Mutual aid

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Mutual aid is an organizational model where voluntary, collaborative exchanges of resources and services for common benefit take place amongst community members to overcome social, economic, and political barriers to meeting common needs. This can include physical resources like food, clothing, or medicine, as well as services like breakfast programs or education. These groups are often built for the daily needs of their communities, but mutual aid groups are also found throughout relief efforts, such as in natural disasters or pandemics like COVID-19.

Contents

Resources are shared unconditionally, contrasting this model from charity where conditions for gaining access to help are often set, such as means testing or grant stipulations. These groups often go beyond material or service exchange and are set up as a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions.

Mutual aid groups are distinct in their drive to flatten the hierarchy, searching for collective consensus decision-making across participating people rather than placing leadership within a closed executive team. With this joint decision-making, all participating members are empowered to enact change and take responsibility for the group.

History

A mutual-aid soup kitchen Conder Street Mission Hall, 1881 Irish-stew dinners for the poor. Wellcome L0003267.jpg
A mutual-aid soup kitchen Conder Street Mission Hall, 1881

The term "mutual aid" was popularized by the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in his essay collection Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution , which argued that cooperation, not competition, was the driving mechanism behind evolution, through biological mutualism. [1] [2] Kropotkin argued that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of humans and animals and has been promoted through natural selection, and that mutual aid is arguably as ancient as human culture. [2] This recognition of the widespread character and individual benefit of mutual aid stood in contrast to the theories of social Darwinism that emphasized individual competition and survival of the fittest, and against the ideas of liberals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. [3]

Practice

Mutual aid participants work together to figure out strategies and resources to meet each other's needs, such as food, housing, medical care, and disaster relief while organizing themselves against the system that created the shortage in the first place. [4]

Typically, mutual-aid groups are member-led, member-organized, and open to all to participate in. They often have non-hierarchical, non-bureaucratic structures, with members controlling all resources. They are egalitarian in nature and designed to support participatory democracy, equality of member status, power-shared leadership, and consensus-based decision-making. [5]

Some challenges to the success of mutual aid groups include lack of technical experts, lack of funding, lack of public legitimacy, [6] and institutionalization of social hierarchies. [7]

Mutual aid vs. charity

As defined by radical activist and writer Dean Spade and explored in his University of Chicago course "Queer and Trans Mutual Aid for Survival and Mobilization", mutual aid is distinct from charity. [8] Radical activist, social welfare scholar, and social worker Benjamin Shepard defines mutual aid as "people giv[ing] what they can and get[ting] what they need." [9] Mutual aid projects are often critical of the charity model, and may use the motto "solidarity, not charity" to differentiate themselves from charities.

Examples

In the 1800s and early 1900s, mutual aid organizations included unions, the friendly societies that were common throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, [10] medieval craft guilds, [11] the American "fraternity societies" that existed during the Great Depression providing their members with health and life insurance and funeral benefits, [12] and the English working men's clubs of the 1930s that also provided health insurance. [13] In the United States, mutual aid has been practiced extensively in marginalized communities, notably in Black communities, working-class neighborhoods, migrant groups, LGBT communities, and others. [14] [15] [16] [17] The Black Panther Party's urban food programs in the 1960s were another prominent example of mutual aid. A Common Ground Relief mutual aid group organized to provide disaster relief for the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. [18]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid and grassroots solidarity groups around the world organized networks distribution for food and personal protective equipment. [19] The term "mutual aid", previously associated with anarchism, drifted into public parlance during the pandemic. Local mutual aid groups, sometimes as local as the street level, organized to help shop, deliver medicine, create games for kids, [18] offering civic connection during a time of isolation. Multiple online outlets ran stories on how to create a mutual aid group. [20]

See also

Related Research Articles

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Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely allied to evolutionary anthropology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Social Darwinism</span> Group of pseudoscientific theories and societal practices

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Kropotkin</span> Russian anarchist (1842–1921)

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<i>Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution</i> 1902 essay collection by Peter Kropotkin

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection.

