By Espi Ramó – Workers’ Voice

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the social explosions that followed, including the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, millions of people turned away from a visibly failing state and toward their neighbors. The concept of “mutual aid”—voluntary, reciprocal exchanges of resources and services—surged in popularity. Community refrigerators, often stocked by precarious workers pooling their own wages, grocery delivery networks, decentralized bail funds, and neighborhood defense patrols spread across thousands of cities.
For many new activists, mutual aid felt like a pure, immediate, and non-bureaucratic form of resistance: a direct action that bypassed corrupt politicians and put care back into communities.
This instinctive solidarity disproves the bourgeois myth that human nature is fundamentally selfish. However, for revolutionaries committed to overthrowing capitalism, good intentions are not enough. We must evaluate every tactic not by its immediate emotional reward, but by its ability to advance the class struggle toward its ultimate goal: socialist revolution and the conquest of power by the working class.
This essay examines mutual aid not as an organic phenomenon of working-class life—which Marxists support and celebrate—but as a political strategy that claims to replace mass movement-building and revolutionary organization. Drawing on the lessons of Bolshevism, solidarity enacted during general strikes, the fate of the Black Panther Party, and the degeneration of reformist service models, we will argue that while mutual aid can play a supplementary role in moments of crisis, it is fundamentally inadequate as a pathway to power. When elevated into a strategy, it risks substituting charity for mass action.

Organic Phenomenon vs. Political Strategy
We must first distinguish between two very different conceptions of mutual aid: one as an organic phenomenon and the other as a political strategy to end capitalism.
Throughout history, when capitalism fails—during famines, wars, economic crises, or pandemics—workers naturally turn to each other for support. During the early months of COVID-19, many countries saw the spontaneous formation of community support networks, demonstrating the capacity of ordinary people to organize themselves. These expressions of instinctive solidarity should be welcomed as evidence that cooperation and solidarity point beyond this failing system.
Yet one thing is to support mutual aid as a spontaneous response to an emergency. Another is to argue that the way out of capitalism’s recurring crises lies in building alternative institutions ourselves: community clinics, food distribution networks, legal collectives, and informal welfare systems.
This position often presents itself as a rejection of electoralism and class collaboration with broken state institutions. But turning to mutual aid as the primary alternative is a dead end.
Mutual aid has been tried many times. It has provided relief to working-class communities, but it has not built a strong anti-capitalist movement anywhere, let alone one capable of challenging state power. The term originates with Peter Kropotkin, the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin brilliantly critiqued social Darwinism—the pseudoscientific claim that “survival of the fittest” justifies competition, hierarchy, and inequality as natural and inevitable. However, unlike many of his contemporary followers, Kropotkin was clear about the limits of piecemeal self-help under capitalism. Speaking of peasant self-help efforts in Europe, he wrote:
“From the point of view of social economics, all these efforts of the peasants certainly are of little importance. They cannot substantially, and still less permanently, alleviate the misery to which the tillers of the soil are doomed all over Europe.”1
While Kropotkin correctly identified the limits of self-help, he did not fully account for the state’s role in perpetuating class relations. The transition from mutual aid to socialized production under workers’ control cannot be accomplished without dismantling the capitalist state. For Marxists, the state is not an external imposition but an intrinsic product of irreconcilable class conflict. Any attempt to bypass the state, hoping that communism will develop gradually from mutual aid, is utopian. The state must be confronted directly.

The Political Economy of Mutual Aid: Value, Exploitation, and Structural Scarcity
To understand why mutual aid cannot function as a strategy, we must ground our analysis in the Marxist critique of political economy. The question is not simply whether people help one another, but whether such efforts can overcome the structures that produce deprivation.
Under capitalism, all wealth is produced by labor. Capitalists extract surplus value from workers—the difference between what workers produce and what they are paid. When workers engage in mutual aid, they are not redistributing surplus value as a class. They are redistributing the limited portion of value returned to them as wages. They are taking money from an already underpaid worker to give to an unemployed worker. This is not a solution; it is a rearrangement of poverty.
