Category: Mutual Aid

Cuba, disaster preparedness, and Mutual Aid

Cuba Prepares for Disaster by Don Fitz caught my attention for several reasons. Reading the article and watching the video below, I’m astonished by what Cuba has been doing for decades related to our changing climate. The work there implements many of the things I’ve been learning from Mutual Aid and Indigenous ways. Cuba is a model for the way I believe we must change to deal with oncoming environmental chaos. And although Cubans might not call it Mutual Aid, what they have done, are doing, is consistent with the concepts of Mutual Aid.

For Cuba to implement global environmental protection and degrowth policies it would need to receive financing both to research new techniques and to train the world’s poor in how to develop their own ways to live better.  Such financial support would include …

  • Reparations for centuries of colonial plunder.
  • Reparations for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, multiple attacks which killed Cuban citizens, hundreds of attempts on Fidel’s life, and decades of slanderous propaganda: and,
  • At least $1 trillion in reparations for losses due to the embargo since 1962.

In the video Cuba’s Life Task, Orlando Rey also observes that “There must be a change in the way of life, in our aspirations.  This is a part of Che Guevara’s ideas on the ‘new man.’  Without forming that new human, it is very difficult to confront the climate issue.”

Cuba Prepares for Disaster BY DON FITZ, COUNTERPUNCH, MARCH 28, 2022

Since Rio de Janeiro [Earth Summit in 1992] the words of our commander-in-chief Fidel Castro provide evidence of the actions and concern for human beings.

An important biological species is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat: mankind… It must be said that consumer societies are chiefly responsible for this appalling environmental destruction…
They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air…
The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding…
Third World countries cannot be blamed for all this; yesterday’s colonies and today nations exploited and plundered by an unjust international economic order. The solution cannot be to prevent the development of those who need it the most.
In reality, everything that contributes to underdevelopment and poverty today is a flagrant violation of the environment…
If we want to save humanity from this self-destruction, wealth and available technologies must be distributed better throughout the planet…
Stop transferring to the Third World lifestyles
and consumer habits that ruin the environment…
Pay the ecological debt, not the foreign debt.
Eradicate hunger and not humanity
Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.
Thank you.

Fidel Castro, Earth Summit, 1992

The main value of the speech was to put environmental problems in their socioeconomic context. The environmental issue has been detached from its origins in capitalist development, from the foundations of a system that, based on excessive consumption, on unequal production and consumption patterns, created the present situation.

From the video Cuba’s Life Task: Combatting Climate Change

Cuba has a system of civil protection established since the early 1960s following Hurricane Flora [1963] which caused major losses of human and animal lives, and economic damage.
It is organized so that the moment there is a threat that phenomenon comes under permanent vigilance and various stages are established with mechanisms for protection and evacuation.
Cuban Civil Defense adopts a systemic approach. The function is to protect the population, their resources, the economy, and the environment against natural, technological, and sanitary threats. Not just disasters, but also war, or the consequences of climate change.

The political organizations and organizations of the masses, made up of the population, are part of the Civil Defense system. When there is a situation or event, they join the health brigades activated in the Popular Councils in the defense zones, they support the lineworker – specialists who establish the vital systems related to energy – the neighborhood clean-up, after damage incurred during the event, including to building structures.

They contribute to local efforts. This guarantees several things; first, that there is protection at the neighborhood level, and second, that there is complete knowledge, because those neighbors know where the most vulnerable people and the most unprotected buildings are. That secures the process.

Every year in May before the hurricane season begins, we have an annual exercise, ‘Meteoro’, in which the population practice for disaster situations. Initially it was focused on tropical cyclones and hurricanes, but it has been broadened to prepare the population for droughts and earthquakes.

Recently we had a meeting about climate change in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and we saw that the number of people who died from Hurricane Irma was 10 in Cuba and 3,000 in Puerto Rico.

People die here from meteorological events too, but loss of life is minimal.

This whole process of relocating people who reside in high risk, vulnerable settlements.
is financed by the state. This is one of the complexities to speeding up this process.
It is not dependent on the ability of each citizen, the state assumes that responsibility
and it requires substantial resources that the state has to allocate among its many expenses.
But it is a state priority to carry out these relocations. New settlements and communities have been built, new buildings in existing communities. We have also learned that it is not only a physical issue of rebuilding houses.
You have to relocate a whole way of life, rebuild a setting where people have social services,
medical services, educational services, job opportunities. This is more complex when the community’s work is linked to the coast, as with fishing communities. We have concluded that relocating communities is an extreme measure against natural, technological, and sanitary threats. Not just disasters, but also war, or the consequences of climate change.

