I haven’t posted about this yet, but I quit Communist Party USA in mid-November 2023. Since quitting, I’ve been focused on getting several major health issues treated, building the Flint chapter of the Michigan Mutual Aid Coalition (MIMAC), and in addition to our mutual aid work, trying to build the basis of an educational program...Read More “Why I Left The CPUSA” »
Mutual Aid is fundamentally an Anarchist idea and, while I don’t seek to defend CPUSA, there are legitimate critiques. It serves as a “release valve” for organizing work: effort that could be put into overthrowing the system as a whole is instead put into helping a small number of people.
Building parallel power structures through Mutual Aid isn’t by any means bad (just like many other things in Anarchist thought), but it is not an effective means to challenging state power in all cases.
Mutual Aid takes a lot of work, and an org performing Mutual Aid has an opportunity cost - less time for organizing protests, educational events, recruiting, social events, speaking at councils, canvassing for petitions, or any other important things that political parties are supposed to do.
I am in a Marxist-Leninist party in Northeast Ohio. We do not do Mutual Aid, but many of our members do work with Serve the People, a Mutual Aid org mostly run by Anarchists (the one Aaron Bushnell was in). I believe this is a more effective way to organize and is compatible with MLism in a way that the political party directly organizing mutual aid is often not
Mutual aid also builds community trust in your organization and can be a way to be authentically present at actions. When you help, for example, an immigrant community that is otherwise left to suffer and you have a big banner at your tables, you have now basically done a tabling event while also strengthening the community you want to work in. It can also serve as a model for (partial) communal living. This is particularly effective when the people you’re working with are poor, marginalized, and low on free time.
The problem, in my experience, is that there is usually no strategy when people do mutual aid programs. No idea of who you’re primarily trying to authentically embed with. No idea how you will sustain the effort financially or with your labor. No idea what kinds of conversations you will have or when. No idea of how you will build a movement by making a community more stable, less exploitable. There are even tendencies that will frown on having political conversations at all or think that building your org and movement through such a program is gauche. These are the thoughts of naive people that really just want to do charity work and feel morally outraged that there are any motives outside of simply feeding or clothing some people and then turning off your brain.
Hickel mentions this parable in the book, The Divide
You see someone floating down a torrential river, screaming for help, afraid of drowning. You dive into the river, and using all your strength, swim to them and carry them to the bank. You’re entirely exhausted, but you feel great that you saved someone’s life.
Then you see another person floating down the river screaming. You use your last remaining ounces of energy to save this second person.
Then it happens again, a third person floats down. You realize it will keep happening; there aren’t enough of you to save everyone, and you need to decide where to spend your energy.
Do you spend it continually exhausting yourself saving each individual person? Or would a better use of your time, be to find out where and why people are falling into the river, and stop the problem at its source.
Serving the people is of course important, but if that aid is not a long-term solution, but a band-aid, then its not going to solve anything. Better to analyze and focus on the root problem.
Wow… umm…
So your organization, that’s supposed to be strong enough to be trusted to wrest the reigns of political power from an entrenched elite, is also just an uWu smol bean that can barely save a few people.
That just tells me the org should have spent more time building its base and less time wish casting about what to do after the revolution.
The ultimate goal, for socialists at least, is to take over the very institutions of the state that are currently hamstrung to the point where mutual aid is necessary. If your interim tactic (mutual aid) frustrates progress towards that ultimate goal, that tactic should not be a fundamental part of your organization’s work.
This seems like a sensible approach.