Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
By Dean Spade
Verso (2020)
Book Review
According to Spade, mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.
In March 2022, many of us had our first experience with mutual aid during the anti-mandate occupations in Ottawa (Canada) and Wellington (New Zealand). Like Occupy Wall Street in 2011, these events attracted many people with no prior experience of political resistance. This introduced them to many totally new experiences, such as re-occupying public space, consensus decision making, distributing free food, blankets and other necessities and consumer-led workshops on our broken health, food, education and money systems. For many of us, the experience generated a new boldness and willingness to defy illegitimate authority. In collectively retaking control of providing for our own needs, we successfully demonstrate to government and powerful corporations that they no longer control us.
Here in New Zealand, members of the freedom movement continue to engage in mutual aid in providing clean-up support, food, fodder, clothing, blankets, shelter, health services and other necessities to Hawke’s Bay and West Auckland survivors of the (February 2022) Cyclone Gabrielle (struggling with the grossly inadequate response by government and the Red Cross).*
As Spade explains in his book, mutual aid isn’t charity, a phenomenon in which rich people or the government decide on people’s “worthiness” for help. Rather it’s a commitment to provide immediate, no-strings-attached food, clothing, health care and other basic needs. This process also helps groups develop skills for other forms of collaboration, participation and decision making.
Mutual aid projects are participatory, helping us learn to solve our problems through group action rather than waiting for a savior to fix them. They also help us prove we can organize human activity without coercion. The vast majority people have never been to a meeting before without an authority figure telling us what to do.
One of the most important points Spade makes in this book is that we presently live in the most fragmented societies in human history, while simultaneously relying on hostile systems for our basic needs (eg health systems that make people sicker and food systems that pollute the Earth and poison people).
Although published at the beginning of the 2020 Covid pandemic, this book is amazingly prescient about the rise of the freedom movement and the importance of mutual aid in our ongoing work.**
*People-to-people mutual aid also played a big role in the aftermath of the devastating 2018 California fires, Hurricane Sandy (particularly in New York City) in 2012, the Christchurch earthquake in 2011 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
**One of the most important outcomes of the freedom movement has been The People’s Health Alliance (“An organic, people-led, integrated health initiative that aims to educate, support and empower people to take responsibility for their own health”). founded in 2022 in the UK, and now active in over thirty countries, including the US.
Great link, Carina. Thanks for sharing.
Mutual Aid – an essay ~ by Errico Malatesta
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-mutual-aid-an-essay