Many thanks to Jackson Heights Books for the paid opportunity to review Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next).
The summer of 2020 was one for the books. New York City was declared dead after the coronavirus killed 18,000 residents, most of them Black and brown, in three months. Weeks of mandated quarantine launched the local unemployment rate to 20 percent. Lines outside food pantries stretched for blocks and rent went unpaid. Meanwhile, thousands marched the streets to protest the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other people of color at the hands of police.
From that desperation and rage sprang a curious thing: mutual aid. But many of its participants did not know exactly what it was. It was an unofficial charity to which neighbors could donate and distribute food. It was an act of solidarity, which gave it a socialist tinge. It was a strike against the establishment, and it was a way to build a political base. It became whatever neighbors wanted it to be, for whatever reason.
Dean Spade, associate professor at Seattle University School of Law, defined it later that year in his treatise Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso Books, October 2020). He described mutual aid as “collective coordination to meet each other’s needs, usually from an awareness that the systems we have in place are not going to meet them.” Specifically, it supports survival while mobilizing social movements to tackle underlying problems.
Probably the best-known mutual-aid project was the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition to feeding children before the school day, it allowed low-income families to shed the stigma of poverty and created a forum for considering the conditions that kept them poor in the first place. “Getting support at a place that sees the systems—not the people suffering in them—as the problem can help move people from shame to anger and defiance,” Spade wrote.
But when the U.S. Department of Agriculture co-opted the program in the early 1970s, it replaced the Party’s philosophy of communal decision-making with the hierarchy of charity, Spade recalled. “Charity, aid, relief and social services are terms that usually refer to rich people or the government making decisions about the provision of some kind of support to poor people,” he explained. “You can be sure that help like that is not designed to get to the root causes of poverty.”
In writing Mutual Aid, Spade draws on his two decades in activism to describe what mutual aid can accomplish and, in some instances, where it falls short. But most of his arguments are buttressed with personal insight instead of evidence, which he could have found easily in the Young Lords’ occupation of Lincoln Hospital and the work of Occupy Sandy in the Rockaways, Red Hook and Staten Island. As a result, his discussion on the value of mutual aid relies too heavily on zeal and not enough on proof of concept.
Where Spade succeeds is in his argument that individualism must be unlearned for a mutual-aid project to succeed. In table after table, he highlights how competitive, defensive and self-serving behaviors can derail a project, and how consensus and introspection can encourage solidarity and enthusiasm. “In our culture, we get a lot of practice either going along with bossy people or trying to be the boss,” he wrote. “It’s time to learn something different.”
Mutual Aid does well as a how-to guide for those already familiar with the philosophy and who want to launch or maintain a project, as Spade goes into meticulous detail on group dynamics in a mutual-aid setting.
The uninitiated can learn more about the philosophy with Occupy (2012, Zucotti Park Press) by linguist and historian Noam Chomsky, and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (2006, Dover Publications) by the late 19th century philosopher Peter Kropotkin. And this fall, food and politics writer Suzanne Cope explores the history of the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program in Power Hungry: The Untold Story of the Women Who Fed the Civil Rights Movement and the Government's Quest to Stop Them (2021, Chicago Review Press).
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), written by Dean Spade. Published October 2020 by Verso Books. Paperback; 152 pages.