Feminist activists in recent years have redefined the meaning of justice to more heavily include the principle of simply caring for your fellow human being. A major driving force within social justice movements today is the desire to create a culture of care—that is, where care is simultaneously the inspiration and expected goal for both the people benefiting from the movement and working within the movement itself. These very ideas are simply radical, as creating a culture of care is both antithetical to and a reaction against capitalism, which promotes competition and individualism over collaboration and collectivism. Knowing this, feminist scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, “How can we organize ourselves intentionally to combat the imbedded isolation of late capitalism?” (Gumbs 51). In Undrowned, Gumbs advocates for a way of living that is reminiscent of the group-mentalities of schools of dolphins, where “we could care for each other and move together” (Gumbs 56). But how can we bring these schools—these cultures of care—out of the ocean and into our movements and societies? Feminist scholars and activists have already answered this question. In particular, a feminist desire to create cultures of care has led to a reexamination of group and inner-movement weorking dynamics, leading to an emphasis on collective decision making and a rejection of “canclling” people within movements, as well as the rise in the creation and use of mutual aid networks. All of these processes ultimately seek to address the failings of capitalism on our very nature as people.
 

One way to conceptualize the dynamics of movements is to think about them in terms of a
culture. Scholar Dean Spade defines “group culture” as the various social signals used within a group or movement, such as how meetings run and how collaboration is facilitated. Group cultures, in many ways, function similarly to societies, which have their own sets of rules and social signals. However, these foundational aspects of group cultures are inevitably influenced by “the ingrained behaviors and responses of the founders” as well as the very society that we live in (Spade 71). There are many things that can influence what these ingrained behaviors are, and, notably, they cannot always be controlled, since, “We do not get to consent to the conditions we live under” (Spade 75). Under capitalism—our current “conditions”—the door has been left wide open for many dangerous cultures and practices to make their way into our movements. For Spade, this takes the form of not knowing how to make decisions as a group without hierarchy—that is, a feature of systems of leadership and decision-making where certain people’s roles and opinions are deemed more important than others—and for feminist scholar and movement facilitator adrienne maree brown this looks like a rise in paranoia and competition within movements that take the form of rampant “cancelling” of people working inside movements.

In her pamphlet We Will Not Cancel Us, adrienne maree brown writes that strict notions of right and wrong, competition, and punishment are alive and festering in today’s social justice movements. She asks, “Why do our movements more and more often feel like we are moving with sharp teeth against ourselves? And what is at stake because of that pattern, that feeling?” (brown 44). Specifically, she writes about the tendencies of movements to allow and encourage the unmediated callouts of individuals and organizations who have caused harm, from something as small as an interpersonal conflict to offensive language used to poorly made organizational decisions. The problem that brown finds with what she calls the “feeding frenzy” of cancelling these people for their behaviors is that it does not allow them to learn from their wrong-doings, never supposing that an act of harm could be a mistake or that a person is capable of growth (brown 43). Cancelling someone, according to brown, ultimately ostracizes a person from their activist community and does not promote the practice of restorative justice—that is, a culture of care where wrongs may be righted—that she would expect of a movement, where everyone is working for collective change and liberation of some kind. brown attributes cancel culture as a whole to the desire to be perceived as good and not bad, arguing that today’s activists want to be able to say, “We are better than... someone” (brown 51). This continuous fight to be better than someone who has done harmful things, to assert one’s own goodness in order to bring this person down, is ultimately a form of competition, a core principle of capitalism.
 

It is clear to both Spade and brown that today’s activists and movements have not been taught how to act as a collective. Collective action and decision-making is broadly not allowed in a capitalist society—or at the very least, not encouraged—which instead promotes the advancement of the individual. On this topic, Spade writes, “We are only practiced at being allowed to make decisions as individual consumers, and rarely get practice making truly collective decisions” (Spade 75). brown agrees with Spade adding that it seems clear that today’s movements simply do not know how to handle conflict in “satisfying and collective ways” (brown 21). Capitalism, as an economic system and a way of living, has made us forget how to work as a group focused on growth as opposed to individual productivity.

