{"id":1933,"date":"2020-12-11T15:07:17","date_gmt":"2020-12-11T15:07:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=138010"},"modified":"2020-12-11T15:07:17","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T15:07:17","slug":"rebuilding-the-solidarity-economy-during-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/11\/rebuilding-the-solidarity-economy-during-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Rebuilding the Solidarity Economy During COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"
Abolition Action<\/a> was one of the many small mutual aid collectives fundraising online in March when the COVID-19 lockdown hit New York City. After raising money for their grocery fund, the group posted their request form on social media in the hope that it would reach people in need. Their email inbox was soon inundated with requests for money transfers. <\/p>\n A mutual aid collective asks no questions and has no requirements. It trusts people to know what their needs are, and it tries to meet those needs. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cWe\u2019re just one group, and we immediately got thousands of requests,\u201d says Cheryl Rivera, an organizer with Abolition Action, which describes itself as an anti-capitalist collective that \u201ccreatively resists carceral systems and mindsets.\u201d <\/p>\n The challenge at the beginning of the pandemic for Rivera was moving money and resources as quickly as possible. Abolition Action ran into roadblocks when it tried to transfer money to many families at once. <\/p>\n \u201cMoney is made to move to the wealthy,\u201d says Rivera, who was hampered in her organizing by transfer restrictions from money payment systems like Venmo and PayPal. <\/p>\n Now, through the NYC-DSA Mutual Aid COVID-19 Relief Fund<\/a>, a trust fund set up by members of Democratic Socialists of America<\/a>, Rivera has been able to transfer tens of thousands of donated dollars to families in need; nevertheless, the mutual aid learning curve at the beginning of the pandemic was steep. Networks of resource distribution needed to be started from scratch and then scaled up swiftly. <\/p>\n Whitney Hu, one of the founders of South Brooklyn Mutual Aid<\/a> (SBMU), says her collective began by working in a single Excel spreadsheet. Given the vastness of the undertaking before them, they had to quickly develop more systematic methods of organizing. Now they have a warehouse and a van to mass distribute groceries to more than 500 families every week. <\/p>\n Mutual aid, a term popularized<\/a> by the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in the nineteenth century, can roughly be defined as the reciprocal exchange of resources for the sake of mutual benefit. But many contemporary mutual aid collectives, especially those that came into existence during the pandemic, may appear to have more in common with charities than with mutual aid collectives in the traditional sense. Yet, nearly all of the organizers I spoke with see what they are doing as very different from philanthropy. <\/p>\n According to these organizers, a lack of means-testing makes mutual aid organizing distinct from other kinds of resource distribution. Hu says that in SBMU, they don\u2019t ask \u201cwho deserves and who doesn\u2019t.\u201d Nor are they \u201cinterested in asking people about their salaries, citizenship status, or where they are.\u201d <\/p>\n Rivera contrasts mutual aid collectives with government welfare services as they currently function. She believes that the primary role of mutual aid collectives is to serve people\u2019s needs. This, she says, is in contrast \u201cto the official support structures of the city in its response to the pandemic, which are frequently centered around \u2018how do we make sure the people who don\u2019t<\/em> deserve to have their needs met are not served.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n She juxtaposes mutual aid work with programs like state unemployment benefits, in which the receiver is required to appear to be searching for work in order to receive payment. A mutual aid collective asks no questions and has no requirements. It trusts people to know what their needs are, and it tries to meet those needs. <\/p>\n In April of this year, Hu received a call from a young single mother who had lost her job and was in debt. \u201cShe asked me if she could set up a payment plan to feed her babies,\u201d Hu recalls. The woman\u2019s assumption was that she could only receive aid from SBMU if she went into debt.<\/p>\n \u201cThe fact that I could have a mom of two children in the richest city in the world want to set up a payment plan so she could buy rice to feed her family, that\u2019s just a moment when you really reevaluate everything you\u2019ve known about the government, about our place in society, about the way things should and should not be,\u201d Hu says. \u201cI said, \u2018don\u2019t worry about a thing, we\u2019re buying you groceries.\u2019 She started crying and I didn\u2019t know how to respond.\u201d<\/p>\n Though many new mutual aid organizations may not conform to traditional leftwing conceptions of what mutual aid is, they open up a community space for non-transactional relationships between strangers. And a growing corp of radicalized volunteers suggests that these collectives will continue after the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n
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