Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis 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 spiralling 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.

When reading books I care about, I always try to subject them to the critical standards I scrutinise Neo-liberal and ancap ideas to, for this my main gripe with this books stems from two points:
1- The book use of sensationalised wording in some chapters can be self-indulgent at times.
2- The overall focus on examples from the US; while there was an example from Hong Kong protestors, I would have liked to see more resources about other mutual-aid projects in other countries.
Besides this, the book is a my goto book for self-organising without slipping into a charity model. And the pitfalls are detailed with examples that go beyond anecdotal and more into the patterns that they usually fail through.

“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.”

“This book provides a concrete guide for building mutual aid groups and networks. Part I explores what mutual aid is, why it is different than charity, and how it relates to other social movement tactics. Part II dives into the nitty-gritty of how to work together in mutual aid groups and how to handle the challenges of group decision-making, conflict, and burnout...Ultimately, helps imagine how we can coordinate to collectively take care of ourselves—even in the face of disaster—and mobilize hundreds of millions of people to make deep and lasting change.”

“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.”