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Title: What is Mutual Aid?
Author: sub.media
Date: 2016
Language: en
Topics: mutual aid, primer, video transcription, Breadtube
Source: https://sub.media/video/what-is-mutual-aid/

sub.media

What is Mutual Aid?

Mutual Aid is a guiding factor behind anarchist practice, and an

essential framework for understanding anarchist views on social

organization more broadly. So... what is it, exactly?

Well... in its simplest form, mutual aid is the motivation at play any

time two or more people work together to solve a problem for the shared

benefit of everyone involved. In other words, it means co-operation for

the sake of the common good.

Understood in this way, mutual aid is obviously not a new idea, nor is

it exclusive to anarchists. In fact, the very earliest human societies

practised mutual aid as a matter of survival, and to this day there are

countless examples of its logic found within the plant and animal

kingdoms.

To understand anarchists’ specific embrace of mutual aid, we need to go

back over 100 years, to the writings of the famous Russian anarchist

Pyotr Kropotkin, who in addition to sporting one of the most prolific

beards of all time, just so happened to also be an accomplished

zoologist and evolutionary biologist.

Back in Kropotkin's day, the field of evolutionary biology was heavily

dominated by the ideas of Social Darwinists such as Thomas H. Huxley. By

ruthlessly applying Charles Darwin's famous dictum “survival of the

fittest” to human societies, Huxley and his peers had concluded that

existing social hierarchies were the result of natural selection, or

competition between free sovereign individuals, and were thus an

important and inevitable factor in human evolution.

Not too surprisingly, these ideas were particularly popular among rich

and politically powerful white men, as it offered them a

pseudo-scientific justification for their privileged positions in

society, in addition to providing a racist rationalization of the

European colonization of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Kropotkin attacked this conventional wisdom, when in 1902 he published a

book called Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, in which he proved that

there was something beyond blind, individual competition at work in

evolution.

Kropotkin demonstrated that species that were able to work together, or

who formed symbiotic arrangements with other species based on mutual

benefit, were able to better adapt to their environment, and were

granted a competitive edge over those species who didn't, or couldn't.

In today’s metropolitan societies, people are socialized to see

themselves as independent, self-sufficient individuals, equipped with

our own condos, bank accounts, smartphones and facebook profiles.

However, this notion of human independence is a myth, promoted by

corporations and states seeking to mould us into atomized, and easily

controlled consumers, concerned primarily with our own short-term

well-being. The truth is that human beings are incredibly

interdependent. In fact, that’s the key to our success as a species.

Do you ever spend time thinking about where the food you eat, or the

clothes you wear come from? What about the labour and materials that

went into building your house, or your car? Left to fend for ourselves

without the comforts of civilization, few among us would survive a week,

let alone be able to produce a fraction of the myriad commodities we

consume every day.

From the great pyramids commissioned by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt,

to today’s globe-spanning production and supply chains, the primary

function of the ruling class has always been to organize human activity.

And everywhere that they have done so, they have relied on coercion.

Under capitalism, this activity is organized through either direct

violence, or the internalized threat of starvation created by a system

based on private ownership of wealth and property.

Capitalism can inspire people to do many amazing things, as long as

there is a profit to be made. But in the absence of a profit motive,

there are many important tasks that it will not and cannot ever

accomplish, from eradicating global poverty and preventable diseases, to

removing toxic plastics from the oceans. In order to carry out these

monumental tasks, we require a change in the ethos that connects us to

one another, and to the world that sustains us. A shift away from

capitalism... towards mutual aid.

Glimpses of the Anarchist ideal of mutual aid can be seen today in

communities of open source software developers, and in programmers

coming up with new forms of encryption to thwart NSA surveillance. They

can be seen in neighbours coming together to organize a daycare

collective, and in the aftermath of disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina

and Sandy, when in the absence of state institutions, perfect strangers

rush to one another’s aid. It can be seen in the bravery of the white

helmets of Aleppo, who risk their lives to pull children from the

collapsed ruins of buildings hit by Assad’s barrel bombs.

Imagine a world in which human activity was not organized on the basis

of ceaseless competition over artificially scarce resources, but the

pursuit of the satisfaction of human needs… and you will understand a

vision of the world that anarchists seek to create.