Mutual Aid Is the Means and Ends
Jan 26, 2025—March 2, 2025
A community resource-share and engagement
Opening Event: Bake Sale + Gathering
Sunday, February 2, 10am-12:30pm
Free to attend; bake sale proceeds will be donated to OPEN CATSKILLS
In lieu of an exhibition this February, Bushel is giving over its walls as an initially “blank page” on which community members can think together about what mutual aid might mean for this community, in these times. Our hope is that by the end of the installation, new connections and actionable ideas will have emerged.
This opening event includes a BAKE SALE to benefit OPEN CATSKILLS, a local group centered on meeting the needs of refugees and asylum seekers, both through advocacy and through support for resettlement in Delaware County.
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“To the daring belongs the future”
—Emma Goldman, The Blast, January 15, 1916
“Practicing mutual aid is the surest means for giving each other and to all the greatest safety, the best guarantee of existence and progress, bodily, intellectual and moral.”
― Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
“Mutual aid is the means and ends.”
—Stephen Bachelor, housekeeper of The Museum of Care, writing about David Graeber’s ideas.
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What is Mutual Aid?
See our bookshelves for an array of new and classic books on the subject, and follow the links below for introductory materials. These resources will be expanded!
LISTEN: “What Is Mutual Aid? Theory and Practice” | “What Is Mutual Aid? A History“ (The Mutual Aid Podcast)
WATCH: Introduction to Mutual Aid with Mariame Kaba
READ: from Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
“Mutual aid is collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created the crisis, or are making things worse. We see examples of mutual aid in every single social movement, whether it’s people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a ride-sharing system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, putting drinking water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training each other in emergency medicine because ambulance response time in poor neighborhoods is too slow, raising money to pay for abortions for those who can’t afford them, or coordinating letter-writing to prisoners. These are mutual aid projects. They directly meet people’s survival needs, and are based on a shared understanding that the conditions in which we are made to live are unjust.
“There is nothing new about mutual aid—people have worked together to survive for all of human history. But capitalism and colonialism created structures that have disrupted how people have historically connected with each other and shared everything they needed to survive. As people were forced into systems of wage labor and private property, and wealth became increasingly concentrated, our ways of caring for each other have become more and more tenuous.
“Today, many of us live in the most atomized societies in human history, which makes our lives less secure and undermines our ability to organize together to change unjust conditions on a large scale. We are put in competition with each other for survival, and we are forced to rely on hostile systems—like health care systems designed around profit, not keeping people healthy, or food and transportation systems that pollute the earth and poison people—for the things we need. More and more people report that they have no one they can confide in when they are in trouble. This means many of us do not get help with mental health, drug use, family violence, or abuse until the police or courts are involved, which tends to escalate rather than resolve harm.
“In this context of social isolation and forced dependency on hostile systems, mutual aid—where we choose to help each other out, share things, and put time and resources into caring for the most vulnerable—is a radical act.”
MORE:
online texts compiled by the Anarchist Library
If you have questions or resources to share, please come to the opening event or send us an email at info@bushelcollective.org with “mutual aid” in the subject line.