Comments I made on social media, that I thought were pretty good, but are going to be buried under all the other comments out there.
Mutual Aid
I’m gonna complain here. Historically, mutual aid societies had a lot of conditions on their support, like paying into the society before getting anything out of it, or being connected to the group by kinship/ethnicity/locality. They were formed by communities that might not be able to get state aid (or state aid didn’t exist).
The nonprofit is a tax category that gives wealthy people who want tax breaks, to donate to, or start, charities. Their charities have strings attached.
Structurally, contemporary mutual aid is private, so it’s a more socially liberal form of charity.
The main form of no-strings-attached aid is state aid, because it’s based on the idea of rights. Contemporary mutual aid is just trying to make a less stingy form of state aid.
There’s no way to avoid engaging the state, and the state should be engaged, to compete against the nonprofits and charities.
Mutual aid projects should not be a turning away from the state, but a spear to poke the state in the correct direction.
Contemporary mutual aid projects must be working together to engage the state, as a whole. For example, the local tenant unions function as counter-capitalist organization within a city, a more progressive force within a reactionary system. They also function as a political base to pass statewide tenant protection laws.
(A kind of darkside “mutual aid” that already exists. For example, the Mello-Roos law allows wealthy areas to self-tax to improve their local infrastructure. This is a kind of “local mutual aid for rich people” that encourages them to be stingy about funding things in other areas. While this is a tax, run by the state, it’s really for groups of local people with a “mutual aid” objective, who engaged the state to create a tax for themselves.)
(State aid is also coercive and can be reactionary, so it’s not without problems. Ultimately, this is an issue of our culture, and our punitive attitudes about poverty, and this extends to our stingyness about education, healthcare, housing, and general welfare.)
See also, Dean Spade’s book, Mutual Aid.
