Insurrectionary Utopias Part 1: Ideas Towards a Liberatory Mutual Aid

by scott crow

Agency is publishing scott crow’s “Insurrectionary Utopias” as a three-part series commemorating the 20 year anniversary of the Common Ground Collective, founded on September 5, 2005, in New Orleans, LA in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Part 2 and 3 will be published in the coming weeks.

“…years ago, a few people scratched history, and, knowing this, they began calling to many others so that, by dint of scribbling, scratching and scrawling, they would end up rending the veil of history, and so the light would finally be seen. That, and nothing else, is the struggle we are making. And so if you ask us what we want, we will unashamedly answer: To open a crack in history.”
– Subcomandante Marcos, E.Z.L.N.

Despair, grief, and fear color much of our days, often challenging our hopes for the future. These emotions have seeped into daily conversations, media portrayals, and the very fabrics of our lives. Our fragile social bonds in civil society have been pushed to the brink due to ongoing disasters, criseis and seeming uncertainty we all face.

Despite the beautiful, historic gains made against Power (1), and the inspiring uprisings and rebellions since the turn of the millennium — undermining the very foundations of U.S. historical and systemic oppression — a loss for what-to-do characterizes much of our reflections.   

Civil society is unraveling due to an unsustainable civilization, the multi-year COVID-19 pandemic, an ongoing climate emergency, and the usurping of 20th century “democratic” institutions by right-wing forces with fascistic dreams. Amidst this, unaccountable corporate social media platforms fuel the unraveling, compounding these ongoing, intertwined disasters and crises, revealing the shortcomings of our fragile house of cards-like society. 

What is needed are alternatives not rooted in fear or domination, but in our desires for something better for all of us.

I still find places where hope exists and projects are happening that can open the “crack in history.” Places where communities and neighbors haven’t given up and are not paralyzed by fear, that offer alternative paths forward that allow for shared visions of something better.  We all need tempered hope, ideas, and visions to counter the collapse narratives of the media and fascists who want to use it for their own power or control. Rather than sticking our heads in the sand in denial, we can counter the fear and despair that leads to inaction and not give in. 

From the Outside In

Current disasters bring my thoughts back over 20 years to the dawning of the 21st century. At the time another national crisis shook our world: on September 11, 2001, planes were used as weapons killing thousands of people, taking down the twin towers in New York and hitting the Pentagon in Washington D.C., bringing the U.S. to a standstill.

As the hijacked planes were striking in Manhattan I was already en route to Washington, D.C. from Texas. I arrived to an unimaginable disaster that evening: a city darkened from power grid and cell phone failures, shuttered offices and stores, no access to banking systems or gas, all under a massive lockdown, replete with a curfew and restricted areas of travel in the city. The political and financial centers of the U.S. had gone dark through terrorist attacks. Those who assumed to hold Power in that moment lost systematic control over the country; they were scrambling even as they tried to lock the country down. Government wasn’t going to protect anyone from this disaster, so they began working to regain control over the narratives and the population. 

I was in D.C. joining coalitions of political organizers for a series of protests against neoliberalism. We were expecting upwards of 200,000 people, building on the energy of the World Trade Organization (WTO) shutdown in Seattle two years prior, and the worldwide anti-capitalist globalization movement that was then in full swing. While still in shock from the attacks, we tried to navigate forward. Small handfuls of us met to grieve, figure out what was happening, and possibly organize. Besides the camaraderie though, my sense from those initial meetings was that as activists rooted in social justice, committed to collective liberation, we actually had little substantial to offer. 

Social and political movements that had focused on stopping oppressive systems could only offer empathy, or more protests. But that was it. Gripped in the fear of the unknown, like everyone around us, we had no visions of alternative futures, and few tools and little infrastructure to rely on for creating them.  We, like the rest of society, were crushed in that moment. All of our meager movement resources — money, people, and decades of organizing experience — actually added up to very little.

I spent days under curfew thinking about our subcultural shortcomings as social and political activists and dreamers. I kept coming back to how we spent generations trying to mitigate the effects of entrenched Power, sometimes successfully. But those same movements spent little time building up our own power through collective autonomy and mutual aid, on our own terms for the long haul across multiple communities. At the end of the day, 9/11 proved we had little collective power or much to really offer.