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References

  1. ↑ Peter Kropotkin; Victor Robinson (26 May 2020). "Introduction". Mutual Aid – A Factor of Evolution: With an Excerpt from Comrade Kropotkin by Victor Robinson. Read Books Limited. ISBN   978-1-5287-9015-4.
  2. 1 2 Kropotkin, Petr (1902). Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution . Retrieved 6 May 2020– via The Anarchist Library.
  3. ↑ Bertram, Christopher (2020), "Jean Jacques Rousseau", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, archived from the original on 2021-03-25, retrieved 2020-12-11
  4. ↑ H, Katie (27 April 2020). "From Mutual Aid To Dual Power: How Do We Build A New World In The Shell Of The Old?". Plan C. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  5. ↑ Turner, Francis J. (2005). Canadian encyclopedia of social work . Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. pp.  337–8. ISBN   0-88920-436-5.
  6. ↑ Zola, I. K. (1972). "The problems and prospects of mutual aid groups". Rehabilitation Psychology. 19 (4): 180–183. doi:10.1037/h0091061. Archived from the original on September 20, 2023. Retrieved December 17, 2020.
  7. ↑ Izlar, Joel (2019-11-01). "Radical social welfare and anti-authoritarian mutual aid". Critical and Radical Social Work. 7 (3): 349–366. doi:10.1332/204986019X15687131179624. ISSN   2049-8608. S2CID   211453572.
  8. ↑ Spade, Dean (1 March 2020). "Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival". Social Text. 38 (1): 131–151. doi:10.1215/01642472-7971139. S2CID   216351581 . Retrieved 10 May 2020.
  9. ↑ Shepard, Benjamin (2015). Community practice as social activism: from direct action to direct services. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. p. 166. ISBN   978-1-4833-0937-8. OCLC   962305465.
  10. ↑ Bacharach, Samuel B.; Bamberger, Peter; Sonnenstuhl, William J. (2001). Mutual aid and union renewal: cycles of logics of action. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University. p. 173. ISBN   0-8014-8734-X.
  11. ↑ Kropotkin, Peter (2008). Mutual aid: a factor of evolution. [Charleston, SC]: Forgotten Books. p. 117. ISBN   978-1-60680-071-3.
  12. ↑ Beito, David T. (2000). From mutual aid to the welfare state: fraternal societies and social services, 1890–1967. Chapel Hill [u.a.]: Univ. of North Carolina Press. pp. 1–2. ISBN   0-8078-4841-7.
  13. ↑ Shapely, Peter (2007). Borsay, Anne (ed.). Medicine, charity and mutual aid: the consumption of health and welfare in Britain, c. 1550–1950; [5th international conference of the European Association of Urban Historians, which was held in Berlin in summer 2000] ([Online-Ausg.] ed.). Aldershot [u.a.]: Ashgate. pp. 7–8. ISBN   978-0-7546-5148-2.
  14. ↑ NEMBHARD, JESSICA GORDON (2014). Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Penn State University Press. doi:10.5325/j.ctv14gpc5r. ISBN   978-0-271-06216-7. JSTOR   10.5325/j.ctv14gpc5r.
  15. ↑ Bacon, Jacqueline; McClish, Glen (2000). "Reinventing the Master's Tools: Nineteenth-Century African-American Literary Societies of Philadelphia and Rhetorical Education". Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 30 (4): 19–47. doi:10.1080/02773940009391187. ISSN   0277-3945. JSTOR   3886116. S2CID   144385631.
  16. ↑ Williams, Colin C.; Windebank, Jan (2000). "Self-help and Mutual Aid in Deprived Urban Neighbourhoods: Some Lessons from Southampton". Urban Studies. 37 (1): 127–147. Bibcode:2000UrbSt..37..127W. doi:10.1080/0042098002320. ISSN   0042-0980. JSTOR   43084635. S2CID   155040089. Archived from the original on 2022-04-24. Retrieved 2020-12-11.
  17. ↑ Hernández-Plaza, Sonia; Alonso-Morillejo, Enrique; Pozo-Muñoz, Carmen (2006). "Social Support Interventions in Migrant Populations". The British Journal of Social Work. 36 (7): 1151–1169. doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch396. ISSN   0045-3102. JSTOR   23721354.
  18. 1 2 Solnit, Rebecca (2020-05-14). "'The way we get through this is together': mutual aid under coronavirus". the Guardian. Retrieved 2020-06-14.
  19. ↑ Preston, John (March 22, 2022). "Rev. of Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During the COVID-19 Crisis". Anarchist Studies . 30 (1): 125–128. ISSN   0967-3393. Gale   A708386016.
  20. ↑ Tolentino, Jia (11 May 2020). "What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic". The New Yorker . Retrieved 28 July 2020.

Bibliography

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