by If DSA avoids approaching mutual aid as a prefigurative project, designed to bypass a direct struggle for political power, socialists can help connect working people’s self-organization for immediate survival needs to an effective strategy to win socialism.
From the COVID-19 pandemic and record-breaking hurricanes and wildfires, to the recent “Texas Freeze,” the capitalist institutions failed to respond quickly and adequately. It’s no wonder confidence in the federal government continues to decline. Instead of passively waiting for action from above, millions of people worldwide stepped up to help their neighbors survive amidst deepening crises. As we barrel from one disaster to another, and the systems under capitalism that many people thought would protect us are failing to meet basic needs, interest in mutual aid is growing in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
According to Big Door Brigade, an online hub for mutual aid efforts,“Mutual aid is when people get together to meet each other’s basic survival needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going to meet our needs and we can do it together RIGHT NOW!”
Mutual aid has borne some of the most hopeful moments in several especially dark years. In a sea of capitalist greed beyond belief, again and again working people have demonstrated their deep capacity for compassion and community. These experiences have shaped the outlook of tens of thousands of newly radicalized socialists, as DSA rapidly grew to nearly 100,000 members in the Trump era. But they have also provoked a lively debate among socialists over the role of mutual aid initiatives within the wider struggle to end capitalism.
Communities self-organizing in response to crises or the failures of capitalist institutions will rarely describe their actions as “mutual aid.” In the same way, millions of workers engage in daily forms of collective resistance to workplace injustices but don’t see themselves as part of a wider “class struggle.” The job of socialists is to engage in these organic forms of working class self-organization, to help people understand the political significance of their own activity, and to anchor this activity firmly within a wider strategy to win a socialist transformation of society.
There are many types of mutual aid. These include collection of union strike funds, food delivery, fundraising to pay for abortions, putting water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, tail light repair clinics, ride-share systems, free medical care, and so on. Mutual aid is a vital factor in the lives of many working-class communities, but in times of social crisis and/or mass social movements, mutual aid efforts can take on a more central and organized form.
How does mutual aid contribute to a revolutionary strategy to overthrow capitalism and replace it with an egalitarian society based on mutual cooperation? Within DSA, some members argue that building mutual aid networks should be the central strategy for laying the path toward broader socialist transformation.
The definition on Big Door Brigade hints at the emerging debate around the role of mutual aid and mass protest movements when it comes to socialist strategy:
Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.
While mutual aid has a strong appeal and can be a useful tactic in revolutionary organizing, it cannot be substituted for a strategy focused on winning working-class control over society to abolish capitalist institutions and replace them with bottom-up forms of organization. This means throwing out corporate executives and undemocratic workplace structures, reclaiming the products of our collective labor, reparative redistributions of wealth to countries who have been looted by colonial imperialism, and re-organizing production to sustainably meet human need rather than profit.
Thinking Strategically About Mutual Aid
Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (and the Next) has become a touchstone for discussions about mutual aid in DSA. He writes:
Mutual aid is only one tactic in the social movement ecosystem. It operates alongside direct action, political education, and many other tactics. But it is the one that most successfully helps us grow our movements and build our people power, because it brings people into coordinated action to change things right now.
Though mutual aid strategists like Spade may have respect for other tactics such as strikes, mass protests, and building electoral political alternatives, they see mutual aid as the core of a successful strategy to change the world. This is in line with the anarchist tradition, which focuses on activities that emulate a classless society within our current framework of a capitalist society (often called “prefigurative politics”) and attempts to provide a vision of what a different world could look like. While they can be powerful examples, mutual aid efforts are inevitably limited by the hostile terrain of capitalist society. In other words, mutual aid must be part of a broader strategy to challenge the capitalist class for control over state power.
Spade is skeptical about the ability of mass movements to lead social transformation by demanding concessions from the state and the capitalist class. He writes:
[M]ovement organizations could fail to provide any real relief for those whose lives are most endangered and leave newly scared and angry people to the most passive and ineffective forms of expressing their opinions.
