When it Comes to Working-Class Solidarity, Mutual Aid is Step One

Reject the fake progress promised by corporate-owned politicians and jump-start the movement in your community

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

To the extent that we are able, our first and foremost responsibility within the movement for social progress is mutual aid, helping those most vulnerable and most oppressed by capitalism’s oppressive hierarchies. That’s step one: to strengthen the bonds of solidarity with the colonized, with the poor, with the exploited laborer. To look upon the houseless and say, “Your struggle is mine.”

This is what chiefly separates us from those who look away from the struggle of others, those who tell them now is not the time to end their suffering. The cowards who espouse incrementalism, who say the crumbs from the Democratic Party are the best we can get, and that we’d better be happy about it because it’s better than the GOP.

Beware of the liberal who enjoys his health care, his white privilege, and his comfortable place in the existing system, all while telling you that in your calls for liberation from the structures his privilege stems from, your angry tone is unbecoming and your pleas for freedom premature. Beware the person who tries to set the timetable for an end to suffering that he does not experience.

Beware, beware. And he won’t be a cartoon character twirling an evil mustache. He may not be a Republican but that doesn’t make him an ally. If he is a Democrat in this modern era he might call himself a ‘progressive’, but if he thinks a BLM protestor’s destruction of property is worth more condemnation than a cop’s destruction of a Black person’s life, one has to question the value of his definition of progress. One has to question his motivations for this tepid stance. And we rarely have to look far to see whose pocket they’re in.

Beware the person who tries to set the timetable for an end to suffering that he does not experience.

Corporate politicians are figuring out savvy ways to siphon some of the populist energy from the fallout of Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns. We already saw faux versions of Medicare for All proposals…