An Alternative to Capitalist Hierarchies

I previously began to describe the Cecosesola Co-op (See: http://bit.ly/3mrdtop). I had been doing research to find examples of large mutual aid communities when I started to see stories about Cecosesola. This InfoGraphic from Venequelanalysis shows there are one thousand three hundred people involved.

**Basic information about Cecosesola (Venezuelanalysis)**

On September 29, 2022, Cecosesola received the Right Livelihood Award, a Swedish prize often known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” This award honors people and organizations that encourage social change. According to a statement issued by the Right Livelihood Foundation, the prize was given to Cecosesola for “establishing an equitable and cooperative economic model as a robust alternative to profit-driven economies.”

In what follows, we talk to three of the cooperative’s associates – Lizeth Vargas, Ender Duarte, and Gustavo Salas – about their project which serves hundreds of thousands of people and is a model for non-hierarchical organizational practices.

An Alternative to Capitalist Hierarchies: A Conversation with the Cecosesola Co-op. A Venezuelan cooperative network that recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” tells its story By Cira Pascual Marquina – Venezuelanalysis, Nov 20th 2022.

Can you tell us the story of Cecosesola?

Gustavo Salas: Cecosesola was born in the 1960s when the Centro Gumilla [a Catholic investigation center for social action] promoted the organizing of cooperatives in the most precarious barrios of Barquisimeto [Lara state, center-western Venezuela]. That is when poor, working-class people began to set aside a bit of money every month to build their own cooperatives.

In other countries, co-ops have a middle-class base, but many Venezuelan cooperatives have a working-class one: that is, co-ops here often begin to take shape in the poorest barrios.

The first cooperatives in Barquisimeto were founded by people with a great deal of commitment to social work and community work. They eventually came together in Cecosesola, a co-op center or a co-op of co-ops [the acronym stands for Central Cooperativa de Servicios Sociales de Lara]. The first Cecosesola project was one that addressed an immediate need of the people: funerary services.

This first iteration of building the community didn’t succeed. Interestingly, it was a bus boycott that re-initiated Cecosesola, which brings to mind the Montogomery bus boycott of 1955-56.

National coverage of the boycott and King’s trial resulted in support from people outside Montgomery. In early 1956 veteran pacifists Bayard Rustin and Glenn E. Smiley visited Montgomery and offered King advice on the application of Gandhian techniques and nonviolence to American race relations. Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison founded In Friendship to raise funds in the North for southern civil rights efforts, including the bus boycott. King absorbed ideas from these proponents of nonviolent direct action and crafted his own syntheses of Gandhian principles of nonviolence. He said: “Christ showed us the way, and Gandhi in India showed it could work” (Rowland, “2,500 Here Hail”).

On 5 June 1956, the federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation was unconstitutional, and in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Browder v. Gayle and struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. The court’s decision came the same day that King and the MIA were in circuit court challenging an injunction against the MIA carpools. Resolved not to end the boycott until the order to desegregate the buses actually arrived in Montgomery, the MIA operated without the carpool system for a month. The Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling, and on 20 December 1956 King called for the end of the boycott; the community agreed. The next morning, he boarded an integrated bus with Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley. King said of the bus boycott: “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation. So … we decided to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery”
Montgomery Bus Boycott, Stanford University, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute

A few years after the foundation of Cecosesola, in 1974, there was a feeling of dissatisfaction brewing among workers and members. Enthusiasm and hopes had vanished, and Cecosesola was now closer to a capitalist enterprise than a social movement or a community-based organization.

As it happens, Cecosesola was immersed in an internal debate. At the time, people of Barquisimeto were on the streets en masse, protesting a hike in bus fares. That is when the Cecosesola bases, those who were pushing to reinstate the original grassroots logic of the organization saw an opportunity to rekindle the cooperative project. Following Cecosesola’s early footsteps and grassroots mission, we built a transportation project that would keep fares down. There were no bosses in this project, which thus reactivated our on-the-ground work. In the end, we ended up assuming many transport routes in Barquisimeto.

Even though the transportation initiative was associated with Cecosesola, it didn’t reproduce the existing hierarchical order. The project became an opportunity to reorganize things and do away with bosses. In fact, the transport initiative would hold massive meetings on a regular basis, and all 300 associated workers would participate in each meeting!

In the beginning, the whole thing was very chaotic: collective decision-making isn’t easy when society is completely based on hierarchies. However, as the transport project became consolidated, it began to leave its imprint on Cecosesola. Eventually, we displaced the conventional top-down model with a system of direct participation that integrates workers and associates alike.

That is how Cecosesola, including its funerary services, was returned to the community, to its origins. Now we have an open administration without intermediation and with direct participation.

What are the principles behind Cecosesola’s modus operandi?

Ender Duarte: Rather than principles set out on paper, we have a set of ideas or principles that organize and regulate our day-to-day practices.

