This is a conversation with Ayman Makarem. He’s a Lebanon-based writer and filmmaker who recently wrote essays on mutual aid in Lebanon for The Public Source.
- Beyond Charity: Our Critical Need for Mutual Aid – Part 1
- Beyond Charity: Our Critical Need for Mutual Aid – Part 2
One of the themes of The Fire These Times is to promote mutual aid for the 21st century so I was really looking forward to speaking with Ayman about this. In addition to reading his essay, this has been a topic that we’ve been discussing since Lebanon’s October 2019 uprising.
We both found that there were structures that were lacking within revolutionary settings in Lebanon that could allow for a much longer-lasting movement, and the same could be said for most of the rest of the world. Mutual Aid is simply voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit. Most of us already practice it with family, friends and/or our communities without really feeling the need to label it anyway.
The problem starts with the fact that Mutual Aid is seen as something that arises out of a state of exception. For example, as we go through an ongoing pandemic more people everywhere around the world have been reported to be willing to adopt ‘exceptional’ societal measures such as a guaranteed temporary monthly income, temporarily canceling rent or forgiving debt, depending on the country and situation.
But what those of us arguing for Mutual Aid argue for is that we shouldn’t need a state of exception to think of ways to build a fairer society, and we obviously believe that Mutual Aid is one way of doing that.
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Transcript prepared by Yusra Bitar, Thomas Cugini, and Antidote Zine:
We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people under siege, and for three, four, five years. What amazed me when I discovered these local councils in Syria is it proved the strength of these forms of organizing. Under the most utterly dire circumstances, structures like these can actually work.
Ayman Makarem: My name is Ayman Marakem. I am a Lebanese writer, filmmaker, and researcher. I’ve been thinking about radical politics for a while now, but especially since October 17, and I have really been struggling, and doing quite a bit of research, to try and find practical solutions to the problems we see in front of us, that address both the political and material.
Elia J. Ayoub: This will be what I hope to be the first of many episodes on mutual aid in the context of Lebanon. And the idea really is to give a general overview of what mutual aid is and what it can look like. What are some of its differences with charity, for example, or philanthropy? But the reason why I personally am interested in a mutual aid is that I feel it’s one of those things that is intuitive to most people. If you don’t call it by name and just say stuff like, We should live in a society that’s fair and where people are helping each other out, most people tend to be on board already. There is no real name, no ism.
So can you tell us a bit about what has interested you in mutual aid?
AM: You hit on quite a few things. First, it’s born out of necessity. Especially now in Lebanon, we see that there is dire need for direct aid and assistance. We talk about these grand ideals that we have, and the society we want to live in—there are people who are starving or unable to pay rent. What I really love about mutual aid and what gets me so excited about it is that it does aid in a way that doesn’t forego the political or the revolution.
It’s very important to frame this in relation or in opposition to charity, partly because most people know what charity is, and are familiar with the dynamics of charity. But also because in comparison they both reveal the ideological roots or ideological presuppositions involved. Mutual aid is a system of organizing around aid; it seeks to build cooperative communities that meet each other people’s essential needs. Charity is also an organizational structure built around aid, but it’s a very top-down organizational structure, and it’s very transactional.
I like to use the example of food distribution: if charity is handing out food, mutual aid is more akin to creating a communal kitchen (something like Foods Not Bombs, which is a global network). It’s a structure where people would acquire food from local producers—I imagine a khodarji here; a grocer has produce that he’s going to throw away (it’s not yet rotten, but it’s no good to sell)—you collect that food, put into this kitchen and process it, cook it, and distribute it. What this includes is not just the more sustainable grassroots structure, but it also breaks down the barriers that charity has of I am the giver and you are the givee or I am the helper you are the helpee. You can imagine that these communal kitchens, in a lot of cases, are run by the people who also use it. It has created a naturally non-hierarchical structure (though it sometimes does have hierarchies).
