Transcript
Speaker: Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
Speaker: Follow us on Mastodon and at thebeautifulidea.show. Thanks for listening.
Speaker: Welcome back to The Beautiful Idea, everybody. Today, we're going to be having a little bit of a different conversation because instead of recording Remotely, we're in a situation where all of us are finally actually in the same room talking. So we're going to be keeping it a little informal today, but we're going to be talking to Kasa and Maroon from the Elements of Mutual Aid documentary that's been touring around the country about some of the dynamics that have emerged in mutual aid organizing over the last you six or seven years, where that's kind of created some problems and ways that we can sort of
Speaker: think of mutual aid differently, not just as a form of charity, but as a form of offensive active activity. You know, to start, like, I know a lot of us have lot of people listening.
Speaker: I've only recently gotten somewhat familiar with the concept of mutual aid. A lot of you since 2020 and since COVID. And like, we did great things during COVID. Like, I think we really did. But The kind of franticness of that helped build some dynamics up that really differ from the way that, say, mutual aid societies used to exist.
Speaker: Right. In the city I live in, um the city we're recording this in, there's a long history of what we're called community houses, which are mutual aid houses that did everything from organized potlucks and collective community education programs and things like that.
Speaker: And what they all were organized around was they were organized around the idea that people put work in together to achieve something that's bigger than they could achieve individually.
Speaker: Right? A really simple expression of this is, say, the neighborhood I grew up in, where people routinely lost factory jobs and stuff, and the community would band together and help that person with the expectation and understanding that if they didn't, their community would be damaged. And if they were ever in that situation, that person would probably come do the same thing for them.
Speaker: And the mutual aid project in that context is literally the community that we were living in, right? And we were all participating in that together. And that was so organic and unsaid that it was never a thing was talked about, really.
Speaker: It was just something that was inherent in living in that community. Yet somehow mutual aid has started to kind of take on different understandings. And I know that these conversations have been going on. I remember Food Not Bombs in the early 2000s was talking about like how to move past charity models and and things like this. But...
Speaker: Yeah, let's just get into it Maybe start off with introducing yourselves. Talk a little bit about the documentary and yeah, why don't we just start there? Awesome. Yeah, I'm Casa. use they and they pronouns.
Speaker: And I'm Maroon. I use he and they pronouns. Yeah, and we made this documentary series. It's a four-part series for folks that aren't familiar, and it's all freely available on YouTube and Peertube and the Internet Archive with Spanish and English subtitles.
Speaker: And our intention was to really build a tool that could be used to start conversations and and deepen our understanding of mutual aid, like its depth, its like length of history, its origin, and nature, indigenous and black communities, and like its potential for helping us guide towards actual like liberated structures for meeting our needs and so yeah we released it on Mayday of this year and we've been on a six month screening tour we're about three and a half months in and a couple of months to go and we've been learning like so much and like really refining and honing our analysis and like checking in with like where the movement in mutual aid and people's association with the concept and opportunities for us to like deepen and like advance along our pathway are so yeah it's really I want to be here and get to talk about it a bit. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah we've been working on the project roughly since 2019. The both of us were a part of the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Workshop Tour in 2018.
Speaker: And during that time, we were thinking, damn, there's a lot of books and zines and even some podcasts talking about mutual aid. But there wasn't a lot of like visual media that helped break down the ideas beyond just giving people boxes of food or whatever. Mm-hmm. And so we were really interested in figuring out how to build out a documentary project that got into the sort of core components of mutual aid-based organizing. We decided that one film wouldn't be enough. We were ambitious and thought that four films would help do it and drew from the indigenous wisdom of the of the elements as a guiding principle and tool to help tell that story. So FIRE is the introductory chapter that talks about the origins of mutual aid, like Casa was just talking about.
Speaker: It features Klee Benally and Lorenzo and Jonina Brown Irvin, who are two former Black Panthers. Klee was an indigenous, specifically Diné anarchist, who unfortunately passed away shortly after recording.
Speaker: And their combined wisdom, along with other mutual aid groups on the ground in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and and Detroit, really helped paint the picture of a more dynamic mutual aid that has an ah offensive sort of component to it.
Speaker: And then Earth is the second chapter and it follows up by exploring the infrastructure of mutual aid, how we build deep roots that have long term sort of visions and theories of change. So we start off at the macro level by talking about Rojava and the Zapatistas and the Black Panther Party and their programs, and then bring it back down to Earth and to our context here and then finish that chapter with showcasing how people are maintaining squatted or otherwise like repossessed social infrastructure in Puerto Rico. in the wake of Hurricane Maria and the anti-austerity organizing happening in the mid-2010s. Water is a really fantastic chapter that gets into healing as a form of collective resistance and capacity building. We talk about burnout, conflict, and harm, and have some really great examples of people can confronting those things in collective ways. And then AIR is our final chapter, which gets into the logistics of this type of organizing. So How do we structure ourselves at an organizational level? Why is horizontality important and fundamental to the way in which we organize with mutual aid?
Speaker: Why is our agency something that we need to uplift within each other? How do we how do we do that? And how do we make our projects accessible? We also talk about things like nonprofit status and stuff like that, money in in that chapter as well. So we designed the the series to be something that could be watched as each individual chapter as a standalone or in a full series, ideally in conversation within communities to sharpen collective analysis of mutual aid to go far beyond just giving people things so and more into a community defense mentality and a theory of change that's about place and territory.
Speaker: That's great. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of what what I've seen happen in mutual aid work is kind of two things. One is that it's become largely this reactive sort of thing, right? COVID happens, we go put something together. You know, ISIS coming to your town, you go put together a food program, you know, and we're really, really good at this.
Speaker: Right. Like, I think anarchists are incredibly good at this. Right. Like, I know in the city I lived in, like, we were the source for COVID masks for a long time because the hospitals couldn't get them. And we figured out how to, you know, like, we're really, really good at these things. And they feel really good.
Speaker: Right. Like, they feel really good. And you're you're helping do an important thing. But there's something that feels missing. Right? Like we we can support an entire city through a pandemic, yet when that wanes, we're back to where we started.
