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

The Black Panther Party sold copies of Mao’s Little Red Book to raise the money they needed to buy guns, and although this isn’t a tip for mutual aid covered by Dean Spade’s short guide to creating militant community solidarity organisations there is nonetheless much of interest in his book. I guess like Mao, Spade recognises that internal group processes are essential to success!

Spade is an activist academic with much which is useful to say. The bibliography has a range of interesting books, websites and articles, together with a study guide.

Written during the Covid crisis, Spade argues that the ‘contemporary political movement is defined by emergency.’ Climate change is promising a future of storms and fires, droughts and floods, with racism linked to repressive policing as another element of the tough present we are living through. There are no reformist illusions here; capitalism is the cause of this unfolding catastrophe, of oppression based on sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity and class all part of the picture. Thus mutual aid, defined as ‘collective coordination to meet each other’s needs’, is a means of both protection and transformation.

Spade spends much of the book celebrating mutual aid as a useful strategy, looking at in the context of racialised capitalism and distinguishing it from charity which is the philanthropy of the bosses under capitalism. As capitalism becomes increasingly unequal, Bill Gates and co. only give to those who they view as deserving. Charity largely protects capitalism, allowing the rich to feel virtuous and promotes a moralistic division between the deserving and undeserving poor. Electoral politics too, particularly in a US context, is seen by Spade as largely a diversion from real struggles.

The book sees mutual aid emerging from the margins and presents it as a way of imagining and creating a post-capitalist society. Spade’s ambition is to promote mutual aid as a pathway to this society: ‘To imagine a society where we share everything, co-govern everything, have everything we need and don’t rely on coercion and domination’.

Much of this short text is based on sweeping rhetoric but it does have practical context. Spade focusses on the need for good internal group processes and strategies for avoiding burnout. In a capitalist society, he argues, we are ingrained with a logic of accepting the discipline of the state and the market. Without police it is argued that we will be unprotected and without the market we won’t have the discipline to provide for our mutual material needs. Of course both the state and the market are repressive processes, but they give rise to cultures that make it difficult to create alternatives based on care and mutual protection. Thus much of the book discusses how we can overcome an often internalised capitalist culture that destroys trust and makes working together difficult. The longest chapter ‘No Masters, No Flakes’ is the most practical, looking at how good personal and collective practices can be constructed.

Spade notes that attempts to build groups advocating liberation can often go wrong, and I am sure this something that all of us on the left have experienced. So he spends much time looking at good and bad internal processes. If groups are undemocratic, new participants are ignored and problems such as how to deal with disagreements and money are not dealt with, mutual aid projects won’t get off the ground.

So far so good! Yet I think a number of critical points can be made about the text. It is valuable for promoting mutual aid as a radical strategy but what we really need is base-building. The distinction is that in base-building capacity is built through practical action for revolutionary transformation. What is built through community work is a community of committed revolutionaries who can work in the long term to overthrow a racist capitalist system. While Spade is advocating not an extension of charity but a more radical strategy, the construction of revolutionary organisation isn’t developed. At the minimum a discussion of what has gone both right and wrong with revolutionary organisations in the past is needed here. To my mind, the really inspiring contemporary examples are present combinations of practical community support activity with attempts to build enduring political organisations. For example, in Wales we have Valleys Underground who combine community activism with revolutionary political education and activism. In the USA, Philly Socialists provide a good example of base-building – linking mutual aid project such as a community garden, to building a solid cadre.

My criticism is perhaps inappropriate; a book on base-building is different to a book on mutual aid. I think though even sticking with mutual aid, there is a lot more that Spade could cover. Internal processes and avoidance of burn out are vital questions but it would be good to see chapters on a range practical nuts and bolts issues. How can money be raised? How is a communal kitchen run? What are the best forms of outreach to recruit activists to the causes?

Additionally, Spade presents solutions that look attractive but it would be interesting to hear directly from mutual aid participants. For example, he advocates consensual democratic structures, these are of course up for debate, but in defending them it would have been instructive to have read about the direct experience of organisers. What do they think works and fails, based on live experience?

Spade in short provides a useful introduction to mutual aid work but a more detailed cookbook based on the perhaps contradictory experiences of mutual aiders would have been even more valuable. Mutual aid is a start but ultimately more enduring revolutionary organisations are going to be necessary to secure a decent future for all. Asking how they can succeed means investigating what is found to work or not, examining the theories of revolutionary change and looking to historical examples. Base-building can be seen as literally building the basis for revolution, mutual aid however radical is a good start but we need to go further.

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
Dean Spade
Verso, 2020
9781839762123