1y ago

Why don't more poor people join mutual aid groups instead of using charities?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2258784

I've been looking through some US and EU labor data and I have started to wonder why don't more of the working poor join local mutual aid groups instead of staying at their likely shitty jobs or relying on charities?
This is a study on the labour distribution in the US among the working poor
On table 4 it shows that there are about 5,812,000 people that are classified as working poor ( Its says number in thousands so I multiplied the number given by 1000) and that alot of those jobs are in essential services like making food or providing support to others.
Similar diversity is show in the EU as well
So if most of these people decided to stop working at their current job and instead bring that those skills to a mutual aid network wouldn't they still get most of the resources they need because other specialists would be there to help them and also live a generally more happy life?
Also the reason why I am saying instead of charities is because charities become less effective the more people request from them because they have limited resources to share and also mainly supported by wealthy people that can unilaterally give and take away support.
Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.
This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

26 comments

This question is analogous to “why hasn’t anarcho-communism yet worked on a wide scale?” Which is a question with many, many facets to it. You’d have to ask a lot of questions separately.
If I were to try, though, I think the simple answer is “people who work in X area usually do not own the means of production and as such cannot redirect the end product to horizontalist organizations.” Most people can’t just quit their jobs to join a mutual aid group because, without being able to contribute things, the biggest thing a mutual aid group can pass around is time, and most mutual aid groups that exist irl are focused on doing tasks like “picking up prescriptions for others,” and cannot replace participation in the capitalist economy.
Nevermind how most governments don’t want horizontalist non-capitalist organizations to gain enough power to provide a viable alternative to living under capitalism.
- Also, there's this idea that everyone has a shitty job. I like my job. I wouldn't do it for free, but I'm happy with it.

What's a mutal aid network? I've never heard of that before but you make it sound like it's a charity.
- This is my answer in another comment on a different post.
  I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but the general gist is that mutual aid is when a group of people band together and share whatever resources and services that they have to offer to other people in that group.
  So if someone made an excess of vegetables in their garden they would give that to others in the group with expecting anything immediately in return in the hopes that when their fence breaks down and they request help someone with knowledge on how to fix it would be willing to come help.
  As for finding mutual aid groups I’ve seen mutualaid.wiki and mutual aid hub but I’m not sure of what else there is.
  
  I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but
  If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn't you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don't join them because people haven't heard of them?
  This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?
  People haven't heard of them.
  Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things....leaving me even more confused about what you're talking about.
  
  I just thought that was "being on good terms with your neighbors". My parents would do that at every house we lived in but I've never once talked to my neighbors and wouldn't think of asking them for help.
  
  We call those cooperatives / co-ops where I am. There are a few food co-ops scattered around the city, but most of them rely on a "you work a couple of days a month at the shopfront" basis because land is obviously not something the urban poor can generally afford, and the produce has to come from somewhere. There are also a few DIY and repair co-ops and community centre sessions, but you have to be lucky enough to live near one or own/rent a car to really make use of them.
  There are fewer formal food ones in rural areas though because of the tyranny of distance, it's more just a few neighbours sharing excess of their own crops. Transport is expensive or inaccessible so the rural poor don't get much selection of produce either, making it not overly helpful in comparison to charities. If everyone around you is only growing wheat because that's what the land grows best, you're not getting much non-wheat nutrition.
  There's also the problem of accessibility. People with disabilities are frequently the ones experiencing the most severe poverty, and they may be unable to practically contribute because of existing barriers. Which leaves the eternal dilemma of "if they don't contribute is it no longer mutual aid?".
  
  Like a barter system or commune? That may be a good way to get homemade things, but you still need to pay (or get help paying for) basic utilities.

Because if everyone involved is quitting their jobs, they'll have no money with which to buy food. Which means they'll have to farm it themselves. And farming, even with top-of-the-line modern tech, is backbreaking fucking work. Also unpredictable as hell: bad harvests aren't uncommon, especially for novice farmers with no formal training like these guys would be.
In other words, one bad harvest, and everyone in the system you're proposing fucking dies. Yeah, there's a reason in the 1800s people were abandoning their family farms for the horrorshow of Victorian era-factories en masse: because even that hell was still preferable to farming.
- Not to mention needing capital for the land, equipment, seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel, power, storage, transportation and uncountable other misc with a price tag. Starting with trained doctors and on to even more narrow specialists.

At least where I live, people already help each other. They even build illegal things like working bridges. The result is the slums.

26 comments