I mean just reading through the first part of the article, it is pretty damning that they think mutual aid doesn't work because it doesn't convert enough people to due paying memebers. If the goal isn't the betterment of people, but of furthering political power, then you are no better then the Democrats or Republicans.
Exactly! Effectiveness matters, but if you aren't helping the masses and are being effective, then what exactly is your effectiveness going toward? Surely not the ones communists are supposed to be fighting for.
Mutual Aid is fundamentally an Anarchist idea and, while I don't seek to defend CPUSA, there are legitimate critiques. It serves as a "release valve" for organizing work: effort that could be put into overthrowing the system as a whole is instead put into helping a small number of people.
Building parallel power structures through Mutual Aid isn't by any means bad (just like many other things in Anarchist thought), but it is not an effective means to challenging state power in all cases.
Mutual Aid takes a lot of work, and an org performing Mutual Aid has an opportunity cost - less time for organizing protests, educational events, recruiting, social events, speaking at councils, canvassing for petitions, or any other important things that political parties are supposed to do.
I am in a Marxist-Leninist party in Northeast Ohio. We do not do Mutual Aid, but many of our members do work with Serve the People, a Mutual Aid org mostly run by Anarchists (the one Aaron Bushnell was in). I believe this is a more effective way to organize and is compatible with MLism in a way that the political party directly organizing mutual aid is often not
Mutual aid also builds community trust in your organization and can be a way to be authentically present at actions. When you help, for example, an immigrant community that is otherwise left to suffer and you have a big banner at your tables, you have now basically done a tabling event while also strengthening the community you want to work in. It can also serve as a model for (partial) communal living. This is particularly effective when the people you're working with are poor, marginalized, and low on free time.
The problem, in my experience, is that there is usually no strategy when people do mutual aid programs. No idea of who you're primarily trying to authentically embed with. No idea how you will sustain the effort financially or with your labor. No idea what kinds of conversations you will have or when. No idea of how you will build a movement by making a community more stable, less exploitable. There are even tendencies that will frown on having political conversations at all or think that building your org and movement through such a program is gauche. These are the thoughts of naive people that really just want to do charity work and feel morally outraged that there are any motives outside of simply feeding or clothing some people and then turning off your brain.
Hickel mentions this parable in the book, The Divide
You see someone floating down a torrential river, screaming for help, afraid of drowning. You dive into the river, and using all your strength, swim to them and carry them to the bank. You're entirely exhausted, but you feel great that you saved someone's life.
Then you see another person floating down the river screaming. You use your last remaining ounces of energy to save this second person.
Then it happens again, a third person floats down. You realize it will keep happening; there aren't enough of you to save everyone, and you need to decide where to spend your energy.
Do you spend it continually exhausting yourself saving each individual person? Or would a better use of your time, be to find out where and why people are falling into the river, and stop the problem at its source.
Serving the people is of course important, but if that aid is not a long-term solution, but a band-aid, then its not going to solve anything. Better to analyze and focus on the root problem.
Wow... umm...
So your organization, that's supposed to be strong enough to be trusted to wrest the reigns of political power from an entrenched elite, is also just an uWu smol bean that can barely save a few people.
That just tells me the org should have spent more time building its base and less time wish casting about what to do after the revolution.
The ultimate goal, for socialists at least, is to take over the very institutions of the state that are currently hamstrung to the point where mutual aid is necessary. If your interim tactic (mutual aid) frustrates progress towards that ultimate goal, that tactic should not be a fundamental part of your organization's work.
We do not do Mutual Aid, but many of our members do work with Serve the People, a Mutual Aid org mostly run by Anarchists
This seems like a sensible approach.
But we do want political power. If that becomes an end unto itself you have a problem, but if political power is instead used as a means to better people's lives, you're still on the right track.
Mutual aid that doesn't lead to political power is just charity. Charity is good, but not all good things are socialist. There are 100 good things an org can do, the challenge is finding which of those things grow the socialist movement, too.
This sounds like a nice excuse in a hypothetical vacuum void of evidence, but we're talking about an org that is also, from what I'm reading, pushing a line of voting for Biden / democratic party in general. How exactly is backing a genocidal monster in a capitalist controlled political party supposed to be gaining political power? For an org called communist of all things?
I'm aware harm reduction is not intrinsically revolutionary organizing, but if an org is refusing harm reduction as not tactical and backing a major status quo genocidal capitalist party, what exactly are people supposed to see in that as revolutionary?
we’re talking about an org that is also, from what I’m reading, pushing a line of voting for Biden / democratic party in general
The CPUSA has a bunch of problems, no argument there. But that doesn't mean it gets everything wrong, and the results of their efforts can still be useful to leftists who think the party is generally misguided.
