Millions are about to go hungry. We need to build power with them.
It's time to feed each other and organize for power at the same time
Starting Saturday, 42 million Americans will lose federal food subsidies. SNAP is about to expire, the Trump admin is refusing to use emergency funds, and a lot of people are about to get a lot hungrier. Federal workers are already overwhelming food banks, housing vouchers are at risk, and numerous other programs are running out of funds. For most people the government shutdown has had minimal impacts so far — that’s about to change.
It’s going to get ugly. A resolution to this shutdown is nowhere in sight, hiring is down, food prices are up, and now SNAP is set to expire. The broader economic picture is uncertain, but the Trump manufactured misery is clear. We’re about to enter an entirely avoidable period of misery for millions of people. And although history doesn’t repeat itself, it does rhyme.
The closest thing to what we’re about to see in terms of mass hunger and millions struggling may well be the Great Depression. And, although most of us know that FDR and World War II dragged this country out of that downturn, what we don’t know is how the poor and downtrodden and workers and the hungry and homeless organized like hell for their own survival, and to force Roosevelt and this country to take the radical action needed to alleviate suffering and turn the economy around.
In a beautiful piece for the Kairos Center, Noam Sandweiss-Back writes: “In the early months of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover was fond of saying that ‘prosperity is just around the corner.’ At the same time, millions were losing their jobs, facing utility shut offs and evictions, moving into tent encampments and shantytowns, and standing in bread lines that stretched for hours.” Sound familiar? Trump insists that we’re in a ‘Golden Age’ while simultaneously creating a completely avoidable catastrophe for tens of millions of people. The safety net, created largely as a response to the Great Depression, is being deliberately sabotaged and undercut, part of a long-term project by oligarchs to destroy everything the working class has ever won.
To understand how the poor, the abandoned working class, organized to save one another’s lives and create the long-term changes necessary to provide better conditions for themselves, I’ll quote Noam at length:
“Abandoned and left to fend for themselves from the scraps of a system of charity, many among the ranks of the poor took survival into their own hands. They marched in unprecedented numbers against hunger and unemployment, led daring wildcat strikes and other militant actions from industrial plants in the Midwest to tenant farms in the Delta, and created mass organizations like the Unemployed Councils, formed through the Communist Party. These multi-racial Councils developed in cities across the country around relief for unemployed workers, preventing or reversing thousands of evictions and gas and electricity shutoffs, among other activities. They worked locally to address their immediate, overflowing needs, but in the early years of the Great Depression they also became a political home for tens of thousands of poor people: central to the Councils’ vision was political education, leadership development, and larger forms of collective agitation and struggle.”
This is the history too often skipped over. The textbook telling of the Great Depression leaves out the organizing of the Communist Party, to no one’s surprise. And the broad brushstrokes rarely delve into wildcat strikes, communities stopping evictions, the self-organization of the working class. Our understanding of the Great Depression is incomplete without the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), for example. Prior to the 1930s, the AFL was the dominant union in much of the United States. There was a history of radical organizing from the IWW and others, but much of that had been forcibly stamped out during WWI. So when the Depression hit, the main union federation was unprepared. The AFL model promoted workplace peace, cooperation with the bosses, and excluded millions of less skilled workers.
The CIO did things differently, they organized entire industries from top to bottom, brining workers at every level into the union. When the Great Depression hit workers realized they had no choice but to unionize. If they didn’t their wages would be forced down, so even if they kept their jobs the bosses would still push them into destitution. So they organized at an incredible rate, with at least five million workers joining unions over the course of the Depression, and over 150,000 workers unionizing in a single month in some cases.
In 1934 alone 1.4 million workers went on strike. People built and exercised power in response to crisis, not just through unions but through the Unemployed Councils and protests and more. Thousands marched, farmers took militant action to prevent farms being bought out, people stopped sheriffs from evicting their neighbors. These actions were often taken in spite of, and outside, the law.
We’re now at a point where the government is not only uninterested in protecting us, but is actively causing the crises we face. That fact must be at the forefront of our thinking. In Noam’s piece he writes that people, “must protect themselves and their communities in the shadow of a government that has abandoned them in ways that strikingly echo the Hoover administration.” And he didn’t write that this week, or this year. His essay, “Beyond Mutual Aid: Toward the Poor Organizing the Poor” was written in 2020, at the beginning of the covid pandemic.
During that first Trump administration, during that previous crisis, we responded primarily with a massive push for mutual aid. People poured money and food into local mutual aid groups, and did incredible work to help one another survive. Groceries, covid tests, rent payments — mutual aid networks that were spun up overnight did incredible organizing, and saved lives. And, yet, it wasn’t enough. That is the tough reckoning we need to have.
Mutual aid is beautiful, and necessary. But one of the hardest assessments to make is acknowledging that something good is insufficient. Helping one another survive is good, and we’re about to need a lot more of it. At the same time this moment demands that we move beyond mutual aid. A foundation of survival is vital, but if we don’t also include long-term organizing and institution building in the equation, we aren’t digging ourselves out of this hole. We have to help each other eat and stay housed, of course, but we also have to orient ourselves upstream, toward that source of this deliberately created crisis.
