Mutual-Aid & Self-Help Groups

How Puerto Ricans are using their long experience of mutual aid to counter government austerity.

This conversation illustrated 4 of the many stories of what the work actually looks like on the ground.

Despite social distancing measures resulting from the coronavirus outbreak, people are forming grassroots groups to meet common needs and combat social isolation.

Mutual aid mobile apothecaries are taking off as a model for providing health services to people who may not have access otherwise.

Razeto starts with an analysis of two perennial sources of transformational energy: the “impoverished and untenable” situation of those who are marginalized and subordinate in the existing order, and the profound dissatisfaction of those better situated who nonetheless hope for a better society in which higher values and ideas are made real. Challenging the wide-spread notion of “system change,” the idea that “the existing social order – understood as a “system” – must be replaced by a different one: a new type of society,” Razeto critiques the focus on conquest of power, and the emphasis on politics as the “proper arena for the application of forces tending to the construction of a better society.”

In this chapter, Razeto introduces the first solidarity economy road, which starts with the self-organized economic activities of people living in poverty, on the margins of the dominant economy. After describing the reality of poverty and marginalization, Razeto defines the term “popular economy,” traces its structural causes, and explains its relation to solidarity economy.