Mutual aid is nice, but it doesn’t challenge capitalism
Review: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next)
By Dean Spade, Verso Academic, 2021, 128 pages.
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The world is getting bleaker by the day: money is being poured into weapons of war, poverty is on the rise, genocide continues in Gaza, and the prospect of climate catastrophe looms ever larger. While for some this is a reason to switch off and retreat into personal life, others are looking for solutions. Yet not all solutions, even apparently radical ones, can win a better world.
Dean Spade makes the case for one in his 2020 book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next). His overarching argument goes like this:
“Government policies actively produce and exacerbate harm, inadequately respond to crises, and ensure that certain populations bear the brunt of pollution, poverty, disease, and violence. In the face of this, more and more ordinary people are feeling called to respond in their communities, creating bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable neighbours. This survival work, when done in conjunction with social movements demanding transformative change, is called mutual aid.”
While social movements are a component of fighting for change, mutual aid is decisive: “our ability to build mutual aid will determine [my emphasis] whether we win the world we long for or dive further into crisis”.
Spade draws on several examples to elaborate what he means by mutual aid. In the 1960s and ’70s, sections of the women’s and gay liberation movements in the US set up health clinics, abortion providers and childcare collectives. One of the activities of the Black Panther Party was their free breakfast programs. As Spade points out, many strikes throughout history have involved the establishment of strike kitchens and the collection of donations for strike funds. There have also been countless examples of natural disasters, which are becoming more destructive thanks to global warming, being met with community efforts to help people escape and access relief.
So, what is it that makes mutual aid the key to winning a better world, according to Spade? He lays out three main reasons. First, “mutual aid projects work to meet survival needs and build shared understanding about why people do not have what they need”. When people must rely on one another to “pool their resources”, it highlights the lack of support provided by governments and the rich. This, he argues, is what makes it ideal compared to charity and government social services, which only give progressive cover to those who are responsible for inequality and legitimise their control over society’s resources.
Second, “mutual aid projects mobilise people, expand solidarity, and build movements”. The fact that they bring people together from different backgrounds in a shared project makes it possible for people to learn from one another’s experiences of oppression and see how they are connected.
Lastly, “mutual aid projects are participatory, solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviours”. When ordinary people actively participate in changing society, they can gain confidence in their own political capacities. One example Spade provides is a group of people helping each other through housing court proceedings so they can learn about disadvantage in the courts and how to fight it, as well as how to facilitate meetings and retain volunteers. Local sustainability efforts are another example, Spade arguing these can help us “imagine getting rid of the undemocratic infrastructure of our lives—the extractive and unjust energy, food, health care, and transportation systems—and replacing it with people’s infrastructure”.
Spade is right to point out that the rich and the governments that serve them are responsible for the many injustices that we see in the world. He is also right to look to ordinary people acting collectively as the solution. But there are nevertheless serious flaws in his argument.
While Spade is at pains to argue that mutual aid is not charity, a lot of the examples he provides are hard to see as anything but. The difference is that the charity is being provided to the poor by the poor, rather than to the poor by the rich. As he puts it, mutual aid is when ordinary people “pool their resources”. This is certainly necessary at times, such as during strikes, as he mentions. Frequently, campaigns and unions rely on donations from supporters because, while they need money, they don’t want to be compromised by taking money from the rich and powerful.
But these are almost always temporary measures to tide people over in a crisis or to win a particular demand or reform. Even if all the resources of the poor were to be pooled, this would not be sufficient to meet the collective needs of workers and the poor. This is due to the simple fact that workers and the poor do not have access to the wealth and products necessary to maintain their existence—this is a defining feature of their social position. For the majority of humanity to have access to what they need to live healthy lives,
the ruling class must be expropriated, which requires a society-wide political struggle.
Elevating the poor providing for the poor to a strategic principle not only takes the focus off this struggle but also lets the rich and powerful off the hook. Governments have been slashing funding to social services for decades. While some of the gap has been replaced with privatisation, the rest of the burden has been put onto the shoulders of working-class people, especially women. According to Spade’s logic, the ideal response to these cuts is to make up for them with community-run services. But what difference does this make from the perspective of the ruling class? While we pick up the slack, they can use the extra cash where they prefer to use it—subsidising business, tax cuts and other measures to maximise the profits of the few.
