Insurrectionary Utopias Part 2: Liberatory Principles for 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. Read Part 1 here. Part 3 will be published in the coming weeks.

Liberatory mutual aid draws upon the histories of mutual aid, as practiced by varying communities worldwide, and from principles derived from anarchist and anti-authoritarian traditions. It opens our thinking to futures where we are individually and collectively in control of our own lives instead of breeding fears of the unknown. Through a liberatory approach and vision, I am not striving to create a new political ideology. Instead, I hope we all seek new ways to see ourselves and the power of our actions before, during, and after the collapse of the worlds we know. Liberatory approaches suggest a living anarchy, of individuals, communes, and small temporary projects that build for a future where those who have been excluded can create their own ways together. A liberatory foundation is built on openly discussed ethics that those engaged find agreement on, and shared principles that are accountable and adaptable, to serve each community. 

Below are some of the principals involved in creating living and dynamic approaches to mutual aid and collective autonomy. Some of these ideas are parallel or cross over with others. These are to be seen as rudimentary foundations for liberatory approaches to mutual aid and beyond:

Liberatory and Insurrectionary Projects and Institutions

This involves creating dynamic, living organizations and spaces where the movement can have a home and thrive. It involves creating a base for developing localized power. These insurrectionary institutions serve specific needs and fold once those needs have been met. In creating insurrectionary institutions, we also have insurrectionary responsibility. Burn it down if need be, but also implement rebuilding, keeping the replacement alive and fresh, and maintaining responsibility to those who use it. 

Dual Power

Dual power in an anarchist context means resisting exploitation and oppression, while also developing initiatives toward autonomy and liberation, as part of practicing self-sufficiency and self-determination. It’s easier to destroy what we abhor. It is much harder to create, nurture and sustain needed infrastructure. Similar to the Wobblies’ (Industrial Workers of the World) slogan that we have to “build the new society in the shell of the old,” dual power embodies the development of institutions, organizations, collectives, liberated work places, community gardens, neighborhood assemblies, and all the other elements of a future society created in opposition to the dominant Power of the state, patriarchy, and capitalism. Dual power provides a framing for our undertakings and approaches. 

Leading by Asking

We should not pretend that we have it all figured out or that we know all the answers. We need to ask questions of those in need instead of dictating to them their desires or our solutions. We struggle alongside folks, making a better world for us all. This method is inspired by the practice of the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) in Chiapas, Mexico who have taken this approach to autonomous and collective leadership since they were founded in the early 1980s. This doesn’t mean we don’t bring our resources and histories to the table, but we must always remember that people have their own ideas and experiences to share. 

Civil Disobedience and Breaking the Law 

“Good laws” don’t always make us safer, but can sometimes prevent oppression. Sometimes unjust laws are changed or rendered irrelevant by protest. Other times laws can only be broken. Assessing what is ethical in any given situation is more important than always just following the law. Civil disobedience, in this context, is about more than protesting unjust laws; it is choosing life over always doing what the law says. This is true especially after disasters. Refusal is the first step towards liberation.

Direct Action 

Direct action is acting without waiting for approval. It involves recognizing that it is essential to act in our lives without waiting for an authority, bureaucracy, or political movement to give us permission. Direct action can be civil disobedience, but it can also involve creating whole new alternative economic structures. A historic example of direct action is that of the Diggers in England, who started farming common land to advance their ideals during the 1600s. They did not ask permission, they just did it. 

Solidarity Not Charity 

The practice of solidarity recognizes that our wellbeing is tied together with that of others. It presupposes engaging in solutions with those in need, not for them. The goal of solidarity is to both alleviate suffering and solve its systemic deep-rooted causes. Conceptually, solidarity links us together across geography, economics, culture, and power. Its framing allows those with more access to resources to truly and deeply support, work with or aid those who don’t. It’s a practice that enables cooperation, power sharing, and approaching questions and solutions together. Providing solidarity can include sharing resources like knowledge, volunteers, material, and monetary aid, as well as raising awareness. Solidarity protects all of those involved because we are acting together, no matter ones’ station in life. 

Charity, on the other hand, only addresses symptoms caused by unjust systems; it is just a bandage for deeper societal problems. Through charity, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals allow problems to persist by not acting to address root causes. It’s mere service work that must adhere to, and never challenge, systems of power. There is no togetherness between those serving and those being served in solving underlying issues. Charity is a needed bandage in this world filled with inequalities and suffering, but the charity idea and its methods often perpetuate problems in the long term.

Unlike charity, solidarity involves more than simply dressing a wound; it allows all involved to be active participants together no matter who we are. Solidarity enriches and improves lives. It aims to alleviate suffering, but also to change the underlying problems creating it.