 

To both Spade and brown, the solution to counteract these impacts of capitalism is to im-
plement a culture of care within groups and movements. For Spade, this looks like changing the structure of groups in order to “make decisions together, caring about every person’s consent,” that is, consensus decision-making (Spade 75-76, italics my own). Ultimately, Spade calls for the elimination of hierarchy within movements, especially in how decisions are made. For brown, this looks like helping the person in a movement who has done wrong to grow from their mistake, ultimately drawing on the principles of abolition in order to fix the root cause of a problem instead of simply punishing wrongdoing. This is to say that a movement needs to focus on caring about and fostering growth within activist spaces instead of believing that people are incapable of change. Specifically, she calls for mediation between the parties involved in order for one party to get closure and for the other party to understand what they did wrong and start towards a path of correcting their behavior with the help of the movement itself. In short, brown calls for an end to giving up on someone and instead demands that we “flood the entire system with life-affirming principles and practices, to clear the channels between us of the toxicity of supremacy” (brown 8). To brown, in-fighting within movements allows capitalism and various forms of supremacy to fester unchecked.

 

Cultures of care have also made themselves known in society at-large, particularly through the creation of mutual aid networks and projects. Dean Spade defines mutual aid as “a collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them” (Spade 7). For Spade, mutual aid serves as a community response to a problem left unanswered by—or caused by—the state. Mutual aid projects can include community fridges, childcare services, and community-supplied money for rent relief. At the smallest scale, a mutual aid project in the classroom can be as simple as a class notes document that everyone has the ability to read and edit for the benefit of the whole class’s learning. A key distinction to make is that mutual aid is not charity, which is a flow of services and support from an elite or wealthy group or individual to a less powerful or poorer group or individual. Charity is a transfer of resources from the top to the bottom by choice of the giving philanthropist without receiving anything in return—besides profuse thanking and maybe naming a building after them—and doing nothing to fix the root problem that necessitated the donation. Charity is only meant to alleviate some of the pain caused by the problem, meaning the practice is “not designed to get to the root causes of poverty and violence” (Spade 21). Mutual aid, however, is created by, used by, and sustained by people of the same community who have the same ability to benefit from the project. Additionally, mutual aid projects are also used as vehicles for collective organization and action to fix the problem itself. While mutual aid seeks to address the problem by providing the forgotten resources and organizing for the problem to be fixed at the source, charity effectively keeps the problem in place by not putting any attention or resources toward eliminating the need for help in the first place.
 

Considering how the US was founded and built on capitalism, mutual aid is nothing less than a direct response to this damaging system. Mutual aid takes the power away from the broken systems created by capitalism by introducing actually effective replacements. An example of this is the Breakfast for Children Program created in the 1960’s by the Black Panther Party. After seeing the issue of Black families not being able to provide meals to their children while not receiving aid from the government, the BPP stepped up to provide it themselves. Not only did this program force the US government to implement its own breakfast program for children but it also “assert[ed] that Black people had to defend themselves against a violent and racist government, and that they could organize to give each other what a racist society withheld” (Spade 10). This mutual aid project made it clear that people of the same community who experience the same struggles can help each other and that “those on the front lines of a crisis have the best wisdom to solve the problems” (Spade 13). Additionally, mutual aid serves as a gateway to further political activity, as Spade writes, “it’s very difficult to organize when you are also struggling to survive” (Spade 13). Mutual aid is just as much a mode of mobilization as it is a way of caring for one another, both antithetical and a threat to capitalism.
 

Activism at its core is driven by a desire to make one’s own and others’ lives better. Activism is built on a foundation of care. Mutual aid projects, pushback against cancel culture, and restructuring movements to eliminate hierarchy are only a few modern examples, but care has always been a large part of activism and the struggle for justice and liberation as a whole. As it has been made clear, all of these things are in complete opposition to capitalism, rising as a response to its numerous failings. Our movements need to lean into these examples if we want to have any real chance of success.