"giving out groceries is not revolutionary."

shout out the oak park neighbor program and credit to j.phin, spoken as he and the rest of the small group packed boxes full of food to distribute to the community. “giving out groceries is not revolutionary.” i think for most people, even those who can make the almost immediate analytical steps to understand what’s true about that, it can still sound jarring, so it deserves a deeper look.

the groceries aren’t what’s revolutionary. feeding people is a moral act. it can be a political one. but the politics aren’t in the food. they’re in the framework the food is operating inside of, in what the act is trying to build, in whether it’s making an argument about the conditions that make people hungry in the first place or just managing those conditions so they stay bearable enough to endure.

somebody once told me that social workers are like the janitors of capitalism. i’ve been sitting with that ever since. and the reality is, its charity that manages the system. it fills the gaps the system leaves deliberately so the system don’t gotta fill them. u give out groceries, the city doesn’t have to. the need gets met and the structure that produced the need stays intact. that’s not revolutionary. that’s alot more like maintenance. and without clear revolutionary content, mutual aid and survival programs can be co-opted and absorbed into the state’s infrastructure. the state is very good at this. it will take your food pantry, give it a grant, put it on a city website, call it a social service. what was ungovernable becomes a line item. what u were building gets absorbed into what u were trying to replace.

this is the warning that runs thru black anarchism: we have to make ourselves and our communities ungovernable. not better-served. ungovernable. so pay attention to which organizations are lacking support, those are the ones that are usually the threat to power.

audre lorde understood something related when she talked about interdependence. not charity, not service delivery, not one person extending generosity down toward another, but actual interdependency, the kind where different strengths meet each other as equals and generate something neither could produce alone. she was talking about women, specifically, about what gets foreclosed when women are only permitted to nurture thru the patriarchal model, which renders care as something flowing from above rather than something built between. the need and desire to care for each other, lorde said, is not pathological. it’s redemptive. it’s where real power gets rediscovered. that distinction between care as a service rendered and care as something mutual, relational, built between people rather than delivered to them, that’s the same fault line running thru this whole conversation about groceries. its all abolition.

mohamed abdou’s reading of taʿāwun in “islam and anarchism” also brings the abolitionist theme into focus. taʿāwun, mutual cooperation, is not charity. it’s not generosity flowing downward from those who have toward those who lack. it’s an ethical-political obligation rooted in the understanding that resources are held in caretaking relationship, not privately owned. the prophet pbuh said that people are partners in water, pasture, fire. that understanding changes everything about the relationship between giver and receiver. charity positions one person as having and another as needing. taʿāwun is solidarity under a completely different premise, shared stakes in survival, shared responsibility to each other and to something larger than any of us. the food is the same food. the relation underneath it is not.

the panthers are most people’s entry point into revolutionary politics. that’s why i keep coming back to them, although i do advocate that people engage with their history more than superficially. their survival programs weren’t charity and they were explicit about that. they were politicizing people and threatening the state by doing the work the state deliberately refused to do. the ideological line drawn around the food was the argument. and the labor of building and sustaining those programs fell largely on black women, hundreds of them, implementing everything while the party’s men got the monuments. but the core of what we can learn from survival programs lives in that gendered labor. not in the speeches.

newton called the programs “survival pending revolution”. not survival instead of revolution. not survival as a destination. the programs were like a first aid kit. something to keep people alive long enough to fight. because how u gon fight if your stomach is touching your back?

but newton was also explicit about the limits. the survival programs were not the answer to the whole problem of oppression. they were the precondition for the confrontation, not the confrontation itself.

and if u not conveying that, if the food is moving but the politics aren’t, if people are being fed but not being organized, not being told why they’re hungry, not being told who benefits from their hunger, then u might just be doing charity. and ain’t nothing wrong with that but the groceries without the argument are just groceries. and the argument without the groceries doesn’t feed nobody. the two have to move together or the whole thing collapses into something the city can put on a flyer.

u can give out the same groceries and be running a food pantry or be building toward something the state can’t absorb. the difference isn’t in the bag. it’s in whether the people receiving the food are being politicized or just fed. it’s in whether the work is making u ungovernable or grantable. it’s in whether care is a service u render to people or a practice u build with them, one that eventually poses a significant challenge to the whole arrangement.

survival pending revolution means something is still coming.

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revolution is love

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