We’re almost half way through our 6-month screening tour and have a lot of reflections to share. It’s taken us time to get into the swing of tour life, to get a beat on how the series is being received, and to develop a stronger analysis of the moment we’re in as repression and economic precarity violently escalate around us.
It’s been 6 years since “mutual aid” was thrust into popular consciousness. Two years before, we’d gone on the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Workshop Tour when more radical circles were talking about it as a framework for anti-authoritarian and antifascist base building. But in 2020, everyone from large nonprofits to Obama were suddenly using the term, and the deeply political, anti-State values foundational to mutual aid were blunted, with most groups getting locked into reactive efforts focused solely on distribution. Tens of thousands of people have gained experience participating in mutual aid projects since then but have run into shared limitations around how to bring its most radical and relational elements to life. Now, as we slip over the edge into outright fascism and climate collapse, it’s time to resharpen the edge of this term so our mutual aid efforts can mature into strategic frameworks for survival and resistance. We believe the series and screening tour are in a good position to support this.
Above all, we want to advocate for more communities using this series as a tool to support reflective conversations: how to deepen the practice of mutual aid, identify challenges and limitations, build strategies and theories of change, and actively build a fight-back mentality against the State and capitalism. It’s so rare that we take time for these kinds of conversations because there’s so many crises around us. But a radical practice of mutual aid means building a vision for what we’re working towards and strategy for how we’re going to get there. We won’t be ready for what’s to come if we just react to the needs in front of us.
This series was made under different conditions than the ones we’re facing now. But we’re seeing it meet this moment by holding some space for these reflective conversations. Here are some of the discussions we’re noticing each chapter help tease out right now:
- Chapter 1: Fire is helping people break down why liberatory mutual aid and the State are fundamentally incompatible. For new people, this concept is foundational. The more that people can recognize the State machine as a threat to our survival, the more easily we can orient toward community power. We’re also seeing people eager to break down the “giver / receiver” dynamics in their efforts and consider how to move beyond just distributing goods into retaking resources like housing.
- Chapter 2: Earth is challenging communities to consider how their efforts could scale up toward communal structures capable of meeting more of our basic needs. The revolutionary reference points of the Zapatistas, Rojava, and the mutual aid centers in Puerto Rico are helping people dream bigger. It’s also sparking conversations about defending the autonomy we build together.
- Chapter 3: Water, unsurprisingly, is bringing up a lot of discussion around conflict and burnout. A lot of people are processing the grief of projects falling apart, but also the “death blossoms” of new projects growing in their place. As for burnout, we’re seeing an interesting conversation around how people tend to approach mutual aid work with a mentality of being servers and never receivers of support. This paradigm is giving people clues about how to make their work more sustainable by becoming more relational.
- Chapter 4: Air is bringing up conversations around what it means to build up agency in each other. We’re treasuring discussions where quieter voices have processed how it feels to step into their agency and louder voices realize how much more powerful the group can be when they help create space for their comrades to do this in. Questions around how to be horizontal or build consensus usually bring up the necessity of having affinity with the people we’re organizing with and boundaries to protect a project’s values and vision.
We’ve just published a new version of our discussion guide, now broken into four zines, to accompany each chapter and support these kinds of conversations in your community. Check them out and consider gathering your friends, neighbors, or comrades to process and strategize together.
We have more reflections to share about this moment and we’ll try our best to spend time documenting them. If you have the means to contribute toward our gas fund, it helps us make additional content like this and push this series out into the world.
love and rage.