WATCH: Mutual Aid – #SolutionsWatch
In this time of thoughtcrime and hate speech laws, here’s a dangerous question: how did people provide for themselves BEFORE government-supplied cradle-to-grave welfare and “social security”? It’s one of those questions that is so obviously staring us in the face but no one thinks to ask. Why? Because the powers-that-shouldn’t-be are afraid of its two-word answer, of course: mutual aid.
Sources, shownotes and links – as well as audio versions and download options – can be found here. Previous episodes of #SolutionsWatch can be found here and here.
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Hi,
Thanks for the video, quite promising! Some friends here in Spain would like to translate the vide for further dissemination. Would it be possible to download it and include subtitles on it? We don’t see an option for subtitles.
Thanks in advance,
Gonzalo.
Hi Gonzalo,
We’re sharing the video from James Corbett’s website, so I’m afraid we can neither give permission to translate nor are we in a position to supply subtitles. I would contact James through his website corbettreport.com, I’m sure he’ll be open to it.
Here is Commerce Secy Howard Lutnick talking about industrial capitalism.
https://off-guardian.org/2026/01/23/watch-mutual-aid-solutionswatch/#comments
Wow. Here’s the correct link
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/forget-trump-and-greenland-howard-lutnick-gave-davos-speech-mattered
It might be useful to review Michael Hudson on Industrial Capitalism rather than Financial Capitalism. And the difference between a Constitutional Republic and an all-out welfare state.
Hunger is knocking at our door. We need new clothes too. My mistress is tired of being locked in 24/7 and wanna go out and spend money.
Utilities just raised 25-50% last year.
Silver doubled. We need practical solutions now. Enough books have been written.
It is UNDERSTANDING the books that is required, because they are a guide to the goal, in the case of Michael Hudson. If you don’t clearly know where you should go, no plan of action is possible.
What did people do before the welfare state? A lot labored 12+ hours 6-7 days a week, like so many wage slaves still do today. And then as now they’d have shit to show for it simply because profit for the few depends on the misery of many, whose cost as human resources for owners of production must be so low as to be unlivable, so as to steal surplus value of what workers create. The secret to getting rich is not working hard but having others work hard for you. That’s why capitalism and the nation state got started by destroying common lands and cooperative conditions in both old and new worlds, killing and robbing people of the means of existence to leave little choice but to live competing to sell themselves on the unfree market.
Survival of the fittest aside, this dog-eat-dog way of living, for survival of the fattest, goes against our nature as social beings. So it’s no wonder people rise up in resistance to reassert our common humanity. Mutual aid occurs every day in acts of kindness and generosity, care and compassion, and also in reorganization of our relations that reach out toward social revolution. Whatever better circumstances of life people may have today have been entrusted to us from generations of solidarity and struggle for common causes of freedom and dignity. In this respect, the welfare state represents such legacy, some vindication of people’s history.
It’s also no wonder powers that be wage class war on any threat of a good example, any alternative to their organized crime against humanity, any practical proof another world is possible. In this respect, the welfare state was a cooptative compromise capital made with labor to redirect revolutionary potential in an earlier period of crisis into system stabilization and population control. Its provisional strategy was evident from the get-go, as legislation and execution were limited if not marginal, more symbolic than substantive, corrupted by capitalist looting of its public funds, and sooner or later dismantled and discontinued.
Those who preach about welfare freeloaders and the dangers of dependency on the nanny state seem lacking in comprehension of or concern for actual poor and oppressed people on this “planet of slums” (Mike Davis), and how our common plight is the result of a ruling class utterly dependent on state protection rackets, being the biggest freeloader of all, parasitically and predatorily living off us and all the life on earth it’s laying waste. Corbett speaks of “private member associations” of mutual aid as some sort of solution in a social system of class rule now implementing final solutions to deprive humanity of any freedom and dignity outside its total control. At this stage, our common welfare and ‘social security’ demand more radical movements that strike at the roots of rule, in order to overthrow the powers that shouldn’t be.
A brief history of greed.
Thanks CC.
In my opinion you sums it all up.
If we screw the time 2000 years back and look in the Bible how it was then?
Slavery, Roman soldiers, beggars, Colosseum entertainment where Christians were feed to lions and Gladiators fought to death. Dog eat dog. Pest, black death and leprosy.
I think, with all respect, that this Corbett report is one more decadent Western socialist pipe dream of ‘living off greed”……..how?
Because they have not tried it yet and will never realize it! They are only whining.
At least I know why the third world and East Europe and East admire/hate West at the same time: It is the social security and free health care and education.
Because only with social security you can begin the luxury of developing civilised manners.
the welfare state was a cooptative compromise capital made with labor
No. The biggest plutocrats were brutal against dissidents, from at least 19th century until a stalemate circa 1955. Gordon Duff wrote a great essay on the brutal, desperate and poisonous life in US. After real civil battles. socialism and unionism helped the whole world thereafter. Capitalist “intelligence” agents set about murdering such leaders everywhere. Despite the debacle in Vietnam and popular dissent, they seized the levers of overt power around 1980 in UK and US. Since there was little headway in Europe, they cooked up the totalitarian EU, EC and ECB.
Absolute shill RFK Jr. Children Protection League (unless there Palestinian children) shills Corbett as one of their spokesmen, who gets some of his funding from normal folks on Social Security, which is one of the hundreds of taxes we pay to be a part of the system that he is demonizing, but he never addresses that the government is a scam game.
Corbett sits on his lazy , needs-a-tooth-job ass in his digital prison , funded by people and known shills whilst he gets patron donations and subs (basic universal income from MSM plus woke alt media types) paid for by people who pay taxes into a system , while he, as a workshy, tells you how bad things are.
He calls this a solution watch. (for him)
“Water, water everywhere….. But not in the Middle East”.
President Trump plans a billionaires beachside resort in Gaza – after
The Cleansing… The huge Smart city will have high demands for fresh
water for it’s swimming pools, showers, and carwash services…
(Las Vegas in Gaza)…
And there’s intention to build huge freshwater guzzling data centers…
In the demand for fresh water by hoomins and data centers, hoomins lose…
…….
https://scheerpost.com/2023/01/23/kushner-reveals-dystopic-plan-to-build-data-centers-on-ruins-of-gaza-genocide/
Why would datacentres consume freshwater?
I still dont understand what these datacenter are for. To make IT scandals?
“Senior White House advisor Jared Kushner on Thursday pitched an ambitious plan to transform war-ravaged Gaza into a Mediterranean resort hub, telling global business and political elites at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos that reconstruction could be completed within three years if Hamas fully disarms under the next phase of President Donald Trump’s peace plan.”
This coming with Trump just stating the if Hamas doesn’t disarm, which anyone with a brain knows will not happen, they’ll get blown away. This is done for the people I can’t mention of the country I can’t mention or my comment will go into pending, and the Trump family.
He’s been saying this for years now, it is not a fucking throw off. It clearly shows what’s really up and that they ALL know it. And most especially the ultra traitor Trump and his fucking family. Fuck the Trump supporters at this site. Seriously.
Pardon my french, but not really.
Wonder why Kit never mentioned this talk.?
It has been mentioned 100 times: ‘Real Estate bonanza in Gaza’ for those who sees opportunity and long term.
I already bought 1000m2 of Gaza and expect to earn a buck 10x the investment in only 5 years.
Sorry guys but money makes the world go around 😆 . https://ok.ru/video/35075721861 .
Yet another medical mindset that has been killing people.
For more than one hundred years:
https://brownstone.org/articles/george-crile-epinephrine-and-the-collapse-of-thinking-in-modern-medicine/
Any aircraft pilot knows only too well, too concentrate only on the state of one particular aircraft parameter (i.e. airspeed, it could be some other) will inevitably result in the ground intervening to stop the ongoing fun.
Healthcare Institutionlized. Create work environments with rigid protocol and incentive structures where collectivism is rewarded. An ok article.
Extraordinary article, Johnny: “The available evidence suggests a troubling trade-off: improved ROSC at the expense of impaired cerebral microcirculation.”
And yet why should I be shocked that epinephrine for cardiac arrest has become such an unreasoning ritual that the dose isn’t adjusted for body weight? So much of modern medicine and the f’g standard of care with insurance companies and hospital administrators deciding treatment has increasingly outlawed THOUGHT.