Speaker: right? That the the mechanisms that we're building to deal with the crises in our lives aren't having persistence. Like we're thinking about them as sort of ancillary to capitalism as opposed to an affront or an attack on capitalism, right? How have you all been seeing those kinds of things manifest? Like you're a lot more deeply embedded in kind of mutual aid circles than I am, right? But how have you seen that dynamic? I mean, I've seen it from where I'm at kind of doing the things I do, but what are you all seeing kind of in that world? You've been doing it for a long time now.
Speaker: I'll just add an addendum to that, to what you're saying that like, yes, it does feel good. I think at first, and then it's going to feel bad. And I think like lot of people are reeling from that like, at like that attempt at meeting everybody's needs and like, okay, I guess this is what we do. It's like, there's people in deep suffering or who are like dying under these systems of their violence. And so we're going to go out and like try and like meet those needs and like go full throttle on them or go, you know,
Speaker: rapid response, like full throttle. And what we've been seeing as we've been on this tour, and part our screening tour, is like a deep amount of burnout and like a lack of like relational rootedness that helps like build back, like pour back into the cup. and a lot of, we've been having a lot of conversations around like, how do we make this work actually mutual? Like, how what does it mean to like break down the giver-receiver dynamics? like And it's like, well, we're not, we have to like break down these concepts of like being like servers. Like we need to actually approach community or like a desire to be in community or be in relationship with each other. And so while it may feel good at the front end, we're also seeing like a lot of burnout and our understanding of burnout or mine anyway is that like we, part of burnout is this like,
Speaker: psychological orientation to like not seeing an end to the like need and crisis and we're staring down the barrel of it and as we're doing like the war on Iran and like the economic destabilization and fascism are all like creating these like more crazy conditions and crises and we're like, it's going to get worse. like It's bad now, but people can't even imagine like moving into like worse because like they're already throwing as much as they can and into it. And so we have been talking about really wanting to help develop more of like a long vision of like what the hell we're doing and moving into like a framework of like strategy. And we can't do that without like spending time analyzing what we're doing, reflecting on it, deepening our practice and of of mutual aid, thinking of it in like an offensive and defensive capacity, and then like moving together from those like iterative conversations. So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and we're seeing like a lot of capacity being built when there's it's not just like a radical milieu that is like mobilizing around the term mutual aid. I think, like unfortunately, the popularization of the phrase turned it into like a like a activist thing. i think like pre-2018 or pre-2020 in 2018, when we were on the Mutual Aid Disaster Relief Tour, we were seeing more people come around the term that had a more expansive understanding of mutual aid as concept of like territorial defense, building up long-term collective infrastructure. It wasn't in a posture of like just giving. And it seems like since 2020, that's been the sort of default
Speaker: stance and people are like you were just saying, Caso, like trying to like figure out how to like unlock the organizing past that. And so I think, I think like now that we're six years in past 2020, I think a lot of people who's like first touch point, like you were saying at the beginning of this conversation has been this, and I think people are deeply dissatisfied. So we're also seeing people because they're burnt out and because they're not seeing anything get better because the conditions are getting worse. There's a lot of hit pieces on mutual aid right now that are saying that mutual aid failed or that it's not enough. And so we're trying to actively confront that right now on our tour by encouraging the sort of pro-social complex understanding of mutual aid as something that's a life-sustaining system. Mm-hmm.
Speaker: and a framework of liberation rather than an act that you do on the weekend with your comrades to like give out boxes of food. like that's That's a part of it, 100%. Direct Aid is certainly a part of the mutual aid framework, but it is not what we're talking about. And so I think that's that's been lost in the sauce, and I think our our responsibility is to help encourage this sort of ah mentality that's far more expansive. Lorenzo Kimboa Irvin, once again, former Black Panther turned anarchist, who's featured in the first chapter of our film, talks about building a fight back movement yeah that is able to overthrow capitalism. that's That's what our mutual aid should be oriented toward. Mm-hmm. And if it isn't, then we're we're deeply lacking in our own analysis and praxis. So I think like that's that's what we're really excited about.
Speaker: And the ways that we're seeing that come, to answer your question, to the fore the most, and in the ways that are the most exciting, are when we're seeing regular people get involved in a way that feels locally specific and actually has an impact on their own material lives. And usually that's like not in a situation which mutual aid is like the banner that everyone's like falling under. It's like a more mundane style of organizing that's like woven into the fabric of the way that people are moving and taking care of each other. And there is a hostility toward the nation state.
Speaker: or against the government or against capitalism. There's an antagonism in people are organizing around pure survival and finding like highly organized ways of being able to do that. I mean, once again, like in Puerto Rico, people had been fighting against austerity from the government and against American colonialism on their island. And that was the backbone of being able to take territory in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Speaker: as people were taking over abandoned school buildings because austerity cuts had shut down a bunch of schools preemptively before the hurricane. And so there was all these abandoned pieces of infrastructure and people who literally went to those schools as children came back and took those schools over and turned them into social infrastructure that still exists today.
Speaker: And so I think like that kind of like power is what we're really looking for yeah when we're talking about mutual aid. And so those are the more exciting examples is when like neighbors, tenant people in like, and ah people who are like organizing around being tenants, people who are organizing in smaller communities or people organizing by block are coming together and taking care of each other. And this is, this is what we're seeing is like dissolving the sort of like giver and receiver sort of like energy.
Speaker: Yeah. And it, it, What you're saying pulls me back pretty heavily to a lot of the conversations that were happening right after Katrina in my circles, right? Which were not, let's go down there and get some houses and give people some food. It's that capitalism failed, climate change killed the city.
Speaker: There's all of this space that capitalism can't occupy anymore and people living there. And this is a place to go reconstruct life, right? And it was an offensive attempt. Mm-hmm. Right.
Speaker: And it was a local attempt. Right. I think one of the things that's really that I love about the discourse of mutual aid, I don't even want to call it a concept because it's it's not.
Speaker: It's more of a basic principle. But the thing that I always come back to with the concept of mutual aid is like the way that I experienced that as a child didn't have anything to do with political decisions at all.
