Abstract
Since the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic, varying levels of crisis have come to define our everyday lives in new ways. Different types of disasters have become layered with each other, and in some cases the pandemic has intensified some of the already existing societal and humanitarian crises globally. In Europe alone we are seeing, amongst other things, increase in unemployment, homelessness, escalation of right-wing politics, different degrees of denialism and conspiracy, and nearly 1,8 million corona-related deaths. In his latest book, Dean Spade addresses how contemporary political environment is defined by disasters, and how further major disasters will also define the near future. Spade uses the anarcho-communist term Mutual Aid, theorized by Pjotr Kropotkin in 1902, referring to the radical act of practicing solidarity and mobilizing ordinary people to work together in meeting each other’s needs, sharing material resources and aiming towards political change.
Spade’s approach to crisis is a practical one, which feels very welcome during the COVID-19 pandemic and other ongoing crises of our time. Due to varying levels of disaster affecting different areas of the world, surviving everyday life has become a struggle for millions of differently compromised people in Europe and around the globe. Mutual Aid is a two-part book providing an introduction to mutual aid as a theoretical concept and a hands-on guide on how to apply it in practice. The first part of the book introduces the concept in the context of grassroot projects, including examples from hurricane Maria Mutual Aid Disaster Relief (MADR) in Puerto Rico to mutual aid work done in prison abolitionist movements to the Black Panther Party’s survival programs in the 1960s and 1970s. Spade defines mutual aid as a radical act that aims for communities helping themselves while existing systems are failing to meet human needs at different levels of society. The focus is not only in meeting people’s needs but also in working together to address and dismantle the underlying causes of crisis. Spade stresses that mutual aid work must include work towards transformative change, to counter what he calls the charity model, referring to the top-down hierarchies typical to charities and state-run aid programs. Mutual aid, contrarily, is community-rooted, local and participatory, aims to share resources and support the most vulnerable people in society, who are typically excluded from state- and NGO-run charity projects. The type of grassroot theorizing Spade practices in the scope of the book is an exceptionally welcome act in bridging the gap between the academia and the material reality of everyday life and its struggles.
The second part of the book focuses on practical advice, tables and questions that aim to help in building and maintaining mutual aid projects. Spade provides insights to the potential pitfalls in mutual aid and guides readers in working together towards dismantling hierarchies, practicing collective decision making, participatory and transparent structures of collaboration, tackling conflicts in constructive ways, working with joy and avoiding burnout and effects of perfectionism. As Spade states: “Activism and mutual aid shouldn’t feel like volunteering or like a hobby – it should feel like living in alignment with our hopes for the world and with our passions.”
The emphasis of the second part of the book is thus in sustainability within movements, providing insight to working in ways that resist coercion, exhaustion, and hierarchical structures. Spade stresses well-being as part of mutual aid work, in contrast to paid work under the regime of capitalism. In a world of individual-focused charity, volunteering and social media activism, that often produce performative ways of showing solidarity, the ideas presented in Mutual Aid are key in sparking sustainable societal change. Spade acknowledges that we will keep facing various disasters in our lifetime. Under such circumstances, finding joy in mutual aid work is essential, and therefore the reflections on joy along with the focus on well-being strike to me as one of the most important perspectives of the book.
Walking the streets of my current hometown of Berlin in the midst of the pandemic solidifies many of the unmet needs and the ongoing emergencies people are facing. Disaster has become a visible part of everyday life in new and more urgent ways than before. In the heart of winter people were camping under bridges because of the housing crisis, mass protests against corona restrictions with people bearing right-wing symbols were making the streets feel unsafe in various new ways. On the last week of July 2021, the queer community in Berlin was met with a series of different violent attacks, motivated by racism and homo- and transphobia. As a result of frequent attacks, queer and trans people in Berlin started to mobilize, organizing demonstrations, starting a queer and trans housing and job search collective and many more projects, to address the unmet needs of queer and BIPOC communities in Berlin and Germany in general. The Berlin queer community is thus practicing mutual aid and so facing together the multi-layered difficulties, that queer people face even in Berlin, the city often referred to as the ‘queer haven’ of Europe.
Wherever we are located, different levels of disaster keep affecting our lives in increasing amounts, the most pressing and all-affecting of those being rooted in climate change. Spade also frequently references climate change as the driving force of many current and future disasters, and prompts building mutual aid groups as a way to survive them. In August 2021 IPCC published its latest assessment report on the state of the climate. It gave concerning numbers on the rapid pace of global warming and intensifying changes in the Earth’s climate. Mutual aid is already practiced in many of the ongoing battles against climate change and consumer capitalism globally. Spade notes that mutual aid has been a common practice among indigenous communities for centuries and is present in indigenous climate movements as well. In times of accelerating climate-related disasters mutual aid could be the mobilization needed to find local solutions to meet affected people’s urgent needs. It could also work as the catalyst in taking those necessary steps to mobilize masses of ordinary people to work together for the climate. Like Spade suggests, disasters often expose injustices and are thus opportunities for pushing social change. The question remains, whether the disasters of our time can spark and expand sustainable, global and ever more populous climate mobilizations.
Spade’s book is successful in being an accessible and practical introduction to the concept and action of mutual aid. By drawing the focus on action and concrete practices Spade participates in dismantling hierarchies in theory making. Further, by drawing the theory of mutual aid from grassroot movements Spade acknowledges the concept as collaborative practice, that has its practical origins in community organizing, including indigenous communities, and that only later has been incorporated and appropriated into academic theory. The prompt to self-reflection in the second part is also a valuable focus, as it invites awareness to ethics in building more sustainable ways of working. Spade’s examples tend to be US-focused, which is understandable, as mutual aid work tends to be local in its core. A more expansive outlook on concrete examples would have possibly required insight from other writers. This would be an interesting expansion in relating the local mutual aid practices to globally operating power structures.
Spade ends in a message of hope for resistance and our mutual ability to dismantle violent and destructive systems of capitalism, imperialism and racism. He is encouraging readers to start building their own mutual aid projects and working together towards a world, that is better in line with the core values of equality and justice. Building mutual aid projects seems like a good start to expanding towards more just societies. With accelerating disasters affecting us daily, imagining a better world is not easy. Hope and utopia of a better world get lost in the news feed, and the neoliberal sense of individualism threatens collective movements. However, taking action and mobilizing as many people as possible is still the best hope in making the drastic changes needed to dismantle violent systems, survive upcoming disasters and slow down climate change. Spade succeeds in giving a sense of urgency of the state of global crises while resisting apathy and sparking motivation, a welcome act that makes the book a helpful read in the current decade.