We can do it. What is our big problem? The worst problem is the [US] blockade. That is why we cannot advance any faster. Martí, Fidel, Raúl, Díaz-Canel…Long live free Cuba!

It is more than 60 years of the [US] blockade, which was greatly tightened by the Trump administration causing a lot of damage, and Biden, despite what he said in his electoral campaign, has still done nothing to loosen those measures. The country is in a very difficult situation as, although many do not think so, persecution is real. Remove the genocidal blockade against the Cuban people!

It is very difficult in conditions of poverty or deep economic and social inequality to advance a climate agenda.

One problem today is that you cannot convert the world’s energy matrix, with current consumption levels, from fossil fuels to renewable energies. There are not enough resources for the panels and wind turbines, nor the space for them. There are insufficient resources for all this.

If you automatically made all transportation electric tomorrow, you will continue to have the same problems of congestion, parking, highways, heavy consumption of steel and cement.

There must be a change in the way of life, in our aspirations.

This is part of the debate about socialism, part of Che Guevara’s ideas on the ‘new man’.

Without forming that new human, it is very difficult to confront the climate issue. I believe that a plan like Tarea Vida needs to be supported by a socialist system. It requires a vision that not directed towards profit, or self-interest. It must be premised on social equity and rejecting inequality. A plan of this nature requires a different social system, and that is socialism.

Perhaps the three most important lessons learned are: political will, communication to translate results, and training young people. From my point of view, these are the most important achievements in Cuba. My message to this climate change conference is a message of social inclusion

I also place Cuba’s disaster response system in conversation with these emergent practices of mutual aid

With the global and local effects of COVID-19 bearing down on us and without any clear expectation of when it might end, it’s as important as ever to take care of our communities. In this episode, we talk about the importance of mutual aid, the history of these networks, and why – if you haven’t before – now is the time to seriously consider getting involved with them.

…We talked about this in an earlier episode about social work in Cuba and the way that model was really rooted more in community organizing and almost somewhat of a mutual aid, at least from what I understood from what we read at that time of basically the community was supporting each other, but then the social worker’s job was actually to almost be the liaison with the state to get stuff that the community needed in order to facilitate that support.

Decolonize Social Work, Episode 10, What is Mutual Aid?

This research comprises a literature review of both humanitarian organization-oriented and social science-oriented sources. In drawing from both NGO and local analyses, I hope to locate practices that could foster a less colonial approach to disaster response. I also place Cuba’s disaster response system in conversation with these emergent practices of mutual aid: in many ways, what theorists learned in the aftermath of the Haiti disaster was already implemented, in a top-down manner, by the Cuban government, which is highly successful at limiting damage and human casualties from disasters (Castellanos Abella, 2008).

CARIBBEAN SOLIDARITIES: CUBAN AND HAITIAN MUTUAL AID NETWORKS IN RELIEF AND RECOVERY EFFORTS by Hayes Buchanan, COLUMBIA GSAPP
up-bouakar-hayesbuchanan-sp21-carribean-solidaritiesDownload

Mutual Aid and Revolution

Mutual Aid and Revolution by Andžejs Jenots is another article in the zine I’ve been writing about, We Gather Here Today in Disservice of the State, from Des Moines Mutual Aid (DMMA). I think of Mutual Aid as revolutionary because it represents a paradigm shift from capitalism. I recently wrote Mutual Aid is the Quaker way of being in the world.

This article addresses a weakness of Mutual Aid that I’ve been aware of, which is “to the extent that mutual aid is an activity resulting in products and services, financed by groups of workers who exist because they (or a large enough share of them) sell their labor power to the enemy class for a wage, mutual aid is the redistribution of a share of those wages.”

But there is much more to Mutual Aid than providing products and services. As Jenots says below, “one of the central tasks of mutual aid is less about doing something for the sake of doing something, and more about thinking and noticing.” Des Moines Mutual Aid is very skilled at noticing and responding.