The slogan ‘Solidarity, Not Charity’ captures an important instinct, but it does not resolve the underlying problem. Charity reinforces hierarchy; mutual aid claims to be horizontal. But the question remains: where do the resources come from?
The scale of institutional charity underlines the problem. Feeding America describes a national network of more than 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries, yet USDA-linked reporting on 2023 food insecurity still found roughly 47 million people in food-insecure households in the United States.2 The problem is not that workers do not share enough, but that capitalism systematically reproduces deprivation.
The deeper problem is structural. Even enormous charitable systems cannot abolish need because they do not control production, housing, transportation, or healthcare. A 2023 qualitative study of pandemic mutual aid participants in Colorado found recurrent patterns of emotional and physical exhaustion, as well as hopelessness, among organizers. Another 2023 study of UK COVID mutual aid groups found that participation declined over time as the emergency receded.3 The very people trying to patch the crisis are consumed by it.
Why is this? Because the problem is not a lack of sharing among workers. The problem is that the ruling class hoards the means of production and systematically extracts surplus value from working-class labor. Even a workers’ party of millions could not solve poverty within capitalism—not because such a party would lack resources, but because capitalism itself prevents the full social product from being distributed according to need. The only solution is expropriation: the working class must take ownership of the economy, end the extraction of surplus value by a parasitic class, and organize a rational plan for human need.
Mutual aid, whatever its short-term benefits, cannot achieve this. It merely rearranges poverty within the existing structure.
This reveals the utopian assumption underlying mutual aid as a strategy: that solidarity alone, without confronting ownership, exploitation, and the value form itself, can overcome scarcity. It cannot.

“Small” Deeds and Big Ones — Strategy and Tactic
To understand the Marxist position, we must revisit the struggle between Russian Marxism and Narodism. The Narodniks (Russian populists who sought to build socialism through the peasantry and local communal institutions) championed “small deeds”: literacy campaigns, soup kitchens, and work within local government committees. They believed these acts would gradually build socialism.
Lenin and the early Russian Marxists emerged in conscious opposition to this strategy. In 1892, as famine devastated Russia’s workers and peasants, liberal politicians and government officials launched relief efforts to aid the suffering. Many populists embraced this work as a way to have an immediate impact. As Krupskaya later recalled:
“During the famine of 1891–92, many young people went into the countryside to help the starving peasants. Vladimir Ilyich regarded this work as useful, but he was strongly opposed to the idea that it could replace revolutionary activity.”4
Two years later, in his polemics against the Narodniks, Lenin made the issue explicit:
“To stand for the village community… what is there socialistic in that, when everyone knows that exploitation of the working people can very well exist and is engendered within this community? That is stretching the word ‘socialism’ to mean anything.”5
Socialism is not reducible to redistribution. It requires the abolition of the social relations—including the extraction of surplus value—that produce exploitation. For Lenin, the task of revolutionaries was not to administer improvements within the existing order, but to organize the working class as a political force:
“The political activity of the Social-Democrats lies in promoting the development and organization of the working-class movement… into an organized struggle of the whole Russian working class directed against the bourgeois regime and working for the expropriation of the expropriators.”6
The liberals and state officials would run the soup kitchens regardless. But only revolutionaries could build the organization capable of overthrowing the Tsar. If they abandoned that task to compete over who could serve more soup, the system would remain intact.
This distinction is often blurred in contemporary mutual aid advocacy. The question is not whether mutual aid is good or bad. The question is: what is primary, and what is secondary?
The primary element is political strategy: building the self-activity and class consciousness of the working class through collective action, with a revolutionary horizon of expropriation, workers’ control, and the conquest of state power.
The secondary element is tactical: any particular activity, including mutual aid, that is subordinated to that primary strategy.