The past 40 years of neoliberalism has undoubtedly reversed many victories of social movements. In the face of huge obstacles and defeats, a romantic belief in the potential of mutual aid projects to lead the way forward which avoids directly confronting capitalists for power is tempting—especially when people are overworked, under-paid, and, especially in many communities of color, subjected to racist state violence. However, socialists would not be justified in dismissing the revolutionary potential of an organized working class, and no system of oppression and exploitation has ever been defeated simply through setting up alternatives within the system. Enclosure came for the peasant communes, the Fugitive Slave Act came for those who escaped enslavement, and imperialist armies went after every rebellious corner of the globe. The only way out is through confrontation.
Winning Reforms and State Power
While Spade correctly criticizes the dominant reformist approach of many “movement organizations,” he dismisses the possibility of linking the fight for reforms under capitalism to a revolutionary strategy:
[R]eforms emerge in the face of disruptive movements demanding justice but for the most part are designed to demobilize by asserting that the problem has been taken care of, meanwhile making as little material change as possible.
However, even when Spade acknowledges reforms that did significantly lift up poor and working-class people, he seems to focus narrowly on the danger of co-optation. For example, the Black Panther Party fed over 10,000 children at the height of its Free Breakfast Program. Furthermore, the Black Panther Party was always linking mutual aid back to building support for their revolutionary 10-point program, and unapologetically using it to build their party and support for revolutionary socialism. This strategy helped expose the racist failure of US capitalism to provide basic necessities to low-income communities. But the scale of the Panthers’ program pales in comparison to the 14.5 million that the governmental Free Breakfast Program feeds today—a reform won by the political pressure the Panthers created. Spade, writing in Truthout last October, seems to emphasize only the negative side of the reform:
The government’s attacks on the Black Panther Party are evidence of mutual aid’s power, as is the government’s co-optation of the program: In the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture expanded its federal free breakfast program—built on a charity, not a liberation, model.
Spade is right to warn that liberal capitalists will attempt to spin every concession working people force out of them as an example that gradual change within capitalism is the only realistic—and acceptable—path to progress. But socialists have often helped millions of working people draw the opposite conclusion through winning battles for reforms—that reforms are only won through struggle, and that if our class organizes on a larger scale and in a direct fight for political power, far more can be won.
Four Questions to Guide DSA’s Mutual Aid Work
Within DSA and among those who agree with a strategy of revolutionary confrontation for state power, there are many who seem to dismiss mutual aid as an inherently liberal and non-revolutionary tactic (see Regeneration’s widely circulated article, “Mutual Aid: A Factor of Liberalism”). Any tactic taken in the context of a liberal strategy is a liberal tactic. But that does not make it an essential quality of that tactic.
For example, Marxists have run in parliamentary elections and created political parties around the world. This does not automatically make elections a “revolutionary” tactic by any means. They can be used in a revolutionary way to demonstrate the limits of reforms, or they can be used in a reformist attempt to use the capitalist state machinery to attempt to legislate our way out of capitalism.
In navigating the complex political pressures and challenges we face, the following questions can help guide socialists in evaluating whether a mutual aid project fits into a broader strategy of revolutionary transformation.
1. Is the Mutual Aid Project Linked to Clear Demands?
No mutual aid project alone can fully meet the needs of what it’s aiming to do. But if mutual aid is used as a tactic to organize the working-class and oppressed communities, then having systemic demands on those in power is key.
The Black Panther Party tied all of their projects to building support for their famous “Ten Point Program,” which they understood as a tool to mobilize and unite poor and working-class Black people into a worldwide working-class struggle for socialist revolution.
A more modern example of the power of transformative demands is the way that the Texas DSA Chapters reacted to the devastating winter storm and collapse of the power grid in February. DSA members were among the first to hit the ground with mutual aid projects to help address neighbors’ immediate needs. They did so openly as DSA members, and linked these projects to demands for a Green New Deal, and called for bringing the power grid in Texas into public ownership.
