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Title: Mutual Aid: A Factor of Liberalism Author: Gus Breslauer Date: 2020 Language: en Topics: mutual aid, anti-liberalism, liberalism Source: Retrieved on 2021-09-24 from https://regenerationmag.org/mutual-aid-a-factor-of-liberalism/
Mutual-aid is in the air. Look near any anarchist or socialist project,
and you will see the importance of it emphasized in big bold text. In
the name of mutual-aid, people are doing food shares, repairing
pot-holes in black bloc attire, fixing brake lights, mucking and gutting
flooded houses, and giving out Narcan and clean IV supplies to drug
users. These have become ubiquitous practices on the left.
All very good deeds, how can we be against this? When people are hungry,
you feed them. If you have two coats and your neighbor has none, you
have one coat and your neighbor now has one. The impulse is more than
relatable, I too believe in these things. The appeal is hard to disagree
with. From disaster to crisis, mutual aid comes like Superman to save
the day, feeding and housing everyone, saving each other’s lives.
But the truth is, mutual-aid isn’t a challenge or threat to the social
order which produced hunger and precarity. The state is largely
indifferent or even welcoming to it. In a world where the working class
is increasingly being told to fend for itself, can we continue to call
this “solidarity” with any honesty? If not, then what actually do these
practices do for us?
The problem of poverty is precisely that we don’t have the shit. Let’s
get a few very agreeable things straight, which really clarify why
mutual aid is wholly insufficient: 1. The world of private property and
wage labor drive poverty and produced a number of social problems. 2.
The poor and working class is characterized by lacking reserves and does
not have free time, and 3. The poor and working class do not have the
unpaid labor and unused property by which to alleviate these problems
directly without going to the source keeping it from them.
However, Big Door Brigade, a
which collects and aggregates mutual-aid efforts across the country says
the opposite:
What do we mean by “mutual aid”? Mutual aid is when people get together
to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding
that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we
can do it together RIGHT NOW!
How can both be true? If the working class does not have the shit, why
is mutual aid elevated as “the work”? What are the impulses behind the
popularity of mutual aid? Is it organizing? Is it solidarity? What do
these things mean if it is not? What does the Bread guy that AOC likes
to quote actually have to say about all of this?
It is more honest to call the bulk of what gets sold as mutual aid to be
“service work”. This comes under various names: “survival programs”,
mutual aid, and “serve the people”. Regardless of the nomenclature,
these function largely the same. They are not new, Food Not Bombs has
been a staple of anarchist culture for decades.
There is no shortage of examples of good groups engaging in honest
service work throughout history. The most well-known example is the
Black Panthers. As the Black Panthers were constantly portrayed in the
media as frightening armed terrorists, their survival programs served a
number of functions at once. They brought legitimacy to their more
central practices. They improved their standing amongst the people they
were trying to organize. They also served as an outlet for those wanting
to have an “immediate” positive impact. It also overcame barriers to
organizing, a Communist Party that takes up a literacy campaign doesn’t
just do this to improve lives, but to actually further be able to reach
people and deepen their relationships.
It is worth delineating and examining these and how they related to
other organizing. The Lincoln Hospital was a site of struggle for the
Young Lords as much as it was a place transformed by service work into
something more egalitarian and humanistic. This was the kernel of what
would become “harm reduction”, which is mostly voluntaristic work that
saves lives every day. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union had service
work as a part of its multilateral apparatus, providing abortion care
and procedures women did not have access to, this was one of many
projects which brought attention to their brand of Socialist Feminism,
while they also were heavily involved in workplace organizing amongst
women in Chicago factories. It is hard to not be influenced by a
historic organization which incorporated service work.
Honest service work is not always antithetical to a broader struggle
which is primarily propelled by target-and-demand driven projects. They
can be a very good supplement, to the point where if you are in a
growing group dedicated to class struggle that is really making bigger
and bigger moves, devoting a bit of extra labor in this direction is a
good idea. However, it raises the question of an overall strategy, and
where we really want to put our faith. We need to harvest new relations
and forms of care, but outside the context of conflict, we lack the
thrust which gives these new forms their class character.