Finding Beauty in Our Failures

These kinds of questions about political movements’ capacity and orientation have rattled around in my head for decades. Those events, and their aftermath, motivated me to find hidden histories where others who professed individual and collective liberation had carved out their own futures in the face of ongoing crisis and disasters. By the time the twin towers in NYC collapsed on 9/11, there already existed generations of social and political organizers and activists committed to realizing worlds beyond capitalism, but who offered no concrete steps toward creating alternative futures. We all felt some level of vulnerability in those times. This led to deeper questions about what liberatory futures would actually look like: what are the limits of activism, and activist subcultures, in being able to think big picture?  How do we keep people from leaning towards fear and fascism? Can we protect ourselves and each other?

Activists, including anarchists, have not built many lasting counter-institutions, or true autonomy of any kind despite the broader embracement of the ideas at the turn of the century. Creating and building institutions, cooperatives, or ongoing infrastructures has often been derided as “liberal thinking,” or largely took non-radical forms through the nonprofit industrial complex, or cooperative businesses in activist subcultural circles. The collective focus to create and sustain them never seemed as important as constantly putting out the fires of systemic oppression. This created a vacuum of viable radical alternatives, much less working solutions. 

When I started to focus on the concepts and histories of creating or building collective autonomy, that led me to a whole new set of questions and concepts that opened up new paths. I began to look to, and think about, what it would look like if we built autonomous communities.  What if we began developing some pre-figurative social and political lives and engagements beyond merely protesting, and were part of, and integrated with, towns, neighborhoods, and cities?  How would we do it everywhere? 

Now More Than Ever

It takes little to bring any “First World” economy or political system to a grinding halt, as we saw after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the fascist takeover of the federal government since 2024.  If we, as creatives and radicals,or dreamers of any stripe,don’t begin offering viable alternatives, with ideas, proposals, and infrastructure to replace current systems — even as dysfunctional or unevenly distributed as anything we create might be — then centralized, authoritarian, top-down forces will continue to consolidate and wield power. There exist large numbers of autonomous networks to draw from in this work (e.g. legal aid, mutual aid, street medics, etc.). Thinking of creating more local networks and mapping and networking existing ones — making them accessible, but still liberatory, and outside of activist subcultures, while dreaming of collective autonomy together — can form some of the foundations to deal with ongoing disasters and crises.

Why Disasters? 

Disasters reveal the vulnerabilities people face from the failures and fragility of governments and corporations, as well as those of cultural and economic systems. Additionally, disasters lay bare the inequalities and shortcomings of supposed safety nets in civil society that are even stressed or non-existent under “normal” circumstances. Most disasters are those we recognize as cataclysmically abrupt. They activate our emergency hearts into community action, with immediate needs escalating quickly (2).

There is also a form of disaster that we often don’t recognize because it is so common. I call this phenomena the long slow history of disasters. These manifest in communities through failed governmental policies or neglect, including poverty, failing schools, lack of access to basic healthcare or decent food, environmental racism and destruction, rampant homelessness, the war on drugs, and prisons, among other examples. These are everyday micro-disasters. And when an acute crisis or cataclysmic disaster escalates, these everyday disasters cascade into ever worse disasters for everyone affected, particularly vulnerable populations.

Through disasters we see the inability of governments, large non-governmental organizations, nonprofits, corporations and economic systems to respond quickly, effectively, or ethically despite their enormous resources. These entities’ monopoly are often exposed after disasters as they try to control who is allowed to respond outside of governmental agencies or their proxies. Governments often see non-sanctioned responses as a problem. This scenario often creates a disaster within a disaster where those who have survived a calamity are left to take care of and defend themselves or their communities, without any outside support. 

Disasters take many forms. We most often think of them as being natural: tornadoes, hurricanes, or fires for example. There are other forms of crisis and disasters that create the same upheavals, including displacement, death, injury, resource shortages, destruction of ecosystems, marginalization of vulnerable populations, and forced migration. These include economic disasters, like the Great Depression; political ones, such as the current electoral choices in the U.S. that have given rise to xenophobia, racist violence, and unfounded conspiracies that target vulnerable populations; and finally war, in all its forms.

