Solidarity, not charity
🌲 Solidarity, not charity
Phrase commonly attributed to Dean Spade, a prominent trans activist and founder of Big Door Brigade, a catalog of mutual aid resources.
Mutual aid was proposed by Peter Kropotkin as an alternative to Social Darwinism.
Dean Spade is a scholar in the realm of mutual aid and has worked on numerous projects to educate those interested in organizing around it. They wrote a short book simply named Mutual Aid and offers four pitfalls that mutual aid organizers may fall into:
- Categorizing people as deserving and undeserving of help
- Practicing saviorism
- Being co-opted
- Working to remove public infrastructure
“No masters, no flakes”
In On Anarchism, Noam Chomsky expresses a sentiment that Anarchism and being pro-government doesn’t necessarily conflict when taking into consideration the social safety nets government provides now. It would be very un-Anarchist to not support a notion to provide food, housing, etc. for the poor and otherwise in need. End goals are different, but in the moment, individuals needs are still being met. Mutual aid comes into play to provide those resources ideally without government intervention at all, but with the common interest and work of the community.
Further Reading
- Chomsky, Noam. 2014. On Anarchism. Penguin.
- Spade, Dean. 2020. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next). Brooklyn: Verso Books.
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