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The Art of Mutual Aid
Andreas Petrossiants
A graphic that spread during the George Floyd rebellions with text from "How to Start a Fire."
Workplace
November
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And if the wreckage of this inheritance will not be complete; if
notwithstanding the crimes committed during this “civilized” war,
we may still be sure that the teachings and traditions of human
solidarity will, after all, emerge intact from the present ordeal, it is
because, by the side of the extermination organized from above, we
see thousands of those manifestations of spontaneous mutual aid.
—Peter Kropotkin
. The Dilemmas of Mutual Aid
At the dawn of the first World War, Peter Kropotkin’s preface to the
edition of
Mutual Aid transmits a specific kind of optimism rooted in his observation that
collective care is an innate characteristic of biological and social life. Rather than
being “idealistic” and starry-eyed, as dishonest detractors would claim in the years to
come, his theory is utopian: a utopianism nested in a very specific realism developed
by observing plentiful examples of animals engaging in mutual aid in the woods of
Siberia, as well as in human, urban domains across the world. In a new edition of
Kropotkin’s book released by PM Press in
, the late and sorely missed David
Graeber and Andrej Grubačić contextualize the original text historically and in the
present. They first describe numerous reactionary responses to Kropotkin’s book
from the early
s to the present: the far right who relegate him to the role of
“crackpot”; liberals who desperately and acrobatically contort to reconcile his
theories with competition (both evolutionary and social); and lastly, sectarian
Marxists-Leninists who, according to Graeber and Grubačić, “pretended [Kropotkin’s]
intervention had never occurred.”
Since the start of the Covid- pandemic many constellations of mutual aid cropped
up all over the world in response to the appalling results of decades of global
austerity that made themselves apparent beyond the typical sites of neoliberal
neglect. In New York City, where I live, one need only look at the list of groups
collected on Mutual Aid NYC’s website to see the extent of the networks. Most
began as food distribution or shifted their prior infrastructures to give out material
necessities. During the George Floyd Rebellions, many transitioned to handing out
personal protective equipment and other supplies at protests and demos, formed jail
support networks, and raised money by selling art to bail out protestors and pay legal
fees for those threatened with incarceration. Some formed (guerrilla) gardens or
came together to help rent strikers sustain themselves. All the above actions are part
of that very same “human solidarity” Kropotkin speaks of in the epigraph, that which
may in fact help people “emerge intact from the present ordeal.”
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At first, many of these nascent formations kept to the historical, anarchist conception
of “mutual aid” as a form of collective survival organized autonomously and
specifically in contrast to charity. Charity operates from above and valorizes
accumulated wealth, while mutual aid works horizontally and transforms the
exchange values of commodities into use values. This can be accomplished by
collecting donations or looting means of subsistence to distribute them freely, or by
creating infrastructures distinct from existing avenues of social reproduction that
come with hefty strings attached. Indeed, as the Art Workers’ Inquiry group of Red
Bloom Communist Collective defines it:
Unlike charity, mutual aid does not function according to a logic of
morality… Mutual aid is a relation that builds working-class power,
solidarity, and capacity, enabling the working class to experiment
with self-determined structures of care that begin to offer
alternative forms to capitalism.
However, during the pandemic in New York and elsewhere, problematics within some
mutual aid groups emerged. Some groups began to devolve into charity as they
disconnected from a political project. Others got stuck in the dilemmas of scale—for
example, deciding whether the potential to serve more people necessitated making
concessions to political actors or aligning with nefarious organizations. To add to
this fraught landscape, elected officials worked tirelessly to absorb mutual aid into
the logics of the state, playing a tightrope game saluting the plentiful examples of
autonomous work while giving off the air that governments were doing the most they
could. Nonetheless, city administrations across the US could not fully account for
their complicity in countless deaths. In the twenty years leading up to the pandemic,
for example, New York City lost twenty thousand hospital beds to the continued
privatization of medicine.
That these issues were confronted does not mean that one should write off mutual
aid as temporary responses to capitalist crisis prone to the pitfalls of “unorganized”
formations, as some democratic socialists or communists might do. Rather, the sheer
breadth of mutual aid can help see how creating infrastructures of survival apart from
the state is integral to lasting beyond any one point in the larger crisis of capitalism.
Furthermore, understanding the longevity of mutual aid outside of the temporalities
of crisis demonstrates how to avoid co-optation by the state’s welfare apparatuses.
