Kropotkin & Mutual Aid – Lesson 3: Mutual Aid in Working-Class History, strikes, friendly societies, and solidarity networks

Working-class people have always built mutual aid networks to survive capitalism. This is not nostalgia. It is a living tradition that is still being practised and extended today.

Kia ora,

The last two lessons established Kropotkin’s core argument: that mutual aid is a real, scientifically observable force in nature and society, and that Social Darwinism is not science but ideology. This lesson we look at what that argument explains about working-class history.

Because the history of the working class is, in large part, a history of mutual aid.

Friendly societies and mutual benefit organisations

Before welfare states existed, working-class people built their own insurance systems. Across Britain, Europe, Australia, and Aotearoa, workers formed friendly societies: voluntary organisations where members paid small weekly dues and received support in times of illness, injury, unemployment, and death.

At their peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, friendly societies had millions of members worldwide. In Britain alone, more workers were covered by friendly societies than by any state scheme. In Aotearoa, organisations like the Oddfellows, the Druids, and the Manchester Unity had branches in almost every town.

These were not charities. They were democratic mutual aid organisations run by and for their members. They built halls, ran social events, supported political campaigns, and maintained dense networks of working-class solidarity that cut across workplaces and communities.

Strikes as mutual aid

The strike is mutual aid in its most direct and powerful form. Workers who withdraw their labour collectively are saying: none of us will work until all of us benefit. The individual worker who crosses a picket line to take a higher wage destroys the capacity of the whole. The worker who holds the line accepts personal cost for collective gain.

The history of labour organising is a history of workers building the capacity to support each other through industrial action: strike funds, food for picketers’ families, solidarity visits from other unions, boycotts, and black bans. These are all forms of mutual aid — cooperation organised around a shared interest against an exploitative power.

The 1951 waterfront lockout in Aotearoa is one of the most significant examples. The government declared a state of emergency and made it illegal to support the locked-out waterside workers. Ordinary families defied the law by leaving groceries on doorsteps and organising food networks in secret. That was mutual aid under conditions of state repression.

Consumer and housing cooperatives

Across the world, working-class communities built cooperative enterprises: stores where members bought goods at cost and shared the surplus, housing cooperatives where members owned collectively rather than renting from a landlord, credit unions that provided finance without interest extraction.

The Rochdale Pioneers in England established the first modern cooperative in 1844, run on principles of democratic control, open membership, and surplus shared among members. This model spread globally. Today, cooperatives employ more than one billion people worldwide, more than all multinational corporations combined — though you would not know it from the economics curriculum.

In Aotearoa, Fonterra is a dairy cooperative, though it has drifted far from its cooperative origins. The credit union movement, Maori land trusts, and community housing trusts are all cooperative forms with deep roots in mutual aid traditions.

International solidarity

Mutual aid has never been limited by national borders. The early labour movement understood that capital was international and that working-class solidarity had to be too. International brigades volunteered to fight fascism in Spain. Dockers in Britain and Australia refused to load cargo for apartheid South Africa. New Zealand unions refused to service South African sports teams. Solidarity donations crossed the world during major strikes.

This tradition of international solidarity is a form of mutual aid at the largest scale: the recognition that workers everywhere share a common interest, and that supporting each other across borders is not charity but collective self-interest.

What happened to this history?

Much of this history has been deliberately suppressed. The welfare state replaced many friendly societies, which had the effect of weakening the dense networks of working-class self-organisation on which they depended. Cooperative movements were absorbed into mainstream capitalism or marginalised. The history of labour solidarity was removed from school curricula.

This is Gramsci’s civil society at work: the systematic effort to make working-class cooperative history invisible, so that competition and individualism appear to be the only available options.

Recovering this history is part of the war of position.

Questions for you

What working-class mutual aid organisations or practices do you know about in your own community, past or present?

Have you ever been part of a strike, a cooperative, a union, or another form of collective self-help? What was it like? What made it work or not work?

Reply or comment below. This history belongs to all of us.

Next up: Lesson 4 – Mutual aid in Aotearoa: hapu, whanau, working-class communities, and cooperative economies.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect