[ Dean Spade is a trans activist, writer and teacher. Stephanie
Luce interviewed him about his recent book Mutual Aid: Building
Solidarity During This Crisis (And the Next).] [[link removed]]


MUTUAL AID, ABOLITION AND MOVEMENTS: AN INTERVIEW WITH DEAN SPADE  
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Stephanie Luce
March 13, 2021
xxxxxx

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_ Dean Spade is a trans activist, writer and teacher. Stephanie Luce
interviewed him about his recent book Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity
During This Crisis (And the Next). _

Seattle Community Fridge is a mutual aid group that sprang up during
the pandemic. From left, volunteers Beija Flor, Jordan Saibic and
Marine Au Yeung install a community refrigerator offering free food in
Seattle’s South Park neighborhood, Aug. 20, 2020., Image credit:
Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut

 

_A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN INTRODUCED TO MUTUAL AID THIS PAST YEAR,
THROUGH THE PANDEMIC. BUT YOU HAVE BEEN INVOLVED AND WRITING ABOUT
MUTUAL AID FOR A LONG TIME. CAN YOU SAY A BIT ABOUT HOW AND WHY YOU
GOT INVOLVED INITIALLY?_

When I first got involved in organizing, in the mid-1990’s in New
York City, I wasn’t aware of the term “mutual aid” but mutual
aid was a core part of what I saw around me in all the groups I was
in.

Rudy Giuliani (or as we called him, Ghoul-iani) was mayor and his
administration was attacking and targeting people on many fronts. He
was going after taxi drivers, street vendors, unhoused people, queer
bars and public meeting spaces, the sex work industry, people on
welfare, and more. His administration’s brutality really
“remade” the city in ways that are so visible today, increasing
displacement and criminalization of poor people, pushing people off
benefits, “cleaning up” Times Square and other areas to be
family-friendly tourist attractions by sweeping street people into
jails and prisons. It’s hard to estimate how many people’s deaths
his policies hastened.

The resistance to Giuliani’s agenda was widespread, with people
working on all these fronts to oppose him and also building vibrant
coalitions to back up each other’s efforts. In all this work, people
were doing a combination of mutual aid, direct action, street protest,
and more. Many people I was involved with were directly supporting
people living with HIV and AIDS who were fighting for public benefits
and housing. This meant we spent time with people in social services
offices and making calls, trying to force the city to comply with the
laws and policies that the AIDS movement had won that said they were
supposed to give people basic necessities.

This was mutual aid work—direct survival support for people in
crisis. It was tied in with lots of other mutual aid efforts like
needle exchanges, jail support and legal support for people arrested,
food programs, and more, and it was also tied in with other actions
like chaining ourselves to the doors of the Human Resource
Administration (NYC’s welfare authority) office to demand change,
having big public meetings about the problems, and much more. Many
people I worked with, in these grassroots all-volunteer groups, had
been part of ACT UP New York and had a lot to share with me and my
friends in our late teens and early 20’s about resistance tactics.

I think my experience is much like many other people’s in that we
enter social movement work and immediately become part of mutual aid
efforts that are intertwined with efforts to get at the root causes of
the problems, to put big pressure on the systems causing the crises,
and to build the new world we want. I have also spent a lot of my life
working in the movement to abolish police, prisons, and borders, and
especially in supporting queer and trans people who are being
criminalized and/or face deportation. In that movement we also see
that direct support [[link removed]] for people
in crisis [[link removed]] goes hand-in-hand with
the work to abolish
[[link removed]] the
systems that are causing those crises.

It is from people in prisons of all kinds and in deportation
proceedings that movement groups find out what the system is doing to
people, what the priorities are for resistance work, and how to not
be duped by surface reforms
[[link removed]] that
don’t make the change we want.

Abolition work is based in networks of relationships between people
inside and outside prisons and comes from the wisdom of the
communities that have been targeted for criminalization and
deportation and have learned first-hand about the failures of the main
reforms that the systems keep offering up. It is through those
networks of relationships that abolitionists have developed
our discernment
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what kinds of reforms are system-sustaining and which kinds will
actually get us closer to our goals of living in a society that does
not cage and deport people.

