I feel somewhat hypocritical accepting food stamps. To completely answer this question, I think it is important for me to elaborate on what food stamps are (to me) ...which is probably a somewhat flawed analysis. Since I don't know off-hand the history of food stamps, I'd be more than happy if anyone comments with more insight.
From what I can tell, food stamps and state insurance (often both are applied for at the same time, in the same offices) are not really the same as minimum wage, constitutional rights, or other such state-based methods of regulating social and economic life. Food stamps and state insurance are individualistic in the sense that they are programs aimed at providing access to food and health care on an individual bases; not in the sense that the individual is considered independently of their family, room mates, or other potential sources of income. In this way, they provide individuals with an incentive to support the intervention of the state; or, the mediation of the state between the individual (and, their community or class), and their needs. So at this point, people can pool their food stamps and health care or use them towards some sort of effort at mutual aid. At the same time, this would leave untouched the reliance on the state - period.
Another note is that individuals receiving food stamps and state insurance are not the sole beneficiaries. The lists of grocers and doctors who accept food stamps and state insurance is a second list of beneficiaries; and, these beneficiaries are often my enemy (to put it bluntly). So this contract is a prefabricated contract between me and those who will accept food stamps/state health insurance. I realize that there are plenty of places where smaller grocers accept food stamps (even farmers markets and such), but I generally accept that most people receiving food stamps and state insurance make us of it by spending them at corporate stores that sell food (Wal-Mart, Fry's, etc.). So food stamps (more than state insurance) are not a strict contract between the poor and the rich, subsidized and mediated by the state; but, that seems to be the net effect.
At the same time, I suspect that it is the owners of these businesses that benefit from 'customers' using EBT/Food Stamps and not the workers. This is obvious in one way: workers' pay isn't the result of an increase of owners' profit. In another way though, EBT/Food Stamps can not be used for so called "hot food": this is simply end-product food that requires on-site labor. I can't comprehend any other reason for the "hot food" regulation; though, I also don't understand why it isn't simply a "on site preparation of food" regulation? Again though, the effect of this is that someone selling hot dogs, tacos, or whatever can't accept EBT/Food Stamps. Someone could use EBT/Food Stamps for the raw ingredients they need for the preparation and sale of "hot food" but I don't think wholesalers take EBT/Food Stamps so whoever did this would face some serious competition (for a number of reasons). At the end of the day, it seems like the net effect of providing people with Food Stamps is to create yet another state subsidy for large corporations: the poor can spend the money of the less poor for the increased profit of the rich.
The fact that JP Morgan/Chase is a major contributor to EBT/Food Stamps in Arizona confuses me a bit when it comes to the way funding for EBT/Food Stamps works, exactly...
Anyway, the above are a couple of the issues that Food Stamps and State Insurance bring up for me. Maybe it would be beneficial for local efforts to be made that can compile lists of grocers who accept EBT/Food Stamps that are a small bit more palatable for anarchists? Either way, when the state mediates and intervenes in the capacity for people to meet their needs ...it is usually a method of social control. Compulsory education and public schools are an obvious example... laws concerned with labor organization... drug safety programs (or, strung-out-to-precarious-worker programs).. etc.
So, I don't know. Short of collectively owning land and sustaining ourselves through working it, living on it, etc. (or illegal whatever) - I'm not sure if there is an answer to the necessities of survival that in some way aren't hypocritical or even self-sabotaging as an anarchist. Unemployment, self-employment, full time for a small business, temp work for a corporation ...the ways we get our bread, shelter, and maybe health care tend to perpetuate the social order we as anarchists struggle to abolish. Or rather, there may be ways to subvert these systems but the general results of these systems are cause to generally oppose them.
