Archive for category: #Mutualaid

The Cibcom Collective take aim at domestic realism, arguing that feminist planning of the domestic economy is necessary to the communist project. This is a translation of an article originally published in Jacobin América Latina.

3D model of Xiong´an, China infrastructure prototype designed by Vicente Guallart

For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden of housework and child care can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one of the radical secrets of women’s liberation. Child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized—and all these services should be readily accessible to working-class people.¹

I

Most socialist, anarchist, and radical feminists of the 20th century believed that the definitive suppression of what we now call patriarchy was inseparable from overcoming the private or individualized domestic economy. Today, however, these debates have disappeared from the political map. Helen Ester, drawing on Dolores Hayden and making original use of Mark Fisher’s well-known concept, calls this situation domestic realism. The spatial design of the isolated household in which domestic chores are, in theory, the responsibility of either the adults in the nuclear family or their maids, has become so accepted and commonplace that no one seems able to imagine that we could live any other way.²

Of course, this lack of radicalism is not a problem exclusive to feminism. The socialist tendency is generally in low spirits. Until recently, no one on the left seemed to take seriously anything other than trying to save the remains of a zombie social democracy.³ It is only in recent years that we have witnessed a wave of research on the possibility of a socialist planning of the economy that overcomes the mistakes of the last century.⁴ Markets, money, and property, despite decades of media and academic propaganda bombardment, are once again being questioned.

The intention of this brief article is to try to convey the potentialities that these new debates have for the feminist cause, as well as to revive deeper research on this subject. Cybercommunism suggests that planned economies could give rise to alternative ways of organizing social reproduction, the domestic sphere, and care. After a brief review of the history of similar initiatives, we will try to explain how this can be done. But first, we provide a brief introduction on the continuing relevance of these questions.

II

Why would we want to change the way our homes work? Socialist feminism has long been demystifying our homes and explaining that, in addition to filial love, they contain explicit and implicit hierarchies and dynamics of domination.

Capitalism’s main sources of wealth are ecosystems and the sale and purchase of labor power. But the latter does not appear out of nowhere like mushrooms.⁵ It needs protection, food, attention, and education, i.e. care, in order to develop and recover. These tasks are partly performed today by schools and other institutions, but above all by the private family, which has historically been characterized by a sexual division of labor in which women (mothers, grandmothers, sisters, etc.) were in charge of care and men worked to bring home income.⁶ After the experience of World War II and the entry of women into the world of work, this structure was disrupted but retained its essential form: in addition to their new jobs, women have continued to carry domestic responsibilities, giving rise to the phenomenon of the double burden. They come home from work and begin to cook meals, do the laundry, take care of the rest of the family, clean, and so on. All these activities are undervalued and made invisible. They are rarely given credit, but everyone notices when they are absent.⁷

This situation is bearable for high and middle-income earners, since they can pay for private caregivers, nursing homes, day-care centers, etc., but is relatively untenable for working-class families, where mothers and grandmothers struggle to carry everything forward. The cultural campaigns of the left and other legislative initiatives that equalize maternity and paternity leave have helped to co-implicate men in these tasks, but do not guarantee an effective equitable distribution, and what is worse, they leave intact the problems that individual domestic economies generate at the social level.

What various theorists have rightly called the care crisis is a worldwide social problem that generates incalculable suffering among the population,⁸ and should be among the top issues for communists to address. The private household economy is an extremely inefficient institution in the use of time and resources, incapable of adapting to the demographic restructuring that is taking place. The plummeting birth rate, linked to the vital difficulties in achieving job stability, has led to a generalized aging of the population. Mothers and fathers combine double care hours and increasingly low-paid work schedules that result in chronic stress and intermittent neglect of those in need of care. Unable to afford private care services, children and the elderly suffer forced loneliness with serious psychological consequences. The case of the elderly is particularly worrying, as the deterioration of public pensions makes their situation even more dire.⁹

As we stated at the start of the article, this situation has been denounced by the most radicalized sectors of feminism for more than a century. Authors as disparate in time and space as Aleksandra Kolontái -although she did not consider herself a “feminist”-, Shulamith Firestone or Savvina Chowdhury have theorized on the need to organize the domestic sphere communally; to socialize care.¹⁰ While this would not wipe away the rest of the problems feminism addresses, it would make its cultural campaigns much easier and more effective.

III

Despite today’s limited historical memory, the fact is that there have been multiple attempts to socialize the domestic. As will be seen, they have all been linked to experiences of socialist planning in which the reconfiguration of urban planning and interior architecture has played a key role.

In the 19th century, different Owenist and Fourierist successors of what is now known as utopian socialism designed housing models in which they experimented with different ways of managing housework. Dolores Hayden’s The Grand Domestic Revolution, which recounts the specific U.S. experience with such initiatives, is one of the best works on this topic.¹¹ In her book, Hayden recounts how the “materialist feminists” of this period are the first to propose that the spatial transformation of the home would give rise to a much more equitable and sophisticated type of housing, technologically and aesthetically, than the typical Victorian bourgeois dwelling. The well-equipped laundries and kitchens of hotels and other commercial spaces exemplified for them the possibility of optimizing their work, so they promoted the formation of communities of between fifty and five hundred people in apartment blocks, large hostels, and rural estates.

Plan of the second floor of the common dwelling built by the Oneida Community, Kenwood, New York, 1861-1878.

In these new cooperative enterprises, called phalansteries by the Fourierists, domestic chores were usually rotated, and the members who worked outside the community environment were entitled to part of their salaries. There were somewhere between 2000 and 3000 communes of this style in the USA.¹² Many of them had a religious orientation and still do, while other communes can be attributed to either the hippie movement or were something like “nests” for workers’ cooperatives. In fact, the attempt to create micro-islands of emancipation survives today in the form of so-called “ecovillages,” in which participants attempt to use the so-called low tech for these purposes.¹³ However, the main problem with these approaches is that they lack a broad socio-political projection and err on the side of being the personal life plan of a few activists. Working women would have to wait for the less idealized but more effective experience of “actually existing socialism” to see large-scale initiatives where integral economic planning was directed towards alleviating the double burden.

(a) Oneida Community Mansion, New York. (b) Amana Colonies, Iowa. (c) Hancock Shaker Community, Massachusetts. (d) Twin Oaks Community, Virginia.

