Is mutual aid inherently revolutionary?

Also: What the first scene of the Godfather with early mutual aid societies.

This is part of a running course on mutual aid. You can read the other articles here.

If you want to have an honest discussion about mutual aid, you have to be willing to discuss radical political ideologies like anarchism and communism, and you have to look at the history of controversial groups like the Black Panther Party or the Young Lords. Many of the groups that advocate for mutual aid also advocate for the overthrow of capitalism and, by extension, the United States government.

This begs the question: is mutual aid inherently radical? Does engaging in mutual aid make you a revolutionary, someone intent on subverting and even overthrowing the existing system?

While mutual aid’s most prominent historical advocate, Pyotr Kropotkin, was indeed an anarchist, the argument he was making about mutual aid was that it was a natural part of evolution, something that all humans and many animals engaged in as a pragmatic means for survival. It seems strange to categorize something many human beings do instinctively as “radical.”

Furthermore, historically many mutual aid societies have not been politically left-wing, and instead have operating under the umbrella of otherwise conservative churches, or through organizations founded around a common heritage. The closest mutual aid society to me personally is the Amerigo Vespucci Society, built for and by Italian-American men who were trying to build a space where they could escape prejudice. Now, it’s main function is in offering scholarships and promoting Italian-Americans in the media while fighting negative stereotypes (which is a big job, here on the Jersey Shore). It is not a radical left-wing organization.

So: what’s happening here? Is mutual aid inherently radical, or is it just something everyone does that radicals try to co-opt?

Revolutionary mutual aid

In America — and in much of the rest of the world — mutual aid happens the most at the margins. One of my old political science professors once let us in on the nasty secret about the so-called “Scandinavian model¹” of social welfare that is advocated for by democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders: the reason those countries were able to pass such robust social safety nets is that, when they were passing the legislation, they were remarkably homogenous countries. Just white Swedes, Danes, Poles, and Norwegians, all over the place. This made it much harder for conservatives to fight the legislation because there was no “out” group that they could use as a way to race-bait everyday people into voting against it.

The United States, as a country founded on slavery and immigration, has always had a far more diverse electorate, which has made it exponentially harder for the country to pass social safety net legislation, what with all of the racism and prejudice. Because of this, large groups of people have been systematically excluded from the paltry safety net that the United States offers its citizens.

The people left at the margins have as such been forced to fend for themselves. Many of the street gangs and mafias in the United States got their start within ethnic communities that were not offered the same protections and opportunities as the “true Americans” were. So they built their own systems. These systems may have been funded through criminal activity², but they provided services that the more legitimate public institutions did not extend to certain groups of people.

Yes, in case you are wondering, this is exactly what the first scene of The Godfather is about.

Not all of these systems were as sinister as street gangs (though in cases like the Young Lords, street gangs sometimes morphed over time into mutual aid and civil rights organizations). In many cases, these ad hoc, unofficial social safety nets simply consisted of mutual aid societies.

As we discussed last week, Black Americans have been engaging in systematic mutual aid since at least the late 18th century, effectively practicing what Kropotkin preached over a hundred years before he preached it. In the late 1800s, activist and writer W.E.B. DuBois reported, 15% of Black men and 52% of Black women in New York City belonged to a mutual aid society.

But if you have to band together for your survival, and if other people in your society do not need to do the same, then you may start asking the obvious questions. Questions like: why the fuck do we need to do this?

When you start asking questions like that, you start getting answers like “capitalism,” like “racism,” like “colonialism,” like “homophobia.” Problems that are firmly embedded in institutionalized systems, and that require massive, sweeping changes to fix. Radicalism is an easy jump from there.

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Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis and the Next makes the case that mutual aid is inherently revolutionary, because it shines a light on the injustices of a system and offers an alternative that could take the system’s place. The way you must engage in mutual aid — as if you’re not above anybody, as if listening matters, which is rooted in trust and compassion — puts you at odds with a system that ranks some people higher than others, which doesn’t listen to the “lower” people, and which is rooted in violence and control.