 

_HOW DO YOU DEFINE MUTUAL AID?_

The term mutual aid is used in many different ways, but what I mean by
it is the direct survival support work we do in movements based in a
shared understanding of the systems that are causing and worsening
these crises. It is the work where we get together and help each other
get by as part of a broader movement to get to the root causes of the
crises.

A key way to understand mutual aid work is to distinguish it from
charity. Charity is a framework where rich people and the governments
they control give small crumbs to some people in crisis to make
themselves look good and legitimize the systems that are causing
wealth concentration and poverty. Charity is based in determining
which people in crisis are “deserving” and it uses elaborate
eligibility criteria to determine this.

So, for example, unhoused people are only eligible for the housing a
charity or social services program is giving out if they are sober,
take the psych meds they have been prescribed, are not undocumented,
don’t have a felony conviction, etc. Charity is moralizing. It tells
us that people are in crisis because there is something wrong
with _them_ and the eligibility criteria are going to root out the
deserving ones and give them some conditional relief.

Mutual aid rejects all of this, arguing that the people in crisis are
not to blame for the crisis, it is the system that is to blame. People
are not homeless because they failed at “personal responsibility,”
they are homeless because of a racialized-gendered capitalist housing
market designed to extract as much profit as possible for the benefit
of the few. Mutual aid rejects eligibility criteria and strings
attached to relief that are based in the idea of who is deserving and
undeserving. Mutual aid is interested in supporting the people in the
most dire situations, which is often the very people who are
stigmatized and excluded from charity and social services.

 

_WHAT IS THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MUTUAL AID AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS?_

Mutual aid work has been part of all social movements that have
organized a lot of people for big change. Mutual aid is typically the
onramp for people into movements. Many people enter social movements
because they go to a mutual aid project for something they need, and
when they get there they get to encounter this liberatory space where
no one is blaming them for being in crisis and instead they are being
invited into collective action to solve the problem many people are
facing. Others enter movements because they get angry about what they
see is going on and they want to help the people in crisis, perhaps
because they have been through something similar, so they join a
mutual aid project to dive right in. For many people who become
lifelong organizers, mutual aid is where they first made contact with
movements.

I’ve been focused for the last five years on trying to popularize
the idea of mutual aid with writing
[[link removed]], teaching
[[link removed]], videos
[[link removed]], a mutual aid
toolkit [[link removed]] because,
especially after Trump was elected, it was clear to that there are
many newly mobilizable people who are pissed and scared about what is
going on.

Unfortunately, there are really damaging mythologies about how social
change happens that are meant to demobilize us, that tell us that
social change come from charismatic leaders, law reforms, elections,
and work done by professionals in nonprofits. This asks us to
participate only passively, to vote, donate, post things on social
media, and admire elites, but essentially to wait for those people to
solve it.

Mutual aid is written out of the histories we learn of social
movements. We are told that the big moments happened when important
men signed legislation, and the reality of millions of people we’ve
never heard of working together on the ground is obscured. I hope that
people talking and thinking more about mutual aid encourages people
towards a different kind of participation. I did not anticipate how
much the idea of mutual aid would mainstream when COVID-19 hit, and I
am hopeful that it is bringing a lot more people into deep movement
participation that helps us build bigger movements for change and help
each other survive as conditions worsen.

 

Volunteers from a nonprofit organization provide food supplies to
people who line up ahead of Thanksgiving amid the COVID-19 pandemic in
the Harlem neighborhood of New York City on November 20, 2020. 
Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency  //  Shalom Rav
 

_YOU WRITE THAT MUTUAL AID IS IN PART ABOUT COMMUNITIES FINDING
SOLUTIONS FOR THEIR OWN PROBLEMS AND NOT WAITING FOR A SAVIOR. ONE
POSSIBLE SAVIOR ALWAYS IS, OF COURSE, GOVERNMENT. HOW DO YOU SEE THE
BALANCE BETWEEN BUILDING OUR OWN SOLUTIONS TO PROBLEMS AND HOLDING THE
STATE ACCOUNTABLE TO DOING SO?_

I think that people really vary on the answer to this question. It is
clear that when social movements do work, including mutual aid work,
that exposes and opposes the brutality of the crises we’re facing,
governments often respond with concessions, providing some kind of
relief.

