Beyond Hope

We are living through a long emergency - a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars and other climate-driven disasters. In Beyond Hope, Greenfield asks what might happen if the individual acts and networks of mutual aid that spring up in response to these times. Also how do these communities fuse, and are brought together in a single, coherent way of life?

Using examples from the astonishingly effective Occupy Sandy disaster-recovery effort in 2012, and the neighborhood-based mutual aid groups that sustained many during COVID lockdowns, to the large-scale, self-organised polities of municipalist Spain and Kurdish Rojava, Greenfield argues for rethinking local power as a bulwark against despair, a way to discover and develop the individual and collective capacities that have gone underutilized during all the long years of late capitalism - and a means for thriving in the face of impending catastrophe.