We Are All We Need
To practice mutual aid is to admit abundance, and to admit abundance we must refuse austerity
Mary Retta
I.
On a Monday in mid-December of what is now last year, Congress passed the second stimulus package since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the $908 billion stimulus bill includes direct monetary aid for low-income and unemployed people, it provides nowhere near enough support, and in many cases allots even less than the already meager stimulus bill from March. This new package allocates direct one-time payments of $600 to individuals who made less than $75,000 in 2019, and 11 weekly payments of $300 to jobless folks. Much larger sums of cash from the same bill will be doled out to causes that range from unnecessary to pure evil. $500 million dollars, for example, are being given to Israel. Meanwhile, due to President Trump’s months-long delay in signing this bill, unemployment benefits expired for millions in late December, plunging many into extreme economic uncertainty.
Last month’s stimulus bill is, unfortunately and predictably, just one example of the severe governmental austerity of the past year. $600 government checks are almost laughable under any circumstances, but they are especially outrageous given that 2020 brought about higher levels of homelessness, food insecurity, and unemployment than any other year in recent US history. While an unprecedented number of Americans are now living below the poverty line, members of Congress are being paid grotesque salaries—often upwards of $100,000 a year—to decide, over the course of several months, whether we deserve even a few hundred dollars of government aid. And this inhumane display of wealth hoarding is playing out in various ways across the country. At billion-dollar companies like Amazon, employees are overworked, underpaid, and emotionally and physically abused while CEOs, like Jeff Bezos, are now richer than they were before the pandemic. Many universities with multi-billion dollar endowments responded to the pandemic by raising tuition, cutting financial aid, or reducing on-campus housing options while students, who are unable to receive stimulus funding, struggle to make ends meet or are forced to drop out.
In many ways, 2020 painfully exposed the evils of capitalism, forcing us to come to terms with the economic, social, and spiritual unsustainability of our pre-COVID lives. This realization has been both devastating and strangely inspiring: as wealth hoarding became a mainstream topic of conversation over the past nine months, it became apparent that the problem is not a lack of resources but an intentional misallocation of what we do have. And so people began to redistribute. Over the last several months, folks have contributed to bail funds and mutual aid networks with a fervor that has perhaps never before been witnessed in this country, donating out of pocket to ensure that people can eat, stay housed, and remain out of jail pretrial. These efforts expose a larger epiphany: we have enough resources to provide everyone with a peaceful, fulfilling, and abundant life. Our government refusing to distribute goods equally will not stop us from doing our part.
II.
While there are many ways we can describe mutual aid, I like Dean Spade’s definition best. In a 2019 video created with the grassroots network Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, the lawyer, writer, and trans rights activist explains that:
mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on representatives, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.
According to Spade, mutual aid is an exercise in trust, one that necessitates remembering that resources are abundant if we distribute them correctly. To discuss abundance, though, we must discuss scarcity, and to discuss scarcity we must discuss capitalism. Economist James Chen defines the Scarcity Principle, a core tenet of capitalism, as an economic theory in which “limited supply of a good, coupled with a high demand for that good, results in a mismatch between the desired supply and demand equilibrium.” In layman’s terms, when there is not enough of something, the price of that thing will increase, and only select people will be able to access it. The scarcity principle operates under the false pretense that there is a limited number of essential goods, like food or housing, to go around. This has been proven false many times over. And, studying the Scarcity Principle, social psychologists have found that operating out of a “not-enough” mentality is not only economically stressful but also emotionally damaging. In a 2017 experiment, for example, researchers in economics and psychology found that simply thinking about an expensive car repair bill significantly worsened the cognitive performance of low-income individuals.
Under capitalism, where wealth is hoarded by a select few while the rest of us are left to suffer at the hands of the state, we are always in a predicament of scarcity—and the financial and emotional toll that it takes. But when we approach each other from a place of abundance, we all begin to live a life that is economically stable and spiritually fulfilling. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need mutual aid funds to ensure that everyone has their basic needs met. This is the work that the government would do for us—and, in fact, it easily could. The outrageous levels of hunger and houselessness in the United States are due not to a lack of food or shelter but chronic disinvestment and neglect. While about 550,000 people experienced homelessness for at least one night in 2018, 16 million housing units were empty at any given time that same year. In 2014, less than 2 percent of American laborers worked on farms and 40 percent of food produced in the US was wasted; yet, in 2010, the average American consumed 2,507 calories a day. These disparities illustrate how an abundance mindset is critical in raising our standard of living and ensuring universal financial security. By focusing on what we already have, we’re able to create structural changes that make life more livable—and pleasurable—for us all. For instance, a recent basic income trial in Ontario, Canada offers a thrilling peek at what we can achieve by rejecting our societal scarcity mindset. When people were able to spend more time with friends and family, and on activities they enjoyed outside of work, their mental and physical health improved. Once more, abundance inspired a healthier life.