Our key ideas are mutuality, respect, and transparency, which are all important to building relationships of trust. In other words, mutual care and solidarity are our driving forces.

These practices guide our day-to-day activities, be they funerary services, healthcare, or food production and distribution. If we break away from our fundamentals, we would break the relationships of trust that we have been developing with so much care and love.

As we work, we are doing away with relations based on exploitation and domination. Ours is an organization without bosses. Over the years we have learned that the ever-present shadow of hierarchies can only be abolished with mutual respect and trust.

What are the main teachings that Cecosesola can share with people about how to make a better world?

Gustavo Salas: If we want to transform our society, we have to do away with hierarchies. When Cecosesola was born, it generated a great deal of enthusiasm and passion. However, when a conventional, top-down administration emerged, that flower wilted. The hierarchical structure separated people from the organization and they went back home. Why? Even when a boss or leader figure has good intentions, the other vanishes: he or she is erased.

When Cecosesola was re-initiated, we did so by going back to the basics. We rebuilt an organization where everyone has a voice and everyone counts. If we really want to live in a more just society, we have to break away from the prevailing logic, and we have to find new organizational models.

Capitalist enterprises are not a model for us; the same goes for governmental enterprises. At Cecosesola we are exploring a new model based on mutuality. The model works, so now we are working hard to perfect it.

Process as Solution

When I’m overwhelmed with complexity and questions, I try to express things visually. Following is the most recent iteration of something I’ve been working on for years.

The most recent change is the red line, representing how failing and corrupt institutions, authoritarianism, and environmental chaos, are blocking solutions like LANDBACK, Black Liberation, Abolition, and Mutual Aid. The forces being used by empire to crush dissent are escalating rapidly.

I still believe Mutual Aid, Abolition, and all the pieces of the Red/Green New Deal are how we will continue to build just communities. Those are the ways we will address the rising forces of injustice. But rather than just the goal of the Red/Green New Deal, they are also the means by which we defeat the forces of empire.

Authoritarianism

It has been apparent for decades that rapidly escalating environmental chaos would overwhelm the resources of our government and society. What I hadn’t given enough attention to was how rapidly authoritarianism would spread.

That is exactly what the idea is here, as it is with all these laws. It’s not just just about bloggers or kids or books. It’s about a strategy. That strategy is blitzkrieg. Again, a classic fascist maneuver. See how hard and fast these laws and bills are coming? You can scarcely catch your breath before there’s another one. The very same day news broke of the “we’re going to keep a file on you if you write about us” bill, news also broke of a bill to give women the death penalty for the crime of…miscarriages.

The point is to overwhelm the system, society, institutions. Sure, maybe all these bills won’t pass. But a few just might. And where they do, they set precedents. Those precedents are like cracks in a dam, that open whole fissures, and eventually — the deluge. This crackpot legislator, tomorrow, can point to that precedent, in that state. This lunatic lawyer can use to it to appeal, when a court strikes down some law.

The idea here is to accelerate. Propose a thousand crackpot bills. Pass maybe three. But those three become precedents, footholds, spearheads, for nine. And those nine become fifty. And those fifty become…and so it goes. This is a classic form of destabilizing democracy, loved by fanatics and extremists, who’ve failed at using hard power — open violence, like Jan 6th. They resort to a kind of blitzkrieg from the ground up, where a top down approach — storming Congress — failed. Accelerate the breakdown of democracy. Just one crackpot bill passes — and the precedent is set for another hundred.
Welcome to the GOP’s Vision for an Authoritarian America. The GOP’s Blitzkrieg of Hate on Peaceful, Innocent People — And Why It’s Fascism by umair ahque, Medium, March 4, 2023

The question is, how are we living today? Are we comfortable with a status quo based upon white superiority, materialism, militarism, and oppression, i.e. empire? To do nothing is to support this status quo.

I’ve been writing about a new campaign from the Climate Mobilization Network that hopes to build a movement of movements, a network of Mutual Aid groups.
(See: https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/?s=climate+mobilization)

This collective visioning, movement incubation and learning gathering will equip you with space for reflection, new ideas, inspiration, and next steps to participate in this new campaign.

Together we will build relationships and explore:

How survival and mutual aid programs can grow the movement
New, creative approaches to taking action against fossil fuels
Ways to integrate healing into our work
And how to create space for reflection, intentionality and strategic clarity

**https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/**

Pause and Transform

I recently attended a Zoom meeting hosted by the Climate Mobilization Network. I was interested because I’ve been following the Climate Mobilization Network’s work for years.

They articulate what has not been working and that they are looking into different strategies that might be successful. I was especially interested to discover their emphasis on Mutual Aid programs.

This collective visioning, movement incubation and learning gathering will equip you with space for reflection, new ideas, inspiration, and next steps to participate in this new campaign.