Speaker: Right. It was people in a common circumstance. It was entirely localized. Right. We weren't being pulled outside of our locality by these questions of the nation or the city government or something. like We were worried about what was going on right here. And people would be really mad about something like NAFTA because that's why their job got lost. But their approach to NAFTA was building resiliency. Right. Right.
Speaker: And I think what happens a lot in radical movements is we come into these movements with this background of the labor movement or the civil rights movement or the anti-nuke movement or something like this. And we think that the limitations of political expression have to do with complaints and protest.
Speaker: Right. And one of the things that opened up in New Orleans a lot for a lot of us is like coming out anti-war movement. We didn't see a lot of hope for that. right, that we had just literally mobilized the biggest movement that humans have ever seen.
Speaker: And the administration was like, man, we don't care. It meant nothing without the direct intervention. It meant nothing. And as we started exploring the implications of that, I think we started looking outside street protest as a form of political activity. New Orleans happened to be this opening into something really new and different that was outside of that generalization, outside of that decontextualization, outside of that abstraction, something that was incredibly immediate.
Speaker: Right. Why do you think we've lost that? Yeah. Like, I think i think that there's a lot of there's a lot of reasons for this, right? I'm curious as to your thoughts about this, but I remember when I was coming up, our perspective was funneling downwards, right? We were getting out of abstraction. we were challenging ideology. we were starting to like talk about the dynamics of the spaces we were in, the infrastructures that sustained those and how crisis looks the place that we live at any given point.
Speaker: And 2020 happened and all of that discourse seemed to disappear. Right. And then Minneapolis happened. And some of that discourse seems to have emerged. Right. And the pattern I see is that political activity in the United States wanes in effectiveness when we're not having those conversations and increases in effectiveness drastically when we do.
Speaker: Yep. Right. That the movements, groups like PSL and stuff that have merged have driven everything into the ground in a way that we will not be able to resist what is going on by staying within those limits. so Right.
Speaker: And it's a make or break time. So how do you think we ended up there? How do we get out of that? Right. Like it is a potentially fatal problem at the moment that we delocalize their politics. So like, how do we start to really understand how that happened and how to combat that?
Speaker: yeah Yeah, I think that that that delocalization is obviously part of that process where like you do have these like national movements, PSL, the PSA, and the Democratic Party, AOC, trying to swoop up the momentum of these large inreary insurrectionary moments and are like very effective at it and like abstracting things. And now I have social media where that's like, It occurs really rapidly and a lot of like trend-based movement of attention.
Speaker: And so an anecdote to that is like the relocalization of our community. And I think one way that we think it is really important to have a like ah political understanding and framework while we're practicing mutual aid and something we try to communicate really excessively in the first chapter was that like, there's like an inherent incompatibility between like the state and authoritarian structures and local community. And like one of the main ways that they've derived power from us is by separating and isolating people like at the like,
Speaker: house infrastructure level like and so many other ways. Yeah, the nuclear family level, yeah. And so we have lost so much of our local power and like orientation to life in general and our capacities to meet each other's needs.
Speaker: We were like so pulled away from from any semblance of having hyper-local community. And so... Yeah, the anecdote is to like rebuild that. didn't really cover this in the documentary, but especially with Minneapolis and anti-ice organizing or out-of-response network model, like there's a huge resurgence of people organizing on their blocks, of like a a few blocks wide or whatever, and that's building relationships and and and building back that social fabric that makes it way more possible to defend specific locations in our community
Speaker: But I think as we're doing this mutual aid work, it is important for us to build political consciousness. It is not enough to just meet each other's needs because the state can always come in and try to like swoop back you know legitimacy by like providing those services in like a nicer way for them. So like for us to like develop collective antagonism towards the state, because we realized that they will always try to come and like squash our autonomy. It's, is important and is like relatable and understandable by working class people all over. A lot of people are disillusioned, disgruntled, like don't know exactly what to do with that.
Speaker: And so mutual aid and, and these like practices of meeting our needs together is a way that we like protagonize our communities against these structures that are going to continue to try to like harvest support or profit or whatever from nonexious.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's all right. And I think I also want to maybe challenge the notion that the paradigms are more like like black and white, not like binary.
Speaker: I think there's like ah there's overlap overlapping ah tendencies that I think are happening all of the time of like localization and atomization. I think like the foundation of this country as a settler colonial project is like far different than many other countries. like we're We're very different than like any European nation state.
Speaker: And I think that like in Europe, even today, there's still some semblance of like the commons. Here, from the from the very emancipation, it was obliterated, right? There was like privatization.
Speaker: from the jump. yeah And it's a genocidal slave-based condition that is like far different than any other country has ever been founded on, save for like possibly Israel like on the planet. And so I think like we're in we're in a very unique circumstance here where from the very beginning, the sense of atomization has been an imposition. And at the same time, there has also been heavy community-driven, decentralized form of organization and resistance since the very beginning.
Speaker: The town hall model, for instance, in New England or across the country, and obviously native forms of direct democracy and consensus and confederation building. are like things that are happening concurrently with the atomization that's happening and privatization that's happening. And so I think like going through the arc of social justice movements, especially in the 1960s, I think we're like seeing those dynamics happening at that time too. I'm imagining, and I know that like people are having the same conversations we're right now. It's what happened to us? How did we get here? Why is everyone so atomized nowadays? And like they were saying that back then too.
Speaker: But like we look at those times as like, wow, these are the pinnacles of social And the League of Revolutionary Black Workers had organization at the neighborhood level, but like they were still dealing with this like is this concept of like atomization. I think deindustrialization at that time, especially coming from like you know Michigan, you know like seeing people like have actual neighborhood organization. We're like my baseball club and like we're all watching each other's kids. and then we all work at the same motor factory, like, that builds a sense of territory. When those industry jobs are stripped away and houses and neighborhoods get redlined and gentrified, that breaks up communities. So I think, like, yes there's ah there's a material aspect to this. yes I also think that in the 1960s and beyond, the sort of, like, professionalization of social justice into academia creates this, like, professionalized, like, class, this vanguard class within the social movements that then, like, creates the sense of, like,
Speaker: You know, and ah like a social elite within them was that activism. And so I think like those two dynamics of like the material aspect of like the working class being like deconstructive and then the like professional class of activists being lifted up into positions where you can like make a living being an activist. Right. I think like these things are like, for me, core elements of how we got here. And I think it's a part of the Salt Lake Colonial Project to take the things that we're using to resist, the tools that we're using to resist and assimilating them into the system.
