Mutual Aid as a Strategic Response
How does mutual aid claim to be a strategic response to the present political moment?
The modern strategic response
In the first article of this series, “Solidarity not Charity,” I examined two interpretations of the term ‘mutual aid’, and explained the strategic issues at stake in their differences. In this second article, I will discuss the strategic response of mutual aid set out by Dean Spade in his book Mutual Aid. As such, this article focuses primarily on Spade’s book, and will mention Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s book Let This Radicalize You only to highlight similarities and differences in relation to Spade’s ideas.
In the first pages of Mutual Aid, Dean Spade identifies the two main tasks of left-wing social movements as being “to organize to help people survive the devastating conditions unfolding every day,” and “to mobilize hundreds of millions of people for resistance so we can tackle the underlying causes of these crises” (11). Can mutual aid help to achieve these goals? Spade says yes, arguing:
“The way to tackle these two big tasks—meeting people’s needs and mobilizing them for resistance—is to create mutual aid projects and get lots of people to participate in them. Social movements that have built power and won major change have all included mutual aid, yet it is often a part of movement work that is less visible and less valued. In this moment, our ability to build mutual aid will determine whether we win the world we long for or dive further into crisis” (11).
It is important to be clear that neither Spade nor Hayes and Kaba conceive of mutual aid as the sole relevant element of leftist struggle. Spade insists that “mutual aid is only one tactic in the social movement ecosystem,” and that “it operates alongside direct action, political education, and many other tactics” (34). In both Mutual Aid and Let This Radicalize You, the authors describe various forms of collective action like strikes, protests, and sabotage that are not considered mutual aid by the modern activist conception. Hayes and Kaba even include an example of institutional state support, in which the Chicago Alliance for Waterfront Safety (CAWS) leveraged the support of a local councillor to get a law passed to install lifeboats on Chicago waterfronts.
Spade’s claim in the quote above is that successful social movements have all included mutual aid, not that they have consisted solely of mutual aid. As such, the main question raised by Spade’s book is not about mutual aid as a strategy unto itself, but rather the assumptions going into mutual aid as a strategic response to the present political moment. Spade’s perspective on mutual aid as a strategic response is outlined most clearly in the conclusion to his book:
“As the world faces the ongoing crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, a worsening economic depression, climate change, and domination by illegitimate and racist policing, criminalization, and border enforcement systems and militaries, it is clear that mutual aid projects are essential to the broader ecosystem of political action. Mutual aid helps people survive disasters of all kinds, mobilizes and politicizes new people, and builds the new systems and ways of being together that we need. The stronger we build our mutual aid projects, the more lasting our mobilizations can be.
“Mutual aid is essential to the other tactics that make up our movements, not only because it is the way to onboard millions of new people into lasting movement participation, but also because it supports all the other strategies. Decades of work developing transformative justice projects provide an alternative vision for community support as we push to end police budgets and redirect resources toward human need. Bail funds, legal defense campaigns, and prison letter-writing projects support those criminalized for bold actions against the police and corporations. Street medics treating tear gas and rubber bullet injuries make street battles with police for days on end possible. Healing justice projects and conflict mediation projects help us live together in police-free zones. Mutual aid is essential to all of our resistance work” (98-9).
Spade’s argument, then, is that mutual aid is an important strategic response because (1) it can meet people’s needs in the context of worsening crises, (2) it brings people into lasting movement participation, and (3) it makes possible bold forms of direct action that can address underlying causes. This means that the strategic relevance of mutual aid depends on the ability of the bolder tactics it aligns with to address underlying causes. This makes it necessary to evaluate the direct action tactics themselves, and the political ideas underlying them.
Spade’s grassroots strategy
The basic political idea underlying Spade’s strategy for mutual aid and direct action is a rejection of hierarchy and coercion. This theoretical position is clearest in Spade’s assertions that “mutual aid is inherently antiauthoritarian,” and that we must build new ways of being that do not “rely on coercion and domination” and “are not profit-centered, hierarchical, and destructive to our planet” (19, 35, 100). This idea leads Spade to promote three elements that make up his strategic orientation: grassroots organisation, opposition to the state, and direct action as a tactic.
Given Spade’s rejection of hierarchy, it follows logically that he would insist on non-hierarchical forms of organisation. As such, his book proposes “a grassroots theory of mutual aid,” dedicates many pages to criticising the work of non-profit organisations for their “hierarchical models,” and favours a “horizontal decision-making structure based on consensus” (10, 26, 51).