Lastly, as this text will argue, the participation of artists in various forms of mutual aid,
from food distribution to jail support and eviction defense, signals that looking to
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radical communities that cultural workers help create and participate in can be a
template for scaling sideways (across class, occupation, and other forms of capitalist
subjectivation) rather than aspiring to growth in a capitalist framework.
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Questions from the Art Workers' Inquiry in Art Work During a Pandemic (
).
. Breaking the Cycle of Crisis and Recuperation
The standard story of mutual aid is that it is born in response to crisis. This is, at least,
how crisis management and liberal, capitalist ideology puts it. All the same, it is
partly, demonstrably true. After Hurricane Sandy in New York, for instance,
autonomous and horizontalist networks from Occupy Wall Street were able to quickly
shift their focus to aid under the banner of Occupy Sandy. But mutual aid should not
only be understood as a reactive phenomenon. Kropotkin certainly didn’t see it that
way; his theory came in response to conversative sociologists and evolutionary
psychologists who erroneously appropriated Darwin’s studies to suit capitalist
historiography and vice versa. Kropotkin saw collective forms of survival as part of “an
instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an
extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they
can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in
social life… It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human
solidarity.” But beyond universalist and biological notions of mutual aid’s intrinsic
qualities—evincible as they may be and as vexing as they are to contemporary
scientists desperately seeking a reconciliation between altruism and the perceived
“naturalism” of the market—a quick glance at history shows that mutual aid
structures also anticipate crises and mitigate them when they arrive.
By its very constitution, the capitalist nation state must be quick to absorb that
collective preparation, take responsibility for it, lest it become clear that the state
cannot provide, that it is in fact unnecessary and harmful. Described succinctly by
Graeber and Grubačić:
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The late nineteenth century and early twentieth saw the
foundations of the welfare state, whose key institutions were,
indeed, largely created by mutual aid groups, entirely independently
of the state, then gradually coopted by states and political parties.
Most right and left intellectuals were perfectly aligned on this one:
Bismarck fully admitted he created German social welfare
institutions as a “bribe” to the working class so they would not
become socialists.
City governments across the United States have already begun instituting publicly
funded “mutual aid” jobs. But, how can this be seen in any another way than the first
step to absorbing collective power to render it powerless? To anticipate this process,
some specificity is required. Asad Haider, for example, makes a helpful distinction
between “neutralization” and “co-optation,” or recuperation. He writes:
What I mean by neutralization is a force which renders opposition
ineffective. It is distinct from the potentially moralistic idea of cooptation, which presumes some authentic belonging of the object.
Opposition is neutralized not through appropriation, but through
the formulation of an effective reactant and the transformation of
each element into a new compound… Neutralization comes from
the top. It contains and redirects opposition into the harmonious
diversity of the system.
Taking this framework, it becomes clear that for forms of collective care to become
neutralized as popularly accepted functions of the state, they must first be co-opted.
Once accepted as such, they can then be subject to austerity. And as with most forms
of statist neutralization, it is done through the carceral apparatus. As Peer Illner puts
it: “States have been quite happy to let communities perform this type of [mutual aid]
work for free, as long as they don’t organize politically in a way that threatens local
governments.” In the US, perhaps the most cited historical example of this was the
recuperation of the Black Panther Party’s (BPP) Free Breakfast for School Children
Program, which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described as one of the biggest threats
to American power. After extrajudicially murdering, framing, and incarcerating
members of the BPP, the federal government soon implemented its own breakfast for
kids program built on the framework of the Panthers. However, following the pattern
sketched above, the US’s program is today “failing to live up to its potential.”
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According to a study by the Food Research and Action Center, “the program is falling
short by at least ten million students, if not more.”
In his book Disasters and Social Reproduction: Crisis Response Between the State
and Community, Illner argues that mutual aid risks allowing the state to shirk its
“duties” by relying on mutual aid parallel to this process of absorption. This argument,
however, is itself dangerous, and clumsily puts (at least part of) austerity’s blame on
those creating networks to survive, somewhat like how liberals and “professional
activists” may blame demonstrators for police violence if those in the street do not
conform to sanctioned forms of protest. The goal of mutual aid should be to wrestle
tasks from the state while defending against their capture.
Another common misconception with mutual aid can be found in Illner’s writing on
the
blizzard in Texas. Referencing the International Wages for Housework
Campaign (WfH), he claims that mutual aid organizers on the ground in Texas could
ask to be remunerated (by the state, ostensibly) for their work. However, this
argument forgets that Silvia Federici’s seminal text for the movement was titled
“Wages Against Housework,” not as it is so often reproduced “Wages for Housework.”