But it’s a sort of paradigm shift, it’s a change of thinking. It’s not, I have a lot of money and you don’t, so I’m just gonna give you a bit. It exposes the ideological roots, betrays ideological presuppositions. In the case of charity, you get the sense that there’s not really much analysis as to why poor people are poor or hungry people are hungry. They just are; it’s almost a fact of nature, a fact of life. These are victims of circumstance, it’s a tragedy, haram, mazloumeen. But that kind of only goes so far. So charity kind of supplements capitalism, because it doesn’t aim at its root structures. It supplements, and in some cases perpetuates, capitalism because it doesn’t really address the root causes. It basically functions as a band-aid. Arundhati Roy created a term for this: the “NGOization” of resistance.
Mutual aid stands in opposition of this, by aiming at the grassroots level, by organizing non-hierarchically. It aims to empower communities and change their root circumstances. That community kitchen approaches the problem at its core. These people aren’t then reliant. It’s not a transaction and then you go away feeling good about yourself. It’s a long lasting community that ultimately aims for sustainability, autonomy, and cooperation.
EA: There are two things that got me into mutual aid. One was the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in the United States, and the other one was the early days of the Syrian revolution. The hurricane Katrina story debunked the idea that when disaster hits—it’s a common movie trope: something bad happens in the world and then it’s dog eat dog, everyone’s going to try and kill one another, start looting everything, and people stop thinking about their neighbors. But what we actually see in many cases, like in the case of hurricane Katrina, is that people actually come together. As you said, mutual aid is born out of necessity.
We saw soup kitchens, of course, but we also saw disaster relief that was functioning on a mutual aid basis. There were big charities that came in as well, and while many who work in these charities and volunteer for them are good people, they only go so far. So the people involved in mutual aid—usually anarchists and people hovering around that kind of politics, and people who don’t define themselves as anything as well—come with an additional critique.
It’s not a critique like they stand at the door of a charity and yell at them. It’s more of a critique through action. Through their actions, they show the limits of charity. If you have enough resources to create a soup kitchen, why that barrier between those who are giving and those who are receiving? You can also create something that’s more communal.
In the case of Syria, it’s more the local councils. I’ll let you talk about this a bit more, but with the local councils and coordination committees in the early days of the 2011 uprising and revolution, it was also this necessity. The state withdrew from certain parts of Syria (was either forced out or tactically withdrew), and that obviously created necessity: Either we organize ourselves and find a way to create an alternative to the state, or we starve. It was really that simple, that basic. Obviously people opted for the former, as one can imagine. They did so through forming what ended up being called the local councils. It was democratic to a certain extent—some local councils were more democratic than others; some had a religious undertone or overtone and others not so much.
So with that in mind, can you talk a bit about some of these contemporary examples of mutual aid that have inspired you personally?
AM: Yeah. I’m honestly kind of ashamed that I didn’t know about these local councils and the grassroots movements in Syria until quite late, only a few years ago when most of them had been destroyed or co-opted. When I became interested in mutual aid: it’s hard to pinpoint a specific time, but I’ve always generally been very interested in the daily life of the superstructures we live under. It’s very important to pay attention to capitalist exploitation at the superstructure level of Jeff Bezos and Exxonmobil, but also how we interact with one another: me going to the grocer, how I live my life. That was articulated to me brilliantly by Omar Aziz. There was a sentence in one of his essays that exemplified this perfectly; he says these councils would be where the revolution meets everyday life.
EA: Omar Aziz, for those who don’t know, was a Syrian anarchist thinker.
AM: Exactly. A lot of these movements are grassroots and born from the communities obviously, but the concept of local councils was a kind of brainchild of his. The local councils, and all the organizing those involved in Syrian cities and towns—in 2011; in 2015; it still sort of exists—when those really became clear in my head, it was after I started asking myself, How are these cities surviving under siege? Siege is such a totalizing event. There’s nothing coming in or going out. There are underground passages here and there, but we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, and for three, four, five years under siege. What amazed me when I discovered these local councils is it proved the strength of some of these forms of organizing. Under the most utterly dire circumstances that human beings can be under, that communities can be under, structures like these can actually work.
