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Title: Solidarity Not Charity Author: Dean Spade Date: March 2020 Language: en Topics: mutual aid, solidarity, survival Source: Retrieved on 7th August 2020 from http://www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Mutual-Aid-Article-Social-Text-Final.pdf Notes: Published in Social Text 142• Vol. 38, No. 1
In the current political moment in the United States, defined by climate
crisis, increased border enforcement, attacks on public benefits,
expansive carceral control, rising housing costs, and growing white
right- wing populism, leftist social movement activists and
organizations face two particular challenges that, though not new, are
urgent. The first is how to address the actual changing conditions that
are increasing precarity and shortening lives. The second is how to
mobilize people for resistance. In the face of these conditions,
movements might strengthen, mobilizing tens of millions of new people to
directly fight back against cops, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), welfare authorities, landlords, budget cuts, polluters, the
defense industry, prison profiteers, and right- wing organizations. Or,
movement organizations could fail to provide any real relief for those
whose lives are most endangered and leave newly scared and angry people
to the most passive and ineffective forms of expressing their opinions.
This article argues that, in the face of these conditions, expanding use
of mutual aid strategies will be the most effective way to support
vulnerable populations to survive, mobilize significant resistance, and
build the infrastructure we need for the coming disasters. Based on my
observations participating in policy reform work, public education
efforts, and mutual aid projects in movements for queer and trans
liberation and prison and border abolition and my study of related and
overlapping efforts, I argue that mutual aid is an often devalued
iteration of radical collective care that provides a transformative
alternative to the demobilizing frameworks for understanding social
change and expressing dissent that dominate the popular imagination. I
examine the benefits of mutual aid, its challenges, and how those are
being addressed by contemporary organizations mobilizing through mutual
aid.
Resistant intellectual traditions have consistently raised the concern
that reforms emerge in the face of disruptive movements demanding
justice but for the most part are designed to demobilize by asserting
that the problem has been taken care of, meanwhile making as little
material change as possible. Many reforms provide no material relief and
change only what the system says about itself, such as when institutions
pass anti-discrimination policies but nothing about the behavior of
participants or the outcomes of their operations change. Many reforms,
if they do provide any material relief, provide it only to those who are
least marginalized within the group of people who were supposed to
benefit from the reform. For example, immigration reforms that cut out
people with criminal records or who are “public charges,” or that make
military service or college graduation conditions for relief, are likely
to be accessible only to those least targeted by police, those who can
pay tuition, those not pushed out of school by able-ism and racism.
Reforms often merely tinker with existing harmful conditions, failing to
reach the root causes.[1] For example, police departments might begin to
hire cops of color or gay or trans cops, but the functions of police
violence remain the same.[2] A slight procedural change in how people
can be evicted, deported, lose their benefits, or be expelled from
school will fail to reach the root causes of how these processes target
particular populations and shorten their lives. Reforms also sometimes
expand the capacity for harm, such as when police reforms include
increasing the number or equipment of police.[3] Reforms also reproduce
cultural norms that mark some people as disposable by dividing the
targeted population into deserving and undeserving categories, such as
by lifting up “good” immigrants and arguing that they deserve relief
that other immigrants do not deserve.
Social movements have developed criteria for evaluating reforms because
of awareness of how they can be inadequate, harmful, and demobilizing.
These criteria are not a simple checklist for determining a beneficial
reform. Rather, they are bases for engaging in debate and speculation as
organizations and coalitions evaluate campaigns and demands. Prison
abolitionists, for example, ask, Does the reform in question expand the
criminal punishment system? Based on an analysis that prison reforms
have tended to expand the reach of policing and criminalization,
abolitionists evaluate reforms based on whether they move toward the
goal of eliminating the system. Police abolitionist Mariame Kaba offered
the following questions as criteria for evaluating police reforms
emerging after Mike Brown’s murder in Ferguson: “Are the proposed
reforms allocating more money to the police? Are the proposed reforms
advocating for MORE police and policing? ... Are the proposed reforms
primarily technology-focused? ... Are the proposed ‘reforms’ focused on
individual dialogues with individual cops?”[4] These criteria address
the dangers of police expansion and legitimization through reform.
Peter Gelderloos offers questions for assessing whether a tactic is
liberatory: Does it “seize[] space in which new social relations can be
enacted”? Does it “spread awareness of new ideas (and ... [is] this
awareness ... passive or [does] ... it inspire others to fight)”? Does
it “ha[ve] elite support”? Does it “achieve any concrete gains in
improving people’s lives”?[5] Gelderloos wants to assess how the tactic
might allow people to practice new ways of being, such as practicing
solidarity across movements, collectively meeting our own needs rather
than relying on harmful institutions, making decisions by consensus
rather than by following authority, or sharing things rather than
hoarding and protecting private property. These criteria suggest that
how movements structure participation can give people new skills for
practicing democracy, redistributing material resources, and
self-defense. Gelderloos’s second question focuses on participatory
rather than passive awareness. He is not simply asking, Have people
heard of it? Rather, he is asking whether people have practiced it,
started their own local chapters, or otherwise replicated it. This
distinction is important in the context of the demobilizing aspects of
social media, where we can be encouraged to solely participate by
liking, sharing, declaring, or debating our views within our media
silos, with-out otherwise engaging with others toward change. Further,
Gelderloos asserts that “if part of the elite supports a movement it is
much more likely that that movement appears to achieve victories, when
in fact that victory is insubstantial and supports elite interests.”[6]
This provides a provocative question about what the interests of any
strange bedfellows in a given fight might be, and what that might reveal
about the limits of a particular tactic or demand.
