CZM Book Club: Mutual Aid by Dean Spade, Part One

Margaret reads you excerpts from a book explaining the ins and outs of mutual aid.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media book Club book Club book Club. Hello
and welcome to coolels On Media book Club, the only
book club where you don't have to do the reading
because I do it for you. Normally, on here we
read fiction, but we've been talking about doing some nonfiction,
and so we're going to do it. We're going to

(00:23):
do nonfiction. This story isn't made up. It's factual. I
don't know if it's factual. I don't know if it's
built out of facts. Whatever, it is my absolute honor
and delight to bring you some excerpts from Dean spades
book Mutual Aid. The whole book is absolutely worth reading.

(00:43):
If you don't want to read a book called mutual
Aid that's from nineteen hundred, you can read a book
called mutual Aid that's from this very decade that we
live in. It's a short, accessible, practical book full of
really good advice for how to organize just about anything.
Dean Spades Mutual Aid. And I know we're a little
late for New Year's resolutions, but if your resolution this

(01:04):
year was to get involved in an activist project, this
book is a great guide. And we're not reading the
whole thing. You still have to go out and get it,
but we'll read useful parts of it. And it just
so happened that the schedule landed this way. But it
feels particularly poignant to do these episodes this week as
we're watching people effectively fight off a full scale invasion
of the Twin Cities at the hands of ice agents,

(01:26):
like people are using underground networks of mutual aid to
minimize the damage and fight back against this stuff. And
so this reading that we're doing today speaks to you,
and you haven't yet, you should check out our coverage
of the rapid response of mutual aid networks that are
coming out of Minneapolis, and Saint Paul me and James
Stout went up there last week to cover those things,

(01:48):
and so both it could happen here and cool people
who did cool stuff have content about that. Today I
will be reading some excerpts from part one of Dean
Spadeses mutual Aid, which mostly covers what mutual aid is
and some examples of how it has manifested within social movements.
We'll do some excerpts from part two next week, which
has more just general good advice for organizing, and obviously

(02:12):
we can't read the whole book. Here by. You should
go pick up a copy if you can. But also
the PDF is up on the Anarchist Library, which is
a free site full of more reading than you'll ever
be able to do in your life, honestly, but it
has Dean Spades's Mutual Aid without further ado. Excerpts from
Mutual Aid by Dean Spade introduction. Crisis conditions require bold tactics.

(02:40):
The contemporary political moment is defined by emergency acute crises
like the COVID nineteen pandemic and climate change induced fires, floods,
and storms, as well as the ongoing crises of racist criminalization,
brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth in
a quality threaten the survival of people around the globe.

(03:04):
Government policies actively produce and exacerbate the 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 innative ways to share

(03:25):
resources and support vulnerable neighbors. This survival work when done
in conjunction with social movements making transformative change is called
mutual aid. Mutual aid has been part of all large,
powerful social movements, and it has a particularly important role
to play right now as we face unprecedented dangers and

(03:47):
opportunities for mobilization. Mutual aid gives people a way to
plug into movements based on their immediate concerns, and it
produces social spaces where people grow new solidarities. At its best,
mutual aid actually produces new ways of living where people
get to create systems of care and generosity that address
harm and foster well being. This book is about mutual aid.

(04:12):
It explains why it is so important, what it looks like,
and how to do it. It provides a grassroot theory
of mutual aid, as well as concrete tools for addressing
some of the most difficult questions facing mutual aid groups,
such as how to work in groups and make decisions together,
how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal
with burnout so that we can build a lasting mobilization

(04:34):
that can win Liberation. Movements have two big jobs right now. First,
we need to organize to help people survive the devastating
conditions unfolding every day. Second, we need to mobilize hundreds
of millions of people for resistance so we can tackle
the underlying causes of these crises. In this pivotal moment,

(04:56):
movements can strengthen mobilizing new people to fight back against cops, immigration, enforcement,
welfare authorities, landlords, budget cuts, polluters, the defence industry, prison profiteers,
and right wing groups. The way to tackle these two
big tasks, meeting people's needs and mobilizing them for resistance

(05:18):
is to create mutual aid projects and get lots of
people to participate in them. Social movements that have built
power and one 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.

