On Mutual Aid

You want EAs to take anti-capitalism more seriously? I can take anti-capitalism more seriously

Graphic associated with mutual-aid group Food Not Bombs. A Syn - originally posted to Flickr as "Food Not Bombs". CC BY-SA 2.0.

I.

I have greatly enjoyed everything I’ve read written by leftist law professor Dean Spade, so I was excited to read their book Mutual Aid, a guide to forming mutual aid groups and why you might wish to do so.

Mutual aid can initially seem similar to charity: for example, mutual aid programs might give children free breakfasts, pay for abortions for people who can’t afford them, provide free legal aid for people facing eviction, or teach people emergency medicine in places where the ambulance response times are too long. However, mutual aid is a fundamentally different approach.

Charities involve a savior—a nurse, a lawyer, a social worker, a therapist, a nonprofit professional, a funder—giving aid to poor, vulnerable people who can’t (it is said) help themselves. Mutual aid involves equals helping each other. I might be paying for your abortion because I have a bit of extra cash, but it could have just as easily gone the other way. I’m serving your kid a free breakfast, but you’re writing letters to prisoners so they feel less alone. In this sense, mutual aid is not actually a very unusual or radical thing: communities of color and working-class communities have always had mutual-aid practices, and everyone starts doing mutual aid when a flood or a fire hits.

Mutual aid is a form of movement-building. Of course, you can stop by the mutual aid group, get help, and leave; Spade emphasizes that all participation in mutual aid groups must be voluntary, not the result of coercion or pressure. But their expectation is that many people will be drawn into the social movement. Many people’s radicalization process begins with the need for healthcare, childcare, disability services, legal defense, or even just friendship.

Mutual-aid work includes political education, not as a poorly glued-on class where you have to be preached at about Communism if you want to get the low-cost healthcare, but as an integral part of the entire enterprise. People will feel less ashamed and isolated, because they’ll realize that their problem is not due to their personal failings but due to the overall system: it’s not that you can’t afford healthcare because you personally are bad at budgeting, but because the system is set up in ways that make healthcare far more expensive than it has to be.

Once they learn about the problems of the system, people will often want to help. Mutual aid emphasizes—and I know everyone flinches at this word—empowerment. People are not passive recipients of Help; they learn to help each other. Perhaps the mutual-aid health clinic will train you to provide pelvic exams yourself. Perhaps you’ll learn about meeting facilitation, or addressing conflict, or retaining volunteers. Most of all, you’ll learn that people like you can do the work and you don’t have to wait around for a savior.

And that last is crucial. Dean Spade argues that mutual-aid groups are far more effective than charities, because the people who are actually affected by a problem know what they need.

Mutual aid groups run on consensus instead of hierarchy. This is hard. Many people have never been in a situation larger than three or four people where they were trying to Do Something and there wasn't an official boss. Mutual aid groups help teach people how consensus-based decision-making works in a lower-stakes setting, so that they’re prepared to use consensus to resolve conflicts throughout society.

Ideally, mutual aid becomes a part of every aspect of a person’s life—not in a scrupulosity-tinged way, but because they’re living in a community that makes it possible. They have friends and make art and have sex and raise children and eat and cook and live in houses and work and all the rest, and it's all part of working for justice because that's just the fabric of their life.

This is the real goal of mutual-aid groups. Through meeting people’s needs, they create the world we want to live in, and they create the kind of people—competent, agentic, generous, anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical—that will be able to live in it.

Though they never quite say it, I think Spade’s vision is a sort of bottom-up anarchocommunism. We will form mutual aid groups and help each other with the necessities of daily life. We’ll learn what works and what doesn’t. We’ll become more the sort of people who can live in a good world. Over time, mutual aid will become more and more of the fabric of everyday life. And, over time, the state and corporations will wither away because they are no longer needed anymore. It’s an appealing vision—not least because if it turns out the state is actually necessary it can still stick around.

II.

Many of Dean Spade’s critiques of charity remind me a lot of effective altruist critiques. Nonprofits, they point out, often misrepresent their impact in order to win grants. For example, many social service nonprofits track how many people they worked with rather than whether they actually helped anyone. Homelessness service groups commonly claim to "reduce shelter use" without inquiring about whether they actually just annoyed the homeless people so much that they stopped using the shelter. Because nonprofits have to appeal to rich people to get money, their theories of change often reflect the prejudices of rich people (e.g. that drug abuse causes homelessness) instead of what’s actually going on.

Similarly, they say, many people who give to charity simply waste their money. Rich people park their money in foundations and don’t have to pay taxes on it. They can spend the money on their own pet projects—art museums, operas, Harvard—even when far more important needs go unmet. Foundations also often pay rich people’s families and friends enormous salaries, which is obscene while children are still dying of malaria.