At present most of the food we distribute comes from sources that paid for the materials and labor to make it. We got it because its freshness date had expired. I envisioned a time when wheat, for example, was grown by farmers who gave it to those who make bread, which is distributed without charge. The farmers and bakers would be among those who received the bread. This is not as naive as it might seem, because capitalism is collapsing. We need to be thinking about and working toward what we want to replace it.

As Jenots goes on to say, “it is clear what the main weakness in this is: all (class-independent) mutual aid activity is constrained by the wages of its participants and donors.”

Mutual aid is not infrastructure for running away or carving out a small plot of land – literal or figurative, it is infrastructure for driving a spear into the heart of capital and sustaining an effort to do so. Mutual aid is a basis for preparedness for future revolutionary events, including for the allocation of all of the skills and capabilities whose aims will be redirected from profit-making to something else as a result of the widespread clarity gained in a revolutionary situation. Even though we can say little in detail about a coming revolution, we know that it will be a conflict between classes, and that will mean strain on dependencies between those classes. To the extent we now depend on the enemy class for the organization of the production of goods and services (and in many ways, we do), someday we won’t be able to anymore. However, the fight will no longer belong only to `we unhappy few,’ these early-to-consciousness revolutionaries, with our meager skillsets. It will become everyone’s domain…

The task of revolutionary mutual aid is to re-link production with distribution when and where capitalist social relations no longer do….

One of the central tasks of mutual aid is less about doing something for the sake of doing something, and more about thinking and noticing – understanding the trajectory capitalism is taking in order to understand the needs it will create and the means, methods, technique, skills, expertise, etc. which finally become available to us as they are expelled from capitalism.

Andžejs Jenots, Mutual Aid and Revolution

We Don’t Leave Our Fighters Behind

Another article in the recent zine, We Gather Here Today in Disservice of the State, from Des Moines Mutual Aid (DMMA) is “Court Solidarity: How and Why, or We Don’t Leave Our Fighters Behind.”

Des Moines Mutual Aid is an Abolitionist Mutual Aid Collective made up of varying radical and revolutionary tendencies in what is currently known as central Iowa.

Even though I’ve been engaged with DMMA for two years, I continue to learn of the many things our collective does. My experience is with the food giveaway project, and I know about the work to help the houseless. I also know about the bail fund. But not the full extent of Court Solidarity.

Des Moines Mutual Aid is the best community organizing group that I know of. Besides putting together and distributing the boxes of food on Saturday mornings, I look forward to hearing what my friends have been up to. And look for ways I can help. By offering to take photos at events, for example.

The Why

The injustices we face are commonly perpetrated and enforced by the state. Which means our demands for justice often require agitation against the state. The state criminalizes the exercise of civil liberties with laws that are themselves often unconstitutional. But this is how the state attempts to quell resistance, by arresting and incarcerating us.

The basic reasoning of why this tactic [court solidarity] has developed is that the state uses isolation as a tool for intimidation and compliance. The state relies on you feeling powerless once they have you in their grips… When we know our communities have our back, we are less likely to be coerced into decisions detrimental to ourselves and our communities and more willing to fight back.

May capitalism’s armed militias never capture you. If they do, may your people have your back like you had theirs.

A Brief History of Des Moines Mutual Aid Court Solidarity

When the uprising after the police murder of George Floyd began, Des Moines Mutual Aid understood we needed to organize a bail fund to keep our fighters out of jail and get them back to the streets. This was also during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and jails are an extremely dangerous hotspot for virus transmission.
As expected, the state responded viciously to the protests and began making mass arrests. We put a call out to the community and they responded rapidly with donations. We set up a hotline that is monitored 24/7 to alert us to arrests and typically have bonds posted within hours. We managed to bail out every protester in Des Moines since the Summer of 2020 and continue to do so at the time of this writing at the beginning of 2022.

This reminds me of my training for community organizing as part of the Keystone Pledge of Resistance in 2013. Everyone participating was told to write the phone number to our bail support team on their skin.

But the court solidarity of DMMA goes far beyond that.

After bail was paid and the person was leaving jail, they were interviewed to see if they had any immediate needs and to obtain their contact information so the court solidarity team could monitor court filings and work on finding pro bono lawyers and mental health professionals as needed.

