The COVID-19 pandemic has strained and even overwhelmed the public health, medical care and disaster response systems where governments and state agencies were ill-prepared to contain and suppress infectious outbreaks. In countries where emergency lockdown measures have been adopted without accompanying policies to guarantee income security and housing tenure, there is the additional problem of economic hardship. Already existing and newly formed non-governmental organizations and associations have mobilized to fill the gap.

These formal and informal groups assist people forced into the margins by government neglect with free meals, grocery and medicine deliveries, safe housing and even cash. They are going beyond traditional voluntary charity disaster relief to provide personal protective equipment (notably face masks⁠), COVID-19 symptoms monitoring, accurate information about locally available COVID-19 and antibody testing facilities, emotional counseling and more. In some cases, these organizations partner with public agencies, including in situations where state institutions are both omnipresent and capable and voluntary associations are essentially licensed subcontractors of the state ⁠— as appears to be the case, but only in part, in the People’s Republic of China.

In other contexts — particularly where robust social safety nets are lacking or where austerity has undermined any expectation of government assistance — people have done what they have always done in a crisis: attempted to stem the tide of misery with the resources they have.

Some of these organizations or associations of individuals are describing their efforts to help those in trouble as “mutual aid organizations.” These groups reflect the social or political philosophies of their founders and members, from a devotion to principles of community self-help ⁠— in both its conservative and radical variants ⁠— to a belief that systematically oppressed groups best overcome their oppression through collective self-management and self-provisioning. They distinguish themselves from charity organizations by their lack of formal association with either the government or the non-profit or religious charity sector and identify as just people helping other people in need.

Jasmine Araujo. Photo by Matthew Seltzer

In New Orleans, for example, a mutual aid group mobilized by Jasmine Araujo called Southern Solidarity has emerged guided by Black feminist liberatory thought and inspired by the direct relief and organizing practices of the Black Panthers. The group of 30 organize the daily delivery of food, medical resources and other basic needs directly to 300 unhoused people in the downtown area of New Orleans because the government failed to meet these needs.

Southern Solidarity is involved in both direct relief and consciousness raising efforts of members and recipients. Members act on the principle that when those who are oppressed receive needs, they are better equipped to move from survival mode to organizing. Key members include trans activists, organizers, formerly incarcerated and the unhoused.

What is mutual aid?

Mutual aid as a political concept is drawn from the work of anarchist and scientist Peter Kropotkin. In 1902, Kropotkin published Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution which argued that it was human cooperation and not competition which has facilitated the survival of our species. Additionally, Kropotkin proposed that the best system of economic and social organization would be one based on mutual exchanges rather than coercion and the profit-motive.

Mutual aid societies or “benevolent societies” have long arisen among disenfranchised groups to fill gaps in insurance, support, education and relief. Examples include the Free African Society formed in late 18th century Philadelphia by formerly enslaved men and contemporary organizations of refugees and immigrants such as the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, Massachusetts, where members gather and share resources to face shared challenges.

The labor movement was founded on the principle of collective organization for mutual benefit of its members and helped politicize such assistance as acts of solidarity, not charity. The radical edges of the labor movement, as represented by the Industrial Workers of the World, broke through the “in-group” orientation of mutual aid efforts with their slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all.” While the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program was an acknowledged charity operation in response to the poverty imposed upon Black people in the United States, the Panthers viewed it as facilitating the development of a revolutionary people. In short, people who are in need of basic necessities such as food cannot effectively rebel until they have those needs met.

In light of budget austerity and the shredding of social services, mutual aid has become a term loosely applied to all kinds of charity supplied by voluntary organizations. For those of us interested in liberatory mutual aid, it is crucial to carefully consider what should be the standards for such efforts. An emancipatory mutual aid is not only about connecting those in need to services or even directly providing services, but also about organizing with those in need to assert their human rights and demand what is socially just from systems of exploitation and domination.

In the spirit of the Zapatista principle of mandar obedeciendo (“leadership from below”), efforts must be made to assure that the agency and voice of those receiving aid are equal to, or even ahead of, those providing it, despite the apparent disparity in resources. An impressive example of a large-scale mutual aid endeavor during the COVID-19 crisis comes from a favela of 100,000 people in São Paulo, Brazil. There, 400 “presidents” each took responsibility for the welfare of 50 families apiece, tracking COVID-19 symptoms in family members, and preparing and distributing thousands of hot meals every day.

Photo by Matthew Seltzer

Radical mutual aid aims to open up space for those forced into dispossession to interrogate why it is that those providing resources are in possession of such resources and those receiving them are not, and also to question why those providing resources are providing them.

That is, one component of mutual aid at its best is education and consciousness raising about power relations — not only the relations between mutual aid donors, distributors and beneficiaries, but also the power dynamics that structure political and economic conditions and social interactions in the places where the mutual aid organizations are active. Consciousness raising might also include education internal to mutual aid teams: for example, training on anti-racism, disability justice, harm reduction and gender studies.

While Southern Solidarity members in New Orleans are immersed in necessary and labor-intensive direct relief efforts that push back against decades of racist austerity measures, group members are encouraged to participate in reading groups and training as well as protests demanding that the government provide adequate resources for all. Southern Solidarity invites the unhoused to reading groups and protests as a way to organize recipients around liberation efforts. An emancipatory mutual aid consciously strives to both prevent the further disempowerment of the recipients and, when possible, push in the other direction, providing platforms on which people can work toward determining their community’s own fate.

Southern Solidarity members act under the premise that solidarity necessitates a deep understanding of the systemic forces of oppression that have created dispossession and crisis. Acts of charity alone do not require a deep understanding of systemic oppression thereby limiting their role as an integral force toward movement building. On the other hand, action-oriented mutual aid interventions motivated by the urge to “do something” but inattentive to contesting these hierarchies and dependencies run the risk of reestablishing exploitative relationships in the very act of trying to help out.