But, while universal basic income is an important tenet of anti-capitalism, abundance is about more than economics or financial gain—especially when the state continues to fail us. It is also about understanding that investing in people is never a waste; that not only do we have the resources to provide for everyone but also, when we do invest in our communities, we collectively get far more than we put in. When people are encouraged to learn from each other, or are given the resources to finish school, we all gain from a more educated society. When we cure the stresses that result from poverty and precarity, we all become healthier. In other words: we would all be happier if we rejected the competition and austerity of capitalism and, instead, chose to base our society around mutual trust and cooperation.
III.
The first person to ever speak with me about abundance was my friend Maimuna, whose dream for many years has been to live on a farm where they can establish an intentional relationship with the land. There, they will only perform labor that is meaningful to them. Maimuna taught me that the earth has already given us all the tools we need to survive: food to harvest, wood for shelter, animals as companions. There is no need for work because there is no need for production; our world is abundant enough as it is.
In place of a Scarcity Principle, I propose an Abundance Theory. Maimuna’s farm fantasy is a beautiful representation of the sort of anti-work philosophy that has long guided anti-capitalist movements, and is also a crucial component of the Abundance Theory. The anarchist media collective ANARCHIMEDIA defines work as “the constrained performance of some skill, be it cognitive, emotional, physical, or otherwise, in return for substituting your own ends with an economic reward, or in the ultimate hope of receiving some such reward.” In other words, any labor performed in order to gain money to pay your bills. Following this definition, those who practice anti-work believe that work should not be necessary for survival, and that we can lead more full and creative lives if we do not spend every waking hour consumed with financial stress. As abundance theory recognizes that there are enough resources to sustain everyone, it concludes that we do not need to structure our lives around drudgery or austerity: the money we earn through labor, and the goods we spend that money on, already belong to us. When we have to work to live, labor is used as a distractionary tool, ensuring that folks are too stressed and tired to organize for healthier and more sustainable living conditions.
The pointlessness of work has only been further illustrated to the public by the events of this year. Throughout 2020, many organizers and activists took on endlessly important tasks—labor that is entirely removed from profit or other traditional markers of work. Throughout the summer, thousands of people attended anti-racist protests across the country; ordinary people organized riots, mutual aid fundraisers, and developed various survival practices that not only provided avenues for fulfillment and purpose outside capitalist standards but also tangibly improved people’s lives in ways that capitalism has no measure for, or interest in. The lasting impact of these movements demonstrates why anti-work is so important to those invested in the frameworks of abundance. While every day people, many of whom were newly unemployed, risked their health to fight for our civil rights and the abolition of police and prisons, people with “real jobs” collected checks to spend months deciding whether we deserve stimulus money to survive.
IV.
Like many others, I benefited immensely from mutual aid this year. Both contributing to and receiving this aid has sustained me since March. In May, I graduated from college feeling emotionally drained, spiritually exhausted, and financially stressed. By June, I had taken on way too much work to offset my strange combination of monetary-anxiety and existential boredom. I’m grateful for the paid work I was able to find but, when I look back at everything I wrote this past year, I’m by far the most proud of the newsletter I started over the summer—something entirely sustained by mutual aid.
The decision to make my newsletter free was both difficult and obvious. As a recent graduate with student loans, I knew I could benefit from paid subscriptions. But deep down I recognized that, if this space was to be used to interrogate capitalism and argue for abolition, money could not determine its material. The ways my community—made up of college friends, internet acquaintances, other writers and organizers, and complete strangers who all share my politic and vision of the future—showed up for me was totally unexpected and entirely humbling. People used Venmo and Paypal to fund my work to the point that I earned more money from some of my newsletter essays than I would have had I published them professionally. Profit aside though, starting the newsletter was a deeply rewarding experience. Before I started writing those essays, I had entirely attached my intellectual worth to the prestige of the publication that would give me a byline, or how much money an editor was willing to offer. I couldn’t—and sometimes still can’t—believe that people are willing (and excited!) to read my ideas, not because of an attachment to a fancy magazine but because they believe in my mind. This trust from readers has pushed me to trust myself, to believe in the abundance of my own wisdom and power, and to deliver essays that my community is proud of. It has also given me the sense that it is possible to create something that exists entirely outside of capitalism: that work can push us to be stronger thinkers, and connect us more deeply to our communities.
Abundance can feel like an impossible thing to practice when faced with our stark reality. A review of 2020 reveals that individualism has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths across the country, and that the people who were elected to keep us safe expect $600 to be sufficient for survival. But it has also revealed that, if anything, these conditions only strengthen our convictions that we have enough, and that we are all we need. After all, we alone can keep each other safe.
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