As the street protests cooled down and the trials began, we put out a call to build a Court Solidarity crew. We used information from the defendants and public court records to keep up to date on court scheduling and made sure we showed up to court dates. This also served as a movement building tactic. Many different orgs are represented on these days and we use this time to eat together, organize further, and strategize about upcoming cases

Arrest

Once arrested there are two things that need to be done right away.

  • Assess the immediate needs of the person arrested, and of those who depend on them.
    • “Needs such as injuries, time-dependent medications, pets, children, dependent adults, immigration status, etc.”
  • Determine their bail and get it paid quickly
    • “The longer someone is in the hands of the state the possibility of something very bad happening increases.”

Pre-trial

Once the ransom is paid, or the defendant is denied bail and must wait in a cage for trial, the next step is to find legal representation.

This is also the time to organize defense committees for the defendant or a group of defendants, with their consent. The defense committee’s roles include raising funds for legal costs and dependent care as well as popular support, as deemed appropriate. They often work hand in hand with the lawyers to make sure neither is creating roadblocks for the defendant’s goals. The defense committees should have one or more individuals that keep track of the defendant’s mental health and arrange for therapy or other means of relief.
All of these processes are traumatic to the defendant.

Remember that many protest arrests are of people knowingly risking their freedom to further ours.

Trial

Once the trial starts, fill those seats! There are few feelings of isolation like sitting in a courtroom inside a building completely filled with people that have your worst interests in mind, many of them armed. When you have a few dozen people sitting with you it can give the little extra courage needed to complete this on your terms. There is evidence to suggest that court support and character letters, which we will come back to, have a positive effect for the defendant during sentencing.
If the defendant is feeling it, have the whole crew eat together during lunch breaks, and rest somewhere together while waiting on the jury to return its verdict. This can have the effect of keeping the defendant’s morale up, as well as that of the defense committees, many of whom may be defendants themselves. The stress of state repression during times of increased resistance can, and all too frequently has, fractured relationships and solidarity.
These are important moments to nurture those relationships and maintain the strength we built together in the street

Post-trial

In the case of a guilty verdict or acceptance of a plea, continued support is needed. Character reference letters can be sent to the court prior to sentencing. And funds need to be raised. crowdfunding is commonly used.

In the worst case scenario money will be needed for commissary.

Letter writing can be very helpful, not only to those who are incarcerated, but as a way those outside the prison walls to learn of conditions in prisons. And organize ways to address conditions. I’ve written about the prison letter writing group I’ve been involved with. That is organized by one of my Mutual Aid friends as part of the work of Central Iowa Democratic Socialists of America.

Transgress the Prison Walls

This is a very broad overview of Court Solidarity. Many of the important details will differ based on the laws of your state. Looking up state code and talking to lawyers, law students, or paralegals will help you get a handle on that.
Our next installment will cover prison escapes, how to live underground, and states that refuse u.s. extradition.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at desmoinesmutualaid@protonmail.com.

We Gather Here Today in Disservice of the State

This is a photo of some of my Des Moines Mutual Aid friends and accomplices, which is found in an excellent zine about Mutual Aid you can download here:

Download Zine We Gather Here Today in Disservice of the State

Today is yet another day with so much horror in the news. The war in Ukraine, rise of fascism, dismantling of civil liberties, and all kinds of environmental chaos. I say this to contrast why I work and write about Mutual Aid, instead. Mutual Aid works on the causes of injustice instead of all the symptoms.

For example, the weekly free food distribution I look forward to attending every week:

  • Distributes free food to our friends and neighbors.
  • Is an opportunity to interact with our neighbors in a positive manner. We always offer a cheerful greeting to each car of people coming for food.
  • Is a chance for us to invite others in our community to join us in this work.
  • Demonstrates the resilience of this program that was started by the Black Panther Party in 1971.
  • Is an opportunity for us to gather joyfully with each other.
  • Is a place where we network with each other. Hear about ways to support each other’s work.

It takes some time to understand what Mutual Aid really is. I can see this zine is going to be very helpful as I try to educate people about Mutual Aid. Because once you’ve experienced “real” Mutual Aid, you want all your friends and neighbors to engage in Mutual Aid projects. Both for their own sake, and as a way to meaningfully work for justice.

The first article in the zine is Mutual Aid: A Burnout Counterculture.

