“Marxism, Bolshevism and Mutual Aid”by Socialist Revolution, 2/2022
This is a pamphlet that addresses a debate on the left,
evidently arising out of DSA. The
subject is ‘mutual aid,’ a strategy or tactic advocated by certain libertarian socialists
and anarchists. The main polemic is with
Dean Spade and his 2020 book: “Mutual Aid:
Building Solidarity During This Crisis.” Spade’s book is carried at
May Day and is also reviewed below.
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| Solidarity & Charity |
Mutual aid can be seen to arise out of a utopian approach
to socialism, which ignores the State, class struggle except in the broadest
sense and real dual power. This pamphlet
attempts to address the issue with a general orthodox Marxist take, while
having weaknesses in detail. Orthodox
Marxism is unpleasant for people who yearn for some powerful government to back
them up, for a role in a powerful capitalist party, for those who want to take sides in a
violent capitalist dispute or for a short-cut around the economic and political
power of the capitalists. Mutual aid as a strategy fulfills that last
role, a shortcut.
But the pamphlet is not against mutual aid as a temporary tactic,
as mutual aid is a normal working-class reaction to disaster, to tribulation,
to collapse. The example of Occupy Sandy
in New York is a great example, as it came to the aid of communities long
before the city, state or federal government arrived. (See the book “Extreme Cities,” reviewed below, which
details this work.) The Socialist Rifle
Association and the “Cajun Navy” have played recent roles in storm disasters
too. In Minneapolis local defense groups
operated in various neighborhoods during the uprising around George Floyd. The Black Panthers and the Brown Berets in
the 1960s/70s both saw some success using mutual aid. The leader of the Mississippi Freedom
Democrats, Fannie Lou Hamer, eventually created farm cooperatives to provide low-priced
healthy food to African Americans. The
Black Muslims have attempted to create a parallel economy run by the NOI, but
they have no pretentions as to revolution.
You will note that little of this created a permanent
radical structure, no more than the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s-70s was
able to undermine U.S. capitalism. A few
worker-owned co-ops exist, a good number of member cooperatives still exist,
but even the example of the 1930s farmer co-ops shows their limited impact, as
they have become well integrated into the capital system. May Day Books itself is a product of that
1960-1970s upheaval. Prior to this the
German Social-Democratic Party, the Austrian Social-Democrats and the British
Labour Party had massive projects, buildings, associations, groups and
‘institutions,’ yet none of this led to a social overturn or the ability to
crush fascism. The Spanish Mondragon has lasted for years, but it has still
been unable to socialize Spanish society. Instead it is an accepted exception. All over the world there are examples like
this. The pamphlet admits these efforts are part of the power of these
movements or Parties, and involve many workers and peasants, but are still insufficient.
What the pamphlet doesn’t do is specify what forms mutual
aid might take if administered by an orthodox Marxist organization. It generally sees its role as the more
traditional one of electoral, union, tenant, community, student, theoretical, mass
movement and anti-fascist organizing with a revolutionary goal. Which seems to be a boatload on its own.
Advocates of mutual aid and direct action as tactic or strategy say it builds skills, influences and recruits working-class people, proves socialists ‘in practice’ to be effective, and creates power bases outside the normal functioning of the capitalist economy. Their mantra is solidarity not charity. In other words a form of ‘base-building’ for what they might see as socialism – though few mutual aid groups advertise that goal. Spade goes on, unlike Kropotkin who developed the term, to propose that mutual aid will actually lead to socialism.
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| Occupy Sandy in NYC |
The pamphlet asks whether social
change comes from this kind of organizing, or whether ‘events’ are the real key
to changes in mass consciousness. It is
clear mutual aid and counter-cultural institutions will exist in any
revolutionary situation. But they will
not be the tip of the spear, only possible supports. After all, Lenin came around to the idea that
the road to socialization of small holdings in the countryside and city was
through cooperatives. But that was after
the taking of political power.
Both Lenin and Marx saw mutual aid like Russian Narodnik ‘literacy’
efforts or English Owenite ‘model societies’ as diversions from revolutionary struggle.
Engels devoted a whole book to
critiquing actually existing utopian socialists - who he called ‘social
reformers’ – in the works of Saint Simon, Fourier and Owen. He wanted to put socialism on a material and revolutionary basis, not a generic humanistic or idealist one.
What Kind of Production Can Prevent or Limit Disasters?
The pamphlet also claims that not pursuing the path of “a technologically advanced society,
which requires the complex global supply chains and large-scale industry that
capitalism has created” will make life harder for workers, not easier. Revolution itself will make life harder for a
time, as will environmental collapse, as will the continuing degradations of
the working classes by capital. Incidentally, present ‘global supply chains’ are not organized with the needs of the working-classes
in various countries in mind.
A consistent weakness of Socialist Revolution and others is their vagueness as to what kind of production will actually be needed under a workers’ state and what kind of production will have to be discarded – if any! This relates to the environmental crisis most of all. Certainly the massive technological adjustment to climate disaster and capitalist functioning will involve an across-the-board look at every form of transport, production, commodities, packaging, infrastructure, agriculture, fishing, urbanism, work and so on - trying to benefit the majority at every step. Crises, including environmental ones, are built into capitalism. So the goal is to build 'mutual aid' into society itself.
In preventing disasters, some needed production changes are obvious, some are not. Reductions should be pointed at 1. capitalist waste, 2. toxic or useless products, 3. commodity fetishism, 4. useless jobs and activities, like advertising, 5. polluting processes, 6. military production, 7. unwise building or infrastructure projects, 8. unsustainable agricultural methods, 9. unnecessary packaging, 10. multiple iterations of basically the same item and 11. the wealth industry for capitalists and their upper-class allies. But even those measures might not be enough. All of these points are gathered under the market category of capitalist GDP and ‘growth.’
For instance, it is obvious now that there is
a limit to the minerals for a battery-run world. In a single-house
neighborhood, will sharing one push mower on a block make life harder or easier? Will transitioning to more bicycles or
e-scooters be harder or easier? Will requiring more human labor on farms, as oppose to heavily-machine oriented monocropping, be harder or easier? Will shorter hours compensate for sometimes harder work? Will
free health care or education and a guaranteed job and housing make life easier,
while consumer choices grow fewer? The
reality is there will be trade-offs.
History and ‘events’ will certainly guide the answers, but
there is enough information presently to make preliminary educated guesses. At bottom I don’t think any of this will make
‘life easier’ in the short term, at least in some ways. No more than strikes are a roll in the hay,
mutual aid easy or environmental destruction a dinner party.
Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box,
upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “Extreme
Cities,” “Mutual Aid – Building Solidarity During a Crisis” (Spade); “The
Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Nomadland,” “May Made Me,”
“The Dawn of Everything” (Graeber); “Without Apology,” “Grocery Activism,”
“Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens” (Wolff); “The Ministry for the Future,” “Lenin’s
Last Struggle” (Lewin); “Antifascism, Sports, Sobriety.”
And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
September 13, 2022
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