I’ve arrived at mutual aid and anarchism in general—In 2008 I was a liberal; I loved Barack Obama and everything. And from 2011 to around 2014, I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was a bit of an obnoxious leftist (though I wouldn’t say tankie). I don’t know when it really started to happen, but I started to move away from these things and tried to find a third way (and not a neoliberal third way). I still have these leftist tendencies but I don’t agree with some manifestations of the state, so I gravitated towards mutual aid. It is so basic.
I’ll go into some examples, but for me, mutual aid is what you do with friends, with family—but it’s also what communities do. A story that I often tell is about my uncle: whenever I’m in my village in the mountains, and he’s there, every single time, at least one person shows up, sees his car, goes up to him and asks him, Hey, I’ve got this thing. My elbow, or, My wife has this problem. And he gives them advice. He doesn’t prescribe them anything because I guess that’s kind of illegal, but he’s got this sense of community.
We have a natural understanding that what’s good for the community is good for the individual, it’s good for all of us. I see a lot of the superstructures that exist today covering and clamping down on those, and destroying those natural bonds that have taken hundreds of thousands of years to form. Mutual aid has that historical depth. You wanted me to talk about contemporary examples and I immediately jumped to the historic!
But in thinking about how fundamental mutual aid is, one of the early thinkers of mutual aid is a man named Peter Kropotkin, who is a Russian anarchist in the late nineteenth century. And even though there were actual mutual aid societies that preceded him formalizing it in these words, he came to the idea of mutual aid as a factor in evolution. He was a zoologist as well as an anarchist as well as a prince. But what he observed was that despite the mainstream notion that evolution is a process of domination of competition, survival of the fittest, in fact, there was quite a lot of cooperation that he saw. You can see it every day, not just in society, but also amongst animals: there’s a lot of symbiotic relationships among animals. Pack animals hunt together, not because then the strongest of them will take the animal and eat alone, but because it’s good for the majority, for the collective.
So we can see that mutual aid is a fundamental thing. It’s almost kind of boring, kind of redundant. Like you said at the beginning: helping each other and cooperation sound like natural phenomena that don’t need to be formalized.
EA: They way I think about mutual aid, there are two different dimensions to it. If we just say, Well, we need to help each other, most people just agree with that statement, it’s a very basic statement. It’s kind of like an instinct, because we are extremely social creatures, and indeed one of the struggles that we’re having right now with the pandemic is that the basic social instinct that we have has been ruptured due to the social distancing.
So, the two dimensions that I mentioned. One is: the economy actually has four sides to it. It’s not just the binary of the private market on the one hand, and on the other, the public, and the public equals the state. Usually the story is, if you’re a leftist, then you want more of the public/state, and if you’re a right-winger, you want more of the market/private property. The four-sided approach that I’m proposing is better (though I did not come up with this) is that yes, you have these two–these are a fact of life in the current society we live in; and these two do exist. But you also have the household/family (I say household to be more progressive about it, because it doesn’t have to be just family in the traditional sense, obviously), and then you have the commons.
The household is very important. It’s gendered in most societies in the world. Domestic work is not counted as labor, or as part of the market or of the public, for that matter. It’s not taxed obviously, it’s not like a mom who works at home is paid an hourly wage or anything like that. And the fourth dimension is the commons: this means everything that can be commonly shared. Mutual aid addresses the latter two, the household and the commons. The commons is public parks, a forest that is not managed, everything in between and beyond—but the household is very important because we already practice mutual aid in most households. It’s a relationship between parents and children. I think of the way my sister and I interact towards one another. It’s not a transactional thing, it’s much more fluid. And this fluidity is what mutual aid is about. It’s about not having to maintain a debt when it’s a friend. There are these “exceptions” in real life: if it’s a friend, you don’t necessarily keep tabs on how much that friend owes you.