Consider the common defense of mutual aid: that it helps revolutionaries “sink roots” into the working class through service. This logic is only half-true. Service alone proves nothing. The Catholic Church runs thousands of hospitals and charitable institutions worldwide. It is not a revolutionary force.7 Service without a political horizon builds loyalty to the server rather than class consciousness.
What builds revolutionary credibility is not service in isolation. It is service plus a political horizon plus concrete organizing toward collective action. A free clinic can be a site of recruitment if every patient leaves with an understanding of why capitalism produces medical debt and an invitation to fight for nationalized healthcare. A community fridge can be an occasion to organize if every neighbor who takes food also discusses why workers spending their wages to fill one another’s fridges is a rearrangement of poverty.
Without that primary political education and organizing, mutual aid is not a bridge to revolution. It becomes a pressure valve. It teaches workers to look to one another rather than to confront the class that is robbing them all.
Community fridge projects offer a clear example. Volunteers spend their own wages to stock food for neighbors. The immediate need is real. But the structure remains untouched: landlords continue to collect rent, supermarket chains continue to profit, and wages remain insufficient. The activity alleviates the symptom while leaving its cause intact.
Tenant-focused mutual aid illustrates a similar limit. Networks raised funds to help renters cover arrears, sometimes distributing thousands of dollars. Yet in relatively few cases did these efforts develop into sustained rent strikes or collective confrontations with landlords. The immediate goal—keeping individuals housed—was achieved temporarily, but without organization at the level of entire buildings, the underlying balance of power remained unchanged.
In each case, the pattern is consistent: mutual aid expands rapidly in moments of crisis, stabilizes suffering in the short term, but struggles to transform itself into durable structures of collective power.
The distinction becomes clearest when we examine it in practice: the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike.

The 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters — Solidarity in the Service of Struggle
To understand what genuine working-class solidarity looks like—and how it differs from apolitical mutual aid—we must study the 1934 Teamsters’ Rebellion in Minneapolis. This was not a mutual aid project. It was a class war. Within that war, an extraordinary network of social organization emerged that looked like mutual aid but functioned as something far more powerful: organized solidarity in the service of a political strike.
Minneapolis in 1934 was known as a “scab’s paradise.” The conservative business unionism of Local 574 had bred indifference and defeatism. But a small layer of revolutionary socialists, including Carl Skoglund and the Dunne brothers, had been patiently building a Marxist cadre. They organized mass meetings, distributed leaflets, and convinced coal workers and truckers that they could win. They transformed the union into a fighting organization.
As Farrell Dobbs, who became a communist during the struggle, later wrote, the key to the Teamsters’ success was “the presence locally of revolutionary socialist cadres who proved highly capable of fusing with the mass of rebellious workers and adding vital know-how in the struggle against the capitalist ruling class.”8
When the strike was called, it was total. Workers occupied the city. A rented garage became a twenty-four-hour strike headquarters. The cooks’ union sent volunteers to prepare thousands of meals daily. Sympathetic farmers and local grocers donated food. A hospital was set up with volunteer doctors and nurses. Auto mechanics maintained the strikers’ vehicles. Women’s auxiliaries organized childcare and supply runs. Teenagers on motorcycles acted as couriers. One family famously ripped the banisters from their own home to use as weapons against the police.
This social organization was impressive and, to a casual observer, indistinguishable from mutual aid. But three critical differences separate it from the contemporary mutual aid framework.
First, the aid was entirely subordinated to a strategic offensive against the employers. The goal was not to “fill a gap” left by capitalism or create a parallel economy. The goal was to shut down the trucking industry, break the bosses’ association, and win union recognition. The food, medical care, and courier services existed for the strike, not as ends in themselves.
Second, the solidarity was mobilized by revolutionary leadership with a clear political program. The leadership did not simply organize logistics; they organized consciousness. They held mass meetings to explain why workers should fight. They published a daily strike paper that became self-funding. They constantly linked the immediate fight for union recognition to the broader struggle of the working class against capitalism.
