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The current of mutual aid . . . flows still even now, and it seeks its way to find out a new expression which would not be the State, nor the mediaeval city, nor the village community of the barbarians, nor the savage clan, but would proceed from all of them, and yet be superior to them in its wider and more deeply humane conceptions. —Peter Kropotkin, 19021 Mutual Aid If the empire of scrounge is populated by a ragtag assemblage of cart pushers, scrap haulers, and everyday environmentalists, it’s held together by an equally irregular network of mutual aid. In fact, this tattered web of mutual assistance answers, in another way, the question of how scrounger’s can survive on eight-dollar loads of aluminum cans. With varying degrees of intention and endurance, many scroungers don’t go it alone; they scrounge with and for one another, and in so doing invent new possibilities of collective sustenance and autonomy. As I found time and again, this mutual aid can occur on the spot, as scroungers share a trash pile or trash bin, sorting through their needs and their Wnds, handing clothes or food back and forth as they uncover them. At times, networks of mutual aid can emerge around some shared focus within the empire of scrounge, and so continue beyond a particular space or situation. Sometimes these eVorts at collective survival are approved of, even supported, by legal and political authorities; more often they’re not. 129 c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e c e Scrapped Together c e ce c e c e c e 5 Within the empire, yard sales and garage sales operate as part of this spiral of mutual survival. At a minimum, such sales provide scroungers situations in which their salvaged materials can, as needed, be turned into cash. This dimension was more than once conWrmed in conversations I had with other scroungers at scrap yards or trash piles; while working one curbside pile with a guy who introduced himself to me as Randy Pac Rat, for example, Randy described the way he supplemented his job’s hourly pay by selling scrounged items at yard sales and Xea markets, and suggested I do the same. Like the scrap yards, yard sales in this way oVer scroungers like Randy not only cash for their eVorts, but a diVerent dynamic than that of their hourly wage—a dynamic by which cash can be acquired with a maximum of personal autonomy and temporal Xexibility. For me—free during my months of daily scrounging from jobs and wages—yard sales oVered yet another opportunity for conversion and reinvention. After all, I was not only recirculating scrounged items. I was pricing them with found price tags, advertising their sale with signs made from found cardboard and printed with found markers, attaching these signs to telephone poles around my neighborhood with found nails driven by a found hammer, and keeping my proceeds in a scrounged Steelmaker Cash Box, complete with interior coin trays. While yard and garage sales in this way function as midpoints in the process by which individual scrounging and salvaging become broader secondhand reuse, their essential mutuality emerges from another midpoint: the one where the scrounger’s need to convert found commodities into a little cash meets others’ need to convert a little cash into necessary commodities. For many who share the economic margins with scroungers and scrap haulers, yard sales and garage sales exist within an everyday universe deWned also by Xea markets, thrift stores, and charity shops—that is, a universe of acquisition that operates somewhere beyond and below the shopping mall and the retail store. The Mexican immigrants and minimum-wage workers who patronize Jenna’s Hope of Grace, the little secondhand church mission a few blocks from my house, also frequent the yard sales that I and other neighbors hold; such sales are an essential source of children’s clothes, household furnishings, and work tools. At these sales, cheaply priced secondhand goods, scrounged and otherwise, Wnd their way into the lives of those who most need them; the sales constitute key moments, key situations, in which the scrounger’s self-made autonomy becomes also the basis for the relative economic autonomy of others. The...

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