Mutual aid: "Investing" in your community

"You should be giving mutual aid when you can" is not a particularly new or controversial take in the circles I'm in. Giving to charities often just assists rich people in money laundering without actually helping people in need, essentially funneling money from working classes to the rich just like buying products from a corporation. By instead sharing our excess resources with comrades in need, especially from someone who works for a big company or something, we build community and working class networks and take a miniscule, barely noticeable step towards justice. Miniscule steps can always add up until they're noticeable.

But what I'm going to argue here is not just that we should give to those in desperate need, but also that we should give to those who would benefit from minor assistance too, and find a balance between the two. Specifically, I believe that giving mutual aid to causes that would help the requester get more money from richer people is a form of "investing" (sorry for the terminology) in one's community in a way that will help redistribute the wealth more than solely funding emergencies.

I'm going to use myself as an example even though I'm not in need of mutual aid for this at the time. My plan for right now is to build my inventory of clothing and accessories I've made so that I can go to the nearest bougie farmer's market and sell handmade items to upper middle class white people who can spend plenty of money on it. With this money, I plan to pay my bills and to give to mutual aid. Right now I'm good on the money front, because I have plenty of materials I can use and it only costs $30 for a booth, but if I didn't have $30 or if I didn't have enough materials and couldn't afford to buy more, this would be inaccessible to me and could be made accessible if I had more money. Even a little bit more. So a couple people who just got a $1000+ paycheck from a wage job could give $15 each and it would probably take only 2-4 people to do that so that I could make money for myself and probably end up giving back way more than $30 to the community. This is a way of communal resource management: it's like giving people preventative healthcare to save money on emergency healthcare. It'd be great if money wasn't needed, but in the places many anarchists, communists, and other anti-capitalists live, we would die without money. So as gross as it is to have to deal with money in the first place, it's in our social interest to save as much money as we can among the community. Because then, instead of everyone trying to scramble up the money to help someone not die because they can't afford emergency surgery, enough of us have increased income due to community "investment" that it's not a struggle to pay for that person's treatment, and then we'll be able to fund another life-saving ordeal.

I want to reiterate to be very clear on two things:

1) I am not requesting money right now. The limiting factor on my plan is currently my energy and my schedule, neither of which could be fixed with money currently.

2) I am not advising to stop giving to emergency funds. I'm suggesting some of us try to find some balance in what mutual aid we participate in. Rather than most of us give all of our mutual aid money to emergencies, some of us give some of it to non-emergency personal projects instead: this could mean funding a KickStarter, commissioning an artist who has a goal to get something for their art, or just giving money to someone who's raising money for a thing that will help them make more money in the future. Bonus points if the business the person is trying to do is also helpful to other people or the environment in some way. Help someone get what they need to recycle plastic? Now not only can they sell products they've made with recycled plastic and give that money back to the community (or just avoid needing more money), but they're helping reduce plastic waste for the environment and animals (and humans).

I see so many articles about how individuals can make more money, and they're all bullshit. I can't survive capitalism by simply putting my money towards making more money, because if I did that for the long term I would starve (or some other death-by-capitalism) in the short term. But as a community, we can do more for each other if we pay attention to ways we can get more money into the community rather than just passing it back and forth.

 

Other ways to do this, if you don't have the money or want to give all of the money you can to people who urgently need it (a valid choice):

• Share mutual aid requests with people you know with money
  
• Share artists' stores, Patreons, etc with people you know wouldn't donate much to mutual aid but would be inclined to buy themselves some art or subscribe to entertainment
• Let others in the community know when you see postings for high-paying jobs you don't want or aren't eligible for but some of us might be
• Offer non-monetary help such as recommendation letters or references to people you know, if this would help them get opportunities
• Boost/retweet/reblog every mutual aid or fundraising post you see
• Watch small creators' YouTube videos and like or comment or whatever for the algorithm. This also applies to other sites with an algorithm that determines someone's monetary gain. I've heard even minuscule donations on Kickstarter help with the algorithm, as another example.

We need to help each other in all of the ways that we can. Handing the same $20 back and forth between people with no or low-paying jobs isn't cutting it. Feel free to comment with any ideas I missed on how to help each other get more money from the rich and/or corporations.