This is the latest take I've seen contrarian secretarianism lead to. MLs believe mutual aid is a thing anarchists do, therefore it is cringe and liberal. They'll do any mental gymnastics required to get there. Meanwhile Ho Chi Minh, Mao and the Panthers all wrote about how important mutual aid is without using that specific terminology
Meanwhile Ho Chi Minh, Mao and the Panthers all wrote about how important mutual aid is without using that specific terminology
They were all rebels working to build a mass movement in colonially occupied territories.
If you're already operating a dictatorship of the proletariat, mutual aid is kinda cringe, as it implies the state party and affiliated government isn't doing its fucking job. Mutual aid is what you do when you can't leverage the powers of the state to your own ends. But why the hell would you run an Underground Railroad when you had access to Union Pacific?
You've got the brawn, I've got the brains / Let's make lots of money
Setting aside how laughable it is to conflate mutual aid with billionaire philanthropy, this reminded me of a banger MLK quote:
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
Also Helder Camara: "When I give food to the poor, they call me a Saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist."
I...uh...what?
Tbh having been living near some very powerful churches for a while now, there are PARTS of their mutual aid that effective. They foster actual connections between their members, net enough money to have people on staff who’s permanent jobs are to orchestrate aid efforts, and run long-running second hand stores and shit like that which employ lots of down on their luck people. There’s stuff to learn from there.
That said, the spend huge amounts of the money to stuff that does not directly go into helping others. Lots of it goes into glorifying the church, evangelizing missions of no material benefit, and paying higher-ups lots of money.
Mutual aid groups or Corporate Charities? Those are impossible to be used interchangeably and it sounds like you're describing the latter
Name names or this isn't happening.
The mutual aid group I've been directly involved with, along with the half dozen mutual aid groups I've been adjacent to has collected a ton of cash and not once has some millionaire approached us to do XYZ for them or suppress leftism in our neighborhoods. It's not like there's a lack of guilty millionaires here in New Jersey.
She has it backwards. Churches do infact do it better. That is part of how MLK got into left type politics.
Cause there were plenty of anti-rasism churches. But the history of community organizing that black churches were knowm for at the time made the uniquely capable of doing leftist work
This is what Chrisman talks about alot in his vlogs. The need for us leftists to devop a non-liberal reason to form community organizations.
Christman also notes how heavily dependent we all are on our geography, infrastructure, and our regional culture.
The need to develop new forms of organizing should not eclipse the possibility of simply leveraging existing organizations. Leftists shouldn't be afraid of joining more liberal institutions in pursuit of leftist goals simply because some other online leftist might call them a fucking :LIB: . I've seen my local DSA chapter, and their hearts are in the right place, but they are swimming upstream. There's no shame in organizing and operating through larger, better financed, and more well-developed initiatives. The Houston Food Bank will do a better job of raising and distributing relief in the city than anything a dozen well-intentioned leftists can manage on their own. So forming a team that integrates itself within the Houston Food Bank and tries to direct aid to areas they see as critical is likely more efficient than constructing a parallel system from whole cloth.
It's true. Mutual aid in and of itself is basically apolitical and only becomes left politics if you have a larger group you're doing PR for. However that group could have any ideology, even sports teams do mutual aid. I don't really get why the US left is in a constant state of doomerism, but also if you question the NGO'd up structure of it all people get mad at you.
Me, a Leftist: "We want mutual aid"
My mom, a member of the clergy: "You have mutual aid at home."
Mutual Aid At Home: Televangelist who wants $54 million jet says he'll donate old jet
notice how catherine liu's first tweet has over 1,100 likes. this is what most people believe. it's the leftists who are an obscure minority. i've never even met a leftist in person.
