Mutual Aid and Class Struggle
Humans produce things in order to live, such as food, shelter, and medicine. Under the capitalist mode of production, the economy is run according to capitalist interests and only indirectly addresses humans’ basic needs. As revolutionaries, we know that the only way for working and oppressed people to guarantee that human life and wellbeing are the top priorities is for the working class to take control over the means of production and the whole running of society. This requires direct conflict with the capitalist class, as the working class builds organizations and engages in actions to control greater and greater portions of the economy. However, some leftists have de-prioritized this direct class struggle in favor of mutual aid projects that, on their own, are insufficient to meet the demands of the struggle.
Mutual aid is framed as voluntary effort, in which the people provide for each other’s needs, motivated by a sense of duty or compassion. Organizations like Food Not Bombs, local projects, community gardens, and protest or activist groups are some examples that can fall under the term. It is true that humans are a social species that tends towards cooperation, and that people will in fact go out of their way to help each other. The impulse to help other people and lend one’s time and energy to caring for one’s community is commendable; but mutual aid can only go so far; it cannot resolve the contradiction between capital and labor. As long as the means of production are controlled by the capitalists, working and oppressed people will never be able to help each other sufficiently to guarantee survival.
Capitalism, however, makes it impossible for the working class to adequately provide for their own needs. Capitalists control the means of production and therefore, the very commodities people need to survive. Land is owned by capitalists and defended by the hired guns of capital (ie, the police and military) and thus capitalists control what it is used for.
Societies provide for all of their members by collecting surplus and redistributing it. Workers create surplus by applying their labor power to the means of production. However, this surplus is stolen by capitalists for private use and can not be adequately redistributed as long as capitalists maintain their control.
Capitalists use the bureaucracy of government for managing their affairs and securing their interests, which makes it impossible for participation in the bourgeois government to lead to meaningful change. Government aid programs to people in need are underfunded, because human need is not the top priority in a capitalist society. Capitalism, therefore, deprives working and oppressed people of what they need, and utilizes violence to ensure the capitalist class’ continued control over these resources.
No matter how hard workers try to help each other, the capitalist mode of production only allows them to reproduce their means of subsistence. Government-sanctioned nonprofits and food groups are insufficient to offset the wealth stolen from workers by capitalists, and non-sanctioned groups to feed hungry people are often threatened and blocked from doing so by the police. Community gardens do not have nearly enough land to feed their communities fully, and can be shut down by the state or bought up by capitalists (or seized via eminent domain, if owned by a private individual). Protests cannot guarantee that their demands are met without the force to back up those demands. Voluntary individual participation in acts of charity cannot provide this. It will only be through Revolutionary Democratic Control by the Working Class that the people will establish a society that serves human needs.
This is why making mutual aid the first priority of revolutionary action is a petit-bourgeois distraction. Not everyone who calls for mutual aid is a part of the petty-bourgeois strata (though many are). However, regardless of intent, the framework of mutual aid does not (and cannot) challenge capitalism. It cannot ensure human wellbeing; it is at best charity, a refusal to create the structures that allow for direct confrontations with capitalists. Mutual aid cannot resolve the underlying contradiction; it can only toss crumbs to the desperate, and insisting that mutual aid is more important than building workers’ organizations ensures that workers cannot seize the whole pie. It is good to help others out or contribute to one’s community when possible, but capitalism makes it impossible for this help to be sufficient. Whether we suffer and die slowly or quickly, we are still condemned to suffering and death by capitalism. We need a way to escape this sentence, and to wrest control from the people with the power to inflict it upon us. We need to get organized, and build workers’ power.
In the absence of organized workers’ power, a mutual aid group might be able to scrounge up funds and supplies to feed impoverished school children once or twice a week. Any efforts to expand will be met with force by the capitalists and their hired guns. A workers’ council, however, could coordinate the activity of workers in a particular shop or trade union in order to address the needs of the local community. For example, workers at a supermarket could withhold their labor until the owners agree to donate supplies for a free breakfast program on a continuous basis. Dockworkers and rail operators could shut down transportation and shipping to protest the export of arms to Israel, in solidarity with the Palestinian people. These are the preliminary steps towards constructing the socialist mode of production.
Capitalist power is rooted in capitalist economic control, and capitalist economic control is based in worker exploitation. The more that workers are able to deny capitalists their profits, the greater control workers will have. Worker power is inherently dependent on economics, and workers must utilize structures such as trade unions, and revolutionary organizations to gain and expand control over the process of production. To further these gains while ensuring correct and effective direction and actions, workers must also engage politically; not within the capitalist state, but within the workers’ movement. Worker steering committees, workers’ councils, and a “general staff” to carry out and direct the workers’ movement (in the form of a communist party) are necessary. To survive we must defeat the enemy which endangers our survival, to defeat our enemy we must be capable of winning, and to be capable of winning we need the correct strategy and tactics. Sharing what little resources we have between ourselves is not enough.