In my own work studying and participating in queer and trans liberation
projects and in organizations centered on border and prison abolition, I
have relied on four primary questions as criteria for evaluating reforms
and tactics: Does it provide material relief? Does it leave out an
especially marginalized part of the affected group (e.g., people with
criminal records, people without immigration status)? Does it legitimize
or expand a system we are trying to dismantle? Does it mobilize people,
especially those most directly impacted, for ongoing struggle? The first
three questions track primary points in the critique of reforms I laid
out above. The final question is about how various approaches to
political organizing might build greater capacity for the next fight and
the next fight. Reforms, especially those forwarded by elite nonprofits
with staff invested in lawsuits, policy reform, and lobbying, are often
won through conversations behind closed doors with elected officials and
heads of administrative agencies or corporations. These “wins” are more
likely to be compromised by carve-outs that protect existing
arrangements and are more likely to be inadequately or selectively
implemented. Reforms won through mobilization, rather than granted
through reasoning with elites, are more likely to meet the other
criteria described here.
Systems of domination produce routes for channeling dissatisfaction that
are nonthreatening to those systems. We are encouraged to bring our
complaints in ways that are the least disruptive and the most beneficial
to existing conditions. Voting, filing lawsuits, giving money to causes
we care about that are properly registered as nonprofits, writing
letters to the editor, posting our views on social media, and maybe
occasionally attending a permitted march that is flanked by cops and
does not disrupt traffic are forms of dissent (as opposed to
disobedience) that are tolerable and mostly nondisruptive for existing
arrangements. Some of those things can be done as tactics within larger
strategies for transformation, but taken alone they are unlikely to
cause significant change to existing distributions of wealth and
violence. Most of these approved methods of expressing concern are
designed to lead to the kinds of limited policy and law reform critiqued
in the previous section of this article. However, also by design, most
people cannot imagine raising concerns in any way besides these. The
central US national fiction about justice and injustice, the story that
racism was resolved by civil rights, also rewrites the histories of
resistance movements, including the civil rights movement, to tell us
that approved tactics are and have been the correct and effective ones
for resolving concerns.
Resistant left movements seek to reignite people’s imaginations about
not just what they can demand but also what tactics they can use to win.
Such movements model three kinds of work that change material conditions
rather than just winning empty declarations of equality: (a) work to
dismantle existing harmful systems and/or beat back their expansion, (b)
work to directly provide for people targeted by such systems and
institutions, and (c) work to build an alternative infrastructure
through which people can get their needs met. Dismantling work includes
campaigns to stop the expansion of surveillance, policing, imprisonment,
and deportation, to close precincts and prisons, to stop privatization
of schools and utilities, to terminate gentrification, pipelines,
fracking, mining, and more. This work includes such tactics as pipeline
sabotage, direct actions at building sites, training people not to call
the cops, divestment campaigns, blocking deportation buses, disrupting
city council meetings, door knocking, and working to change state and
municipal budgets to defund police and jails. Work to support people
impacted by harmful systems can include prison visiting and pen pal
programs, rapid response systems for ICE raids, ride sharing, reentry
resources, eviction defense, medical clinics, childcare collectives,
food distribution, disaster response, and court support efforts. Work to
create an alternative infrastructure based in left values of democracy,
participation, care, and solidarity includes many of the prior
activities, which establish community connections and put in place
structures for meeting needs. It might also include things like creating
food, energy, and waste systems that are sustainable and locally
con-trolled, building methods of dealing with conflict and harm that do
not involve the police or prisons, and building health, education, and
child-care infrastructure controlled by the people who use it.
The balance of these three elements is particularly important because of
the boldness of working to end capitalism, white supremacy, colonialism,
and borders.[7] The three-part framing avoids a purism that would
suggest only the most overtly militant actions are valuable,
dis-counting work that directly cares for people made vulnerable by
current conditions now, while also avoiding becoming solely focused on
providing for people without getting to the root causes of what produces
vulnerability. Similarly, building alternatives without also dismantling
current systems can lead to utopian projects that can sometimes become
exclusive, building a new way of life only for the few who access such
projects disconnected from frontline struggles. Acknowledging the
necessity of immediate care and defense work alongside work to get at
the root causes of harmful conditions and work to build alternative
structures allows for a complex, nuanced, and developing imagination of
coordinated short- and long- term strategies.
Even within this strategic framework, however, some forms of
participation are more valued and more visible than others. In the
context of contemporary culture, certain activist and social movement
activities align with imperatives of external validation and elitism.
