Dean Spade
In the current political moment in the United States, defined by climate crisis, increased border enforcement, attacks on public benefits, expansive carceral control, rising housing costs, and growing white right-wing populism, leftist social movement activists and organizations face two particular challenges that, though not new, are urgent. The first is how
to address the actual changing conditions that are increasing precarity and shortening lives. The second is how to mobilize people for resistance.
In the face of these conditions, movements might strengthen, mobilizing tens of millions of new people to directly fight back against cops, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), welfare authorities, landlords, budget cuts, polluters, the defense industry, prison profiteers, and right-wing organizations. Or, movement organizations could fail to provide any real relief for those whose lives are most endangered and leave newly scared and angry people to the most passive and ineffective forms of expressing their opinions. This article argues that, in the face of these conditions, expanding use of mutual aid strategies will be the most effective way to support vulnerable populations to survive, mobilize significant
resistance, and build the infrastructure we need for the coming disasters.
Based on my observations participating in policy reform work, public education efforts, and mutual aid projects in movements for queer and trans liberation and prison and border abolition and my study of related and overlapping efforts, I argue that mutual aid is an often devalued iteration of radical collective care that provides a transformative alternative to the demobilizing frameworks for understanding social change and expressing dissent that dominate the popular imagination. I examine the benefits of mutual aid, its challenges, and how those are being addressed by contemporary organizations mobilizing through mutual aid.
http://www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Mutual-Aid-Article-Social-Text-Final.pdf