Adrian Riskin 🇵🇸🍉 on Nostr: I guess I don't see it as a dichotomy between billionaires and ad hoc requests. As ...
I guess I don't see it as a dichotomy between billionaires and ad hoc requests. As others have said online mutual aid requests are a stopgap that mostly makes sense under capitalist oppression. In a sense, to me, they're only marginally mutual aid since they're not really based in a reciprocal community. They're much more like charity even if some recipients do manage to contribute in turn. Charity is good and necessary now, but it's not mutual aid.
That being said, my vision of genuine mutual aid is informed by my experiences in Los Angeles over the last ten years. We've built a strong, incredibly capable community, here, which goes back long before 2014, when I got involved. It's deeply committed to activism around homelessness, hunger, tenants' rights, and political violence and repression. It includes outreach to encampments, large scale food distributions, actual housing projects, and mutual aid against evictions and police violence both in courts and in streets.
It's not charity because it really is mutual. Just for instance, we've built networks that included both housed and unhoused people with capabilities that have brought us right up to the limit of mutual aid that police will allow. See for instance the community-building in Echo Park, which was violently ended by police in 2021.
Homeless people benefit from outreach and free access to the necessities of life, but housed people benefit too. Directly, e.g. by empowering the homeless to participate in politics, which makes everyone's positions stronger. But indirectly too, through the relationships and knowledge that we all build with one another. We've built capacity together to the point where I have no doubt at all that if we could put an end to police repression we could end homelessness and hunger in Los Angeles basically tomorrow. To me this is a genuine foreshadowing of the kind of actually mutual aid that would be possible in the absence of violence to prevent it.
That being said, my vision of genuine mutual aid is informed by my experiences in Los Angeles over the last ten years. We've built a strong, incredibly capable community, here, which goes back long before 2014, when I got involved. It's deeply committed to activism around homelessness, hunger, tenants' rights, and political violence and repression. It includes outreach to encampments, large scale food distributions, actual housing projects, and mutual aid against evictions and police violence both in courts and in streets.
It's not charity because it really is mutual. Just for instance, we've built networks that included both housed and unhoused people with capabilities that have brought us right up to the limit of mutual aid that police will allow. See for instance the community-building in Echo Park, which was violently ended by police in 2021.
Homeless people benefit from outreach and free access to the necessities of life, but housed people benefit too. Directly, e.g. by empowering the homeless to participate in politics, which makes everyone's positions stronger. But indirectly too, through the relationships and knowledge that we all build with one another. We've built capacity together to the point where I have no doubt at all that if we could put an end to police repression we could end homelessness and hunger in Los Angeles basically tomorrow. To me this is a genuine foreshadowing of the kind of actually mutual aid that would be possible in the absence of violence to prevent it.