After Hurricane Sandy hit New York in 2012, the Red Cross refused to coordinate with the volunteer networks that had formed — because those networks were connected to Occupy Wall Street. What filled the gap was mutual aid. And the difference between mutual aid and charity is not semantic. It is structural. It is political.

Kropotkin spent years in Siberia watching animals cooperate and came back with a scientific argument against Social Darwinism. Dean Spade updated it for the twenty-first century. Silvia Federici showed why the conditions for mutual aid were deliberately destroyed. The Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Program fed 20,000 children a day — and J. Edgar Hoover called it the greatest threat to the FBI's efforts to neutralise the Panthers.

The problem is never that there isn't enough. It is that what exists is controlled by people who benefit from scarcity.

Topics: mutual aid, anarchism, solidarity, Dean Spade, Kropotkin, Silvia Federici, Black Panther Party, Occupy Sandy, dual power, charity vs mutual aid.

Further reading: — Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) — Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (2020) — Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (2004) — adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy (2017)

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