When this sort of service provision has become a focus of social movements, it has failed to take them forward. In the US women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) was one of the most influential feminist groups. Considering themselves radicals, they organised feminist education programs and set up community-run women’s services, which they called “counter-institutions”.
While some CWLU members spoke of the need to make coinciding demands on the state that would challenge the power of the ruling class, their political campaigns were stifled by debate over which demands would be reasonable, “manageable targets”. In this context, the CWLU’s community-run services became the predominant focus of most of their members, given it seemed to be a much easier way to achieve “tangible” change. Despite the radical gloss that was given to these services, in practice they became an avenue leading away from revolutionary ambitions and politics.
Spade does admit that this is a potential overhead to these sorts of activities. According to Spade, then, to achieve a total transformation in the way that society is organised so that human need is prioritised, mutual aid projects need to grow:
“We need mutual aid groups and networks capable of bringing millions of new people into work that deepens their understanding of the root causes of the crises and inequalities they are fired up about and that builds their capacity for bold collective action. We need groups and networks that do not disappear after the peak of the crisis, but instead become part of an ongoing, sustained mobilization with the capacity to support people and keep building pressure for bigger wins.”
How to draw more participants into fighting for a better world is certainly an important question. It must be said that the main reason most people aren’t fighting most of the time is that they feel powerless—and that is a reasonable perception. As individuals we have very little control over how society is run. We vote for a change of government and then barely anything seems to change, and at work it’s our boss who makes all the important decisions. Even if we invest our time into the sorts of community-run services that Spade talks about—like free breakfast programs or legal aid for housing tenants—as supportable as they are, the reality is that they barely make a dent in the big picture of wealth inequality. It’s no wonder, then, that most of the time they do not draw in large numbers of people.
The sorts of actions that have involved large numbers are those that draw on the collective power workers and the poor have to challenge their rulers when they stand together and disrupt the normal functioning of society. We’ve seen this happen many times in history, from the radicalisation of the 1960s and ’70s to the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. When masses of people feel compelled to hit the streets and protest in their thousands and their millions, when they start to organise in mass meetings in the streets, on university campuses and in workplaces, that is when people have really felt their power.
Now, Spade does argue that it is when mutual aid is tied to mass movements that it really has the capacity to fundamentally transform society. According to Spade, it is by focusing on and extending this aspect of mass movements that they can grow and win.
But this is the biggest problem with Spade’s argument. Every time people are drawn into a fight against the people who rule our society, the challenge that they are confronted with is the fact that these people have significant power. Their power comes from their ownership of society’s resources, and from their ability to defend that ownership with all the institutions of the state—the courts, the police, the military and so on. The reason that mass movements have failed in the past—something that Spade barely discusses—is that they have failed to overcome the power of the capitalist class. While it is true that people can feel inspired to join movements when they see people sharing with one another and creating spaces based on dignity and care, this alone is not a pathway to victory.
In fact, when you look at many of the movements that have taken place in the last decade, this has been their biggest weakness. During the Egyptian revolution of 2011, millions were drawn into a permanent occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where people set up their own health clinics, schooling and food kitchens. But this could not stop the military from stepping in to take over as the new rulers of Egypt, nor could it expropriate the wealth of the millionaires and billionaires at the head of Egypt’s industries.
The only group that could have done so is the working class. It is indicative that the overthrow of Egypt’s previous dictator, Hosni Mubarak, came after a strike wave spread across the country. As inspiring and important as protests and occupations are as a way to draw people into fighting for change—to give people a sense of power in numbers, provide an avenue for organisation and sometimes to give people hope that a world based on care for one another is possible—if workers’ power at the point of production does not become centre stage, then these movements will eventually be defeated or coopted.
When people set up community-run kitchens, health care and schooling, and when they coordinate projects that care for the environment, this does nothing to challenge the control that capitalists have over the hospitals, the education system and the production of food and energy. There have been revolutionary moments in the past—the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Chilean revolution in 1973 to name a few—where workers of multiple industries have taken over and coordinated production in a way that prioritises human need. This is when we have seen change go the furthest. And the key lessons out of these revolutions have been the need for the working class to overthrow the capitalist state that rules for the rich, and the need for revolutionary leadership.
Spade is right to situate the hope for a better world within the ordinary people who are trodden on every day by a profit-driven system. But to win a world where the trodden-on are the ones making the decisions, we need a strategy that can get us there. The pathway to victory is not more mutual aid projects—it can come only from workers’ revolution.
