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I laughed when I saw the caption on Them Magazine’s most recent post about queer mutual-aid efforts in the wake of the devastating North Carolina flooding: “You know our systems are broke when 5 gay DJs can bring 10k of supplies back before the national guard does.” The same self-deprecating spirit has suffused my organizing in Clean Air Club, too: why is a group of unserious and untrained queer artists doing a better job at public health than the CDC, the credentialed public health experts, and the doctors combined? Something’s not adding up.
Many people in the Covid-cautious community have noticed this, of course, and rightfully pointed out the injustice of it — the entire weight of pandemic public health is being carried on the shoulders of some of the people most marginalized and harmed by Covid’s spread. We’re living and dying in the midst of widespread institutional failure, and we are picking up the pieces without any support. The only way to cope with how bleak our conditions are is to joke about it with one another; to laugh at the fact that the heroes are indeed in uniform, but the uniform is bedazzled and worn by someone doing the splits in full drag.
Every article celebrating these mutual aid efforts — whether for Covid-safety, flood recovery, or any other facet of surviving late-stage capitalism — runs the risk of glorifying survival and finding “inspiration” in desperation rather than properly putting the target on the deteriorating conditions that make such survival necessary. In a recent conversation I had with Miles Griffis (of The Sick Times), he likened it to those viral stories we’ve all seen where a child raises a large sum of money to pay for their mother’s cancer treatment, or “school lunch debt”, or some other horrific euphemism for suffering only made possible under American capitalism. Stories like these whitewash injustice and transform it into an unseen and unquestioned backdrop for individual triumph. To avoid this obfuscation, press about the heroic mutual aid efforts of the queer community must take care to frame these efforts as something more than a feel-good story about human resilience.
I want to offer up an alternate understanding of mutual aid in which our efforts are not simply feel-good reactions to political failure but also the necessary preconditions to political liberation. Far from being a “second best” option in the face of institutional failure, mutual aid has a unique world-building potential that the queer community in particular has always harnessed in service of imagining better futures. It is no doubt a burden to do this work, especially when we are not trained for it; but it is also a privilege to be able to imagine and then forge the kinds of relationships and worlds that we want to inhabit long term. When we celebrate mutual aid efforts, then, this world-building potential is what should take center stage. Mutual aid is not just a feel-good story about human resilience; it is a laboratory for the imagination located right in the belly of the beast. For this reason, it prefigures and holds the keys to our liberated futures.
One of the casualties of living under capitalism is a vivid imagination. This is not an accident. Indeed, part of the success of capitalism rests on the atrophy of our collective imaginative capacity. Marx’s concept of ideology is helpful here: he observes that class-divided societies that contain a substantial degree of repression nonetheless do not have much overt class conflict — that is, there is a certain stability to the social order despite its objective (one would think) intolerability. Capitalism, for example, has been growing unabated for hundreds of years, despite the increasing misery which it requires of large swaths of the population. Why is this the case?
Marx attributes this relative stability to the cooperation of two elements: coercive force and ideology. Coercive force is not to be underestimated; the police powers of the state and our now-sprawling prison industrial complex are major players in extinguishing the fires of protest that emerge from time to time. The stability of capitalism requires state violence and the looming threat of it.
But ideology is not to be underestimated either. By “ideology,” he means the dominant modes of thinking in a certain era and under a certain mode of production. Ideology is composed of the ideas of the ruling class: those false stories of “how the world works” that conveniently leave out how the world really works. It is the story of the meritocracy and “if you work hard, you’ll succeed.” It’s the idea that the police “protect and serve.” It’s the notion that the pinnacle of freedom is when we contract with our bosses for an hourly wage. These are stories that are not just false but also suspiciously reinforce the economic system we live under and its asymmetric distribution of benefits and burdens. Ideology is one of the ways capitalism forestalls protest before it even gets off the ground — in our case, it is capitalism presenting itself as eternal. Why bother protesting against that?
A hallmark of ideology is that it is not just confined to the ruling class itself, even though its benefits are. Everyone, if their consciousness has not been “raised,” endorses the main premises of the ideological system of their particular historical era. These economic and political fictions have the status of scientific truths, like the laws of physics or thermodynamics. They are so taken for granted that our imaginations are confined — they constitute the invisible boundaries beyond which we do not think to think. We see this atrophy of the imagination when we think about prison abolition, for example, and the ways that people simply cannot imagine what a world without prisons would look like (despite prisons not existing for large portions of human history). We see it when someone proposes the decommodification of housing, or food, or medical care. Certain proposals are not only “off the table” but unimaginable. They exceed the categories available for human thought.
The work of liberation today, then, involves expanding our imaginations beyond the boundaries staked out for them by capitalism itself. Mariame Kaba calls this a “jailbreak of the imagination.” She writes:
It is time for a thorough, unflinching examination of what our society has wrought, and what we have become. It is time to envision and create alternatives to the hellish conditions our society has brought into being….It’s time for a jailbreak of the imagination in order to make the impossible possible.
Her point is that the world cannot change until we are willing to see it as it really is; the moment we do that, though, we expand the boundaries of the possible beyond the limits drawn by ideology. Radical change must be preceded by sober reflection on how the world really works, stripped of its stories and ideological obfuscations. It requires a willingness to see things as they are so that we might see things as they could be. We have to begin thinking about the world in unimaginable ways.