Yes but it is the same all over. Its not the people in it but the system itself who promotes it, and it is getting double worse with the Digital age.
Linear statistic thinking married with binary artificial closed math with no time and care for the individual.
Only the labor masses fight against Das Capital, the Kulaks, and Empirialistic Colonialistic upper class matters.
It is collectivist thinking from the good old Commie days.
Underground communism. The soil bacteria, little critters who work tirelessly,
without foremen, bosses, or leaders (or politicians)… They turn minerals and
mush into plant food, in return the plants provide sugars etc…
It’s mutual aid at its best…
Hoomins, of course, think they are smart. They think they dont need the under=ground communists, relying in their arrogance instead om artificial fertilisers that, over time,
kill off the commies, deplete the soil, wither the nutritional content of plants…
Long Live The Underground !!
(And join The Revolution by going regenerative Ag)…
I guess in full blown apocalips, we’ll see what’s left of us in terms of surviving… I hope for the best. But until then…
“Grab clusters, suck air!” – I read that in a book many Moons ago.
Spot on les.
Wiki mocks it, but what the fuck would they know.
They claim vaccines are lifesavers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodynamic_agriculture
We have vaccines for animals. How about some for plants?
Coming. Whattabout insects? Socialist jobs for everybody.
I’d agree with you but anyone referring to people in that trite manner needs a kick in the hole. Hoomins… get over yourself.
‘Hoomins…. think they are smart.
We dont sink as someone else here on these pages, we know we are smarties.
Hmmm. I havent seen you objecting to sheeple being called sheeple on this site.
Off topic, but aUStralian readers will enjoy this piece:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2026/01/payola-laws-the-gilding-of-golden-tonsils/
John Laws was a commercial broadcaster/shock jock, who sullied the airwaves here for several decades.
His self $erving ilk are on every continent.
John was praised by the population because he represents something in us all.
With your fluffy pink socialist illusions, you and the Labor Aussies think you are the gooder than most. Well you are not, what John here clearly presents.
Live in Australia or live at Wembley. Its being hailed and praised all over as you write.
https://youtu.be/6iJ-4WolLD0 . You dont like the reality? Your problem.
Time to grow up Erik.
‘Reds under the beds’ was a scare campaign, just like Convid.
And Laws was an elitist parasite.
He just got more money out of it than you. Thats why you dont like him.
You never had the courage to actually LOOK under your bed yes?
You just dismissed it like all the other dangers hitting that we the people who represents humanity had to suffer.
Moon landing, My Lai, Global heating, Fallulah, 1929 wall street crash, boat refugees storming our borders, WWIII.
You just dismiss these hard realities as ‘scare campaigns’.
Why? Because you are a soft-ice journalist. Thats why!
Those powers that shouldn’t be have been destroying the very idea of community since 1945, and have succeeded so well people literally no longer know how to talk to their neighbors.
The problem is the vast majority of people went right along with it. Not only along with it, but accepting it and wanting more.
It began with the design of housing areas, gentrification, etc. Helps to keep them suspicious and separated. Also undermining income through breakup of employee unions, covert immigration, selective taxes, etc.
”Reclamar de barriga cheia 😩 “.
All right, so you wanna return to the times before 1945 where we talked a lot with our neighbours?
.
“People, like it or not, are asymptomatic carriers of communism” … (anon) …
“It’s in their genes” … (anon) …
Eh, I’m not so sure about this one. In centuries past, and in the absence of social safety nets, millions of people in Western countries died in – and of – poverty, lacking safe drinking water, enough food to survive, even the most rudimentary housing, the ability to heat or cool themselves to liveable temperatures, etc. Let alone the ability to afford essential medical care.
Even today in relatively under-developed countries, millions of people die in – and of – poverty.
Even today in the US, food, housing, healthcare, and energy assistance programs are going the way of the dodo. Before too long, the same will be true of the people these programs were designed to help.
I lived in the US for 25 years. I returned home to Australia in my mid-50s because America is no place to be if you are old and poor, which is how I felt at the time. It was wonderful to be back in a country that has an old-age pension (or so I think of it) and universal basic healthcare. I hope never to need either, but it’s so good to know they’re there, for all of us, however eroded these programs has become in recent years.