Here, a local CPUSA chapter tested how effective mutual aid is as a movement-building tactic. They concluded it wasn't that effective. We can get into how they conducted the test, how they measured the results, etc. (the linked essay is light on details), but testing different tactics then adjusting your efforts based on the results is the right approach. We shouldn't dismiss those results because we theorize the test should have gone differently.
testing different tactics then adjusting your efforts based on the results is the right approach
Again, this is the right line in theory, but the practice of how this is actually being done matters a lot. I have not seen this "test" and its recorded results and if it was linked to here, I missed it, so I cannot at this time comment on the specifics of whether it makes any sense. What I can say is that in science, a single experiment does not constitute sufficient evidence to generalize about an entire practice under varying conditions.
Furthermore, it is important in this kind of political practice to ask why something was or wasn't effective, not just if it was. My nonexistent capability to hit a home run in baseball does not constitute evidence as to how capable all human beings are at doing so. Babe Ruth's capability to hit a home run while blindfolded in a hurricane does not constitute generalized evidence as to how many home runs Babe Ruth can hit under average baseball conditions. The context and conditions matter. That's why we say we can't just take the model of one AES state and plop it onto another country with different conditions and expect it to work exactly the same way. Maybe I'm preaching to the choir on that point, I don't know, but I emphasize it because generalizing about a whole practice based on one test is not only not scientific in the more general sense of science, it's not in fitting with communist dialectical theory and practice. Yet from what I've read, as alleged, CPUSA extrapolated from one test that mutual aid is not effective and is pushing that as a line for the entire party. For all I know, the people conducting the "test" just suck at relationship building and teaching, and so they gained nothing other than performing charity from their "test". Without a clue as to why it wasn't effective in whatever metrics they used to measure its effectiveness, what is there to learn from it?
To adjust, you need to know why something didn't work, not just the plain fact that it didn't. If I attempt to walk forward and the handle of a bag I'm holding gets snagged on something, I would rightly be thought a fool to conclude that one should never carry a bag if they want to be able to walk. On the other hand, if I recognize that holding in such a way the handle can trail behind me and get caught on things out of view is causing problems, they I can adjust the way in which I hold it.
Yet from what I’ve read, as alleged, CPUSA extrapolated from one test that mutual aid is not effective and is pushing that as a line for the entire party.
The essay talks about a local chapter's stance on mutual aid. I didn't get the impression it reflects a broader party line. Frankly, the author is too light on details for us to really know what happened. Look at how oddly vague this is:
But our local leadership poo-pooed mutual aid as “ineffective” and “not worth it.” The metric being used was apparently the efficacy of converting MA recipients to dues-paying party members. Evidently they “tested” doing mutual aid work and opted against it, but from all appearances, the “test” was a one-off attempt
What does "poo-pooed" mean? Does the chapter want to reduce time spent on mutual aid but still do some, or do they want to do none at all? What do they mean by "apparently" and "from all appearances"? Do they know about the chapter's experiment(s) with mutual aid or not?
If nothing else, there's a lesson here about being specific when levying criticisms.
I broadly agree with all your points about how ideas should be tested -- you need at least a few tests to draw conclusions, and how you execute those tests can change a lot. Unfortunately, we're stuck talking about this in the abstract because the details here just aren't clear.
It wasn't political power that the CPUSA leadership was worried about, it was specifically "dues paying members".
"Political power" is a fuzzy concept; "dues paying members" is a measurable proxy. Alternate proxies (crowd size at events, number of people on contact lists, interest in or curiosity about leftism) seem much harder to measure and much less reliably connected to political power.
I can see room for improvement, but the bottom line of "does this tactic help our organization grow?" seems reasonable.
Pretty sure you can use "dues paying members" as a valid metric without using it as an excuse to scuttle community outreach programs.
If your org is too weak to do two things at once, your org isn't strong enough to worry about reaching for political power.
If your org is too weak to do two things at once, your org isn’t strong enough to worry about reaching for political power.
The solution here is to grow the org, so we're back to the question of whether mutual aid can be an effective way to do that.
One way or the other, you're going to be doing mutual aid projects with your comrades to help other comrades.
My point wasn't that attempting to gain political power was not a necessary part of swaying the political landscape, it was that it should not be the goal. More over, why the all out rejection of mutual aid on the parties part? As you stated mutual aid is good as a means of charity, but they rejected the ideal wholely on the lack of conversion. Yet again, to me that is evidence the goal is not betterment, it is political power. Does the party think that the only people who diserve betterment are party members? That is, as stated before, a sign of being no better than the Democrat or Republican parties in my eye. I reject In and out crowd poltics no matter who the peddler is.