Third, the aid was reciprocal and class-wide. The unemployed—one-third of Minneapolis’s population—were not treated as passive recipients of charity. The Teamsters invited them onto the picket lines, included them in strike committees, and fought alongside them for public relief projects. The relationship was not “helpers” and “helped.” It was a united class mobilizing all available forces against a common enemy.
And the Teamsters won. After two strikes, pitched street battles with police, and the National Guard occupation of the Minneapolis stockyards, the employers were forced to recognize the union, accept binding arbitration, and raise wages. The victory electrified the labor movement and sparked organizing waves across the Midwest. But for the revolutionary cadre in Local 574, the strike was not an end—it was a lesson. As Farrell Dobbs later wrote, winning a union contract was not the same as winning workers’ power. The bosses remained in control of production. The state remained intact. That is why the same revolutionaries who led the strike spent the next decade building the Socialist Workers Party: they understood that solidarity in struggle must be subordinated to a strategic program for expropriation and working-class rule. The strike kitchen fed workers to win the strike; it was not mistaken for a new society.
Compare this to the typical mutual aid project today. A community fridge is installed; neighbors take food. This is kind. But who is the enemy? What is the demand? Where is the offense? The fridge does not threaten the landlord, the supermarket chain, or the state. It manages hunger; it does not abolish its cause. The Teamsters’ strike kitchen, by contrast, was a cog in a machine designed to stop capital accumulation in an entire city.
The lesson is not that revolutionaries should never engage in mutual aid. It is that mutual aid must be subordinated to the primary task: building the revolutionary party. When a communist organizes mutual aid that is not connected to organizing, agitation, and political education, they are substituting palliation for confrontation.
Under capitalism, there will always be urgent wounds to tend. That is why revolution is necessary—not because we can patch enough wounds to make the system just. If we are to engage in mutual aid activities as an occasional tactic, our task is to ensure that every act of care is also an act of organizing: every meal a lesson, every clinic a recruitment, every fridge a foothold for the party.

Material Aid as Political Weapon, Not Parallel World
None of this means revolutionaries ignore material needs. After seizing power, the Bolsheviks organized relief during the 1921 famine. Communist Party members in the 1930s built Unemployed Councils that famously moved evicted families’ furniture back into their apartments—direct action that looked like “mutual aid” to the untrained eye. But the key difference is the political frame and strategic subordination. These actions were never presented as a utopian alternative to capitalism or a path to socialism in themselves. They were weapons in a class struggle. The Unemployed Councils did not ask workers to pool their poverty; they demanded public works, prevented evictions through collective confrontation, and organized the unemployed to fight alongside the employed. The goal was not to build a parallel community fridge network but to demonstrate that capitalism cannot provide for basic needs—and that only workers’ power can. Material aid, when it is used, must be a bridge to organization, not a substitute for it. Every bag of groceries distributed should come with a leaflet, a conversation, and an invitation to the next union meeting or tenant assembly. Otherwise, it is not revolutionary aid; it is palliative care for a dying system.

The Black Panthers — Survival Programs Without a Mass Party
No discussion of mutual aid is complete without examining the Black Panther Party. Their programs were extraordinary. The Free Breakfast for Children Program fed 20,000 children daily by the end of 1969. They operated free health clinics in dozens of cities. They ran free clothing programs, optical clinics, ambulance services, housing cooperatives, and door-to-door sickle cell anemia testing.
Huey Newton captured their purpose precisely: these were “survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution.”9 J. Edgar Hoover himself acknowledged their political significance, describing the Breakfast for Children Program as “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.”10
All of this is true. And yet the Panthers did not build a mass revolutionary party capable of seizing and holding power.
The problem was not the existence of survival programs. The problem was their strategic role. The party remained relatively small—at its peak, around 5,000 members nationally—and did not succeed in organizing the broader working class at scale. While the breakfast programs fed children, they did not consistently organize parents, workers, and communities into durable structures of mass political power.
