Kropotkin & Mutual Aid – Lesson 5: The State vs Mutual Aid, when welfare replaced self-organised solidarity

The welfare state was a genuine gain for the working class. It was also used to dismantle self-organised networks of solidarity. We need to understand both sides of that story.

Kia ora,

This lesson is one of the most politically complex in the course, and one of the most important. We need to think clearly about the relationship between the welfare state and mutual aid — because getting this wrong leads to serious errors in both directions.

The welfare state as a gain

The welfare states built across the world after the Second World War were real gains for the working class. They were won through decades of labour movement struggle and represented a genuine redistribution of power: guaranteed access to healthcare, education, housing, and income support regardless of individual circumstances.

In Aotearoa, the first Labour government of 1935–49 built one of the most comprehensive welfare states in the world. The Social Security Act 1938 provided universal entitlements to health and income support. State housing gave working-class families secure, affordable homes for the first time. Free secondary and university education opened up pathways that had previously been closed by class.

These gains were enormous. To argue that the welfare state harmed the working class would be absurd. It did not. It substantially improved the material conditions of life for millions of people in Aotearoa and around the world.

What the welfare state also did

But Kropotkin’s tradition asks us to look at a second dimension of the welfare state’s effect: what happened to the self-organised networks of mutual aid that working-class communities had built?

Friendly societies lost their membership as state insurance replaced their core function. Workers no longer needed to join a mutual benefit organisation to access healthcare or income support. The dense social fabric those organisations created — the halls, the networks, the culture of collective responsibility — gradually dissolved.

This was not entirely bad. Many friendly societies had been racially exclusive, limited to men, or tied to conservative churches. The universalism of the welfare state was in many ways more just than the particularism of voluntary mutual aid networks.

But the effect was that working-class communities became more dependent on the state and less capable of self-organisation. The political muscle that comes from running your own institutions — managing finances, resolving disputes, building solidarity through shared practice — atrophied.

This mattered enormously when the welfare state was dismantled.

The neoliberal attack and the mutual aid vacuum

When Rogernomics hit Aotearoa in 1984, the welfare state was rapidly dismantled. Benefit levels were cut, state housing was sold, public services were corporatised or privatised, and the labour market was deregulated. This was done with extraordinary speed and without a democratic mandate.

Working-class communities were devastated. But they had lost much of the self-organised infrastructure that would have allowed them to absorb the shock collectively. The friendly societies were gone. The union movement was weakened by the Employment Contracts Act 1991. The cooperative institutions that might have provided alternatives had been absorbed into mainstream capitalism or had withered.

The result was a crisis managed individually: families made do alone, communities fragmented, and what remained of collective support was channelled through increasingly professionalised NGOs dependent on state contracts — exactly the transformism we discussed in the Gramsci course.

The lesson Kropotkin teaches us

Kropotkin does not tell us to oppose the welfare state. He tells us to never allow it to become a substitute for self-organised solidarity. The welfare state should be a floor, not a ceiling. And while we fight to defend and extend it, we must also build the cooperative institutions and mutual aid networks that can survive if it is attacked.

This is not a counsel of despair or a retreat from state politics. It is a counsel of resilience: build from below while fighting above, so that you are never entirely dependent on the goodwill of governments that can change without notice.

The communities that weathered the 1984–93 reforms best in Aotearoa were those with the strongest self-organised networks: Maori communities with intact whanau and hapu structures, Pacific communities with strong church and family mutual aid, working-class communities with strong union cultures that survived the Employment Contracts Act by building new forms of solidarity.

Questions for you

How has the reduction of the welfare state in your country or community affected people’s reliance on informal mutual aid? What has emerged to fill the gaps?

Do you think it is possible to defend and extend the welfare state while also building robust self-organised solidarity networks? What would that look like in practice?

Reply or comment below. This question sits right at the heart of what socialist politics looks like today.

Next up: Lesson 6 – Mutual aid now: from food banks to tenants unions to climate response, and how we build further.

In solidarity,

The Kiwi Dialect