Preface to the 1914 edition of Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1914).
David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić, introduction to Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution (PM Press, 2021), ➝.
This term, however, comes from Stephen Jay Gould’s text “Kropotkin was no Crackpot,” ➝.
Graeber and Grubacic.
See ➝.
Art Workers’ Inquiry, Art Work During a Pandemic (Red Bloom Communist Collective and Common Notions, 2021), 52. (page numbers refer to the PDF pages of the zine and may not correlate to the printed copy.)
The thought that one needs to constantly scale up is a trap, set up by the existing social order to prescribe collective action into codified and extractive systems of social reproduction and growth. Beautifully put by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: “scaling up is really scaling down, losing connection rather than gaining it, losing abilities rather than consolidating them, settling for form rather than formation.” Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Sandra Ruiz, and Hypatia Vourloumis, “Resonances: A Conversation on Formless Formation,” e-flux journal, no. 121 (October 2021), ➝.
Elected officials blamed “irresponsible” people for crowding the hospitals. While Covid-19 was certainly something that could not have been avoided, systems (of medicine, housing, food distribution) across the West has been set up in recent decades to guarantee a poor response. See: ➝.
See Rouen dans la Rue, “Solidarity and Collective Autonomy: An Interview with Woodbine,” Mute, April 20, 2020, ➝.
Peter Kropotkin, introduction to Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (McClure Phillips & co, 1902), xiii, ➝.
Graeber and Grubacic.
Asad Haider, “Emancipation and Exhaustion,” South Asian Avant-Garde: A Dissident Literary Anthology, March 10, 2021, ➝. This essay, and citation were brought to my attention when reading Keith Ocheing Okoth’s stellar “Decolonisation and its Discontents: Rethinking the Cycle of National Liberation,” Salvage, no. 10 (Spring/Summer 2021).
Illner, 18.
A less-referenced example is the work of the Young Lords in instituting syringe exchange programs. See M. E. O’Brien, “Junkie Communism,” July 15, 2019, ➝.
Another interesting example is studied by Sean Michael Parson who makes the case that city governments in San Francisco were much more violent with those handing out food with the anarchist group Food Not Bombs than others squatting homes in the 1980s and 90s. He writes: “While squatting would seem to be a graver offense than distributing free food, Homes Not Jails was treated far more leniently by city officials during the Jordan administrations. I trace the difference in v treatment of the two groups to the fact that Food Not Bombs engages in anarchist direct action in public space, while Homes Not Jails does so in private residences. The public nature of Food Not Bombs made them a visible threat to order to both Agnos and Jordan and one they had to confront and stop.” Sean Michael Parson, “An Ungovernable Force? Food Not Bombs, Homeless Activism and Politics in San Francisco, 1988–1995, (PhD diss., Graduate School at the University of Oregon, 2010).
Roberto A Ferdman, “How Our Schools Fail Poor Kids Before They Even Arrive for Class,” Washington Post, February 18. 2015, ➝.
Woodbine, “Organizing for Survival in New York City,” Commune, April 24, 2020.
See Marina Vishmidt in conversation with Andreas Petrossiants, “Spaces of Speculation: Movement Politics in the Infrastructure,” Historical Materialism, online, ➝.
Art Work During a Pandemic, 47.
Available here: ➝.