Dean Spade. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during This Crisis (and the Next). London: Verso, 2020. 128p. Paper, $14.95 (ISBN 978-1-8397-6212-3).

Abstract

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by Dean Spade is about creating and maintaining relationships, organizations, and projects that help people survive in crises, processes that together are known as “mutual aid.” Mutual aid helps people refuse to be disposed of and refuse to dispose of one another. In doing so, it offers the means to develop a better analysis of the conditions of people’s lives and builds capacity for sustained action to improve those conditions. Tending to one another through mutual aid opens doors to other forms of organizing. Among library workers, this book may be most useful to those who are fighting for better conditions in both workplaces and communities. Sustaining mutual aid, Spade argues, is a twofold matter. First, it involves a sense of being in struggle with: understanding one’s survival and liberation as being tied to others’ survival and liberation. Second, mutual aid expands the landscape of struggle by showing that empty stomachs, living unhoused, precarious and invisible labor, and institutionalization (in prisons, long-term care, and “digital poorhouses”) are each political and therefore sites of struggle.