"Mutual Aid in the Age of Fascism" The Boston Review

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By Judith Levine, April 10, 2025

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.”

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.

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