(05:42):
We can imagine what is possible when we come together
in this way by examining the response of Hong Kong's
protest movement to COVID nineteen. In twenty nineteen, a massive
anti government mobilization swept Hong Kong, with people opposing police
and seeking greater control over their lives. By the time
the COVID nineteen pandemic emerged, Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lamb,

(06:06):
had an eighty percent disapproval rating. Hong Kong's protest movement
had escalated significantly, with protesters coordinating sophisticated mass mobilizations, including
the use of bold tactics like fighting police with poles, projectiles,
laser pointers, and petrol bombs. Lamb was remarkably non responsive
to the pandemic, despite the vulnerable position of Hong Kong,

(06:28):
a densely packed city with a history of epidemics and
a high speed railway connection to Wuhan, where the COVID
nineteen pandemics started. Hong Kong residents criticized Lamb for her
delay in closing the city's borders and her order barring
city workers from wearing masks. But despite the government's failures,

(06:48):
the people of Hong Kong, mobilized by the protest movement,
launched a response that suppressed the original wave of COVID
nineteen and mitigated its resurgence. On the day the first
over A nineteen case in Hong Kong was confirmed, people
from the protest movement created a website that tracked cases,
monitored hot spots, reported hospital wait times and warned about

(07:10):
places selling fake personal protective equipment PPE. The protesters defied
the government's ban on masks and countered misinformation from the
World Health Organization discouraging their use. They set up brigades
that made and distributed masks, especially making sure they reached
poor people and old people. They created a system of

(07:30):
volunteers to set up hand sanitizer stations throughout crowded tenement
housing and maintain the supply of sanitizer at the stations.
They also created digital maps to identify the station sites.
This essential mutual aid work was complemented by boulder strategies.
When the government refused to close the border with China,
seven thousand medical workers as part of labor unions that

(07:54):
had been formed during the protest movement, went on strike,
demanding ppe in that the border be closed. Members of
the protest movement threatened the government with stronger action if
steps were not taken to address the epidemic and explosives
were found at the border with China, possibly for this purpose,
The Hong Kong government then created quarantine centers and dense neighbourhoods,

(08:15):
but never consulted the people in those neighborhoods, and the
protest movement responded by throwing explosives into the quarantine centers
before they were used, causing the government to change the
location of the facilities to less densely populated holiday villages.
As a result of these efforts by a mobilized and
coordinated movement and no thanks to the government, Hong Kong

(08:35):
had an immensely successful response to the first wave of
COVID nineteen. Through the combination of mutual aid and direct
action to force concessions, the protesters did what the government
would not do on its own, saving untold numbers of lives.
This book provides a concrete guide for building mutual aid
groups and networks. Part one explores what mutual aid is,

(08:58):
why it is different than charity, and how it relates
to other social movement tactics. Part two dives into the
nitty gritty of how to work together in mutual aid
groups and how to handle the challenges of group decision making, conflict,
and burnout. It includes charts and lists that can be
brought to group meetings to stimulate conversation and build shared

(09:18):
analysis and group practices. Ultimately, I hope this book helps
readers imagine how we can coordinate to collectively take care
of ourselves even in the face of disaster, and mobilize
hundreds of millions of people to make deep and lasting change.
Part one. What is mutual aid. Mutual aid is collective

(09:43):
coordination to meet each other's needs, usually from an awareness
that the systems we have in place are not going
to meet them. Those systems, in fact, have often created
the crisis or are making things worse. We see examples
of mutual aid in every single social movement, whether it's
people raising money for workers on strike, setting up a
ride sharing system during the Montgomery bus boycott, putting drinking

(10:06):
water in the desert for migrants crossing the border, training
each other in emergency medicine because ambulance responds time in
poor neighborhoods is too slow, raising money to pay for
abortions for those who can't afford them, or coordinating letter
writing to prisoners. These are mutual aid projects. They directly
meet people's survival needs and are based on a shared

(10:28):
understanding that the conditions in which we are made to
live are unjust. There is nothing new about mutual aid.
People have worked together to survive for all of human history,
but capitalism and colonialism created structures that have disrupted how
people have historically connected with each other and shared everything
they needed to survive. As people were forced into systems

(10:50):
of wage labor and private property and wealth became increasingly concentrated,
our ways of caring for each other have become more
and more tenuous. Today, many of us live in the
most adomized societies in human history, which makes our lives
less secure and undermines our ability to organize together to
change unjust conditions. On a large scale, we are put

(11:12):
in competition with each other for survival, and we are
forced to rely on hostile systems like health care systems
designed around profit, not keeping people healthy, or food or
transportation systems that pollute the earth and poison people for
the things we need. More and more people report that
they have no one they can confide in when they
are in trouble. This means many of us do not

(11:34):
get help with mental health, drug use, family violence, or
abuse until the police or courts are involved, which tends
to escalate rather than resolve harm. In this context of
social isolation and forced dependency on hostile systems, mutual aid,
where we choose to help each other out, share things,
and put time and resources into caring for the most

(11:54):
vulnerable is a radical act, and we can see again
an again how mutual aid is a primary on ramp
for people into resistance movements. Mutual aid tables and tents
at protests and occupations of public space are the places
where new people out in the streets for the first
time seeking to join with others often make their first contact.

