By Angelo

When Kropotkin created his theory of mutual aid, he established for revolutionaries the ethical core of our project.[1] Put simply, we want to cooperate and to care for each other, and we want to build a world where we can do so. Kropotkin taught us that building such a world isn’t a crack-pot, utopian scheme--it’s how many people live already and have always lived. It’s a fundamental aspect of who we are that will become reality us as soon as we allow it to. 

Others crystallized this into a simple formula: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

Since then, revolutionary actors interested in not only dreaming about a future world based on these principles but also bringing it about realized a few simple facts:

1. People tend to be loyal to the institutions, structures, systems, practices, and infrastructure that allow them to feed themselves and their children.

2. Those who control those mechanisms hold great power.

3. Most people are unlikely to overthrow a system that provides them the basic means of survival without having any idea what will replace it. Or, as the Invisible Committee put it: “so long as the prospect of a popular uprising will signify a guaranteed fall into scarcity, of health care, food, or energy, there will be no strong mass movement.”[2]

4. Revolutions can either figure out how to provide for basic needs or someone who can will step into the vacuum they create.

The strategy they devised was simple—create the means (technical, social, infrastructural, and otherwise) of taking care of each other and invite those who are either already agitating for revolution or who hold the potential to do so to join. Sometimes they called them “mutual aid societies,” meaning structures revolutionaries could join to support themselves, their families, and their communities in the process of building revolution and living well in the meantime. Sometimes these structures were organic—informal networks of people who relied upon one another for their survival and who shared in life’s joys and pains together—and sometimes they were formalized, with formal organizations, meetings, and bylaws.

They built social centers, they ran bars and restaurants where revolutionaries would hang out, debate ideas, listen to lectures, run book clubs, and feed each other. They pooled their money so that emergencies didn’t ruin them, or so their families were cared for if they died. They shared food, childcare, weapons, tools, everything they needed to survive. They built communes to live together, they celebrated together. This became the ground upon which they fought.

It’s a myth that early socialist movements, with their powerful general strikes and struggles against capital, were organized primarily by the industrial workers who, after all, were too busy working and too disciplined to do much of anything. It was the unemployed, the women, the artisans and landless peasants, those who made their livings here and there as they could, who did the planning and populated the barricades. It was the revolutionary infrastructure they built that allowed them to do so, which explains why the battles were always the fiercest in the towns with the most comrade-owned run bars, childcare collectives, theater troops, and the like.[3] As they built these things, they invited others into their structures, hoping they would become loyal to the revolutionary movement rather than the infrastructure of the state.

To explain the world they were trying to bring about, they called their strategy mutual aid. These words, “mutual aid,” therefore, mean two things: they name the practice of sharing and cooperation that Kropotkin called the fundamental impulse of animal life on earth, and they name the revolutionary strategy that could recruit enough partisans, and instill in them the enough confidence, to carry out a revolution to bring about a world based upon this impulse.




Years later, some radicals seem confused about what mutual aid is. There’s two forms this confusion takes:

1. Some believe that we should get resources and share them with those in need. In doing this, they believe we fulfill an ethical obligation we inherit by nature of mere our existence on earth. In this they are correct. This is called charity, and it’s an important part of living ethically in a world that tolerates opulence amidst scarcity, luxury amidst starvation. But it is not revolutionary. They may also believe that in giving away resources, we model the kind of world we hope to live in some day. In this they are also correct, but without a revolutionary strategy, these models end up tolerating (and being tolerated by) the ruling order. What they miss is that mutual aid is, or can be, a revolutionary strategy.

2. Some believe that mutual aid is pointless because all revolutionaries must do to bring about revolution is fan the flames of the spontaneous popular insurrections that are the real source of power of our times, and perhaps of all times. While they’re right that we must do so, what they seem to miss is the importance of building a revolutionary movement that can sustain the insurrection beyond its initial phase. They see mutual aid as meaningless charity work that keeps revolutionaries occupied instead of doing the more important work of fanning the flames. What they miss is that mutual aid is, or can be, a revolutionary strategy.

We need to go look in every sector, in all the territories we inhabit, for those who possess strategic technical knowledge. Only on this basis will movements truly dare to "block everything." Only on this basis will the passion for experimenting towards another life be liberated, a largely technical passion that is the obverse, as it were, of everyone's state of technological dependence. This process of knowledge accumulation, of establishing collusions in every domain, is a prerequisite for a serious and massive return of the revolutionary question.[4]

Our branding for this revolutionary strategy of “knowledge accumulation” and “experimenting towards another life” is mutual aid. We form logistics networks that link farmers, drivers, and under-resourced communities via organizational systems that allow us to move large amounts of food easily without centralization. We experiment with open source technologies that will replace the highly technical sites of production that are now located thousands of miles away from us anyway. We practice cooking at scale so that we can feed a strike, a general assembly, a whole neighborhood. We learn medical skills, we learn to code, we learn to create mesh networks, we create projects where we do those things together so we’re not alone in it, and so we’re not alone in general. We build housing coops so we can live cheaper and without landlords, collectively if we choose. We call these things mutual aid, but not because we’re giving stuff away to the needy. We might be doing so, but that’s not the point. We call it mutual aid because we’re building the revolutionary capacity to bring about a world in which cooperation replaces profit. A world based upon the principle Kropotkin taught us drives all life on earth.

The mechanism that brings this world about is insurrection. Through a series of popular insurrections, we chip away at power, breaking off pieces and giving them to the social revolution that is changing how we live from below. Through successive phases of popular insurrection, and the imagination and creativity they unleash, we weaken the sites of power that make up the current configuration of things and strengthen our own movements. This is called an insurrectionary strategy. Mutual aid is one of the mechanisms we use to drive insurrections forward, consolidate their gains, and organize the imaginative activity they unleash.




But revolution isn’t a single, historical event, like falling off a cliff. A clean line drawn in the sand. This is the stuff of religion. Nor is it an evolution of our collective consciousness over time, or a way of life, or a mindset. It’s a series of actual events, a concentrated process, or a sequence, that involves a fundamental change in who holds power, who controls the infrastructure that sustains life, that allows us to make the things we need to take care of each other. This process has phases, and we have some names for some of those phases.

Dual power is one possible phase. It names a situation in which two competing centers of power exist in the same territory, maintaining an unstable and necessarily temporary balance of power—sometimes tolerating each other, sometimes seeking the other’s annihilation. We could call multi-power a temporary situation in which a central power is forced to tolerate the emergence of several new centers of power, which provide for the needs and earn the loyalty of some portions of the population without fully deposing the central power and without destroying the other emergent nodes.

The goal of mutual aid, then, is to bring about a multi-power situation in which infrastructure, resources, means of coordination and decision-making, logistics networks, and the ethical, spiritual, social, and metaphysical tools necessary to animate them with revolutionary fervor win the loyalty of some portion of the population, reducing the power of the central authority (in our situation the local, state, or federal governments, the chamber of commerce and local and national business interests, etc.) while tolerating, when possible and when strategic, the emergence of other nodes. We do this until we can collectively overcome the central authority, establish our autonomy, and build the capacity to deploy enough force to maintain it.

Mutual aid projects should find our place in this strategy and recalibrate our activities based upon this trajectory. Are there ways our projects could grow, or be more ambitious, to rise to the occasion of this moment? Should we invite different people to collaborate with us than we’re currently focused on? How can we focus on supporting revolutionaries in the task of making revolution—providing each other with the things we need to free ourselves from the pressures of work? If we think of ourselves as the nascent logistics hubs and repositories of technical knowledge that will feed, supply, and sustain the revolutionary movement as it unfolds, how would our activities be different?