How, though, are we to think the unthinkable? Ernst Bloch, in his treatise on radical hope, says that hope “looks in the world itself for what can help the world.” He goes on:
Thinking means venturing beyond. But in such a way that what already exists is not kept under or skated over….[R]eal venturing beyond never goes into the mere vacuum of an In-Front-of-Us, merely fanatically, merely visualizing abstractions. Instead, it grasps the New as something that is mediated in what exists and is in motion, although to be revealed the New demands the most extreme effort of will.
Hope involves a kind of radically liminal thinking, one which straddles both the future and the now in order to generate the means required to move beyond this world. It involves focusing so intently on the world as-it-is that we tunnel through it and towards the world as-it-might-be. This process is what renders the unthinkable thinkable — it explodes the boundaries of the given in order to find ways to overcome it.
I would like to suggest that the mutual aid efforts we see around us are examples of this kind of action-oriented, radical hoping. Mask blocs, clean air organizations, and collectives delivering resources to hurricane-stricken towns (to name just a few) are immersed in the messiness of hope rooted in the here-and-now. They are not utopian; they do not aim to design a new world. What they do is actualize the kinds of relationships and communities that their members want to be a part of, lending a materiality and an immediacy to what otherwise would be mere ideas. In this sense, mutual aid groups prefigure what life after capitalism could look like, if only we had the collective will to insist on it.
This prefiguration stretches the boundaries of our imaginations in part by exposing ideology for what it is. Mutual aid collectives show us that there really is an abundance of resources; that we really can just give them all away for free; that never-ending bureaucracy is not a glitch in the capitalist system that slows down the distribution of meager aid but rather a feature of it meant to slow this aid down to a trickle. When we want to, we can show up for each other, and we can do it fast. The lie of capitalism is revealed every time a collective of gay DJs delivers a truckload of water to Asheville.
The authors of the incredible anti-capitalist primer, The Future is Degrowth, refer to this as an “interstitial strategy.” They write:
“[Interstitial strategies] emerge within and despite the old system and prefigure post-capitalist relations on a small scale.”
The Catalan Integral Cooperative is one example of such a strategy — it is a sprawling commune with its own food pantries, currency, infrastructure, and collectively-run factories. But interstitial strategies need not be as robust or as permanent. As needs arise, cooperatives spring up; when those needs diminish, the cooperatives can dissolve. Permanence is not the metric of success. Rather, the metric of success is whether they expose the ideology of the mode of production in which they arise; whether they make relationships of care and mutuality possible, which are ordinarily stifled under capitalism; whether they are rooted in both the now and the future. “Degrowth does not propose a universal future but a ‘pluriverse’ - a world where many worlds fit.” The more decentralized, autonomous organizations spring up all over the world, the more worlds we have to draw upon when building the new one.
It is not surprising to me that queer people are often at the forefront of mutual aid efforts, both historically and today. Queer people are already familiar with what it’s like to grow up under the shadow of a constrained imagination, as heteronormativity always finds new ways to interrupt the idle fantasizing that children engage in when dreaming of what their future holds for them. Especially before the current landscape of visible queerness emerged, it was exceedingly difficult to imagine a queer future, much less desire a queer future, because very few templates existed (and those that did were marked with so much shame as to become cautionary tales). Queer futures and queer desire were largely inarticulable.
And yet, somehow queer people push through. We forge relationships outside of heteronormativity; we build new models of chosen family; we design queer lives that are energizing and beautiful and political and all of the other things that we might want from them. We have lived experience of overcoming an imagination constrained by unjust circumstances. This requires an insistence on hope as well as an embodied rebellion. And to paraphrase Miranda Fricker in Epistemic Injustice, one rebellion inspires another. Queer people are already practiced in seeing ideology for what it is, at least when it comes to gender and sexuality. It is less of a stretch for us to turn this critical gaze upon capitalism itself.
What our mutual aid efforts have revealed is a tension at the heart of capitalist ideology: it operates on the premise that the earth’s resources are infinite at the same time as it gets us to believe that everyday resources — like food, housing, and care — are scarce. The lie of this paradox is laid bare by any mutual aid effort. Work getting supplies to North Carolina flood victims shows us that there is enough for everyone, and we can get it quickly. It simultaneously shows us, though, that if we continue treating the earth as if its resources were infinite, climate change will displace us all. Its lesson is the perfect inversion of capitalism’s paradox.
Mutual aid efforts have only begun to tap the abundance of resources that truly exist. They operate on the premise that resources delivered “here” do not take away from resources available “over there,” a welcome antidote to the artificial scarcity that is in fact an artifact of capitalism’s ideology: there truly is enough for everyone if we distribute it equitably. The more we encourage autonomous, decentralized efforts at tapping into these resources, then, the more we will do the work of liberating our imaginations from the myopia of capitalism. Each of them acts as a template and a testing ground for what might come next, what we might come to actually desire. From this perspective, mutual aid work is the opposite of a burden; it is a pinnacle expression of hope in the midst of collapse and a necessary precondition to the education of radical desire. It is a way we ensure our belonging in the future by unearthing our belonging in the present.