It’s an all-too familiar feeling for your average person trying to dismantle the capitalist state: Brought on by the combination of endless problems to solve, repetitive tasks to keep up with, monotonous wage labor, and disillusionment of having not made any progress over the past two years (among a myriad of other stress-inducing conditions), the exhaustion never seems to go away. Burnout is experienced when pushing one’s individual capacity with any type of work.

What is needed instead is an integral culture of community care in the practice of mutual aid within organizing spaces. A main feature of mutual aid is building communities that can support and sustain themselves, as opposed to relying on and being disappointed by the capitalist state, NGOs, or other nonprofits to meet basic survival needs. A bit of irony is found as people often become burnt out as a result of working on various “mutual aid” projects, which in theory, should be supporting and empowering the people who are organizing them. If organizers don’t gain anything from their efforts besides a feel-good, savior-sense of having helped someone else to survive, it’s not mutual aid. It’s merely setting oneself up to work until there’s no energy left to give.

Organizers must focus on actively avoiding burnout by caring for each other in tandem with the work they take on. There is a great need to understand that taking care of each other as human beings is “the work” and must be incorporated in “the work.”

Successful organizing leads to having more capacity. It’s Going Down, November 24, 2021 “Organization, Repression, Burnout, Action: A Discussion with Crimethinc.”

Successful organizing leads to having more capacity.

Crimethinc
https://crimethinc.com/

Dean Spade, author of the widely circulated Verso publication, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and The Next), defines burnout as “the combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion in the work and instead encounter difficult feelings like avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety.”

Networking

Yesterday I was struck by all the interconnected relationships among my friends at Des Moines Mutual Aid.

I was happy to see my friend Donnielle at Mutual Aid for the first time yesterday. She and I were part of the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March, September 1-8, 2018. A small group of native and non-native people walked and camped along the path of the Dakota Access pipeline, from Des Moines to Fort Dodge, Iowa (ninety-four miles). One of the main purposes of that walk was to create a group of people who began to get to know each other so we could work on issues of common interest and concern. That really worked and many of us have worked together in many ways since. One of the first things several of us did together, was to lobby Senator Grassley’s staff to support a couple of bills related to safety of Indigenous women. That was in 2018. The renewal of the Violence Against Women Act was just passed and includes those tribal protections. The photo below at the Neal Smith Federal Building was taken the day of the meeting with Senator Grassley’s staff.

Jake, the climate justice advocate from Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI) was also there. Two weeks ago, I attended a board meeting of the Iowa Energy Center Board, having been asked to take photos there. Jake organized a group of us to attend the board meeting to try to get MidAmerican to shut down their five coal burning plants. We have since learned our presence there has had some effect. He also asked me to write a letter to the editor about the same issue, which I did. Yesterday Donnielle asked Jake about an upcoming city council meeting where MidAmerican’s franchise with the city will be discussed.

Jade was at Mutual Aid, as usual. She organizes the prison letter writing project of Central Iowa Democratic Socialists of America, which I have joined. A friend of mine in Indianapolis, a professor at the law school there, got me involved in Religious Socialism, part of DSA, hence the name of this blog.

And as usual, my good friend Ronnie was at Mutual Aid. I had told him about some transgender people who were looking for support. Yesterday we talked about that some more, and he gave me a couple of suggestions that I passed along.

My small Quaker meeting is also part of this networking. Some members have been supporters of ICCI for years. It is this meeting that is looking into how we might support the trans people. And I will be speaking about Mutual Aid during the annual gathering of Quakers this summer.

Other connections include supporting the Wet’suwet’en peoples as they try to stop the construction of the Costal GasLink pipeline through their pristine territory in British Columbia. In the photo below you can see Des Moines Black Lives Matter is helping us stand with the Wet’suwet’en.

The signs about Prairies Not Pipelines and #NOCO2PIPELINES was organized by my friend Sikowis, who also walked on the First Nation-Famer Climate Unity March.

End of free meals for all students

It is both disgusting and ironic to learn Congress decided to leave money for free meals out of the recent spending package. Ironic because I’m getting ready to leave to join my Mutual Aid friends for our weekly free food distribution. This has continued since the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program started in Des Moines and other cities across the country, in the 1970’s.