Speaker: And so I think that we've like seen certainly like currents and waves of people who have been in like deep community, ah have those communities be broken. up but But I think we've also seen people sell out for this like larger concept of like having like personal stability or or maybe like a sense of pragmatism that like the you know like working within the system or something like that, getting like a job within a university or a nonprofit or going into politics will also help. and so i think like Part of how we've gotten to where we are right now is like coming from these like longer legacies that also at the same time had highly communitarian, territory-driven styles of organizing. so And I think the same thing is happening right now. and I think like there are people who are like in their blocks, in their neighbors, in their neighborhoods, regionally organizing against climate crisis. Some of the like best organizing happening in the South right now against climate and against like big industry is... like
Speaker: regional in its character and then i think at the same time yeah we're seeing this like hyper individualization and like abstractification of organizing happening at the same time so i just want to like maybe add a little bit more complexity to the fact that you know it's not just like back in in the you know anti-globalization era we had it and now we don't yeah i think there's like there it was happening back then too yeah the beautiful idea is a proud member of the channel zero anarchist podcast network here's a taste of another project on czn
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Speaker: Okay, so I'm going to get a little theory nerd here, especially right after the conversation about the abstractification of academia. Because one of the things I find really fascinating about mutual aid in the way that it's developed in the modern era, is that it's a way to think outside of the simplistic individual society binary that so much of our politics in the modern era is based on. Yeah. Right.
Speaker: That part of the... delocalization that happens is a result of the fact that our political categories aren't themselves localized, right? We talk about policy. We talk about the nation. We talk about all these things.
Speaker: Right now, we're all talking about Trump, right? But what the question that isn't often being asked is, what does an ICE surge look like where I live? On my street, in my neighborhood, with the surveillance cameras that exist, and so on, so on, so right But mutual aid forces us to kind of do two things, I think, which are really important.
Speaker: One is break down that isolation without creating a like singular social unit that then gets re-regulated. right And secondly, as a result, kind of allows things to develop along the lines of organic condition. right And in that way, it feels like a kind of escapes a lot of the traps that of modern politics where we're sitting here as the radicals who understand the problems of the world and the solutions and then trying to sort of manifest those outwardly.
Speaker: Right. And it it feels a bit like what's happened and mutual aid is like that distinction almost has gotten lost where that kind of temporality or that position of mutual aid is something which is like a different approach to life rather than just a way to meet has been kind of lost.
Speaker: How do we start to move back into allowing that complexity to exist? right Because the thing i always really loved about mutual aid circumstances, right and i again i went I went to a Jesuit university, right it's really funny, right as like an atheist, it's a philosophy student at a Jesuit university, which if any of you want to study philosophy in a fascinating context, Jesuit schools are fascinating because they are like the biggest theology nerds.
Speaker: in history and have like the most fascinating conversations. But anyways, one of the things I would do when I was there is I ran a little program with the anarchist collective at the university to take all of these like,
Speaker: trust fund suburban kids that were going to this fancy ass school and take them to the Catholic worker house on West side. Right. Because what I wanted them to do was I wanted them, and these were people with really good ethics, right? They're Catholic social justice people. They just kind of grew up with this understanding of their own kind of impunity and power and things like this. And this idea of like, what would the perfect world look like? And then they get down there And now all of a sudden they're in a context they've never experienced before around people they've never met before.
Speaker: And the whole purpose of that was that it jarred their certainty. right It got them to think about not how am I going to be you know the hero of the revolution on the top of the barricade, but how am I going to like play cards with this dude who's trying to teach me how to play craps with like you know or uuchur with like rules I've never heard before because he learned them in prison. And I need to like sit there and I'm going to play a game with this guy and not judge this person for having been in prison.
Speaker: right And it was a really jarring experience for a lot of people. That's what used to love about mutual aid. Right? What seems to have been lost? Where did where did that go away?
Speaker: right Where did that complexity, that ability to kind of meet difficult people where they are, where do we think that disappeared? it's a deep It's a deep, long, difficult question.
Speaker: yeah That's what we do on the show, though. so No, I love it. Yeah, I might prime it with something that Cass has been challenging me on a lot with our discourse, because we're driving in our van between communities and and sort of like verbally processing what we're seeing all from place to place, and then like trying to figure out how we then bring those lessons to the next place. So in live time, we're sharpening our analysis and theory of change around mutual aid.
Speaker: through the conversations we're having with so many people across the country. So just quick plug, if you're hearing this and if we're coming to a city near you, we want to be in dialogue with you around this shit because we don't know everything. And we really like need to be like sharpening our analysis together. So something that I've been saying a lot is that as and anti-authoritarians, we failed in 2020 to sort of meet the moment and help guide people into a radical politic that was anti-state.
Speaker: we became foot soldiers of distribution and fell in line with that model of organizing in many ways, and in many ways didn't. And so having like a more complex understanding of this wasn't like ah like using the the language of failure or using the language of like everything is this way or everything is that way, having these like sort of like broad generalizations flattens the complex complexity of what's going on and what's happened and also invisibilizes a lot of the very critical work that people have been doing of being the people who are continuing to hold that torch of radical politic and instilling it in their communities.