Together we will build relationships and explore:

How survival and mutual aid programs can grow the movement
New, creative approaches to taking action against fossil fuels
Ways to integrate healing into our work
And how to create space for reflection, intentionality and strategic clarity

Why We Decide to Pause and Transform our Strategy

Congressional failure to take meaningful action on climate
The slow pace of local climate programs where policy change is severely limited by what’s considered politically possible
Rising inequality amid continued neoliberalism
Escalating climate disasters that are hitting global and US-based frontline communities the hardest and will continue accelerating rapidly!
And widespread cultural and generational concern about climate change has not yet been tapped into effectively by a mass movement.

Climate Mobilization Network

Movement Analysis

We reached out to more than 20 leaders across the Just Transition movement to guide our strategic planning process – we asked them about what learnings, gaps, and critical takeaways they saw emerging in their movement work. The opportunities that interviewees identified our movement needs to build on included:

We need more support for escalating, disruptive direct actions
We need work building a movement of movements
We need local organizing & base building as a foundation for larger mass movement
We need solutions outside of government
We need a more coherent, clear, and unified narrative strategy and message
We need more training on healing and community care as the center of our movements – and a politics of empathy and love at the center of our movements

Climate Mobilization Network

Climate Mobilization’s 2023 Pilot Programs: Political Education on Climate Survival, Healing Justice, Movement History and the Need for Escalated Direct Action

After processing our movement analysis, as well as the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges of our current focus campaigns and Network – and realizing the need for more radical and inventive approaches to addressing the climate emergency – we decided to build for our pilot program to focus on building out a transformational, motivational and commitment-driven political education training program that builds understanding, alignment and action around the need for climate survival programs and escalated, coordinated, and creative direct action.

This includes:

Direct action strategy and tactics from Indigenous struggles, from the Global South & from history, encouraging participants to develop their emergent ideas
Why and how to start mutual aid based climate survival programs – pulling case studies for effective models of sustained community resilience
Mass movement history & state of current climate / need for climate survival
Healing Justice organizing practices addressing burnout, trauma, climate grief at the root cause; integrating organizing and healing justice approaches into one, making climate organizing a more joyous, community-oriented, accessible, and sustainable practice for all peoples to get involved in – with a focus on building out leadership of resilience of frontline communities

Why This: Political education is movement connective tissue and a key resource for organizers to become more resilient, effective and reflective. Climate organizing in the US is particularly disconnected from the important resources offered by movement history rooted in global context.

Why Now: This program addresses several emergent movement needs:

Burnout is at an all-time high, a signal to reflect, rebuild resilience, shift organizing practices across the movement to center healing, and re-root our organizations in movement history.
Climate groups’ interest in direct action remains high, while increasing numbers of groups working on other issues will be trying to add climate programs. We will provide a container for this work.
We’ve also heard concerns that the direct action toolbox and strategy need to be expanded and strengthened.

This program will forge common ground among a burgeoning climate survival movement that brings together climate and non-climate groups. Alignment and political education around direct action, healing justice and mass movement history is an unmet need across sectors; the training will also provide an appealing, approachable framework for groups new to climate work to launch climate survival programs. The focus is on moving people to launch direct action and climate survival programs, change their organizing practices (to incorporate a climate survival focus and become more healing justice centered), and access improved resilience in the work they are already doing.

Climate Mobilization’s New Direction for 2023

Here are the slides from the presentation

final-slides-for-feb-28-workshop Download

#NoCarbonPipelines #NoCO2Pipelines #MutualAid

Changing course

How straight has the course of your life been?

During my life I’ve changed course many times. Sometimes a change was forced upon me, sometimes a voluntary change. Sometimes both.

I grew up on farms and in small towns in rural Iowa. I hadn’t lived in any cities prior to moving to Indianapolis in 1971. That was a culture shock. I had a tough time seeing how many cars there were and could see and smell the auto exhaust (prior to catalytic converters). I had a Spiritual vision of my beloved Rocky Mountains hidden in clouds of exhaust. That vision played a huge role in the rest of my life.

In one way you might say my vision was wrong. The Rocky Mountains have not, yet, been hidden by smog. Although they are engulfed with greenhouse gases.

In the late sixties we traveled to California. As we approached Los Angeles, our eyes began to water, and we coughed a lot. We were told we would get used to it. And the mountains and hills around Los Angeles were veiled in auto exhaust.

I’d always had objections to people owning personal automobiles. Why own a complex machine that sits idle most of the time? Vast amounts of land became covered by highways. Those in large cities routinely sat in traffic for a long time each day. All the traffic and parking infrastructure, and police. Interstate highways cut through the middle of communities. Little or no mass transit was being created.

I’d also always been interested in science. I learned how fossil fuels were formed, how long that took. And, most importantly, that meant fossil fuel sources needed to be protected, because they were not renewable. Our profligate waste of fossil fuels was energy stolen from future generations.

