We rushed into the dark little apartment that smelled of stale cabbage and put the pieces down and returned for more. Men, women and children seized articles and dashed inside shouting, laughing. I looked for the two trusties, but they seemed to have disappeared. Then, coming down into the street, I thought I saw one. He was carrying a chair back inside. . . .

. . . When I reached the street there were several of them, men and women, standing about, cheering whenever another piece of furniture was returned. It was like a holiday. I didn’t want it to stop.

“Who are those people?” I called from the steps.

“What people?” someone called back.

“Those,” I said, pointing. 

“You mean those ofays [white people]?”

“Yes, what do they want?”

“We’re friends of the people,” one of the white men called.

 “Friends of what people?” I called, prepared to jump down upon him if he answered, ‘You people.’

“We’re friends of all the common people,” he shouted. “We came up to help.”

“We believe in brotherhood,” another called.

 “Well, pick up that sofa and come on,” I called. . . .

. . . “Why don’t we stage a march?” one of the white men called, going past.

 “Why don’t we march!” I yelled out to the sidewalk before I had time to think.

They took it up immediately. “Let’s march.”

The actions were not always nonviolent. During the Great Rent Strike War of 1932 in the Bronx, landlords brought in police and marshals to force tenants from the buildings. Hundreds of protesters there to defend the strike fought the police hand to hand.

Such interventions were both numerous and effective. Between November 1931 and June 1932 New York saw some 186,000 evictions. But many tenants were rehoused by popular force. According to Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais in Labor’s Untold Story, the Communist Party’s Unemployed Council moved 77,000 families back into their homes, at least until the next dispossession.

Similar actions were taking place around the world. In Sydney, for instance, the Communist-led Unemployed Workers’ Movement (UWM), which numbered in the thousands, turned rehousing efforts into weeks-long occupations. Always more than an army of furniture movers, the UWM suffused its mutual aid with political analysis, in leaflets and street corner orations “blam[ing] the profit-driven chaos of capitalism for the destitution facing millions,” wrote Eddie Stephenson on Red Flag, an Australian blog.

For neighborhood groups in the United States, mutual aid was not an end in itself either. The persistent rent strikes and eviction resistance, coupled with political agitation, pushed Congress to enact the Housing Act of 1937—the precursor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development—which provided loans to local agencies to build low-rent public housing. Activism also led to the passage of the Emergency Price Control Act of 1942, which established caps on allowable rents nationwide. While that law expired in 1947, some states and cities kept rent controls in place. Meanwhile, the federal government kept building public housing for low-income tenants—which was racially segregated until the Fair Housing Act of 1968. (In 1974 President Nixon placed a moratorium on public housing construction, and the feds got out of the building business for good.)

The collective response to the needs of the community strengthened existing collaborations and sparked new ones.

Mutual aid and legislative or electoral campaigns require different systems and skills—and both take resources. It’s not always easy to do them simultaneously. In 2024 Siembra paid a small army of canvassers, who, along with volunteers, knocked 125,000 voters’ doors for Kamala Harris. We know how that turned out. For Andrew Willis Garcés, who co-founded Siembra eight years ago, the Democrats’ fiasco brought up perennial questions about that tension. At the time it seemed obvious that Siembra had to put all hands, and a lot of dollars, on deck to defeat Trump. Yet “without more for thousands of paid canvassers to talk about beyond repeating the uninspiring message from the top of the ballot, Harris still lost,” he wrote in a self-critical post-election piece in In These Times.

Some organizations managed to balance the two. “In Los Angeles, where tenant organizers have aggressively worked to build public support for local and statewide policies to bring down the cost of rent,” wrote Garcés, “those organizers used their door-knocking muscle to win funds for homelessness prevention and help a tenants rights attorney unseat a sitting council member whom they saw as pro-landlord.” Siembra also had some electoral victories of their own. In nine of North Carolina’s ten most populous counties, voters replaced Republican sheriffs who were enthusiastically arresting immigrants and locking them in local jails with “people who are much more protective of public safety”—and the Constitution, Co-Director Nikki Marín Baena told me.

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A fascist society is one in which some people are deputized to do violence, and everyone else is forced to defend themselves. Those who have lived under an authoritarian regime know how it weakens collective self-defense. “Nothing binds people together more than complicity in the same crime,” wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam of life in Stalinist Russia. “The more people could be implicated and compromised, the more traitors, informers, and police spies there were, the greater would be the number of people supporting the regime and longing for it to last thousands of years.” When anyone can be summoned by the state to extract information, she continued, “people lose their social instincts, the ties between them weaken, everybody retires to his corner and keeps his mouth shut—which is a great boon to the authorities.”

In extorting media outlets that have reported on Trump’s crimes and law firms that have helped to prosecute him, the administration achieves one of the goals Mandelstam describes: turning perceived enemies into cowed collaborators. In demanding that universities name names of the foreign students who’ve engaged in protest and withdrawing cultural grants whose applicants used verboten words like “woman” and “inequity,” it shuts mouths. In eliminating every government agency and program that encourages cooperation or empathy, it advances the third, most pernicious, aim: to break social ties. 

If we are to have any hope of surviving the coming dark age, we need mutual aid—not just to keep people housed and fed, but to keep them connected.

It makes sense that immigrant communities, who are in the most drastic danger, have been the first to organize. They were ready anyway, having worked to keep each other safe for years of draconian immigration policy—during Obama’s, Biden’s, and Trump’s terms—before today’s cruel, spectacular assaults. Other existing mutual aid networks are girding against the Republicans’ next salvos. The feminist underground that has been distributing abortion pills into red states since the bans began is figuring out how to continue its work while protecting its members and the pregnant people they serve in the face of heightened surveillance and penalties. The activists know one thing: even if the Comstock Act is resurrected, they will not stop.

Still more mutual aid formations and institutions will need to be born, or reborn. The Department of Agriculture has canceled over $1 billion in funding for two programs that link local farms with food pantries and public school cafeterias. We need farmers’ cooperatives based in agrarian socialism. Daycare and afterschool programs are under the knife; Christian nationalism is creeping into curricula. Bring back the free school movement of the 1960s. Health and Human Services is closing the Administration for Community Living, which has helped frail elders and people with disabilities live at home, not in institutions. Because caregiving will be even more privatized than it is now (and we won’t have immigrants to do it cheap), the burdens will revert to the family, particularly women. What will family mutual aid look like? Communal, intergenerational housing, shared kitchens, child care shifts, leaving free time for creativity and leisure: let new forms of intimacy and interdependence supplant the patriarchal nuclear family religious fundamentalists and their elected officials have been laboring to reinvigorate for decades.

Mutual aid is not “a thousand points of light,” George H. W. Bush’s euphemism for replacing the public social safety net with charity. There is no substitute for the state, whose obligation is to redistribute the nation’s wealth for the greater good of the greatest number of people. But when the state is a malevolent kleptocracy, mutual aid—neighbors helping neighbors—starts to look like radical civil disobedience, less a thousand points of light than a brilliant beam shining toward a different world.

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Judith Levine

Judith Levine is a journalist, commentator, and author of five books, most recently The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (coauthored with Erica R. Meiners).