That distinction is crucial. Though there were multiple branches with differing
opinions, Federici and her comrades in WfH were less interested in this ultimately
statist socialist demand to get paid for housework, but rather in abolishing the wage
and the necessity to be paid in order to survive in the first place. Maintenance work
isn’t going anywhere: it takes “all the fucking time,” as artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles
put it perfectly in
. But wages should, and could. The work in Texas as well as
other mutual aid networks appearing today make those possibilities clear.
One of the most promising proposals to break out from the cycle of aid, recuperation,
austerity, and incarceration, was proposed during the pandemic by the Queens
cultural hub Woodbine as an alternative to “disaster communism.” Bridging the work
of caring for one another with the work of building our own infrastructures, they
propose “disaster confederalism” that would provide “the conditions for a kind of
infinite strike in which communized resources and infrastructures have a crucial role
to play, not only in immediate material survival but in building bases of autonomy for a
citywide network of dual power.” Here, rather than embracing the subsumption of
mutualist work to the logics of the wage, the goal is in producing self-sustaining and
cooperative forms of engagement with one another outside of those logics.
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Responses to the question "What changes would you like to see after the pandemic?" in Art Work During a
Pandemic (
).
. Retooling, Not Reskilling
In contrast to classical aesthetic theory, which had it that art is other to labor,
understanding art and cultural production as work is the very precondition for artists
to participate in liberation struggles large and small. As I was contemplating this text,
Common Notions published a zine put together by Red Bloom Communist Collective:
an art workers’ inquiry in the spirit of Marx’s unrealized
inquiry for La Revue
socialiste, and later others like the workerist Quaderni Rossi in Italy and the JohnsonForest Tendency in the US. It demonstrated how artists and art workers can relate to
mutual aid work and in building popular power in their communities. Artists and art
workers have skills, networks, and supplies that when taken together with others help
create infrastructure(s) that can be used or re-tooled in the interests of abolition,
struggle, and collective care.
Responses to an inquiry about life “after” the pandemic included: “no cops,”
“communism!,” “free MTA,” “college and preschool should be free,” “Abolition!,”
“abolish rent and housing for all!” Among them are also many that hope for an
expansion of mutual aid: “I [would] like to see the rich run scared and the rest of us
really truly do the work we need to do to keep each other safe,” and “the world to
have a better understanding of the myriad and intricate ways humanity is connected
and co-dependent across the globe.”
Following the work of Marina Vishmidt, there is revolutionary potential in what she
calls an “infrastructural critique”: a form of cultural and political antagonism that sees
the potential for creating extra-parliamentary, autonomous infrastructures of care,
mutual aid, and so on both within and outside of existing supply chains. What, then,
if we were to not think of artists as defining a “class” of workers, one exceptional to
the capitalist mode of production, but rather as potential, and integral, parts of
communities already interwoven with others like neighborhoods, autonomous unions,
and party scenes? Red Bloom’s definition of community illustrates this:
A community is a group of people with some shared characteristic:
they may live in the same place, work at the same job, share an
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experience of being a mother, pet owner, etc… But what does it
mean to be in community? For community to be a praxis? A
community is grounded in mutual dependence and recognition…
Mutual aid is a means of building community, and both mutual aid
and community work against the alienation that only serves to
weaken our ability to self-organize.
This understanding of community is another way to connect what is done in larger
networks (municipal sanitation, food production, medical care even) with selforganization and self-management common to much artistic and cultural work. It
shifts the veneration of skills sellable on the free market into tools that are available to
communize. For instance, during the early parts of the pandemic, a new organization
called Art Bailout NYC collected donations for a bail fund, with artists retooling their
networks (of buyers and producers) and sellable objects into a decidedly different
abolitionist pursuit. Artist Luba Drozd used machines and tools available to her
(through institutional and personal spaces) to D print shields for front linters and
distribute them to hospitals with a team of volunteers. Woodbine shifted almost
entirely to distributing food to thousands every week, using their space which was
typically reserved for cultural events and organizing meetings. Take Back the Bronx
and NYC Shut it Down, two community groups fighting gentrification and police
violence, expanded their Feed the People (FTP) food and clothing distribution to
respond to new needs like hygienic and sanitary products.