When I first moved to Indianapolis, it was to join the Friends Volunteer Service Mission (VSM). There, wages from one year of working were saved to support yourself to do service work in that neighborhood the second year. So, there was no money for a car. At the end of those two years, I tried to avoid having a car. But the Metro city bus schedule did not always extend to the hours I was working, nor always run in the neighborhoods I lived in. When someone in the neighborhood offered to sell me his used car for $50, I bought it.

Necessary Evil?

But all this weighed on me spiritually. I knew it was not right to have a fossil fuel-based society/economy. And yet, I began to think having a car was a “necessary evil”, as so many people told me. But how could “evil” be “right”?

After a few years, my car was involved in a traffic accident. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the car was totaled.

I clearly remember a Spiritual leading, telling me that this was an opportunity to find an alternative to a necessary evil. I had put a lot of prayer and thinking into my discomfort in having a car all during the time I had one.

I had been making some changes that made this look possible now. I moved nearer downtown, since that is where the Medical Center where I was doing research was located. I had to be within walking or running distance of work in case the bus schedule changed. Or more commonly, to get to work on the weekends when the bus schedule was scaled back.

I also made sure a laundromat and grocery store were within walking distance. I had been learning how to shop in a way that I could carry everything home.

Opportunities

My grandmother, Lorene Standing, said the will of God is often revealed in a series of small steps. The above is an illustration of that. With the pieces now in place, I wondered if the accident provided a new opportunity to try to live without a car. I remember a feeling of unease, whether I could really do this. At the same time, there was a much greater awareness that this might be the time. If not, I feared I would fall into the trap of owning a car. There was the fallback possibility, to get a car if this experiment didn’t work out.

Many adventures resulted from making the decision to give up a car. It lifted the burden of the spiritual weight of having a car. It showed me and others that having a car was not a necessary evil. A witness.

Just because you can’t make a difficult choice at one point in your life, doesn’t mean the opportunity won’t come around again.

Changing Course

At the beginning I said sometimes change is forced upon us, sometimes a voluntary choice, sometimes both. Perhaps what we thought was forced upon us was actually a spiritual leading. If that is true, shouldn’t we be paying more attention to the Spirit in our lives?

How did we get here?

I often reflect upon how I don’t know what I’ll end up writing on any given day. I thought I’d be writing about a Zoom meeting I attended that was hosted by Climate Mobilization, an organization that has been going through changes in their approach to call attention to our climate emergencies. I’ve been following their work for years.

Tuesday night was an introduction to Climate Mobilization’s change of course that I’ll be writing more about. I was fascinated to see the emergence of a national/international plan to prepare for climate survival. And to see the pieces that have been coming together for me over the past five years are the same that Climate Mobilization has been going through.

You can see these points in the diagram below.

Emphasis on working locally
Mutual Aid
Indigenous sovereignty
Abolition
Prefigurative solutions
Healing
- Emotional
- Spiritual
- Physical
- Transformative Mutual Aid Practices (T-MAPs)

CECOSESOLA: Building, here and now, the world we yearn for

I’ve been enthusiastically involved in Mutual Aid for three years. I’ve also been frustrated for those years, because I haven’t been able to tell others what a significant change Mutual Aid represents. Recently discovering Cecosesola will help with that, I think. “The theoretical frameworks for Protest and Social Movements are not sufficient to understand the emergent horizontal and prefigurative practices.”

The title of an article cited for this post, “CECOSESOLA: BUILDING, HERE AND NOW, THE WORLD WE YEARN FOR” is the definition of a term I recently learned, prefigurative.
(See: Prefigurative Societies and Mutual Aid).

What has been taking place in disparate places around the world is part of a new wave that is both revolutionary in the day-to-day sense of the word, as well as without precedent with regard to consistency of form, politics, scope and scale. The current frameworks provided by the social sciences and traditional left to understand these movements have yet to catch up with what is new and different about them. Specifically, the theoretical frameworks for Protest and Social Movements are not sufficient to understand the emergent horizontal and prefigurative practices. I suggest we think beyond these frames, and do so first by listening to, and with, those societies and groups organizing from below – and to the left.

…
People from below are rising up, but rather than going towards the top – ‘from the bottom up’, they are moving as the Zapatistas suggested, ‘From below and to the left, where the heart resides.’
Power over, hierarchy and representation are being rejected, ideologically and by default, and in the rejection mass horizontal assemblies are opening new landscapes with the horizon of autonomy and freedom.
Prefigurative Societies in movement by Marina Sitrin, Popular Resistance, December 21, 2022

Those who live in Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) communities have been on the front lines, building such communities for years. because they have never fully benefited from the systems of white superiority, dominance, and capitalism.