The second dimension is something called “doughnut economics.” The idea is that there should be a lower limit and an upper limit to our economies. The lower limit is everything related to social safety nets, like homelessness, poverty, hunger, water, safety—wi-fi internet actually is included these days as well. It’s anything that people need to stay afloat; what people need in life to not be drowning in debt or to not find themselves on the street. The upper limit is planetary limits: climate change, the ozone layer, soil degradation, ocean acidification; we also need obviously to live in a healthy environment, on a healthy planet.
The idea of doughnut economics is just saying, Let us at least agree that there should be this lower limit and upper limit, and then we can have a discussion on how to organize societies better. For me, that is the spirit of mutual aid. Because what it says is you have to have social safety nets for people so that you no longer have these extremes. You’re eradicate these extremes, like extreme poverty. And then you have to have these upper limits for basic survival, so that future generations can participate in our world in the same way that we supposedly want to. Mutual aid comes in between those two.
Now, in doughnut economics, [Kate Raworth] doesn’t frame it in the way of mutual aid; one might argue it’s a more social democratic or democratic socialist take on things. It will always have its limits. But the general idea is that we need to think about our world beyond just unfettered growth, More is Better, We organize our lives around GDP and only think about the national debt. The idea is that we need to upend that logic to have a better logic, a more sustainable logic—a more mutual-aid-oriented logic, a friendlier logic, to use a more basic term.
In the context of Lebanon, with the popular uprising that we’ve been seeing since October, one of the things that it highlighted for me is how little prepared we are to deal with emergencies. We are not well prepared for it, in my opinion. Up until now, outside of small circles, we haven’t really thought of our societies as being able to be built around—to actually function on—principles like mutual aid. We only think about mutual aid when it comes out of a state of necessity. Okay, now we’re in a state of emergency, a state of exception, this is not a normal way of doing things, so now we can allow ourselves to be more decent to one another.
It’s a bit surreal when we put it in these term, but this is what we’ve been seeing in the case of the pandemic. In all of the polls that I’ve been reading—in the UK, Spain, Mexico, Thailand, and other places—people have shifted and become more progressive about things, saying things like People should be supported, they shouldn’t lose their jobs, they should have some basic security, basic safety nets, they shouldn’t be criminalized if they cannot pay for healthcare, healthcare should be free. People are more likely to accept these things because now we’re in a state of exception. My frustration with all of this is: why do we only think about how to be more decent towards one another when we get to a point where we have no other choice?
AM: It is quite upsetting, because it feels like these shifts could have/should have happened earlier, and that now that it’s become a necessity, it’s harder to do them. I see this in a lot of different cases. The big awakening after Trump was elected: Oh, now we must form this new movement! Surely there was enough room under the Democrats that you could have formed these things and not have had to deal with the inanities that are coming out of the White House since Trump was elected.
It is a paradox, and I find it is very frustrating. I agree with you that the initial burst of the October revolution exposed our unprepared-ness, especially us that are more politically engaged. A lot of people talk about the “WhatsApp tax” being the initial trigger, and just in terms of the timing, it explicitly was. But the fires in Chouf, the wildfires that happened only two days earlier, exposed the exact same unpreparedness. What are we living? What kind of state is this? There are thousands and thousands of trees and acres just burning to the ground. I find it very poetic that the government, that the state had nothing to deal with it. There are reports that they were using riot water cannons to put out the fires. That’s genius, because it exposes that the state has really reduced its functions to just protecting private property.
But interesting there as well: there was a Palestinian camp nearby where their firefighters came out and helped; there was crowdfunding that within a day or two raised about a hundred thousand dollars. And I really saw that energy build into October 17. It seemed like, This is fucked, and we need to work together to deal with it.
