Mutual Aid in north London during the Covid-19 pandemic

The outbreak of the Covid-19 disease in Europe in early 2020 prompted myriads of solidarity initiatives towards the most vulnerable, from the Voluntary Emergency Brigades in Milan, the Brigades de Solidarité Populaire in Paris to the Mutual Aid groups in London. At first sight, these grassroots structures did not immediately strike as a phenomenon that could qualify as a social movement: of various scales (a building; a few streets; a neighbourhood) and shapes (WhatsApp groups; Facebook pages; residents’ networks), these groups were initially created to address basic survival needs such as bringing groceries and medicines to infected people, the elderly, and other vulnerable populations in quarantine. These forms of relief were seemingly devoid of political intentions; it was just about neighbours helping other neighbours. One could even say that the very specific purpose of these Covid-19 solidarity groups meant that they were doomed to disappear as soon as lockdown would be over. In presenting a profile of the meso-level organization of eight north London Mutual Aid groups on Facebook, I show, on the contrary, that we should pay attention to the potential for mobilization of these grassroots structures. Some of these Mutual Aid groups were a form of activism expressing dissent with the state’s response to the pandemic and addressing gaps in this response. To do so, they developed horizontal forms of organizing with the help of social media. Between March and June 2020, residents in north London faced the pandemic by creating Mutual Aid groups mostly throughout WhatsApp groups, loosely coordinated through Facebook pages. Their success (some 31,000 members) was linked to their rapid mobilization, adaptability, and local knowledge. In a matter of days, a common pattern of organizing emerged: north London Mutual Aid groups covered small geographical areas, usually a few streets, sometimes copied on the existing borough and ward system of London’s urban administration. This organization reflected a desire for horizontality which brought them closer to the horizontal social movements of the last decade, such as Occupy Wall Street, the movements of the squares and some of the Arab Uprisings (Della Porta & Mattoni, 2014; Maeckelbergh, 2011). This paper presents the trajectory of these groups over three months, and briefly introduces how some groups later had to negotiate the desire for horizontality with municipalities. This paper could fit in the theme subsection ‘The new importance of the everyday/lifestyle politics? Mobilizations and the politics of solidarity in times of lockdown’