Spade is the founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a legal aid program that serves low-income and people of color who are transgender, intersex, or gender-nonconforming. The project is founded on mutual aid principles in that it offers free legal advice and assistance to the people it serves, but also works to empower those same people to advocate and fight for themselves and their broader movement. This means if you’re a trans youth who just came in for some legal help, you may learn enough about the injustice of your situation to become politically active and start lobbying for policy changes in your home, school, workplace, or community. If you engage in this work as a white trans kid, you will quickly realize that the systems that oppress you oppress BIPOC trans kids, undocumented trans kids, and HIV-positive trans kids much worse. This will force you to not just ask how you can make things better for trans people, but how you can confront systemic racism, police brutality, awful immigration laws, and criminally expensive healthcare systems as well. Through this one issue, you build solidarity with other groups. Through this one issue, you become a revolutionary.

Mutual aid may not seem like a particularly radical idea to you, but for many people it is absolutely a radicalizing idea. Etymologically speaking, the root of the word radical is, radix, which is Latin for, well, root (the word “radish” comes from the same place). In America, radical politics are usually depicted as fringe beliefs. But from the radical perspective, they are merely getting to the root of the problem.

Mutual aid without revolution: The New Deal and the Mondragon

The revolutionary perspective on mutual aid is not, however, the only one. The other perspective — which for our purposes we’ll call mutualism³ — argues that progressive forces like unions and mutual aid societies can work together to rebuild a social safety net and a more equitable society within the ruins of modern capitalism. This model does not necessarily involve revolution, but instead models itself off the Basque cooperative corporation known as the Mondragon (which we’ll get to in a minute) and on the politics of the New Deal Era, where socialists, union workers, and progressives were able to build enough power to effectively pressure the government to enact massive, wide-ranging programs that created jobs, protected workers, and invested in the working and middle classes⁴.

The credit for this massive expansion of the social safety net in America is usually given to the President at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But in his seminal work A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn convincingly argues that FDR was not the Working Class Hero his supporters have made him out to be in retrospect, but instead was a savvy politician who understood that if he didn’t make large concessions to the working class, then the country, which was in the darkest depths of the Great Depression, risked falling into a Russian-style communist revolution.

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To curb this possibility, FDR worked with unions leaders and less radical socialists to implement the New Deal, which gave enough concessions to take the steam out of the revolutionaries sails⁵.

While this approach sounds a lot more conservative, it doesn’t have to be: much of the progress that was made in the decades before the New Deal was made by trade unions⁶, which often operated on the principles of mutual aid. Unions didn’t just organize strikes, they also provided a social life, access to medical care, support for struggling members, and some even opened banks that offered favorable, non-predatory terms to their members. These union priorities helped dictate the direction and scope of the massive social safety net which was built in the New Deal era. Because of decades of work on the part of the unions and the radicals, the left was able to build up enough power to force the US government’s hand.

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So what would this look like today? First, we’d need bigger and more powerful unions. Fortunately, this seems to be the direction we’re headed in. The summer of 2023 was dubbed “Hot Labor Summer” by union workers and journalists because of all of the high profile, successful strikes. But it won’t just be unions. For people who aren’t protected by unions, there are still ways they can start building something better on principles of cooperation and mutual care. The historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz details many of these in his excellent books What Then Must We Do? and America Beyond Capitalism.

Alperovitz saw how it can be done first hand: In 1978, a steel manufacturer in Youngstown, Ohio was shut down by its owners for not turning the profits they wanted. They laid off 4,000 employees, and outsourced the work overseas. These layoffs were devastating to the local community, so the workers did something radical — they went back to work, and called in Alperovitz to help them develop the now-empty factory into a worker and community-run institution. The workers argued the plant was still capable of being profitable, but the corporate owners had hobbled it because they didn’t want to cut into their profits by investing in more modern machinery. The workers argued that they had more of a stake than the owners in modernizing and improving the plant, and that they could run the factory better, because they wouldn’t cut corners that would harm their local community, they would have more of a stake in keeping the factory viable, and they wouldn’t sacrifice their neighbor’s livelihoods for a cheap buck.