Speaker: people have been continuing to have the conversations that you've been talking about uninterrupted. um They're less visible, because I think there's so much more static happening now. So yes um i don't i don't want to like speak too long on this, because I think, Cassie, you've got a a great way of speaking about this. But I just want to like sort of just use like but this time as like a personal reflection that I think i've been asking very similar questions like, where did we go wrong? Why isn't this happening anymore? Or how did we fail? And Cass has been encouraging me to think about in more complex way of understanding that we we haven't failed, that there are like strategic like differences that need to be like revived, and we need to like continue to hold the torch of those things and like encourage the things that have been happening so that we can then see more of it. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I want to just share like an encouragement for folks who are listening who's like only experience with mutual aid has been like distributing boxes of food or what have you. It's like, it's okay. You're like seeing need and you're showing up and you're figuring out how to do that with dignity and figuring out what like real relationships look like. and that is like a hard thing to do in and of itself and that is like a a step and like it's not like you're doing something wrong it's that like we can just like continue to walk more deeply in that and so for folks who are newer to that to this like type of organizing and the concept of mutual aid just an encouragement to like go deeper and like build a more radical understanding of that so that we can like apply this value in a more expansive
Speaker: radical way and actually build worlds where people don't have needs instead of just putting band-aids on it. And then also alongside that, parallel to that, an encouragement to people who have been in this a long time to help be a grounding force for people that are just getting involved in this. we have tens of thousands of people that are newly radicalized, are trying to show up the best they can, are being told through social media and all these places that they're like fucked up because they don't care or something, and they'll show up, and people are showing up to the best of their ability, and like we're in a learning moment together, and so we should like
Speaker: be learning together and some of our most radical like deep conversations on this tour have been in communities where radical anti-fascist anti-authoritarians have continued to show up alongside people who are getting newly radicalized the people who are you know moms suburban moms who are like getting on rapid response the world's messed up that like aren't writing them off as just like liberals or whatever so just encouragement in both those directions i think something that we can like mature in which we should as like revolutionaries and people who are like trying to build something alternative to the hellscape that is being offered us is that we should be trying to hold a thread like understand that we are holding a thread through these different waves of crisis and like the pandemic was an immense wave of crisis where people weren't able to get their like and we didn't get these met. So people showed up that way. And like ice shit is like crisis where people aren't able to get groceries. And so people show up in that way. And like, we just need to like put a little bit of our capacity or understanding into this like responsibility of holding the thread between these different peaks and like down points of the waves, understand that they are gonna come and go. And if we're just like throwing our all into things,
Speaker: and then wondering why it fell apart or why it didn't do the revolution or whatever, we are going to be disappointed. oppress yeah how are we How are we building like a long vision of what possibilities we're laying out? like The folks in Minneapolis, that we just did a screening tour there and had an amazing conversation with people.
Speaker: It was really cool to like incorporate what we've been thinking and what they've been learning. And one of the things that they reflected on is that they're like, encampment support networks were able to like feed into the rapid response and like carry those skills into that work.
Speaker: through they like got through operation metro surge there's still like tons of people that need like rent support and like all this like the crisis is still there and on one level some people are like where's that where'd everybody go everybody's burnt out it's like disappointment in like how things have panned out but like to see the through line that now like the rep the skills that were learned in rapid response are now influencing how like encampment support and defense are happening and like we should be looking for this like the ways that we're like learning and growing and have some grounding in that and like assurance that those can be carried forward and be dynamic in the future waves and also be protagonists in that realize that that's our responsibility as we like
Speaker: I can see the amount of intensity that is to come. Yeah. I think that's a really, I mean, we've, the three of us been around for a while. you know, I've been around 27 years at this point doing this kind of stuff. And like, that is such a critical point.
Speaker: I mean, I think we were really hard on ourselves when I was young, where we didn't stop the Iraq war, so we failed. Right. Right. But in reality, like there are tens of thousands of people radicalized and moving now because of all of those quote failures that we had over the last quarter of a century. Experiments. Experiments. yeah Right.
Speaker: And this is a really important point that we were kind of talking about a little bit before. But it seems like what you're proposing and often what I'm proposing is very radically different approach to how we do politics, right? Where traditionally in radicalism in the modern era, we come at things from positions of certainty.
Speaker: We know what is wrong. We know what is right. We understand how to get there. Right. This is a kind of Leninist sort of specialist way of understanding what is to be done. Yeah. What is to be done. Right. As if there's a singular answer to this across all time and space. Right. It's kind of a a really weird understanding of history that they then call materialism. And it's like, yeah, it's very it's very metaphysical. Right. Like historical materialism is incredibly metaphysical to religion.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of fascinating when you really, really, really dive into it, how theological it can get. But we tend to approach politics from that perspective. It's faith-based. Yes. yeah What it seems like you're proposing is very not, yeah right? That what we're going to do, and this is this is the anarchism I became a participant in, right? Like, I was a punk, you know? Like, we we were talking about this before we started recording, but like,
Speaker: punks were shitbags, you know, like we were all just like suburban kids, you know, from more or less working class areas with like real actual anger and frustration about the possibilities of life.
Speaker: And, but we weren't perfect. And in fact, I think a lot of the narrative at the time was like, things are so completely broken that we can't even as people socialized in this begin to understand different ways of living right now.
Speaker: Right. That we had an understanding of revolt, which revolt changed our categories. And that what we were going to do was we were going to open those categories up as much as possible and experiment with them. And that's that's what revolt was. Right. That's what insurgency was. And that's what the world that we were building was. Right. All of those were the same thing.
Speaker: That's apart from a very different place. Right. i think. We've hit a point in politics now where because of the chatter online, because of how easy it is to articulate ideology in 140 characters and how the internet is a machine that kills nuance, that a lot of that experimentalism has sort of fallen into the background, let's just say. Yeah, for Right.
Speaker: I know where i'm where I live, we've been doing, I've been doing a lot of work and the people around me have been doing a lot of work to try and create that as an approach that's very central again, that we're trying things out, we're playing with things.
Speaker: The one problem that we run into often, and I think that this is a really critical question when we're talking about mutual aid, is mutual aid as it's conceived of now is there to respond to crises, right?
Speaker: Those crises are now constant. And the anxiety that creates pushes people towards narratives of certainty. Right. Which then undermines the ability to do mutual aid, have that longevity, intergenerationalism, the things that allow us to build up to the point where we can contest an ice operation in a city and win.
