The one who helps is not the strong and the one who receives is not the weak; the roles change. Needing one another is no shame — and freedom is not escaping every tie but having a say in how the ties that sustain us are built.
When a disaster strikes, the first story told is usually the same: order collapses, people panic and everyone tries to save themselves. Shops are looted, neighbours turn on one another, the selfishness beneath humanity’s thin shell of civilisation appears. This story is repeated so often that we readily believe harsh authority is inevitable in emergencies. Yet a closer look at what happens during an earthquake, a fire, a flood or an economic collapse reveals another scene as well. There are people trying to rescue complete strangers from the rubble, opening their homes, preparing free meals, finding medicine and reaching one another long before official help arrives.
Mutual aid does not regard such behaviour as passing sentiment or a moment of heroism. It says that a significant part of people’s capacity to survive and live well rests on cooperation. The one who helps is not the strong and the one who receives is not the weak; the roles can change. The burden I carry today you may carry tomorrow. The return need not even come from the same person, in the same form, or at once. Mutual aid is not a ledger of exchange but the acknowledgement that all of us are beings who need others.
A relation different from charity
Mutual aid is often confused with charity. In both a need is met; food, money, shelter or labour may be shared. But the relations they build are not the same. Charity usually establishes a vertical structure in which whoever has gives to whoever has not. The giver may decide how the resource is used and may expect gratitude, silence or particular behaviour from the receiver. Help is presented not as a right but as the favour of good intentions.
In mutual aid, by contrast, the person in need is not a passive recipient. They have the right to define what the need is and to take part in shaping the solution. It does not measure people’s worth by how productive they are, how much they can repay or how far they “deserve” it. Someone unable to contribute today is an equal part of the community. For illness, old age, unemployment and the need for care are not exceptions to life but conditions all of us may meet at different times.
This distinction is not drawn in order to belittle the helper’s good will. Sometimes in an emergency one person must simply give and another simply receive. The point is that this moment should not turn into a permanent relation of superiority. Parcels distributed for a photograph and a sharing point built by neighbours together, from which anyone can take what they need without having to account for themselves, may look like the same work, yet what they say to people is different.
Why does solidarity become visible in crises?
In the everyday order it is easy to forget how bound to one another we are. From the bread we eat to the internet we use, our life rests on the labour of countless people, yet the market covers this relation with a price tag. Once we have paid we think we owe no one anything. Unpriced labour such as care, cleaning, emotional support and neighbourliness usually stays invisible. A moment of crisis exposes the dependence that the normal order conceals.
After an earthquake we see how important a phone charger, a stranger’s car, or the person who knows which home holds an elderly resident can be. Official institutions may work at a large scale but their local knowledge is limited. When people know one another, needs are noticed faster and resources reach the right place. Spontaneously formed networks therefore do not merely fill the state’s gap; they produce another kind of knowledge, carrying details central structures cannot see.
But if we leave solidarity to disaster days alone, we must start from scratch in every crisis. Communication groups that disperse once the crisis passes, materials forgotten in depots and exhaustion left on a few shoulders are a familiar cycle. The real strength of mutual aid lies in trust built in ordinary times working in extraordinary ones. Rather than expecting people who do not know each other’s names to become a flawless community during a disaster, small shared tasks must be organised from today.
Filling the state’s gap with unpaid labour?
An important suspicion is directed at mutual aid networks: when volunteers take on services the state is obliged to provide, does public responsibility not become invisible? As people solve problems of food, care and housing among themselves, do administrators not escape their obligations more easily? This danger is real. Especially in periods when social rights are being cut, the discourse of “community solidarity” can be the friendly name for replacing public services with unpaid labour.
Mutual aid must not mean giving up the demand for rights. While delivering food today to a hungry neighbour, it is possible at the same time to ask why people go hungry and who produces these conditions. Postponing an urgent need by saying “let the state solve it” is as callous as meeting the need and forgetting its structural cause is incomplete. A solidarity network can both sustain life and become the ground of shared demand and struggle.
One measure here is decision-making power. If volunteers quietly close a gap determined from above, they may become the system’s auxiliary staff. But if those experiencing need take part in managing the resources and can turn their experience into collective voice and pressure, the network does not merely deliver a service; it also produces political capacity. What is decisive is whether aid turns people into well-behaved recipients or into subjects deciding together.
Invisible labour and burnout
In romantic accounts of solidarity everyone contributes as much as they feel able and things run by themselves. In reality certain people prepare the lists, answer the phones, cook, clean, calm the disagreements and come back the next day. These people are often women, young people, or the quiet members of whom it is said “they’ll do it anyway.” Praise goes to the visible speakers while the care labour that sustains continuity stays in the background.
Good will is not enough for mutual aid to be sustainable. Tasks must rotate, the exhausted must be able to step back without guilt, the person in need must not be obliged to become a volunteer as well, and resources must be managed openly. The sentence “let everyone do what they can” must not become the exploitation of those who can always do more. When solidarity leans on a culture of self-sacrifice, it soon burns out its most devoted people.
Proximity, moreover, does not always produce justice. People may give priority to those they know, to those who resemble them, or to whoever tells their story more convincingly. Those who stay silent, who do not speak the language, who are excluded or who are considered untrustworthy because of their identity may fall outside the network. Mutual aid therefore needs not only warm feelings but explicit principles that notice discrimination.
Remembering that we need one another
Modern life describes independence as needing no one. The successful person earns their own money, solves their own problems and asks for no help. Yet this appearance of independence rests on other people’s labour becoming purchasable and invisible. Whoever has money buys care work, transport, food and security, and then believes they are self-sufficient. Mutual aid breaks this illusion.
Needing one another is no shame. Freedom, too, is not escaping every tie but having a say in how the ties that sustain us are built. The dependence we are forced into, in return for which obedience is expected, is not the same as an interdependence we openly accept and govern together.
Mutual aid is not a magic method that will change the world by itself. It can close in on small circles, carry the state’s burden, and exploit invisible labour. But when it faces these risks it re-establishes a very basic truth: life is not the achievement of individually strong people but the shared work of others whose names we often do not even know. Solidarity is the attempt to place that truth not in a brief moment of disaster but at the foundation of the everyday order.