Reproductive labor, such as cooking; cleaning; caring for sick people,
old people, and children; maintaining one-on-one relationships; visiting
prisoners and people in hospitals; providing emotional support to people
in crisis; making sure people have rides; and making sure people are
included and noticed, is devalued and mostly uncompensated. Social
movements reproduce these hierarchies, valuing people who give speeches,
negotiate with bosses and politicians, get published, get elected, and
otherwise become visible as actors in ways that align with dominant
hierarchies. Forms of celebrity similarly circulate within movements. It
is glamorous to take a selfie with Angela Davis, but it is not glamorous
to do weekly or monthly prison visits. The circulation of dominant
hierarchies of valuation inside movement spaces shapes how people
imagine what it means to participate in work for change, who they want
to meet, and what they want to do and be seen doing. This is especially
true for people who have not yet gotten to participate in social
movements and have been fed obscuring fictions about social change from
misrepresentations of the civil rights movement circulated in school
curricula and media. Such representations center charismatic individuals
and hide the realities of mass participation and coordination that does
not produce careers or notoriety for most participants.[8] For these
reasons and others, mutual aid work is one of the least visible and most
important forms of work that social movements need to be developing
right now.
Mutual aid is a form of political participation in which people take
responsibility for caring for one another and changing political
conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their
representatives in government but by actually building new social
relations that are more survivable.[9] There is nothing new about mutual
aid — people have worked together to survive for all of human history.
The framework of mutual aid is significant in the context of social
movements resisting capitalist and colonial domination, in which wealth
and resources are extracted and concentrated and most people can survive
only by participating in various extractive relationships. Providing for
one another through coordinated collective care is radical and
generative. Effective social movements always include elements of mutual
aid. The most famous example on the left in the United States is the
Black Panther Party’s survival programs, including the free breakfast
program, the free ambulance program, free medical clinics, a program
offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and a school aimed at
providing a liberating and rigorous curriculum to children. The Black
Panthers’ programs mobilized people by creating spaces where they could
access basic needs and build shared analysis about the conditions they
were facing. J. Edgar Hoover famously wrote in a 1969 memo sent to all
FBI offices that “the BCP [Breakfast for Children Program] represents
the best and most influential activity going for the BPP [Black Panther
Party] and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by
authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”[10]
The night before the Chicago program was supposed to open, police broke
into the church that was supposed to host it and urinated on and
destroyed all the food. The co-optation of the program, with the US
Department of Agriculture (USDA) starting a federal free breakfast
program that still feeds millions of children today, is evidence of the
significance of this mutual aid tactic.[11]
The Black Panthers’ survival programs have inspired many other
organizations to organize mutual aid efforts to attract people to
movements and to build shared analysis of problems as collective rather
than individual. People often come to social movement organizations
because they need something, such as eviction defense, child care,
social connection, health care, or advocacy. Being able to get help with
a crisis is often a condition of being able to politically participate.
It is hard to be part of organizing when you are struggling with a
barrier to survival. Getting support through a mutual aid project that
has a political analysis of the conditions that produced your crisis
also helps break stigma and isolation. In capitalism, social problems
resulting from maldistribution and extraction are seen as individual
moral failings of targeted people.[12] Getting sup-port in a context
that sees the systems, not the people suffering in them, as the problem
can help combat the isolation and stigma. People at the front lines have
the most awareness of how these systems harm and are essential
strategists because of their expertise. Directly impacted people and
people who care about them often join movements because they want to get
and give help. Mutual aid exposes the failures of the current system and
shows an alternative. It builds faith in people power and fights the
demobilizing impacts of individualism and hopelessness-induced apathy.
Mutual aid projects also build solidarity. I have seen this at the
Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a law collective that provides free legal
help to trans and gender-nonconforming people who are low income and/or
people of color. People come to the organization for services but are
invited to stay and participate in organizing. Members may have some
things in common — being trans or gender nonconforming, for example —
but also differ from one another in terms of race, immigration status,
ability, HIV status, age, housing access, sexual orientation, language,
and more. By working together and participating in shared political
education programming, members learn about experiences that are not
their own and build solidarity. Doing explicit work around difference
within the group builds the skills of members to practice solidarity and
build broad analysis. In the context of nonprofitization, organizations
are incentivized to be single-issue oriented, aligning with elites
rather than with targeted populations, and use palatable tactics.[13]
Solidarity is disincentivized, yet solidarity is what builds and
connects large-scale movements. Mutual aid projects, by creating spaces
where people come together based on some shared need or concern but
encounter and work closely with people whose lives and experiences
differ from their own, cultivate solidarity.
Mutual aid projects also build skills for collaboration, participation,
and decision making. People engaged in a project to help one another
through housing court proceedings will learn the details of how the
system does its harm and how to fight it, but they will also learn about
meeting facilitation, working across difference, retaining volunteers,
addressing conflict, giving and receiving feedback, following through,
and coordinating schedules and transportation. They may also learn that
it is not just lawyers who can do this kind of work and that many people
have something to offer. This departs from expertise-based services
systems that connect helping one another to getting advanced degrees.