On September 29, 2022, Cecosesola received the Right Livelihood Award, a Swedish prize often known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” This award honors people and organizations that encourage social change. According to a statement issued by the Right Livelihood Foundation, the prize was given to Cecosesola for “establishing an equitable and cooperative economic model as a robust alternative to profit-driven economies.”
An Alternative to Capitalist Hierarchies: A Conversation with the Cecosesola Co-op.
A Venezuelan cooperative network that recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” tells its story by Cira Pascual Marquina, Venezuelanalysis, Nov 20, 2022

I have been amazed at how my Mutual Aid community functions. The services to those who are houseless, jail and court solidarity, and our free food project are some of the things we do. With no government support.

Something new is happening – something new in content, depth, breadth and global consistency. Societies around the world are in movement
Prefigurative Societies in movement by Marina Sitrin, Popular Resistance, December 21, 2022

For a long time, I’ve been looking for stories about large groups of people who have established Mutual Aid communities. I haven’t been quite sure what that would look like. The Mutual Aid community I have been part of is pretty small. The free food project usually involves about eighty people. A dozen of us filling and passing out the food boxes, about fifty people picking up food boxes, and about ten people from the places that donate the food. All of these people are part of our Mutual Aid community. That’s one of the keys of Mutual Aid, we’re all in it together. Working to avoid hierarchy.

I also wanted to find examples of large Mutual Aid communities because, when I explain what I know about Mutual Aid to others, they see us as just another one of the usual small community service groups. And they don’t see how the ideas of Mutual Aid could scale.

Those are reasons why I’m excited to be learning about Cecosesola

Cecosesola

Cecosesola was established in Barquisimeto, capital of the State of Lara, in the central western region of Venezuela, as a cooperative integration organization on December 17, 1967. It is a meeting place where more than 50 community organizations are active, integrated in a network of production of goods and services that brings together more than 23,000 members from the popular sectors. Through this network, we develop a wide variety of activities such as: agricultural production, small-scale agro-industrial production, funeral services, transportation, health services, financial services, mutual aid funds, distribution of foods and household items. We are made up of about 1,300 associated workers who manage daily activities through participation that is open to everyone, without hierarchical positions.
Building, here and now, the world we yearn for by Cecosesola, Grassroots Economic Organizing, February 19, 2023, Popular Resistancs.org

When the government is incapable

It’s just unbelievable, or sadly, it is believable, that Congress can suggest severe cuts to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Social Security, Medicare, and other social safety net programs. All of which could be paid for by a small fraction of the military budget. This is just another example of the government being incapable of helping us. And/or unwilling to do so.

The following is from Des Moines Mutual Aid, that I am proud to be a part of.

In the late 1970’s the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for School Children Program fed tens of thousands of children daily. Our free food project in Des Moines is a continuation of the program started by the Des Moines Chapter of The Black Panther Party for Self Defense fifty years ago.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recognized what a threat the free food program was to the status quo in those days.

Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war against them in 1969. He called the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.
How the Black Panthers’ Breakfast Program Both Inspired and Threatened the Government. The Panthers’ popular breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders to feed children before school by ERIN BLAKEMORE, History.com, FEB 6, 2018

Newly uncovered FBI records are a poignant reminder of just how long African Americans and others have been demanding fair treatment from the law. Together with the marches across the nation last year after the killing of George Floyd, the records serve as a stark reminder why lasting police reform can no longer be delayed.

The FBI documents shed new light on a scandalous raid on a Black Panthers apartment on Chicago’s West Side on Dec. 4, 1969. In the pre-dawn raid, officers under the command of then-Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan shot and killed Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
The killing of two Black Panthers, the secrets of the FBI — and our nation’s long fight for police reform. Newly released documents shed disturbing light on the FBI’s involvement in a 1969 police raid that resulted in the deaths of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by CST Editorial Board, Chicago Sun-Times, Jan 24, 2021,

When those in authority talk about threats, they are referring to social, political, and militarized policing threats. Threats of violence and death.

It’s important to point out that Mutual Aid is absolutely nonviolent. Violence is antithetical to Mutual Aid. The following describes the first action of Des Moines Mutual Aid, participating in a peace march.

One year ago today Des Moines Mutual Aid participated in a march protesting the potential for war or increased hostilities with Iran that followed the fallout of the assassination of Qassem Soleimani by drone strike in Baghdad.

This was our first “public” event since adopting the name Des Moines Mutual Aid, a name we gave our crew during our growing work with our relatives at the houseless camps throughout the city and our help with coordinating a weekly free grocery store that has a 50 year history, founded by the Des Moines Chapter of The Black Panther Party For Self Defense.
Des Moines Mutual Aid, January 7, 2020

For years I’ve been warning about the collapse of our social, political, and governance systems from environmental chaos. But it has become increasingly clear that social and political collapse from extremists and the movement to authoritarianism is happening now. Authoritarianism advancing with the aid of increasingly militaristic, deadly police forces. With radically expanding surveillance and characterizing political dissent as terrorism. I removed the credit for the quote above from a good friend of mine for security reasons in this political climate.

