Why Mutual Aid?

Mutual aid is the direct, participatory, reciprocal, and voluntary distribution and exchange of resources, services, and skills among community members. Rather than relying upon charities, corporations, nonprofits, or the state, we can altruistically support each other in self-organized and autonomous solidarity networks that facilitate the sharing of resources to fulfill our basic needs. Solidarity is central to the practice of mutual aid because it engenders unity in the face of corporate and state intervention. It also creates and preserves resilient social relationships when oppressive forces attempt to attack or pit us against each other in order to suppress our initiatives. In contrast to the current market-based economy, which is constructed on consumption, exploitation, greed, and the private ownership of the means of production, mutual aid and solidarity can help us build cooperative, intersectional, and sustainable communities.

It’s important to note that the practice of mutual aid has a long history in the Black community. Many of the first formal networks that people of African descent created upon arrival to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade and formation of racial capitalism were based on mutual aid. In fact, the members in these newly formed “Free African Societies” drew upon principles from African communalism, reciprocity, and solidarity to provide insurance, resources, services, and other forms of mutual aid to support each other and the larger Black community. By the early 20th century, some Black mutual aid societies had evolved into a movement of consumer, farmer, housing, and worker cooperatives, which established a framework for a solidarity economy in the Black community. We look to the tradition of Black mutual aid societies and contemporary autonomous disaster aid relief collectives as models of decentralized and horizontal organization in the on-going struggle against gentrification, oppression, and state-sanctioned violence.