Solidarity is a Place: Mutual Aid Networks and Cooperative Institutions in NYC

Keywords: mutual aid, solidarity economies, collectives, cooperatives, organizing, new york city
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61

Abstract

Collective and cooperative organizers are familiar with the argument that crises expose the contradictions and brutality required of capitalism, using the position to frame the urgency of their work: we need to build collective spaces to not only weather acute crises, but negate capitalism itself. The ‘Solidarity Economy’--a movement of democratically run forms of reproduction like food, financial, and worker cooperatives, community gardens, cooperative and communal housing, and others--has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to varying degrees and with varied success in New York. At the same time, the pandemic has led to a rapid growth of new collective entities like neighborhood-based mutual aid networks. However, when these responses thrive they run the risk of either cooptation or legitimizing state failure. Narratives of their success also risk obscuring the ways that movements old and new, struggle internally in these moments.

This work expands on earlier reflections published in Rethinking Marxism’s ‘Pandemic Dossier’, and center around my own experiences as a Solidarity Economy organizer in New York City—the former epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. Here, I not only discuss how the crisis exposes contradictions within our collective institutions, but how emerging mutual aid work raises larger questions about the ‘formality’ of said institutions, the geography of these emerging organizing strategies, and the organizing capacity of ‘solidarity’ itself.