In the early Soviet Union, and largely due to the influence of the Zhenotdel (Department of Women Workers and Peasant Women) led by Aleksandra Kolontai and Inessa Armand, women’s liberation would take center stage in Bolshevik politics. To this end, they envisioned a society in which soup kitchens, kindergartens, and public laundries would replace women’s unpaid work in the home. As Wendy Goldman details in Women, State and Revolution, the women of the Zhenotdel set out to reform society through laws that sometimes clashed with material reality, especially with the traditional structures of the Soviet peasantry as, for example, new divorce laws designed for city life did not adequately address the status of peasant property in common.¹⁴

One of the most striking ideas of the time, promoted by Kolontai, was the socialization of care for the young and, in particular, for orphans left behind by the war, known as besprizornost. Kolontai saw the socialization of care as part of her program to constitute a higher form of family, and these orphanages seemed indicated to be the first step. Despite the destruction of the war and the lack of resources, numerous care centers were built, where up to a quarter of a million orphans were sheltered (albeit in far from ideal conditions). With the advent of the New Economic Policy in 1922, many of these centers would be closed due to lack of funds and then their real impact would be seen: without these centers, many mothers could not care for their children and work at the same time. Married women stayed at home, reintroducing dependence on their husbands’ wages. And many single mothers or war widows would be forced to abandon their children to the streets because they could not combine domestic and work duties.

In 1930, the Zhenotdel would be abolished, as the feminist question was (erroneously) categorized as solved by considering that the elimination of private property, combined with the new institutions of the state, had solved the problems faced by women. Although women’s rights would suffer another setback with the entry into force of the family code in 1936, Soviet “welfare state” measures, later extended to other socialist bloc countries, would ease women’s lives and enable their incorporation into the workplace by alleviating the double burden. However, as Kristen Ghodsee writes in Second World, Second Sex, sexist ideas would not go away, or be culturally challenged. Women were still expected to do the housework in socialist countries, and the feminist question would be of little importance in almost all the bloc countries except Bulgaria, where there was a mass women’s organization that was relatively independent of the communist party and published a newspaper discussing women’s concerns.¹⁵

In parallel, the People’s Republic of China pursued its own path. During the first Maoist period, the collectivization of social reproduction was taken to extremes that were not replicated in other countries, especially in the agricultural communes. One of the objectives of commune construction was the liberation of women from domestic work, and to this end, many of the tasks performed by women, such as education, childcare, and food preparation and distribution, became communal. This last measure was made possible by the opening of around 2.6 million communal dining halls, where people could generally come and eat whatever they wanted. This utopian experiment did not survive long, and sadly the canteens are now known as a cause of the famine of 1958-9. This is mainly because food distribution was centralized in the hands of few people, and faulty implementation and management combined with poor harvests in an already poor and starving country exacerbated the bad situation that existed during the Great Leap Forward. Despite Mao’s insistence, the communal kitchens would be dismantled in the early 1960s.¹⁶

A dining room of the popular communes.

However, many institutions which alleviate the burden of social reproduction, mostly borne by women, from this period would survive to later days. During the Cultural Revolution, a second utopian period would give renewed impetus to collectivist measures, expanding public health care in a country where it was practically nonexistent, although the major focus of this period was to break down the cultural barriers that tied women to domestic work and prevented them from performing many jobs. To this end, measures were taken such as enacting maternity and opening many schools.¹⁷ With the reforms of Deng Xiaoping many of these gains would be reversed at the end of the seventies.¹⁸

Workers preparing food at a Chinese commune.

IV

Even though the aforementioned experiences represented notable advances in the situation of women, they presented serious limitations and drawbacks. The utopians’ islands of socialism experimented with forms of integral economic planning from which much can be learned, but they fell into the oblivion of their own isolation. The USSR’s efforts to develop public services for women were commendable, and while they made life much easier for women than for their Western counterparts, they did not ensure an effective sharing of domestic tasks. The agricultural communes of Maoist China tried to attack the root of these problems in a much more radical way, but in their attempt they overreached and generated forms of life that were perhaps too intrusive and not compatible with the demands of privacy which we today understand as basic.

Nevertheless, intermediate paths aim to bring the best of both worlds. In 1993, Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell published Towards a New Socialism, a systematic work in which they set out the technical and institutional foundations of a socialist planning of the economy updated by the new digital technologies.¹⁹ In chapter 12, entitled “The Commune,” they argue that cyber-socialism and feminism could converge in the revolutionary struggle because of the possibilities that the planned economy offers for the massive proliferation of urban communes. What are these urban communes and why should they be of interest to the feminist cause?

Urban communes are architectural structures that combine the socialization of household chores through dining rooms, laundries, nurseries, and communal cleaning services, etc. with apartments and individual rooms in which families and their members have all the privacy they need. There are several potentialities within them.

In the first place, by assigning tasks to a small group of people, professionalizing them or rotating them among the members of the community, we ensure a mortal blow to the sexual division of labor, which discriminates against women. In other words, by guaranteeing that most of the tasks such as cleaning and cooking are carried out by communal agents who meet the community’s criteria, we ensure that this work does not end up falling to our mothers and grandmothers.

Second, we enjoy the benefits of economies of scale. It is much more efficient in terms of time and resources for one person to cook for a hundred people than for each of those hundred to cook for themselves. Also, large scales allow for the application of scientific and technological criteria more easily. By socializing the menu, for example, we can ensure that the members of the commune have access to a balanced diet, as well as invest in better facilities that they could not afford individually. It may seem that this would reduce everyone’s freedom of choice, but the key to this is that each urban commune would decide for itself how to implement public recommendations for sanitation and usability. Going back to the cooking example, there are hundreds of thousands of possible recipes that could be valid and there is no reason not to offer several options on the same day.

Children and the elderly would benefit from the communal space even with the falling birth rate, since, by optimizing the management of tasks, more time would be available to care for them, and what is more important: by generating communal spaces for leisure and supervision, we ensure a full social net, from the cradle to the grave, of the entire neighborhood, thus developing much closer relationships.

It is possible that, even after having explained the above, one thinks that urban communes will be apartments in which three or four families live in overcrowded conditions. To get an idea of what this would imply, it might be interesting to recall the experience of Red Vienna between 1919 and 1934, despite all its limitations.

Karl-Marx Hof seen from above.