Speaker: Right. Which is to put it out there for everyone. Really a big deal. Yep. Right. I like just really want to make that very clear. Like, let's think about this historically 50 years from now when people write about this. That was a big deal. Massive.
Speaker: That is not a thing that has happened in American history in the modern era where people have pushed the federal government out of a city. Like that is a big deal. That would have been unthinkable in the early 2000s.
Speaker: Unthinkable. I didn't even ever assume I would be an anarchist in a world where that was thinkable. We were so far away from it. And here we are. And it didn't come through certainty. It came through through experimentalism. How do we deal with all that chatter? How do we deal with the noise? It's like trying to push in the opposite direction, recognizing that it's completely destructive.
Speaker: Yeah, no i think i think you're like really hitting something that's really important. And I think the other thing, too, is that the response to Operation Metro Surge was not uniform in its ideology either. And I think like that's the sort of approach to anarchism that we're the most excited about, is like an anarchism that can speak for itself, that doesn't need to like label itself. And I think that's the same approach to mutual aid that we have as well as... The more exciting projects that we know of don't have mutual aid in their names. yeah They might not even talk about mutual aid at all, but like that that ethic, that framework, that theory of change, or the the concept, as you put it, is like central to the way that people are moving treating each other. um And that's that's what we saw with the response to Operation Metro Surge was, like Caso was saying, it was like regular people who are showing out because they had pre-existing infrastructure of popular assemblies and defensive capabilities and organizing around encampments that like was the glue.
Speaker: And I think that's that's the thing that we're the most excited about is moving forward with a pro-social organizational strategy that showcases that we can have complex relationships with people that may have different understandings of freedom than us. and I think we have to be like willing and bold enough to like imagine what a world with complexity looks like. and then be, like Caso was saying earlier, mature enough to then prepare ourselves to live in it.
Speaker: I think I'm like, I'm really scared. Yeah, I'm really scared right now about like where we're heading with global geopolitics and internal American like rot.
Speaker: I think that we're going to be seeing a lot of suffering that has been relegated to the global south in this country. I think people call that the imperial boomerang. Yes. And so I think that we're like, we're, we're living in the thing that I think like when I got radicalized, you know, I was like, oh hell yeah. The fall of the empire. I can't wait.
Speaker: And now I'm like, whew, this, this shit's going to, this shit's going to suck. Yeah. holy fuck and i think you know like cleave and ali talked about this a lot and you know he was he was moving in really radical ways that were they were like deeply nihilistic yes and in in really beautiful ways and i think that this like understanding that the empire must be abolished and it should have never existed and that means that the entire operating system that sustains our life right now whether we like it or not one of our comrades in the first chapter of our film
Speaker: has a beautiful phrase where he's talking about his definition of mutual aid. And he's he's saying that, you know, our ability to build accountability and inter-reliance on each other is the thing that's the most important. And if we're not doing that, whether we agree with the state or not, if we're just defaulting to the state to supply our needs, then we're accountable to those values. yeah And I think like that's the thing that we need to be mature in of building the relational infrastructure and capacity right now and be bold in our imaginations of what freedom really looks like and start living it And so many people have been talking about prefiguration, you know, like we're preaching to the choir a little bit here, but I think like actually starting to think about, okay, complex shit means more than distribution. It also means more than just like me and my homies, yeah like doing something that's like kind of cool, like building a co-op or a garden or whatever. It means like actually talking to our literal neighbors and building out popular assembly infrastructure, tenant organizing infrastructure that like becomes something of self-reliance. Some of our comrades who are the most imaginative in the country that we really love speaking to are talking about how to build out full on counter like economies at scale. like How do we like actually make food, preserve it, and share it with each other get to like keep ourselves alive? yeahp It requires a high level of organization. It it requires cooperation.
Speaker: And it requires talking to people that like fundamentally disagree with some of the things we're talking about But like if we're going to actually like save lives, including our own, because like once again, we're breaking down givers and receivers here, we're not the vanguard who like are just going to, how are we going to eat? you know like yeah We're not immune from the crisis. We're in the middle of it. And I think like the the thing that I'm sort of getting at here is that like in 2020, there was this huge upsurge of interest around the concepts of mutual a transformative justice and abolition.
Speaker: And that was really amazing. And also it was backed by like foundations, nonprofits and tons of money. yep And we are never going to see a material condition in which that happens again. The economy is crashing, the United States petrodollar is losing confidence at the global scale. We are not going to confront another crisis in which there's an outpouring of aid that's backed by money like that ever again. And so we have to then be bold enough to think about how we build the the infrastructure now so that when that crisis comes, we're actually prepared for it ourselves. And isn't that what we're talking about doing? Isn't that what like autonomy is? yes like This is what we're sort of thinking about, is like how to live free from the state, how to get away from it. So we have to be bold enough to do it now and and have this like sense of accountability to each other, a responsibility.
Speaker: I think the last thing that I'll end on here is that we draw a lot of inspiration, Casa and myself, from the Kurdish liberation struggle yeah and the way that they lift up each other's agency is like a deep sense of responsibility to each other to the point that if you are not practicing your agency and stepping into places of responsibility within the movement, yeah you're taking from the rest of us. yes You're doing something that is like withholding by defaulting to leadership or or not wanting to take on leadership roles yourself. Like we need to see your talents and your gifts and your skills and your insight in the movement. And if you're withholding your own agency, then that's that's a theft from the rest of us. And I think we need that like sort of militant encouragement in each other not to extract labor from each other.
Speaker: I'm not trying to get to this level of like this like militant sort of like materialist, like Marxist kind of way or productive or politics yeah yeah We need to like showcase our humanity to each other, and that's what the Curtis Liberation Circle is all about, is defending life. Yes.
Speaker: I think a concept of that is like discipline. have to be disciplined together. And we also need to have strategy. One of the things that our friend in the last chapter says towards the end is mutual aid isn't about clothing and feeding every person in the entire city. And I think like that is a that is a reality that we need to reckon with, like just where we're at right now. is yeah There's so much crisis around us and we're scrambling to respond to it. But we have to...
