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March 31, 2020

Other Democracies: Mutual Aid and Benefit Organizations


               Protecting communities and aiding vulnerable members of communities becomes a high priority in times of conflict and disaster. Some even say that the duties of protection and aid for the vulnerable are the highest priorities for political bodies, such as governments, local neighborhoods, and grassroots organizations. Yet few elected democracies and organizations make this their highest priority.
Benefit organizations often make equality possible in practice that is impossible under electoral democracy and other political structures that promise equality but rarely deliver. In exchanging equal say in decisions, what some call horizontalism, for shared resources distributed according to need, benefit societies produce more equal social outcomes for those in need. They also educate their communities about how to put equality into practice. Easy to form when many people work together with shared interests and goals, mutual aid and mutual benefit organizations have a long history and an active presence today.
As modern governmentality has come to emphasize the surveillance and enforcement of behavioral norms over care for the population during the past several centuries, governments often lose sight of what many see as their primary purpose: protection and aid for citizens. As enclosure and industrialization forced people off the land where they could care for their own basic needs and displaced them into urban settings, people turned to each other when employers and governments did not ensure their safety and welfare. As governments come under the sway of the wealthy and of other narrow interests, then they put profits before people.
               These changes over past centuries have meant that many governments take their own self-preservation as a higher priority. As a result, some governments put protecting the leaders and administrators of nation-states before protecting the common person and before ensuring the care of vulnerable populations. This priority reversal can be seen when government leaders enter conflicts unnecessarily where many citizens die, especially conflicts without direct threats to the nation-state. It can also be seen when disaster strikes and the government does not care effectively for those affected or, worse, takes advantage of disasters to implement policies opposed by its citizens.
In times of disaster and conflict, those social sectors that have not found governments reliable turn to other means to protect and care for their community members. As governments fail to serve all members of their populations, communities may seek out other ways to manage their own affairs. Some of those other means include benefit organizations and mutual aid societies, organizations that practice a specific form of democratic self-governance known as democracy from below or direct democracy.
Benefit societies and mutual aid organizations are often seen as a type of communalism, long-established practices that experiment with attempts to find better ways to live while providing concrete benefits to participants. By sharing not only resources but also conviviality, these organizations provide an ethics that is missing from capitalism and electoral democracy. In educating their members and encouraging shared social norms, they may provide a sense of community that prioritizes sharing over private gain. By practicing reciprocity rather than charity, they provide important sources of belonging and mutual care that differs from the benevolence found in twentieth-century charities and twenty-first century non-profits and non-governmental organizations. While less functionally specific than cooperatives, communal movement have often been a resource for those who wished to escape oppressive conditions and find liberation.
What are today called “benefit organizations” are a very old type of organization, perhaps as old as government itself. They generally form when social networks take action to care for a population, whether an occupational group, an ethnic or religious group (often under attack from other social sectors), a town or regional community, or other social groups that determine it is time to act to care for their shared interests. In this sense, “benefit organization” or “mutual aid” are more general terms for self-government or for autonomy or even for what many refer to as “sovereignty” or “politics.”
While some associate mutual aid with European organizations, this type of collective care has a long history in other regions, such as Asia and Africa. While some schools of thought and economic practice, such as libertarianism, anarchism, and some schools of socialism, have tried to claim mutualism as their own, others find the practice of caring for the vulnerable in society to be broader than any specific sectarian interest. Organizations from communities using approaches as varied as Indigenous autonomy and cultural revitalization movements, landless workers, slum dwellers, and other urban subalterns have worked collectively to protect and care for their community members.
Benefit orders and mutual aid societies were commonplace in much of the world until the modern welfare state and for-profit corporations and nation-states began to compete for their members. Many of their features have been taken over by for-profit entities, such as insurance companies and health-care companies, and by non-profit organizations like credit unions and religious charities, so some modern benefit societies now take these forms. The penetration of the modern, centralized nation-state into local governmental affairs was another major competitor for benefit organizations, and their failure to effectively care for the basic needs of all may be seen in the flourishing of organizations like Reclaim Our Homes and Habitat for Humanity, two of the best-known benefit organizations in the United States. The transnational donor structures of civil society organizations and international non-governmental organizations like the Red Cross and Red Crescent are a distorted form of benefit societies on a global scale, often transforming private resources into mechanisms that care for vulnerable populations based on a charity model rather than by building reciprocal relations. The continuing presence of mutual aid organizations is also seen strongly in Europe, where they still supplement health care for many.
Today these organizations go by many other names, many of which are familiar: labor or trade unions; credit unions; immigrant hometown societies; friendly societies and secret societies; self-help groups; coworking communities, and many others. Rural communities in the Global South and pre-capitalist guilds and neighborhoods have long put mutual benefit practices into place as a way to engage community members. In urban communities where the unemployed and others abandoned by the nation-state have come together to serve their own needs also practice mutual aid and benefit in such forms as social centers and unions of the unemployed.
Mutual aid community organizing often emerges in post-disaster circumstances, and the current corona virus pandemic has inspired many to suggest mutual aid as an important resource. These spontaneous organizations have emerged also in times of political struggle, as in resistance to slavery, the Tienanmen Square Protests of 1989, and the Los Angeles uprising of 1992. Already established benefit organizations, such as the Village Movement in the Untied States, have already begun to respond to the corona virus, for example. New mutual organizations have also emerged in response to the pandemic in the United States and other locations.
Benefit societies can also be formalized through charters, incorporation, and other modes of communal or governmental recognition. Many benefit societies currently active were established a century or more ago, and have incorporated to carry out their activities, including Woodmen of the World, the Knights of Columbus, and Teachers Life. While some of these groups have very long roots, they remain a significant force in the twenty-first century with some 9 million members and about $400 billion dollars (US) in assets in the United States alone.
               While the language of benefit societies and mutual aid may not be familiar to all in our day, that is because the nation-state and for-profit and non-profit organizations have eclipsed them in public awareness. When the European health-care industry and the American Association of Retired People and other mainstream organizations advocate joining or starting your own mutual aid group, however, then what might seem like an antiquated organizational model has clearly entered the mainstream.
               If you wish to practice equality, it is as easy as volunteering with the Village Movement or Habitat for Humanity, participating in a hometown organization, becoming a union or credit union member, or joining other mutual aid groups near you. When the inequality of centralized hierarchies like private corporations, non-profit organizations, or nation-states are recognized as generators of the inequality they disavow but cannot avoid, then perhaps more people will form benefit organizations to meet their basic needs and protect themselves and vulnerable groups. It would  be easier to find ways to practice equality when not impacted by major threats like natural disasters, wars, and pandemics, but times of stress and high risk for many is precisely when mutual aid organizing takes off.

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