Mutual aid versus volunteerism: Autonomous PPE production in the Covid-19 pandemic crisis

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic crisis has confirmed neoliberal capitalism’s inability to meet critical social needs. In the United Kingdom, mutual aid initiatives based on ‘solidarity not charity’ blossomed in a context of state incompetence and private sector negligence – including Scrub Hub, a network of groups that autonomously produced personal protective equipment and provided it directly to health workers. Using a convergence of autonomist and anarchist perspectives, this article examines Scrub Hub as an example of emergent autonomous political economies and considers the challenges of resisting co-optation into volunteerist hierarchies and suppression by the neoliberal state.

‘Anarchist technologies’: Anarchism, cybernetics and mutual aid in community responses to the COVID-19 crisis

“…Much of the academic literature on mutual aid and COVID-19 has underlined the intimate connections between mutual aid and anarchism (Donaghey, 2020; Grubacic and Graeber, 2020; Jun and Lance, 2020; Lachowicz and Donaghey, 2021; Preston and Firth, 2020; Swann, 2020a; Travlou, 2021). What ties mutual aid to anarchism is, on the one hand, its role in resistance to the state and capitalism and, on the other, the focus on radical forms of democracy (Beacham and Willatt, 2020: 80–81; Ticktin, 2020) and conflict resolution (Melville and Wilkinson, 2020; Spade, 2020a: 75–84).…”

“…One text asked, ‘what happens if local supply chains are disrupted?’: ‘[o]ur approach is to forecast the coming need for supplies and services and to build accordingly’. 19 The idea of supply chain planning is not unique to this text, with others drawing on concepts such as ‘distributed factories’ 20 and ‘counter-logistics’ 21 to describe this kind of coordination ( Lachowicz and Donaghey, 2021 ) bring to this an attention to political economy in their focus on autonomist Marxism’s concept of the ‘social factory’).…”

“…The anarchist technologies this nurse talks about are not those that involve fabricated, material devices, but are the organisational tools that communities can construct to be more resilient and adaptive in complex scenarios. The effectiveness of these anarchist technologies is foregrounded by Lachowicz and Donaghey (2021 : 9) in their discussion of Scrub Hub: [G]roups made efforts to bring health workers into the production process by centring their designs around the immediate needs that the workers reported [. .…”

“…. and] producing the scrubs’ ( Lachowicz and Donaghey, 2021 : 2). As time went on, some groups also became involved in helping those without reliable internet access register for vaccinations and supporting Black Lives Matter and other social movements (Soden and Wood Owen, 2021).…”

Solidarity, not charity: Learning the lessons of the COVID‐19 pandemic to reconceptualise the radicality of mutual aid

“…This support has arisen from the pre‐pandemic work of particular individuals, engaged communities and organisations as well as the spontaneous actions of others who mobilised at the start of and during the pandemic. There has been a reawakening of mutualism, in the UK and internationally, at a scale not seen for decades, each enactment itself focused at a local and very intimate level but with the support of other, similar groups who see themselves and their struggles reflected in others (Chevée, 2021 ; Lachowicz & Donaghey, 2021 ). At the outset of the pandemic, many forms of community support were classified as “mutual aid” and these covered a diverse range of activities across a spectrum of approaches, enacted across the canvas of local communities.…”