In Principles of Communism, Friedrich Engels argued that the proletarian revolution should have among its priorities the “construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.”²⁰ The government of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party did not succeed in abolishing the distinction between town and country, but it built the closest thing to workers’ palaces that ever existed; palaces for women workers would be more correct. Huge buildings such as the Karl-Marx-Hof house some 1300 individual dwellings which have access to communal services ranging from laundries and toilets to pharmacies.²¹ In all of these, “the utmost attention is paid to common services, to the liberation of women from domestic slavery.”²²

3D plan of the Karl-Marx Hof.

An indication of the potential that these institutions have for the care crisis is that they are still on the horizon of initiatives such as feminist urbanism,²³ which aims to generate these community spaces even within the bourgeois state. But in the context of market economies, where only monetarily profitable initiatives are rewarded, it finds only limitations. It seems no coincidence that the only places where similar projects are being carried out are Venezuela and, particularly, today’s China, where the public sector continues to have considerable weight in the economy.²⁴ The new capsule neighborhoods in regions such as Xiong’an bear striking similarities to the above.²⁵ On the other hand, the recent “Integrated Community Development Plan” aims to encourage regional administrations to promote the consolidation of integrated communities based on the existing urban fabric. The idea is to develop strategically located communal services within a ten-minute walking distance that are affordable and allow for communal living.²⁶

Prototype plan of a neighborhood in the new urban area of Xiong’an.

Nevertheless, an essential caveat of feminist urbanism must be emphasized: as authors such as Liisa Horelli explain, the socialization of reproductive work does not automatically dissolve the sexual division of labor. Therefore, cultural campaigns are necessary to prevent communal care services from being performed mainly by women, as well as to make them visible and dignified.²⁷

V

In short, we are talking about an extremely sensitive subject that requires reflection on very intimate aspects of the social psychology of our world. When these alternatives and their history are discussed today, it is common to observe a certain suspicion that leads to rejecting them outright as soon as one becomes aware of any of their problems. However, it is necessary to emphasize something that is indisputable: even though these proposals were far from perfect, the situation of women worsened -very much- when they were absent. Therefore, it seems reasonable to reflect on how we could learn from their successes, while trying not to repeat their mistakes.

Urban communes should not be taken as the definitive solution to the problems mentioned, but as an attempt to reopen the debate on these issues and combat domestic realism. If socialism intends to return to being a mass movement it must find ways to radicalize the current social movements among which feminism cannot be ignored. To do this effectively, the discourse cannot be framed as a mere attack on the limits of a hegemonic feminism, but as the need to remember what revolution, economic planning and true democracy have to offer to half the world’s population.

We need a socialist and feminist urbanism. Socialist, insofar as it is capable of mobilizing time and resources in a planned manner for multidimensional objectives that go beyond profitability, but also productivity,²⁸ and feminist, insofar as it is conscious of and committed to effectively overcoming the sexual division of labor in the communal spaces generated.

The post Socializing Care: Against Domestic Realism appeared first on Cosmonaut.

Women are joining forces under one roof, using the age-old power of sisterhood to split the household bills and raise their children.

Kali and his fellow members of Cooperation Jackson are creating a model for how the rest of us might be able to achieve peace on and with Earth.

The Unsung Cooperative Hero Award & Ella Jo Baker

Vernon interviews Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., Professor at John Jay College, and Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, Co Editor at Grassroots Economic Organizing. Both are also economic social justice advocates. Vernon and his guests will discuss the Unsung Cooperative Hero Award, and its first recipient Ella Jo Baker.

On 20 October 2012, during the last council of ministers of the Venezuelan government attended by Hugo Chávez Frías, the then president pronounced what went down in history as the golpe de timón, the “change of direction” of the Bolivarian revolution’s policy towards socialism. In his speech at the Miraflores Palace, Chávez called for self-criticism and higher efficiency of state management, not simply by increasing the financial resources and institutional power of the ministries, but by strengthening people’s power through the comunas (communes).

The Bolivarian revolution was not to be limited to the seizure of the bourgeois state and the replacement of one ruling class with another. At the center of the process was always the aspiration to lead the transformation to a Communal State in which the communes form the political and economic basis of the future socialist society and in which the organized people build the conditions to meet their own needs. Chávez concluded his speech with the slogan “commune or nothing”—either the revolution invests in people’s self-organization and self-government, or the revolution is betrayed.

The problem Chávez posed in his last speech to the council of ministers refers to one of the central problems of any revolutionary movement, namely the relationship between the party, government, and organized people in the process of building socialism. Based on a meticulous study of revolutionary experiences in history, Chávez asked himself how to build the political process of socialism beyond the action of the state, and directly with the people.

Chávez’s slogan from 10 years ago has in the meantime grown and turned into concrete projects that the organized Venezuelan people continue to protect using all means necessary as they advance along the path of the socialist revolution.

Strengthening the popular base of the Bolivarian revolution

Beyond the rhetoric of the Western media, the Venezuelan people still constitute the key actors in the Bolivarian revolution. For many, the communes serve as a primary instrument for building socialism. The Ministry of Popular Power for the Communes and Social Movements, led by Jorge Arreaza, has registered 3,600 communes. However, according to Ángel Prado, one of the founders of the El Maizal commune in the state of Lara and a member of the national leadership of the Union Comunera, “There are only about 500 communes really active throughout the country.” In 2021, Prado was also elected mayor of Simón Planas for the PSUV, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela founded by Chávez in 2007.

On March 4 and 5 of 2022, some 60 communes from the five regions of Venezuela founded the Union Comunera in a first congress held in the El Maizal commune. The Union Comunera is a kind of trade union of the communes, the result of an organizational process started years ago. Today, it occupies a decisive role in the daily life of the communes: it coordinates and acts as a multiplier of the communes’ experiences accumulated over the last 15 years, elaborates and disseminates—internally and externally—the organization’s political line, and builds political, ideological and technical training programs according to the needs in the territories. “The Union Comunera was an important step forward in stabilizing the idea of communes in the country,” Prado adds.

El Maizal: strengthening territorial agricultural production

The El Maizal commune is one of the most dynamic communal experiences in the country. Established on March 5, 2009, it encompasses a territory of 2,300 hectares between the two states of Lara and Portugesa in the west of the country and more than 3,500 families with a total of 14,320 people. This is a territory that before the start of the Bolivarian revolution was abandoned by public institutions and where people lived in absolute poverty with precarious housing and an agricultural production that was barely enough for their own consumption. Surplus products were bought by intermediary traders who paid them a paltry price. This reproduced the subordination of direct producers to the arbitrariness of middlemen, large landowners, and multinational corporations.