Political factors compounded this limitation. The Panthers’ confrontational posture contributed to isolation and made state repression easier. Without a strategy for sustained mass organizing rooted in workplaces and unions, the organization struggled to expand beyond its core layers. As the party came under intense FBI repression (COINTELPRO) and internal factional pressures, its revolutionary energy fragmented.
Some within the Panthers drew important conclusions about the limits of their approach. They saw that community survival programs, however heroic, could not substitute for a disciplined revolutionary party rooted in the industrial working class. The lesson was not that such programs were always misguided, but that they could not, on their own, resolve the problem they sought to confront. Without a strategy to organize the majority of the working class and confront state power, even the most courageous initiatives remain confined to emergency response.
The most revealing lesson came later. What remained of the Panthers’ leadership cadre degenerated into reformism and electoralism. Bobby Rush became a Democratic Chicago alderman and later a U.S. Congressman, where he voted for crime bills that filled prisons with Black men. Huey Newton endorsed Tom Bradley, the Democratic candidate for Los Angeles mayor, in 1973—a liberal who oversaw police violence. This trajectory—from revolutionary militancy to liberal integration—was not inevitable, but it was the logical outcome of a strategy that emphasized community service over building a mass revolutionary party capable of seizing and holding state power.
A more recent example can be seen in Jackson, Mississippi, where activists built networks around community refrigerators, water distribution, and tenant organizing. During the city’s water crises, mutual aid groups distributed bottled water across neighborhoods. These efforts were essential for survival, but they did not translate into organized control over the water system. Rather than mobilizing workers to take over the infrastructure, the response remained oriented toward petitioning state authorities for relief. The result was a familiar cycle: heroic emergency response without a corresponding advance in working-class power.
The lesson is not that such programs were always misguided, but that they could not, on their own, resolve the problem they sought to confront. Without a strategy to organize the majority of the working class and confront state power, even the most courageous initiatives remain confined to emergency response.

The Strategy of “Small Deeds,” Electoralism, and the Service Model
Before World War I, the German Social Democratic Party built an impressive array of mutual aid-style programs: cycling clubs, choir societies, grocery stores, funeral associations, and workers’ clubs—encompassing hundreds of thousands of members. Yet it failed catastrophically when revolution swept Germany in 1918 and 1923. The party had degenerated into a reformist organization that saved capitalism rather than overthrew it.
Rosa Luxemburg warned against precisely this substitution of reforms for power:
“Those who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer, and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.”11
The defeat of the German Revolution led directly to the rise of fascism. What the German working class lacked was not more mandolin clubs but a tightly organized Marxist leadership with a revolutionary program. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks won power in Russia without a significant mutual aid infrastructure. They won through agitation, propaganda, and the program of “Peace, Land, and Bread.”
The same logic that doomed the SPD now shapes much contemporary NGO and union activity. Under the capitalist crisis, many unions have shifted toward becoming “service organizations”—managing poverty rather than abolishing it. Mutual aid networks are often formalized into 501(c)(3) organizations, where they take on grant-funded service roles. This shift introduces new constraints: dependence on philanthropic funding, pressure to demonstrate service outcomes, and a tendency to avoid confrontation with employers, landlords, or state institutions.
This evolution echoes the earlier pattern. The SPD’s vast associative life provided real benefits to workers, but as Luxemburg warned, the substitution of these activities for the struggle for political power altered not only the pace but the direction of the movement. The result was not a gradual path to socialism, but integration into the existing order.
Our Priority — Build the Revolutionary Party, Not the Safety Net
The central question for any revolutionary is this: while we are tending to immediate needs, who is building the organization that can end the system that generates those needs?
The Panthers’ offices were described as “buzzing bee hives” of activity. But while they were solving individual problems, no one was building a disciplined party capable of attacking the root causes of those problems. And the party was destroyed.
