Marxist theory fundamentally focuses on combining education with practical on the ground work, which would include mutual aid. Nobody really cares about being preached to in the abstract, but if they’re getting direct material support then they become much more open to education. This is a pretty decent introduction to doing practical mutual aid https://freight.cargo.site/m/D2275728601487376829209345140067/Mutual-Aid-by-Dean-Spade.pdf
Incidentally, I was talking with some friends just the other day how local online forums could be used as a direct vehicle for mutual aid. We were talking about using something accessible like Lemmy or even just Slack to connect a neighborhood, and it strikes me that this could facilitate building a practical support network.
Right now, mutual aid often relies on scattered online groups or flyers. But a dedicated local forum that lets people in the community to get to know each other would help build relationships. And then that could act as a searchable hub for solidarity among people who already know each other. You could have “requests” channel where an elderly neighbor could ask for help with groceries, a “skills-share” thread where people offer tutoring or basic repair services, or an “excess resources” board for giving away food or supplies. It formalizes the “I have/ I need” exchange that already happens informally, making it accessible to the whole community.
It also becomes a system for education. You could have a pinned post explaining the principles of mutual aid and how it’s solidarity as opposed to charity. It could be used as the platform to coordinate tangible projects like community fridges or tool libraries. The fact that everyone is colocated is key because it means the help is immediate and the relationships built online can be solidified in person, creating a resilient community fabric that can respond to both everyday needs and larger crises.
In a way, you can use online tools to rebuild the kind of tight-knit village support system that globalized life has eroded, but with the efficiency and reach of modern technology. It turns the internet from a space for abstract global conversation into a practical tool for local care and collective survival.
Buy Nothing is often done through Facebook, as is lots of local event planning.
But you probably want to use something that is not Facebook. That is, something that’s easy and familiar enough to check regularly, but that isn’t subservient to law and capital and doesn’t have behavior modification as a core part of its design.
Getting people to sign up for services outside the big corporate walled gardens is the biggest hurdle.
People in my locality recently started using some public calendar tools from Gancio, and it seems to have really taken off, to the point where it’s way more useful than the local newspaper.
Yeah, I think ideally this sort of stuff should happen away from corporate platforms. Another interesting idea is to go even further and create wifi meshes within neighbourhoods that don’t even need to be connected to the internet at all. People have made turn key devices like PirateBox that you can just plug in without needing any technical expertise. Extending these to work together as a mesh would be the next step which would allow this idea to scale to a whole neighborhood.