International Anti-Capitalist Disaster Response Brigades

Haiti was the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion. As revolutionaries, anti-capitalists, anti-fascists, anti-racists, and anti-imperialists, we owe them our respect and solidarity.

The Brigades’ 3 Points of Unity:

• All-volunteer. No paid positions. No bureaucracy, no bureaucrats

• Decentralized autonomous self-organizing units

• Horizontal, decentralized, participatory, consensus decision-making processes

An Autonomous Division of the Anti-National Brigades and The Last International

About us:

This group has been created as part of an effort to assess the potential for the formation and deployment of international brigades of anarchists, anti-fascists, and anti-capitalists to respond to natural and anthropogenic disasters. Primarily, this group was created to connect people to discuss, organize, and deploy corporeal, on the ground aid/relief efforts and solidarity in action.

Inspiration for the creation of this group comes the ongoing disaster in Haiti, the significant lack of adequate aid and relief efforts, and from the anarchist response to Hurricane Katrina through horizontal and grassroots organizations and groups such as the Common Ground Clinic.

Inspiration also comes from the many wonderful, knowledgeable, and skilled street medics to be found in the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movement (and beyond). These amazing human beings have literally saved many lives in the streets.

Also inspirational are the International Brigades, the “military units made up of many non-state-sponsored, anti-fascist, mostly socialist and communist, volunteers from different countries who traveled to Spain to fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939.” (Wikipedia)

We draw anti-capitalist context from the concept of “disaster capitalism” as articulated by Naomi Klein. We are now also seeing the emergence of disaster militarism and disaster imperialism. The United States has chosen a military response concerned primarily with the security of business interests and only secondarily with the safety and survival of the Haitian people.

Just as disasters are social ruptures upon which capitalists seize to further centralize wealth (and governments to further centralize power and control), they are also social ruptures which anti-capitalists must seize upon in active solidarity with the affected to emphasize the failures of capitalism and to demonstrate the viable and achievable potential for alternative, grassroots, horizontal, anti-capitalist mobilization and organization from below.

Use this group to discuss the potential of sending anti-authoritarian and horizontalist humanitarian, medic, and disaster response units to Haiti and other places where disaster strikes. How would we fund such operations? What would it take to get into Haiti and other disaster areas? Would we transport supplies or acquire them on the ground? etc.

Also use this group to share anti-capitalist means of solidarity and financial contributions to the Haitian people. Please do your homework and avoid posting disaster capitalist operations, unless of course to expose them as such.

The International Anti-Capitalist Disaster Response Brigades can be found online at the Guerrilla Underground Network and on Facebook.

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