Why Mutual Aid

The text below is from a pamphlet our chapter wrote for our sister organization, Feed the People SoMD (FTP). FTP is a mutual aid organization dedicated to providing food, hygiene, and harm reduction to members of the community with no means testing based on the idea that everyone is deserving of those things. All material aid comes from members of the community. You can view their website here or go to their requests page on Facebook here.

How is Mutual Aid different from Charity?   You might have noticed several groups doing really nice things for their community and calling it “mutual aid.” When they explain further, they make sure to point out that it is not charity.    But it certainly looks like charity, right? So what’s the difference?   Mutual aid is when people in a community take care of each other. They share skills and resources horizontally. If people in your community notice that you don’t have any food, and they chip in to give you some, that’s mutual aid. The community decides how to use their resources. Charity comes from outside of the community, and it usually comes from more privileged people. People from wealthier communities give money to organizations. Those organizations then give resources to poorer communities. The organizations decide what to do with those resources, so the people who are giving the money have power over the people receiving it. So why does this difference matter? It matters because charity disempowers communities. Mutual Aid empowers them. How does Mutual Aid empower communities? With charity, the “haves” give to the “have nots.” When you’re a “have,” you want to keep your position. But in our system, the only reason the “haves” have so much in the first place is because they profit from high rent and low wages. They profit off of the “have-nots.” When there are fewer “have-nots,” the “haves” don’t have as much. Because of this, charity will never challenge the system that creates “have-nots” in the first place. Doing that would hurt the “haves” who give to charity and run the organizations.   Let’s say a community is being hurt by gentrification. Certain realtors are buying houses and flipping them, which drives up everyone’s rent. A charitable organization might help you pay your rent, but it would never do anything to stop gentrification because some of their donors might be realtors.  Mutual aid, on the other hand, is democratic. Mutual aid is when the community takes care of itself. People can advocate for themselves because they have control over how their resources get used. They might pool their resources to help people pay rent, or they might use them to campaign against the realtors.   Mutual Aid can also grow. It can become an alternative support system for the people who have been failed by capitalism. How can Mutual Aid change the world? You might have noticed that it is mostly left wing radicals who start Mutual Aid projects. This is because people who are against capitalism see Mutual Aid as the best way to improve society for the better. Under Capitalism, the rich exploit your labor for profit, and all profit comes from exploiting labor.1 Under Capitalism, you only deserve a home, healthcare, and food, if you are a productive worker for the capitalists. If you cannot work to produce a profit, or if the capitalists decide that your work isn’t valuable enough, you are cast aside. We believe this is wrong. We believe that everyone deserves a home, food, and healthcare because all human beings have value. We understand that workers all over the world produce enough for everyone to survive. Take housing, for example. For every one homeless person in the United States, there are 31 vacant homes.2  This means that we have enough homes for everyone to have a place to live, it is just more profitable for landlords to keep them empty and leave people on the street. Food is another example. There are 7.7 billion people living on the planet. Nine million people die of hunger each year. This must mean there is not enough food for all of those people, right? Actually, we produce enough food per year to feed 10 billion people.3 It is simply more profitable for the rich to let people starve than it is to feed them. We produce enough for everyone to get what they need. Under the current system, however, things are not distributed to the people who need them. Instead, they are hoarded and sold for profit. Mutual Aid is based on the idea that things like food, medicine, and shelter are human rights. They should be provided to people by their communities, instead of hoarded and sold for profit. People start Mutual Aid programs because they want to build the foundation for a more just society. In the short term, they hope that mutual aid will help people survive. In the long term, they hope that mutual aid will grow to become a robust system for fairly distributing the things people need in a community. What starts with canned food could turn into housing and healthcare.   Isn’t Mutual Aid against human nature? When people talk about Evolution and human nature, they  usually only talk about the idea of competition. They talk about “survival of the fittest.” A Russian naturalist named Peter Kropotkin, however, observed dozens of animal species and noticed that the ones who cooperated had the highest chances of survival.4 The animals that shared resources and cared for each other were the ones that survived. Humans created communities for the same reason. It is in our nature to cooperate. We are a social species. We developed communities and families because it is easier to survive in groups. Early societies were communal and clan-based. Many cultures still have communal, clan-based lifestyles even in the modern age. Even medieval peasants cooperated to survive. They treated most of their farming land as a “commons” that they farmed and looked after as a community. They only stopped when Governments forcibly removed them and sold the land to wealthy factory owners. The fact is, when people are greedy and competitive, it is not because of nature. It is a learned behavior. Under capitalism, you learn to be competitive because that is how you survive. In a world where we cooperate to survive, people will learn to cooperate.   Conclusion The goal of Mutual Aid is to empower communities and meet peoples’ needs. We promote Mutual Aid because we believe that everyone deserves to survive and to thrive, regardless of their wealth. The capitalist system leaves people homeless and starving because it is profitable. Mutual Aid is the alternative, and it can be the foundation of a new world.   The world is, obviously, very complicated. We no longer live in small communities and tribes. We live in a globalized, technologized, and plugged-in world. We live in a world still suffering under institutional racism and colonialism. We recognize that Mutual Aid is not the only solution. In fact, there will have to be many solutions to truly transform the world. But it is a great way to get started, right here in your hometown.If we fail, what’s the worst that can happen? We help someone?