how to buy collective liberation
Since the Reagan administration, the west has become a neoliberal hellscape of diminishing returns. Lax corporate tax rates and the myopic capitalist logic of consumption unto death have led to a world in which the 1% has siphoned off a greater and greater portion of total wealth from the 99%, leaving a high percentage of the population in poverty with no way out. The logic of never-ending expansion and ever-increasing profits for shareholders that drives the corporate world is categorically incompatible with sustainability and longevity. We are already living through the catastrophic consequences of a system designed to extract as much wealth as possible from the natural environment and the labor of the working class. The result is a society in which more than half of the population is living paycheck to paycheck. We are trapped in a system that is exploiting the vast majority of us for the benefit of a very small number of people.
Anyone who has come of age and entered the work force after the Reagan administration, and certainly since the turn of the century, has likely experienced a decline in quality of life prospects compared with those of their parents. The Boomer generation coasted on the high tax rates and relatively high level of government investment in public services and infrastructure of the 1960's, which afforded low levels of societal wealth inequality and high prospects and standards of living even for those with no higher education. Millennials and Gen Z are the most educated generations in history and also vastly poorer than their parents. As of 2020, Millennials only owned about 5% of the total wealth of society, whereas Boomers, when they were the same age that Millennials now are, owned about 21% of the total societal wealth. The difference is staggering in terms of the degree to which the buying power, opportunities, and economic stability of Millennials (and Gen Z) has been crippled.
How can we escape from such an abysmal system designed to extract our labor and leave us as burnt out husks of human beings with no property, no savings, and no energy or time left to live our lives? The younger generations have become more educated about and invested in mutual aid out of sheer necessity. What I see in mutual aid is a way out.
The powers that be have a vested interest in maintaining the hyper-individualistic status quo whose heel we suffer underneath. Alienated, isolated, and operating under the assumption that each person must get as much as they can for themselves while in competition with all others, the people of today's world have been thoroughly divided and conquered. Yet at the peripheries of this hellish premise of an existence, there are those who have not lost their sense of communalism and interdependence, have not lost sight of the fact that humans have never functionally lived as individuals, but rather as members of communities living in collectivity. Mutual aid is as old as human life itself. It is arguably the foremost practice that has allowed us as a species to survive and adapt for as long as we have.
Mutual aid in today's world can look like many things. In a capitalist society where everything, or almost everything, has been transactionalized and monetized, mutual aid can largely feel like trying to prevent people from drowning by bailing saltwater out of small vessel sinking on the high sea. So much wealth has been extracted from the working class (and by that, I mean all of us except those who own the means of production) that it feels like we are all just passing the same $20 around from person to struggling person. But within the broad swathe of the working class, or the 99%, there are gradations of privilege and access to resources. While we all have to sell our labor to survive, some of us have large amounts of disposable income, while others run deeper and deeper into debt every month, dancing forever on the knife's edge of precarity. (There are also some who sell their labor to survive but also acquire land and become landlords, and this segment must be counted amongst the capitalist class, since they hoard land and extract money from tenants upon pain of homelessness, starvation, and potential death.)
Mutual aid writ large could trigger a restoration of the Commons, of the communal and collective way of living that is native to our species, and it could also spell out Collective Liberation if we are capable of taking it to its maximal conclusion. There are certain physical mechanics required in order for this to take place. In the hyper-individualist, hyper-consumptive world we live in, people are encouraged and manipulated into spending and consuming in endless cycles of waste and gluttony, because increasing levels of consumption and therefore production are required in order for capitalism to function along the lines of its imbecilic "logic" of infinite growth. Capitalism has imprisoned us by convincing us to spend what little money we earn in endless consumption instead of pooling our resources to make our money go further. If you and all the neighbors on your block pooled your money and bought food directly from growers and wholesellers in bulk, you could save tons of money. If you and your neighbors started a tool library, you wouldn't all need to own a pair of pliers and a standing mixer for your kitchen; you could collectively share commonly-owned tools and save space, money, and the need for the raw materials used to produce twenty pairs of pliers and twenty standing mixers.
In terms of monetary mutual aid, or the redistribution of cash, we must make ourselves abundantly aware of the fact that most people in the world live in poverty and do not have enough. People who are fighting every day simply to survive and to make ends meet do not have the capacity to invest time and energy into political organizing even though that political organizing would benefit them personally. People who are living in poverty are in a permanent state of exhaustion, burn-out, stress, and anxiety, wondering how they are going to pay their bills, get out of credit card debt, feed their kids, and avoid evictions. They simply, physically do not have the capacity to expend any time, energy, or resources towards things other than meeting their survival needs. (This is a generalization, and there are certainly exceptions, but for the most part, it is an unattainable luxury for people experiencing poverty to engage in long term elective activities such as activism when their most basic material needs are not being met.) In this situation, there is a symbiotic opportunity that we must take: we need the support and participation of people living in poverty in order to effect revolutionary socioeconomic change; and people living in poverty need our constant, reliable, and unwavering support to lift them out of the poverty they are trapped in. We, the People, the Collective, have the autonomy to rewrite the social contract and determine our own fate, but we absolutely and categorically must work and fight for each other, not just for ourselves.
Mutual aid is a prerequisite to revolutionary change. We will never attain the level of active participation needed to change the way our society works until we free our friends, neighbors, and comrades from the burden of abject poverty. Those of us with the means to redistribute our wealth, even if it is only a small amount of wealth, must invest in Collective Liberation by bailing our comrades out of total poverty. Only once our comrades attain a certain level of financial stability and ease will they be fully able and willing to join our work. In order for us to free ourselves, we must simultaneously free everyone around us. If a single mother working several jobs to make rent receives a bit of help from her community, she might be able to quit one of her jobs and suddenly have more time to invest in raising her kids or attending an organization's meeting or volunteering at a distribution. We must invest what little we have in our communities and bet fervently on the notion that our investments will pay the right dividends. And they will. The experience of having someone believe you are worth fighting for is never forgotten. When you demonstrate that you care about the wellbeing of your neighbor enough to make some small personal sacrifices, you neighbor begins to believe in the goodness of others and in the worthiness of themselves.
We become free by discarding and shedding that which does not serve us collectively. We become free by inwardly experiencing that we cannot flourish while others perish. Once enough people are lifted out of poverty, their consciousness and awareness of the nature of their own oppression will crescendo into the realization that there is a way out. By refusing to engage in capitalism, by divesting from the systems and entities that oppress and enslave the vast majority of us, we can economically cripple and disempower those systems and entities. We can destroy an exploitative corporation like Amazon, Walmart, or Target by boycotting it and refusing to spend our money there. We can destroy the ability of the ruling class to enslave us in hierarchical institutions where our labor is exploited in order to produce private profits by forming workers' cooperatives and rebuilding society around principles of direct democracy, equality, and horizontality. We can create a world where every single human being is afforded the same respect, where no one is above or beneath anyone else. We can live in a world where all human needs are met and people thrive while at the same time not exceeding planetary limits on natural resource extraction (see: Doughnut Economics).
The realm of what is possible, perhaps inevitable, if we work towards the highest common good is almost limitless. But the only way to open this window of possibility is to buy our way to Collective Liberation through the constant, never-ending practice of mutual aid. You will never get free from oppression by trying to hoard and stockpile as much wealth as you can individually. Individual accumulation and the death cult of individualism will never serve you or truly make you happy. You must stop thinking of yourself as ending at the edges of your body and recognize that your truer and realer self is everything you see around you (see: The Spread Mind by Riccardo Manzotti). Act on behalf of your true self, your collective self, and know that freedom awaits.