This is something we as radicals don’t talk about much but which has come up a lot in my experience:
You deserve mutual aid. You’re not too privileged for it, you’re not stealing it from people who need it more - you have a right to use community resources just as much as anyone else
I’ve seen food rot, clothes and books be forgotten in storage, because the people volunteering at or supporting these projects don’t think the resources are for them. Then those same volunteers will go out and put money they don’t have into the capitalist system to buy the resources they could’ve gotten for free
You’re thinking like a charity. You’re drawing a line between the people giving resources and the people taking them, which inevitably leads to a feeling of separation and eventually superiority, unconsciously seeing yourself as a savior coming in and helping the less fortunate. That alienates the people you’re helping from you, and results in neither side fully recognizing the other as human and the same as them
There’s a reason we say “solidarity not charity”. There’s a reason mutual aid is called mutual. Because by lifting each other up, we all become stronger. In solidarity and mutual aid, there is no separation between giver and receiver, because everyone involved is benefited by it
But that doesn’t happen if the resources aren’t used! Get out of the capitalist scarcity mindset - give freely and take freely, because by being lifted up you help us all
This is important! When I first started doing the food distributions, I’d feel really weird about taking a leftover box of produce or an extra meal home. Then my volunteers started feeling weird about taking theirs and very quickly we developed a culture of “who really deserves/needs this food”? I realized what was happening and started taking a little bit home myself, and then everyone got much more comfortable with me and people who were originally just standing in the line to get food began volunteering and doing other things to help out.
This one thing that like clicked for me since doing mutual aid is that capitalism’s overproduction is so deep. The Food Bank in my city, in order to maintain its grants at certain financial volume, ends up giving families soo much food it’s like they handed out boxes that came direct from Costco.
10 cans of peaches, 2 5lb cans of crushed tomatoes, 6 loaves of bread, a whole box of tuna packets, 8 mangoes, 6 1lb bags of rice, 10lbs of frozen chicken tenders or fajita meat. And it’s like wtf? They gave this to a family of 4??? They can’t even fit some if that in their fridges/freezers half the time so it gets donated to us.
I had my neighbors stop me before last distro to hand me all those items, plus other things. This one of many small examples, that pounded in my skull, that if I want/need it, I’m taking it.
One of my partners hit me with some wisdom a few months back, “Are you trying to build a community that you dont get to be a part of?” And that shit just echoes in my brain these days.
The idea that people only should use public services if they really need them is almost always an excuse to make said public services miserable.
