Mutual aid is the praxis of helping one another in order to overcome social and material barriers. The fundamental idea behind mutual aid is that such cooperation is necessary in order to overcome scarcity imposed by capitalism, fascism and other authoritarian forms of organization. Thus, practicing mutual aid is not only a way of ensuring that everyone is able to meet its needs, but also a form of class struggle that aims to confront intrinsically hierarchical forms of organization.
The term was popularized by the anarchist philosopher Piotr Kropotkin, who in his book “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution” argued that the driving force behind evolution is cooperation amongst individuals, rather than competition. He argued that all living beings cooperate in order to increase their survival rate. Charles Darwin himself, in his book “The Descent of Man”, wrote that “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed”. Mutual aid has existed since the beginning of life, and has been present in every aspect and every moment of human history.
In a world where the ecosocial emergency is getting worse and worse and where class divisions are getting greater and greater, the only option that lower classes have is to cooperate amongst ourselves. To combat class divisions we need to build cooperative social relationships that make ourselves less dependant on market competition and the State, and that enable ourselves to subsist autonomously. Moreover, to solve the ecosocial crisis we need to make this cooperation extensive to all the other living beings. As Darwin wrote, “sympathy beyond the confines of man -that is, humanity to the lower animals- seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions”.
Building such cooperative relations needs to be done in such a way that recognizes and addresses racism, ableism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression. In fact, mutual aid relationships need to be based on the acknowledgement that every individual is different. Building mutual aid is therefore a necessary step in order to overcome those forms of discrimination. It is precisely because of this transformative potential that I argue that it is necessary to extend mutual aid to every aspect of our society. The purpose of this guide is to help in this objective.