I’ve been looking through some US and EU labor data and I have started to wonder why don’t more of the working poor join local mutual aid groups instead of staying at their likely shitty jobs or relying on charities?
This is a study on the labour distribution in the US among the working poor
On table 4 it shows that there are about 5,812,000 people that are classified as working poor ( Its says number in thousands so I multiplied the number given by 1000) and that alot of those jobs are in essential services like making food or providing support to others.
Similar diversity is show in the EU as well
So if most of these people decided to stop working at their current job and instead bring that those skills to a mutual aid network wouldn’t they still get most of the resources they need because other specialists would be there to help them and also live a generally more happy life?
Also the reason why I am saying instead of charities is because charities become less effective the more people request from them because they have limited resources to share and also mainly supported by wealthy people that can unilaterally give and take away support.
Whilst mutual aid networks can take the diversity that more people joining the network gives them and use it to offer more services to other people in that community.
This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?
What you are proposing is that “poor people” should all band together and create a new separate society, which is basically communist. Like some sort of left-wing Sovereign Citizen movement.
One big problem with this concept is that you cannot create a new separate economics whilst living in wider society. You still need to live somewhere, and you will need to pay the landlord with money. You will need to pay the electricity bill with money. You will still need to use joint facilities like roads, and the State is not going to happily provide all that to you for free, they will be looking at your new little economy and working out exactly how to value it to send you a tax bill.
While you are dealing with all of these issues, you also have to deal with the people within the group. How are you running it and making sure it is fair? It takes a massive amount of work to manage something like this on even a small scale. So you will need some sort of tax on transactions so that the people putting the time in to running it can be covered. Who is actually going to join if everyone’s time is valued equally - it will be a great deal for people whose skills are not valued on wider society, but a bad one for anyone with more valuable skills. So you won’t end up with a wide skill set involved, and can’t cover the requirements to do everything needed. So for example if you found a farmer who wanted to provide all their produce through this scheme, you could not provide the resources they need to produce and transport the produce. There is a massive difference between “making food” (ie, working at McDonalds) and actually creating food.
Plus what happens when things go wrong? When the person you arranged to come over to help you with something falls and hurts themselves, or they do substandard work that damages your property? Is your mutual aid group providing some sort of insurance coverage? Do you have some sort of dispute resolution process to mediate problems?
Having a strong community that supports members and shares resources can definitely be a good thing, and help to improve the lives of everyone involved. But “quit your shitty job and create a mutual aid network” is not at all a viable path to prosperity (or even to survival).
i’ve met people and communities where people did exactly that. They, of course, start by “quitting their shitty jobs” and spending what they were able to put aside on a piece of land away from the gluttonous metropolises. They don’t cut all their ties with the society that’s around them, but they create a network that survives autonomously. They negotiate their “harmless” little space in the greater state controlled territory.
Oh, of course. Poor people just need to get enough money to own property and build everything required to create an autonomous society.
You have a wildly different definition of poverty to me.
it’s not my idea. Like i wrote, i’ve met some people in different places, different networks who did exactly that.