• It's self-guided economic development from within and across communities. It's the provision of the needs of the people of the community from the resources of the community.
  
• It's peer to peer, not top down. If you believe you know better what a person needs than that person does, you're doing charity at best. If you are making your aid to them contingent on something, you're not even doing that you're doing base coercion.
  
• There's no universal template for mutual aid because the needs of each community and each individual are different, and you're not going to know what to do unless you're engaged in an ongoing dialog with the people you want to help. There are some extremely common threads like food support, but you can't show up in a community and know what it needs better than the people in it do. Similarly, the number of people doing a mutual aid effort, the structure of their formation, etc. will naturally vary from community to community and need to need.
  
• Probably the hardest concept to get across is that you can't just write a check or vote for higher taxes to solve these problems, because until you have your own actual human touchers on the materials being provided and the people in the community who need help, you are blind. You can't trust the legalist NGO system or the government to do this work because it alienates the supporters from the community and vampirizes the good intent of the people with resources to support a parasitic system that takes more than it gives and leaves people's needs unmet and people desperate and deprived.
  
• People don't need your politics, theory, or whatever. They need poo poo. They need food, clothes, a place to live, medical care, defenses against the physical and legal assaults on them by our hosed system, etc.
  

The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Oct 9, 2020