With the rise of Chavismo, the situation changed radically. “In 2009, the Chávez government enlarged the highway connecting Caracas with the West. The Comandante visited the construction site and stopped at the municipality of Sarare where he visited us. This meeting was decisive for the development of our communes and thus the whole territory,” says José Luis Sifontes, one of the PSUV’s provincial commune policy coordinators. “From 2009, we started to occupy abandoned land and greenhouses and set up communal production units that were then regularized by the government. We have also built houses for about 300 families and school facilities for the whole territory. The funding came from the Great Housing Mission and the Ministry of People’s Power for Education, but we did the work ourselves.”

The beginnings of the El Maizal commune are exemplary for the dialectic between the socialist government and the people’s power of the communes. Driven by Chávez’s electoral victory and the democratization of the country’s political and economic structures, the self-organized people acted on the territory, creating the conditions to meet their needs autonomously. The Chavista government, in turn, provides support where the communes need it, respecting the forms of territorial self-government. This is also the framework that can help one understand the regularization of occupied land, the financing of housing and schools and many other government projects in the territories. The government therefore does not simply control its citizens with policies from above, but provides the framework in which the people expand their participation from below. The commune activists insist, however, that building self-government is not simply a (precarious) balancing act between public institutions and popular power, but the permanent quest for total autonomy in the territories through communes.

Food sovereignty and internationalist solidarity

Today, 14 years after the foundation of El Maizal commune, around 120 direct producers run 14 food production units: white and yellow maize, beef and pork, eggs, milk and cheese, coffee and various vegetables. In addition, a company created in 2011 manages the distribution of gas throughout the commune. Thanks to this collective management of the production and distribution of basic necessities, the commune largely succeeds in guaranteeing food sovereignty, which the activists describe as a fundamental weapon against the sanctions imposed by the United States, which, especially during the years 2015 and 2021, caused severe consequences among the Venezuelan population.

A second fundamental weapon against the political and economic isolation produced by US imperialism is international solidarity. The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement of Brazil (MST) has sent its members to be part of its internationalist brigade in Venezuela since 2005. Their function is summed up in their slogan technicalize knowledge, elevate consciousness. In the different areas of agricultural production in the country, the MST supports producers thanks to the experience and knowledge accumulated over the last 40 years of occupying land, building camps all over Brazil, and developing sustainable agriculture against agribusiness that exploits workers and destroys territories.

In the El Maizal commune, specifically, the internationalist brigade has helped run the Che Guevara Agricultural School for three years. Thanks to the permanent presence of the MST, the school offers technical, but also political and ideological courses in which several dozen young people from the area can perfect their learning of agricultural techniques and elaborate the deeper meaning of territorial production in the construction of socialism. This school does not replace the public school, but adds to it.

March 5 socialist commune: multiplying popular self-organization

If El Maizal represents the ideal example of an agricultural commune, the Eternal Commander March 5 socialist commune is one of the most advanced urban communes in terms of territorial rootedness. Located in the El Valle neighborhood, it covers a hill of over 11 hectares of the city, brings together some 6,000 inhabitants and has 19 socially-owned production units. This is an area where problems existed before the revolution and continue to exist today: many homes do not have running water, electricity is precarious, to reach the highest homes one has to climb hundreds of stairs without the possibility of using public transport.

The young militants active in the barrio are mostly organized in the Left Cultural Front (FCI). In the neighborhood that approaches the main street Av. Intercomunal de El Valle, two militants, Gabriela and Ericsson, welcome me and tell me about their journey. “The FCI was born in 2010/2011 as a student movement. We came into contact with the world of communes initially thanks to El Maizal began to work on political-ideological training. Then, in the years 2017/2018, we built brigades that went across the country to bring together the experiences of the communes. From there the idea of the Union Comunera was born.”

Communes are not only political-organizational structures in a given territory, but they should create their own economic-productive base. In the urban context, socially-owned enterprises cannot produce food like in rural communes, but they are active in the service and distribution sector, often from shops, which play a fundamental role in the neighborhood. Gabriela explains: “Here we sell products from the other communes, such as coffee, panela, cocoa, products from the Andean areas. This economic exchange constitutes the financial base of the communes. But that is not all, because the construction of a network of producers and territories has a political and educational purpose. By doing this, we strengthen the role of the communes and insist on the centrality of organization in the revolutionary process.”

At least two other projects of the March 5 Commune deserve attention. The first is a recycling system that on the one hand helps to build sustainable garbage collection, and on the other provides jobs for people living in the area. Together with the People’s Power Ministry for Ecosocialism, a recycling training school has also been opened where people can learn work techniques – another example of the government-people’s power dialectic with the aim of strengthening the people’s way to socialism. This “moral economy” is an essential element in the formation of a workers’ consciousness that is not simply based on exchange value, but on concepts such as self-organization, mutualism, and sustainability.

An example of feminist self-organization

The second area of political work is called La Ruta de las Flores. It is a feminist communal policy that offers answers to the needs of women, children and adolescents in the area. I met Emily, 24 years old and also a militant of the FCI, in the Communal Technical House Tejiendonos Mujeres, a feminist meeting center of the March 5 Commune. She explains to me that their organization does not simply stop at the practical issues of feminist intervention such as sex education, campaigns against gender violence, network of psychologists supporting women and children, etc. They are working on drafting a text of theoretical orientation that seeks to establish a communal feminist line that combines gender and class contradictions. “We are not against men, we don’t want half the cake or to overturn gender relations, we don’t want to be either leaders or oppressed. What we want is to change the recipe of the cake, we want another way of relating on all levels,” Emily told me.

Capital is not simply an economic relationship between workers and bosses, but a relationship that touches every social sphere, even outside the world of work. Socialism therefore cannot be limited to changing economic property relations, socialism is also a cultural and moral issue. The Ruta de las Flores is an example that highlights the moral significance of the communes as organizational instruments that aim to permanently create new social relations. Started in the March 5 Commune, this feminist project now exists in four other communes in the states of Sucre, Lara, Miranda and Táchira.