The Aged Care program my mum used in her final years was remarkably good, even with all the bureaucratic red tape. Mum died in early 2021 (and no, not of covid). The Aged Care program is a shadow of its former self now, but it is still head-and-shoulders above what is available in “the land of the free.”
So, yes to mutual aid; and yes to basic social safety nets as well. Both, not either/or.
Because social safety nets are mutual aid.
Chris? You are a wise person. Please continue posting.
Of course social safety nets are mutual aid. Those who can, helping those who can’t.
Let’s face it, the wealthy and the Corparasites have been receiving handouts, tax write offs, rule and law exemptions and government contracts for at least one hundred and fifty years. And it’s a worldwide phenomena.
It fucking annoys me no end when the Haves whinge and moan about social welfare, when they have been its biggest beneficiaries. By orders of magnitude.
Kropotkin’s rules Now!
That is, Rules WITHOUT Rulers.
Social aids, yes, but it comes with a catch. Many people simply don’t fucking deserve it. It’s not all pollyanna. So those that can, end of supporting those that won’t. An age old problem if one studies history.
It’s like the stories from the early American colonies. Those in the colony would have to work hard to produce and store enough food to get through winters, and they would generally work together to do that. But there were always those that didn’t want to participate and too lazy to contribute. Then they’d come begging in the winter for food from those that did the work. Those that did the work didn’t take to kindly to that, generally. And understandably so. Today, it’s the same thing only different.
There are always sociopaths and psychos in any large polity, but the little ones do far less harm than those at the top.
I didn’t say sociopaths and psychos, I said people who are capable of contributing to society but refuse to do so. But of course the ones at the top are the most harmful.
We must look after the frail and the disabled, especially the intellectually disabled.
The percentage of lazy Folks. would be tiny in comparison with those who demand more than they need, or can use.
Social welfare works well in aUStralia, most Scandinavian countries and Germany, because they don’t have bloated military budgets.
Have you been to the states? There are plenty of lazy people who simply don’t want to do their share. I do believe in each contributing to their own capabilities. I have a fully deaf son who only speaks sign language. He’s on social security. I do believe in social services, I’m just saying that “it comes with a catch, some people don’t deserve it”. I stand by that.
We call them bludgers in aUStralia. They exist in every strata of society.
The majority of welfare recipients are genuine and deserving.
Corporate welfare is far more draining on the public purse.
The MIC and Big pHarmer have stolen trillions over the years.
Enough to pay a living wage to every bludger, and those without the wherewithal to earn a living.
You don’t deserve it, you cluck. Because you are a flaming shits. No largesse for flaming shits!
Seriously, fuck off.
In United bluff they say 1%. One percenter is outlaws.
The rest who dont like to work are disabled people one or the other way for whom we have responsibility.
But they can fill out some jobs where their laziness can be accepted.
Oh, you idiot. North America was so rich in wildlife and natural resources of all kinds, you could pluck a fish out of the river and eat it, there were so many fish. There was no scarcity in colonial America. There were no grasshoppers, because even grasshoppers could survive just fine on the overflowing bounty. Thus, American contempt for the poor was based on a specific circumstance, an unexploited continent.
Not the same now. There is much, much scarcity in the US. The fish are all fished out. And yet Americans still have the same contempt for the poor, as if you could still pluck a fish from the river and eat it. (Fish are a metaphor in this comment. If you take it literally I will laugh at you.)
When the Rabid Empire incorporates Australia as a state, that will be sorted out.
Consider a local network where there is no hierarchy, no power structure, no commercial transactions, no barter or any direct agreement of exchange (no money changes hands), and supports the autonomy and sovereignty of each individual: http://solaris-ontario.org/
For this to work we’d first have to unlearn pretty much everything that rules our psyches today. Begin with health: Humans are the only species that does not even know how to feed itself in order to maintain good health into old age. Ergo No.1 lesson would be to take responsibility for our own bodies before getting to more complex issues.
Exactly. Garbage in, garbage out.
If food was there, we’d find it like any animal… have self respect.
Just foraging is not quite enough. Nothing wrong with using our smarts and cultivate plants.
Today’s problem is the greed of BigAg and Big Chem that have genetically altered plants (and some animals, such as pigs) and exhausted and poisoned the soil.