This is not just the domain of the left either, Identity Evropa (a
fascist group, now American Identity Movement) shares supplies and picks
up trash in parks and neighborhoods, and you’ll hear a lot about the
“good work” that Gazi and the Black Hammer organization are doing.
However, this also says a lot for how we should approach honest service
work: it’s politically neutral, often the domain of opportunists, and is
very limited. It should be seen honestly for what it is, rather than
giving the impression that this suffices for organizing. A “both-and”
approach isn’t something I’m against, but it’s on us to make the
service-work supportive of the organization’s broader thrust.
Today’s mutual aid efforts spend a great deal of time explaining all the
ways in which they are not charity. They try to make it clear that they,
the feeders of the hungry, are on the same side as the freedom fighters.
According to Mutual Aid activist Dean Spade, mutual aid organizations
“Use people power to resist any efforts by government to regulate or
shut down activities”, “is connected to other tactics, including
disruptive tactics aimed at root causes of the distress the aid
addresses”, and “builds broader political participation, solidarity,
mobilization, radicalization”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says in her
Mutual Aid 101 guide, that mutual aid is: “A great jumping off point for
other kinds of organizing and movement work”
My contention is that mutual aid organizations do little, to none of
this. The beliefs and rhetoric simply do not translate into action.
There is certainly support at the peaks of struggle, protests are
supplied with medics and water-bearers, however this is not the way this
looks day-to-day, for either the mutual-aid groups, or the disruptive
organizations they claim to build solidarity with. Most of the
day-to-day looks like increasing support for mutual aid.
One characteristic of mutual aid sticks out, and reminds me of the
self-exploitation that co-op workers put themselves through. It’s the
rebranding of what are essentially capitalist firms and enterprises to
be “movement-friendly”. As someone experienced on what a non-profit
looks like from the inside, including as someone who was paid but was
glad to do the work otherwise, this jumps out as a major concern from
Spade’s chart:
Efforts to flatten hierarchies—e.g. flat wage scales if anyone is paid,
training so that new people can do work they weren’t professionally
trained to do, rotating facilitation roles, language access.
If implemented on a wider scale, this could possibly lower the value of
everyone’s labor in a related industry. The capitalist class laughs all
the way to the bank with this one, just look at the “learn to code for
free” classes tech companies are giving, this lowers the cost of the
labor for everyone, which Silicon Valley wants very badly to cut.
There’s also nothing preventing a non-profit from seeing this and
running with it, thus using a mix of volunteer and paid-staff labor to
further exploit everyone!
I always try to reserve judgement not for where people came from, and
less so (but still important) what they say, but mostly for what they
do. These are not always the same thing, and the disconnect should
always set off alarms. mutual aid groups dress up what is functionally
similar to NGOs and church groups, and pass it off as something new and
most contentiously, something “radical”.
Most of what Spade characterizes as mutual-aid he believes is radical
because of what is believed about poverty (which reduces stigma) by the
organization, how people are educated (to overcome differences), and an
egalitarianism of expertises and skills. These are all good things, but
all in the realm of ideas, the problem isn’t the way we think about care
and poverty, it’s about how it’s organized, and how our labor is
organized.
The problems and insufficiency with NGOs was never really the services
they provide though, it’s where they locate and build power (“proper
channels”, Democratic Party, seat at the table), and yes, to Spade’s
credit, their ethic and structure. However, it’s not clear if breaking
with this structure in form yields some new content. If anything, the
mutual aid model that has become popularized is a good guide of
practices that many non-profits could adapt and improve themselves, and
they should. At times when reading Spade, I become confused as to
whether what is being proposed cannot be done by a non-profit or is
antithetical to them, as when describing the solidarity which mutual-aid
builds, he still describes a non-profit organization (Sylvia Rivera Law
Project), with a multi-tiered staff structure and all the fixings.
Why does the “non-profit industrial complex” use the organizational
model of capitalist firms (sometimes at the cutting edge) to operate?
Because it is effective. We will also never out-organize them by trying
to compete directly with them. Instead, my proposal is to circumvent
them entirely and organize the unorganized, but also to break with the
primary function (service) they serve. Also, instead of abandoning NGOs
to create a superior model, we should consider the fact that these are
workplaces that need to be organized, and would be improved by
organizing.
