Important Values within Mutual Aid

1. We don't need the state to survive. We keep each other safe.

For thousands of years, Black and Indigenous communities have worked together to meet each other's needs outside of global capitalism and the neoliberal state. Today, many people cling to the state as our only hope, ignoring how we can survive and thrive in collectivities. 17

2. Solidarity, not charity will liberate us.

The work of mutual aid is horizontal out of necessity. Solidarity asks us to develop relationships of reciprocity and co-resistance. Charity, on the other hand, enforces a top down charity model that maintains the power dynamics that we are seeking to destroy. 18

3. We have to make lasting commitments to this work.

Resistance isn't a career or a hobby. Instead of being reactive we must put are values into practice in our everyday lives and within our interpersonal relationships. Our lifestyle must be consistent with our demands for justice, it can't be something that we come back to later. 19

4. We must aim to dismantle all systems of oppression.

All of our struggles and freedoms are interconnected. Isolating them from one another weakens our power and fails to bring true liberation. We're not free until we are all free. 20

5. We must practice community accountability within our movements.

@mollyccostello

Our movements will suffer if we cannot be in healthy relation with one another. Building community in which we are accountable is an essential part of revolutionary organizing and building mass movements that are grounded in radical love solidarity. 21