I don't think it is a tense. "Would" is a modal verb. All the modals take an infinitive and they never conjugate. There is no need to refer to a verb pattern that never conjugates as a tense. It makes little sense. If I were forced to call it a tense, I would call it past tense of "will" because, historically speaking, that is how "would" entered the English language. In Old English, the verb order would have been different: "We would ourselves to help", and once upon a time the modals were actual first-class verbs.
Another meaning of "we would help ourselves" is as follows. Imagine you are at a banquet where there is a lot of food on the table. If you take your own food, rather than letting someone else put it on your plate for you, that is called "helping yourself".