What if all the new mutual aid formations developed during the pandemic were not
built as a reaction to temporary crises, but for longevity? Similarly, what if the spaces
managed and organized by artists and the skills and networks cultivated by new,
numerous mutual aid networks were put to the ends of creating permanent
structures of collective social reproduction, consumption, and aid? Quoting “How to
Start a Fire,” a text that spread during the George Floyd rebellions:
Pirate radio. Build stoves. Learn to cook. Learn languages. Get
arms. Open street carts and businesses. Occupy building. Set up
cafes. Diners. Restaurants. … Permaculture. Mend wounds. Lathes.
Giant pots. Orchards. Build friendships. … Get cars. Steal money.
Move close to each other. Start uncontrollable riots.
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The secret to mutual aid being sustainable (rather than scalable) is realizing that
everything in that list is mutual aid if it’s done with a rejection of philanthropy,
hierarchy, and not-for-profit co-option. Mutual aid is a political practice that sees
collective care as permanent, and artists, many of whom live in and comprise
precarious communities, know that as well as anyone else.
Notes
Preface to the
edition of Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann,
).
David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić, introduction to Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution (PM Press,
), .
This term, however, comes from Stephen Jay Gould’s text “Kropotkin was no Crackpot,” .
Graeber and Grubacic.
See .
Art Workers’ Inquiry, Art Work During a Pandemic (Red Bloom Communist Collective and Common Notions,
), . (page numbers refer to the PDF pages of the zine and may not correlate to the printed copy.)
The thought that one needs to constantly scale up is a trap, set up by the existing social order to prescribe
collective action into codi ed and extractive systems of social reproduction and growth. Beautifully put by
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: “scaling up is really scaling down, losing connection rather than gaining it,
losing abilities rather than consolidating them, settling for form rather than formation.” Stefano Harney, Fred
Moten, Sandra Ruiz, and Hypatia Vourloumis, “Resonances: A Conversation on Formless Formation,” e- ux
journal, no.
(October
), .
Elected o cials blamed “irresponsible” people for crowding the hospitals. While Covid- was certainly
something that could not have been avoided, systems (of medicine, housing, food distribution) across the
West has been set up in recent decades to guarantee a poor response. See: .
See Rouen dans la Rue, “Solidarity and Collective Autonomy: An Interview with Woodbine,” Mute, April ,
, .
Peter Kropotkin, introduction to Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (McClure Phillips & co,
), xiii, .
Graeber and Grubacic.
Asad Haider, “Emancipation and Exhaustion,” South Asian Avant-Garde: A Dissident Literary Anthology, March
,
, . This essay, and citation were brought to my attention when reading Keith Ocheing Okoth’s stellar
“Decolonisation and its Discontents: Rethinking the Cycle of National Liberation,” Salvage, no.
(Spring/Summer
).
Illner, .
A less-referenced example is the work of the Young Lords in instituting syringe exchange programs. See M. E.
O’Brien, “Junkie Communism,” July ,
, .
Another interesting example is studied by Sean Michael Parson who makes the case that city governments in
San Francisco were much more violent with those handing out food with the anarchist group Food Not Bombs
than others squatting homes in the
s and s. He writes: “While squatting would seem to be a graver
o ense than distributing free food, Homes Not Jails was treated far more leniently by city o cials during the
Jordan administrations. I trace the di erence in v treatment of the two groups to the fact that Food Not Bombs
engages in anarchist direct action in public space, while Homes Not Jails does so in private residences. The
public nature of Food Not Bombs made them a visible threat to order to both Agnos and Jordan and one they
had to confront and stop.” Sean Michael Parson, “An Ungovernable Force? Food Not Bombs, Homeless
Activism and Politics in San Francisco,
–
, (PhD diss., Graduate School at the University of Oregon,
).
Roberto A Ferdman, “How Our Schools Fail Poor Kids Before They Even Arrive for Class,” Washington Post,
February .
, .
Woodbine, “Organizing for Survival in New York City,” Commune, April ,
.
See Marina Vishmidt in conversation with Andreas Petrossiants, “Spaces of Speculation: Movement Politics in
the Infrastructure,” Historical Materialism, online, .
Art Work During a Pandemic, .
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Available here:
The Art of Mutual Aid - Architecture - e-flux
➝.
Workplace is a collaboration between e- ux Architecture and the Canadian Centre for Architecture within the
context of its year-long research project Catching Up With Life.
Category
Labor & Work
Subject
Protests & Demonstrations, Covid- , Community, Art
Activism
Return to Workplace
Author
Andreas Petrossiants is a writer and editor living in NY. His writing has appeared in The New Inquiry,
Historical Materialism, Artforum, Bookforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Momus, ROAR Magazine, and
e-flux journal, where he is associate editor.
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