Change Is in Our Hands: Establishing a Local Mutual Aid Network

Not a set of instructions, this is an encouraging shove in the direction of agency, to grow something in context, fit to the shape of your community's needs and hopes.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

“… a comprehensive Utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realize it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Rebecca Solnit’s deeply moving and inspiring book A Paradise Built in Hell, through historical examples of ordinary people engaging in spontaneous mutual aid in response to disasters, consolidated an already growing conviction in me that individuals acting together in equal relations can shape the environment that they want without the oversight and control of a centralised authority. Of course, the examples she recounts are confined to states of sudden, severe crises and, more critically, the loosening of top-down control that can accompany them. These “utopias” are temporary, dissolving with the resumption of business-as-usual, as power reasserts itself and frantically tries to cover up the evidence of its dispensability, and erase the euphoric experience of mutual aid from the collective consciousness. But these blips in the usual order of things are, nevertheless, compelling evidence of a strong, innate instinct to take care of each other and work as communities towards common goals in the absence of state coercion. The key takeaways: 1) most of us are not, at the core, selfish and individualistic, and 2) we are capable of organising efficiently, in anarchical ways, to meet each other’s needs (and have fun doing it). In fact, the norms of individualism and scarcity, the dissolution of the “public square”, and countless identitarian fictions that serve hegemonic power not only alienate us from each other but from the meaning and purpose derived from a more communitarian way of life.

In this era of mounting exigency and unprecedented inequality, there are many reasons besides meaning and purpose to replace the structures of capitalism and hegemony with local, egalitarian structures of life support. No, we are not fleeing collapsing buildings at the epicentre of ONE earthquake, as the victims of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake had to. Nor are we facing mass death and peril in the aftermath of ONE hurricane, as citizens of New Orleans did after Hurricane Katarina, when they pulled together to rescue more lives than the far better-equipped and sometimes murderous authorities did. But we are living in an ERA OF COLLAPSE, for which we have clear evidence in the form of a growing frequency and intensity of disasters around the world. In a very real way, although its salience is felt differently depending on your region, socioeconomic status, age, mobility, health status, gender, and ethnic background, we have moved beyond the point of return into a “polycrisis” that will deepen within our lifetimes.

We are already inside the borders of “hell”. It is time to start building our “paradises”.

Withdrawing and Redirecting Value

Any advice I have for you regarding mutual aid should in no way be seen as immutable or prescriptive. I do not claim to be an “expert” in community organising, and neither would I privilege expertise in this area too much. I believe that runs contrary to the spirit of mutual aid and non-hierarchical collective organising, and I fear it might lead people to think of themselves as inadequate to the task.

Secondly, our profoundly social species has been doing mutual aid for most of its history. It might take a little time to find our feet again, but we are naturals!

And, thirdly, unpaid labour is already something you are doing to some extent, something integral to keeping the ball rolling under capitalism. (By some estimates, unpaid care and domestic labour accounts for as much as 40% of a country’s GDP; but all estimates may be conservative given the intractability of tracking and accurately evaluating, according to market rates, the value of all productive human behaviour—a fundamentally myopic and degrading exercise.)

Unpaid labour currently serves as the unsung Atlas of a society that prioritises personal wealth accumulation at the cost of neglecting human needs and destabilising the life-sustaining systems of the Earth. At the same time, most of us invest much of our energy in capitalist structures through wage labour. These vampiric structures exist to extract value from human lives (as well as other lifeforms and the abiotic elements of the Earth) and channel that value up the imperial hierarchy. We have been conditioned and coerced into subjecting ourselves to this machinery of accumulation and control. We were never consulted. We were born enslaved to a system that we are told constitutes society and the best conditions for its provision, and then we live with the increasingly visible contradictions.

Through your labour—paid or unpaid—and your consumption, the system feeds off of you. It recognises your value in an extremely impoverished and objectifying way. And while it will happily dispense with you and, indeed, whole ethnicities, whole species, and devastate the richness of life on Earth, it needs us for its nourishment. It simply cannot stop growing, metastasising, devouring everything in its path.

But things could be otherwise. They always can. One exit, one front on which we can disinherit and starve this life-leeching, planet-destroying system, is found in our own redirection of value.

We can recover what belongs to us, even piecemeal, by channelling our resources out of the capitalist machine and back into nourishing our resilience through networks of mutual aid.

So, how do we come home to each other? How do we start providing for each other in ways that respect our dignity and equality, and begin to repair our wounded ecology?

Getting Back Together

Collectively, we already know what needs doing because we are the ones who have been doing it all along! The skills of productive labour belong to the labourers!

The Tools We Have, the Hands That Fit Them

The work of keeping society afloat is obviously kaleidoscopic in range, with roles fading away, more arising anew, and many that are perennial in nature (e.g., childcare), as constitutive of our species as abstract, syntactic, and grammatical communication and two-legged locomotion. And while we do not want to repeat the capitalist ills of over-specialization, certain work is best placed in hands that hold it with care and affinity. A life devoted to diverse labours and acquiring new skillsets might be more fulfilling than one devoted to the familiarity of a well-trodden routine, but not everyone feels this way. It stands to reason that there will be work that fits your hands best. And if that’s what you wish and how you think you can best serve your community and the world, then it will be up to you to discover that work and apply it where it is needed.

No Patrons, No Saviours

Mutual aid is about equals helping equals, and when it is not immediately, obviously reciprocal, it is about collective care—solidarity. If we assume we are better authorities on someone else’s needs by simple virtue of those needs currently being satisfied in us, we are taking on a paternalistic stance in relation to our comrade. Many of us, being better acquainted with charity and other hierarchical relations than we are with mutual aid, can be susceptible to falling into the saviour identity when helping another. In the paternalistic frame of mind, we make assumptions that disrespect our comrades’ authority on where their needs lie, and, to make matters worse, these assumptions can be incorrect. Think: turning up with a bag of allergens to our neighbour with coeliac disease, or providing temporary disaster relief that isn’t needed and inadvertently slows the urgent process of rebuilding more permanent infrastructure.