Speaker: dedicate some of our capacity to building strategy together. And that means like we have some friends in Minnesota that, you know, just while we were there, like drew a big scatter plot of all the different projects they can do out of a mutual aid warehouse that they're working to figure out how to buy.
Speaker: yeah And we're like talking through the different like all the different projects. And like it is like very powerful to imagine all the things that we can do, which there are many, all the ways we can apply mutual aid. And then to think about what are the what are the few or what is the one thing that triple duties things. So like we need to be building infrastructure that can like take care of us without getting a bunch of donated goods. It doesn't just rely on donated goods or like the capitalist supply chains. We need to be building relationships, like real relationships that are capable of like trusting each other in the streets and you know, calling on each other when we need each other. And then we need to be building political empowerment with each other. And part of that is also part of the relationship, political empowerment aspect of that is to build up agency and other people so that like we're not thinking... how are we going to meet the whole entire city's needs? ourselves It's like, no, how are we devoting some of our capacity to building up agency and people that we see already doing the thing or already having some like footholds in the values or already rooted in that because of their lived experience and like building them up so that they can go and do that with other people. And so, yeah, just like if we're like really,
Speaker: in like our in our like cultural frameworks like really wrapped up in capacity a lot of people talk about that how many spoons we have and stuff it's like oh maybe when you start thinking about the percentage like percentage of our work is going to like like actually doing the thing you know like getting the narcan out doing the whatever. a percentage of it is coming back for reflective conversations together where we're iterating on what we're doing and like learning from what we've done and deciding like what is more strategic. And part of our capacity is building up political empowerment in each other. And like it takes time to develop radical relationships and identify the people that like we can fan the flames in and get them into a position so that they can then go build power themselves with other people as well. do So like just that mutual aid is not just doing the thing, whatever we're like...
Speaker: imagining the thing is it is having the discipline to have like a strategy to have a theory of change to be reflecting on that with our comrades and community and like building that and i think we need to do a lot more of that and that is a huge part why we made this series is because we wanted to just kind of put a pin in like where the conversations were at there so many conversations that were happening we filmed in 2022 2023 so like Some of it feels like maybe a little dated, a lot of it doesn't, and it does still feel really ah applicable, but it is really important for us to have these like touch points of like where things are at, and then let's like iterate on it and like grow past it, and we really want to see things continue to grow from this point.
Speaker: Yeah, I think we we developed the film out to have conversation starters alongside it. And so on the on the website, we've got our discussion guides. And within there, there's for people maybe who have never done film screening before, facilitation guide. And so that the the guides are written to be read as a group. We really want people to be able to like practice the things that Caswell was just saying, like in the way that they even have these discussions. like The way we build circle, the way we facilitate is important and like maximizes people's agency. And we need that.
Speaker: And so we designed these things to be done in community. And they have not only questions, but also activities. And so some of those activities are like trying to help people get into a position of this like higher level of organization from things like mapping out your local police mutual aid agreements and understanding how they function. Because for those that aren't aware, the police also have mobilized around the term mutual aid for over 100 years. It's not a new, they didn't steal it from us. In fact, like going all the back to California, Potkin, he didn't coin the term, he didn't make it up. He contextualized it within an anarchist politic, but mutual aid is apolitical. And a lot of people mobilize around the term mutual aid from corporations to first responders. So anyways, we have activities to give people a more expansive framework of the repressive conditions that they're in, and then also start mapping out their own capacity and projects that they feel need to be expanded upon or created in their environments. And Some of the things that we're sort of like circling down on now are trying to figure out what it would look like to build out.
Speaker: don't know if we're going do like another project around this or tap in other people, but some sort of a toolkit for framework of a liberatory style of mutual aid like we're talking about right now. Like what are some examples of actual projects that you can start doing that build toward this like autonomy at scale? And we're sort of zeroing in on,
Speaker: we need communication, we need food, we need medicine, we need consensus style organizing tactics and facilitation and trust. and We need defensive capabilities. And we need to be able to like think about how to offer ways that people can like move into those things from like just the ground level, and then like help people move through the sort of like higher echelons of like,
Speaker: what this looks like as it grows. I think i think it feels very overwhelming, like Caso was just saying, to look at the whole thing of like imperial collapse and try to like build a perfect mutual aid organization that's able to like solve all of it. But I think like all the cool little projects from like mesh you know ah networks that are being formed across the country, community gardens that are being formed, or people thinking about community farming, all the anti-ice response that builds up defensive capabilities, popular assemblies, like all these things are a part of that.
Speaker: And so I think like helping create like a map. I think that's one thing that we don't necessarily explicitly do in the film is like showcase like a sort of like map of possibility. We offer a lot of examples, but I think it would be helpful to have a tool. So i'm just like sort of putting this out into the ether of something. like helps people who are like, what do I do?
Speaker: Start doing things. I think like we need, we need that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it it feels, and maybe we'll close on this prescient at the moment specifically. I mean, as we were kind of getting ready to start talking on air, we were talking a lot about how, you know, what's happening in America now is creating a situation in which people collectively supporting each other. Isn't an option.
Speaker: right It is a reality. yeah I live in the Rust Belt. It's very clear here. It's already something that's happening. People do this as a matter of life. right They live partially within capitalism. they' live outside of capitalism. They never call the police. They have their own structures of justice. right like This is something that that, I mean, I can only speak from the Rust Belt context, but that emerges all throughout that part of the country, right like really militantly.
Speaker: And I think what's really interesting about what you're talking about here is that it's an approach to those kinds of environments, which recognizes that we are one of many forces within a really broad matrix of things that are happening in our spaces. And that we have to start thinking of ourselves that way, as opposed to thinking of ourselves as a people controlling the situation. or you know And you see this kind of emerge in radical discourses where like a movement doesn't work and everyone's like, we failed for this reason, as if we control the totality of what
Speaker: Right. What I really love about what you're talking about is it kind of opens that up as a primary terrain of how we're doing things. Right. I think that that really causes us to have to like organize in really different ways. Right. In ways that aren't necessarily as legible and public and things like this. Right.