Similarly, the rejection of hierarchy leads to a fundamental opposition to the state, and thus a rejection of attempting to use the state to support oppressed people. Spade acknowledges that mass mobilisations have compelled the state to support poor and oppressed people in the past, but he cautions against reliance on the state, calling this a “dream of a savior government” (34). His main argument is effectively that state support is a form of external support that is dependent on “a capitalist, imperialist system” (33). As such, it “usually exclude[s] particularly vulnerable people” and “can be shrunk or taken back whenever the moment of instability passes” (32). This critical approach to engaging with the state is expressed in his statement that “it took mass movements threatening capitalism’s very existence, like those seen during the Great Depression and the 1960s uprisings against racism, just to get stigmatizing, ungenerous welfare benefits” (33).
Nonetheless, Spade also claims that “concessions won in crises—crises of sudden disaster and crises created by powerful social protest—will be as strong and lasting as the mobilizations that made them necessary,” suggesting that strong mobilisations can make significant concessions possible (33). He does not follow this thread, though, and instead of proposing struggles for state concessions, he calls for mutual aid projects that leave no-one behind.
These requirements to address underlying causes using grassroots forms and non-state means of struggle necessitate the use of direct action as the primary tactic. Since anything that is hierarchical is coercive and oppressive, it necessarily follows that the only tactic capable of opposing these harms and moving us forward is grassroots collective action. Hence Spade’s support for grassroots forms of direct action and, of course, mutual aid.
This argument for grassroots direct action is not a ‘positive’, empirical argument on the basis of the tactic’s ability to affect concrete sociological mechanisms. Rather, it is a ‘negative’, abstract argument on the basis of the claim that grassroots action is the opposite of the hierarchical structures we have to oppose. In the context of premises that reject ‘hierarchy’ and therefore demand grassroots and non-state forms of action, it is not necessary to provide positive arguments for grassroots action at all, since the negative argument eliminates all other options.
These premises form the theoretical foundation of Spade’s strategic focus on grassroots mutual aid and direct action to meet people’s needs and address underlying causes. The general idea, then, is that hierarchical structures like the state are inherently oppressive, so they can only be overcome by opposing them with grassroots collective action. As such, I will refer to the combination of mutual aid and direct action in this strategic orientation as Spade’s ‘grassroots strategy’. Ultimately, then, the intervention that Spade is making with Mutual Aid is a strategic response to build up one of the crucial elements of his grassroots strategy.
Grassroots strategy and the state
Spade recognises that unless we reckon with the oppressive power of the state, we will fail to address the underlying causes of the problems we face. To meet this challenge, he envisions a strong foundation of mutual aid making possible bolder and bolder direct actions to undermine the state’s power:
“As crises mount, our organizing could inspire people to greater daring, using our people power to block ICE and the police from arresting people, block marshals attempting to evict tenants, and even to prevent military forces from occupying territory. We might reach a level of mobilization where we free our own people from prison, rather than asking that their captors free them, and where we redistribute stolen wealth rather than asking that it be taxed and spent differently” (100).
Spade deserves some credit for attempting to confront the problem of the state’s repressive apparatus (the police, border security, armed forces, etc.). The problem, though, is that he doesn’t confront the problem nearly thoroughly enough. Street battles with police, blocking arrests and evictions, freeing people from prison, recouping and redistributing stolen wealth, and preventing military occupations very clearly challenge the state order, and as such they raise questions of state power and control. What will the state do if any of these acts become consistently successful? Will it surrender at the first sign of defeat, and hand over power to the insurgents? Or will it double down and devastate the communities where the insurgents are based? The answer is that the state will double down and devastate the communities where the insurgents are based, and will do so until its capacity to oppress is subdued.
Spade’s direct action tactics only make sense if the plan is to defeat the state in its violent attempt to repress grassroots rebellion, and further, to replace the state with a new form of public power that can organise a new, stable society that can defend itself against attempts to restore the old regime. This “new form of public power,” of course, is itself a state. It need not have all the oppressive and repressive properties of a capitalist state, but if it is to survive, it will necessarily have the capacity to defend itself against usurpation and to coordinate the organisation of a new society - and these are functions of a state. So if Spade’s grassroots strategy is taken at all seriously, it must be understood as implying the need to destroy the existing state and raise a new public power - a new state - in its place. Spade, however, does not want to create a new state, which he imagines can only be an oppressive and unaccountable force. And because of this, he cannot articulate what his own grassroots strategy would actually demand in order to address the problem of the power of the capitalist state.
The problem with Spade’s grassroots strategy, then, is that it fails to acknowledge the full scope of the state’s power, and as such, it fails to organise in a way that might be able to confront this power. This oversight is what makes it possible to conceive of grassroots action as capable of addressing underlying causes in the first place; the idea that grassroots action could suffice to address underlying causes is only tenable if we fail to acknowledge the reality of the state’s highly coordinated power, and its consequent ability to ignore, undermine, or if necessary, to devastate grassroots opposition to it. This is precisely the dynamic at play in the problem of ‘co-optation’, which endlessly frustrates and disempowers mutual aid projects which, because of their grassroots and non-state orientation, cannot address this problem.
