I am a pastor. I have seen informal mutual aid networks do miracles, and I have also seen them fail spectacularly. Here are two examples from the same community, a tiny rural farm town.
The first case was a white man in his 40s, a farmer, who was deeply injured on the job. Six months in a wheelchair, a year until he was back fully mobile and able to fully do all the farmwork. His wife had a day job and his daughters were in school, they could do some of the work of running the farm but there was a lot that they just couldn’t do, especially that first month he was in the hospital and a rehab facility, both an hour’s drive from home. So his neighbors and other farmers who were members of our church gathered in the church basement a few days after the accident, and made up a schedule: who was going to take care of his livestock on what days, who was going to plant what field, who was going to do the spraying, and come harvest time, who was going to harvest it. They came together, they took care of things so that his wife and kids could focus on taking care of him and the farm and livestock would keep going and the family wouldn’t lose half its income for the year. Mutual aid worked perfectly in that case, exactly as it was supposed to. A dramatic crisis that will be resolved eventually, after which things can go back to normal? A crisis that happened to a man who was related to half the people in town? Yeah. They were all over that.
The second case was not like that. The second case was a family who’d lived in town for thirty years at that point, but weren’t related to anybody or married in to any of the prominent families. About fifteen years earlier, things had started going wrong for the family. Chronic illness. Car accidents. Tragic deaths. By the time I came to town, the least disabled members of the family were the two teenage boys and their eighty-year-old grandmother with heart problems. Nobody in the family had any income besides social security and disability and other welfare programs. The boys were good kids but everyone in that family who was still alive had so much trauma and grief, and like most teenagers the boys really didn’t know how to handle it. Especially since their family had thoroughly fallen through the cracks. Everybody liked them; almost everybody had forgotten them. None of the men of the community took an interest in those boys to give them male role models that they lacked since their father and uncle had died. Nobody took the mother or grandmother to their medical appointments. Nobody stopped by to help fix the things in their house that broke, or to show the boys how to do basic maintenance. The grandmother pretty much only left the house for medical appointments and grocery shopping; the mother wasn’t even able to do that much. Once a year the church had a work day and would send a crew of people over to whack their yard into some semblance of order and do things like cut down the saplings growing out of their foundation. That was about the extent of it. The first moment of crisis, the church and the larger community of the town had been there for them. The long, slow slog of just dealing with the every-day shit of multiple disability and trauma, that was what the community couldn’t handle. Especially since they were “newcomers” with no ties of blood or marriage to any other family in town.
Mutual aid can work wonders, but it is not enough. It has never been enough.
This is something most people don’t know, and the ones who think social aid should be in the hands of private charity and churches actively try to obscure: the only times churches have successfully been the entire social welfare system has been when the churches were tax supported. In the middle ages, in most places people paid a tithe--a ten percent tax on everything they produced--to the church. Some of it went to pay the priest and build and maintain church buildings and whatnot, some of it got sent off to Rome, but a lot of it stayed local and went to things like making sure nobody in the parish was hungry and everybody had a roof over their head and people who were sick got taken care of. It wasn’t perfect (for one thing, it excluded both Jewish people and people with no home parish), but it was broadly functional. With the Renaissance and Reformation a lot of those functions got passed along to civil government in many places. But whether secular or church, the system broke down during the Industrial Revolution.
The old system simply could not cope with the explosive growth of cities and factories and the accompanying change of lifestyle. It couldn’t. Poverty, illness, and disability increased dramatically with the Industrial Revolution. In response, Christians formed huge voluntary social service networks, some of which still exist today (although many have shed their Christian affiliation). YMCA and YWCA. Red Cross. Salvation Army. Many others that you’ve never heard of. These organizations did huge amounts of work to feed and clothe and educate and house people and take care of the sick and the disabled. And they failed. They were utterly overwhelmed by the scale of the need. Huge amounts of people put in huge amounts of time and money, and it was not enough.
Two things turned things around (at least for white people, things still sucked for people of color who were largely excluded from all forms of help both public and private):
labor laws which protected poor and working class people from being exploited and endangered by their employer. Things like minimum wage and overtime and Occupational Health and Safety and disability insurance and all of that stuff. The things unions fought for and won.
Government welfare programs, paid for out of taxes, everything from SNAP to Low Income Heating Assistance Program to disability to Social Security to Medicare and Medicaid.
Labor laws minimized the people needing help by making it easier for people to earn enough to care for themselves and their family. Government programs helped all white people who fell through the cracks. And you know what? It worked, pretty much. There was more upward mobility than downward mobility. Life expectancy lengthened. Average health got better. There were fewer people in dire need. There were fewer people in poverty, and “poverty” meant something less dire than it had in previous generations. Getting help didn’t depend on being the sort of person nice Christian people liked. Private charity was a supplement to welfare, not the whole of it, and in that capacity it worked fairly well.
And then, with the Civil Rights movement, more of these things became available to people of color, and we as a society decided we’d rather deny these things to white people than give black people equal access. And people suffered, and continue to suffer, because of it.
The way out of this mess is not to form more mutual aid networks. It’s to get the labor laws and unions the power they need to actually do what they’re supposed to do, and expand the government social safety net.