Independence, communes, and socialism

Ten years after the death of Hugo Chávez, political participation of the people, self-organization, and self-government from below continue to constitute the soul, body and heart of Chavismo. The construction of socialism, however, cannot be limited to local activism. José Luis Sinfontis recalls how Chávez also insisted on this: “Before his death, Comandante Chávez explained it precisely in one of his speeches: those who stop at the local cannot build socialism; localism is counter-revolutionary.”

The other slogan of the communes, “independence, commune and socialism,” sums up this internationalist perspective. Independence: from foreign interference, especially US imperialism, but also from multinationals and the national bourgeoisie with special interests (large landowners, private investors etc.). This independence also means food, political, and economic sovereignty. Commune: “commune or nothing”, a revolutionary process that is not top-down, with the belief that the communes can serve as a tool against the bureaucratization of the party and government. Socialism: acting local is not enough, communes without clear structures, without a government, and without socialist policies are reduced to petty-bourgeois localism.

The militants in the different territories of the country fight for the communes, as they attempt to transform Venezuela into a communal, socialist state.

The post The advance of the commune in Venezuela appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

The first in a series looking critically at mutual aid programs that exploded following the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd rebellion. Originally posted to Notes on Mutual Aid.

Zine PDF For Printing HERE

In Spring of 2022 we were rejected by our anonymous friends at PugetSoundAnarchists.org. The site admins declined to publish a report-back submitted by a long-running project working with local mutual aid groups. They reasoned that the project in question wasn’t really mutual aid and thus not relevant to anarchism. In true anarchist fashion, the only solution that came to our minds was to write thousands of words telling them why they’re wrong…and why we were also a bit wrong.

This project comes out of our frustrations and hopes working with local mutual aid and anarchist projects for some years. The recent proliferation of groups taking the name “mutual aid” has led to an explosion of new and valuable organizing. But it has also spurred confusion over what exactly mutual aid is, and how its radical potential profoundly differs from charity. This zine is the first in a series that will explore and critique the budding movement of mutual aid groups around the Pacific Northwest. Our own experiences, observations, and research are synthesized with accounts gained from networking with other groups near and far.

Following this zine’s exploration of mutual aid’s history and theory, the next zine will explore the various enemies and allies mutual aid crews may encounter. A collection of helpful tips, tricks, and firsthand knowledge will follow. The final entry will provide more detail on various mutual aid groups as well as thoughts and hopes for future organizing. We hope it will provide both practical information and food for thought.

What Is Mutual Aid?

The past three years have seen an explosion of self-described mutual aid groups. The first wave formed in the early days of the Covid-19 Pandemic as grassroots organizers sought to build community support amid the cascading crisis of shutdowns, layoffs, and lockdowns. Many of these groups looked to Mutual Aid Disaster Relief networks established during recent natural disasters for inspiration. The George Floyd Rebellion sparked the next wave; as action in the streets slowed, many desired to stay active and saw need in every direction.In Seattle and many other towns, local government eased off everyday repression of unhoused folks during the early pandemic but restarted with a vengeance as protests died down. Much of this new wave of mutual aid sought to support these unhoused neighbors.

While some mutual aid projects struggled to build long-term activity, particularly in the first wave, others have carried out excellent work for several years at this point. Some of these groups are still creating new ideas and dynamics or growing in scope. There was a lot of initial energy and innovation, but we have also seen a lot of settling into patterns accompanied by burnout.

Feeding the kids with Tacoma Mutual Aid Collective at McCarver Elementary until noon or until we run out. pic.twitter.com/sRAkfE5Wcg

— J. (@GritCityMissfit) March 21, 2020

Early in the Pandemic it felt like the term “mutual aid” was on everybody’s tongue. Talking heads were very successful in getting the basic definition out there, but this definition frequently lacked the context for work being done in the streets and was removed from a broader revolutionary analysis. Taking a different approach, there were a ton of ‘how-to’ zines that were super helpful in getting infrastructure up and running but lacked a framework for thinking bigger. Many things have been called mutual aid, from e-spanging to public feeds. We have to consider deeper dynamics at play and take an honest accounting of our capacities.

Distros can meet daily needs in a crisis, but what happens when the crisis is every day? When hard-built relationships are constantly under attack as people are kicked from one curb to the next? Endless crisis response becomes unsustainable.

Where do we go from here? One starting point is rethinking our conception of mutual aid. How do we take this beautiful idea and apply it to our current landscape?

A whole lot of people have given definitions of mutual aid. A helpful working definition is that mutual aid encompasses the exchange of goods or resources with the expectation that the entire community will benefit. A resource can be thought of broadly, moving beyond material goods into things like physical spaces, legal support, or sharing time or knowledge. It’s about more than just giving things away, but rather seeks to reorient social relationships around interdependence – a world where we can freely rely on each other.

We keep these ideas of free association, of community control in our hearts and want to build towards them. But we live in a flawed and broken place that comes with baggage, and we understand why many people feel unable to just directly live their ideals. We have to take the real world into account. We need our hopes and ideals as well as an understanding of the current political structures to move forward. Survival is important but we need more. Using mutual aid as a compass can help us keep on the right track through the constant struggles of everyday work.

Century-old texts and decades-old struggles provide profound inspiration and warnings of pitfalls. Mutual aid has a privileged place in anarchist discourse in-part due to the eponymous 1902 work by Peter Kropotkin. He argued that societies and species survived and prospered because their members cooperated with one another, as opposed to the contemporary social Darwinist obsession with competition.

Mutual aid societies for workers once provided a place to find support in hard times as well as a network for education and sociality. Many such organizations laid the foundation for later labor unions; modern unions with a strong, fighting culture almost invariably practice a culture of everyday mutual support for their members beyond the job site. On a broader level, many powerful movements seeking to liberate an oppressed community develop mutual aid dynamics among participants. Radically breaking from hierarchical control over support and resources is itself an act that builds and sustains resistance to capitalist, colonial, or patriarchal domination.

A new interview with the Tacoma Mutual Aid Collective about why we need solidarity not charity and how we will only survive the pandemic with #MutualAid https://t.co/mdmGtolUGt pic.twitter.com/pWx1qUcb5N

— Shane Burley (@shane_burley1) March 30, 2020

Kropotkin and other old white radicals did not invent mutual aid from thin air, instead frequently drawing on and at times appropriating community dynamics they witnessed in other societies. One practice Kropotkin cited based on his 1897 visit to the region is a set of related traditions by Coast Salish and neighboring peoples’ often known as Potlatch, or in Lushootseed speaking communities as Sgwigwi. Local communities frequently held great events where accumulated wealth was distributed to all; struggling community members got the support they needed while friendly relations were maintained with neighboring towns. In the case of Potlatch, Kropotkin’s status as an outside observer meant that his assumptions suffered de-contextualization. Even as the bulk of community material wealth was distributed, Potlatches were also a means of reinforcing social hierarchies. Those who had the most to give were expected to give the most, but in return gained prestige as leading figures in the community. Lacking this understanding, Kropotkin viewed the Potlatch as a pre-capitalist form of communism, the principle of an egalitarian society in which resources flowed “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.”