Mutual aid is anti-authoritarian, demonstrating how to do things
together in ways that we were told not to imagine and how to organize
human activity without coercion.[14] Most people in the United States
have never been to a meeting where there was not a boss or authority
figure with decision-making power over others determining the outcomes.
Most people work inside hierarchies where disobedience leads to
punishment or exclusion. Of course, we bring our learned practices of
hierarchy and (de)valuation with us even when no paycheck or punishment
enforces our participation. However, experiences of being in groups
voluntarily motivated by shared transformative principles and a sincere
effort to practice them can build new skills and capacities.
For example, in Occupy encampments that emerged in 2011, people engaged
in skill building about how to resolve conflict without calling the
police. Occupy mobilized many people who had never participated in
political resistance before, introducing them to practices like
consensus decision making, taking public space, and engaging in free
political education workshops. Many who joined Occupy did not already
have a developed critique of policing. Participants committed to police
abolition and anti-racism cultivated conversations about not calling the
police. This was inconsistent and imperfect, but it introduced many
people to new skills about responding to harm, which they took with them
in their work after Occupy encampments were dismantled by the police.
Mutual aid lets people learn and practice the skills and capacities we
need to live in the world we are trying to create — a world shaped by
practices of collective self- determination.[15]
Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a willingness to defy
illegitimate authority. Taking risks with a group for a shared purpose
can be a reparative experience when we have been trained to follow
rules. Organizers from Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR), a network
organizing to provide mutual aid in the context of disasters, share this
story in their 2018 workshop facilitation guide to emphasize their
argument that “audacity is our capacity”:
When a crew of MADR organizers traveled to Puerto Rico (some visiting
their families, others bringing medical skills), they found out about a
government warehouse that was neglecting to distribute huge stockpiles
of supplies. They showed their MADR badges to the guards and said, “We
are here for the 8am pickup.” When guards replied that their names were
not on the list, they just insisted again, “We are here for the 8am
pickup.” They were eventually allowed in, told to take whatever they
needed. After being let in once, aid workers were able to return
repeatedly. They made more badges for local organizers, and this source
continued to benefit local communities for months.[16]
MADR asserts that by taking bold actions together, “we can imagine new
ways of interacting with the world.”[17] In the face of disaster, mutual
aid helps people survive and builds new social relations centered in
solidarity and resistance to illegitimate authority. When dominant
social relations have been suspended, people discover that they can
break norms of individualism, passivity, and respect for private
property above human need and collaborate to meet their needs. MADR
asserts that “saving lives, homes, and communities in the event and
aftermath of disaster may require taking bold action without waiting for
permission from authorities. Disaster survivors themselves are the most
important authority on just action.”[18] Courageous mutual aid actions
of disaster survivors occur against a backdrop of injustice, where
government agents primarily show up to lock down cities while failing to
provide aid or support recovery.[19]
Mutual aid projects providing relief to survivors of storms, floods,
earthquakes, and fires, as well as those developed to support people
living through the crises caused by poverty, criminalization, housing
costs, endemic gender violence, and other ordinary conditions, produce
new systems that can prevent harm and improve preparedness for the
coming disasters. In the context of Hurricane Maria’s devastation of
Puerto Rico, it was the existence of food justice efforts that made it
possible for many people to eat when the corporate food system that
brings 90 percent of the island’s food from off-island was halted by the
storm. Similarly, it was local solar that allowed people to charge
medical devices when the electrical grid went down. The mutual aid
projects that exist before the acute disasters become the alternatives
that help people survive when disasters arise. By looking at what still
works in the face of disaster, we can learn what we want to build to
prepare for the next storm or fire. Naomi Klein argues that locally
controlled microgrids are more desirable for delivering sustainable
energy, given the failures of the energy monopolies that currently
dominate energy delivery.[20] In the wake of the 2018 fires in Northern
California, Klein’s descriptions of how large energy companies work to
prevent local and sustainable energy efforts offer particularly
compel-ling support for her argument that in energy as in other areas of
survival, we should be working toward locally controlled, democratic
structures to replace our crumbling and harmful infrastructure.[21] In
the wake of those fires, as the public learned that they were caused by
the mismanagement of PG&E and the state government immediately offered
PG&E a bailout while failing to support people displaced by the
disaster, Klein asks us to imagine getting rid of the undemocratic
infrastructure of our lives and replacing it with people’s
infrastructure. For social movements working to imagine and build a
transition from extractive “dig, burn, dump” economies to sustainable,
regenerative ways of living, mutual aid offers a way to meet current
needs and prepare for coming disasters.[22]
Charity and social services frameworks dominate mainstream
under-standing of what it means support people in crisis. Mutual aid is
not char-it y. Charity, aid, relief, and services are terms used in
various contexts to denote the provision of support for survival to poor
people where that support is governed by rich people and/or government.
Charity models promote the idea that most poverty is a result of
immorality and that only those who can prove their moral worth deserve
help. Charity comes with eligibility requirements that relate to these
moral frameworks of deservingness, such as sobriety, piety, curfews,
participation in job training or parenting courses, cooperation with the
police, or identifying the paternity of children. The determination of
deservingness and undeservingness is based in cultural archetypes that
pathologize Black families, frame poor women as overreproductive, and
criminalize poverty.[23] The conditions of receiving aid are made so
stigmatizing that they discipline every-one into taking any work at any
exploitative wage or condition in order to avoid the fate of people who
must seek relief. Charity makes rich people and corporations look
generous and upholds and legitimizes the systems that concentrate
wealth.[24]
Charity is increasingly privatized and contracted out to the massive
nonprofit sector. Nonprofits compete for grants to address social
problems. Elite donors get to decide what strategies should be funded
and then protect their money from taxation by storing it in foundations
that fund their pet projects, most of which have nothing to do with poor
people. Even nonprofits that do purport to address poverty are mostly
run by white elites. Nonprofitization has reproduced antidemocratic
racist and colonial relationships between the winners and losers of
extractive, exploitative economic arrangements.[25]
Mutual aid projects face the challenge of avoiding the charity model. A
member of North Valley Mutual Aid, a group working to support people
displaced by the Camp Fire in Northern California, described how
narratives of deservingness drove the attacks on the tent city that
emerged in a Walmart parking lot after the fire.[26] In the days
following the fire, as displaced people with more resources began to
leave the tent city, city officials and media portrayed the people still
living there as not displaced fire survivors but ordinary homeless and
itinerant people who did not deserve to remain. The eligibility
processes of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) exclude
people who cannot confirm an address before the disaster, such as
homeless people or people living in poor communities where individual
dwellings are not given an individual mailing address. The distinction
between deserving and undeserving disaster survivors rests on the idea
that suddenly displaced renters and homeowners are sympathetic victims,
while people who were already displaced by the ordinary disasters of
capitalism are blameworthy.
Mutual aid project participants replicate moralizing eligibility
frame-works inside mutual aid projects when they require sobriety,
exclude people with certain types of convictions, or stigmatize and
exclude people with psychiatric disabilities for not fitting behavioral
norms. Myrl Beam traces the tension that emerged in an organization
founded to support queer and trans youth, and to operate by and for
youth, as the organization formalized, diverging from its initial
mission and commitments to youth governance. The organization began to
participate with the local police to check warrants for youth.[27] This
example of departure from mutual aid principles and toward the
implementation of eligibility requirements that enforce deservingness
highlights the relationship between governance practices and the slide
toward punitive charity models. A MADR participant tells a related
story:
After Hurricane Irma, a local sheriff announced that, “If you go to a
shelter for Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly escort you to the
safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail.” [This] ...
essentially weaponizes aid against the most vulnerable and put numerous
lives in danger.... There is always a shocking number of guns that show
up after a disaster. A dehydrated child without access to electricity or
air conditioning in the blazing Florida or Texas or Puerto Rico sun,
needs somebody carrying Pedialyte, not an M16. Both the military or
police and the nonprofit industrial complex often serve to reestablish
the inequitable dominant social order rather than leverage their
resources to assist disaster survivors in leading their own
recovery.[28]
Mutual aid projects must also be wary of saviorism, self-congratulation,
and paternalism. Populations facing crisis are cast as in need of
saving, and their saviors are encouraged to use their presumed
superiority to make over these people and places, replacing old,
dysfunctional ways of being with smarter, more profitable, more moral
ways of being. Politicians, nonprofiteers, and business conspire to
remake these places, implementing devastating “innovations” that
eliminate public housing, permanently displace residents, privatize
schools, and destroy public health infrastructure.[29] Mutual aid
projects and their individual participants must actively resist savior
narratives and find ways to support participants to build shared
analysis about the harms of saviorism and the necessity of
self-determination for people in crisis.
Mutual aid also faces the challenge of neoliberal co-optation.
Neo-liberalism combines attacks on public infrastructure and public
services, endorsing privatization and volunteerism. As public services
are cut, neo-liberals push for social safety nets to be replaced by
family and church, assuming that those who fail to belong to such
structures deserve abandonment. Philanthropy and privatization are
expected to replace public welfare, and public-private partnerships are
celebrated as part of a fiction that everything should be “run like a
business.” The cultural narrative about social justice entrepreneurship
suggests that people who want change should not fight for justice but
should invent new ways of managing poor people and social problems. This
raises the question, How do mutual aid projects remain threatening and
oppositional to the status quo and cultivate resistance, rather than
becoming complementary to abandonment and privatization? In the wake of
Hurricane Harvey, corporate media news stories on volunteer boats for
rescues followed this pattern, neither criticizing government relief
failure nor interrogating the causes of worsening hurricanes and whom
they most endanger.[30] Stories of individual heroes obscured the social
and political conditions producing the crisis.