After every disaster across the world we see those in Power lose grip, no matter how dominating they may have been before. All of the seemingly powerful institutions, like the police, the military, or even basic government functions, are completely ill-equipped to deal with wide scale devastation, outside of restoring “law and order,” which is often the top priority. If these institutions that we are supposed to look to, believe in, and recognize as having power won’t — or can’t — help us or our neighbors, then we should realize that we have to do something together for ourselves.

Mutual Aid Now!

“The mutual-aid tendency in man [sic] has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history.” 
– Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, (1902)

Disasters reveal openings for collective liberation due in part to the extreme neglect and failures of governments. Disasters offer opportunities for interventions, a possibility for something else after losing everything, that often could not happen in day-to-day life. When people are left to die and they see no government entity, no corporation, no nonprofit organization is going to save them, by necessity they begin to self-organize for their needs. Openings for liberatory mutual aid do more than just fill in the gaps where established Power fails. Instead, we can use these openings to further advance towards people’s autonomy and community self-determination. Mutual Aid is a fancy way to say cooperation. We often do better when we cooperate, especially in disasters. 

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the hot waning summer of 2005, I experienced and facilitated alternative responses to what governments and nonprofits were failing to offer. I was fortunate to be involved with the creation of the Common Ground Collective (CGC), a project that responded to the hurricane, and the long slow history of disasters in those communities that led up to it. We built upon the long histories and practices of mutual aid that already existed. Common Ground allowed us — as an organization, a network, and as self-organized individuals and groups within neighborhoods — to engage in different ways. These examples have provided inspiration for autonomous disaster relief efforts across the globe since. 

History has shown us that most people spontaneously react cooperatively when disaster strikes, often in direct opposition to our assumptions and stereotyped beliefs. Small autonomous efforts can do a lot with little resources, are flexible and dynamic due to their smaller sizes, and are most importantly humane.  No matter where you are on the political spectrum or rank in life, it all goes out the door after disasters strike, when people become reacquainted with their humanity amidst calamity. People help people because it’s wired in us. We can put our politics aside without losing them. 

All mutual aid comes from a place of love and caring, our emergency hearts. Our emergency hearts beat with compassion and empathy and reveal the importance of what needs to be done. We ignore all the other BS that interrupts those connections. “Emergency hearts” is a phrase I use to describe the immediacy of our feelings of empathy and compassion that motivates us to act to end oppression, exploitation, and destruction. Our emergency hearts are this beautiful part of us that drives us with both passion and compassion to create more than just for ourselves.  Each of our emergency hearts is the spark that compels us to action.

Cooperation or mutual aid among various human and non-human animals has been well documented over the last 100 years in many disciplines, including anthropology, social theory, politics, and evolutionary biology. Despite living under economic and cultural systems that reward sociopathic behavior, such as the self-interest and narcissism that is continually reinforced by the media and mainstream economists, voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit sustains everyday working people. We all care for each other and willingly work together for mutual betterment in a variety of ways. The concept is simple. We all benefit more when we collaborate, even taking our own self-interests into account. As I often say, “we each can be better when we all do better, instead of some doing better on the backs of others.”

Peter Kropotkin’s seminal Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution was a starting point for naming cooperative endeavors, giving them a social and political reference, and grounding them in a study of the natural world. Mutual aid, especially within disasters, is the antidote to fear and powerlessness. It gives all of us opportunities to connect with our neighbors, and larger communities, that we may not see in our busy day-to-day lives. It offers us community control as well as community defense. Mutual aid can keep us from giving in to isolation or trying to buy our way out of crisis. Consciously helping each other can keep fear at bay and give us a path toward collective liberation on our own terms.

Footnotes:

(1) I use the term “power” in two ways: 1. power with a little ‘p’ is exercised directly by individuals and communities, as part of civil society, working to make changes in the world, and 2. Power with a capital ‘P’ is concentrations of authority and privilege in economic, political, or cultural institutions that exercise undue influence on the world.

(2) For more on this, see Rutger Bergman, Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore, translators, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Little Brown and Company, (New York: 2020) and David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)