Mutual aid and radical neighbourliness

In the run-up to the general election last year, my friend Sita Balani wrote a prescient blog about the politics of risk.¹ She was writing about canvassing for the Labour Party, and in particular what it meant for those of us rooted in particular kinds of queer, feminist and antiracist organising practices, with their emphasis on ‘safer spaces’, to engage in the fraught uncertainties of door-knocking. The Covid era has of course added a whole new kind of danger to knocking on strangers’ doors, but the central theme of her blog has become even more apparent- that societal risks cannot be addressed within tiny bubbles of the radical left, and that there is an urgent need, as she put it, to seek ‘mass social change, not pockets of safety’.

So, we have got busy again, and it seems like everyone I know is now bottom-lining a local mutual aid group. Conversations with friends, as we swap notes on WhatsApp etiquette and the best way to pick up prescriptions, have a similar election-time feel of a dispersed but powerfully collective experience. The key difference between now and then is where this organising is happening. While last winter we found ourselves travelling in Labour-branded woolly hats to marginal seats, the lockdown has forced us to engage in a kind of organising that is arguably even more out of our comfort zones, with our literal, geographical neighbours.

The focus on physical proximity is discomforting on a number of levels. For people who have rarely felt included in any clearly defined ‘community’, and who are well aware of how the concept is weaponised by the right, it is disconcerting to have to re-centre our relationships around basic material conditions like walking distance. Just who we are now apparently in community with can feel particularly arbitrary for transient groups and dispersed minorities, whose lives have till now been geared around maintaining relationships with people who cannot consistently be nearby. And there is something worryingly small-c conservative about fixating on forming relationships with people who happen to live on your street, especially when the worst of our curtain-twitching, Neighbourhood Watch-ful impulses are being actively encouraged by the state.²

The fact that different political projects could emerge from this groundswell of organising is the source of new opportunities and new risks. These have a different and more mundane flavour to door-knocking, in part because the actions of mutual aid groups are not necessarily being understood as involving a politics (the anarchist roots of the concept of ‘mutual aid’ having been successfully obscured). Arriving on someone’s doorstep and asking them how they are planning to vote invites a possible confrontation precisely because it is unequivocally understood as a political act. Getting together with your neighbours to deliver shopping sits much more in the realm of Big Society-style ‘little platoons’; this both provides a meeting point for the different kinds of people who might participate, and runs the risk of avoiding crucial questions about responsibility and power.

My current research project, Policing the Political, has been exploring many of these questions within wider civil society, focusing on how small organisations experience a loss of voice and political agency by constructing oppositional activities as ‘political’ and therefore illegitimate.³ Given this, I have obviously been highly interested to see these same dynamics playing out within mutual aid groups. The process of silencing people by categorising certain actions as ‘political’ was particularly explicit in one WhatsApp group I’m in, when a woman who shared a petition to renationalise the NHS was shut down on the grounds that the group was ‘not the place for politics’ - although it had been considered uncontroversial to use the platform to encourage people to #clapforcarers on Thursday nights.

More often, the different political positions at play are more coded. A friend tells me about a bust up in her local group over whether to share a poster advising people to think carefully before calling the police, which some members said was ‘outside the group’s remit...