Liberation! A must read. [Mutual Aid by Dean Spade]

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiraling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, 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 the vulnerable.

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 is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.  

Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

The more I learn the more radical my understanding and approach to society. I'd never heard of "mutual aid" before this book. I've become increasingly aware of publishers like Haymarket Books and Verso Books during this time of crisis and upheaval. The internet had connected me with them loosely before the mismanagement of COVID-19 in the United States got so out of hand, most assuredly through Twitter; but being a book borrower more often than book buyer I hadn't interacted with them directly, unless you count some free eBooks I "bought" during these last few months. So with NetGalley and new books always on the mind I checked the site to see if Verso Books was a listed publisher and lo and behold, here we are.

New life experiences in the context of millenial adulthood have shaped my understanding of the political systems and realities around me, of the pervasiveness of capitalism in every aspect of my life, and more. Video accounts and reports of political protests and clashes nationwide have galvanized not only myself, but many others, of the younger generations especially, in support of police abolition, or at the very least in support of extreme levels of police reform. And with radical and new ideology come questions. What-ifs and a lot of what-about-ism.

Dean Spade's Mutual Aid sold me on the basic concept of mutual aid. Communities are enough to solve their problems of need. I can't say that I'm 100% for prison abolition, at least not yet. A lot of has to do with my questions of how justice will be achieved for victims of sexual violence. There are a lot of crimes that I can't see being appropriately addressed through means of rehabilitation and so I have a lot of questions. Perhaps this is part of my social conditioning, an inability to imagine justice for sexual offenders outside of carceral means, even though I do understand how laughable the "justice" meted out my the current system is. Restorative justice in those terms is something I have more to learn about, but that lack of understanding of proposed visions and their potential global applications is always a caveat I have when radical ideas are presented to me. Still, I want to learn about what community-led justice can, could, or would look like, in all aspects of a society.

Unfortunately I walk away with those probing inquiries of the full extent of mutual aid unanswered. But I can't say I'm unsold on mutual aid, because of a lot of it just makes sense. So yes, communities need to rise up and run themselves. Liberation! We need to free our minds and lives from dehumanizing capitalistic mindsets and structures. Still, this book was more a study on best practices in mutual aid groups and less a deep exploration of what mutual aid is and could be. This is definitely a must read, just a 4 star must read for me.

Mutual Aid is due for publication October 27, 2020.