Social Movements

Woodbine recently published a text on getting organised within the pandemic, ‘Mutual Aid, Social Distancing, and Dual Power in the State of Emergency’.¹ They have since transformed their space into a mutual aid organising hub for their neighbourhood of Ridgewood, Queens, and have partnered with a local homeless outreach organisation to start a food pantry.

The austerity programme imposed by the IMF after Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, far from imposing debt universally as Maurizio Lazzarato’s figure of the ‘indebted man’ would have it, hit women hardest. George Jepson revisits this history to extract the figure of the ‘indebted woman’ it forged and the collective female body of protest that erupted as a result.

How can ‘solidarity’ be possible in and against the objective conditions that divide us? K. Aarons distinguishes the afropessimist position from the politics of symbolic valorisation or integration, and argues that it is not simply at odds with, but is in fact hostile to identity and privilege politics – whether Black or non-Black. It is the thought and practice of self-abolition that can hope to overcome the present anti-Black structure of humanity.