Co-optation and privatisation
Co-optation is the phenomenon through which the state takes over non-state efforts by community members to meet their community’s needs themselves. The classic example for modern mutual aid is of the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program.1 This program was co-opted by the state, which then fed tens of thousands more children than the Panthers were ever able to, thus undermining the relevance of the Panthers’ program and defusing their organisational influence in general. The dynamic of co-optation is taken to be evidence that the state will make concessions in order to undermine the potential of alternative structures, and hence to stabilise the status quo.
But what co-optation is really evidence of is the strategic limitations of mutual aid and Spade’s grassroots strategy. Spade says that “when mutual aid efforts truly build and legitimize coordinated action and autonomy against existing systems, governments typically crack down on them” (31). But what can we do about this, except fight the state with militant direct action that will almost certainly provoke violent repression? Co-optation is a problem without a solution for Spade’s grassroots strategy, because it has no approach to engaging with the state other than grassroots means of struggle, which simply cannot withstand the state’s ability to devastate or disempower it.
And why should we want to stop the state from helping more people than we can help? Why should we not be trying to exert popular control over the state in order to transform it and support people better than it currently does? The idea that alternative structures can “build and legitimize coordinated action and autonomy against existing systems” is true until they are confronted by the state’s destructive power. This is precisely the point I made in my previous article, “Theory, Practice, and Political Urgency.” It is not enough simply to build alternatives, because these alternatives are built in the context of an oppressive world social order. Unless we are able to confront this order - and in particular the capitalist class and state, which shape economic and political decision-making - then “our efforts to transform the world will remain vulnerable to its interests, and will tend to be overwhelmed by its sheer destructive power.”
The fact is that the capitalist state does provide some functions that are in the interests of poor and oppressed people, and these are constantly under threat as well. This is the other side of co-optation, which Spade describes as “privatization and volunteerism,” in which governments defund or underfund public services, offloading them onto private actors - including mutual aid projects - to pick up the slack (41). Spade says that “if we don’t design mutual aid projects with care, we can fit right into this conservative dream, becoming the people who can barely hold the threads of a survivable world together while the 1 percent extracts more and more while heroizing individual volunteers” (42).
But what would it mean to “design mutual aid projects with care” to prevent this from happening? Spade provides no answer to this question, because there is no answer. Just like the problem of co-optation, privatisation is a problem without a solution for Spade’s grassroots strategy, because it has no way of engaging with the state beyond grassroots direct action, which will not suffice to stop an onslaught of privatisation unleashed by a government that adopts this policy. But because he refuses to consider popular control over the state, Spade cannot address the twin problems of the state making private services public (co-optation), and making public services private (privatisation).
The problem with the grassroots strategy, therefore, is that no amount of grassroots action, however widespread, will suffice to overcome the coordinated, destructive power of the capitalist state. The capitalist state will co-opt to defuse grassroots power, and privatise to overwhelm it, thus forcing grassroots groups always to be on the defensive. Spade’s grassroots strategy uncritically takes for granted the idea that the state cannot be controlled by and for oppressed people. But this assumption makes it impossible to address the root causes of the problems to which his strategy responds, because these are problems of the negligent and oppressive character of the capitalist class and state, and it is necessary to confront the full scope of this power.
Conclusion
Spade’s grassroots strategy therefore ties itself up in a self-defeating bind that will always fail to address root causes, and hence render defensive mutual aid projects always necessary. It also provides a self-fulfilling prophecy that allows people to think that they’re acting strategically, because the assumptions underlying their strategy fail to empower them to do anything better. But because it is both self-defeating and self-fulfilling, it both appears to make a difference while also failing to make the difference it purports to make, leading to an endless cycle of doing the same thing and making little to no progress.
This is what happens when you derive your theory of change from the abstract premise of ‘rejecting hierarchy’, and not from empirical premises about how the social world actually works. Starting from a rejection of ‘hierarchy’ leads to a confused understanding of collective organisation, decision-making, and accountability. It also makes it unnecessary to develop an empirical, historical, and sociological understanding of how the social world works, since we know that the problem is simply ‘hierarchy’. But embracing these ideas makes it impossible to account for the criteria I set out in my article “Problems of Theory and Practice,” and hence makes it impossible to understand how to change the world, and what organisational forms might help us do so.
If all of this is true, then what is the alternative? I will discuss this in a third and final article.
It should be mentioned that the Black Panther Party was not a mutual aid organisation, nor was it a non-hierarchical organisation with a non-state approach. It was a political party that did both community work and ran candidates for various political offices. The success of its social programs cannot be straightforwardly detached from its organisational forms and political work, and so cannot be claimed so easily by Spade’s theory of mutual aid. Some information about the Panthers’ organizational structure during the time of the free breakfast program can be found in Ollie A. Johnson III, “Explaining the Demise of The Black Panther Party.”