Funding? Nowhere in Spade’s “Solidarity, Not Charity”, even in the
section describing the challenges of not being a charity, is there any
discussion on how mutual-aid groups are funded. My personal experience
is that they are either crowd-funded, or are funded by
micro-grants/sub-grants from actual non-profits. That’s not quite “the
revolution will not be funded”. Member run unions, tenant and student
organizations solve this problem often with dues structures. Dues can be
made sliding scale and have free rates for houseless and unemployed
members, and slush funds to further assist them. If an organization is
committed to democracy regarding how dues are spent, members can have a
sense of ownership in the organization. Also, restricting donation sizes
for members also prevents any member from using this as leverage, while
still allowing for large donations and incomes overtime from members who
have more to spare.
A common source for the popularity of mutual aid is the work of 19th
century Russian Anarchist Communist Peter Kropotkin. One of his works
which could rightly be called his magnum opus, titled Mutual Aid: A
Factor of Evolution has endured almost 120 years of relevance. I want to
side-step a bit to examine what Kropotkin meant, as this is a common
justification for the practices amongst anarchists. Is the mutual aid of
today really what Kropotkin meant? In reading his description towards
the end of the book, it would seem that Kropotkin was a proponent mostly
of mass strikes and rebellions. He also described pretty clearly the
interdependency of the working classes historically, even under
capitalism, mutual-aid is a factor of capitalism, it was a factor of the
reformation in Europe. In capitalism, through wage-labor, the working
class is collectively subservient to the production process and
therefore each other.
Nothing in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution justifies the mutual-aid
groupings of today. I wish he had foretold more, but there’s certainly
no evidence that this was what he envisioned. It’s pretty clear that
Kropotkin was a proponent of worker’s revolt, and spent a great deal
highlighting the history of this in Chapter 7. He spoke clearly and
plainly about solidarity, but of a specific kind, and never made
reference to what we’d call mutual aid today.
In Chapter 7, Kropotkin clearly states:
From the point of view of social economics all these efforts of the
peasants certainly are of little importance. They cannot substantially,
and still less permanently, alleviate the misery to which the tillers of
the soil are doomed all over Europe.
Kropotkin does follow up with a good deal of clarification, and I don’t
think we should entirely dismiss the social economics, and examine the
practices of the Panthers, Young Lords and CLWU as above. However, it is
clear that quoting Kropotkin to justify today’s mutual-aid is misleading
and uncharacteristic of his views. Kropotkin does decry individualism of
the ruling class, and associates this with charity and philanthropy. He
also tells clear stories of mutual-aid playing a part of a life-death
cycle of systems and institutions in Europe, the destruction of guilds
by the state, and their replacement with trade unions. He also discusses
mutual-aid in the daily lives of those living in slums, but again, you
find no calls for trying to distribute goods and supplies within these,
and amongst its inhabitants.
Look anywhere near a mutual aid grouping and you will see the slogan
“Solidarity, Not Charity”. While the look of “charity” and its
association with philanthropy may not be what is intended, and it is
arguable if the model is different enough to say it is not charity, the
point is that “solidarity” doesn’t describe service work. This is
concurrent with a historical decline in class struggle organization.
By conflating “solidarity” with service work, we risk impoverishing what
solidarity actually means and feels like. It’s a serious problem when
we’re perplexed when a worker is having a conflict with their
boss/landlord over stolen wages and rent, and the best thing we think we
can do is start a GoFundMe for them. If your work is visibly
indistinguishable from NGOs, capitalist firms, well-meaning religious
groups, and even fascists, you cannot expect the political content to
actually be different. No amount of plastering red flags changes this.
Proclaiming “solidarity, not charity!” doesn’t actually put you in a
position of solidarity with the people you claim to fight for,
solidarity isn’t about service, it’s about reciprocal defense of each
other because we are in the same social position. It also means “skin in
the game”, you’re all in it together. That feeling, that massive
undertaking, all the building that happens prior to the march on the
boss, are not bonds formed by sharing our meager crumbs, but coming
together to take what is ours. It’s high points are preceded by less
flashy work, but it’s based in the kind of relationship between people
willing to sacrifice themselves for each other.
