness center, with a first aid station, herbal teas, and a chair for massage and acupuncture. The next room over is filled with supplies to send to Puerto Rico, where nine people from their group will fly in about a week. The garage is also full of supplies, and people keep dropping off more.
There’s no count of how many people have been in and out of the space, but the group’s Irma response Facebook page has over 1,400 members. Nobody gets paid or pays for anything.
“People oftentimes come in to get something, and they end up staying and volunteering. That’s the kind of thing we mean by mutual aid,” Jimmy says.
Their idea, which is modeled after groups like the Black Panther Party and the Zapatistas, is that independent, decentralized disaster relief can also raise people’s consciousness about what they call the disaster of capitalism.
“What we are doing now is the world that we want to see,” Dez explains. “It’s the absence of a hierarchical structure that puts profits over people.” She describes a world where communities self-organize, jails and police are abolished, people grow their own food, live off the grid, and have a solidarity economy free of oppression. And she believes disaster relief work can prefigure that world.
“This vision can be activated anywhere, autonomously,” Dez says.
Read the rest at scalawagmagazine.org
