“As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable members of their communities. This survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.” – Dean Spade
Weaving our Worlds has monthly study in struggle conversations and this month we focused on Mutual Aid. Spade describes three key aspects of mutual aid:
1) Mutual aid addresses survival needs while understanding the root causes of inequity from a place of solidarity not charity.
2) Mutual aid acts as a mobilization tactic for building solidarity around broader social movements.
3) Mutual aid projects are organized through direct participation and collective action.
Mutual aid draws on a living legacy of sustained cooperation and resistance by Black, Indigenous, racialized, colonized, houseless, criminalized, disabled, and queer and trans communities around the world.
“Mutual aid defies the hierarchies and white saviourism inherent to charity, instead asking us to share our skills and resources in order to decentralize community care, and help one another break free from capitalism and colonial authority…. It also demands that we treat each other as responsible and meaningful contributors, so it often includes reciprocity and resource exchange (though not immediately or always). Mutual aid is a long-term commitment to your community.” – Regan de Loggans
Our list of Study in Struggle resources consider the practice of mutual aid by many communities over time, various discussions about mutual aid, the centrality of mutual aid to abolition and care, and practical resources about starting mutual aid projects!
Relational Commitment & Direct Participation since Time Immemorial
“When Black and Indigenous people work to end their communities’ dependency on the settler state through community care, they threaten the foundations of settler colonialism and capitalism… Mutual aid is a unifying term, putting a name to the practices that many of us BIPOC folx have been acting on all our lives.” (Source: The co-option of mutual aid by Regan de Loggans, Briarpatch, 2021)
“K’é is this huge overlapping philosophy that the whole universe is interconnected. But it’s also these relationships that we have with one another and with the elements that exist in the world, whether that be the weather or the water or the animals.. We are all given unique gifts and abilities, and we must do what we can to provide for others with our unique gifts and abilities. We didn’t know it as mutual aid, that was just k’é.” (Source: In the Navajo Nation, Anarchism Has Indigenous Roots by Cecilia Nowell, The Nation, 2020)
“Money pools are deeply familiar to many people from Black diasporas. Your moms and aunties get together, they cackle loudly for a couple of hours, and later, your mother says not to worry, you will be going to university. There’s a magical quality, money appearing as if from nowhere. Depending on where you’re from and who invited you in, the pools have different names: sol (Haiti), susu (Ghana), box hand (Guyana), jama (Kenya), hagbad (Somalia)… The money, as useful as money can be, is almost beside the point. Mutual aid is a reciprocal experience; once welcomed, you’re now in a community of giving, with all the joys and burdens that entails.” (Source: Black Communities Have Known about Mutual Aid All Along, Vicky Mochama, The Walrus, 2020)
“More than funds and services, friendly and fraternal societies offered people a sense of community and a safety net that was based on reciprocity. In contrast, government relief was highly stigmatized and perceived as demeaning because it was administered in hierarchical and impersonal ways, and marked recipients as objects of pity rather than entitlement… With the dissolution of these mutual aid structures and the development of centralized state welfare institutions, we saw the emergence of a new social order, one based on a paternalistic and impersonal administration beholden to the market.” (Source: Mutual Aid Then and Now: Survival and the Power of the People, Upping the Anti, 2001)
Care Ethic & Mobilization Tactic for Collective Power Outside State & Capital
“During the early morning hours of July 14, 1970, the Young Lords and a patient-worker group called Think Lincoln Committee took over Lincoln Hospital. During the twenty-four hour takeover, the Young Lords ran health programs in a building the hospital was not even using. There, they held TB and lead poison detection and set up a day care center that would later be put to service.” (Source: The Lincoln Hospital Offensive by Latino Education Network Service, 1970)
“Here is a list of some distinct qualities I witness showing up in crip mutual aid work: Crip mutual aid isn’t always a big public thing; Crip mutual aid is often low-key; Crip mutual aid is crip creativity; Crip mutual aid is not a romanticized, sanitized version of care, it is fucking real; crip mutual aid has a lot less of what I think of as ABLED PANIC; Crip mutual aid doesn’t think the pandemic is going to be a short-term thing, that the worst is over and we’re on our way back to “normal.” (Source: How Disabled Mutual Aid Is Different Than Abled Mutual Aid, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Disability Visibility Project, 2001)
“Mutual aid is dangerous to the state and neoliberal economy when it is not easily co-opted as free labour or charity, because it opens up a space for alternative forms of being and acting supported by collectivity. Most well-known is how the Black Panther Party incited great alarm by organizing community breakfast programs, as the state feared that the community would then demand food as a right, leading to housing, health care, safety, and work envisioned as rights.” (Source: Mutual Aid Then and Now: Survival and the Power of the People, Upping the Anti, 2001)
“The marginalization of care work as uncompensated feminized labor, the mystification of law and policy reform, and the demobilizing liberal mythology of moving hearts and minds that keeps people busy expressing themselves online all impede a focus on mutual aid. However, mutual aid projects are central to effective social movements, and as conditions worsen, mutual aid projects are becoming an even more essential strategy for supporting survival, building new infrastructure, and mobilizing large numbers of people to work and fight for a new world. It is through mutual aid projects that we can build our capacities for self-organization and self-determination.” (Source: Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival by Dean Spade, 2020)
Current Challenges & Questions
“Capitalism has already mobilised to try and absorb this wave of everyday radicalism into its own currents. Local councils and MPs, spying a golden opportunity to steal valour from the grassroots, have been swooping into Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats with heavily-branded diktats. Hot on their heels came a flock of would-be Elon Musks: hapless tech bros eager to ‘disrupt’ the mutual aid ‘market’ through inexplicable data-gathering and technocratic centralisation.” (Source: Mutual Aid, Incorporated by josie sparrow, New Socialist, 2020)
“To make an organisation genuinely mutual is not an easy task, particularly when most people only approach such organisations in order to solve a problem that they are currently experiencing, whether it’s a lack of food, unpaid wages, or whatever. Once the problem is solved – or if the group is unable to help – people have a tendency to withdraw. This attitude is a byproduct of the incredibly ruthless capitalist regime we live in… People feel incredibly disconnected from each other, and they experience their grievances as individuals, not as a collective.” (Source: Socialism Is Not Charity: Why We’re Against “Mutual Aid”, Black Flag Sydney, The Anarchist Library, 2021)
“I have a question about what our current conditions are within this system and within our communities… It is exceedingly challenging to be working on meeting people’s immediate needs, while also engaging in consistent political education, while also developing leaders, while also building internal cultures of accountability and building healthy responses to conflict.. To be doing all these things simultaneously, how can all these things be done and held effectively? What are the good models for our present conditions?” (Source: Mariame Kaba in Building Communities of Care During Crisis and Beyond video with Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, Klee Benally and Kali Akuno, 2021)
Additional Resources & Books crowdsourced through WOW collective & network
- Five Book Plan: Mutual Aid by Dean Spade, Verso, 2020 here
- Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by Eman Abdelhadi and M. E. O’Brien here
- Mutual Aid by Dean Spade available online, searchable by sections here
- Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha here
- Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful by Mirca Madianou here
- Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin, full pdf online here
- Collective, The Care here
- Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited collection here
- Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies by Andrea Ritchie here
- Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis, Edited by Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar here
- No Spiritual Surrender by Klee Benally here
- Intro to MAST (Mutual Aid & Self Therapy), compiled by Dani Your Darling here
Practical Resources