“Creating New Futures” states that capitalism is organized abandonment, so the only possible response is organized care. To me, that means mutual aid—non-transactional exchange based on a sense of safety, trust, and collective liberation. Mutual aid rejects scarcity.
Mutual aid lays bare the false equivalence of obedience and safety. Communities experiencing incredible loss have stepped up to feed, house, and care for one another. People battling the police have carried critically injured strangers off the front lines, stood ready to wash away the effects of chemical weapons and risked their own lives to actively de-arrest others.
There’s a huge shift in seeing people take responsibility for one another under changing, dynamic circumstances—especially in this country where we have a very individualistic legacy. I get that it’s a big leap from meeting basic human needs to solidarity within performance. But I can see how the spirit of mutual aid could permeate our daily work, in terms of leveling hierarchy.
It’s about duration. We need to tend these moments over a lifetime. I want to think about a reparations approach to mutual aid. The structure of mutual aid in Chicago is the North Side bringing support to the South and West Sides. It reinstates the inequities in geography. It’s really clear-cut where the resources are and where the damage has been done. The question of mutual aid, at least in Chicago, is a reparations approach to resource sharing. I don’t think mutual is the way to go. It hasn’t been mutual. We need to undo the lack of mutuality.