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The term mutual aid has multiple meanings.

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In emergency services, mutual aid is a formal agreement among emergency responders to lend assistance across jurisdictional boundaries when required; either by an emergency that exceeds local resources or a disaster. On a smaller scale the principle of mutual aid guides the creation of militia and community emergency response teams, e.g. volunteer fire fighters.

In political economy, mutual aid is a term which describes a principle central to libertarian socialism or anarchism, and is used to signify the economic concept of voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit.

As a concept it was developed and advanced by Proudhon and also by the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin. Mutualism was a fundamental concept in the invention of labor insurance systems and thus trade unions, and has been also used in cooperatives. In his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin explored the utility of cooperation as a survival mechanism for animals, in order to counteract the conception of evolution as a fierce competition for survival between individuals that provided a rationalization for the theories of Social Darwinism. His observations of indigenous peoples in Siberia guided him to conclude that not all human societies were so competitive as Europe's.

In another of his books, The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin proposed a system of economics based on mutual exchanges made in a system of voluntary cooperation. Kropotkin's thesis was based on the premise that scarcity was unnecessary, and it was possible to produce enough wealth to satisfy the needs of everybody by working only five hours a day during adult life (leaving the rest of the day to satisfy desires for luxuries, if so desired), but that flawed economic systems had led to inefficient allocation of resources which prevented this bounty from being achieved.

In Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin, a geographer by training, gives a detailed accounting of the physical evidence for his claim that the earth was fully capable of satisfying the resource needs of all its citizens with a minimum of work.

However, Kropotkin never fully outlined how such a system would be achieved, nor did he answer the questions of how such a system would be structured or make decisions, other than to make broad pronouncements about mutual exchanges. For example he gives the examples of farmers in the countryside producing grain for the city based on the understanding that workers in the city will then provide them with finished goods.

• Benefit society
• Peter Kropotkin
• Gift economy
• Meitheal
• Mutualista
• Political science