EA: The timing was phenomenal, because it was this build up of energy and anger, both these things at the same time: the catastrophic failure of the government on one side, and the fact that people actually stepped up. For listeners who don’t know: the reason these fires were even put out was a combination of luck (because it started raining after two days), and the fact that some foreign governments (Greece, Cyprus, Jordan) donated a few planes, and the fact that volunteers stepped up to help firefighters. The Palestinian firefighters were one example; then people living in the area just come out and try to extinguish the fires. That is mutual aid.
That’s the thing: I don’t need to call it anything else! Here’s what people did: There’s a forest burning down and we need to stop the forest from burning down, so that’s it. When something as basic as that happens, you don’t think, What is the most cost-effective way of extinguishing the forest fire? What is the most market-friendly way of putting out the fires? These are not the calculations that we make.
AM: When this happened, around October 20, I tried writing a poem. I’m a terrible poet, I don’t do it. I’ll just stick to articles and screenwriting. But there was such a poetic symbolism to the fires, and to the waters that put out the fire, and then there are masses of people coming out into the streets, representing that same rain, that will put out the fires in the Grand Serail—whatever, it was a terrible poem. But the poetry still exists, and I’ve heard Naomi Klein use similar imagery, of fires burning: two different fires, the fire of climate change as well as this competing fire, which is global grassroots protest movements.
Yes, there’s this fire, climate change. I get panic attacks when I think about it—Holy fuck, the world is on fire!—Brazil, the Amazon, Australia—We have to do something. There is that urgency, that necessity, it’s the most basic, fundamental thing. And this is where Kropotkin really comes in: it’s a matter of survival of the species. That’s why I am very skeptical of capitalist solutions, because the problem is competition, the problem is thinking about things in terms of growth.
We cannot think about how to put out the fires that are literally destroying the world by thinking, Well, how can we make it profitable? Mutual aid services a new type of economics that disagrees with growth. We can’t have infinite growth with finite means and finite resources. It’s just paradoxical. So mutual aid really does redefine economics. What is economics? We’re so wrapped up in GDP and all these things—but it’s how we relate to one another and our resources, and how we actually provide for another and go about our relations, how do we deal with one other?
Mutual aid brings it back to the core: do we want to treat each other as competition, with skepticism? What have you done for me lately? Or is it more about, I care about you because you’re my neighbor, or my friend. I love my friends, I want the best for them. If they come to me asking me for help, I don’t ask them, What can you do for me? Because there’s reciprocity. I really like the example that David Graeber brings up. He brings up an anecdote of an anthropologist going to Madagascar, and the core of the story is that people start giving her gifts. She is inundated with gifts left and right, and she has no idea what to do about this. She’s happy, but she doesn’t know what’s going until someone comes up to and breaks it to her:
Listen, I’ll let you off the hook and tell you what’s going on. No one will tell you, but in giving you gifts, these people are expecting you to give something back—but it’s essential that you give them something of less or greater value! If you give them something of equal value, you’re telling them you want nothing to do with them, but if it has lesser or greater value, you’re perpetuating the cycle of social indebtedness and that implies you want to continue the relationship.
I love the story, because I do this. I realize I do this with my friends. Someone invites me to dinner and I want to invite them to dinner, and back and forth. I’ll let you pay this time, but next time it’s on me. Aside from capitalism, aside from how we’re used to living our lives nowadays under all these oppressive systems, that’s still at the core of it. And it reminds me of the village, reminds me of that mutual reciprocity: I love my neighbor, therefore I want the best for them.
Mutual aid does really service new thinking in economics, and new ways of relating to one another outside of competition.
EA: And the key thing about Next time is on me is that the “next time” is not defined. That’s what differentiates it from taking out a loan from a bank: at the end of the day, you have to pay back the loan! And usually with interest.
AM: He uses the example to counter the myth of bartering. He says it doesn’t make any sense. If you pay for my dinner and it’s $25, then I have to buy you literally a $25 shawarma? It’s really more vague than that. As the feelings of love and reciprocity are really vague.
