Mutual aid
Voluntary exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit
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Through Natural disaster, COVID-19 pandemic and Competition (biology)
Definition
Dean Spade identifies three key elements of mutual aid: (1) addressing material needs while analyzing why these needs aren't already met; (2) building solidarity and strengthening social movements; (3) participatory. In contract to charity, which often requires benefit recipients to meet certain conditions (e.g., means testing, grant stipulations), mutual aid does not discriminate between those "deserving" and "undeserving" of care. These groups often go beyond material or service exchange and are set up as a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions.
Mutual aid groups are distinct in their drive to flatten hierarchy, searching for collective consensus decision-making across participating people rather than placing leadership within a closed executive team. With this joint decision-making, all participating members are empowered to enact change and take responsibility for the group.
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History
The term "mutual aid" was popularized by the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, originally published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Kropotkin argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution, through biological mutualism. Kropotkin argued that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of humans and animals and has been promoted through natural selection, and that mutual aid is arguably as ancient as human culture. This recognition of the widespread character and individual benefit of mutual aid stood in contrast to the theories of social Darwinism that emphasized individual competition and survival of the fittest.
Practice
Mutual aid participants work together to figure out strategies and resources to meet each other's needs, such as food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief while organizing themselves against the system that created the shortage in the first place.
Typically, mutual-aid groups are member-led, member-organized, and open to all to participate in. They often have non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic structures, with members controlling all resources. They are egalitarian in nature and designed to support participatory democracy, equality of member status, power-shared leadership, and consensus-based decision-making.
Some challenges to the success of mutual aid groups include lack of technical experts, lack of funding, lack of public legitimacy, and institutionalization of social hierarchies.
Examples
In the 1800s and early 1900s, mutual aid organizations included unions, the friendly societies that were common throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medieval craft guilds, the American "fraternity societies" that existed during the Great Depression providing their members with health and life insurance and funeral benefits, and the English working men's clubs of the 1930s that also provided health insurance. In the United States, mutual aid has been practiced extensively in marginalized communities, notably in Black communities, working-class neighborhoods, migrant groups, LGBT communities, and others. The Black Panther Party's urban food programs in the 1960s were another prominent example of mutual aid. During the AIDS crisis in the United States, many LGBT+ groups started mutual aid networks to provide medical care, support groups, and political activism when the government chose to ignore the community. A Common Ground Relief mutual aid group organized to provide disaster relief for the 2005 Hurricane Katrina.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid and grassroots solidarity groups around the world organized distribution networks for food and personal protective equipment. The term "mutual aid", previously associated with anarchism, drifted into public parlance during the pandemic. Local mutual aid groups, sometimes as local as the street level, organized to help shop, deliver medicine, create games for kids, offering civic connection during a time of isolation. Multiple online outlets ran stories on how to create a mutual aid group.
Around the same time was the Black Lives Matter movement, which resulted in multiple protestors detained and arrested by police. Bail funds, which are community organizations that pays cash bail for people in need for free, is another example of a mutual aid organization.