Distinguishing Charity and Social Work from Revolutionary Strategy by Kenny Lake (December 2020) Click here for a printable PDF of this article. In the 1990s, aside from militant protests and a wil…
I kinda skimmed through it so apologies, but I think levying a critique of this is good. We don't get anywhere by simply serving the people, we need to organize the people to serve themselves and move them into struggle with the state. Fred Hampton gave a wonderful speech where he talks about little old black ladies who knew nothing about communism getting in shouting matches with cops in defense of the breakfast program. It might have been the Panther's program, but the people on the ground were largely just people who wanted to see hungry kids fed. The Panthers brought them together to feed the community.
For me, if we look at it in the labor context it makes even more sense. Communists would never organize a union and then try to run it like their own petty fiefdom - even if we know the boss is the enemy and we're the best equipped to win concessions. If we can't involve the workers in a union in the labor struggle (including action and bargaining) than we will probably fail, if not immediately than certainly once the relationships we have cultivated have faded and the novelty of the union has died down. Alternatively you put too much of your political leadership's resources into maintaining something that is labor intensive and you burn them out.
Where I think this article fails is that it doesn't analyze anything that is actually happening right now. The unholy alliance of anarchist mutual aid and Maoist survival programs is a boogeyman beyond a brief analysis of a mutual aid organization 25 odd years ago and analysis of now defunct organizations from half a century ago. You read Lenin and Mao and they are constantly bringing up the actions and failures of their contemporaries, naming them and examining their successes and failures. Why is there none of that in this? Surely they could find a local Food not Bombs chapter to assess their actual relationship with the people they serve or something like that. There doesn't seem to be any assessment of what is happening, only what happened long ago, so how do we know this sort of mutual aid work isn't working now?
I kinda skimmed through it so apologies, but I think levying a critique of this is good. We don't get anywhere by simply serving the people, we need to organize the people to serve themselves and move them into struggle with the state. Fred Hampton gave a wonderful speech where he talks about little old black ladies who knew nothing about communism getting in shouting matches with cops in defense of the breakfast program. It might have been the Panther's program, but the people on the ground were largely just people who wanted to see hungry kids fed. The Panthers brought them together to feed the community.
For me, if we look at it in the labor context it makes even more sense. Communists would never organize a union and then try to run it like their own petty fiefdom - even if we know the boss is the enemy and we're the best equipped to win concessions. If we can't involve the workers in a union in the labor struggle (including action and bargaining) than we will probably fail, if not immediately than certainly once the relationships we have cultivated have faded and the novelty of the union has died down. Alternatively you put too much of your political leadership's resources into maintaining something that is labor intensive and you burn them out.
Where I think this article fails is that it doesn't analyze anything that is actually happening right now. The unholy alliance of anarchist mutual aid and Maoist survival programs is a boogeyman beyond a brief analysis of a mutual aid organization 25 odd years ago and analysis of now defunct organizations from half a century ago. You read Lenin and Mao and they are constantly bringing up the actions and failures of their contemporaries, naming them and examining their successes and failures. Why is there none of that in this? Surely they could find a local Food not Bombs chapter to assess their actual relationship with the people they serve or something like that. There doesn't seem to be any assessment of what is happening, only what happened long ago, so how do we know this sort of mutual aid work isn't working now?