Mutual Aid and Mosh Pits

While the phrase ​“mutual aid” has long been used in underground and anarchist circles, it gained common parlance in 2020. Mutual aid funds and networks began cropping up across the country to support those impacted by Covid-related illness, loss of work or legal fees from involvement in the uprisings that summer — and included everything from food and water distribution to providing access to face masks, plumbing, winter clothes and first aid.

But as abundant as these mutual aid networks became, the history and actual meaning of the term was often lost.

Mutual aid within anarchism, as popularized by Peter Kropotkin, is a concept of building autonomous, horizontal, cooperative community networks of care. Community members support one another however we can, from trading skills, sharing info, creating radically free markets and community events and spaces, providing child care, sharing housing, raising funds, sharing resources and connections, providing transportation, and creating disability care networks and street medic resources. Predating modern Western systems, mutual aid stems from Black, Indigenous and global South practices rooted in the understanding that we cannot trust ​“traditional” systems of governance to care for us as they continue to fail, exploit and harm us. Many marginalized and nontraditional workers and communities — including unhoused folks, undocumented immigrants and sex workers — continue to face barriers to food stamps, unemployment funds and government-subsidized healthcare.

Mutual aid is not reparations, charity or emergency fundraising, though it can intersect with all of these forms of care structures and resource redistribution. Mutual aid is food, art, music and words. It involves community responses to harm and to medical emergencies without involving police. It is relational, intentional and radical, a theory and a practice of teaching us how to rely on each other and not the state, which does not create care nor safety for many marginalized people.

While punk and anarchism, as scenes and politics, don’t necessarily overlap (one can be an anarchist and not a punk, or a punk and not a radical), in many scenes and for many individual punks, they do. This intersection sees the self-determined and self-run underground and anti-authoritarian nature of punk rock converging with the ​“for us, by us” ethos of mutual aid work.

As a radical and transgressive social and political space, punk exists alternate to and within more mainstream third spaces. Punk mutual aid functions much the same. Often, we are creating spaces, connections and resources that do not exist for the most marginalized in schools, nonprofits and churches.

Mutual aid is stewarded and tended by and for the sake of community itself, as a site for community and the equitable redistribution of goods and skills for people. It’s often not officially sanctioned by local government and runs afoul of capitalist structures of entertainment and care, which are highly consumerist and business-based.

Mutual aid spaces are often sites for education and old-school consciousness-raising, often with tables offering political art, pins, patches, info sheets and zines, or performers speaking out on movement demands and political issues. At the Anti-Fourth of July Benefit, my friend Georgia tabled with free masks and Covid safety 101 zines.

As my friend and organizer Mayala explained: ​“I’ve viewed bands as being mutual aid projects themselves and a way to directly contribute to revolution. A lot of people organized to get our friend JT out of the ICE detention center. We didn’t just have benefit shows, but also wrote him letters and were there for his court dates. It was hilarious seeing a bunch of decked out punks hand off an envelope of cash to his lawyer at the courthouse. We were able to raise the money to pay the lawyers and get him out. When his father died after this, we also had a benefit show at Rancho. I think that show was a good example of continued community support, and an emphasis on mutual aid, because the family was able to participate in raising the money.” 

I first learned about mutual aid through a venue in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., called the Division Avenue Arts Collective or the DAAC, a community-run space that was neither business nor non-profit. When the venue was at risk of getting shut down by the fire marshal in 2007, the community got together to get the space up to code. We raised funds through shows, bake sales, merch and T-shirts. The venue itself gave back by offering sliding-scale rental of the space, hosting anarchist potlucks and movie shows, and holding a monthly ​“Sunday Soup” event in which community members would gather and put money toward a pot — artists, folks and community initiatives would pitch their ideas, and the community would choose which cause to fund that month.

Through these structures and practices within punk, our mutual aid is not meant to simply copy or reimagine charities or nonprofits or traditional social spaces. We do this work not for the sake of acclaim, power or money, but for the joy and love of ourselves and our community. There’s no decoupling mutual aid from this radical ethos, and punk mutual aid is specifically rooted in radically supporting, creating and connecting with one another on our terms, not those of normative capitalist statist society. Punk mutual aid is about the act of subverting, of creating alternate roots, networks and scenes for communities to take care of one another.

Concepts and scenes like punk and mutual aid get popularized and co-opted, losing their meaning and leaving the hands of the people at the fringe. Instead, people create charity funds with no aspects of solidarity, skill-sharing, autonomy-building or caretaking. It’s true that the work needs all different approaches from all different places, but it is important that a political scene and concept that comes from the ground up remains in the hands of the people, not profiteers. I count myself lucky that I’ve always been in a community where punk rock aid is abundant, something I support and that supports me, where I’ve gained so many lifelong skills and friends.

These spaces cannot be replaced or replicated by mainstream businesses or charity structures, and they’re important for us to participate in and protect with ferocious love and care.