It should also be noted that while Kropotkin and his contemporaries ostensibly drew on local indigenous traditions, mutual aid societies and cooperative colonies founded by white settler radicals frequently fought to take land and resources from these same indigenous groups. While it can be valuable to take inspiration from many sources, it is important to root our conception of mutual aid in our own context rather than romanticizing other cultures or the past.

Today we find ourselves trying to influence our communities in the context of gentrification, continuous war, and environmental catastrophe, but also amid revolt from below across the globe. Anarchism in the US is in a weird place, many of our ideas and practices have gained a certain level of acceptance in the last few years, but some of these ideas have become watered down. Practices are repeated even when divorced from their original context. If we want to build our communities and movements to meet the challenges we are facing we will need to learn from each other, learn from our past, and be critical about our own projects and the projects that we encounter. We should take ourselves seriously and be honest about the direction we are headed.

We hope to provide useful tools. We hope people read this piece critically and use it to start conversations. Contexts are different, not just in terms of physical space but involving different people who have their own experiences. But tools are meant to be used and any bare strategy or tool-kit can be used by anyone. Police departments use “mutual aid” to support one another when they would otherwise be overwhelmed. Many fascist groups do community meals (with a very different idea of community from our own); some even have squats, fight the police and engage in other forms of activism that would more commonly be associated with anarchists. It is very important that we don’t just follow a form, but that we are intentional and building from a deeper analysis.

Doing a little distro and helping people survive is great, but if we are trying to build something bigger, we also have to incorporate it into a broader set of practices. Our communities and our friends are under constant attack and we need to do more than just respond. We must defend the gains that we make from the state, reactionary violence, and liberal co-option, but we have to take a more holistic approach. This can and should look a lot of different ways. We must build strategies not just for defense, but for building power with the people and communities we’ve built trust with.

A Local History of Survival and Struggle

Intra-community liberation movements blossomed in the late 1960s. Most famous were the Black Panthers, whose community-oriented “Survival Programs” were as vital to their legacy as their better-known armed resistance to white supremacy. Seattle’s Panthers created clinics, medical testing, jail visitation, and free breakfast programs for the Black community to be a “survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft… to sustain himself until he can get out of that situation.” “Survival pending revolution” was both an organizing tool and a concrete expression of Panther politics. Alongside these formal programs, the Panther’s developed a culture of supporting community members in need. Local Panther Captain Aaron Dixon recalled how the local Panther headquarters often served as an informal safe-house and shelter for sex workers and other folks on the streets.

The Panthers and the Black Power movement profoundly influenced movements to liberate other marginalized communities. Indigenous peoples around the region reclaimed fishing waters at sites like Frank’s Landing and Lake Washington, and transformed occupied abandoned government facilities into community centers. Chicano activists took over an abandoned Seattle school that still serves as the centerpiece for a community center and low-income housing. Queer activists established networks of safe-houses and shelters for those forced to live rough while demanding visibility and respect. Many siloed away in asylums and state mental institutions organized to end institutionalization and provide real support as integrated members of the community.

The Neoliberal counterattack of the early 1970s was launched as the initial momentum of these movements slowed and internal conflicts emerged, often around a lack of intersectional awareness towards the needs of the most marginalized within particular communities. The only limited concessions that saw the light of day were those that could be framed through an economic logic of slashing state expenses while simultaneously increasing control over everyday life.

Widespread programs of “urban renewal” were initiated. Trendy apartments and galleries replaced the numerous single-residence-occupancy hotels that had long been a cheap place for anyone to spend the night in Pioneer Square, Belltown, Chinatown, and other neighborhoods. Seattle’s defacto residential segregation laid the basis for new gentrification. Simultaneously, state investments in public or social housing plummeted. Governments saw an opportunity to cut budgets and appease some disability liberation advocates by shuttering mental hospitals, but provided minimal support to the hundreds of thousands no longer committed.

With this came a massive expansion of “nonprofits” and “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGOs) receiving state support; a never-ending, accountability-obscuring shell-game. Many of the most militant fighters for liberation were locked up or killed. Those willing to compromise with power received cushy grants and connections in return for “managing” but never truly solving the problems plaguing their communities.The husks of many former survival programs lingered, stripped of their connection to liberatory struggles driven further underground. Survival alone was on the agenda, revolution left out in the cold.

Starting in the 1980s, the deadly power of this malicious neglect reared its ugly head as the AIDS and Narcotic epidemics overlapped with the state’s War on Drugs. The Reagan administrations’ willful misinformation and intensified policing bordered on genocide. Grassroots mobilization became necessary simply to survive. What is now called “Harm Reduction” developed as organic practices of survival and care by folks “living, working, and dying on the streets.”

Drug users, radical queers, rogue healthcare workers, and anarchistic activists recognized the particular danger of needle-sharing in spreading HIV. They began exchanging clean needles acquired through a variety of creative means with anyone who needed them. The first needle exchanges in the United States emerged in 1988. Queer activists in Seattle’s ACT-UP chapter and Dave Purchase in Tacoma initially launched underground exchanges, setting up tables with supplies where they knew they could find fellow users. Not long after queer radicals in Bremerton followed suit; the Ostrich Bay Needle Exchange started out of an old gay communist’s garage. Ostrich Bay went mobile when the city declared the garage-exchange a public nuisance, but the same garage still stores harm reduction supplies over three decades later.

Harm Reduction sees drugs as an inescapable fact, not a moral issue. It seeks to reduce the harm associated with use. But the tensions at play since Harm Reduction’s days of illegality are illustrated by asking “whose harm?” Answers that are focused on the individual user, or a marginalized community one is a part of, draw easy parallels between Harm Reduction and older Panther Survival Programs. Many early developers of Harm Reduction practices saw their activities in this very light. Their efforts were oriented towards deeper social roots of harm; folks needed to survive to be able to fight.

