Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

By Dean Spade

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.
 
Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.
 
Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.  
 
Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839762147

Dean Spade

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He works as an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. Dean’s book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law was published by South End Press in 2011. A second edition with new writing was published in 2015 by Duke University Press. Bella Terra Press published a Spanish edition in 2016. In 2015, Dean released a one-hour video documentary, Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!, which can be watched free online with English captions or subtitles in several languages. Dean’s new book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next) was published by Verso Press in October 2020.

Book preview

Preface

Much has changed since I started to write Mutual Aid in 2016, and even since it was published in 2020. Many of us have witnessed and survived drastic shifts in conditions—both material and social—and joined with each other to resist. People are hungry for ways to help each other, alleviate their own suffering, find connection, and do something to stop the mounting violence and repression. I hope that this new edition, enhanced with information and guidance that has bubbled to the surface as millions of people try and try again in ongoing experiments at collective liberation and survival, will support this work.

In the summer of 2025, as I prepared to write this preface, I asked a few friends what they thought should be said at this time, five years since the term mutual aid went mainstream in the context of COVID and the George Floyd–Breonna Taylor uprising in 2020. Peter Gelderloos, whose writings on anarchism, direct action, ecological crisis, and much more have been influencing me for over twenty years, offered a very useful intervention by way of an arresting image.

Imagine a giant polluting factory, spewing poison that is covering the land around it, the waters, plants, and animals. When we are doing mutual aid work, it is often as if we are beside this factory, cleaning off rocks and birds and turtles, filtering small amounts of water. Meanwhile, the factory is producing toxic sludge thousands of times faster than we can clean any of its mess or support impacted beings. This can generate exhaustion, burnout, hopelessness. Our care work is not enough. It has to be in concert with work to destroy the causes of the conditions we are responding to. We have to attack the factory and shut it down.

Peter’s illustration offers a corrective to a key misunderstanding that became visible and was exacerbated with the mainstreaming of mutual aid: the idea that mutual aid is nonthreatening volunteer work that is complementary to government and corporate business as usual. This de-fanging, accomplished by separating mutual aid from a broader multi-tactic context of militant revolt, not only undermines the solidarities needed but also sets people up to have dispiriting, exhausting experiences of providing inadequate care under impossible conditions, resulting in widespread burnout and conflict between distressed, over-extended organizers.

I originally wrote Mutual Aid because of a frustration at how mutual aid work is consistently written out of the history of resistance struggles. Liberals portray social movements as a combination of acts of charismatic leaders and shifts in public opinion through education that result in enlightened governments and corporations changing course. This formula instructs us all to remain passive observers, speaking our minds on social media or at permitted marches, voting, donating to nonprofits, and writing to lawmakers, but never taking matters into our own hands. We are instructed to act through proxies, expressing ourselves to NGOs, corporate media platforms, and elected officials, hoping someone will take care of the crises. In reality, effective resistance requires that people engage in direct action, caring for each other and disrupting and destroying violent infrastructure. The problem is not that the elites who govern don’t know that criminalization, pollution, and war shorten lives. They know, and they are moving forward with gusto. Domination is not a result of misunderstanding, and liberation will not come by convincing them to stop. We have to stop them.

Mutual Aid was published in 2020, but the inspiration for it was the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Many people were shocked and dismayed by the results of that election, and many people who had never been part of resistance before were suddenly looking to get involved, afraid for themselves and loved ones, ready to fight back.

I was horrified, seeing how mainstream liberal organizations and ideas misled these newly mobilizable masses. The dominant message seemed to be that people should donate to the ACLU, the National Organization for Women, and Planned Parenthood, as though these massive organizations could or would change course to disrupt business as usual. The ACLU even launched a digital campaign calling on Americans to take ‘The People’s Oath’ pledging to protect and defend the Constitution. The idea that to make change we should go through intermediaries—nonprofits, courts, legislatures—and make symbolic statements online was pervasive. I was struck, once again, with how liberal myths about change misdirect people who are ready to care for and defend life. The stories we’ve been told about social movements teach people to think that change comes from charismatic leaders and elite institutions, and that ordinary people should vote, donate, share opinions on social media, stay informed, and perhaps occasionally march.

Among the most famous stories from US history that is misrepresented to tell this lie is the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This inaccurate version portrays Rosa Parks as an unwittingly brave woman who refused to give up her bus seat, whose case became the basis for important speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., leading to desegregation of the bus system. This telling erases the context of the resistance work that Parks and King were part of, as well as the tactics undertaken in the boycott. Parks was not a nice lady who stood up for herself suddenly one day. She was a long-time organizer who had been part of coordinated feminist, anti-racist work in the South for decades, including work focused on ending sexual harassment and assault of Black women. Public buses were a common site of such harassment, and Parks was part of long-term organizing efforts to address violence, both by police and ordinary white men, against Black women on buses.

The winning tactics of the boycott were not Parks’s civil disobedience or King’s leadership but rather the coordination, by thousands of working-class Black people, and especially women, of a giant transportation campaign to move 30,000 Black people around the city for eighteen months without using the buses. Women such as Georgia Gilmore supported the boycott through food projects that raised money to buy vehicles to drive people to work—she established the Club from Nowhere, an underground network preparing and selling food to fund the boycott.

