26 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
of the 2016 Presidential election. In 2017,
as wildfires ravaged Northern Califor-
nia, a collective of primarily disabled
queer and trans people, who called
themselves Mask Oakland, began giv-
ing out N95 masks to the homeless; in
March and April, they donated thou-
sands of masks that they had in reserve
to local emergency rooms and clinics.
Radicalism has been at the heart of
mutual aid since it was in-
troduced as a political idea.
In 1902, the Russian natu-
ralist and anarcho-commu-
nist Peter Kropotkin—who
was born a prince in 1842,
got sent to prison in his early
thirties for belonging to a
banned intellectual society,
and spent the next forty
years as a writer in Europe—
published the book “Mutual Aid: A Fac-
tor of Evolution.” Kropotkin identifies
solidarity as an essential practice in the
lives of swallows and marmots and prim-
itive hunter-gatherers; coöperation, he
argues, was what allowed people in me-
dieval villages and nineteenth-century
farming syndicates to survive. That in-
born solidarity has been undermined, in
his view, by the principle of private prop-
erty and the work of state institutions.
Even so, he maintains, mutual aid is “the
necessary foundation of everyday life” in
downtrodden communities, and “the
best guarantee of a still loftier evolution
of our race.”
Charitable organizations are typi-
cally governed hierarchically, with de-
cisions informed by donors and board
members. Mutual-aid projects tend to
be shaped by volunteers and the recip-
ients of services. Both mutual aid and
charity address the effects of inequality,
but mutual aid is aimed at root causes—
at the structures that created inequal-
ity in the first place. A few days after
her conference call with Ocasio-Cor-
tez, Mariame Kaba told me that mu-
tual aid couldn’t be divorced from po-
litical education and activism. “It’s not
community service—you’re not doing
service for service’s sake,” she said.
“You’re trying to address real material
needs.” If you fail to meet those needs,
she added, you also fail to “build the re-
lationships that are needed to push back
on the state.”
Kaba, a longtime Chicago activist
who now lives in New York and runs the
blog Prison Culture, describes herself as
an abolitionist, not as an anarchist. She
wants to create a world without prisons
and policing, and that requires imagin-
ing other structures of accountability—
and also of assistance. “I want us to act
as if the state is not a protector, and to
be keenly aware of the damage it can
do,” she told me. People who are deeply
committed to mutual aid
think of it as a crucial, ev-
eryday practice, she said, not
as a “program to pull off the
shelf when shit gets bad.”
Historically, in the United
States, mutual-aid networks
have proliferated mostly in
communities that the state
has chosen not to help. The
peak of such organizing
may have come in the late sixties and
early seventies, when Street Transves-
tite Action Revolutionaries opened a
shelter for homeless trans youth, in New
York, and the Black Panther Party
started a free-breakfast program, which
within its first year was feeding twenty
thousand children in nineteen cities
across the country. J. Edgar Hoover wor-
ried that the program would threaten
“efforts by authorities to neutralize the
BPP and destroy what it stands for”; a
few years later, the federal government
formalized its own breakfast program
for public schools.
Crises can intensify the antagonism
between the government and mutual-
aid workers. Dozens of cities restrict
community efforts to feed the home-
less; in 2019, activists with No More
Deaths, a group that leaves water and
supplies in border-crossing corridors,
were tried on federal charges, including
driving in a wilderness area and “aban-
doning property.” But disasters can also
force otherwise opposing sides to work
together. During Hurricane Sandy, the
National Guard, in the face of govern-
ment failure, relied on the help of an
Occupy Wall Street offshoot, Occupy
Sandy, to distribute supplies.
“Anarchists are not absolutist,” Spade,
the lawyer and activist, told me. “We
can believe in a diversity of tactics. I
spend my life fighting for people to
get welfare benefits, for trans people to
get health-care coverage.” Kaba isn’t
doctrinaire, either; she had, after all,partnered with Ocasio-Cortez, a mem-
ber of the federal government, to help
people learn how to help one another.
(Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, insisted,
on Twitter, that organizers and activ-
ists, not politicians, are often the ones
who “push society forward.”) Still, there
is a real tension between statist and an-
archist theories of political change, Kaba
pointed out. In trying to help a com-
munity meet its needs, one group of or-
ganizers might suggest canvassing for
political candidates who support Medi-
care for All. Another might argue that
electoral politics, with its top-down
structures and its uncertain results, is
the wrong place to direct most of one’s
energy—that we should focus instead
on building community co-ops that can
secure health care and opportunities for
work. But sorting out the conflict be-
tween these visions is part of the larger
project, Kaba suggested, and a task for
multiple generations. The day-to-day
practice of mutual aid is simpler. It is a
matter, she said, of “prefiguring the world
in which you want to live.”B
y April, as the death toll rose in
New York City, many people I knew
in Brooklyn had begun working with a
mutual-aid group called Bed-Stuy
Strong, which serves the neighborhood
of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Once predom-
inantly black, the neighborhood has, in
the past few decades, seen an influx of
white residents. Bed-Stuy Strong was
started by the writer Sarah Thankam
Mathews, whose family moved to the
United States from Oman when she
was seventeen. Mathews organized the
group on Slack, and it initially consisted
of the Slack demographic: relatively
privileged youngish people familiar with
the digital workflows of white-collar
offices. But volunteers plastered the
neighborhood with flyers, and word of
the group started to spread through
phone calls and text messages. Hun-
dreds of people began joining every day.
James Lipscomb, a former computer
programmer in his sixties, who moved
to Bed-Stuy from South Carolina when
he was a teen-ager, learned about the
group on Facebook—an acquaintance
had called the organization’s Google
Voice number, then written a post won-
dering if the whole thing was a scam.
Lipscomb, who survived polio at age four,