PALMS UNHOUSED MUTUAL AID
Mutual Aid
is Not
Apolitical
Rejecting the co-optation of revolutionary organizing and abolitionist community care.
Mutual aid is the antithesis of non-profits and reform politics. These solutions benefit the private ownership class, which relies on capitalist governments' constant negotiation between the needs of the masses and landlords, developers, and corporations regarding the extent of their economic subordination of the working class through the commodification of housing.
Mutual aid groups provide survival support with food, supplies, harm reduction, sweep defense, etc. This is not our goal but a necessity due to a government designed to benefit and prioritize the needs of the ruling class through endless opportunities to privatize and to exploit poor folks. These systems cannot be addressed through just voluntaristic distribution. Instead, mutual aid requires both (re)distribution and solidarity work that “hinges upon recognizing our deep interconnectedness."
For many Black and Indigenous organizers, mutual aid is a defining attribute of the non-western collectivist knowledge they bear, to be practiced not merely as a means of survival but as a way of being. Mutual aid groups born during the pandemic are also informed by more recent survival & movement organizing like the Free Schools, the Mutualistas along with the Black Panthers’ and Young Lords’ popular programs of the 1970s.
Mutual aid can certainly address communities’ survival needs, but it also serves another purpose, i.e., to undermine the reification of transactional human relations under capitalism. As the desire for capital returns subsumes many aspects of our lives, the very institutions of care that this system relies upon begin to decay. This point in history also presents an opportunity for new institutions not based in traditional nuclear family nor neoliberal welfare state to emerge.
Political education is a collective way of studying, learning, and engaging for transformational change. For us, political education – learning from and building relationships with folks who know what it’s like to experience state violence – is a key part of revolutionary organizing and mutual aid. Since 2020, we’ve been learning and engaging with our community through teach-ins on sweeps, education on housing issues for others and ourselves, community research projects, and programs for/with our community.
Political education aims to go beyond Los Angeles issues as we understand the interconnections between local, national, and international systems. From the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings against police violence to now where we organize alongside other local mutual aid workers against the genocide and forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza and other nations facing the same under imperialism and Western hegemony.
Mutual aid is collective care. It will take all of us to work towards abolishing all systems of oppression. The ruling class is invested in expanding private ownership, and our survival is trivial to them and the government that serves them. They pay low wages that lead to evictions that lead to more of us becoming unhoused, even though they need us and our labor to gain profit. This fundamental contradiction shows how much power we have as the working class when we unite together –Mutual aid is a force of revolutionary organizing it is which, in turn, must be anti-policing, anti-carceral, anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and fundamentally anti-capital.