May Day

a story of mutual aid

After a police raid, detentions, zip ties, the students running the nearest Palestine solidarity encampment started negotiating with the school administration. The result: they would be allowed to maintain their encampment overnight, but they would be fenced in, cops would control the entrance, and they had to kick out non-students.

R and I visited to show some support, but after one occasion—I can’t remember if it was in DC or NYC, but it was the run-up to the second US war against Iraq—I’ve sworn never to enter a protest pen again.

This morning I was thinking about dropping off some literature for the encampment library that would encourage other approaches to resistance, but then I got the news. After a day, they learned what they needed to know, and they stopped negotiating with the administration and told the cops to fuck off.

It’s not a surprising conclusion to reach. After all, why would a university administration that has been funding genocide in Palestine for decades treat its students decently? Why would cops who kill with impunity whenever they can keep a group of antiracist protesters safe?

Likewise, in 1886, a burgeoning anticapitalist movement learned that reformist demands for an eight hour day wouldn’t keep them safe; that capitalism needs to be abolished completely. In the following days they also learned there was no safety as long as there were police. In the following year, they saw the five Haymarket anarchists killed by the State (one escaped the gallows and died by his own hand). In the decades after that, with more reformers and progressives invited into the halls of power, and the war against the anarchists still continuing unabated, it was easy to conclude which approach presented the greater threat to the ruling class.

The internationalism in the air is also appropriate for the day. People standing up to obstruct the financiers of a genocide happening on the other side of the world. Likewise, May Day is celebrated all over the world. This isn’t accidental. In 1889, Spain became one of the first countries to commemorate an anticapitalist May Day. The socialists tried to keep it legal and peaceful, a day for speakers, parties, and private events, but the anarchists decided to commemorate it with a general strike, as it had been all across the United States in 1886, and—if possible—with an insurrection, which is what it had turned into in Chicago. In València and Barcelona, they succeeded.

The date became so potent as a day for organizing general strikes that progressive governments in Spain and elsewhere turned it into a legal holiday, hoping people would go on vacation instead of going on strike.

There are other histories to May Day as well. Are you familiar with this one, The Witch’s Child?

It is the tragedy of some in this world to be uprooted, of others, to be rootless. This is the story of the rootless ones. Your bones already know the story, though your mind does not yet understand it. One day, in the waking world, this story will come back to you.

Some say it began with the Romans, with their new geometries of warfare, their civilization and slavery. But the truth is, we only have ourselves to blame. Already before the Southerners came, we had lost the first battle. We chose the War, and have been living in it ever since.

It was a small mistake, but it was we who opened the gate to our enemy. We can still undo this mistake, but the hour grows late.

Our Mistake was this: we stopped celebrating the Spring. We let the silence of Winter extend over the whole of the year. The time of the year for turning inwards became our entire lives. We turned away from one another, and became bored with ourselves. We cared less about what happened in the world outside. So we turned the sensitives into priests, and asked them to bring the mysteries to us, rather than searching for them. We turned our war leaders into leaders of every day: of course all of our days should become a quiet war!

Resonance Audio has a beautifully formatted version of the zine here in PDF, as well as an audio version. Print out a few, or listen to the audio version with friends.

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So I am on strike today, like every May Day. Jokingly, seriously, friends and I encourage the collective practice of not buying anything (many North Americans have forgotten this, but you *never* buy anything on the day of a general strike, because to do so is tantamount to scabbing) with one exception: if we’ve been pounding the pavement all day with no time to cook, if the collective, anonymous “we” has burned at least a few banks, stretching out at a café as evening settles in to survey the beautiful wreckage over a coffee or beer.

Today I won’t be going to any protests, though. I’ve got to learn how to participate in the struggle from a different place. I’ve started the next cycle of chemo, and each one gets worse.

Instead of protest, I can tell a story of mutual aid. Because I can’t be on the street today, but I’ve found the energy for writing, and I’m propped up on my couch, wrapped in mutual aid.

Lately I’ve started to argue that we should never refer to single projects as mutual aid. After all, mutual aid describes a relationship, it is a pattern that stretches across entire ecosystems. And it’s one of the most revolutionary concepts and practices at the heart of anarchism, and of stateless societies throughout history. With the explosion of “mutual aid projects” in the wake of the pandemic, it’s only healthy to worry about leftists¹ and NGOs stealing the word from us and watering it down into a hip new form of charity, the way they systematically try to steal subversive concepts from us and pacify them, stabilize them, as they’re doing with transformative justice and abolition, intersectional and queer, as they did a long time ago with socialism (which referred to all currents of anticapitalism, until 1876 when a certain academic broke solidarity and destroyed a growing tool of internationalist organizing to keep from losing control over it...)

