Republished from the Green Anticapitalist Front’s YouTube account

View the webinar here:

GAF is reacting to the Covid-19 lockdown and enforced social distancing, by moving online. We will be doing a series of lifestreams about a variety of subjects that we hope will provide food for constructive discussion.

Episode 7: Tactics against Repression and Co-optation of Mutual Aid

In the livestream our guest speaker will draw on 5 years’ research into Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, including interviews with activists involved with Occupy Sandy in New York, and COVID-19 Mutual Aid groups in London. The talk will introduce some of the political theories underlying state policies which have both explicitly and implicitly attempted to repress, deradicalize and co-opt mutual aid movements. It will consider some of the ways in which movements and activists have been co-opted, for example through becoming regulated and bureaucratized as official NGOs, and will also consider ways in which they have successfully resisted co-optation and de-radicalization. The talk will hopefully form the basis of a participatory discussion on whether some of these points resonate with the personal experiences of people present on the call, any experiences they may have had that weren’t covered, and how they might be able to take some of these ideas forward in their own actions.