The liberal mythology of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is emblematic of the larger trend in US liberalism, explaining social change as a result of actions by leaders and elites, with most people operating only as bystanders. In fact, the boycott is a story about a giant mutual aid project that provided an essential survival need—transportation—through risky, coordinated action by thousands of ordinary people. The people who took part in it faced threats of criminalization and violence, and they sustained their fight not knowing if they would ever win or when. Their actions were not spontaneous, coming out of thin air. They were part of a radical, militant lineage of resistance to white supremacist and patriarchal violence. Their mutual aid work operated in concert with other tactics aimed at destroying their opponents’ infrastructures of racial violence, including armed resistance to police and the Klan, disruption of business and government operations, and the creation of autonomous methods for sustaining Black life. They didn’t just provide care to people poisoned, they also attacked the sources of the poison. Their freedom project remains unfinished.

The Mainstreaming of Mutual Aid

The COVID-19 pandemic and the uprising against police violence and anti-Black racism that emerged with it in 2020 resulted in a mainstreaming of the concept of mutual aid. Suddenly, news outlets of all kinds were using the term to talk about people helping their neighbors get groceries, bailing protesters out of jail, and rescuing each other during disasters like fires and flooding. And that same period saw millions of people participate, most for the first time in their lives, in community projects providing for basic survival needs, just as many people took to the streets in battles with the police for the first time during that momentous summer.

But racial capitalism relies on our disempowerment. We are forced to get our basic needs met through exploitation, working for a wage so that we can buy housing, food, childcare, health care, transportation, and other necessities. We are supposed to believe we cannot provide these things to each other and ourselves, and, for the most part, we currently do lack skills to make and share them. We are brainwashed into consumer desires that keep us in a rat race, needing to work for money to buy versions of basic goods that our local communities could not make. We also live under a supposedly protective system of licensure and regulation—of drugs, health care, childcare, food purity, and the like—that ensures that these necessities will be provided by large organizations, primarily for profit. These regulatory frameworks make it illegal for us to make and share these things ourselves. This system of wage labor and forced dependence on extractive infrastructure is the central engine of racial capitalism and colonialism. It takes our basic needs and turns them into fuel for global wealth concentration.

So mutual aid is a serious threat to the powers that be, and when it catches on in moments of crisis and rupture such as in 2020, they try to manage and contain it. One way this was managed in 2020, by entities ranging from liberal nonprofits and elected officials to media, was through a message that mutual aid is complementary to business as usual. People who save their neighbors from floodwaters or distribute food, for example, are cast as do-gooder volunteers, cheered by elites. Mutual aid is seen as a stopgap measure during brief disruptions, until the usual systems can return to normal. This framing insists that normal conditions are a fair and adequate way of managing human needs. It requires ignoring the constant crisis conditions produced by racial capitalism and the ongoing mutual aid that sustains people whose communities are ravaged by criminalization, immigration enforcement, housing insecurity, poverty, ableism, sexual violence, and targeted pollution.

The division of mutual aid into two categories is part of this: some mutual aid participants are portrayed as neighborly, harmless do-gooders, but others—those who seek collective autonomy from coercive systems— are cast as dangerous threats. This division is illustrated in the indictment of sixty-one #StopCopCity participants in August 2023. Georgia Attorney General Christopher Carr’s eighty-page narrative describing the multifaceted campaign against a police training facility in Atlanta as a criminal conspiracy articulates mutual aid as a sinister, violent anarchist plot.

The indictment, importantly, hinges on accusations of charity fraud, accusing participants in the broad, multi-tactic campaign of coordinating a plan to solicit donations from unsuspecting donors who didn’t know they were contributing funds to violent anarchists. The entire indictment is worth reading to see how the prosecutor interprets local resistance to carceral expansion. But it is particularly useful to see the portrayal of solidarity, mutual aid, and collectivism as Carr writes them:

The major factor in anarchist mutual aid is the absence of government and the absence of hierarchy. Indeed, an anarchist belief relies on the notion that once government is abolished, individuals will rely on mutual aid to exist. In doing so, anarchists believe that individuals will work together and voluntarily contribute their own resources to insure [sic] that each individual has its [sic] own needs met.

…

Indeed, the belief is that the government is engaging in a form of violence by denying individuals [sic] basic needs through capitalism, government action, and law enforcement by police. Anarchists often point to law enforcement as one of the chief violent actors, and they accuse the government of using law enforcement to oppress societal change, and they view the structure of government as inherently oppressive and violent. As a result, violent anarchists often engage in violent activity towards law enforcement.

For Carr, mutual aid is dangerous because it is antigovernment, seeks autonomy, and is inextricably tied to police abolitionism.

