Mutual Aid

I found this very, very helpful because while I knew of mutual aid, I was not clear on specifics. This book is great for that introductory information.

It’s actually also really good if you want to think about starting your own mutual aid program. There’s a lot of practical “how-to” advice. I can’t say how useful it is since it’s not like I’m going to make use of that information to start a program. But it gave me an idea of the inner workings of such a group.

The last bit of chapter 5 was a bit odd because it gets in a little deep on conflict management and burnout. It felt too deep for this book but also not deep enough to be truly useful. I guess it gives you an idea of common problems.

I also wondered about issues of pay. Spade’s concern about the way being paid for the work impacts the organization makes sense to me. But I think it’s a shame that paying people for their time would be complicated. It brought to mind mission trips that go to x country and paint a school when they could have paid locals to paint it. At what point should mutual aid be about hiring local BIPOC owned businesses to do the work? There are cases where that wouldn’t be possible or wouldn’t make sense, but are there cases where it does?

This book is an important contribution to thinking through how to politically and organizationally face our current moment. In the first section, Spade discusses what mutual aid is and is not, and argues that building mutual aid projects is a crucial component of supporting and expanding the work of social movements seeking transformative change, and an important site for integrating new people into social justice work. Importantly, he distinguishes mutual aid from charity, which is often non-profit driven, controlled by those with privilege and is concerned with managing poor and marginalized folks through the allocation of support based on respectability politics that fail to address or challenge the root causes of the conditions that create the myriad forms of harm and subjection in this society.

On the contrary, mutual aid is premised on solidarity, where rather than waiting to be rescued, individuals exercise their agency to come together to collectively address their shared needs without intervention or permission from the state, corporations, or non-profits. In the process, mutual aid projects also serve as a space for political education and analysis regarding the conditions and forces that lead to the need for mutual aid in the first place, while also destigmatizing the need for support within a system that blames and shames individuals for their impoverishment and oppression.

I found myself nodding in agreement with much of the second section of Mutual Aid, as Spade dives into the nitty-gritty of group organizing and the various issues that can arise, especially in groups that aim to be anti-authoritarian, non-hierarchical, non-coercive, and consensus based. Spade argues that without good internal practices, groups risk creating unacknowledged hierarchies, becoming co-opted, falling into saviorism and paternalism, and can lead to burnout and conflict. The detailed focus on group dynamics, structure, and decision-making is especially important as many new people are engaging in mutual aid work for the first time. With that there is enormous potential, but also great risk of alienating people if their first encounter with “political” work is a negative one.

In particular, I was grateful for Spade’s deeply empathic and psychological (without pathologizing) encouragement for both group and individual reflection regarding issues that may arise, and the acknowledgement that coming together in new ways other than those we’ve been socialized to perform or expect is very difficult. I feel attention to these matters are often overlooked in the name of doing “the work,” but ultimately, intentional focus on these forms of being with one another is the bedrock of “the work” itself, and the lessons contained apply far beyond mutual aid groups.