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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 427-447 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Capital & Class |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 21 Nov 2021 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published (in print/issue) - 1 Sept 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© The Author(s) 2021.
Keywords
- Economics and Econometrics
- Sociology and Political Science
- History
- Scrub Hub
- social factory
- Covid-19
- mutual aid
- United Kingdom
- neoliberalism
- co-optation
- anarchism
- suppression
- volunteerism
- voluntarism
- autonomism
- infrastructures of resistance