Trump and his billionaire accomplices think we’re weak. They think they can crush everything the working class has ever won with minimal pushback, and we have to prove them wrong. I’m so tired of the takes saying “we’re cooked” and “it’s over,” because these memes can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Virtually nobody in the US, outside the super-rich, are accustomed to the feeling of power. The rest of us are used to politics being a spectator sport, where we’re always on the losing team. We’ve been conditioned toward passivity, at best toward charity — none of us have been conditioned to hold and wield power.
Well, almost none of us. What the ruling class knows, knows better than a lot of us, is that millions of people have started shifting. In the last decade in particular countless people have been moving left, and beyond just changing views we’ve begun to pick up the tools of organizing. Protest, one tool in our toolkit, has taught millions of people the feeling of power as we take over the streets. Mutual aid, particularly in 2020, introduced countless people to organizing. The labor movement has gained new popularity and massive strikes have erupted repeatedly over the last several years.
We have a long road ahead of us, but the American population isn’t where it used to be. We aren’t where we were ten or twenty years ago. Mutual aid, Palestine protests, leftist politics, labor and community organizing have steadily seeped into the consciousness of a larger and larger chunk of the population. Now, we have to bring it all together.
Our first instinct will be to feed people. And that’s a good start. We need to take care of everyone we can, but we also need to bring people into a movement oriented toward radical change. When covid hit in March 2020 and groups sprung up to care for people who were suddenly out of work suddenly hungry, a lot of good was done. But, in the scramble to give, we rarely built organizations for the long haul.
So as we try to feed and care for people in various capacities over the coming weeks, months, and years, we should remember what Dean Spade writes in his book on the topic, “Mutual aid is only one tactic in the social movement ecosystem. It operates alongside direct action, political education, and many other tactics.” Mutual aid is an important start, because it “helps us grow our movements and build our people power, because it brings people into coordinated action to change things right now,” but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
We need to feed people, and provide for one another, but we also need to bring people into organizing, into power. Mutual aid can bring people into this work in the most immediate way possible: it feeds those who need to be fed, clothes those who need clothing, and ideally meets a whole host of needs. And as we demonstrate that, through organizing, we can provide for one another, we can bring people deeper into the process of building power, into organizing to shift structures and systems so that there is no hunger and homelessness to address in the first place.
Perhaps no organization in US history exemplified the way we can meet people’s needs and simultaneously build power like the Black Panthers. The Panthers knew that kids in their communities weren’t getting breakfast, let alone a nutritious breakfast, at school. So in 1969 they launched their free breakfast program with 11 kids. By the end of that year they were feeding 20,000 children across the country. Not only were they providing what they called a “survival program” for the community, the Panthers breakfast program also “served as a site for political education. Children and their families were introduced to Black Panther Party ideologies, learning about empowerment, self-reliance, and community solidarity.” And this program was just one of the many BPP survival programs that fused meeting needs with building power.
It’s good to feed people, and it’s better to welcome them into organizing. Charity is easier than organizing, but it’s no substitute for power. Difficult moments like this are when people become willing to commit to organizing and radical action. Difficult moments like this are when people become willing to build the power we need. So as we care for one another as best we can, as we create new groups, and as existing organizations pivot to feeding the hungry, we also must welcome thousands and millions of people into the work of fighting fascism and building something new in this hollowed-out shell of a system we live under. Masses of people organized and mobilized, millions finding their agency and power, countless people collectively forcing the change we need: this is our way out. - JP
So very well written JP Hill, and an interesting history lesson regarding the Great Depression. It appears history is repeating itself, with gross wealth inequality, and people running the US government who are actively causing the societal harm and upheaval, and doing nothing to further the common good of all Americans.
Americans have been brainwashed over the last four to five decades that any kind of unionization or collaboration, even sharing amongst themselves is "Anti-American" - "Communist" and leads to terrible outcomes. That only the rugged individualism of Capitalism and the holy grail of corporate greed, can lead to a successful life.
But it turns out that after 40+ years of declining wages, declining living standards for the majority of working Americans, while at the same time year after year record profits for ever bigger corporations, and the super rich whom own these corporations (Amazon, Boeing, Facebook, Google, etc.) .. it turns out that this model of extreme greed at any cost, and extreme self-reliance has created a system where 40 million Americans (40% whom are children) now have found themselves relying on food stamps to just get by every day, while the same system is about to produce the first Trillionaire.
And now we're about to see even the food stamps taken away, deliberately ... like being in an abusive relationship that depends on continuing abuse - abuse of a nation founded on the myth of competition and greed, rather than collaboration and sharing.
Your examples and the words of Noam show how people could organise when in a crisis, may this still be the case now. It must be desperate for some, that is why mutual aid is so important now.