This danger of becoming a complementary structure to harmful systems
pervades debates about restorative justice programs and other
alternatives to incarceration. These kinds of programs, including drug
treatment programs, programs that divert some arrestees from the
criminal system to social service programs, and restorative justice
programs where people who have done harm go through a mediated process
with those they have harmed, all have the potential to be disruptive
mutual aid programs or to be nondisruptive adjuncts and/or expansions of
carceral control. Most such programs emerge from communities impacted by
racist systems of criminalization, but many formalize and transition to
become funded and shaped by police and courts. Minnesota’s restorative
justice program, one of the earliest examples of a state incorporating a
restorative justice approach statewide, has become another site where
the same populations already targeted for arrest are processed through a
system. Its emergence did not change who is criminalized or disrupt the
way policing and criminalization operate; it only added to the existing
system and provided legitimacy through the cover of innovation.[31] In
Seattle, throughout a seven-year fight to stop the building of a new
youth jail, public officials have relentlessly used the small, minimally
publicly funded diversion programs operated primarily by people of color
as cover to suggest that the county has already addressed concerns about
youth incarceration and that the jail construction is actually in line
with a county’s commitment to “zero youth detention.”[32] The
co-optation of grassroots projects aimed at supporting criminalized
youth to rationalize further investment in caging youth exposes the real
dangers facing mutual aid projects.
Mutual aid projects may appear to overlap with neoliberalism in that
their participants critique certain social service models and believe in
voluntary participation in care and crisis work. But the critiques of
public safety nets made by mutual aid project participants are not the
same as those of neoliberals. Mutual aid projects emerge because public
services are exclusive, insufficient, or exacerbate state violence.
Neoliberals take aim at public services in order to further concentrate
wealth and in doing so exacerbate material inequality and violence. The
difference is visible comparing the trend of privatization of fire
services to the work of the Oakland Power Projects (OPP), which seeks to
build an alternative to calling 911. Increasingly, public firefighting
services are inadequate and also face cuts; meanwhile, the private
firefighting business is growing, with wealthy homeowners paying
insurers who come to seal their homes, spray fire retardants on the
premises, and put owners in five-star hotels while less affluent people
struggle in shelters and fight FEMA for basic benefits. The shift toward
eroding public firefighting and creating private, exclusive,
profit-generating fire services typifies the neoliberal attack on public
services that exacerbates the harms of fire and the concentration of
wealth.[33] The OPP’s critique of public emergency services and efforts
to create an alternative differ in origins, aim, impact, and
implementation. OPP emerged out of antipolice and antiprison movement
organizations that observed that when people call 911 for emergency
medical help, the police come along, endangering people who called for
help. In response, the OPP is working to train people in communities
impacted by police violence to provide emergency medical care for
treating conditions such as gunshot wounds, chronic health problems like
diabetes, and mental health crises.[34] This strategy is part of broader
work to dismantle policing and criminalization, and it works to both
meet immediate needs and mobilize people to participate in building an
alternative infrastructure for crisis response that is controlled by
people with shared commitments to ending racist police violence and
medical neglect.
Feminist and antiracist movements building mutual aid projects have
disseminated insights gleaned from this work about how co-optation of
mutual aid projects happens and what practices might help resist it. In
the written resources produced by mutual aid project participants, as
well as at gatherings where activists share their work, discussion of
the necessity of maintaining community control of mutual aid projects
and the dangers of accepting funding that limits activities or
eligibility and of collaborating with law enforcement are prevalent.[35]
Feminist scholars and activists have traced how the anti–domestic
violence movement shifted from centering mutual aid projects, such as
community, volunteer-run shelters and defense campaigns for criminalized
survivors, to formalizing and taking government money that required
collaboration with police and that increased criminal penalties and made
arrests mandatory on domestic violence calls. These shifts increased the
criminalization of communities of color, made the services less
accessible to the most vulnerable survivors of violence, and provided
good public relations for police, prosecutors, and courts as protectors
of women.[36] This history and others like it high-light the necessity
for mutual aid projects to cultivate autonomy from elite institutions
and government and accountability to the populations made most
vulnerable by the existing systems. Mutual aid projects also work to
maintain community control by structuring decision making to avoid
concentration and hierarchy. Co-optation of projects and organizations
often happens through co-optation of individual people, often
charismatic leaders or founders of projects who get bought off by elites
through access to increased funding, influence, job security, or other
forms of status.[37] When one or a small number of people have the power
to shift the direction of a project, it can be hard to resist the
incentives that come with co-optation. Often, charismatic leaders are
people who are not the most vulnerable inside the participant group,
because being regarded as charismatic, persuasive, important, or
authoritative relates to hierarchies of valuation and devaluation that
also determine vulnerability. As a result, a single individual or small
group running a project may not be the same people who would have the
most to lose if the project veers toward elite interests. It is those
most vulnerable within the participants who are most likely to have
objections to the shifts that come with co-optation, such as new
eligibility requirements that cut out stigmatized groups. To return to
the example of the queer youth center described earlier, the adults who
had the power to make decisions about accepting additional funding and
agreeing to run warrants on youth were people who would personally gain
(with job security and leadership status) from those decisions, while
the youth who would no longer be able to use the space without facing
arrest were excluded from the decision-making processes that led to the
changes. Given these dynamics, many mutual aid organizations work to
create horizontal, participatory decision-making processes and to
utilize consensus decision making to cultivate meaningful collective
control and prevent co-optation. Relatedly, some establish explicit
criteria or guidelines about making sure certain perspectives that are
often left out or marginalized are heard, including by agreeing that
decisions that break down around identity lines will be reevaluated to
assess alignment with the group’s transformative principles. Some groups
establish quotas about members of decision-making bodies within the
group, ensuring that groups particularly likely to be left out are well
represented in those bodies.[38]
Consensus decision making, in addition to avoiding the problem of having
majorities vote down minorities and silence vulnerable groups,
establishes an ethic of desiring others’ participation. Decision-making
systems focused on competition — on getting my idea to be the one that
wins — cultivate disinterest in other people’s participation. Consensus
decision making requires participants to bring forward proposals to be
discussed and modified until everyone is sufficiently satisfied that no
one will block the proposal. This means participants get to practice
wanting to hear people’s concerns and their creative approaches to
resolving them, and not needing the group’s decision to be exactly what
any one individual wants. If the goal of our movements is to mobilize
tens of millions of people, we need to become people who genuinely want
others’ participation, even when others bring different ideas or
disagree with us. Most people will not stay and commit to intense unpaid
work if they get little say in shaping that work. We need ways of
practicing wanting one another present and participating, not just going
along with what one charismatic or authoritative person says. Most
people have not gotten to practice this, since the institutions that run
our lives, like schools, jobs, and governments, are hierarchical.