Collective Autonomy

Collective autonomy creates the condition for a hybrid of individual desires and self-interests to be integrated and negotiated within larger groups. The concept allows for various communities to network in strategic alliances, but with each retaining their independence, encouraging a framework where individuals, groups, or communities determine their own futures. Like the anarchist emphasis on healthy individuality being enmeshed within collective solidarity, this takes that practice to a more complex level of social organization.

Community Defense 

Community self-defense in any form is not defined by laws but by ethics based in need (to protect) and the principles of anarchy (whether people call it that or not) by which groups of people collectively exercise their power in deciding their futures and determining how to respond to threats without relying on governments. Limits on marginalized groups to determine their futures or collectively protect themselves need to be recognized and corrected. Community defense includes having strong networks of solidarity and care that can be called upon; people looking out for each other and prepared to come to each other’s aid. It’s the ability of a community to mobilize large numbers of people on short notice and is an expression of solidarity. 

Collective Liberation

Collective liberation encourages decentralization and power sharing within groups and communities; to acknowledge, minimize, or eliminate existing hierarchy and power imbalances so that all people involved can directly participate; to allow for personal autonomy within a framework of social equality, and to create social-political movements and communities that share power and resources and are free of any kind of unjust oppression and exploitation. 

Narrative Shift

Each of these political principles and practices include narratives of resistance, telling us stories of impossible revolutions and daring us to dream. Embracing and spreading new narratives can begin to affect a social and cultural shift. It is by talking to each other, holding each other, and developing new practices that the seeds of larger social changes are planted. People understand themselves and their place in the world through stories. By telling new stories we begin to shift larger narratives and impact cultural and social changes, which can eventually result in political change, affecting the power relations in society. This has been happening from the bottom up since the middle of the last century at least and, in a sense, what we are experiencing today is the battles over the stories we tell ourselves about race, gender, work, health, and our place in nature all coming to a head at once.

LIBERATORY EXQUISITENESS

Liberatory mutual aid aims to create openings for people to transform their lives. This should not be seen as mere service work, or simply helping each other, but engaging in ways that challenge us to go deeper in systemic reimagining of infrastructure. Liberatory mutual aid seeks to open paths that allow us to upend the inequalities of the slow disaster of capitalism by localizing and harnessing our power, collective autonomy, and networks near and far. Mutual aid can be liberatory, both personally and within communities, if approached within a revolutionary framework of fundamentally transforming society. Liberatory mutual aid seeks to challenge our investments in dominant narratives. Governments, corporations, NGOS/non-profits will never save us from either sudden and cataclysmic or slow, chronic disasters. 

Humans are not inherently selfish or altruistic, they are both. The majority of people within disasters, if given the chance and despite limited resources, will help each other when it really matters. If we approach each other with the idea of solidarity, instead of charity, we need to acknowledge power differences, seek to subvert them, and come from a place that acknowledges that each of our wellbeing is intertwined.

Already existing solidarity networks are the ground from which liberatory mutual aid and disaster anarchy grow. From there, it begins by asking the people and communities what they need and how they can be supported. If we begin with “leading by asking” communities (like the Zapatistas are fond of encouraging us to do), then we will have a clearer picture of what needs to be done. We do this on a hyper-localized scale: breaking down larger regions into smaller ones, then making connections block by block. Liberatory mutual aid also involves being accountable to those with whom we are engaged; both those doing the work, and the people in the communities where the work is being done.

Liberatory mutual aid is rooted in the idea of dual power as mentioned above. Within this framework, for instance, many people in New Orleans’ Common Ground Collective (CGC) engaged in civil disobedience to disobey unjust and immoral laws: occupying a church to stop foreclosure, arming ourselves against white militias, running “illegal” clinics, while at the same time rebuilding or creating from scratch basic infrastructure: community clinics, women’s centers, neighborhood assemblies, and community gardens. Engaging with these frameworks from the beginning can give people localized collective autonomy and control of their neighborhoods and towns. These were coordinated and networked efforts. 

In the early months after Katrina, the CGC held small free schools across different neighborhoods for kids who were slowly returning home to broken neighborhoods and closed schools. These were small openings. Additionally, CGC volunteers, working with students and faculty, cut the locks on the Martin Luther King public school to gut it, clean it, and get it reopened. Those communities needed that school, despite the fact the city and the school board said it would cost too much and wasn’t worth the effort. MLK School became exemplary once it reopened. CGC and student volunteers broke the law because doing so benefited many. This far outweighed legal restrictions, in short, because it made sense to the needs of those communities. This was direct action in resistance and an expression of dual power.