Yet other answers were just as (if not more) focused on abstract harm to “the social order.” From this perspective, Harm Reduction could become a new logic of governing and control. The inevitable byproducts of a toxic system must be managed so the system can keep limping along. A lone public health officer may not have shared the anarchist politics of a needle exchange they clandestinely supported, but no one else was working to reduce the deadly epidemics before their eyes. As these efforts gained traction and broader support, however, a power imbalance emerged. Moonlighting-professionals were best placed to receive a new wave of grants and often backdoor state sanction. This spurred a de-politicization of the Harm Reduction movement still underway. Growing nonprofits like Seattle’s Downtown Emergency Services Center (DESC) began to embrace “Harm Reduction” in this context by the 1990s.

The Mutual aid group @TheWitchesPDX , who have been providing water and snacks to BLM protesters in Portland, have arrived in Mulino to drop off supplies to firefighters pic.twitter.com/QWaj9Pct7S

— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) September 11, 2020

Many “living, working, and dying on the streets” were not content to remain on the streets. As countless were displaced and evicted every year, urban governments began harsh crackdowns. “Sweeps” was a racially-charged term before the 1980s; it described lily-white police forces rolling through parks in black and brown neighborhoods to arrest and assault anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way, usually under the guise of fighting drugs, gambling, and sex-work. As more folks of all demographics (though always disproportionately BIPOC and/or Queer folks) ended up on the street, they banded together for their mutual protection. People squatted, set up encampments, and built shacks in greenbelts and under overpasses. By the late ‘80s, major urban police departments began launching “Sweeps” against encampments that typically used the same excuses as older racist sweeps. People’s belongings were destroyed and stolen. Those not arrested had to find somewhere else to start over.

In many cities across the United States, homeless and formerly homeless folks organized the National Union of the Homeless. The movement started in 1984 in Philadelphia. People came together to open their first survival project, a shelter run by homeless folks themselves. In 1989 a “take off the boards” campaign coordinated takeovers of vacant homes in 73 cities. Massive public housing complexes abandoned by neoliberal policy were also occupied. By the early 1990s there were full-fledged Union chapters in twenty cities. Unfortunately, a combination of co-option and addiction took its tool on the organization. Some successful projects received major government grants and turned away from the more radical roots of the organization. Meanwhile, many of the most visible street-level organizers struggled to keep in touch amid the exploding crack epidemic. Seattle never had a full chapter of the Union, but people on the streets led a similar movement locally.

In Summer 1990, Seattle hosted the “Goodwill Games.” Thousands of athletes, tourists, and journalists from 54 countries poured in. The city established a “Goodwill Games Crime Suppression Task Force.” County sheriffs and police from Seattle, Tacoma, Kennewick and Spokane ran nightly raids and “street sweeps” with the usual excuses. An event allegedly fostering global “Goodwill” had none to share with homeless folks, an all-too-familiar pattern for high-profile global events.

A group of current and formerly homeless folks organized together as SHARE (Seattle Housing and Resource Effort) and set up a “Goodwill Gathering” in Myrtle Edwards Park for those displaced by the ongoing sweeps. The connections made there persisted. By November SHARE squatted the mudflats south of the Kingdome to establish Tent City 1, a democratically self-managed camp soon home to 166 people. Negotiations with the city won them a handful of temporary buildings. When these agreements expired, SHARE refused to leave until offered permanent accommodations. The Aloha Inn was established as a result, but not without strings attached: the city required SHARE to have a “fiscal sponsor” to oversee grants and large facilities. The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) was established as a separate nonprofit from the grassroots, democratically-run SHARE.

Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, SHARE continued establishing non-permitted, self-managed encampments. The city’s concessions included grants to cover facilities and eventually city-sanction for some tent cities. SHARE annually hosted camp-out protests outside of City Hall in collaboration with Real Change. The largest in 2008 forced the city to implement its current “72 Hour Rule” for clearing encampments, previously (and often still) carried out with no notice. It also saw the first local use of the slogan “Stop the Sweeps.”

But SHARE’s relationship with LIHI was a double-edged sword that divided the struggle for survival from that for systemic change. State support in the 70s helped drive the wedge between formalized Survival Programs and their revolution-minded initiators. Now an emerging Homeless Nonprofit Industrial Complex offered stable if not lucrative careers in ‘managing’ homelessness without solving it. Eventually even some long-term SHARE members made a career out of their efforts. They increasingly ran the show outside the ostensible democratic frameworks on the ground. LIHI, meanwhile, maneuvered with the city to undermine these democratic camps entirely in favor of their own management structures.

These conflicts have only sharpened over the past decade. Tech capital floods into the region, leaving the rest of us struggling to keep our heads above the water. All the while, the people living, working, and dying on the streets keep fighting for their survival. Campers established a series of squatted, collectively-run encampments called ‘Nicklesvilles’ in the late 2000s into the 2010s. Since a group of activists began showing up regularly at the city’s sweeps in 2016, the demand to Stop the Sweeps has grown particularly poignant. A large occupation at City Hall in 2017 brought this call to wider attention, but messy coalition organizing disrupted momentum. Groups like Socialist Alternative co-opted and transformed the original demand (Stop Sweeps, period) into what later became the failed Amazon Tax. As the political opportunists lost interest, though, hard work continued.

Homeless folks have also played an essential, and all-too-often overlooked role in recent social uprisings. The Seattle Police murder of homeless Nuu-chah-nulth woodcarver John T. Williams sparked significant unrest in 2010. The 2011-12 Occupy movement would have been impossible without homeless people forming the backbone of its occupations. The sustained occupation on Capitol Hill surrounding SPD’s East Precinct during the 2020 George Floyd Uprising would have been similarly impossible without hundreds of homeless comrades. Many of them remained in the neighborhood long after the CHAZ/CHOP was officially cleared.

The Present Wave

The groundwork for the current proliferation of autonomous mutual aid projects was laid in the years before the 2020 pandemic and protests. Stop the Sweeps helped facilitate a growing network of folks providing everyday support, while testing out ways to support residents facing imminent sweeps. Autonomous outreach and distro collectives were formed in Tacoma and a handful of Seattle neighborhoods like SODO. Community members in Ravenna and the Rainier Valley began holding weekly popup kitchens, joining long-running projects like Seattle Food Not Bombs. Small networks emerged to collect and distribute seasonal supplies like cold weather and smoke-protective gear. Those organizing around smoke-season in particular looked to the long-running efforts of Mutual Aid Disaster Relief providing community support amid crisis. These efforts provided not just a blueprint but also formative experience for many that started mutual aid groups since 2020.

