In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene, the deadliest to hit mainland USA since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, struck the Big Bend region of Florida. The damage inflicted by natural disasters in the US is sometimes reported in terms of ‘insured losses’, which in this case ran into the tens of billions, but the human cost was also extremely severe. At least 252 deaths have been attributed to the storm. Thousands of people were displaced. As is so often the case following natural disasters of this kind, community organisations and mutual aid groups were quick to respond to the crisis, providing disaster relief more efficiently than large NGOs and either federal or state governments.

Adam Greenfield’s new book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire was inspired by his experiences in Occupy Sandy, the mutual aid organisation set up in the wake of Superstorm Sandy in New York City in 2012. Improvised, spontaneous, non-specialist, local, and leaderless, Occupy Sandy was initiated by veterans of the previous year’s Occupy Wall Street. Drawing inspiration from Occupy Sandy and a range of historical examples — including the Black Panther Party’s survival programmes, mutual aid responses to Hurricane Katrina, and solidarity networks established in Greece following the financial crisis of 2008 — Greenfield proposes establishing networks of ‘lifehouses’. Self-organised community hubs providing basic resources and support could, he argues, act as refuges to protect people from the already unfolding disasters of late capitalism.

Given the intensifying economic, political, and climate-related poly-crises of the present, it is probably not surprising that books concerned with mutual aid and reciprocal care are currently proliferating: Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) advocated interdependence and solidarity in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba celebrate mutual aid initiatives in Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (2023), while many of the case studies that structure Greenhouse’s narrative also appear in Sarah Jaffe’s From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire (2024), which has an almost identical apocalyptic subtitle. The surge of interest in family abolition and social reproduction similarly responds to concerns about the uneven provision and performance of care under capitalism. M. E. O’Brien’s concept of ‘insurgent social reproduction’, which she defines as ‘the meeting of direct daily needs in the midst of extended mass protest’ could apply to many of the initiatives discussed by Greenfield, although often in his examples the meeting of daily needs is itself understood as activism.

Catastrophe, according to Greenfield, is already here, and we need to act accordingly. Though he draws heavily on the concept of ‘organised state abandonment’, he advocates for a horizontally organised abandonment of the state: we should abandon the state before it even more fully abandons us. Greenfield suggests that it’s already too late to enact meaningful systemic change that might, for example, significantly reduce global heating through a green energy transition or dramatically improve existing healthcare infrastructure and people’s access to it. He suggests there’s no point wasting time hand-wringing about the role of the state whose ‘capacities for care have been thoroughly and intentionally eroded’. His arguments are not presented as stemming from an ideological attachment to anarchism but from cold-eyed pragmatism: he is not asking whether the state should ideally provide for people but whether ‘it is likely to’. Under current conditions people have little other option than to organise in their communities: ‘stop waiting and start doing’.

Though his view of reciprocity in the lifehouse is not overly romantic and he does not revel in steampunk post-apocalyptic aesthetics of disaster, at some points it seems that the function of the lifehouse is as much therapeutic as it is material. It is also more focused on the present than the future. Greenfield asks: ‘[W]hat if the experience of coming to the aid of our community affirms us in ways we might not have dared to ask for, or even imagined possible?’

But does seeking a feeling of affirmation risk distracting from larger structural problems? People who joined these initiatives, he says, ‘experienced the experience of interdependence as healing’, but are there not forms of healing that require medical expertise, infrastructure, specialist equipment, and resources? Greenfield’s analysis is explicitly anti-systemic (though he would probably characterise it as post-systemic), but surely the provision of vital forms of mutual aid can be combined with other forms of political campaigning and protest?

Peer Illner’s 2021 book Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response Between the State and the Community also includes a discussion of Occupy Sandy alongside many of the other US-based cases that Greenfield discusses, but he draws very different conclusions. Though Illner acknowledges that self-organised community initiatives have proven far more effective at providing disaster relief than governmental bodies in many contexts, his book unpicks a more complicated and intertwined relationship between self-organised mutual aid and the state in the case of Occupy Sandy. (Mayor Bloomberg went out to Brooklyn to pay tribute to the activists. A few weeks later, Occupy was meeting with the NYPD and National Guard to soak up their praise and coordinate contingency plans. After another few months, the social movement that had blockaded banks on Wall Street was filling out applications for government grants and soliciting donations for reconstruction from Home Depot. What had happened?)

In 2013, a proposal was made to cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) budget by $1 billion, citing the success of community-run initiatives. For Illner, spontaneous mutual aid is not just a response to state austerity and the increasing privatisation of disaster relief, it can also deepen them. Establishing reciprocal relations of care remains a political goal, but interdependence is already an empirical, and not always rosy, reality. It is necessary to organise to meet people’s needs within and against the state, and not only in some imaginary space outside of it.