It is certainly not easier to do actual organizing, with targets and
demands, amongst people who are actually positioned to be in solidarity
with each other. It takes a great deal more patience, planning, ground
work, research, courage, pain and sacrifice. However, it is without any
substitute. So, we need to think critically and politically about what
is elevated as “good work”, because there’s a lot that’s getting thrown
around as such which is getting us nowhere.
Some may detract and point to the need to organize collective care work
and the creation of a new world, and this deserves consideration.
However, this is always proposed in the context of a clearly demarcated
struggle. Proponents of mutual aid differ in that they presume the
relationship of fighting organizations to mutual-aid efforts, and
presume their political content, whereas those who sought to
revolutionize care work paid close attention to the relationship of
their reproductive labor to capital. What is proposed by these
proponents looks markedly different than the mutual aid that Spade
proposes.
If our mutual-aid efforts are not closely linked with target-and-demand
driven fights with bosses, landlords, administrators, it has no
relationship to organizing. What passes as “organizing” today is mostly
being a member of an organization and doing whatever it takes to make
that organization grow. Like “solidarity” and “direct action”, we have
to draw some lines and some contrasting of “organizing” with mutual-aid.
Prevail?
What is the grip that mutual-aid has on the left? Why do people take to
mutual-aid so quickly, instead of building a target and demand driven
fighting organization? The answers to me are pretty clear
also a risk for the state to repress it, because of the moral
consequence and optics of trying to impede service work. It poses very
little challenge to the state and capital, who view these efforts
largely indifferently, or even positively, since you are actively
helping them reproduce workers, a burden increasingly relegated to the
working class
aristocratic worker/petite bourgeois socialists can easily get in on the
“work” without blowing their cover. There’s very little in common you
actually need to have with the people you are serving. In fact, there’s
a stark power division, you have something valuable, that these people
need and do not have.
ability to capture the rhetoric of “organizing”, you are doing “the”
“work”. You can tell people “well, what are you doing?”. Most leftists
who become active and reach out to leftist groups are looking for the
first thing to DO and will latch themselves to the first thing that
looks good. You can “do first, think critically about what you’re doing
later”.
Your critics become critics of feeding people, and your opponents can be
framed as not desiring people to be fed. This moral buffer can even be
used to excuse other unrelated problems with your politics or practices.
In this sense, it serves the same function as philanthropy from the
ruling class.
juggling 5 different communications platforms and work-flows are needed.
You learned everything you need on how to check vibes, social network,
“emails emails emails”, the whole thing. You’re on the cutting edge, and
there’s important work to do. Who’s gonna send the email about it?
work. Instead, the “good feelings” are immediate. The payoff and
gratification of “doing something” comes instantly, and cannot be taken
away from you. You may have had to enter an uncomfortable conversation
but for the most part, you can do a lot just talking to the people you
know.In today’s fast-moving world, our redemption and sleep at night
comes to the lowest bidder on a first come, first serve basis.
the economy is already service oriented. Therefore, it is easy for some
to reduce it to the same interchangeable parts, and the work is
accessible, and people know to expect a grind. It is easier to get
people to give their labor in a strategic way, than it is to get them to
withhold it.
It’s not as simple as it is to say it’s “easy”, as mutual-aid
organizations do a lot of work. In fact, the point of it is sort of that
there’s always work to do. It’s more accurate to consider the myriad of
political reasons why this gets attention over organizing. Mutual aid
projects are more well supported than fighting organizations because
they alleviate conditions on an individual basis (even if done many
times over) without challenging their source, and it also provides no
challenge to “common sense” consciousness that pervades much of US
liberalism.
Spade, in the beginning of “Solidarity, Not Charity”, gives an urgent
warning to those who neglect mutual-aid:
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.
Is mutual-aid now the least passive and most effective form of
expressing your opinion? Also, is expressing our opinions the only
channels we need to fly open? Why is it not an option to build an
organization where people feel like they have a voice, where democracy
lives and propels the organization forward, which actually favors direct
action?
What do these things look like to me? Taking the problem to the boss.
