Mutual Aid: Non-Hierarchy in Practice
by: Tammy Gan
Examining the non-hierarchical principle in mutual aid: theory and practice
Our world is built on hierarchies.
Working masses are perpetually coerced into creating profit for the wealthy, and our everyday lives are structured and revolve around hierarchical discipline.
We’re coerced into going to work, school, following laws and rules, whether we believe in them or not. In spaces we inhabit, we encounter various authority figures who hold decision-making power. If we disobey, or if we refuse to conform, we risk punishment, exclusion, stigma, starvation, and more. So not only do we encounter dominating relationships, we are also defaulted into oppressive structures within hierarchical legal, economic, political, social systems. These structures lead people to develop domineering attitudes towards people in their own communities, reproducing hierarchies and systems of power.
Beyond our personal experiences, our world, that has been colonised by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, runs because of the oppressive and exploitative forms of power.
For our world, as is, to run, there must be an inherent valuing of some bodies over others. This is what we mean when we talk about “racial capitalism”, the idea that capitalism emerged, as Cedric Robinson argued, on the grounds of a civilisation based on racial hierarchy. Racism, in designating and ideologically convincing people that some people are inferior to others, allows for a system of extraction (capitalism) to exploit Black and brown people, while white people carry this out, or benefit from this system, thereby never abolishing it. So hierarchy (racial or otherwise) is the foundation that maintains our structures and system.
Thus, to liberate ourselves and each other from this system, one of our main tasks is to confront hierarchy and hierarchical forms of power.
Confronting, is different from attempting to appeal to the people who are in power (e.g. solely depending on billionaires, or politicians), or striving to obtain the kind of power that we’re subjected to (think #girlboss feminism). Instead, confronting means to transform hierarchical forms of power into other forms of power. We must have “power of our own”: moving away from power-over to power-with. This is where spaces and projects that attempt to create that new world, starting from rethinking our relationships, come into play.
Mutual aid is one of these such spaces and projects.
Mutual aid is a form of prefigurative politics, aimed at abolishing hierarchy and hierarchical forms of power in the world by first living out these principles ourselves, bringing new ways of relating to each other into being. Specifically, mutual aid aims to: form the structure of a new society within the shell of the old; embody the forms of social relations, decision-making, culture and human experience that are its ultimate goals (i.e. to practice what it wants to see, now); and continuously experiment, and be reflexive through trial and error.
Mutual aid desires to abolish hierarchy, in part because mutual aid has its roots in anarchism and anarchist theory. Anarchism, generally speaking, is “the rejection of all forms of rule and domination” and many anarchists “strive to construct egalitarian social relationships”, with their spaces practising autonomy, voluntary association, self-organisation, direct democracy and mutual aid. So naturally, mutual aid projects are conceived, ideally, with these foundations, and have wider aims of transforming society as a whole, by bringing these new social relationships into being.
What does the non-hierarchical principle look like in practice?
To understand this, we must revisit one of the main ideas associated with mutual aid, “Solidarity not Charity”. This is a reminder that mutual aid is not charity, and that mutual aid projects should not function effectively as charity. Dean Spade, American lawyer, writer, trans activist and academic, who has written extensively about mutual aid, shares that charity or social services organisations often function in ways that “supplement, stabilize, or sustain violent and coercive hierarchies”.
Spade contends that the charity model we see today “has origins in Christian European practices of the wealthy giving alms to the poor to buy their own way into heaven”, and “promotes the idea that most poverty is a result of laziness or immorality and that only the poor people who can prove their moral worth deserve help.” These are the foundations of much of contemporary charity, and contributes to how many charity programmes we see today, run both by governments and nonprofits, come with eligibility requirements to determine which poor people deserve help—notably, methods of deciding which “usually promote racist and sexist tropes”—and then further make it “stigmatizing and miserable to receive help”.
From application to receiving of aid, charity creates and reinforces a hierarchical relationship between recipients of aid and the institutions that give it. Even without these processes considered, relationships between givers and receivers within the framework of charity reinforces hierarchies (moral or otherwise), making “rich people and corporations look generous while upholding and legitimizing the systems that concentrate wealth”—systems that maintain hierarchies on a structural level too.
Building off of Spade’s comparison of mutual aid and charity/social service programmes, there are three ways to actively practice non-hierarchy in mutual aid projects.
The first is to abolish hierarchy embedded within the traditional “giver/donor-recipient” relationship, which positions the donor as superior, more powerful, more able, and the recipient as in need of help, pity, as less worthy and less able. Donors, in charity and social service programmes, and their institutions often perpetuate saviour complex, and along with that, as Spade highlights: self-congratulation and paternalism. “Populations facing crisis are cast as in need of saving”, as needing to be “fixed” (which comes from the “notion that people’s poverty and marginalization is not a systemic problem but is caused by their own personal shortcomings”). Mutual aid, on the other hand, practices non-hierarchy, positioning recipients as members of the project—with a goal of self-determination. (Eventually, those who receive aid, in any form, are supposed to have their immediate needs met to participate in organising in the long-term.)
The second is to abolish hierarchy within organisation structures. Presently, charities, or more broadly, the nonprofit sector “not only fails to fix injustice but also replicates it within the groups themselves.” Nonprofits “have the same kinds of problems as other businesses that rely on hierarchical models: drastically unequal pay, race and gender wage gaps, sexual harassment in the workplace, exploitation of workers, and burnout.” In contrast, in mutual aid spaces, participants seek to “unlearn [hierarchical] conditioning to build new skills and capacities”. Mutual aid projects adopt a variety of approaches to flatten hierarchy in their functioning. One example is consensus decision-making: making decisions together, caring about everyone’s consent, moving away from domination and coercion, avoiding “the worst costs of hierarchies and majority rule, which can include abuse of power, demobilization of most people, and inefficiency”. Spade writes: “We will honor people’s different levels of experience and wisdom… but we will not follow someone just because they act bossy, got here first, or have a higher social status in the dominant culture because they are a professional, white, older, male, formally educated, etc.”
Finally, mutual aid projects, in practicing abolishing of hierarchies between members and within the organisation, in participating in prefigurative politics, seek to change the world beyond these projects. In looking beyond hierarchies interpersonally, mutual aid has radical aims, unlike charity/social service programmes.
See below for a comparison between mutual aid and charity, taken from here.
Tammy Gan (she/her) is an activist-in-progress and Bad Activist Collective member, based in sunny, tropical Singapore. Her mission is three-fold: (1) to make climate justice activism and theory more accessible; (2) to create digital and physical community and learning spaces towards a more just, regenerative, and loving world within our current one; (3) and to mobilise the best parts of social media in service of all this. Currently, she spends her time connecting theory to real-world issues, dreaming up collective spaces as prefigurative politics, and having regular existential crises. Officially, she’s a “digital creator + communicator” and identifies as a Builder and Visionary-in-progress according to the social change ecosystem (from Deepa Iyer). Follow her on Instagram