I suspect what you’re missing is that the vast majority of people have never heard of mutual aid groups, including myself.

Could you explain what a mutual aid group is and how someone would go about finding one?

What you’re describing is essentially how society functioned for most of human history until the advent of large-scale, organized civilization. In fact, even in modern society, most family structures and friendship dynamics worldwide still use this.

Mutual aid depends upon reciprocity, the idea that I help you today on the understanding that you’ll help me when I need help. But what happens when Gondor calls for aid but Rohan refuses to answer, especially despite being capable of it? Well, at a small scale (such as within families or among friends) we make a mental note to never help that particular person again, and we might even tell others that they’re a selfish scumbag and not to trust them. Therein lies the disincentive to cheat: if you cheat, you will find yourself cut off from any future aid.

But humans have a fundamental limit to how many personal relationships we can maintain. In fact, this concept has a name: Dunbar’s Number.

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2]

It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.[8][9]

So if your society/family/mutual aid group gets bigger than Dunbar’s number, you stop being able to meaningfully keep track of who’s a cheat, and so does everyone else. Without that, cheaters can cheat without nearly as much repercussion, which breaks down the whole system of trust mutual aid is built upon.

And that’s why we now have more complex systems in modern society. Things like currency and laws to ensure fair exchange and stop cheaters. But even with all of this, we still have mutual aid in the form of our immediate friends and family. And because friends and family are a naturally select group, they’ll never surpass Dunbar’s number, allowing the system of trust to (mostly) function. It still sometimes breaks, of course, such as when families excuse toxic behavior so as to not rock the boat.

What you’re missing is the fact that it would be a huge risk and we have mouths to feed and bills to pay. Who’s to say the other people in the mutual aid group will stick around? Without a job I have no health insurance, what happens if I get cancer? Who pays for that? How do I know that I’ll be able to pay rent every month? With whose money? What happens if my dog needs surgery, who pays for that? Where do I get money for groceries?

Also as one of the working poor I have never relied on charity for anything because I live in a shit hole that doesn’t really even offer anything. Only churches do charity work here and my gay ass is not welcome there.

That’s not even taking into account the fact that you’d have to get people to agree to help each other. Do you think all the racist white assholes in my town will join up with black and Mexican families? lmao

Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.

at least in the US, and from the experience of watching that happen, the problem is there’s more people that focus on the “aid” part and forget the “mutual” part. This causes the people who were reciprocating to leave because the returns were largely unequal, leading to an over-all deterioration of the services that could be provided by the group- which in turn leads to fewer people joining in the first place.

What you are proposing is that “poor people” should all band together and create a new separate society, which is basically communist. Like some sort of left-wing Sovereign Citizen movement.

One big problem with this concept is that you cannot create a new separate economics whilst living in wider society. You still need to live somewhere, and you will need to pay the landlord with money. You will need to pay the electricity bill with money. You will still need to use joint facilities like roads, and the State is not going to happily provide all that to you for free, they will be looking at your new little economy and working out exactly how to value it to send you a tax bill.

While you are dealing with all of these issues, you also have to deal with the people within the group. How are you running it and making sure it is fair? It takes a massive amount of work to manage something like this on even a small scale. So you will need some sort of tax on transactions so that the people putting the time in to running it can be covered. Who is actually going to join if everyone’s time is valued equally - it will be a great deal for people whose skills are not valued on wider society, but a bad one for anyone with more valuable skills. So you won’t end up with a wide skill set involved, and can’t cover the requirements to do everything needed. So for example if you found a farmer who wanted to provide all their produce through this scheme, you could not provide the resources they need to produce and transport the produce. There is a massive difference between “making food” (ie, working at McDonalds) and actually creating food.

Plus what happens when things go wrong? When the person you arranged to come over to help you with something falls and hurts themselves, or they do substandard work that damages your property? Is your mutual aid group providing some sort of insurance coverage? Do you have some sort of dispute resolution process to mediate problems?

Having a strong community that supports members and shares resources can definitely be a good thing, and help to improve the lives of everyone involved. But “quit your shitty job and create a mutual aid network” is not at all a viable path to prosperity (or even to survival).

My initial thoughts would be that the priority for most poor people is housing, followed by food and keeping the lights on.

My experience of mutual aid groups is primarily in the form of local exchange trading schemes (LETS), which typically provide services such as cake making, aromatherapy sessions, bicycle repair and maybe garden maintenance etc.

So although you may be able to deal with the food side of things through that to some extent, there really aren’t many landlords who will take rent in the form of aromatherapy and almost no utility suppliers will accept payment in bicycle repairs.

I have known a group to establish a housing co-op, which is great and all, but that, after around a decade, has housed around 8 people in total, which leaves a very long way to go.

Overall, I am in favour of the idea, but it is easy to see the issues that leave most people stuck in some job that actually pays the rent.

As a person who was poor and is now doing OK, wtf is a mutual aid group? And I don’t mean that as my being unable to Google; I mean it as: I’ve known a lot of people in poverty and I’ve been to many a government welfare office and there’s no discoverability for things like this in many areas.

I am disabled. Those mutual aid networks are going to turn me away just as fast as the shitty far right “charities” vs churches masquerading as charities, despite the fact that my services were in remarkably high demand before the doctors took my organs. The only way to get aid is via force. Ask me how I know.

A. They don’t know about such things. This isn’t as popular as you seem to think. Let’s talk about that after.

B. There’s no way that works the way you seem to imply. If they have to get the land for it, they probably aren’t poor, but even if they were given stuff, how much are they given.

C. People like things. So how is this mutual aid group supposed to afford, let’s say a car per person? Are they buying everyone a home, and a car? Or are they making cars. Similarly, how does this work with skilled individuals. I’m a programmer, I can make computers work, who makes my computers, or more importantly my daughter got sick last night, we had the ER in society, in this alternate society is there a doctor on call 24/7?

But let’s go back to A.

I think you linked www.mutualaidhub.org, so I’m using that. I just looked up a listing of mutual aid networks near me. The only ones I found in LA and San Diego (county), after clicking through 10-20 I stopped because I got a good idea about what they are. Someone on here said they’re like communism and communes. The mutual aid networks I found were minor help, a few were food services, one was just a nightly call, and so on. Quite a few were now defunct as well, which kind of tells how they went.

The one that was taking help was asking for VOLUNTEERS, not people who partake in all the services, and none of them offered all the services. I could quit a job and volunteer there, but I still need money, housing, I like games, I like electricity, I like computers. Again how are we getting those? I haven’t even touched on the idea of taxes as well.

Really the point is… From what little I saw when I looked this up Mutual Aid Network doesn’t seem to mean what you are implying, but even if they did… well I’m doubting most of those have enough skilled individuals that joining them even as a poor person would offset the problems.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…

The messed up thing about severe crisis, poverty, homelessness… you have 3 heavy duffle bags you carry at all times. Often each night you’ll never know where you’ll sleep. Shelters usually don’t have wifi. You are in constant crisis, survival mode.

Getting connected to mutual aid groups, yes, a platonic ideal. But given all the work it’d take to just find such a thing… it’s not feasible. Without a larger system, infrastructure to support it.

A version of mutual aid groups that exists in my city… homeless encampment that turn into self sustaining, resourceful communities, then get torn down by police. There’s a newer trend in mental health crisis stabilization places, more are becoming Peer Respite. Run and staffed by people who’ve been exactly where you are, who themselves are still struggling.