EA: The sentiment that you and I are trying to get across here is that everyone already practices mutual aid on a day-to-day basis with their friends and family, sometimes with their neighbors, if they’re close or their neighbors. We see this.
I will say something that might sound weird at first, but work with me here. I work in cultural studies, so I look at media: TVs series, movies, books—cultural productions. When we feel this homey feeling about villages in TV series like Sex Education, the thing about that village is that it is both in a lovely environment (it’s a beautiful place, forests everywhere, people are biking everywhere), and it’s also a multi-cultural environment: it’s almost an impossible place, because in most countries it’s usually urban areas where there is higher diversity.
But the reason I get this cozy feeling, the reason we’re so attracted to TV series like this, no matter how problematic they are, is that you get to know these people. It’s called parasocial relationships. You end up relating to this fictional character, as though you have a relationship with them. But more importantly, you sort of live through them. This can obviously reinforce loneliness, if the ideal situation you’re seeing on screen isn’t reflected in real life, but more often than not, what you’re craving is just that human interaction. What you’re craving is to live in a second floor apartment where you can go down, walk a bit, go to the cafe, the local grocer, people know each other, if not by name at least they would say hi every now and then—this kind of familiarity. Mutual aid for me is that sentiment—the coziness, the community feeling—but put in practice on a wider scale.
So the idea isn’t just We should just have a small community where people are nice to one another, and outside this community it’s still a capitalistic mindset. The details are negotiable—I don’t have the perfect “economic model.” I’m not telling you, This is how our resources should be organized. But instead of the general idea being, We need to balance the debt, we need to make sure that our credit is good, we need to make sure we keep increasing GDP, no matter the income inequality, no matter the suffering—instead of all that, you flip the base. The basic assumptions that we have are changed, and then we can talk.
So that is what appeals to me when it comes to mutual aid. But I wanted to ask you, have you found examples in Lebanon where mutual aid is already being practiced, even if it’s not called that, or where you feel mutual aid would be welcomed?
AM: Of course. I’ve found numerous examples. None of them really use the term mutual aid. I find that the word tadamon or solidarity is used much more, and basically describes the same thing. But I found very few examples pre-thawra, pre-revolution. Before the revolution, most of those holes were either filled by charities and NGOS or by the sectarian clientelist system—which obviously has numerous problems. A lot of the mutual aid networks we’ve seen developing stand in opposition to them, because the clientelist systems are quite reactionary and anti-revolution. Whereas these networks are supportive of the overthrow of the sectarian system.
The first one I noticed, I found really beautiful. It’s was at this moment where we’re out on the streets together, and I was seeing all these people that I’ve seen scattered over the city over the last few years all coming together, and also meeting new people. It’s a beautiful feeling of community. So the first aid networks that I noticed were the food distribution networks in Azarieh in Martyr’s Square. There was Matbakh el-Balad (Kitchen of the Country); it was a place where you could volunteer, giving food products, giving resources. They would just cook food en masse, and it was really, really tasty. The guy runs a very good restaurant. But it adhered fundamentally to the principles of mutual aid, because of where it is situated.
Fair enough, it didn’t aim to create a community, but the community was already forming in the squares and the streets. So if we describe mutual aid as a process by which revolution meets aid, and necessity means helping one another survive so that we can push back further against these oppressive systems, then literally having a stand in a revolutionary square, and distributing food, keeps people in the squares. You can’t really have a revolution if people get hungry and need to go and work and get food. So it’s immediately political by its geographical position. So there I saw an example of mutual aid. And they didn’t take anything—they took donations if you wanted, but it was open for anybody.
And there were a lot of people in the squares doing something similar. Me and my friends did something similar a few times: we just brought some food and handed it out. You could tell there are some people who are reliant on this food, and there are other people who aren’t—and one thing I found very beautiful was how many people wanted to give money—Thank you for doing this—and we’re telling them no.
