A little more on self-organising and mutual aid. It's not a new invention, it has been the backbone of human development since we started to walk the earth. However we do need to refine it to suit the disaster that we seem to have created on this same earth we walked all those generations ago.
Communities across the planet are more and more turning to this human resource of mutual aid, experimenting, refining and developing as they grow. We can all learn from one and other, that's the basis of mutual aid, mutual co-operation.
The following extract is from an article taken from Open Democracy:
Dance festival as part of the month-long program, called “Celebration of
Life”: members of a Zapatista community are enacting life after 1994.
Signs say “Education,” “Health,” and “Collective Work.” | Photo: Anya
Briy
Read the full article HERE:As the COVID-19 pandemic has undermined healthcare systems and economies of even the most advanced nations, mutual networks and self-organizing efforts have sprung up across the world in a show of pandemic solidarity. With the police murder of George Floyd, the U.S. has seen further spread of self-organizing: from bond and mutual aid funds for protesters to citizen patrols in Minneapolis and a police-free autonomous zone in Seattle. As the first attempt to abolish police and replace it with community-based, transformative justice are underway in the U.S., we may want to look at the communities that have been experimenting with self-organization without recourse to the states that oppress or dispossess them, such as Rojava in North East Syria, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and Zapatistas in Chiapas. Zapatistas, in particular, have spent the last 26 years organizing their communities autonomously from the state across all spheres of life—from police and justice system to health care, economy and education. As we witness the limits of the imaginable being radically shifted, the Zapatista experience is more relevant than ever.
Thanks Loam for the link.