Carr’s narrative portrays a unity across our campaigns and movements that does not, in fact, exist, in Atlanta or anywhere else. There are, of course, many attitudes about and approaches to mutual aid among people participating in it. Many people enter mutual aid work with a burning desire to reduce suffering and support others, often without a developed assessment of how mutual aid fits into resistance movements. Some people see mutual aid as complementary to efforts to elect socialists and mobilize nonprofits and government welfare systems to offer increased poor and disaster relief. And some of us are actually seeking autonomy, opposing law enforcement, and understanding state violence, which promotes and protects ecocidal, warmongering racial capitalism as the biggest threat to our lives and all life on earth.

I wrote this book to lift up the core role of mutual aid in resistance movements, and to support people who are scared and pissed to step into this vital work as conditions worsen. I wrote it having spent decades working in many formations (autonomous community groups, nonprofits,

[llkeyes-639626 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've been doing mutual aid work since the early 1990s, but I never had a name for it. I called it "street work." Mostly outreach and help to our unhoused population in the cities I've lived in. This book was helpful in that I can now put a name to what I've intuitively been doing. I love the idea that we are "solidarity not charity."

The first part of the book was a great primer in what mutual aid actually is (and isn't). The second part was extremely helpful in allowing to me identify what has gone wrong in some of these groups I've been part of.

I'm currently involved in a local group here in Vancouver, WA addressing the many food insecure people in our city. The group I joined has been around for a while and even though it's pretty non-structured, all the personalities work well together and are welcoming.

I found this group after leaving another one addressing the same issue in a slightly different way. After joining that group, I realized the leaders were projecting their own life struggles onto the group and trying to make members responsible for meeting their needs, or at a minimum being targets of that projected stress.

Reading Part II was an eye opener and helped me to put a name to the various dynamics that were happening. That experience caused me to look for a book, and I found this one.

Now, I feel very well equipped to not only address problems in the future, but to be a part of the solution. Everyone benefits that way.

[askelmore · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Best for:
Anyone who is interested in building community and addressing challenges while working outside the traditional methods.

In a nutshell:
Author Spade discusses the concept of mutual aid and how it differs from the concepts of non-profit and charity work, and offers tips for successful solidarity work.

Worth quoting:
(There is a lot, but the below paragraph I think helped me to shift what changing the world means to me.)

“Solidarity is what builds and connects large-scale movements. In the context of professionalized nonprofit organizations, groups are urged to be single-issue oriented, framing their message around ‘deserving’ people within the population they serve, and using tactics palatable to elites. Prison-oriented groups are supposed to fight only for ‘the innocent’ or ‘the nonviolent,’ for example, and to do their work by lobbying politicians about how some people — not all people — don’t belong in prison. This is the opposite of solidarity, because it means the most vulnerable people are left behind: those who were up-charged by cops and prosecutors, those who do not have the means to prove their innocence, those who do not match cultural tropes of innocence and deservingness. This narrow focus actually strengthens the system’s legitimacy by advocating that the targeting of those more stigmatized people is okay.”

Why I chose it:
I’ve had a very capitalistic view of community engagement and improvement in the past, and was looking for a book to help me better understand a different model for community support.

What it left me feeling:
Motivated

Review:
I live in the UK, and during the lock down phases of the pandemic (which were many in the UK) I joined a mutual aid WhatsApp group. It was pretty straightforward, and I don’t want to overstate my involvement as others actually organized the work - I just responded when I could. This usually meant printing and delivering grocery vouchers to individuals. The money came from (I believe) the local council in the beginning; eventually there were calls for funds from the community, and then the whole operation was shut down. There was something so lovely about it from the standpoint of there wasn’t, as far as I knew, any real gate keeping. Someone would say what they needed, and people would provide if they could.

Prior to this experience, my involvement in supporting and building community was usually limited to donating to charities and assuming that non-profits knew what was best to address social challenges overlooked by the government. Heck, I was even on a junior board for a health non-profit. I often applied for jobs at non-profits, and went to school for public and non-profit management and policy. But much of what I learned in grad school is challenged by this book.

The book talks a lot about collaboration vs majority rule, and challenges the hierarchical nature and set-up of so many non-profits and charities. I found those parts super interesting, as someone who has only worked in hierarchical spaces. The book doesn’t shy away from warning about the potential pitfalls of mutual aid work either - there’s a whole chapter in there on what to look out for.

My only real gripe with the book is that there isn’t much evidence provided to support Spade’s claims - there’s a great resource list in the back, but when the author makes claims that one would consider declarative, he doesn’t provide anything to back that up. Granted, most of the statements feel true, but it’s easier to dismiss statements when they are presented as fact without evidence. An example of this is this statement: ‘When groups are volunteer-based, people are more likely to admit their limitations and scrap bad ideas, because they are motivated by purpose, not elite approval.’ Like, I mean, probably? But that’s a statement that I’d like some support for if we’re going to then base other actions off of it.

That seems like a huge caveat, but in reality I don’t think it takes too much away from the message of the book and the very real tips Spade offers. So many books about world-changing are very theoretical; this one feels super practical to me, and I very much appreciate that.

This is a small book (only about 150 pages, and the size of a trade paperback). It took be a long time to read only because I just didn’t read a lot this month. Once I finally sat down and decided to finish it, it was a quick read.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Recommend to a Friend and Keep