With the COVID-19 pandemic and summer 2020’s historic uprisings in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the concept of mutual aid exploded onto the progressive scene. It’s a framework attributed to anarchist philosopher Peter Krotopkin that differs from charity in that networks are organized by members of an affected community.
A New York magazine article about the growing interest in organizing mutual aid networks defined the term loosely as “a form of solidarity-based support in which communities unite against a common struggle, rather than leaving individuals to fend for themselves; these types of groups can come in many shapes and sizes.
In Brooklyn, for instance, there are community refrigerators where anyone can take or leave food, organized supply drives for needy neighbors without the red tape of means testing, and more recently, drives to help elderly Black and brown residents get vaccinated. In Texas, mutual aid networks sprang up in the wake of the unprecedented snowstorms that left people without power for weeks. Other networks are operating nationwide to serve specific communities, such as mutual aid groups that support trans women of color and undocumented people who are not even eligible to get government stimulus money. And in cities across the country, community bail funds were set up to bail out activists arrested at police brutality protests.
Growth of a movement
Per an analysis by the Sustainable Economies Law Center, more than 1,000 documented mutual aid networks sprang up in 2020, and there are “likely thousands more that are operating informally in hyperlocal efforts.” As governments failed to address the growing needs of its citizenry during the COVID-19 pandemic, people began to organize to get food and other essentials to their communities and neighbors across the United States—and began doing so en masse, in ways the country hasn’t seen since the Great Depression. As SELC notes, mutual aid is far from new, can be traced back to Black and indigenous communalist practices, and was evidenced in the modern era during the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program and the mutualista societies that proliferated in Mexican immigrant communities in Texas.
The growing progressive interest in mutual aid dovetails well with the increased emphasis on mutualism, the focus of a new book, “Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up,” by Sara Horowitz, founder of the Freelancers Union. The root causes behind mutualistic endeavors like the Freelancers Union, which strives to provide healthcare and a community hub for freelancers, as well as other services that they lack without or between full-time jobs, are almost identical to those behind the more radical mentality that undergirds mutual aid. Both are based on the understanding that the support networks traditionally provided by jobs are lacking to the point of being nonexistent, and that regular people are better able to take care of each other than those in power.
Paired with the trend toward democratic socialism and other political theories critical of capitalism, the recent resurgence of interest in mutual aid points toward a larger paradigm shift in progressive thought. While many thinkers to the left of center have long criticized American individualism as a harmful fantasy, mutual aid and mutualism provide a solution to the ills of individualism. Whatever slogan one chooses—“solidarity not charity,” “bread and roses,” or “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—the concept of mutual aid within the context of the growing push left in American politics portends a boom in community-based activism that champions interdependence over rugged individualism.
Born of necessity
The current mutual aid moment was borne of necessity, and as trans activist Dean Spade told The Progressive magazine in December 2020, “mutual aid always pops up where disasters are.”
“If you look at the media coverage of a hurricane or a flood, you’ll see people discussing mutual aid,” Spade said in an interview about his new book, “Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next).” “But because this disaster rolled out everywhere at once, that proliferation of mutual aid projects was more visible. Many people started doing mutual aid projects at the exact same time. That’s the main reason the idea of mutual aid went mainstream during this period.”
There’s long been a saying in activist groups that we should place more emphasis on movements rather than moments. Already, last summer’s interest in mutual aid networks is diminishing as the world marches onward toward the “new normal” of a post-COVID vaccine world. Mutual aid organizers are looking toward the future of the “solidarity economy” and counting on the power built within communities by their networks to see to the needs of neighbors as the conditions that were worsened by the pandemic—unemployment and underemployment, food insecurity and identity-based violence—continue unaddressed.
Perhaps one of the greatest political effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. is the deepening distrust in governments that fail to provide for the people. Mutual aid networks alone cannot and will not save us, but they do provide an excellent study in how much people are willing to share with their neighbors, especially in a culture where every man is supposed to be for himself.
