Panthers and pandemic prove limitations of dual power strategies- pushing for reform to universal state services is a better strategy

(Joanna Wuest holds the Fund for Reunion–Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in LGBT Studies and is a lecturer at Princeton University.https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mutual-aid-pandemic-covid/ , 12-16)

But scale wasn’t their only goal. Unlike organizers of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin—who conjoined labor, civil rights, and demands for a federal minimum wage and jobs program—the Panthers were interested in building dual power institutions that would one day compete with the state. As party member Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin explained, their aim was to bypass the state by building “our communities into dual power communes, from which we can wage a protracted struggle with capitalism and its agents.” But as the Panthers’ influence waned, an increasing number of self-styled community leaders became integrated into a political and entrepreneurial elite that largely neglected policies that would materially benefit the working-class Black population. Some would even come to assist a revanchist capitalist class in pillaging the welfare state and breaking the back of labor. There is a striking parallel between these developments and the trajectory of 19th century ethnically organized mutual aid outfits and related small-business ventures, which just as often evolved into capitalist enterprises and municipal political machines as they did vehicles for reform. And while a handful of those groups paved the way for strong unions and welfare policies, Black power came onto the scene at a time when the American left was enervated and there were few similar opportunities for egalitarian influence. A left-wing politics of mutual aid and self-care gave way to accommodation and brokerage. By the late 20th century, liberals pushed for a more limited deployment of the state, inaugurating the practice of leasing out state functions to private entities like nonprofits. By the late 1970s, an all-out assault on labor and the welfare state began to roll back 20th-century workers’ wins. As the United States went into lockdown last spring, the country entered a pandemic-induced recession with scant social protections. Faced with a hollowed-out welfare state and inadequate relief from the federal government’s initial stimulus, Americans had no choice but to rely on the generosity of their neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Since March, people from weekend volunteers to full-time anarchists have done extraordinary things to distribute food staples and provide shelter for those who found themselves hungry and homeless. Still, given that nearly a quarter of American households with children are carrying rental debt and that a permanent exodus of the poor and working class from major urban hubs is underway, such efforts are confined mainly to the margins. Weathering the current crisis requires nurturing useful hope while avoiding palliative delusions. That means ditching our magical thinking about the sustainability of those mass mobilizations of goodwill that make the nightly news and pepper the pages of left-wing periodicals (both of which neglect the fact that charitable giving actually plummets during recessions). It also means recognizing that crises are excellent opportunities for revanchist right-wing forces to further raze state institutions and slam the lid on cries for justice. When labor-left movements were strong and could afford to go on the offense, the Great Depression created an opening for reform. If there is a lesson from mutual aid’s role in these past triumphs, it is that such community work was subordinated to the tasks of invigorating trade unions and pushing the state to enact universal programs. Kropotkin was not wrong about our natural inclination to cooperate. But how we organize and nurture that cooperative instinct is crucial. A crisis can bring us together to rebuild durable structures for the collective good. It can also exacerbate the dog-eat-dog mentality that neoliberalism has cultivated for decades. Our country is coming to resemble a long-sought libertarian fantasy, with only atomized acts of compassion for those left out. We would do well to guard against this despotic individualism—the natural condition of the social without the state—and to be sober about what spurred this renaissance of mutual aid and what it portends.