Does universal basic income actually work?: Mutual aid
Thirty days
March 15, 2020. The federal government told everyone to stay home. The check didn’t arrive until April 15.
In Jackson, Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson organized food distribution to 10,000 families in two weeks. In the South Bronx, community fridge organizers had lines around the block — they fed everyone, no application, no caseworker. In Oakland, thirty refrigerators stocked by anonymous donors, available to anyone, twenty-four hours a day.
Nobody filled out a form. Nobody proved they deserved to eat.
The UBI advocates want the government to send a check. The conditional pragmatists want the government to send a check with strings. The work-identity defenders want the government to create jobs. Every proposal begins and ends with the state. We are not anti-government. We are anti-monopoly — a conversation that cannot conceive of social provision outside the state has a single point of failure.
Mutual aid is not charity. Charity flows down. Mutual aid flows laterally — among people who all lack something and pool what they have. The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program fed 20,000 children daily. Rotating savings clubs — tandas, susus — function as banks without licenses. Community land trusts in Burlington and Houston keep housing affordable by removing it from the speculative market. Mondragón employs 80,000 worker-owners. Time banks exchange labor without money.
Linux, Wikipedia, the open-source ecosystem — global infrastructure built by volunteers told it was impossible until it ran under half the servers on earth. The question is not whether mutual aid scales. The question is whether the people designing the next safety net are looking.
Where we concede ground: The organizers who ran fridges during COVID — many are gone now. Burned out. Voluntarism has a sustainability problem.
What would change our mind: A federal UBI running ten years during which mutual aid networks and civic participation strengthened rather than atrophied.
Read the full synthesis: Does universal basic income actually work?