Mutual aid is the brigade of volunteers mucking out basements after a flood, the church basement food pantry staffed by retirees, the GoFundMe to pay the rent for a tenant about to be evicted. It can look like an easier alternative to politics, which requires not just generosity but toughness, not just tolerance but side-taking.
If we are to have any hope of surviving the coming dark age, we need mutual aid—not just to keep people housed and fed, but to keep them connected.
It makes sense that immigrant communities, who are in the most drastic danger, have been the first to organize. They were ready anyway, having worked to keep each other safe for years of draconian immigration policy during Obama’s, Biden’s, and Trump’s terms before today’s cruel, spectacular assaults. Other existing mutual aid networks are girding against the Republicans’ next salvos. The feminist underground that has been distributing abortion pills into red states since the bans began is
figuring out how to continue its work while protecting its members and the pregnant people they serve in the face of heightened surveillance
Mutual aid is not “a thousand points of light,” George H. W. Bush’s euphemism for replacing the public social safety net with charity. There is no substitute for the state, whose obligation is to redistribute the nation’s wealth for the greater good of the greatest number of people. But when the state is a malevolent kleptocracy, mutual aid—neighbors helping neighbors—starts to look like radical civil disobedience, less a thousand points of light than a brilliant beam shining toward a different world.