(12:16):
People in crisis who find support through a mutual aid
project break through the isolation and stigma to connect with
others who imagine that collective action is the solution. As
more and more people become outraged by the compounding disasters,
we need millions of entry points into resistance movements, and
mutual aid is so frequently where people build those initial

(12:38):
relationships and find a connection to the work. And nothing,
by the way, connects me to the work, like these
goods and services, that's right, they just bring you right
in to Now that's not true, Well, they're here anyway.
Here's Ads and Rebecca Chapter one. Three key elements of

(13:15):
mutual aid One. Mutual aid projects work to meet survival
needs and build shared understanding about why people do not
have what they need. Mutual aid projects expose the reality
that people do not have what they need and propose
that we can address this injustice together. The most famous

(13:35):
example in the United States is the Black Panther Party's
Survival programs, which ran throughout the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
including a free breakfast program, free ambulance program, free medical clinics,
a service offering rides to elderly people doing errands, and
a school aimed at providing a rigorous liberation curriculum to children.

(13:56):
The Black Panther programs welcome people into the liberation strung
by creating spaces and build a shared analysis about the
conditions they were facing. Instead of feeling ashamed about not
being able to feed their kids in a culture that
blames poor people, especially poor Black people, for their poverty,
people attending the Panther's Free Breakfast program got food and

(14:16):
a chance to build shared analysis about black poverty. It
broke stigma and isolation, met material needs, and got people
fired up to work together for change. Recognizing the program's
early success, FBI director j Edgar Hoover famously wrote in
a nineteen sixty nine memo sent to all field offices

(14:38):
that quote. The BCP Breakfast for Children program represents the
best and most influential activity going for the BPP Black
Panther Party, and as such is potentially the greatest threat
to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy
what it stands for. The night before the Chicago program

(14:59):
was supposed to open, police broke into the church that
was hosting it and urinated on all the food. The
government's attacks on the Black Panther Party are evidence of
mutual aid's power, as is the government's co optation of
the program. In the early nineteen seventies, the US Department
of Agriculture expanded its federal free breakfast program, built on
a charity not liberation model that still feeds millions of

(15:22):
children today. The Black Panthers provided a striking vision of liberation,
asserting that black people had to defend themselves against a
violent and racist government, and that they could organize to
give each other what a racist society withheld. During the
same period, the Young Lord's Party undertook similar and related
mutual aid projects in their work towards Puerto Rican liberation.

(15:45):
The Young Lords brought people into the movement by starting
with the Everyday needs of Puerto Ricans and impoverished communities.
They protested the lack of garbage pickups in Puerto Rican neighborhoods,
hijacked a city mobile X ray truck to bring greater
tuberculosis tests in to Puerto Rican communities, took over part
of a hospital to provide healthcare, and provided food and

(16:06):
youth programs for Puerto Rican communities. Their vision for decolonizing
Puerto Rico and liberating Puerto Ricans in the United States
from racism, poverty, and police terror was put into practice
through mutual aid. Throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies, many
overlapping movements undertook mutual aid efforts, such as feminist health

(16:29):
clinics and activist run abortion providers, emerging volunteer run gay
health clinics, childcare collectives, tenants, unions, and community food projects.
Although this moment is an important reference point for the
contemporary left, mutual aid didn't start in the sixties, but
is an ongoing feature of movements seeking transformative change. Klebanali,

(16:52):
project coordinator and Indigenous Media Action argues that mutual aid
is an unbroken tradition among Indigenous people across many cycles
of colonialism maintained through the traditional teachings that contemporary Indigenous
mutual aid projects are working to restore and amplify. Settlers
have long work to undermine Indigenous people's self sustaining practices

(17:14):
by first destroying food systems and then forcing dependency on
rations given at forts and missions and now by sedtler nonprofits.
Indigenous mutual aid efforts are both a matter of survival
and a powerful form of resistance to the force dependence
on settler systems. The long tradition of mutual aid societies

(17:35):
and other forms of quote self help and black communities,
which as early as the seventeen eighties sought to pool
resources to provide health and life insurance, care for the sick,
aid for burials, support for widows and orphans, and public
education efforts is another important example. These efforts have addressed
black exclusion from white infrastructures by creating black alternatives. Long

(17:59):
traditions of mutual aid are also visible in working class
communities that have long supported workers on strike so that
they could pay rent and buy food while confronting their bosses.
Perhaps most of all, the pervasive presence of mutual aid
during sudden disasters of all kinds, storms, floods, fires, and earthquakes.