So, it’s time for many more of us to do something like a free food program again. A growing number of us are doing what “the government is incapable of”. In a minute I’ll be leaving to go to our Des Moines Mutual Aid free food project, as I have for almost three years.

Mutual Aid is something I’ve written about extensively. See: https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/mutual-aid/

Spirit, Justice, Mutual Aid, Healing and Survival

A number of ideas have come together for me lately. So, I’ve taken some time to write the following, putting them all together.

The PDF of Spirit, Justice, Mutual Aid, Healing and Survival can be found below. There is a button to download the PDF.

This is the link to the same PDF document online: spirit-justice-mutual-aid-healing-and-survival.pdf

Additionally, I’ve published an eBook version of the same document here:
Spirit, Justice, Mutual Aid, Healing and Survival eBook version

Feel free to leave comments below.

Spirit, Justice, Mutual Aid, Healing and Survival

spirit-justice-mutual-aid-healing-and-survival_63ebacbf Download

Confluence

Doesn’t it seem that we are in a time when many swollen tributaries are coming together, causing massive flooding?

Not only literally from environmental chaos.

While I’ve been devasted by the killing of land defender Manuel Teran Tortuguita in Atlanta, there is the emerging story of yet another police murder, that of Tyre Nichols in Tennessee. This against a background of mass shootings occurring nearly daily. Sometimes more than one a day. School children drilled on what to do in response to an active shooter.

The violence of the militarization of policing. When Congress cannot pass laws related to gun safety and reforms of policing. The violence of the attack on the US Capital. The authoritarian practices and legislation passed there. The example this provides to other countries around the globe. The extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression.

Against a background of the violence of poverty, hunger, and houselessness. The epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous relatives. The ongoing discovery of the remains of thousands of native children on the grounds of the institutions of forced assimilation. Children continuing to be removed from their homes. Continued violence against women, including criminalizing abortion.

The continued colonization and broken treaties.

The violence of US military around the world. The escalating proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine.

The violence against Mother Earth. Monocropping, CAFOs, fertilizers, pipeline construction and leaks. The violence against the water.

The violence of substance abuse and deaths. And suicides.

The violence of banning books. Violent suppression of free speech. Eradicating study of the multicultural peoples that many of the students are members of. Forced assimilation continues.

The violence of the southern border, against those seeking asylum, and against those in the country who are immigrants.

This violence and oppression fueled by systems of capitalism, institutional racism, white supremacy, and dominance.

It’s both enraging and exhausting to hear people who are supposed to be leaders lament these tragedies and offer the same tired ideas that have never worked before. Why would they work now?

Mutual Aid

Trying to make incremental changes to the system will never work because the system is the problem.

As my friend Ronnie James says:

I’m of the firm opinion that a system that was built by stolen bodies on stolen land for the benefit of a few is a system that is not repairable. It is operating as designed, and small changes (which are the result of huge efforts) to lessen the blow on those it was not designed for are merely half measures that can’t ever fully succeed.

So the question is now, where do we go from here? Do we continue to make incremental changes while the wealthy hoard more wealth and the climate crisis deepens, or do we do something drastic that has never been done before? Can we envision and create a world where a class war from above isn’t a reality anymore?”
Ronnie James

Mutual Aid is “where we go from here.”

This morning Ronnie and I were in Des Moines as usual, distributing donated food.
(See: https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/mutual-aid/)

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

Do you trust the police?

There continue to be conflicting versions about the first killing of an environmental activist in this country, Manuel Teran “Tortuguita”. I am also an environmental activist.

So many times, the initial versions of police killings from the police have proven to be false. In this case the police say Tortuguita fired at them. Do you trust the police version? There is supposed to be body cam video, but that hasn’t been released. We are waiting for more details, but the truth may never be known

I know people have different ideas and/or experiences related to policing in this country. My attitude has changed dramatically over the past decade because of being involved in Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s communities.

We as White Quakers like to think of ourselves as ahead or better than dominant culture, but we have been complicit in a system and mindset that are ubiquitous. Claiming the full truth of our history and committing to repair the harms done are deeply spiritual acts of healing our own wounds of disconnection. I would argue it is the pathway upon which we can, perhaps for the first time, discover and invigorate our faith with its full promise.

What would it mean for us to take seriously and collectively as a Religious Society a call to finish the work of abolition, hand in hand and side by side with those affected and their loved ones? What would it mean for us to stand fully with the calls to abolish the police and fully fund community needs instead? What would it mean to reckon with our past complicity with harm and fully dedicate ourselves to the creation of a liberating Quaker faith that commits to build the revolutionary and healing faith we long to see come to fruition? What would it look like to finally and fully abolish slavery?

