As some of you may know, I am a big fan of mutual aid as my primary form of organizing. I think going into your community, providing for the people, trying to build intentional communities, trying to give back to the people—going amongst the masses, doing good works—I do believe that is one of the most effective ways to bolster your connections to your community, connections to your neighborhood, connections to other people. Find new people who are allies. It's just a great starting point. And I think it's something that anyone can do, and it's a nonviolent logistical form of resistance that is infrastructure-focused on action. I'm a big fan of it.
That said, I've learned many things in my time, whether it has been going and physically handing out meal kits, safety kits, and hygiene kits to people, or actually working at pop-up soup kitchens, or free fridge programs, what have you. I've learned some things, and I think that we're missing some of the points with mutual aid. Maybe I'm going to come off a little bit too ruthless here, but we are creating hierarchies in our own organizations, and we are effectively doing charity, not mutual aid community building.
Take for example, you do a free wash program. You say, "Look, we've partnered with a local laundromat. If you're homeless, if you don't have a home, downtrodden—come and come for two or three hours and do laundry." I think that is a really good thing. I think that's a really great thing. But what are you doing in that scenario? If the only people who are coming to that event are homeless people, and then you have a separate group of people who come to that event to specifically serve those homeless people, to help those homeless people—what you've done is you've created a hierarchy wherein you have the helped and you have the helper. The helper gets used to being up in the position of giving the help, and the helped get used to getting the help, right? There's an othering that happens. The two people aren't equal in this scenario.
I think a lot of organizations fall for this or have this issue—not intentionally, but because the concept of mutual aid has been defanged and turned into that charity, that non-profit NGO charity aid distribution, friendly to capitalism mindset. When in reality, what we should be striving towards is community-oriented events and revolutionary infrastructure.
Imagine that same laundry program, but it's not just for the homeless. I'm not saying there can't be programs that are specifically for the homeless—there is always a need for specifically targeted programs—but not every program should be specifically targeted. We should be trying to build community.
So let's say it's a college town, and you're trying to help the homeless, trying to help people stay clean, hygienic. Instead of it just being "homeless people come and do their laundry every third Saturday for four hours," it's anyone. Hey, you've got a whole bunch of laundry built up? Depression got the laundry built up? No pressure zone. Everybody's hanging out. We're doing some folding or cleaning, some detergent. Maybe hold a little class. “Oh yeah, this is how you can wash plastic goods so you don't get microplastics in the water.” "This is how you wash lights and darks." Basic shit like that, just to sort of build a community-oriented thing.
So now you have college kids coming in—"Yeah, I haven't done laundry in six weeks since the last time"—and then homeless people coming in. Unhoused people. Poor people. What you're doing now, instead of a helped/helper hierarchy like a charity, now it's a community event. Now it's: every third Saturday, everybody gets together and does laundry. Thirty, forty people show up. It's a good time. "I met so-and-so that way, and now we're getting drinks tonight."
Now you've built that community.
This is so important because we are living in a hyper-alienated age. We're living in a hyper-alienated age where, before you can even begin to start talking about class war, start organizing, or start pushing more extreme positions, you have to break the glass that everyone has been coated with—that glass being hyper-capitalist alienation. The death of community spaces. The death of in-person interaction. The Bowling Alone book/documentary goes into this much better than I can. That sort of thing. The Bowling Alone phenomenon. You have to break through that.
So now, instead of it being charity, it's mutual aid. Everyone's getting together and mutually benefiting from this community-oriented event. And yet, at the same time, the people who need the service are still getting the help they need.
Now, I'm not saying that's going to work for every situation. But I think that's a good example of something we should be working towards.
Now on the other end of it—let's say you do want to specifically feed the homeless. When I first started doing mutual aid work, it was me and a couple of friends. We'd just make a bunch of food, put it in go-bags, and physically drive to each individual homeless person and drop off fifty, sixty bags of food a night. We tried to do this once a week. Just something like that. "We have the extra money, we have resources, let's go do some good for the community."
But the problem with that is, one, it still falls under all the problems listed above. It's not actually mutual aid, it's charity. And two, there's no effective propaganda happening, the act of doing the mutual aid should in and of itself be an act of propaganda within the spectacle.
For example: Food Not Bombs Houston. I'm not sure if they're still doing this, but for a long time they would serve food in front of the big main public library. All the homeless people come to be fed. It's a community thing. Not even just homeless, everyone could come get a meal. "We're gonna feed the community for free."
And then the police arrest them.
Now there's 1,000–3,000 people in one space waiting on food, and the police are arresting the people with the food. Arresting the people handing out the meals. Breaking up the tables. Throwing away the food in front of all these hungry people and all the bystanders watching, and all the people seeing the clips on TikTok. That delegitimizes the regime while pointing out the contradictions within the system.
Why are we the richest country in the world, yet you won't let people feed people?
Politicians rant about how we're a Christian nation, but when someone wants to feed people, it's: "Oh, you can't do that. You're arrested. You get a ticket. Police come." They're not militant with it right now—but they could be. Sometimes they are. That is another thing we're missing: understanding they could be militant and understanding the logistical, infrastructure oriented role these mutual aid orgs will play in the coming [party rockin'].
When I did work with a free food fridge program, it was kind of the same thing. You're rarely in contact with the people youre helping. It's more like a charity. And I'm not saying that these things are bad because of that. I think they're doing good work. But if we want to improve them—want to level this shit up—then we should be considering two factors:
And third—though intertwined with the above:
These are all things we should be keeping in mind. I'm going to be doing a lot more organizing in person going forward. These are things I'm trying to hold myself to. So I wanted to share.