Public schools have been serving all students free meals since the COVID-19 pandemic first disrupted K-12 education. In March 2022, Congress rejected calls to keep up the federal funding required to sustain that practice and left that money out of a US$1.5 trillion spending package that President Joe Biden signed into law on March 11, 2022. We asked food policy expert Marlene Schwartz to explain why free meals make a difference and what will happen next.

The Conversation, March 14, 2022

What are the advantages of making school meals free to everyone?

In my view, the biggest advantage to universal school meals is that more students actually eat nutritious school meals. Following the regulations that emerged from the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, the nutritional quality of school meals improved significantly, and a recent study found that schools typically provide the healthiest foods that children eat all day.

The research shows that making school meals free for everyone improves attendance and boosts diet quality. It also decreases the risk of food insecurity and the stigma associated with receiving a free meal. When no one has to pay, the growing problem of school meal debt is also eliminated.

There are important logistical benefits to universal school meals. Families don’t have to fill out any paperwork to establish their eligibility for free or reduced-price meals. And cafeteria staff can focus on serving the meals if they don’t need to track payments.

Marlene B. Schwartz

The office of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., did not immediately respond to reports that he is against funding and extending school nutrition waivers.

Kate Waters, a Department of Agriculture spokeswoman, said Wednesday that the agency is “disappointed” in the lack of action by Congress, but that it will “continue to do everything we can to support leaders running these programs during this difficult time.”

Earlier this week, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told The Washington Post that “the failure of Republicans to respond to this means that kids are going to have less on their plates.”

School meal programs in ‘financial peril‘ after spending bill snub, advocates say. Temporary changes that allowed schools to keep feeding children during the pandemic are set to expire unless Congress acts. By Erik Ortiz, NBC News, March 9, 2022

Once again, the government fails to take care of we the people.

Jeff Kisling

What we have is each other. We can and need to take care of each other. We may have limited power on the political stage, a stage they built, but we have the power of numbers.

Those numbers represent unlimited amounts of talents and skills each community can utilize to replace the systems that fail us.  The recent past shows us that mutual aid is not only a tool of survival, but also a tool of revolution. The more we take care of each other, the less they can fracture a community with their ways of war.

Ronnie James, Des Moines Mutual Aid

Spirituality over religion

People ask me if I believe in god… I tell them I pray to creator.
They tell me Jesus died for me… I tell them my ancestors did.
They say I will burn in hell for not following the Bible, but it has been used as weapon to colonize and murder my people…
for me it’s spirituality over religion. I don’t hate people for going to church, but I do hate what the churches have done to us…
before colonization we had our own ways and ceremonies, I choose the path of my ancestors.

Indigenous

I find myself in a spiritual crisis regarding Christianity. I realize being a Christian and professing to be a Christian are often not the same.

The Christianity I cannot be part of is the weaponized version of a religion. One that created and enforced the doctrines of discovery which gave permission to steal indigenous lands and instructed killing the people living on them. That codified white supremacy and empire. That drove global colonization.

One that raised great wealth from stolen lands and labor. And then built ostentatious churches in the midst of profound poverty.

One that tore native children from their families and took them far away, to places of forced assimilation where every kind of abuse was visited upon them. Where thousands died or were killed. And their families were often not even told of their deaths. Where other children were sometimes forced to dig the graves. The trauma passed from generation to generation. An open wound in Indigenous communities to this day that I have witnessed in my native friends. A wound that has been ripped open with the verification of the remains of thousands of native children. With many more places that haven’t been scanned yet.

Part of the reason for my crisis is reading “American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World” by David Stannard. Recent scholarship has revealed sophisticated Indigenous communities in the Americas prior to the arrival of white men. And much larger numbers of Indigenous people, millions more than previously thought. Meaning millions more deaths occurred.

American holocaust.

The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.

Stannard, David E. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

More often than we realize, in ways we don’t recognize, white Quakers continue to benefit from the American Holocaust. Continue white domination.

We made a small step in learning about land acknowledgements. But those are empty statements if we don’t take the next steps. We need actions, not more words.

The reason I write and talk so much about my experiences with Mutual Aid is because that gets to the root causes of white supremacy. Mutual Aid exemplifies what Christianity is supposed to be. Mutual Aid is a means to begin decolonization.