In Minneapolis, the revolutionaries did not spend their time running a permanent soup kitchen. They spent years building a cadre: studying Marxism, organizing meetings, writing leaflets, and winning advanced workers to a revolutionary program. When the crisis broke, that cadre was ready to lead. The social organization of the strike—the kitchens, clinics, couriers—was built during the struggle, by the masses themselves, under the political direction of the leadership. It did not substitute for the party; it expressed the party’s work in the class.
What does “building the party” mean? It means forming Marxist study circles to train cadres. It means organizing in workplaces and unions around class demands. It means running class-independent electoral campaigns that use bourgeois elections to agitate, not to win office within the existing system. It means fighting for transitional demands that improve conditions while exposing why capitalism cannot deliver them permanently. And it means preparing for revolutionary upsurges by building networks of trusted cadres who can act decisively when crises open.
The Russian Marxists posed the same strategic problem in the famine years of the 1890s: if revolutionaries dissolve themselves into relief administration, who is left to carry out the revolutionary work that only they can do? Liberals run charities. State officials administer relief. Philanthropists fund service provision. But only Marxists can build the revolutionary party.
This does not mean revolutionaries should be cold to suffering. It means we must raise our sights. The working class does not need helpers; it needs leaders. It does not need bandages; it needs the expropriation of the entire healthcare system.
Conclusion: From Helping to Leading
The resurgence of interest in mutual aid reflects a deep desire to act, to care for one another, and to reject the cruelty of the status quo. Marxists share that desire. But we insist on scientific clarity. Mutual aid, as an organic expression of working-class solidarity, is beautiful. Mutual aid, as a political strategy for overthrowing capitalism, is a dangerous illusion.
The Minneapolis Teamsters showed us the alternative. They built solidarity that was not an end in itself but a weapon. They organized not to manage poverty but to defeat the bosses. They succeeded because a revolutionary cadre had prepared the ground for years beforehand.
We cannot empty the sea of need with a teaspoon. The teaspoon is not too small because we are not trying hard enough. It is too small because capitalism is designed to keep the sea full. Only expropriation—the working class taking ownership of production and ending the extraction of surplus value—can drain it.
We cannot defeat the Pentagon, the FBI, and Wall Street by changing diapers and sewing masks. The capitalist state is a centralized, armed power. It requires an equally organized counter-power: a Leninist party rooted in the working class, armed with Marxist theory, and oriented toward the conquest of political power.
The top priority for revolutionaries today is not to serve the people in the narrow sense, but to lead the people. That means building cadres, studying history, organizing unions, running class-independent electoral campaigns, and preparing for the inevitable revolutionary upsurges as capitalism decays.
As James Connolly said, “Our demands are most moderate, we only want the earth.”12
Do not settle for managing the misery of capitalism. Prepare to overthrow it. Build the party.

Footnotes

1 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), chap. 7.
2 Feeding America Action, “We Are Feeding America,” network statistics; USDA-linked 2023 food insecurity reporting.
3 Qiana Walton et al., “‘Fuck Capitalism’: Mutual Aid Participants’ Experiences of Burnout and Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Advances in Social Work 23, no. 2 (2023); Chris Cocking et al., “All Together Now: Facilitators and Barriers to Engagement in Mutual Aid During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” PLOS ONE (2023).
4 N. K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959).
5 V. I. Lenin, What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (1894), in Lenin Collected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1960).
6 Ibid.
7 Agenzia Fides, “Vatican – Catholic Church Statistics 2024,” published 2024 (statistics updated to December 31, 2022).
8 Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion (New York: Monad Press, 1972; Pathfinder, 2004), 38.
9 Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People (New York: Random House, 1972).
10 J. Edgar Hoover, FBI memorandum, quoted in David Hilliard, The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).
11 Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1899).
12 James Connolly, quoted in Labour in Irish History (1910).