Many charities strive to help The Deserving Poor (TM). As any effective altruist would agree, people matter equally whether they are Deserving (TM) or Undeserving (TM). It is unacceptable to say that there are some people—undocumented immigrants, criminals, homeless people, the mentally ill, drug addicts—whose needs don’t matter and whom it is all right to treat unfairly.

The attempts to limit help to The Deserving Poor (TM) can make charities hostile to and humiliating for the people they’re supposed to help. Charities and government programs often impose standards—not drinking or taking drugs, following a particular religion, attending parenting classes, cooperating with the police, not having more children—that donors would find outrageous applied to themselves. Some charities and government programs require recipients to do busywork assignments for little pay;¹ others have to answer long strings of personal questions intended to catch them in a lie.

Dean Spade is not entirely an effective altruist: I grimaced at their statement that you don’t need an advanced degree to figure out the cause of poverty because all poor people know it’s because their bosses and landlords are greedy. But there is a lot in common between Spade’s beliefs and effective altruism. The problems, I think, can be obvious to many different people, even if we disagree on the solutions.

III.

There is, as I said, a lot that I like about the concept of mutual aid. I want to be part of a group of equals helping each other, not a hero saving passive victims who can do nothing for themselves. I want to empower people to set the course of their own destinies. I am acutely aware of how difficult it is to actually help people if you’re not on the ground with them. I’m not sure we can actually do without hierarchies, but I’m all for reducing them to the minimum necessary.

The problem is that, on a global scale, I am very very rich.

I can’t be in a mutual aid group with the global poor. They live far away from me and mostly don’t speak English. But I can casually spend on one book-shopping trip the amount of money they have to live on for a month, and it is unconscionable to me that I would sit here and do nothing.

There is, it is true, extraordinary poverty in my home city of San Francisco. But the poor far away are—not more deserving, never more deserving—but people who have needs that are significantly easier to meet. And I have limited resources; if I don’t prioritize based on what gets me the best justice bang for my resource bunk, I end up prioritizing based on who is closest to my house.

The task we effective altruists who prioritize global poverty have set before us requires tremendous humility. The risk of patronizing white saviorism is ever-present. Our ignorance, as people who are not affected by the issues we care about, is enormous. Randomized controlled trials, constant monitoring and evaluation, admitting mistakes, correcting for cognitive biases—these aren’t primarily to pick the best causes, they’re primarily to make sure we are doing anything at all.

The most mutual-aid-like charity is unconditional cash transfers: I have more resources than the global poor, so I’m giving them resources and allowing them to decide what to do with it. I think you shouldn’t donate to a charity if it doesn’t outperform giving people cash. But most effective altruists who prioritize global poverty don’t donate to Give Directly; they donate to global health charities.

Why not just give cash? There’s an asymmetry in knowledge one direction: the global poor know better than I do what they want and what their lives are like. But there’s also an asymmetry in knowledge the other direction. Through no fault of their own, people in the developing world tend to know less about medicine, public health, and development economics than the specialists at GiveWell.² They don’t usually know how best to turn money into health for their children—even when they really want it.

Of course, we should do careful empirical work about what beneficiaries’ preferences are. GiveWell has commissioned at least one report on the subject, but more should be done.

Is there a role for mutual aid in ending global poverty? In The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly writes about Searchers: people with a deep knowledge of local conditions, who find something that makes people’s lives better and are rewarded for it. Global poverty, Easterly believes, can only be ended by Searchers among the global poor. A white-saviorist Plan For Democracy And Anti-Corruption In Country X will not work; what works is individual Searchers figuring out ways to hold their individual governments accountable. External plans for development almost never do much of anything; individual Searchers forming companies and industries does. Women’s empowerment charities made up by Americans fail (and are oxymoronic anyway); women’s empowerment groups formed by the women themselves lead to reform.

Most of these programs are not precisely mutual aid, in the technical sense.³ But there is something mutual-aid-like in it. Affected individuals have the agency to solve their own problems. They use their local knowledge to figure out what’s wrong and what should be done about it. Foundations named after past millionaires or present billionaires are not invited.

And my job, as an outsider, is—with great humility and caution—to set up the conditions for the global poor to solve their own problems. As Dean Spade points out, very few people can start a revolution if they’re hungry or sick. We should give the global poor the malaria nets and the vaccines and the clean water and the AIDS drugs; the rest is up to them.

1. It’s important to contrast this with the empowering work of mutual aid—superficially similar, actually very different!

2. The same is, of course, true of nearly all people in the developed world.

3. Dean Spade would probably prefer that a country not stop being poor because of the newfound existence of local capitalists!