As painful as it is, I know out of my confusion and distress, I will be led to a better place.

Real radicalism implores us to tell the whole ugly truth, even when it is inconvenient.

Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018)

Transgress the Prison Walls

I just sat down after taking two letters to prison pen-pals to the mailbox and saw the article Abolitionist Efforts to Trangress the Prison Walls by Jaden Janak, Hood Communist, March 10, 2022. I don’t like to include too many quotes in my writing, but this article touches on many things I’ve been learning, much which is about Mutual Aid.

Through a close reading of Black Communist trans prisoner Alyssa V. Hope’s legal efforts and writings, this article unearths how a pen-pal relationship transformed into a comprehensive abolitionist community. This case study provides an example of how abolitionists are grappling with the need to support the material needs of marginalized communities while still building otherwise possible worlds separate from a failing welfare state. Mutual aid projects, like the one formed by Hope’s supporters, showcase that otherwise possible worlds are not only possible, but they are being created right now before us.

Abolitionist Efforts to Trangress the Prison Walls by Jaden Janak, Hood Communist, March 10, 2022

… it was not always this way, which proves it does not have to stay this way. 

What we have is each other. We can and need to take care of each other. We may have limited power on the political stage, a stage they built, but we have the power of numbers.

Those numbers represent unlimited amounts of talents and skills each community can utilize to replace the systems that fail us.  The recent past shows us that mutual aid is not only a tool of survival, but also a tool of revolution. The more we take care of each other, the less they can fracture a community with their ways of war

Ronnie James, The Police State and Why We Must Resist

The focus of the Transgress the Prison Walls article is on the writings of political prisoners, but much applies to prison pen-pal relationships with anyone who is incarcerated. I’ve become involved in the prison letter writing project of the Central Iowa Democratic Socialists of America. Not surprisingly, I found several of my Des Moines Mutual Aid friends are also involved.

I wrote the following based upon a sample letter.

As abolitionist organiser and theorist Mariame Kaba writes, “The work of abolition insists that we foreground the people who are behind the walls… That we transform the relationships we have with each other so that we can really create new forms of safety and justice in our communities.” (Duda/Kaba 2017) This solidarity takes many forms such as written correspondence via pen-pal pro-grams

Abolitionist Efforts to Trangress the Prison Walls by Jaden Janak, Hood Communist, March 10, 2022

More than a one-way exchange of sympathy, abolitionist solidarity operationalises mutual aid as a foundational modality for community building. Abolitionist mutual aid recognises the necessity of meeting immediate communal needs while also addressing deeper causes of violence: mechanisms of control, management, and punishment that structure everyday life (Spade 2020, 9). Historically, mutual aid communities have taken many forms including the 1969 Free Breakfast programs of the Black Panther Party in the United States and the maroon communities formed by free and escaped en-slaved people (Nelson 2011). In the 1950s and 1960s, health providers routinely refused Black patients and relegated Black people to sub-standard facilities (ibid., 24). To protest this treatment and provide for their community, the Black Panther Party of Oakland and other chapters around the nation and world opened People’s Free Medical Clinics that provided quality medical services free of charge to Black community members (ibid., 79). Mutual aid work, like that of the Black Panther Party, is not top-down charity. Rather, mutual aid projects “are an integrated part of our lives… and [they] cultivate a shared analysis of the root causes of the problem.” (Spade 2020, 28f.) Even as the welfare state continues to crumble, communities work together to meet each other’s needs while creating new relations of accountability and care in the state’s absence.

Abolitionist Efforts to Trangress the Prison Walls by Jaden Janak, Hood Communist, March 10, 2022

So, I work with a dope crew called Des Moines Mutual Aid, and on Saturday mornings we do a food giveaway program that was started by the Panthers as their free breakfast program and has carried on to this day. Anyways, brag, brag, blah, blah.

So, I get to work and I need to call my boss, who is also a very good old friend, because there is network issues. He remembers and asks about the food giveaway which is cool and I tell him blah blah it went really well. And then he’s like, “hey, if no one tells you, I’m very proud of what you do for the community” and I’m like “hold on hold on. Just realize that everything I do is to further the replacing of the state and destroying western civilization and any remnants of it for future generations.” He says “I know and love that. Carry on.”