(18:20):
Demonstrates how people come together to care for each other
and share resources when inevitably the government is not there
to help, offers relief that does not reach the most
vulnerable people, and deploys law enforcement against displaced disaster survivors.
Mutual aid is a powerful force. Two Mutual aid projects

(18:42):
mobilize people, expand solidarity, and build movements. Mutual aid is
essential to building social movements. People often come to social
movement groups because they need something eviction defense, childcare, social connection,
health care, or help in a fight with a government
about something like welfare benefits, disability services, immigration status, or

(19:06):
custody of their children. Being able to get help in
a crisis is often a condition for being politically active,
because it's very difficult to organize when you are also
struggling to survive. Getting support through a mutual aid project
that has a political analysis of the conditions that produce
your crisis also helps break stigma, shame, and isolation. Under capitalism,

(19:29):
social problems resulting from exploitation in the maldistribution of resources
are understood as individual moral failings, not systemic problems. Getting
support at a place that sees the systems, not the
people suffering in them, as the problem can help people
move from shame to anger and defiance. Mutual aid exposes
the failures of the current system and shows an alternative.

(19:52):
This work is based in a belief that those on
the front lines of a crisis have the best wisdom
to solve the problems, and that collective act is the
way forward. Mutual aid projects also build solidarity. I have
seen this at the Silvia Rivera Law Project SRLP, a
law collective that provides free legal help to trans and

(20:13):
gender non conforming people who are low income and or
people of color. I worked with the group from two
thousand and two to twenty nineteen. Again and again I
saw people come to SRLP for help because something bad
had happened to them in a shelter, in prison, or
in interaction with cops, immigration authorities, the foster care system, or

(20:33):
public schools. People seeking legal services for these problems would
be invited to participate in organizing and become part of SRLP,
working on changing the conditions that had brought them to
the group. As people joined, things were often bumpy. Members
may have had some things in common, being trans or
gender non conforming, for example, but also differed from one

(20:55):
another in terms of race, immigration status, ability, HIV status, age, housing, access,
sexual orientation, language, and more. By working together and participating
in shared political education programs, members could learn about experiences
different from theirs and build solidarity across those differences. This
changed and continues to change, not only the individuals in

(21:18):
the group, but the kind of politics the group practices.
Solidarity is what builds and connects large scale movements. In
the context of professionalized nonprofit organizations, groups are urged to
be single issue oriented, framing their message around quote deserving
people within the population they serve, and using tactics palatable

(21:40):
to elites. Prison oriented groups are supposed to fight for
only the quote innocent or the quote non violent, for example,
and do their work by lobbying politicians about how some people,
not all people, don't belong in prison. This is the
opposite of solidarity because it means the most vulnerable people
are left behind, those who are upcharged by cops and prosecutors,

(22:02):
those who do not have the means to prove their innocence,
those who do not match cultural tropes of innocence and deservedness.
This narrow focus actually strengthens the system's legitimacy by advocating
that the targeting of those more stigmatized people is okay.
This pattern of anti solidarity incentives and practices has been

(22:23):
devastating for movements. As in the next chapter, solidarity across
issues and populations is what makes movements big and powerful.
Without that connection, we end up with disconnected groups working
in their issue silos, undermining each other, competing for attention
and funding, not backing each other up, and not building power.
Mutual aid projects, by creating spaces where people come together

(22:47):
on the basis of some shared need or concern in
spite of their different lived experience, cultivate solidarity. Groups doing
mutual aid to directly address real problems and real people's
lives tend to develop a multie and solidarity based approach
because their members' lives are cross cut by many different
experiences of vulnerability. Sometimes, even groups that start out with

(23:09):
a narrow goal adopt a wider horizon of solidarity and
a wider vision of political possibility if they use the
mutual aid model. An initial goal of serving people impacted
by homelessness quickly reveals that racism, colonialism, immigration, enforcement, ableism,
police violence, the foster care system, the healthcare system, transphobia,
and more are all causes of homelessness or causes of

(23:33):
further harm to homeless people. Solidarity in an ever expanding
commitment to justice emerge from contact with the complex realities
of injustice. This is exactly how movements are built, as
people become connected to each other and as one urgent
issue unspools into a broader vision of social transformation. But