Taking the problem to the landlord. That’s direct, not passive. That’s
effective. People with a common grievance come together and fight back
and win every day. That’s tenants coming together to fight deposit theft
and rent hikes in their complexes. That’s workers coming together to
fight wage theft and speed-ups in their workplaces. That’s public
university students coming together to fight tuition hikes and cuts to
ethnic and cultural studies in their schools.
You won’t find any of this in Spade’s paper. The bonds formed this way
can never be formed in his mutual-aid model. This is because it’s not
even on the table in his vision. In his view, “Working and living inside
hierarchies deskills us for dealing with conflict”, therefore conflict
is best not located and fought in our daily lives, between workers and
bosses and tenants and landlords, but in the context of mutual-aid.
Spade gives what comes closest to a vision for a broader struggle in
“Solidarity, Not Charity”:
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
controlled, building methods of dealing with conflict and harm that do
not involve the police or prisons, and building health, education, and
childcare infrastructure controlled by the people who use it.
A lot of this is very solid, however there are also glaring omissions.
Almost all of the above can be done without having to talk to your
neighbors and co-workers or build in the places where the dreaded
hierarchies that Spade decries run our lives. When you eliminate a lot
of stuff on this list categorically, such as work that could also as
easily be the domain of non-profits (anything involving education and
service), spectacle-oriented and symbolic actions (disrupting
city-council meetings, direct actions at building sites), you’re left
wondering how this is supposed to both build up and coordinate what we
need. It speaks to the decades of decline and defeat of the labor
movement.
There is an liberal tendency within today’s anarchism that favors
amorphous movements over the kind of long-term organization building
that poor and working class people need, such as member-run independent
unions or political organizations. There is a lot of emphasis on service
and consciousness raising with symbolic actions and protest militancy,
with some good ideas mixed in. Of course, I think organizations need
childcare infrastructure, and things like rapid response systems for ICE
raids are great as well. However, there is an allergy to organization
building that has been plaguing anarchism since the 90’s. The
prescription is to look inward, to affinity groups, to people you trust
only because you have the same ideas. Most (but not all) of the tactics
in Spade’s vision are completely consistent with the CrimethInc affinity
group model. This is the same model that allowed for a dine-and-dash,
calling for a Rent Strike everywhere early in the COVID-19 crisis, only
to hear not a peep about the tenants movement months later.
Instead of actually grappling with the realities of friends and enemies,
winning and losing, we have in its place grandiose delusions about
“actually building new social relations that are more survivable” while
my city is 6 feet underwater. Mutual-aid during Hurricane Harvey was
phenomenal, but was also rife with conflict, opportunists, and just
generally tragic experiences. Mutual-aid was so prevalent, whereas
fighting organizations were nowhere to be found, what happened was
people were left to fend for themselves, and the state called the bluff,
evicting people at record-breaking rates. The role that mutual-aid
actually played was contradictory and a mixed-bag at best. What we
learned most from that experience is we cannot treat mutual-aid as some
kind of silver bullet.
What we needed during Hurricane Harvey that wasn’t there was any
struggle against the forces which made our lives so fragile to begin
with. There was no accountability and no taking back any of the wealth
we created. What we needed was what we always needed, and the problems
of poverty in Houston could not be resolved in Houston alone, nor does
disaster present any special “opportunities”, nor does it make
organizing easier or change the rules around long-term building and
fighting and winning.
To conclude, my prescription is actually not to pack up all the service
work the left does. It is instead to be honest, to start building the
kinds of fighting organizations the working class needs in the long run,
and to think strategically about the role that service plays in our
organizations, movements, and history. We can make the organizations of
our future right now, and build the workplace organization that will
someday be able to stop and bend entire economies to its will. We can
build tenants’ movements that won’t stop until we have a world rent and
landlords. These are where we can locate the kernels of “actually
survivable relations” and they all begin in the here and now. We will
have the mutual-aid and revolutionizing care work too, but we can’t have
a revolution without the organizations that build and fight at the
places where capital is produced and reproduced. Every picket line needs
reinforcement, every rent strike needs support, every comrade deserves
care and aid. Instead of envisioning mutual-aid to contain the
beginnings of a new world, we have to apply mutual aid to existing
organizations that actually are.
Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season.
It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or
future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater
usefulness of tomorrow.
--- W.E.B. DuBois
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