The messy stew of the early Covid-19 Pandemic disrupted and transformed preexisting social and political networks. Millions were out of work, millions more got a pat on the back and an “essential worker” sticker as compensation for awful working conditions. Almost paradoxically, some poor folks temporarily had more disposable income then they’d ever had. Everyone was impacted by lockdowns and closures. With the world seemingly falling apart, survival was high on everyone’s mind. “Mutual aid” became an explosive buzzword on all sorts

of new tongues.

In Seattle an eclectic coalition established a local “Covid-19 Mutual Aid Network,” a formation paralleled in many other cities and towns. Participants in Seattle’s network sought to unify a diverse set of tactics under one roof. One part of the network wanted to be a clearinghouse for rank-and-file labor agitation during the early pandemic, another sought avenues to pressure the system with demands, while a third and highly visible chunk sought to provide direct aid to people impacted by layoffs and lockdowns.

Seattle’s Covid-19 Mutual Aid Network dealt with growing pains that any new project bringing together a massive range of groups and tendencies is bound to face. Significant media attention and the trendy buzz around “mutual aid” funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to direct aid programs before a clear framework for how to handle so much money was established. Proposals for utilizing the sizable new volunteer list to try and form locally-based groups for longer-term support never really got off the ground. The organization’s direct-aid wing instead acted as a complex middle-man, matching random volunteers who could pick up some groceries with people who needed them delivered during the lockdown; something like a slower, free Instacart. This wasn’t an inherently bad thing, but lay far from the reciprocity and formation of new social ties central to mutual aid as opposed to charity.

The Covid-19 Mutual Aid Network ostensibly sought to organize on decentralized, non-hierarchical lines. Unfortunately, some participants had little background organizing this way and even less interest in learning how. A messy mix of long-time anarchists, state socialists, and non-profit operatives wrangled over structure. Structural ideas were imported from non-profit environments with little critical reflection how these might function in a loose, rapidly growing group.

When George Floyd’s murder set the world on fire in May 2020, many of the conflicts and limitations within Seattle’s Covid-19 Mutual Aid Network were coming to a head. These were left unresolved as many involved in mutual aid organizing across the continent quickly became active in the uprising. As an organization Seattle’s Covid-19 network more or less went dormant; its large social media pages mostly just repost and highlight and projects that emerged afterwards.

Hello everyone here is an unboxing video mutual aid resource COVID-19.
Atlanta survival program:
Is based on projections, we expect that the new coronavirus will have a severe impact on people in Atlanta 🥕 🍎 🍉 🥦 💕 https://t.co/QpSSDONtDG https://t.co/0EKfI5faKW #Covid_19 pic.twitter.com/zQpTy7J0PP

— Shanice Turner (@ShaniceSpeaks) May 7, 2020

But the street battles and occupied zones of Seattle’s Capitol Hill provided space for new ideas of mutual aid to flourish. Mutual aid stations sharing all sorts of skills and necessities were established amid a broad ethos of reciprocity. Genuine connections and comradeship were built between those who spent time in the occupied area, whether or not they had a home to return to. Many who traveled from afar to share food and resources around Cal Anderson Park and the East Precinct brought these ideas back to their communities. As one of many examples, visitors from Aberdeen on the Olympic Peninsula returned from the CHOP/CHAZ inspired to bring Mutual Aid ideas to their rural town; among other things they are now the only source of Harm Reduction supplies for their entire county.

As one might expect given the tragic, bloody end of Seattle’s occupied zone, mutual aid organizing was not all sunshine and roses. Messy power dynamics emerged around stockpiles of donated resources as some individuals took up the role of gate keepers. The “No Cop Co-Op” was one visible example; the woman who first set it up quickly clashed with many of the volunteers over her desire to monopolize the collection and distribution of donations. Other participants elected to break up the Co-Op and scatter its supplies when she began doxxing black activists and tried giving orders to barricade volunteers to act as her own security.

As protests continued for months, and the state remained legitimately afraid, many things seemed possible. The city of Seattle disbanded its police Navigation Team in August 2020, previously responsible for overseeing sweeps of homeless folks. Covid emergency conditions had already imposed a moratorium on most sweeps, and many people were temporarily offered hotel rooms. For those on the street this new pandemic was not particularly earth-shattering; pandemics from HIV to Hepatitis have afflicted the poorest and most vulnerable for years without a second-glance. The temporary reprieve from repression thus appeared as something of an opportunity for many.

During this brief lull, the first groups in the present wave of mutual aid were initiated to proactively support homeless neighbors that were establishing communities with a modicum of stability for the first time in years. Perhaps influenced by previous calls for decentralized organizing, Seattle-based crews set up as local neighborhood-based mutual aid collectives. Today these number several dozen, though a few have come and gone. New formations emerged in cities like Everett, Bremerton, and Bellingham while existing projects in Olympia and Tacoma were joined by new groups and faces.

While the Covid pandemic continues to rage years later, the imposed return to ‘normalcy’ included newly intensified attacks on those living on the streets. Vigilante attacks never ceased, and the feeling on the street was that they may have been increasing. But pressure from the state in Seattle re-escalated at the end of 2020 when the City announced plans to kick sweeps back into high gear. A perversely named “Hope Team” was established to oversee this dirty work at the same time as Covid relief programs were being gutted. A new Stop the Sweeps emerged in response out of the growing new networks of mutual aid crews and uprising veterans. Some sweeps have been significantly delayed and everyday support is provided when it otherwise would be absent. Interventions are most effective when local neighborhood groups with established relationships work in conjunction with a broader Stop the Sweeps network. But truly stopping the sweeps will require even more capacity and combativeness. Those in power are determined, and increasing millions have been pumped into terrorizing folks on the streets with often twice-daily sweeps.

The present wave of mutual aid work is at a crossroads. A solid foundation for future work has been established, but it is vital that groups avoid stagnant patterns, non-profit and electoral co-option, or settling into a wholly reactive pattern of responding only when attacks intensify. The dozens of disparate crews around the region must continue building networks between one another to share experiences and resources. The work of helping our neighbors survive while building community able to confront settler capitalism continues.