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

by Dean Spade

Left social movements have two big jobs right now. First, we need to organize to help people survive the devastating conditions unfolding every day. Second, we need to mobilize hundreds of millions of people for resistance so we can tackle the underlying causes of these crises.

The way to tackle these two big tasks—meeting people’s needs and mobilizing them for resistance—is to create mutual aid projects and get lots of people to participate in them.

Mutual aid is 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.

Under capitalism, social problems resulting from exploitation and the maldistribution of resources are understood as individual moral failings, not systemic problems.

Mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian, demonstrating how we can do things together in ways we were told not to imagine, and that we can organize human activity without coercion.

Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a willingness to defy illegitimate authority. Taking risks with a group for a shared purpose can be a reparative experience when we have been trained to follow rules.

MADR asserts that “saving lives, homes, and communities in the event and aftermath of disaster may require taking bold action without waiting for permission from authorities. Disaster survivors themselves are the most important authority on just action.”

In The Battle for Paradise, Naomi Klein argues that locally controlled microgrids are more desirable for delivering sustainable energy, given the failures of the energy monopolies that currently dominate energy delivery.

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—that is, rich people or the government deciding who gets the help, what the limits are to that help, and what strings are attached.

Charity makes rich people and corporations look generous while upholding and legitimizing the systems that concentrate wealth.

But any poor person knows that poverty is caused by the greed of their bosses, landlords, and health insurance companies, by systems of white supremacy and colonialism, and by wars and forced migrations.

Elite solutions to poverty are always about managing poor people and never about redistributing wealth.

Despite the fact that they pitch themselves as the solution for fixing the problems of the current system, nonprofits mostly replicate, legitimize, and stabilize that system.

The false separation of politics and injustice from ordinary life—and the idea that activism is a kind of lifestyle accessory—is demobilizing to our movements, hides the root causes of injustice, and keeps us passive and complicit.

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.

Keeping people numb to the suffering in the world—and their own suffering—is essential to keeping things as they are.

Being more engaged with the complex and painful realities we face, and with thoughtful, committed action alongside others for justice, feels much better than numbing out or making token, selfconsoling charity gestures.

Disasters exacerbate and expose inequalities, showing the preexisting crises that elites strive to ignore and hide from view.

Our capacity to win is possible to the extent that we can collectively realize what they do not control—us—and collectively disobey and disrupt their systems, retaking control of our ways of sustaining life.

Whenever we rely on a capitalist, imperialist system to provide vital necessities, we can guess that the provisions will be fragile and inadequate, and designed to transfer far more wealth toward the populations those systems were designed to support: white people, rich people, straight people, and men.

Part of the reason our dream of a savior government is so compelling is that it is hard for us to imagine a world where we meet core human needs through systems that are based on principles of collective self-determination rather than coercion.

Mutual aid groups face four dangerous tendencies: dividing people into those who are deserving and undeserving of help, practicing saviorism, being co-opted, and collaborating with efforts to eliminate public infrastructure and replace it with private enterprise and volunteerism.

The charity model often ties aid and criminalization together, determining who gets help and who gets put away,

Mutual aid projects and their individual participants must actively resist savior narratives.

The prevailing myth is that business models are more “efficient.” The truth is that making everything profit-centered, as we’ve seen with our health care system, actually degrades the care that people receive, as businesses seek short-term gains at any expense.

Politicians and CEOs, who fantasize about a world where nothing is guaranteed and most people are desperate and easily exploited, love the idea of volunteerism replacing a social safety net.

Mutual aid projects emerge because public services are exclusive, insufficient, punitive, and criminalizing.

Capitalism makes us think about short-term gains, not building the long-term capacity for all of our well-being.

We are told we live in a system of “majority rule,” yet there is rarely anyone to vote for who is not owned by—or part of— the 1 percent, and the decisions those leaders make do not benefit the majority of people.

If we are trying to build a world where people have collective self-determination, where we get to make justice-centered decisions together about land, work, housing, water, minerals, energy, food, and everything else that matters, we need to practice new skills beyond dominance and submission in decision-making.

We will never have as much money and weapons as our opponents. All we have is people power. We need to support people who have not been part of social movement work to join social movements. They need to feel like they can become part of a response to conditions that they find intolerable.

This.

When we get our sense of self from fame, status, or approval from a bunch of strangers, we’re in trouble.

we have all been shaped by systems that make us insecure, approval-seeking, individualist, and sometimes shallow.

Burnout is the combination of resentment, exhaustion, shame, and frustration that make us lose connection to pleasure and passion in the work and instead encounter difficult feelings like avoidance, compulsion, control, and anxiety.

We are steeped in a capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist culture that encourages us to compete, distrust, hoard, hide, disconnect, and confine our value to how others see us and what we produce.

Burnout is prevented or lessened when we feel connected to others, when there is transparency in how we work together, when we can rest as needed, when we feel appreciated by the group, and when we have skills for giving and receiving feedback.

The need to avoid acting out my defensiveness, or taking on a victim narrative, is especially important when I am in a position of privilege of any kind

The trick is to realize that our raw spots belong to us, rather than us being hostage to them, and that we can experience the feelings, notice them, and decide how to move forward, rather than having the feelings drive our behavior.

We live in a society based on disposability.

Humility, compassion for ourselves, and compassion for others are antidotes to disposability culture.

The only thing that keeps those in power in that position is the illusion of our powerlessness.