My PhD project

Mutual aid: a factor of (r)evolution? The economic anthropology of ‘everyday anarchism’ in the wake of COVID-19

How might forms of mutual aid that exist in the here-and-now help us reimagine the ways we exchange and relate to one another? At first glance, following an outpouring of mutual aid organisations to emerge in the early lockdowns, the phenomenon seems to have dissipated (or been overshadowed by market responses) just as quickly as it emerged. In this moment, I see an opportunity to document the ways the forces behind it have played out (and may continue to play out).

My PhD project research responds to a crucial moment, where we see multiple economic, natural, and social crises intersect and compound, and state solutions fall short. What communities on the ground need right now is not charities to come to their aid, but autonomy, resilience, and capacity building to build and sustain movements which demand and create better conditions.

As Gibson-Graham (2006) say, illuminating the very economic diversity around us brings hope. Indeed if nothing else, mutual aid is testament to an exchange relation that reflects not only the reality of economic diversity, but possibility.

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(1) Methodology & research questions: the who, what, when & where

My exploration centres on three elements. First, relating to crises, the social and material conditions in which mutual aid emerges and flourishes, and how it is shaped by broader socio-political forces. Second, the nature of the relationships and interactions within mutual aid structures, and what these can tell us about reciprocity, exchange, and economy, both within and beyond the market sphere. Finally, on prefigurative politics: the very idea of mutual aid as a force of political (re)imagination.

My methodology uses ethnographic participant observation – that is, working with mutual aid groups on the ground, participating in their everyday work, and taking observations, over a 9-month period. My observations (field notes) are qualitative and interpretive in nature; “thick description”, paying close attention to intimate, everyday interactions between people.

The research is guided by the following questions:

What are the social conditions (of crisis) from which mutual aid networks and relations emerge?
What do different ‘modes’ of mutual aid respond to and what do they bring to different communities?
To what extent does mutual aid plant or activate politically prefigurative ‘seeds of hope’? (Where/how)
What does the phenomenon have to say about the nature of reciprocity?

Where has this led? An update from Newcastle Upon Tyne, November 2023

I started my fieldwork in April 2023 by talking to a number of mutual aid communities spanning diverse forms, scales, and contexts. These ranged from political movements, to neighbourhood networks, and commonplace relations that David Graeber (2014) might call ‘baseline communism‘. My idea was to ‘trace’ these networks and to narrow down on one for particular ethnographic focus, which I would spend the rest of my fieldwork exploring.

Since June 2023, I have been conducting fieldwork with a mutual aid society in Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K.

Initially a pandemic response, Food & Solidarity started as three neighbourhood Whatsapp groups in the West End of Newcastle. They have since flourished into an active and growing membership-based network.

For the past 5 months as a member, I’ve been participating in food distribution, community defence, and direct actions. All the while, I’ve been trying to understand how the group – and the very phenomenon of mutual aid – might challenge our understanding of exchange and reciprocity, and demonstrate new political possibilities.

Initially a pandemic response, Food & Solidarity began as three neighbourhood Whatsapp groups in the West End of Newcastle.

They have since flourished into an active and growing membership-based network, wielding the principles ‘solidarity not charity’ and ‘everything for everyone’. For the past 5 months as a member, I’ve been participating in food distribution, community defence, and direct action, all the while, trying to understand the ways the phenomenon might challenge our understanding of exchange and reciprocity, and demonstrate new political possibilities.

(2) Background & context: What is mutual aid?

In all human societies we see the persistent emergence of loose networks and social movements, whose relations of exchange are based on principles of ‘solidarity not charity’ principles antithetical to those of the ‘market’. I call this phenomenon ‘mutual aid’, but it also falls loosely under the banner of direct action, solidarity economy, and many other terms (my personal favourite being ‘everyday anarchism’).

Mutual aid spans geography, culture, and form, from large-scale, decentralised political movements, to more quotidian community projects. Beyond a method, momentary display of solidarity, or an organisational doctrine, I see it as essentially a way of relating; an ethos of radical care.

What all these projects around the world tell us is that they can be the foundation for bigger projects, both practically and as the imaginative and ideological basis. For something new, based on generosity, abundance, horizontality, mutuality, inclusion.

Sitrtin et al. 2020, XV

Perhaps the most recognisable form of mutual aid to emerge was in the pandemic. As the world went into lockdown in 2020 and citizens were confronted—many for the first time—with unemployment, school closures, social isolation, and rise in social and economic inequalities, thousands of autonomous mutual aid networks materialised across the globe, seemingly spontaneously. Not only did COVID bring the inadequacies of state solutions to the fore, but it exposed gaping cracks in the capitalist landscape. Moreover, it presented people with a glimpse at possibility: the very prospect that things don’t have to be this way.

(3) A factor of (r)evolution?

The term ‘mutual aid’ has roots in anarchist scholarship around prefigurative politics, though the phenomenon itself runs through human history and is at the heart of many Indigenous cultures. Lots of practitioners are not even familiar with the term, yet others espouse it as an organisational principle or ethos, and endorse its radical or prefigurative connotations.

Not only is mutual aid thought to contest the political, but to construct it—according to Big Door Brigade, ‘not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on government representatives, but by building new social relations that are more survivable’. What often begins with everyday ‘survival work’—what may seem instinctual or materially necessary among marginalised populations and disaster-stricken communities—can quickly embed itself into a social fabric (with living examples in Athens and Rojava, for instance. In this sense, mutual aid is said to plant ‘seeds of hope’ for new political and economic imaginaries. As several scholars have pointed out, these imaginaries are already scattered through our everyday relations—“the niches or cracks within capitalism” (O’Hearn and Grubacic, 2016).

(4) Theoretical lens (the academic stuff)

My project is grounded in economic anthropology. I started with a critical exploration of economic anthropological notions of gift exchange, dating back to Mauss, tracing through to current debates around the nature of reciprocity.

I rest it on a critique ‘crisis’ informed by feminist social reproduction theory, which looks beyond narrow explanations of crisis as a historical conjuncture with an external cause, to illuminate ways that crisis permeates the social fabric of everyday life under capitalism.

I have brought this literature into dialogue with classical and contemporary anarchist political theory, Marxist political economy, feminist geography, and conceptual debates around reciprocity, prefiguration, essentialism, and care labour. This framework raises a series of questions around the nature of crisis itself: what is it about the conditions of crises that culminate to produce these outpourings of mutual aid? How do these factors interact with the ‘seeds of hope’ (prefigurative politics) that mutual aid is supposed to contain? What, then, can we say about the contexts in which mutual aid has flourished outside our conventional understandings of a crisis?

This lens interrogates what mutual aid (particularly its recent upsurge) can reveal about human exchange relations. Ultimately, it aims to challenge some of our fundamental assumptions about economic exchange, human relations, and social change.

(5) …And the ‘why?’

In the past, economic anthropologists have remarked upon the ways that the financial crisis in 2008 revived dialogue around the sheer range of human economic practices to exist (Hart et al., 2010). Now, looking at the ways mutual aid has proliferated across communities and places, it would seem to me that the COVID-19 crisis should have similar, if not greater, effect. This brings to bear feminist ‘community economists’ J. K. Gibson-Graham (2014, 152):

“For ethnographers today, no task is more important than to make small facts speak to large concerns, to make the ethical acts ethnography describes into a performative ontology of economy, and the threads of hope that emerge into stories of everyday revolution.”

rhutton@deakin.edu.au