A Quaker Call to Abolition and Creation by Lucy Duncan, Friends Journal, April 1, 2021

Lucy’s article includes this correction, that so many White people do unintentionally:
Correction: The author and FJ editors realize that an earlier version of this article inadvertently erased BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) Quakers in describing Quakers as though we were/are all White. Certainly there have been Black Friends and Friends of Color in our body from our earliest history. We apologize for this error. This online article has been updated accordingly. We have also clarified the relationship of George Fox with Margaret and Thomas Rous.

I have learned much more about community safety from my experiences with my Mutual Aid community. Mutual Aid is about rejecting hierarchies. Policing is about enforcing, often violently, hierarchies, systems of dominance.

I would like to see more people join our efforts to abolish police and prisons.

I’ve been participating in the Quaker for Abolition Network, initiated by Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge and Jed Walsh. The following is from an article they wrote for Western Friend.

Mackenzie: Let’s start with: What does being a police and prison abolitionist mean to you?
Jed: The way I think about abolition is first, rejecting the idea that anyone belongs in prison and that police make us safe. The second, and larger, part of abolition is the process of figuring out how to build a society that doesn’t require police or prisons.
Mackenzie: Yes! The next layer of complexity, in my opinion, is looking at systems of control and oppression. Who ends up in jail and prison? Under what circumstances do the police use violence?
As you start exploring these questions, it becomes painfully clear that police and prisons exist to maintain the white supremacist, heteronormative, capitalist status quo.
Abolish the Police by Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge and Jed Walsh, Western Friend, November December 2020

I contributed to another article in Western Friend.

In late 2020, the two of us wrote an article for this magazine, called “Abolish the Police.” Through writing the piece, we realized we wanted to convene a larger space where Friends with an interest in police and prison abolition could have conversations with one another. Quaker abolitionists today face major pushback from our Meetings; we hoped that drawing Friends together would support and strengthen our work.
In this context, the Quakers for Abolition Network is being born. We are a collection of Friends from at least five Yearly Meetings; we range in age from high school to our 80s; we are disproportionately queer and trans. While AFSC and FCNL staff are participating, this is a grassroots project without any formal connections to existing organizations. We are in the process of defining our mission statement, structure, and our methods for addressing white supremacy when it shows up in our work, while building relationships with each other as we go. Below, four Friends write about their approaches to abolition, their lessons, and their visions for where Quakers might be headed.

Jeff Kisling: Mutual Aid and Abolition
I grew up in rural Iowa, where there was very little racial diversity and interactions with police and the court system were rare. About ten years ago, I was blessed to become involved with the Kheprw Institute, a Black youth mentoring and empowerment community. I’ll never forget how shocked I was when a Black mother broke down in tears, explaining how terrified she was every minute her children were away from home. It was obvious that every other person of color in the discussion knew exactly what she was saying.
After retiring, I was led to connect with Des Moines Mutual Aid, a multiracial organization founded to support houseless people. For over a year, I’ve helped my friends fill and distribute boxes of donated food, while continuing to learn about the framework of mutual aid.
To me, mutual aid is about taking back control of our communities. Besides the food giveaway, we support houseless people and maintain a bail fund to support those arrested agitating for change. We also work for the abolition of police and prisons.

Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge and Jed Walsh: Introducing the Quakers for Abolition Network, Western Friend, Sept 2021

Points of Unity. Des Moines Mutual Aid

We believe in working shoulder to shoulder and standing in solidarity with all oppressed communities
We ourselves are oppressed, and our mutual aid work is a fight for our collective liberation. We do not believe in a top-down model of charity. Instead, we contrast our efforts at horizontal mutual aid, the fostering of mutually beneficial relationships and communities, to dehumanizing and colonizing charity.
We believe in community autonomy.
We believe that the communities we live and organize in have been largely excluded from state social services, but intensely surveilled and policed by the state repressive apparatus. Capitalism is fundamentally unable to meet people’s needs. We want to build self-sustaining communities that are independent of the capitalist state, both materially and ideologically, and can resist its repression.
We are police and prison abolitionists.
Abolition and the mutual aid that we practice are inextricably linked. We don’t rely on capitalist institutions or the police to do our work. We believe in building strong and resilient communities which make police obsolete, including community systems of accountability and crisis intervention.
We work to raise the political consciousness of our communities.
Part of political education is connecting people’s lived experiences to a broader political perspective. Another component is working to ensure that people can meet their basic needs. It is difficult to organize for future liberation when someone is entrenched in day-to-day struggle.
We have open disagreements with each other about ideas and practices.
We believe there is no formula for resolving our ideological differences other than working towards our common aims, engaging each other in a comradely manner, and respecting one another, whether or not we can hash out disagreements in the process.

