We’ve Lost The Plot With Mutual Aid

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I think the popularization of mutual aid is all well and good, but I think it's important to clarify that it is not anything unique to anarchy or anarchism or really any radical social system.

[00:00:11]Now, the term was coined by the anarchist Peter Kotkin in mutual aid, a factor of evolution. I read it many years ago and I realized that a lot of people have not read it based on how they're talking about mutual aid. The whole point of Kapotin's writings on the subject was that mutual aid is something that comes naturally to us. is something that we evolved for. It's something that is necessary to the functioning of humans and human society under any social arrangement, whether it's an egalitarian social relation or a hierarchical society. You know, mutual aid, as he describes, is something that exists under feudalism. It's something that exists under capitalism. The existence of mutual aid does not automatically translate to anarchism in action. It's a thing that people do whether they know it as such or not as part of being human. And the concept of mutual aid, cooperation as a factor of evolution was meant to be putting it in context was meant to be a counterweight to the overemphasis on competition on the survival of the fittest. Not as a reputation of competition as an evolutionary factor, but as an addendum, as an accompanying factor in that evolutionary process. So I see a lot of value in raising awareness of mutual aid of what it is and how important it is to human life and society. That's good. And I think that discussing mutual aid, educating about mutual aid can get you an opening to talking about the ways that hierarchy can serve as an obstacle to our natural tendency and and it can get you talking about what anarchy means or explaining parts of what makes anarchy work. But mutual aid alone is not enough. And it's reached a point now where mutual aid is being attached to things that really are not mutual aid, that are literally just charity. And the conflation of the two, I think, is very unhelpful because mutual aid and mutual aid groups can serve a radical function.

[00:02:06]And I'll get into how in a moment. But conflating mutual aid and charity just creates a bunch of confusion for no reason. There's no need to rebrand charity as mutual aid. Now, there are some charities that in their operations, in the areas that their funding is headed, they can be labeled quote unquote problematic. But there's no shame in just the idea of charity, in working at a charitable organization, in engaging in these systems and practices that have been put in place to act as a release valve to make capitalism more bearable. But I see posts from time to time where people are asking others to donate to their mutual aid fund. It's charity. It's not mutual aid. And I don't understand the compulsion to conflate the two. I think it really neuters the radical potential of mutual aid consciously practiced as a revolutionary approach. Yes, I said that mutual aid is something that exists in any society. But that doesn't mean that mutual aid doesn't still have some revolutionary potential. It's just that that potential to really grasp it and to be able to apply it must be contextualized in an overarching framework or project. Sometimes I've seen the sentiment that theory is is not not as important as action. That you should just be out there, you know, putting in the work in your community engaged in a mutual aid. And whole time, of course, that mutual aid is just charity, which while beneficial, really moves nothing forward. You know, doesn't advance any kind of prefigurative work, doesn't advance anyone's analysis of the world. I keep saying that theory and practice must work together. You read to expand your knowledge. You read so that you can learn from those who came before you so that you're not reinventing the wheel over and over again, committing the same errors, engaging the same mistakes as those who came before. And you put that into practice. You put those lessons into practice. And then through practice, that can inform how you approach other theory or that can inform the way that you put forward theoretical frameworks of your own.

[00:04:14]But the two need to feed into each other. I just want people to be honest that their mutual aid projects are not necessarily mutual aid. That they are unidirectional. That they are grassroots charities. That they're not always explicitly anti-state and anti- capitalist. That some of them even end up taking on a kind of a nonprofit structure. There's value in the immediate relief of food distribution, rent support, disaster response. You know, fill in the gaps left by state failure. But filling in those gaps does not necessarily prefigure an alternative. It does not necessarily actually pose a challenge to the system.

[00:04:51]You know, a lot of the mutual aid networks and disaster relief collectives and community fridges, they're a great salve, but how mutual are they? Are the participants mutually helping each other or are they funneling their efforts to others in a unidirectional way? Is it mutual assistance or is it unilateral assistance? Is it that welloff people or relatively privileged people are given in one direction to the poor and homeless? And yes, I understand that the mutual a mutual aid is not immediate, right? It's not an expectation of tit for tat immediate return in every instance. But even in the most idealized gift economy, there is an eb and a flow.

[00:05:33]uh you scratch my back, I scratch yours.

[00:05:35]A give and a take, a diffused sense that I will be helped by others as they will be helped by me. Whereas charity tends to be flowing in one direction. It's not an eb and a flow. It's I'm helping these people and I expect nothing out of them.

[00:05:49]I expect nothing in return from them.

[00:05:51]It's not an exchange where people are bringing what they can bring where some are bringing food, others are bringing skills, others bringing time. It's a give and a receive in one direction.

[00:06:01]Now, historically, a lot of the mutual aid societies of the late 19th and early 20th century aimed to go beyond survival under the system. They were explicitly anti-state and anti- capitalist. Mutual aid was incorporated into the revolutionary practice as a means of building alternative institutions. These were societies that would establish their own education systems, establish burial funds, health care, cultural centers, child care support, strike funds, mutual insurance. And if we are applying that in the 21st century, I would include even libraries of things and food banks. If the people who are donating food are also the ones taking food out, that would require greater infrastructure in the realm of food production. associations that are directly engaged in that food production process so that we are slowly reducing our dependence on the state and capitalist infrastructure to sustain us to support us. There's value in pooling our resources for survival, but I want us to think outside of survival funds and towards long-term self- sustaining alternative infrastructure.