The goal of socialism is to improve lives via systemic political change. If you get caught up spending all your efforts bettering lives on an individual scale, to the point where it interferes with your ability to change the system, that's good, but that's not socialism. It's charity. Charities are good, but they're not going to end capitalism.
Indeed, seems like CPUSA has completely decoupled itself from any material work at this point.
Got smacked in the face how much its like how the Democratic party views Red States...
Against mutual aid? Yikes. Even as an individual who isn't a member of a party I've had plenty of success working with mutual aid groups. Absurd for them to dismiss one of the only proven pillars of socialist success within the imperial core.
I knew about most of the rest of this, but to see it all laid out like this...damn. This is such a fed party that I'm amazed anyone could actually support them. They might as well just join the democrats.
It's completely ridiculous and if this is at all accurate this is a damning indictment of that party. I mean if mutual aid is supposedly so “ineffective” and “not worth it" (even though it has a proven track record of success) then what the hell do you call telling people to vote for the Democrats which has proven over and over to be an abject failure of a "strategy", if you can even call it that? I can think of nothing that is more ineffective and not worth it, in fact i'd say it's downright counterproductive.
Helping people and getting them more socialism minded and anti-capitalist. I think trying to recruit people via mutual aid makes it less "aid" and more of a transactional experience. With mutual aid we show people there are different ways to do things beyond capitalism, and that community and togetherness are far more important than chasing the dollar. Trying to recruit people, like your org is a pyramid scheme or a cult seems likely to just turn them away.
I have been thinking of joining a party recently to at minimum add an extra member to help build numbers (which matters if a party wants to be seen by normies as "legitimate" and give options). And would hope to further meet more real leftists IRL and help out in whatever ways I can. Has been down to basically CPUSA and PSL. But seeing the CPUSA feeling the need to follow the Dems after the Trump shooting thing (they could have just posted nothing and it would have at least kept some face in the matter). And after the recent purging of a whole chapter for the crime of quietly and without any big show leaving the panel from the Israel party. Along with the added condemnation of that chapter for being out trying to help people and the moment.
It seems that the CPUSA has forgotten that there can't be a revolution if we just play by the rules made up (and always changed to benefit keeping out third parties) by the two "allowed" parties. Mutual aid and showing deep solidarity with real struggling working and poor people is how we both teach what we really are and about. It is how we learn what does and doesn't work and how to adapt our efforts in waking people up to the lies. And it is most importantly how we keep our humanity.
Currently it seems that PSL is likely where I will apply for membership. I just need to commit myself to reading their provided information first as I don't want to waste their or my time applying without knowing the party and programs. Just sad to see that the oldest communist party in the US fall into the same regressions that the USSR lost their way in by allowing the capitalists to dictate what is and isn't acceptable. And the CPUSA hasn't even had the benefit of being in power. At least the USSR actually had a revolution and made giant leaps for humanity and the people.
When choosing an organization, I recommend going to lefty events and making some contacts there, including asking if there are ways to help out. You can effectively do a "test run" if being in an org by helping with one of their actions, often a front group. For example, ANSWER will give you a sense for PSL. It can be hard to know which org to join without already being in one, but this helps with that.
That makes sense, and I do like how it is a two-way street. I can get a feel for them and they can do the same. Thanks!
Of course! And don't hesitate to ask questions here if you think vibes might be off. Sometimes things are normal lefty organizing but still a surprise (e.g. a construction crit session) and sometimes they are a red flag (a not constructive crit session).
I'm glad you're looking to join an org! When we organize, we win!
I had a lot of comments I wanted to reply to but instead of spamming it I'm just gonna go out and say, I'm kind of shamed of all the people shitting on mutual aid in here.
As communists, where does our political power come from? Is it pandering for money and spouting ideology while ignoring the needy? Or is by helping people and working to build the organization that way? As a yellow Parenti once said, "if communists want for power, then why do they side with the powerless?" Our strength comes from our desire to help people. If we stop helping people for the pursuit of money and political power then we might as well just go join the libs.
Indeed, mutual aid is the most fundamental aspect of building power. It's absolutely incredible that anybody who calls themselves a communist wouldn't understand that.
Owl Fact:
If an org is too weak to feed people its too weak to worry about taking political power.
There seems to be debate around mutual aid and political power in the comments. Let us recall this famous quote from Mao Zedong: 枪杆子里面出政权 "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Other quotations that might be relevant can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm
Mutual aid must be sustained with resources, but more importantly it must be protected by an armed force. Do not forget the lessons paid in blood by revolutionaries throughout history. The history books are not even needed, because genocidal Zionists and their imperialist accomplices are reminding us continuously that one does not have to be communist to be a target for eradication.