Martin Luther King and Capitalism

Whenever I try to talk about the necessity of rejecting capitalism, people don’t seem to even comprehend what that means. Why it must happen. When I asked Ronnie, my Mutual Aid mentor about this, he said he’s been having that experience for the twenty years he’s been an activist. He said that was because people hadn’t experienced the collapse of capitalism in their lives, yet. I believe he’s right. Unfortunately, that is changing as the capitalist economy is collapsing. Yet another reason to form more Mutual Aid communities.

I’m of the firm opinion that a system that was built by stolen bodies on stolen land for the benefit of a few is a system that is not repairable. It is operating as designed, and small changes (which are the result of huge efforts) to lessen the blow on those it was not designed for are merely half measures that can’t ever fully succeed.

So the question is now, where do we go from here? Do we continue to make incremental changes while the wealthy hoard more wealth and the climate crisis deepens, or do we do something drastic that has never been done before? Can we envision and create a world where a class war from above isn’t a reality anymore?”

Ronnie James, Des Moines Mutual Aid

I too have become fully convinced of the evils of capitalism. Moreover, I have come to the conclusion that my faith dictates that I work to replace it.
Fran Quigley, Director of the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work was as much about economics and poverty, as it was about racial equality.

“I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” Martin Luther King admitted to Coretta Scott, concluding that “capitalism has outlived its usefulness.”

Speaking at a staff retreat of the SCLC in 1966, King said that “something is wrong … with capitalism” and “there must be a better distribution of wealth” in the country. “Maybe,” he suggested, “America must move toward a democratic socialism.”

For King, the only solution to America’s crisis of poverty was the redistribution of wealth. In a 1961 speech to the Negro American Labor Council, King declared, “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.”

The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Matthew Miles Goodrich, In These Times, January 16, 2023

Again, we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice, the fact is that Capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor both black and white, both here and abroad. If Negroes and poor whites do not participate in the free flow of wealth within our economy, they will forever be poor, giving their energies, their talents and their limited funds to the consumer market but reaping few benefits and services in return.”

I wish that I could say that this is just a passing phase in the cycles of our nation’s life; certainly, times of war, times of reaction throughout the society but I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism
The Three Evils of Society – Delivered at the National Conference on New Politics August 31, 1967, Chicago, Ill

“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”
Excerpts from King’s speech “Where Do We Go From Here?” delivered at the 11th Annual SCLC Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967

The title for this blog, Quakers and Religious Socialism, came from exchanges of messages with my friend Fran Quigley. The following was in response to my blog post, The Evil of Capitalism.

This post of yours struck me close to home. I too have become fully convinced of the evils of capitalism. Moreover, I have come to the conclusion that my faith dictates that I work to replace it. Turns out I am far from alone, so I’ve been devoting much of my time this past year to the Religion and Socialism Committee of the DSA, www.religioussocialism.org .

And, as part of a book project on religious socialism, I have published several articles profiling activists from different faith and spiritual traditions who feel called to advocate for a socialist society. (Examples, if you are interested: a Catholic socialist, a Jewish rabbi socialist, a Black Presbyterian minister socialist, a Liberation Theologian Lutheran minister/professor, Muslim socialists , a Buddhist socialist and a Black Baptist minister socialist. I also co-wrote with longtime Religion and Socialism activist Maxine Phillips a short, one-stop primer on the argument for Christian socialism: https://mphbooks.com/democratic-socialists/ )

I do not know of a definitive guide to Quaker socialism, but I know Bayard Rustin, Staughton Lynd, and AJ Muste (late-in-life switch to being a Friend) at various times identified as socialists, and there is a robust UK Quaker Socialist Society: https://quakersocialists.org.uk/ Willard Uphaus was a Christian socialist and pacifist Earlham alum, but it’s not clear to me if he was a Quaker: https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/willard-uphaus

Fran Quigley, director of the Health and Human Rights Clinic at Indiana University McKinney School of Law and a religioussocialism.org editorial team member

Des Moines Black Lives Matter/ Black Liberation
https://www.facebook.com/desmoinesblm

Early in our lifetimes, industry provided nearly full employment. Nearly every household had someone who was working, and bringing home a paycheck. All commerce was based on capitalism. Money was required for every transaction. Money was the only way to obtain goods and services.

Then with increasing automation, and moving jobs overseas for cheap labor, the unemployment rate began to increase. Soon millions of people no longer had the income needed to pay for goods and services. The numbers of those without jobs has increased dramatically from the economic impact of the COVID pandemic. Those without jobs have to rely on social safety nets, which often means people are living in poverty, at subsistent levels.

As a society we failed to address the loss of wages for millions of people who no longer had money, in a system that required money for everything–food, shelter, healthcare, etc.

It is clear to me that capitalism is an unjust, untenable system, when there is plenty of food in the grocery stores, but men, women and children are going hungry, living on the streets outside the store. There is no justification for this.

Conscientiously Object to Capitalism, Jeff Kisling, 12/4/2020