Instead, we get a lot of practice either going along or trying to be the
dominant person or people. MADR says, “We all have something to
offer.”[39] This is a radical idea in a world where help is
professionalized and most people are supposed to stay home and passively
consume and occasionally make a donation to a nonprofit or volunteer at
a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving. To argue that in the context of crisis
everyone has something to offer, that we are all valuable and we can
work to include us all, is a significant intervention on the
disposability most of us are taught to practice toward one another and
the passivity we are encouraged to feel about direct engagement to
remake the world. MADR offers the slogan, “No Masters, No Flakes.”[40]
This simultaneous rejection of hierarchies inside the organizing and
commitment to build accountability based on shared values asks
participants to keep showing up and working together not because a boss
is making you but because you are working together on something that
matters.
Conflict is part of all groups and relationships, so mutual aid projects
need methods for addressing conflict. Working and living inside
hierarchies deskills us for dealing with conflict. We are taught to
either dominate others and be numb to the impact of our domination on
them, or submit with a smile and be numb to our own experiences of
domination in order to get by. We learn that giving direct feedback is
risky and that we should either suppress our concerns or find sideways
methods to manipulate situations and get what we want. We are trained to
seek external validation, especially from people in authority, and often
have minimal skills for hearing critical feedback, considering it, and
acting on what is useful. To survive our various social positions, we
internalize specific instructions about when and how to numb our
feelings and perceptions, avoid giving feedback, disappear, defend,
demand appeasement, or appease. As a result, we are mostly unprepared to
engage with conflict in generative ways and instead tend to avoid it
until it explodes or relationships disappear. Mutual aid organizations
often work to build shared analysis and practices that recognize and
address racism, ableism, sexism, classism, and other systems of meaning
and control that produce harm between participants and structure
interactions, in order to be better prepared to address conflict. Some
provide skills-building activities for giving and receiving direct
feedback and avoiding gossip. Ensuring that organizations have a clear
approach to decision making and that participants understand it can
prevent conflicts that tear projects apart. Creating transparency,
especially about money, can prevent destructive conflict. Using
transformative justice and mediation frameworks for addressing conflict
and harm between participants can help address immediate crises and
build skills for preventing and addressing harm in the future.[41] Work
to address conflict and harm within organizations and projects, like
mutual aid work in general, builds infrastructure and capacity for
collective self-governance and survival.
The most visible mutual aid work in contemporary movements for justice
is happening on the front lines of storms, floods, and fires. In those
locations, people experience failures of dominant infrastructure and the
power of helping and sharing with one another. These disasters are, of
course, anything but natural. The profound loss, trauma, and violence
occurring at their front lines are created by the ways that access to
survival is already organized to support exploitation and extraction.