A couple weeks ago, I was able to listen to a panel speak about mutual aid from the perspective of disability justice. Unlike me, several of them used “mutual aid” to describe the projects they worked in, but they also shared several important distinctions that keep what they do from sliding into charity.

They are often providing the kinds of support and access to resources they also need to get by.

They are building relationships that are not transactional, but reciprocal, not elitist, but boundaries: everyone gets to decide how they fit in, what they need, what they can give, and when to say no.

Since it’s reciprocal, they understand that mutual aid isn’t just handing out free resources, but also that it’s a relationship that takes time to build in an alienated society like ours.

Someone shared a story of a person who came into distro for years, taking free supplies, until one day they offered to give something back (I don’t remember if this was the person with a line on free food or medical supplies, or someone who offered to lend a vehicle to help with distribution: inspiring stories of solidarity were abounding that day). Mutual aid will become a cover for charity if we don’t give it time, if we don’t have the patience to understand how long healing takes.

Scarcity and lack of care make us afraid in a way that roots deeply in our bodies and hearts. If we find something free, we take it, maybe we take a whole lot of it so we can stockpile, and we don’t look back. And we’ll take it again and again and again—whether it’s food or love or medical supplies or respect—before we notice the expectation that there isn’t going to be any tomorrow, the deep-seated belief that we don’t deserve this thing… before we’re able to stop, and turn around, and notice the person taking care of us, and give back.

People who don’t have that patience or that empathy for scarcity are either not going to do this work for long, or they’re going to measure themselves by how many boxes of food they give out and not their impact on a deeper level. Which means not asking questions, not reflecting critically, stealing words like mutual aid to cover up practices of charity.

The talk reminded me that the deepest practices of mutual aid I have come across have been those carried out by disabled, chronically ill, and crazy comrades. (I’ve only read parts of it, but for the best book on this topic, R recommends Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice). And the people on that panel were no exception: queer, chronically ill, migrant, racialized, crazy, grown up poor, and not trying to save other people; trying to help ourselves survive.

It was the most beautiful talk I’ve heard in a long time. (Okay, I have to get at least a little bit salty: one person claimed anarchists turn their noses at practices of care and mutual aid, but the specific actions and discourses they were referring to were those of an authoritarian Marxist group in town, and I gotta say it’s been nearly two centuries and I’m fucking tired of leftists throwing anarchists under the bus. There’s that pattern again: slippage, indistinction, the loss of meaning and memory.)

A short time later, I received one of the most beautiful gifts I’ve gotten in a long time. This blanket:

Between the surgery, the steroids, the radiation therapy, the chemo, my body has been through a roller coaster. I’ve gained weight and lost weight, lost sleep and lost some more, and frequently I get the chills, whereas I used to always run hot, go barefoot in the snow, warmblooded hippy shit, ya know the deal.

Talk about patience: friends here in Cleveland started plotting back in August (and anarchists can conspire like nobody’s business), they got the yarn, they designed the pattern, they shared the work, and patch by patch they put this blanket together. When they handed it over, they laughed about how many times they’d been knitting on a section of it while I was in the room, totally unaware. Conniving, illegalist little devils!

And I don’t need to tell you how beautiful it is, how warm it is, how a collective weaving project for a sick friend—the entangled, colorful yarn of a blanket—is the perfect metaphor for mutual aid. But I do want to tell you, I see it, I feel it, and I’m not walking away.

May Day last year, I was in the hospital. I don’t remember if I hadn’t yet gotten news of the tumor or whether I was still keeping it close to my chest. This year, I’m still not at the protests or encampments, but I feel like I’m right where I need to be, wrapped in solidarity, and I can just pull this thread or that one or that one, and I’m connected to you and you and you, and we’re all of us in this, all of us trying to get better. Some of us burning shit down, others planting trees, some of us occupying space, others resting up on the couch, some of us kicking out the cops, others telling stories, cooking a big pot of soup, knitting a blanket.

We’ve played all of these roles. Let’s pull these threads tighter. Let’s bring us all closer.

Happy May Day everyone. Salut i anarquia!

1. Rather than watering it down, they used conflation and slippage, took advantage of the moralistic penchant for binaries, to make anglophone radicals forget what “leftist” means, its origin, and what the historic role of the Left has always been.