The article we published a few months ago on mutual aid provoked a bunch of different responses. We received a sympathetic and critical response from comrades in the UK that we encourage people to read. We also received responses that were less sympathetic. The article “In Defense of Mutual Aid” by Kimmy Dibben and Melissa Sukkarieh published in Honi Soit brings up the issue and mentions us by name. We think it gives us a good opportunity to clarify some of our points, since it is well-argued and raises many of the objections we received.
A strategic dispute, not a moral one
We do not argue that mutual aid is not “radical enough” – as if there’s an imaginary bar we’re setting, and then scorning people for not reaching it. Our argument is primarily that the question of whether to deploy mutual aid strategies is a strategic one, and should be evaluated on those terms. There is an unfortunate tendency among some anarchists and other leftists who suggest that the primary task of revolutionaries is to create these mutual aid groups and to have them spread across the earth like a benevolent cancer, thus realising communism. The gist is that the “practice of mutual aid” should be an end in itself. We strongly disagree, and we think such a perspective is side-stepping much harder but much more important questions of revolutionary strategy.
We also think these mutual aid strategies are generally better referred to as “service-provision”, since in many or most cases, there is nothing mutual about them. That doesn’t make them worthless, we just need to be clear about what they are.
The “aim of mutual aid” may be to make itself obsolete but practically speaking, mutual aid programmes fail to achieve their aims. One could run a feed-the-homeless service for a hundred years and still not put a dent into the root causes of homelessness: lack of affordable housing, lack of healthcare, unaffordable daily necessities, abusive relationships, etc – in other words, capitalism, private property, the exploitation of the working class, etc. The relationship between a homeless person in desperate need of food to survive, and a group running a soup kitchen is not one of mutuality. To repeat a point we stressed in the original article: this does not make such an activity worthless.
Speaking more generally, to state that “empowering and caring for your community will always be radical, as it acts in direct opposition to the exploitative and individualistic nature of capitalism” is in our view a major mistake. Capitalism does not simply rest on setting workers against each other as individuals. It also substantially depends on cooperation and “caring for your community” in order to survive: the mutual support between friends and partners that is necessary for people to keep working; the care between a parent and child that is necessary for that child to become a future worker; etc. Cooperation between workers on the job is even necessary to keep capitalism functioning.
What we need to do is identify how that cooperation that already exists between people could become valuable in the wider fight against capitalism. In the case of cooperation in the workplace, that cooperation is “reclaimed” whenever workers use that association amongst each other as a weapon against a boss: to strike, go-slow, sabotage, etc. This is all an open strategic question.
As we stated in the conclusion to our article,
In figuring out a strategy for socialists in our region, we have to think about two things: one, how we can take the “mutual” part of “mutual aid” seriously, and two, how fundraising and charitable projects like legal defense funds could form part of a general strategy for working class rebellion.
We know there is a role for mutual aid projects. They can be valuable tools to strengthen the working-class and fight capital. We just stress that they are one tool among many, and that the bigger picture is what’s most important: strengthening the working class, and fighting capital. It’s to those ends that our strategies must be directed.
Dibben and Sukkarieh identify two practical examples that they believe vindicate mutual aid: the Black Panther Party’s social welfare programmes and the abortion clinic escort project that was part of the campaign for safe access zones around reproductive health clinics. The case of the safe access zones campaign is a complicated, sensitive one; we intend to dedicate a full article to the issue in the future. However, the case of the Black Panthers is clearer, and we think it’s worth going into why it doesn’t back up the arguments expressed in the Honi Soit article.
On the Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party’s social programmes, like the project providing children with free breakfast, are inseparable from their broader “vanguardist” party-political approach. They never saw “caring for your community” as inherently radical; the programmes were deployed as a conscious strategy to advance the party’s goal of securing political power.
Huey Newton would explicitly state that “survival programs […] are emergency services. In themselves they do not change social conditions, but they are life-saving vehicles until conditions change”. In a private meeting of Panthers, he would state more candidly “that these programs are neither revolutionary nor reformist” but neutral, “no different to the gun”.
