Mutual aid impregnates our life at every level. It means organizing a large scale free food network, but also to help your neighbor to carry the bags. Or to maintain a constructive friendship. Or to do reproductive work at home. Most mutual aid relationships arise organically in our everyday life. However, in this webpage I will rather focus on talking about more organized forms of mutual aid.
A Mutual Aid Group or network is a group of people that, in an organized way, share their resources and their workforce with each other to cover their basic needs in a communal way. They are self-managed, horizontal, radically equitable, egalitarian, democratic, and non-profit organizations that address social problems from the perspective of mutual support and collective struggle. Their members find a way to solve their material needs, but also to create bonds of attachment and mutual aid and to find social reinforcement of their emotions and beliefs. In that sense, Mutual Aid Groups are a way of radicalizing care work.
What characterizes them, according to Dean Spade, is:
- An understanding that it is the system, not the people suffering under it, that creates poverty, crisis, and vulnerability
- Governance/control by people who are most affected
- Transparency about how they work, any money they use or manage
- Open meetings and open pathways for new people to join and participate
- Political education within the organization
- Willingness to accept feedback
- Long-term commitment to the project
- Connection to and solidarity with other mutual aid projects
- Consensus-based decision making
Mutua Aid Groups can be very diverse, specially regarding the need that each group aims to solve. There are thousand of needs to be solved, and each mutual aid group organizes differently. Mutual Aid Groups can coordinate themselves into a Mutual Aid Network, which allow them to extend their social labor.
Mutual Aid initiatives exist in contraposition with the State. While the State has the resources to provide aid to everyone, it does not have the willingness nor the capacity to do so. Bureaucratic structures are detrimental to mutual aid, not only because bureaucracy discriminates groups of people, but also because it slowers the reaction to give immediate response to people’s needs. Thus, Mutual Aid Groups have to be anti-bureaucratic and accessible to anyone: this will attract people to the mutual aid groups.
The benefits of Mutual Aid Groups
Mutual Aid Groups are, by definition, beneficial for the community and individuals. Their main benefit is that thing for which the group was organised (for example, the main benefit of a solidarity kitchen is precisely the fact that is provides food for free). But that does not mean that this is the only benefit that they have: for example, a solidarity kitchen might help psychologically the individuals that participate in it, or might help creating new friendships and social bonds, etc. Mutual Aid Groups have other collective and individual benefits.
On a collective level, thei benefits are multiple:
- Creation of social bonds and cohesion, including friendships or sexo-affective relationships.
- Care work
- Cultural impact by debunking the myth of survival of the fittest and that “humans are evil in nature”
- Collective political empowerment
- Inclusivity
- Social resilience
- Collective learning
- Etc
On an individual level, mutual aid group empower individuals in various ways:
- Provides pschological support
- Provides companionship and friendship
- Individual resilience
- Individual learning (life experience, social skills, manufacturing skills, etc)
- Individual political empowerment
- Improve self-esteem (by getting appreciation from other people)
Their attitude towards the State
Mutual Aid aims to provide a way of meeting community needs that is an alternative to the Staet. However, the attitude that Mutual Aid Groups have towards institutions can be very different.
Some mutual aid groups have a non-agressive stance towards the State and the Police. To me, it is the least desirable kind of mutual aid group. But it is the most appropriate one for small towns where there isn’t previous any kind of organizational experience, or any anarchistic organization. In places where people don’t have the experience to create a mutual aid group. Where people is not sufficiently ideologized to confront the local police and government, it may be better to stablish a non political mutual aid group, because it’s either this or nothing. Furthermore, it is better to start like this to create a precedent of self-organization in the town that can eventually turn into an openly anarchistic mutual aid group. As I said before, it is important to create precedents of self organization, even if they are not ideologized groups.
Some Mutual Aid Groups take a collaborationist stance with the State and the Police. This might be either because they are completely apolitical or because they need to use the State’s resources to run the Mutual Aid Group (for example, they need to get money grants or need to use the municipal facilities). Most of them are legally registered as an entity.
But the majority of Mutual Aid Groups take a confrontative stance towards them. They aim to stablish a network of radical care that confronts hierarchies of any kind. Those Mutual Aid Groups are mostly not registered as a legal entity. They are completely self-managed and self-reliant, completely neglecting any relationship with the State.
Membership and participation
Mutual Aid Groups must be open to anyone (with the only exception of fascists of any kind). Members should be free to join and leave the Mutual Aid Group at any point, with no restriction. There will be ups and downs in terms of membership and involvement, ant that is completely normal and fine. The needs and capacities of every member need to be taken into consideration, for the guiding principle of the mutual aid group must be the Marx’s quote “from each according to its ability capacities, to each according to its needs”.
Decision making
Mutual Aid Groups have to function through radical democracy.