Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, 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 vulnerable members of their communities. This 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 has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Mutual aid isn't charity: it's a form of organizing where people get to create new systems of care and generosity so we can survive.
Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, 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 vulnerable members of their communities. This 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 has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Mutual aid isn't charity: it's a form of organizing where people get to create new systems of care and generosity so we can survive.
A handbook for how to organize to meet immediate needs in your community and work toward lasting change.
Dean Spade is an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where he teaches courses on policing, imprisonment, gender, race, and social movements. Dean has spent over two decades working in social movements working to end prisons, borders, poverty, and war and support people trying to survive right now. In 2002, Dean founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a non-profit law collective that provides free legal services to transgender, intersex and gender non-conforming people who are low-income and/or people of color, and which operates on a collective governance model. Alongside his book Normal Life: Adminsitrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, Dean’s writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Out, In These Times, Social Text, and Signs.
We need this book right now! This reads like a how-to manual for
modern and future interdependence. Dean walks us through what
mutual aid is, best practices, pitfalls, and helps us tap into the
wisdom and potential of this strategy for surviving the crises we
can anticipate and those that will surprise us. Read this and move
from a scarcity/charity mindset to one of abundant solidarity!
*adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism*
Mariame Kaba said she 'cheered after I read this book,' and other
readers may join in her enthusiasm for its helpful guidance and
useful framework for our mutual aid projects.
*The Indypendent*
Peter Kropotkin called mutual aid a "factor in evolution." The
Black Panther Party called it "survival pending revolution." Dean
Spade tells us that mutual aid is fundamental to making revolution.
It is about building solidarity, preparing for battle, and creating
a culture of collective care to displace the atomizing culture of
individualism and the market. An indispensable guide for our
moment, this book teaches us that effective social movements are
impossible without mutual aid. Read every page. Carry it
everywhere. Share it with everyone. Change everything.
*Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams*
Urgently calling for radical creativity and transformative change,
Spade invites readers to think critically about their roles in
groups and liberation.
*Booklist*
[Mutual Aid] provides a useful framework of the meaning of mutual
aid while explaining how it is an essential component to social
transformation and solidarity movements.
*The Tulane Hullabaloo*
Deftly exploring the grassroots theory of mutual aid and its role
in social justice movements, Spade critiques the existing systems
and the need to "fix" people who are in need, as well offering
actionable advice for activists.
*The Progressive*
[Mutual Aid is] at once a call-to-arms, a balm for all those
despairing at the present and future, and a blueprint for how we
might better live with one another.
*The Nation*
Miriam Kaba said she 'cheered after I read this book,' and other
readers may join in her enthusiasm for its helpful guidance and
useful framework for our mutual aid projects.
*The Indypendent*
[Mutual Aid] can be read as a manual for people already doing
mutual aid work, but it will also be of interest to people [who]
don't identify as activists but are questioning that identity amid
the chaos and pain of the pandemic, continued police brutality,
polarization, and climate chaos.
*Lit Hub*
[Spade's] book sees mutual aid emerging from the margins and
presents it as a way of imagining and creating a post-capitalist
society. [His] 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'.
*Ebb Magazine*
Spade outlines how the systems we currently have in place are not
set up to meet people's needs-as we've seen highlighted by last
year's major global disruption.
*Marie Claire*
Spade's book argues for the power of mutual aid to remake social
relations based on solidarity, break stigmas around
interdependency, and build social movements. ... Mutual Aid
stresses the autonomous, localized aspects of community organizing
and resists the power structures that come with the
professionalization and centralization of radical care work-whether
at the hands of government, nonprofits, or the capitalist
class.
*Artforum*
Mutual Aid is not an appeal to people with power to give it up,
step aside, or make room.Instead, it addresses people building
power together to achieve their goals.
*College & Research Libraries*
Mutual Aid is not only a guidebook for surviving current and future
social crises; it offers a means by which social life may be
radically transformed toward widespread social equity, cohesion,
dignity, and belonging.
*Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
