What is Mutual Aid?

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, you might have logged onto Facebook and joined a local, or national mutual-aid group. I was the 400th or so member of the Metro Detroit Mutual-Aid network, now a group of over 6,000 just over a week later. The Facebook group is led by volunteer moderators, and users can ask questions and post resources and information related to the coronavirus outbreak, and about where to access resources for food, how to get their water turned back on, news about pauses in tax foreclosure and how to talk to your landlord about pausing rent, etc. People have been tremendously forthcoming with information, ideas, organizing group chats and video calls to talk deeper about organizing to help residents and community members get through this crisis.

The Free African Society was one of the first mutual aid societies established by Black people in the United States. Mutual aid societies are autonomous institutions created to provide their members with the basic needs of everyday life — food, clothing, shelter, health care, burial insurance, etc. — as well as providing protection and sanctuary. The Free African Society was started by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in Philadelphia in 1787. Allen and Jones later started the first Independent Black church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816. (Atlanta Black Star)

Like me, you might have joined a mutual aid network for the first time, but the concept and practice of mutual aid are certainly not new. In fact, mutual aid societies predate modern welfare. A mutual aid associations is defined as, “associations formed voluntarily for the purpose of providing their members with financial assistance in case of need”. It also includes any kind of assistance with essentials, including food and healthcare.

Mutual Aid societies have a deep history in African American communities for generations in the US. W E. B. DuBois called "the first wavering step of a people toward organized social life." The earliest mutual assistance societies among free blacks in the United States to navigate the oppressive and restrictive welfare system controlled by whites. These societies included The Free African Society, New York Society for Mutual Relief, Negro Mutual Benefit Societies of Philadelphia, among others. Later societies sought to promote education and job training, especially for newly arrived African Americans, freemen and fugitive slaves. Membership of mutual aid societies also had spiritual, moral, and philosophical components. These practices were in conjunction with financial assistance when illness and death struck the family.  Most mutual aid societies at this time were short-lived and not always well-documented, but the evidence is clear that such groups existed and contributed positively to the free black and slave community. While the number of societies attests to the wide-ranging efforts of northern free blacks, most were hampered by low funds and low membership. (VCU).

In the nineteenth century in the United States, mutual aid societies were part of a robust series of informal and formal groups including lecture and debate groups, unions, cooperatives, and political activist groups.

Where are mutual aid and mutual benefit societies today? Many credit unions, trade associations, and mutual savings banks, as well as modern fraternal orders, can trace their roots back to these mutual benefit societies. Many benefit societies also form around cultural and ethnic groups- in the U.S. particularly immigrant groups, who form lending circles, child care cooperatives, or lend for births and funerals, for example.

In a competitive and individualist western world, it can be hard to notice the concept of mutual aid, of sharing money for mutual benefit. Yet, there is nothing like an international pandemic to catalyze these large networks to form again, this time on social media platforms, which are widely accessible and free to join.

Where will mutual aid go from here? Further! I hope. Right now we are seeing mutual aid networks all over the world to respond to the Coronavirus, each creating systems and many creating new systems to support their communities. New systems are being created! We are practicing what we are preaching right now. Right now we are supporting the most at-risk populations, reaching out to loved ones or people we have not always been in touch with, we are deeply checking in with how each other is doing. We are realizing too, that the most vulnerable workers, low wage labor, are also the most necessary workers, the people who keep food on our table and keep our facilities clean, and behind the scenes systems running. Hopefully, if we want, because ultimately it is up to us, we can keep these systems of community care going. We can keep fighting for social and economic welfare, but this time with a very recent example that it was all real, it was all critically necessary for a future world that is more resilient, and more responsive to an emergency, because this certainly will not be the last time we will all need to rapidly respond.

In his Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, the Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin uses examples from both non-human animals and human society to show that cooperation, not competition, is the most important factor promoting the survival of organisms and therefore the evolution of species. (Columbia Univeristy)

Sources

Hanagan, Michael. International Review of Social History, vol. 43, no. 3, 1998, pp. 475–478. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44583420. Accessed 26 Mar. 2020.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro Church (Atlanta University Press, 1903), p. 124.

Barga, Michael. Social Welfare History Project. Virginia Commonwealth University.