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- Mutual aid is "survival work" *iff**Â done in conjunction with social movemenets demanding transformative change*.
- Purposes:
- Provides a point of entry based on immediate concerns
- Social spaces for new solidarities
- Objectives of left movements now:
- Survive the crisis
- Prevent the next one
- The covid response in Hong Kong was fairly successful specifically through infrastructure run by protesters with little government response (websites, distribution of masks and sanitizer, countering disinfo (from WHO?)
- Meeting each others' needs *with *the understanding that this is an issue of justice
- Raising for strike funds, supporting boycotts, planting supplies in the desert for migrants, street medicine, prison writing.
- Historical argument: cap/col disrupted old social networks based on sharing
- Unprecedented loneliness, competition, reliance on "hostile systems"
- Example: Black Panther Breakfast Program
- Cops pissed on the food in response and co-opted it as a charity model
- The Young Lords in Puerto Rico: addressing garbage collection, hijacking an x-ray truck, hospital occupation, food distrib.
- Feminist clinics, abortion providers, gay clinics, childcare collectives, tenants unions
- "Mutual aid is an unbroken tradition among indigenous people across many cycles of colonialism"
- Black communities since the 1780s: pool resources for healthcare, burials, widows and orphans, education
- Question: How has capitalism disrupted more communal kinds of living?
- Professionalization
- Wage labor
- Closure of the commons
- Mutual aid projects tend to arise after natural disasters (but is it MA if the conditions it's responding to are an act of god? depends on the criticality of its framing i guess)
- Reframing of need as a systematic issue and not an individual failing
- The destigmatization of need
- This work is based in a belief that those on the front lines of a crisis have the best wisdom to solve the problems, and that collective action is the way forward.
- Sylvia Rivera Law Project
- TPOC come in for help and often join the cause
- Conflict arises despite commonalities: working together bridges these gaps and changes the group and the people in it
- Professionalized nonprofits do not practice solidarity
- Single-issue organizing
- Restricts who they help to categories that elites are already sympathetic to
- Builds competition instead of co-operation among orgs
- Mutual aid orgs are multi-issue, and if they aren't initially, they quickly find that they kind of have to be
- Example: "helping the homeless" quickly implicates queerness, race, immigration, foster care, etc
- Solidarity and an ever-expanding commitment to justice emerge from contact with the complex realities of injustice.
- Departure from models of expertise
- Learning active skills and carrying out plans is always accompanied by learning about co-operation and communication
- "We can organize human activity without coercion"
- The space provides an opportunity to unlearn behaviors acquired as a response to domination
- By participating in groups in new ways and practicing new ways of being together, we are both building the world we want and becoming the kind of people who could live in such a world together.
- Example: Occupy camps
- conflict resolution without cops
- consensus decision-making
- occupying public space
- distributing food
- free political education workshops
- occupy members without a critique of policing were educated by more experienced activists
- Example: Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR)
- Insisting your way into a government warehouse to distribute needed supplies after hurricane Maria
- Learning to defy illegitimate authority as a group is deeply empowering
- "When dominant ways of living have been suspended, people discover that they can break norms—and even laws—that enable individualism, passivity, and respect for private property."
- "Disaster survivors themselves are the most important authority on just action.”
- Charity focuses on vetting who deserves help, what strings are attached, and improving the image of the charitable
- The model is inherited from medieval Christians who saw alms-giving as a means of personal salvation
- Progressive-era idea of the clique of experts
- "In this way, poverty-focused and homelessness-focused nonprofits are essentially encouraged to merely manage poor people"
- Nonprofits are often tax-shelters for the rich. "Foundations" only give out 5 percent of their wealth (???)
- Non-profitization was a way of co-opting the mutual aid movements of the 60s and 70s
- Nonprofits are typically run in a businesslike, non-democratic fashion.
- Frames politics and everyday life as separate spheres
- "Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby—it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions. It should enliven us."
- Crises test the capabilities of existing systems, forcing them to either adapt or break
- Interest in mutual aid has increased during covid
- Challenge: groups which persist after the crisis has peaked
- 3 official responses to mutual crisis aid:
- Ignoring it
- Co-opting it, protraying it as "heroic", as supplemental to government projects
- Surveillance and punishment
- Example: Hurricane Sandy
- DHS expanded Occupy surveillance
- NYC gave them some supplies
- Cuomo & Bloomberg ignored them
- "At best, mutual aid projects get framed as non-threatening temporary adjuncts to existing systems."
- politicians associate themselves if the movement is popular
- Criminalization: Police attacks on Panther breakfasts, Trump-era raids on No More Deaths med camps at the border
- *We can learn the most from people with experience breaking the law*
- Gov. concessions which fill in needs previously met by mutual aid are victories of a kind ("we were so strong they had to co-opt us")
- However, gov. can and will reverse concessions once the crisis is over
- gov. work will necessarily exclude certain populations
- Example: New Deal catered to white men
- Other, bolder strategy: promise concessions and then just don't give em lol
- "Even unsatisfying concessions, in other words, only come with big, sustained, disruptive mobilizations. Nonprofit leaders and politicians frequently encourage “pragmatism” and peaceful incremental change, but the most radical imagination of what we want, and the escalation of direct action to get it, is what is truly pragmatic"
- Concessions will be offered on the premise that the system is "fundamentally fair"
- We want to believe that we can win over the leaders' conscience and deploy their resources to benevolent ends
- Historically, this has rarely been a realistic outcome. We should not let our unprecedented conditions convince us that transformative change is impossible
- End goal: "scaling up" not as centralizing and expanding (little anti-soviet nod), but as adapting practices that worked elsewhere
- Intergroup connection, co-operation, and intel trading, not domination
- Using bigger resources for bolder moves
- Ideal upscaling: strike to factory takeover
- All this requires shedding the belief that people are inherently and irredeemably selfish