By eschewing paternalistic relations, we are not denying differences in ability and need. As well as expressing the ideal principle of communist distribution, the following phrase, popularised by Karl Marx, works well to emphasise the spirit of mutual aid.

“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

Mutual aid is not about uniformity across the species; it recognises the profound diversity of humanity as well as our equality. It is about giving in the ways that you are able, receiving according to your needs, and the universal dignity of having needs met without having to grovel or be made to feel “less-than”.

We must doff conceptions of charity, capitalistic transaction, or bookkeeping for uniformity. Mutual aid is none of these things.

Instead, it more closely resembles relationships of love. It is rooted in care, acceptance, and communal commitment. By actively seeking others out, open-heartedly sharing spaces and stories, and devoting attention to one another, a map of the terrain of needs, desires, and capacities to give will begin to appear. That’s where the instinctive human behaviour of matching needs and resources can freely and cooperatively take place.

Forging Connections

My decision to finally reconnect with community, as somebody with a lifelong “outsider” complex (a trait I suspect is common among radicals), provoked a fair dose of anxiety. I felt a fool, albeit a determined one. I thought others would balk at my anti-capitalist and anti-hierarchical castles in the air, and I’d be marked with a red (or black?) flag ever after. And maybe that’s true, but several months after first reaching out, now that my faith that there would be others who share my values has been proven right, and mutual aid has been put on the table, association with the black flag doesn’t bother me so much. It’s not that misconceptions don’t abound, or that there aren’t negative responses; it’s that it was enough that not all responses were negative.

My point is not that you need to identify as an anarchist in order to connect to your community and build a mutual aid network—if anything, it should be an inclusive space that doesn’t require identification with a specific label. Rather, my point is that, as big a step as it may seem to expose yourself in the act of asking others to build something unorthodox, something contrary to—defiant of—the explicit norms and expectations of the dominant ideology, you may be surprised that some people have been thinking like you. Or, if they haven’t, what you propose might be compelling to them in a way that they’ve never experienced before, but perhaps were waiting for, on a subliminal level, for a long time.

I probably don’t need to remind you that “self-reliance” is getting more difficult for many of us. Part of what makes mutual aid so compelling is that it completely turns on its head the norm of individualism: the idea that you are responsible for your material conditions and, therefore, your state of comfort or struggle is a reflection of your competency and your inherent value. Not only does the principle of mutual aid challenge this dehumanising belief and promise social support in getting needs met, but it fulfils a deeply social need to be, not isolated in one’s self-reliance or lack thereof, but part of a larger, mutually sustaining network of individuals that is greater than the sum of its parts. As I touched on in the introduction, when referencing A Paradise Built in Hell, the sense of belonging, of being held, of becoming part of something larger than “I”, of being asked to give and receive in an ecosystem of care, has the power to lend an enormous sense of meaning and purpose to people’s lives. Frame it right—for many, the time is right—and the proposal to build a local network of mutual aid will sound extremely compelling to many people. Not everyone will receive the idea positively, but the value of finding those who do should massively outweigh the discomfort of the negative responses you will receive.

Once you have made your first genuine connections, you will experience the relief of sharing the burden of creating your network among others. People have a wealth of resources to draw on, even if they don’t realise it initially. Encourage each other. Believe in each other. Competencies will often rise to meet expectations.

Mutual aid is already taking place near you, but it may not be taking place outside of family and other close ties, and those taking part in it may or may not be referring to it explicitly as “mutual aid”. If there is a self-described mutual aid network nearby, sometimes referred to as a “pod”, it might be easy to locate it through local social media accounts or print media. If people have already built something, there’s probably no need for you to start from scratch. Mutual aid builds strength through connection. Approach the already existing group and learn about how they function. If your values and goals align, pool resources and grow something even better together.

The Short Version: Make Friends and Help Each Other

I felt conflicted about starting this article. It was important for me to provide information that would reassure people enough to take what might feel like an intimidating step while avoiding giving an impression of the esoteric by offloading too much detail or trying to be comprehensive. If my intuition has been wrong, you can find some amazing articles, as well as entire series, dedicated to the specifics of mutual aid here on Substack.

My approach has been different because, in keeping with the spirit of mutual aid, I trust in people to know what they need and to find the best solutions. Of course, it can be inspiring to read about how another community is feeding its neighbours through a community fridge or garden, and it can be downright instructive to read about how less everyday and more technical feats are being accomplished, such as getting lawyers to do pro bono work for your mutual aid legal clinic, etc. We can learn from others, but don’t limit yourself to what’s already been done. More than anything, the message I want readers to carry away with them is:

You are capable of taking care of each other.

We need to awaken to the fact that we can organise horizontally, without government or corporate dictates. We don’t have to wait for the authorities to save us or give us permission to save ourselves. We don’t even need other mutual aid groups to tell us how we should be doing things. If we already honour each other’s equality and freedom, and the Earth and our Earthling kin, we’re already well along the right path. We are already innovative. We already have each other.

So, reach out and enter into dialogue with your community. Bring curiosity, humility, and compassion to the conversation. Make friends! Meet each other’s basic needs and then fill your lives with joy! Criss-cross your community with a more resilient fabric of social relations. This is an opportunity to mobilise and shape a more promising future. Above all, trust in yourselves. You already know what to do.

Thank you for reading this call to action. This was not a blueprint; it was just an attempt at sweeping away any reservations. :)

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