Aside from that, we’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding on Facebook. This is also not aiming towards community building, but this is separate from charity insofar as it centers people’s specific needs, as opposed to just handing out random amounts of food and resources.
There are a few other things, happening mostly in the North, which really excite me, because these are very new, as far as I’m aware, in Lebanon. There is an organization called “7arakit 7aba’,” which translates to the Basil Movement. It’s a cooperative agricultural movement that explicitly talks about returning to the land. It originally started with this guy, Murad Ayyash, who had this idea and posted on Facebook: I want to start farming and create a cooperative agriculture system, so if anyone has any land, or any resources, hit me up. It gained quite a bit of traction, first of all because of that thing we were talking about earlier where people were realizing that The state isn’t gonna help us; the sectarian clientelistic system is incredibly corrupt and we’re having this revolution to overthrow it. And matched with that there is also a lot of unused land in Lebanon.
So it’s been a few months, and I check up on them, and they’re doing well. They’re farming, and it has educational purposes as well. In Se7it el-Nour in Tripoli, they’ve held numerous meetings where they talk about cooperative agriculture and sustainability. They’re explicitly organic and talk about the same things we’re talking about: sustainability and relating to one another. That’s something else that’s very interesting about things like this, as opposed to charity. I don’t want to use the word dignity, but there’s something about handing food out versus allowing people to work and feed themselves and to be part of a community; there is more of a sense of belonging, and it’s empowering.
And there are other things happening in the North. It’s very strange, but the North is usually a bit neglected, politically. That may be one of the reasons why, but somewhere in Koura, a guy called Alaa’ Farhat is also working in cooperative agriculture. He’s developed a development council, and he created a mini-ministry to deal with all the circles around agriculture: education around it, the acquiring of goods. He’s creating a small seed bank. Especially in a country with such fertile land, I find these cooperative agriculture movements quite interesting.
There are also a few examples of rooftop farming, of urban agriculture, which is something that I’m very excited about, because we have so much sun, we have so many resources. I’ve heard of one in a Palestinian camp, I believe in Bourj El-Barajneh. You linked me to one today in Furn El-Chebbak.
And along with that—this is something I really want to mention because it’s a slightly different way of seeing mutual aid, since we’re talking about relating to another. There’s a Facebook group called Izraa’ (wihch means farm, the verb). It’s a community of around 20,000 people explicitly opened up by a few engineers who want to disseminate what they describe is best practices in farming organic farming. It functions as a community of people who are all interested in agriculture—urban agriculture, large farms—and it serves such an educational purpose, in terms of cooperation and helping each other out and talking to each other.
I have a little urban garden growing on my balcony, and I’ve sent dozens of photos. I have these tomato plants that the flowers dropped, and I was heartbroken, but ten minutes later a person says, Oh, these are fine. You can actually pinch these off and the next ones grow better. Or, you’re watering too much, it needs this nitrate. Because there’s quite a lot to know actually! That sort of mutual sharing of information and education, matched with the need for agriculture, and (eventually we’re going to see this much more in Lebanon) a need for food security, this is why it’s one of my new favorite things, Izraa’. It’s so supportive.
EA: Mutual aid is one of those topics that I know we can just go on for hours and hours, and tell people it is important. But what we’re saying is that this is already happening around you. These things are already happening. We’re not inventing anything new, it’s been happening for centuries. We’re just arguing for it; we want more of this and not less of this. We need to turn how we interact with one another within a state of exception—like in the case of a pandemic, people are more generous, their priorities are better, it’s no longer about just the “survival of the fittest”—into something that is more general. We don’t actually need to have a pandemic for people to start thinking that we need to be better towards one another and have a better society.
Is there anything that you want to conclude on?
AM: This is one of those topics that I go on for hours about, and I get so worked up that I can hardly stop. I’ve got a lot that I could continue, but that may be for another conversation.
EA: This is going to be the first of many. Thank you a lot for your time.
AM: Thank you, I had a lot of fun with this.
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