Ronnie James, Des Moines Mutual Aid

Tool Libraries, Circular Economy, and Mutual Aid

Several years ago, a friend in Indianapolis started a tool library. He was supported by the Kheprw Institute community I was involved with.

That library included photography equipment. I liked the idea that those who couldn’t afford their own camera being able to check one out for a while. Besides taking personal photos, it could also be used for justice events.

iTooLL: Indy Tool Lending Library

iTooLL is a membership-based tool sharing project that makes audio, visual, creative, and event production tools available for just $1/week. As a member, you are also given direct purchasing power to fill the library with the tools you need.

Economic status should not determine Indianapolis art, culture, and entrepreneurship! For creatives, makers, organizers, and aspiring professionals alike, access to quality equipment can often dictate creative capacity, event effectiveness, and overall community impact. Equal access is key to amplifying diverse Indianapolis voices.

https://kheprw.org/indy-tool-lending-library/

For the past two years I’ve been part of a Mutual Aid community and I see as a just alternative to capitalism. Tool libraries work within the context of Mutual Aid.

Based on principles and practices of resource use reduction, sharing, conviviality, solidarity, and mutual aid, the BTL can be considered a small-scale laboratory for a reorientation of society towards degrowth.

Brisbane Tool Library

I share here few key insights of my experience in being part of and contributing to the Brisbane Tool Library (BTL). Based on principles and practices of resource use reduction, sharing, conviviality, solidarity, and mutual aid, the BTL can be considered a small-scale laboratory for a reorientation of society towards degrowth. The most common understanding of a tool library is that it is a library for things, in which people can borrow tools, camping gear, kitchen appliances, and many other items. The work undertaken at the BTL since 2017, however, goes beyond lending items — it seeks to build systemic change.

The Brisbane Tool Library challenges the system’s misconception that quality of life rests solely on individual ownership of more and more things. It shows that we can meet people’s needs by prioritizing access over individual ownership. This enables a cultural shift towards an economy of sufficiency that nurtures limitation of private ownership as a cultural journey of plenitude. Additionally, by prioritizing access over ownership, tool libraries could also represent a way to reduce inequalities, in particular in cities. The Brisbane Tool Library, like many other tool libraries across the world (such as the Toronto Tool Library in Canada, Seattle Tool Library in the USA, Glasgow Tool Library in the UK Scotland, and La Manivelle in Switzerland) is based on a membership model, meaning that people pay a small annual fee that allows them to borrow various items through the year. 

The Revolutionary Power of the Real Circular Economy. How the Brisbane Tool Library provides an inspiring example of degrowth in action by Sabrina Chakori, Medium, 1/27/2022

The Brisbane Tool Library Inc. is a not-for-profit organization that is sustained by the voluntary contribution of its members. There are many different ways you can get involved and support this change with us. You can help out on a specific project or focus on specific tasks. If you don’t see anything interesting below, just reach out to us and we can discuss any ideas you have about how you can help.

Within the possible tasks we always need staff working at the tool library:

  • Checking in and out the tools that people borrow,
  • Testing & tagging
  • Marketing/media production guru (marketing, photography, videography)
  • Community event organisers (for workshops & social events)
  • Fundraiser heroes and
  • General casual volunteers

Brisbane Tool Library http://brisbanetoollibrary.org/

This is a page from the Brisbane Tool Library. They have more than 1,000 items in their inventory.

A tool library is an example of a Library of Things. Tool libraries allow patrons to check out or borrow tools, equipment and “how-to” instructional materials, functioning either as a rental shop, with a charge for borrowing the tools, or more commonly free of charge as a form of community sharing.[1] A tool library performs the following main tasks:

  • Lending: all kinds of tools for use in volunteer projects, facility maintenance and improvement projects, community improvement events, and special events.
  • Advocacy: for the complete and timely return of all borrowed tools, to guarantee the long-term sustainability of available inventory. Staff also seeks compensation for lost tools and tools returned late.
  • Maintenance: performing routine maintenance and repairs on all equipment to ensure good condition and to extend the lifespan of the inventory. This function is typically performed by volunteers and community service workers.
  • Education: Some tool libraries also provide educational classes. Vancouver Tool Library and Community Access Center (VTLCAC) in Vancouver, Washington offers individual project support and classes on woodworking and basic car maintenance[2]

Tool Library
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_library