Bobby Seale summarised their viewpoint quite clearly:
“A lot of people misunderstand the politics of these programs; some people have a tendency to call them reform programs. They’re not reform programs; they’re actually revolutionary community programs. A revolutionary program is one set forth by revolutionaries, by those who want to change the existing system to a better system. A reform program is set up by the existing exploitative system as an appeasing handout to fool the people and keep them quiet.”
In other words: the difference between the Panthers providing free breakfasts and the local school district itself providing free breakfasts is that the Panthers were radicals with good intentions and the school district are not radicals and have bad intentions. They were a means by which the “revolutionary party” could develop a following among the black poor and become a force in the local communities they were situated in. In her autobiography, Elaine Brown mentioned J. Edgar Hoover’s accusation that the Panther social programmes were part of a hearts-and-minds propaganda approach. Rather than deny it, she agreed with him: “Hoover had, in a manner of speaking, hit the nail on the head”.
As anarchists – like Dibben and Sukkarieh – we naturally feel that “vanguardism” as such does not facilitate working-class power. The Black Panthers certainly played an important role for many years in agitating among the Black American working class, but their positive contributions diminished as the party centralised and darted between a kind of insurrectionism and municipal electoralism. It would wind up dying a painful death squeezed between brutal government repression from the outside, and centralised authoritarianism from the inside.
We don’t think the problems of capitalism can begin to be solved by substituting conservative charities with “revolutionary community programs”, whose primary difference from the former is that the latter are led by revolutionaries. The early breakfast programmes were facilitated by clergy in the San Francisco area, who realised the commonality of their approaches. To quote Earl Neil, an Episcopalian priest who encouraged the Panthers to use his church as a space for the programme, “the Black Panther Party has merely put into operation the survival program that the Church should have been doing anyway. The efforts of the Black Panther Party are consistent with what God wants…”.
The Party, which had consistently identified their goal as the seizure of political power, used their welfare programmes as a bridge to this goal. They only ever had utility for that purpose. In 1972, when Newton decided that the welfare programmes in Panther branches across the USA were a drain on resources, he moved to shut them down and centralise operations around Oakland, where the Panthers were strongest, in preparation for a serious but ultimately unsuccessful electoral bid.
The Oakland programmes served as a propaganda point to enhance the Party’s image, thus potentially giving them more votes. It also was a means of ingratiating themselves with non-working class sectors of “the community” that they needed the support of in order to win elections. Brown noted that Seale’s grocery giveaways meant that “middle-class blacks, heretofore reluctant to support or be identified with the party, began endorsing it and making contributions”. The programme could also settle disputes: the Party once ended a boycott of a local black businessman’s stores after he agreed to donate regularly to the Party’s programmes.
All quotes in this section taken from either Elaine Brown’s memoir A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, or JoNina M. Abron’s essay “Serving the People: The Survival Programs of the Black Panther Party”, as published in Charles Jones’ collection The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Further framing historical material regarding the Panthers’ decline into electoralism and centralism can be found in the sixteenth chapter of Bloom and Martin’s Black Against Empire, “Limits of Heroism”.
Conclusion
When we brought up the ACP’s CUDL front group, we were stressing that service provision isn’t an inherently good tactic in of itself; it’s a question of how it fits into broader strategies. In the case of the ACP – and the Black Panther Party – the strategy is not one that can be seriously endorsed. The emancipation of the working class can only be the task of the working class itself, not a party acting on their behalf.
There are cases where strategy calls for “mutual aid” sorts of activities, or where these activities develop fairly organically in the course of worker struggles. We translated an article from comrades in France about a “people’s McDonalds” cooperative precisely because we think there is plenty we can learn from it and other things like it. In addition, we have no problems admitting that mutual aid in the sense Kropotkin meant it (as opposed to the meaning given by people like Dean Spade) is a key component of all social struggles. Our primary divergence, however, is that we can’t mistake these things as ends in and of themselves, or as things that are inherently revolutionary. This is the easy way out of the hard conversations about strategy that we have to answer in order to move forward. We hope this article encourages further discussion to that end.