MADR writes:
Neoliberal capitalism and colonization is daily disaster — the
meaningless drudgery of the work, the loss of authentic social
relationships, the destruction of the water, the air, and everything we
need to survive. Even though a hurricane or a fire or a flood is
immensely devastating, it also in a sense washes away the unnamable
disaster that is everyday life under neoliberal capitalism. Without the
coercion from above, most disaster survivors default back to meaningful
relationships based on mutual aid. After the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake, Dorothy Day said, “While the crisis lasted people loved one
another.” We want that love to last. We want to stretch out these
temporary autonomous zones, where people are able to share goods and
services with each other freely, where we reimagine new social
relationships outside of the dictates of the market, where we work for
something real and build something together.[42]
MADR’s understanding of disaster relief as a moment of production of new
social relations is actually not entirely different from that of
disaster capitalists, who seek to remake populations and regions in
crisis according to neoliberal imperatives. We might understand mutual
aid projects as frontline work in a war over who will control social
relations and how survival will be reproduced, especially in the face of
worsening crises. Will neoliberals come in to further privatize and
extract, or will mutual aid projects based in collective
self-determination and local control and dedicated to meeting human
needs determine emergent social relations in the wake of disaster? MADR
writes,
Think of all the things we rely on our opposition to do for us. Our
food, water, energy, transportation, entertainment, communications,
medical care, trash pickup. If the political establishment takes care of
people’s survival needs, they maintain power, but due to capitalism
eating itself, the political establishment seems increasingly
disinterested and unable to meet those needs. If instead corporations or
fascists meet people’s needs, people will probably look to them for
leadership. But if grassroots movements for collective liberation
facilitate the people’s ability to meet their own needs, the better
world we dream of very well may become a reality.[43]
Mutual aid work is mostly invisibilized and undervalued in mainstream
and left narratives about social movement resistance, despite its
significance as a tool for opposing systems of domination. The
marginalization of care work as uncompensated feminized labor, the
mystification of law and policy reform, and the demobilizing liberal
mythology of moving hearts and minds that keeps people busy expressing
themselves online all impede a focus on mutual aid. However, mutual aid
projects are central to effective social movements, and as conditions
worsen, mutual aid projects are becoming an even more essential strategy
for supporting survival, building new infrastructure, and mobilizing
large numbers of people to work and fight for a new world. It is through
mutual aid projects that we can build our capacities for
self-organization and self-determination.
There are enough spare rooms and empty houses for everybody who is
homeless. There is enough food produced to feed anybody and everybody
who is hungry.... In order to face the resource depletion and other
climate change realities that are just around the corner, we need to be
experimenting now with alternative ways of relating to each other that
are based on humanity and generosity, rather than self-interest and
greed. It is imperative for our collective survival.[44]
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[1] Peace, “Desire to Heal.”
[2] Tan, “NYPD Unveils Rainbow-Themed Vehicle.”
[3] Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 22 – 39.
[4] Kaba, “Police ‘Reforms’ You Should Always Oppose”; Critical
Resistance, “Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps.”
[5] Gelderloos, Failure of Nonviolence, chap. 3.
[6] Gelderloos, Failure of Nonviolence, 15.
[7] Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 12 – 15.
[8] Flaherty, No More Heroes, 11 – 33.
[9] Big Door Brigade, “What Is Mutual Aid?”
[10] Collier, “Black Panthers.”
[11] Ealey, “Black Panthers’ Oakland Community School”; Nelson, Body and
Soul, 17; Heynen, “Bending the Bars.”
[12] Neubeck and Cazenave, Welfare Racism, 15 – 38; Piven and Cloward,
Regu-lating the Poor, 3 – 37.
[13] INCITE!, Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 21 – 39, 53 – 62, 129 – 49;
INCITE!, Color of Violence, 53 – 65, 208 – 21.
[14] Levine, Resisting Illegitimate Authority, 5 – 21.
[15] Gitterman and Schulman, “Life Model,” 30 – 31; Caffentzis and
Federici, “Commons against and beyond Capitalism,” 95 – 105; Mutual Aid
Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 26 – 31.
[16] Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 36.
[17] Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 36.
[18] Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 29.
[19] South End Press Collective, What Lies Beneath; Banuchi, “Llueven
las denegatorias de asistencia.”
[20] Klein, Battle for Paradise, chap. 1.
[21] Morris, “California Regulator.”
[22] Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, “From Banks and
Tanks to Cooperation and Caring.”
[23] Neubeck and Cazenave, Welfare Racism, 15 – 38; Piven and Cloward,
Regu-lating the Poor, 3 – 37.
[24] Bowman, “Flip Side to Bill Gates’ Charity Billions”; Eisinger, “How
Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself”; Rhodes and Bloom, “Trouble
with Chari-table Billionaires”; Savage, “Privatizing Morality.”
[25] INCITE!, Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 21 – 39, 53 – 77, 129 – 49.
[26] It’s Going Down, “Autonomous Disaster Relief Organizing.”
[27] Beam, Gay, Inc., chap. 4.
[28] Staufer, “Mutual Aid Disaster Relief,” 2.
[29] Klein, Shock Doctrine, 3 – 25, 409 – 84, 487 – 512.
[30] Jervis, “Citizens with Boats.”
[31] Peace, “Desire to Heal”; Minnesota Department of Corrections,
“Restor-ative Justice.”
[32] Spade, “Faux Progressive Arguments”; King County, “King County Zero
Youth Detention.”
[33] Smiley, “Private Firefighters.”
[34] Critical Resistance, “Oakland Power Projects.”
[35] Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “From the Bottom Up,” 1 – 17; Munshi and
Willse, “Navigating Neoliberalism”; Barnard Center for Research on
Women, “Queer Dreams and Nonprofit Blues.”
[36] INCITE!, Color of Violence, 1 – 24, 208 – 26.
[37] INCITE!, Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 129 – 49.
[38] Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “From the Bottom Up,” 1 – 17.
[39] Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 68.
[40] Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 68.
[41] Sylvia Rivera Law Project, “From the Bottom Up,” 1 – 17; Alatorre,
“From Drama to Calma.”
[42] Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 81.
[43] Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, “Workshop Facilitation Guide,” 81.
[44] Staufer, “Mutual Aid Disaster Relief,” 3.