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The World Needs Mutual Aid. So Do We. 2020 has been a year full of hardship and loss, one that we would gladly put behind us if we could. Unfortunately, the effects of the pandemic will be long-lasting -- physically, spiritually and otherwise. It is difficult to even imagine what forms our grief will take in the coming years. We also know that COVID-19 was far from the beginning of hardship for so many, due to the countless imbalances in American society. If one truth has become apparent throughout this especially dark era, though, it’s the importance of The Collective in our struggle for a better world.
“it is for our collective well-being to take care of one another. If collective liberation means that none of us is free until all of us are, collective safety means not one of us is safe until the world is safe for us all.”
It is easy in the United States to imagine one’s life as completely separate from the lives of others. Borders can look like many things: linguistic barriers, income inequality, highways separating neighborhoods, cultural norms, the exclusivity of the “nuclear family”, and of course geopolitical borders. If nothing else does the trick, a catastrophic global pandemic should make it clear how arbitrary these borders really are.
In the hyper-globalized present, it makes perfect sense to ask, “How will this affect my community?” when someone across the ocean contracts a highly-contagious and deadly virus. Inevitably, this person’s sickness will affect the health of your community. It is only a matter of whether those fabricated borders will cushion or accelerate your fall. Regardless, it is for our collective well-being to take care of one another. If collective liberation means that none of us is free until all of us are, collective safety means not one of us is safe until the world is safe for us all. These sentiments might ring true to readers of a mutual aid zine, but to the handful of people who control so much of the world’s wealth and resources, it hasn’t sunken in yet. Most likely, it never will. Already we see the world’s reserve of vaccine doses being bought up and doled out in wealthier, more “developed” nations, while much of the Global South will likely not receive their fair share of vaccinations until much later. What does this mean for the safety of people around the world, with new waves of infections and the possibility of the virus developing an increased resistance to the vaccine? What will it mean for travel, for trade, for international relations as a whole? Whether or
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not Donald Trump was the first president to so unabashedly declare “America first!” (which history will tell us-- he was not), this selfishness has always been part and parcel with national diplomacy. And that isn’t about to change. But what do we miss out on when we turn a blind eye to the suffering of those around us? What do we make ourselves vulnerable to through this chosen ignorance? Jim Klinge, a featured speaker in the 2018 documentary Owned: A Tale of Two Americas responds in his own way to these questions: “When you look at a rainforest, you’re seeing a very complex ecosystem. Not only do you have these massive trees, but you have all the understory, all the animals. Every leaf has its own individual ecosystem. And when you add up all that, you have this massive, massive complexity. You compare that to, say, a corn field. You have one species of plant. A complete monoculture. And what you see is a very efficient undertaking… You produce a lot of corn in a very small space. But you certainly don’t have the complexity and the ability to thrive that a rainforest does. So what we did (referring to the US housing economy) is we switched cities from being complex systems to corn fields… This pattern of development has allowed us to be intentionally ignorant of the pain and the hurt and the needs that go along in all our places.” Essentially, when we close ourselves off to the people and lives around us, we forfeit our complexity and, in effect, our humanity. We’re no longer part of a rich, complex ecosystem, but a one-crop field reliant on outside forces rather than each other to remain fruitful. We are both oppressor and oppressed through our ignorance. And with decades upon decades of structural reinforcement (namely, the enforcement of both material and social borders), it becomes increasingly difficult to reach out and connect with one another. So what can we do when we live in a society that makes it so difficult to forge connection and warmth beyond our so called “pods” or beyond the workplace? We intentionally build community. When the state and the market give us crumbs to live by, we build a new world from the ashes of the old. We, Pittsburgh Mutual Aid and our anti-capitalist comrades, pool our resources to take care of and defend each other and the people we’ve never met, for the sake of our collective survival.
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Pittsburgh Mutual Aid: Who we are Who is Pittsburgh Mutual Aid? Pittsburgh Mutual Aid is an autonomous group of community members that connects folks in the Pittsburgh area to provide support and care for one another. This can look like a lot of different things, from lending a helping hand to a neighbor with transportation or a home repair, to getting groceries for someone, or just checking in on one another. We hope to help infuse the Pittsburgh community with care and commitment to one another’s well-being.
What do we believe? We are explicitly anti-capitalist. Through mutual aid, we work towards creating the world we want to live in—one based on care, trust, and the beauty and strength of community. We are not associated with the state and are not a non-profit organization. In practice, this means we trust folks to know and communicate their own needs, no to jump through. Everyone have no “eligibility requirements,” and nohave hoops deserves to have their needs met and to feel cared for, and we believe that collective, community care is key to working towards and ultimately accomplishing that. We are all interdependent on one another, beautifully woven together in ways well beyond our comprehension. It is through this interdependence—both leaning on one another and holding each other up—that we are able to take steps towards the world that exists in our dreams.
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This inherent interdependence also reflects another main component of mutual aid: Mutual aid is for everyone. We all have something to offer to our community, and we all need help, care, and tenderness from one another at the same time. By coming together, we are able to work towards collective liberation—to acknowledge, understand, and internalize that none of us are free until all of us are free. We are one of many groups and individuals working towards and for this dream. At its core, Pittsburgh Mutual Aid is for and by the Pittsburgh community, understanding our deep interdependence and interconnectedness. As anti-capitalists, we reject the notions of scarcity and individualism. Instead, we believe in care, respect, and that we all simultaneously have needs and something to offer. This means listening to and trusting our neighbors and finding ways to provide support and meet each other where we are at.