This experiment failed when the Carter Administration, which had promised loans to the workers, reneged after they made it through the midterm elections. But the failure was an instructive one, and Alperovitz has spent the decades since detailing the many ways in which people have built communities and workplaces that are mutually beneficial to all, not just the rich. He points to worker-owned cooperatives, Employee Stock Ownership Programs, B Corporations, public banking, and community land trusts as all being ways that we can start redirecting our society’s wealth away from the rich and towards the people who actually create that wealth, the workers, and which set their core value as cooperation, not competition.

Importantly, these methods are popular across the political spectrum: public banking, to use just one example, has had its greatest successes in the deeply conservative state of North Dakota.

Critics of the type of companies and institutions Alperovitz advocates for will argue that it’s impossible for them to scale up and fit into today’s globalized world. Fortunately, there’s already a large-scale model of a cooperative economy in the Basque region of Spain. It is centered around the Mondragon Corporation. It employs 80,000 people and earns more than €11 billion a year. The New Yorker’s Nick Romeo explains:

The Mondragon Corporation… is a voluntary association of ninety-five autonomous coöperatives that differs radically from a conventional company. Each co-op’s highest-paid executive makes at most six times the salary of its lowest-paid employee. There are no outside shareholders; instead, after a temporary contract, new workers who have proved themselves may become member-owners of their co-ops. A managing director acts as a kind of C.E.O. within each co-op, but the members themselves vote on many vital decisions about strategy, salaries, and policy, and the votes of all members, whether they are senior management or blue-collar, count equally.

The Mondragon has existed since 1956, and it managed to grow and flourish in the extremely hostile environment of a separatist region in Franco’s Spain, where the anarchists were systematically hunted down, imprisoned, and murdered. If this model can make it there, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, it can make it anywhere.

So: which is better?

It is worth noting that the more conservative mutualist approach to mutual aid — one that seeks to build more just structures within the current system — is reliant on the radical approach. If you didn’t have scary revolutionaries clamoring to overthrow the government and institute a communist utopia, you wouldn’t get more conservative liberals like FDR cooperating with socialists and leftists. And even if the radicals do get their revolution, they would end up building it on the work that’s already been done by the mutualists.

You can choose your side according to your politics and your personality, but both viewpoints rely heavily on each other, and their disagreements have a tendency to be extremely productive for everyone.

Next week, we’re going to discuss the phenomenon of disaster utopias, spontaneous mutual aid societies that spring up in the wake of a catastrophe. That article will be mostly paywalled, but reminder, I have a free year subscription to give away! Respond to the email or leave a comment, I’ll give it to the first person to ask.

1. Did you know that in Norway, they put barcodes on all of their ships?

It’s so when they come back into port, they can SCANDINAVIAN.

2. Not unlike governments!

3. I choose mutualism because that’s how it’s applied in reference to these larger scale mutual aid programs like mutual insurance, and because it’s the term used by Sara Horowitz in her relatively conservative book Mutualism: Building the Next Economy From the Ground Up. Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancer’s Union, which is not a union but an insurance company. While she’s done some great work in organizing that under-protected part of the economy, because of how she makes her money, she opposes single-payer healthcare, which is wild for someone who advocates for gig economy workers. Most of her book’s best ideas are more clearly and thoroughly expressed in Alperovitz.

4. And, incidentally, which also systematically excluded Black Americans.

5. From the start, the program was under direct attack from the right — Jerome Frank, a prominent New Deal lawyer, once famously said “We socialists are trying to save capitalism, and the damned capitalists won’t let us.”

6. One of the best ways to engage in mutual aid AND support organized labor is to donate money to strike funds, which help support struggling union members during a strike.