2. Who Do We Say Should Pay for the Crises of Capitalism?
Mutual aid can take the form of strike fund contributions or bail support, or offering basic life-sustaining help to neighbors forced out of their homes by floods, fires, or unemployment. But the overwhelming majority of society’s resources are concentrated in the hands of the capitalist class and the state. Asking working-class people to sacrifice in solidarity with those in greater need should be combined with clear calls to make the rich pay.
The Black Panther Party solicited donations to the Free Breakfast for Children program from local businesses. But they didn’t just ask like a corporatized non-profit. According to Kurt Schaeffer, writing for the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project:
Elmer Dixon said that the Seattle Panthers had concluded that Safeway was profiting handsomely due to the patronage of Central Area customers. In return the company should therefore donate eggs and sausage for children’s breakfasts. In July of 1969, Elmer Dixon presented a letter requesting $100 each week for the breakfast programs. The letter added that if the stores did not comply, the Party would raise the request by $25 each week. The stores rebuffed the demand so the Party set up pickets and attempted to institute boycotts.
These tactics caused the Safeway to close and another grocery store to open who did contribute. To this day, there’s no Safeway in the Central District.
3. Are We Helping to Build the Confidence and Fighting Capacity of Workers?
In 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, young women who worked as mill workers were forced to work 56 hours a week. Their average life expectancy was 26 years old. When a law lowered the length of the workweek to 54 hours, the mill owners lowered the wages accordingly. But these women, barely surviving as it was, said no. Organized by the radical Industrial Workers of the World, they began what is now known as the “Bread and Roses Strike.” While working mothers stood on the picket lines for two months without pay, sympathetic families cared for many of their children. This mutual aid kept the strike going, and the mill owners were eventually forced to concede 20% wage increases.
In recent times, Bread for Ed, Tacos for Teachers, DoNut Cut Education, and other DSA-led mutual aid actions supported the educator strike wave of 2018-2019. These efforts strove to help socialists connect with teachers to build fighting rank-and-file groups, popularize a class-struggle program, and campaign to democratize and transform the unions.
Mutual aid needs to complement, not replace, the patient work of building the socialist movement and popularizing socialist ideas within the labor movement.
4. Are We Building DSA Out of Our Mutual Aid Work?
Around the world, most successful mass socialist parties, from the Social Democratic Parties of the late 19th century until today, have linked their wider political demands and their party-building work to projects that meet the immediate needs of working people—from health clinics to sports and cultural centers, from food banks to schools, and so much more. Especially in the early era of socialism, and in countries where the workers movement has not yet won as many social welfare provisions (or where they’ve been stripped away), such programs can be pivotal to building mass unions and socialist parties.
Given the neoliberal erosion of social programs and the deep poverty facing more oppressed sections of the working class, DSA will need to to learn this history if we aim to sink roots in the working class and grow into an organization of hundreds of thousands in the years ahead. When done well, these mutual aid programs can serve as entry points to recruit people into the struggle for a better world. When done poorly, they’re merely a service for a passive “customer” base—or charity. I can’t tell you how many “member benefits” and “exclusive discounts” letters I’ve gotten in the mail from my union, and not one of them that I can remember was ever paired with any call to action.
There’s an understandable worry among DSA members that linking solidarity and mutual aid efforts with recruitment will come off sounding like a ‘socialist time-share pitch.’ This leads many organizers to avoid recruiting people into the DSA through mutual aid projects. It’s easier to “do the work” and put that aside. But if you believe, like I do, that the only motorforce for change is mass action and political organization by the working class, disenfranchised poor, and oppressed communities, then linking DSA’s mutual aid work to an active campaign to build DSA’s membership is vital.
Finally, we must reject the idea that working people are simply too busy or overworked to join a socialist organization. While some people may well have too much on their plate to get involved, it is patronizing to assume that’s the case for everyone. History is made by mass movements of people who are overburdened and exhausted, yet still find the energy to unite and overthrow oppressive laws, systems, and ruling classes.