What is mutual aid? Mutual aid is a practice in which community members work to provide support for each other outside the bounds of capitalist systems. It depends on communal leadership, striving to meet the needs of all people in a sustainable way. The concept of mutual aid is something that has existed around the world for centuries under many different names (or no name), but its main goal is always to work to create a safe and prosperous community where all may give what they can and find what they need.
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An Analysis of Jan. 6. and Takeaways for our Movement Throughout the events of January 6 there was a segment of the revolutionary book To Our Friends by the Invisible Committee that I couldn’t stop thinking about: ...when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets... even the most fervent conspiracy freaks would find nothing arcane there; the truth is that power is simply no longer that theatrical reality to which modernity accustomed us. - To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee, Chapter 3.1 As people dressed in MAGA hats, anti-Semitic shirts, and buffalo-horn headdresses wandered aimlessly around the US Capitol building, it must have dawned on them at some point that the imagined power of the building did not exist. They were not in control of the government by standing on the dais of the Senate chamber or sitting in the office of the Speaker of the House. And when they were asked to leave at the end of the day, they simply walked out. What else could they do? Of course, this rioting mob of white supremasists are contemptible. Despite their ignorance about the true nature of government and governmental power, they were trying to hold a putsch in support of Trump, after all. A Putsch is defined by a far right attempt to overthrow the government without any military or popular support. Just like Hitler’s Putsch in the Munich Beer Hall in 1923, the people who stormed the Capitol building represented a small segment of far rightwing thought and upper class interests as they pathetically tried to claim a popular mantle without real popular support. Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky that this marauding band of fascists didn’t have the backing of the army, the capitalist class, or any popular legitimacy.
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The rejection of these people has fortunately been swift. Moving forward, it is important to ensure that they face punishment so that their power and their ideas do not proliferate. But there is also something that can be learned from their failed Putsch for us, the people seeking positive change to the system. Unlike in ages past, the capture of the seat of government did not threaten change to the system. This should be a significant realization for us. Even if some huge protest were organized and the halls of government were taken by people seeking positive reform, the likelihood of real significant change would be small. That isn’t to say that protests where we challenge power shouldn’t be organized, they should. But it is to say that there is no shortcut to revolution. Revolution must be built, “In this way, we have an advantage organized, and connected on over the stormers of the Capitol: we many levels with a long-term center solidarity as a virtue. They mindset. Everyone from the believe in strange conspiracies, white passive supporter to the leaders supremacy, and keeping the struggle of must be engaged, invested, and capitalism. We believe in the power of organized. In order to create this engagement there must be community, togetherness, and real commitment and caring as centrality of solving human problems.” the basis of the movement. In this way, we have an advantage over the stormers of the Capitol: we center solidarity as a virtue. They believe in strange conspiracies, white supremacy, and keeping the struggle of capitalism. We believe in the power of community, togetherness, and centrality of solving human problems. This is also not to say that the revolution must be years or decades away: people are struggling now, people are starving now, people are dying now. However, when we build our revolution, it cannot exist at the level of the symbolic alone. It must be woven in with our community and the collective struggle of the masses against the power and exploitation of the capitalist classes. In short, as the stormers showed (to our great fortune), a takeover of an ornate building will not change much if the entire movement is just those few thousand
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people and the cops that were complicit in their pursuit. But, by building a strong, interconnected, working class movement based around our common caring and desire to provide for human needs, we may be able to accomplish much more and for the better. Throughout the COVID crisis it has been made clear how little our government cares about us and our needs. They have left us to die without healthcare, housing, food, or income even as Wall Street profits soar. At Pittsburgh Mutual Aid we have been organizing to provision for the needs of our community despite the uncaring nature of the government that rules us. This too has reminded me of a passage from the Invisible Committee writing about self organization of protest movements around the world: Crowds forced for weeks to deal on their own with the crucial questions of provisioning, construction, care and treatment, burial, or armament not only learned to organize themselves, but learned something that most didn’t know: that we can organize ourselves, and that this capacity is fundamentally joyful. - To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee, Chapter 7.4
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Examples of Mutual Aid
We all already practice mutual aid on a regular basis in our day-to-day life. Here are some everyday examples of mutual aid: -
Helping a friend with homework
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Watching a neighbor's cat while they are in the hospital
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Bringing food to a co-worker who has nothing to eat
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Picking up medication for an unhoused person you know
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Helping an acquaintance move to a new house
What examples of mutual aid can you think of? Draw or write below:
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Mutual Aid Marigolds
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Ways to get involved ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖
We’re always looking for volunteers to help with community needs! Sign up at: https://www.covaid.co/pgh-volunteer Join our team by emailing us at: contact@pittsburghmutualaid.com Check out our website: https://www.pittsburghmutualaid.com/ Follow, get organized with, and donate to our local comrades: ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢ ➢
Bukit Bail Fund Pittsburgh Union of Regional Renters (PURR) Steel City John Brown Gun Club Pittsburgh Democratic Socialists of America Steel City Food Not Bombs Jailbreak PGH Landlord Watchlist Project PA Put People First PA Pittsburgh Restaurant Workers Aid True T PGH
Follow Us on Social Media! ❖ ❖ ❖
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pghmutualaid/ Instagram: @_pghmutualaid Twitter: @AidPgh
Links to Donate ❖ ❖ ❖
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Venmo: @pghmutualaid Cash App: $pghmutualaid Grocery fund: ➢ Venmo → @ratzon-food-distro
Thank You for Reading!
Flip to the back cover to see a bunny! Love and Solidarity, PMA
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