selfenjoyment:

Teen Vogue out here quoting Kropotkin:

What is mutual aid?

Mutual aid is basically a fancy term for helping each other. For an intellectual perspective on it, we turn to the anarcho-communist writer and thinker Peter Kropotkin, who wrote in his 1902 text, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the concept is foundational to our systems of survival.

“It is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind,” Kropotkin wrote. “It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity.” Kropotkin went on to argue that society is based on “the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all” and “the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.”

The organizers we talked to seemed to agree that this moment of crisis is also a time when communities can come together and be stronger than ever.

“In times like these … it’s important to transform our relationships and practice community care via mutual aid,” Nehanda said. “Disabled people are often not thought about or valued, especially in times like a global pandemic, when we are the most vulnerable.”

Petty told Teen Vogue, “We have the ability to organize ourselves and build the infrastructure to get what we all need when the state and formal institutions fail to do so.”

Ratto pointed out that “secondary impacts,” like people being out of work, under quarantine, socially distant, and other social and economic disruptions, will be as much a part of the crisis as the health impacts.

“We can all start small,“ Ratto said, “with the people who live on the floor of our apartment, or the people who live next door and across the street from us on our streets, and check in and exchange contact information.”

“There’s nothing new in America about people not being able to work, being laid off or not having a job, or not having access to food, or not having access to reliable transportation, or facing any of those problems,” Ratto continued. “It’s important to keep the mindset moving forward, [and] that the lessons we learn from this about how communities can take care of each other and how neighbors can come together [are] a potential solution to some of the hardships of coronavirus, but also a potential solution to some of the hardships that will continue to exist.”