I started listening to that Jacobin video, and it's even worse than I expected. Socialism means the New Deal and nothing else to them.

They literally open by bashing Dean Spade for pointing out the problems with the New Deal, how it advanced racial segregation, and disempowered people.

I don't have the stomach to listen to the whole thing.

Spade's book is great, though.

https://www.deanspade.net/mutual-aid-building-solidarity-during-this-crisis-and-the-next/

Okay, I'm fifteen minutes in. They've not even mentioned mutual aid yet. They're just focused on defending the New Deal.

... and as I'm typing, Paul Prescod is arguing that the *only* improvements to the lives of Black people come from government spending.

FFS. They're just liberals. They're just talking in the terminology of Democratic Party policy wonks.

It's 18 minutes in, and they finally mentioned mutual aid.

They come straight out and say that advocates of mutual aid seek to replace the state, and they think the only way to benefit people is the state.

They literally refer to the state, repeatedly.

And here's why we keep making the distinction between charity and mutual aid: they keep collapsing the distinction, in order to dismiss mutual aid as apolitical.

OMFG. Amber Frost is explicitly arguing that the Black Panthers were irrelevant, that the state didn't really consider them a threat, and that their Breakfast Program accomplished nothing.

She's just straight up lying, and the other co-hosts are backing her up. This is utterly disgusting.

I resumed listening, and it gets increasingly incoherent.

After the long denunciation of the Black Panthers, they use the fact that the Black Panthers' breakfast program was explicitly political as evidence that it wasn't actually mutual aid. Somehow.

Aside: what is it with people at Jacobin completely missing the point of the movie Snowpiercer?

The protagonists intended to take control of the train until they found out that it was in a decaying spiral, feeding directly on human life. It was monstrous and intolerable.

Their response is like a grotesque satire of social democracy: oh, sure, keep throwing children into the engine. It's better than changing anything.

And now they're literally ranting against the concept of communities. Like, they're literally against communities.

It's like they're Thatcherites. So profoundly alienated, they can't imagine not being alienated, and find the idea offensive.

Weird. Later Amber Frost gives an example of a labor union that supports its community. As if that's not what we're talking about.

They're making some distinction between professionalization (good) and managerization (bad).

If by professionalization, you mean developing skills, fine, but it's not clear that's what they're talking about.

At 1:03, they get to their point: labor organizing takes a lot of resources, so we shouldn't use any resources on anything else.

Following which, Amber talks about her bigoted grandfather, who wants healthcare, but questioning gender will alienate him.

And then she says, of mutual aid advocates, maybe these people want a community because they never really had one, they've all been destroyed.

Holy shit. That's the fucking point. That is literally the fucking point. How do you just say it and not get it?