Some people doing social movement work would articulate their goal as
having governments provide relief. That is not my approach. I think
that we should celebrate government concessions as an indicator of our
movements building influence and capacity, but as someone who has
spent my life studying poor relief and disaster relief programs and
fighting for people’s benefits in them, it is clear to me that
government relief will always exclude stigmatized populations, be
distributed through racialized-gendered hierarchies of deservingness,
and be inadequate.

Additionally, the government can withdraw relief, and will do so, as
soon as possible. This is the history of welfare
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the US—it expands during crisis when people are organized and there
is a real threat that people will topple the machine of extraction and
wealth concentration, and then it contracts as quickly as possible
after. Sexist, anti-Black rhetoric has been relentlessly used to
contract welfare and to punish the poor
[[link removed]]. Disaster
relief, similarly, is designed in ways that leaves the poorest people
out
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that exacerbates debt
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further criminalization
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poor people and Black people. Because I don’t believe that poor
relief or disaster relief in the US, including if we had universal
health care or other welfare state features common in rich countries
that we currently lack, will ever be distributed in ways that are fair
or just, I do not see government relief as the goal of mutual aid.

The US is a colonial government founded in slavery and genocide.
It’s institutions, whether they are welfare programs, police, health
programs, schools, or housing programs, are designed to implement
racialized-gendered colonial control, have always done so, and will do
so. Additionally, they are crumbling as the world faces climate change
and the US lives with the results of decades of deindustrialization,
divestment from basic infrastructure, and massive investment in
militarism, surveillance, policing, and border control. Given all
this, I do not see a robust anti-racist feminist welfare state as
likely emerging here.

Instead, I think we will be facing mounting crises and that the more
practice we get taking care of each other, sharing, building
relationships based on mutuality instead of domination and extraction,
and making decisions together, the more likely we are to reduce
suffering and increase survival.

In the meantime, if we’re doing a good job putting up a fight,
we’ll sometimes see concessions from the government, like inadequate
stimulus checks or maybe even Medicare for All. But whatever they give
us will be designed to be inadequate and excluding. People on the
margins have always survived on mutual aid here, and as wealth
concentrates and suffering increases, mutual aid is the only way to
survive for more and more of us.

All across the country, as the housing crisis mounts we see increasing
tent cities. I’ve been moved seeing the mutual aid projects
supporting people living in those tent cities, like StreetWatch LA
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charging stations and hygiene kids. I’ve also seen the bold defense
tactics
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people across the country are using to defend
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encampments from police raids.

Meanwhile, other anti-eviction activists have been blocking the doors
to courts
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stop evictions, while migrant justice activists block ICE from
arresting
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I think we will be seeing more of these kinds of militant forms of
mutual aid, in addition to the distribution of housing, food and
medicine, and conditions worsen in the coming years.

To me, particularly with the Biden Administration coming into power
and showing that it is beholden to the fossil fuel industry
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US military imperialism, and eager
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continue the Obama’s deportation
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it is well past time to let go of the fantasy of a savior US
government that will finally deliver racial and gender justice and
take care of us all. This country was designed for extraction and
wealth concentration, and it has done a great job at that and
continues to do so. If we want something else we have to make it
together, just as we always have. I love that slogan, “We’re all
we’ve got. We’re all we need.”

