MUTUAL AID: BUILDING SOLIDARITY DURING THIS CRISIS (AND THE NEXT) - DEAN SPADE

I got this book because I was at my buddy’s house, drinking tea, when I absent-mindedly picked it up. My buddy said that he had a big list of things to read and, since I read fast, I could take it home and go through it. I was able to read it in 2 days and during that time I had several friends ask me to borrow the book when I was done. The phrase, Mutual Aid, seems more popular that ever. I certainly see it around much more than before, though I fear that the term has been drained of its specificity and power. Spade doesn’t mention it but I believe “Mutual Aid” was coined (at minimum popularized) by Kropotkin, an anarchist I have a lot of admiration for. Spade seems to envision mutual aid as assistance to others with the larger goal of building movement to transform the world. To me, this is slightly off. To me the difference between charity and mutual aid has less to do with this secondary goal of building a large left (anti-capitalist seems like the best way to describe it but Spade doesn’t lean on this language) and more to do with the relative social positions of the people involved. Charity is a way of policing a class line since the idea is that the people receiving the charity will never be in a position to reciprocate the assistance. In this way, the people giving the charity feel that it’s more pure since the only thing they’re getting in return is the good feelings associated with munificence. Mutual aid mostly because of that first word, mutual. In this conception you see yourself as a peer of the person you are helping. You can envision and encourage scenarios where you would need aid from them. In this sense it is a gift given between peers with the understanding that it could be paid back. There’s a wonderful book called THE GIFT by Lewis Hyde that makes these points more eloquently. Basically, I would say that there could be Right-Wing mutual aid and it seems to me like Spade would disagree. But that difference is pretty theoretical and academic. This is very similar to my complaint about how people use the phrase “direct action,” for me, the more specific these terms are, the better. However, in the world of action, I think Spade and I largely agree about what sorts of projects we should be undertaking and to what ends. He does suggest you could have mutual aid projects with professional staff as well as volunteers and I struggle to even imagine how that would work. The second part of the book is largely practical about how to run mutual aid groups and deal with the interpersonal conflicts that come up. I’ve participated in lefty projects for a while now, so I’m pretty familiar with all of the techniques he’s discussion, I would actually say he left out some of the more useful and interesting like fish-bowling or straw-polling, but as a short info for a newbie, this could be good. This has a bit of the bell hooks problem where it’s speaking in a high-register and is slightly light on examples and practical advice. Having been in these spaces, I need more practical advice than something like, “use direct communication.” But this is very hard work, we need to become different sorts of people to build the world we want to live in. For the interpersonal stuff, I would recommend CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE as a better, more through guide to this area of activism. Either way, our future lies in mutual aid, we have no choice. This is very readable and quick, I’d recommend it to new folks. 100,000+ strategies for liberation.