Speaker: And I know when when social media started becoming a huge thing, I know in insurrectionist circles like where I ran, we were like, oh, hell no. Right. Like never touched it. Kept our actual relationships with each other.
Speaker: Right. And those relationships still form a lot of the foundation of a lot of the long term anarchist projects that have existed in the US. Right. Since the era of social media has taken over, what's happened is those networks have become incredibly fragile.
Speaker: Right. People have become incidental to each other. They become kind of symbols of one another. Right. There's no real connection anymore. I know where I live, we've been approaching a lot of us have been approaching that by just not doing politics on the Internet at all.
Speaker: Right. And really trying to go back to the old ways, for lack of a better term. do But how do we start to build those relationships, especially in a period when socially those are kind of collapsing?
Speaker: Right. That to build those relationships is sort of pushing against the social trend. Right. What are your thoughts about how we kind of reorient what we're doing, how we think about things to allow ourselves to be able to do things like that to reorient our own position to the space that we're we're doing activity in.
Speaker: I don't think it has to be too complex and we've been seeing a lot of and and have experience in our hometown of Michigan doing this as well just getting getting neighbors together. like I think since Trump got reelected, people are really afraid.
Speaker: They're also really hungry for what to do next. Yes, absolutely. They're really disillusioned. And like we should create spaces where people can process that together and like be in community again together, like be in a relationship again together. And like a really simple way to do that is to like have a monthly potluck at the park.
Speaker: you know That's awesome. Or like have a block party, which, like by the way, also... like it's like helps you build the skills and like cultural acceptance of shutting down the street. Yes. I used to live in a neighborhood where we did that stuff without permits and it was really amazing. Yeah. Yeah. People used to do that a lot more like when i was a kid in the nineties. Oh yeah. And, and we've lost that. And actually the older liberalish people on our street were just like, Oh yeah, that's great. Let's do that. Awesome. Let's do it. We're not getting a permit. it And like,
Speaker: you know like planting some We planted some trees ah across the street on our median, and the city tried to cut them down. like we all defended them. and Now we have like a really radical neighborhood assembly of people that like we always thought would just be normal. That's amazing.
Speaker: getting the skills and figuring out what infrastructure we need. And like, there's a lot of possibility in that. And, um, I just want to like shout out Cleveland always. One of one of the things that he says in his interview is he doesn't have a, he didn't have a politics of hope. He had a politics of possibility and how do you like lay possibility for those things to grow? And just like big encouragement, like after a,
Speaker: years of being in this, it like actually is really amazing to see like the really small things you do, the little trees you plant because whatever, we need some fruit trees to like help create a community, ah like a mentality of community defense or whatever. and the neighbor The relationship that you have with your neighbor can help when you know, the other neighbor is in a mental health crisis and you're like, you know them by name and you can go talk to them instead of the police coming in or whatever. Like, yeah these are small things that we can do. And other people have talked about this a lot, but just like a big encouragement to like do that, take it seriously.
Speaker: And if you're having a community potluck, also create a political element too. I don't, and does it doesn't have to be one or the other, but it should, It should be both, actually. like It should be social and restorative and like, oh, we're sharing food together.
Speaker: And some sort of element of like, oh, and here's a conversation starter that we can have talk about tonight. yeah Or people can talk about it if they want to, whatever. Or like, we're going to watch an episode of the Elements Mutually Together. you like That sort of thing can build politicization, protagonization in these really dynamic ways. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. I don't think I can add too much to that, but I think certainly building out pro-social infrastructure that's like actively designed at not assimilating people into like a new organization, but allows people access to the organizations and projects that are happening on the ground.
Speaker: when these moments happen, if we have that sort of you know pro-social infrastructure, whether it's like a movement school or certain sort of like like technical support for the movement that we're able to build up to like advise or offer workshops or offer like hard infrastructure or skills or resources to the movement. When moments of upheaval happen and we have those pro-social, outward-facing, above-board on-ramps accessible, ah then we're able to, I think, like help people feel like they're actually joining a movement and not like an organization or just getting caught up in the moment. Cause I think that's how we've like seen so many waves of people lost. And I think, I think my, my question isn't about like retention of people. I think that's like a very authoritarian mentality. I think it's about the preservation of relationships and like the flourishing of our relationships in a way that's like,
Speaker: thinking about the long form sustainability of our movement. And once again, like Casa was saying, protagonizing people and making people, giving people access to a space in which their agency is being prioritized in a collective way. So I would say that those those are the encouragements. Those are the things that we're really excited about right now is getting back home after this long tour, bringing the things back that we've learned, hearing from our comrades about the things that they've been up to, and then building out more of this, you know, sort of pro-social organizing that also has like deep,
Speaker: anti-authoritarian politics to it yeah because I think, you know, but maybe the very last thing that I'll say is that we really designed this project to be accessible enough to our parents, but encouraging enough to people who have been anti-authoritarians for a long time. And we've done screenings now with both our sets of parents and... It's been really cool to like see our families talk about these ideas with us and actually feel a sense of, wow, I want to be a part of that.
Speaker: How do I get involved? And that feels really good because it feels like we we were able to achieve something that reaches that goal of being able to feel accessible for people and encouraging. So I think i think that's that's a big part of it for me is not leaving people behind or relegating people to like bodies. I really fucking hate the term bodies. like We don't need more bodies. We need like more relationships. yeah so yeah I'll leave it at that.
Speaker: Well, cool. Thank you for joining us today. do either of you have any final thoughts, things you want to plug, anything like that? Other projects? Yeah, the documentary. watch the documentary. It's on YouTube. Have screens with your neighbors, your apartment complex, your mutually group, your be larger community, whatever that is. And have discussion. Most importantly, have discussion.
Speaker: Yeah. And bring that discussion back to us as well. Hit us up. We're on Instagram, Mastodon and YouTube. We have our email as well. We like getting feedback from people and hearing what people are saying. It's helping us sharpen our analysis and the way that we're sharing these ideas. And so if you have any like findings or criticisms, please bring them to us. We want to be in dialogue.
Speaker: All right. Well, thanks again for being with us. This has been The Beautiful Idea. we will talk to you all next time.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchist and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.