 

_I KNOW YOU HAVE ALSO BEEN ACTIVE IN THE ABOLITION MOVEMENT, WHICH
CONNECTS WITH A CRITIQUE OF THE STATE, AND THE IDEA THAT WE AS
COMMUNITIES SHOULD LOOK TO DEVELOP OUR OWN FORMS OF JUSTICE. CAN YOU
SAY A BIT ABOUT HOW YOU SEE THESE CONNECTIONS?_

Yes, the abolition movement is based on an understanding that the
police, prison, and border systems are not redeemable. They cannot be
reformed to be something they are not. They do not make people safe,
they protect the interests of the rich and bring enormous violence to
the BIPOC communities, poor people, people with disabilities, queer
and trans people and other targets.

Abolitionists work to shrink police, prison and border enforcement
anywhere we can, to support people who are currently in the grips of
these systems, and to build real safety strategies. This reframing,
which identifies the biggest threats to our safety as coming from
government  which not only maintains (and arms to the teeth) a
brutalizing police force and prisons that are torture centers, but
also organizes a deadly for-profit health system, facilitates the
poisoning of our the land, air and water, and organizes property
relations that keep most people in desperation, is essential. It moves
us from a conversation about reforming the police to examining the
root causes of suffering and early death. It moves us from a
conversation about what to do with “dangerous people” to a
conversation about how to stop the biggest sources of suffering in our
lives.

Feminist abolitionists, particularly women of color, have also
created brilliant
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[[link removed]] for
doing Transformative Justice
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to address the violence that happens between our people, particularly
as we face community desperation combined with internalized value
systems that permit and encourage racialized-gendered violence. In
these ways, abolitionist work attacks and undermines the
justifications for state violence, and practices building the world we
want, where we work to prevent and address threats to our safety based
in community capacity for response rather than calling the police.

 

_YOU GIVE SOME GREAT EXAMPLES IN YOUR BOOK ABOUT HOW SOME OF THE
MUTUAL AID PROJECTS INTERSECTED WITH MOVEMENT BUILDING. WHAT DO YOU
SEE AS THE POTENTIAL FOR THE MUTUAL AID NETWORKS THAT HAVE DEVELOPED
AND GROWN OVER THE PAST YEAR TO BUILD WITH THE OTHER MOVEMENTS OF OUR
CURRENT MOMENT, SUCH AS THE MOVEMENTS FOR RACIAL JUSTICE, MOVEMENTS
AGAINST “TRUMPISM,” AND MOVEMENTS FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE?_

Because mutual aid is most frequently the onramp into social movement
participation for people, where people go from passively holding
certain beliefs to participating with others in collaborations to make
change on the group, I think we will be seeing the impacts of the past
year’s proliferation of mutual aid projects for years to come.

A lot of people who had never previously been part of social movement
groups, we can’t yet know how many, joined mutual aid projects this
year and practiced organizing in new ways. I meet these people all the
time because mutual aid projects often reach out to me to get support
on building their internal structures, addressing conflict, and
dealing with other problems that have come up. Almost everyone I talk
to never organized before 2020, and it is remarkable to hear about all
they have learned and tried. People might have gotten involved
initially because of one particular issue they are interested in, but
inevitably learned a lot from the people they were collaborating with
and grew new solidarities.

For many, the combination of already being involved in a COVID mutual
aid project of some kind, and then joining the summer 2020 (and
ongoing) protests against police violence and anti-Black racism, has
meant a quick education in social movement tactics and a
transformation of life values and life plans. A decade ago, I saw
something similar when tons of people who were new to organizing
became part of Occupy/Decolonize encampments. Even after the police
raided and destroyed those camps, people who got started in them
continued doing all kinds of movement work in their cities and
regions. Comparatively, 2020’s mobilizations were much larger, and I
think that we will continue to see people who got mobilized in this
time both sustain the mutual aid projects they started and expand the
reach of their participation and leadership in new directions. I am
grateful to be alive in this moment of emboldened resistance, and I
hope that together we can do enough to tackle the immensity of the
crises we are facing.

 

_[Stephanie Luce is a professor of labor studies at the CUNY School of
Labor and Urban Studies, a member of the xxxxxx collective, and on
the editorial board of Organizing Upgrade.]_

 

 

Shit's Totally FUCKED! What Can We Do?: A Mutual Aid Explainer

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Watch here [[link removed]]

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