(23:54):
do you know how podcasts are built? Dear listeners? Do
you know that some of them, including the very podcast
you are listening to now, are built on the dollars
of advertisers? For better and for worse? And here they
are and we're back. Three. Mutual aid projects are participatory,

(24:28):
solving problems through collective action rather than waiting for saviors.
Mutual aid projects help people develop skills for collaboration, participation,
and decision making. For example, people engaged in a project
to help one another through housing court proceedings will learn
the details of how the system harms people and how

(24:49):
to fight it. But they will also learn about meeting facilitation,
working across differences, retaining volunteers, addressing conflict, giving and receiving feedback,
following through and coordinating schedules and transportation. They may also
learn that it is not just lawyers who can do
this kind of work, and that many people, including themselves,

(25:11):
have something to offer. This departs from expertise based social
services that tell us we need to have a social worker,
licensed therapist, lawyer, or some other person with an advanced
degree to get things done. Mutual Aid projects always include
an invitation to participate in any offer of support. People
are invited to take a tent or water or food,

(25:32):
but also to become part of the project. Getting material
support from the Mutual Aid group isn't conditional on participating.
You can have what we're giving out whether or not
you come to our next meeting and join our protest
at the Landlord's office on Tuesday. But because mutual Aid
is based on an understanding that we won't solve the
crises we are facing through just giving things to each other,

(25:52):
we must organize as many people as possible to care
for each other and fight back. Any aide shared includes
an invitation to become part of the world work. Every
person in crisis or need is also a person who
can be part of transforming the conditions with others. Mutual
Aid is inherently anti authoritarian, demonstrating how we can do
things together in ways we were told not to imagine,

(26:15):
and that we can organize human activity without coercion. Most
people have never been to a meeting where there is
not a boss or an authority figure with decision making power.
Most people work or go to school inside hierarchies where
disobedience leads to punishment or exclusion. We bring our learned
practices of hierarchy with us even when no paycheck or

(26:36):
punishment enforces our participation, or even in volunteer groups where
we often find ourselves in conflicts stemming from learned dominance behaviors.
But collective spaces like mutual Aid organizing can give us
opportunities to unlearned conditioning and build new skills and capacities.
By participating in groups and new ways, and practicing new

(26:56):
ways of being together, we are both building the world
we want and becoming the kind of people who could
live in such a world together. For example, in the
occupy encampments that emerged in twenty eleven to protest economic inequality,
people shared ideas about how to resolve conflict without calling
the police. Occupying brought out many people who had never

(27:18):
participated in political resistance before, introducing them to practices like
consensus decision making, occupying public space, distributing free food, and
engaging in free political education workshops. Many who joined occupy
did not yet have a developed critique of policing. Participants
committed to police abolition and anti racism cultivated conversations about

(27:41):
why activists should not call the police on each other.
This process was inconsistent and imperfect, but it introduced many
people to new skills and ideas that they took with
them long after occupying encampments were dismantled by the police.
Mutual aid can also generate boldness and a willingness to
defy illegit jitimate authority. Taking risks with a group for

(28:03):
a shared purpose can be a reparative experience when we
have been trained to follow rules. Organizers from mutual a
disaster relief MADR share the following story in their twenty
eighteen workshop facilitation guide to illustrate their argument that quote
audacity is our capacity quote. When a crew of MADR

(28:26):
organizers after Hurricane Maria traveled to Puerto Rico, some visiting
their families others bringing medical skills. They found out about
a government warehouse that was neglecting to distribute huge stockpiles
of supplies. They showed their MADR badges to the guards
and said, we are here for the eight am pickup.
When guards replied that their names were not on the list,

(28:47):
they just insisted again, we are here for the eight
am pickup. They were eventually allowed in told to take
whatever they needed after being led in. Once aid workers
were able to return, Repeatedly they made more badges for
local organizers and this source continued to benefit local communities
for months. MADR asserts that by taking bold actions together quote,

(29:11):
we can imagine new ways of interacting with the world.
When dominant ways of living have been suspended, people discover
that they can break norms and even laws that enable individualism, passivity,
and respect for private property. Madr asserts that quote saving lives, homes,
and communities in the event and aftermath of disaster may

(29:31):
require taking bold action without waiting for permission from authorities.
Disaster survivors themselves are the most important authority ONUS action.
Mutual aid projects providing relief to survivors of storms, floods,
earthquakes and fires, as well as those developed to support
people living through the crises caused by poverty, racism, criminalization,

(29:53):
gender violence, and other quote ordinary conditions produce new systems
that can prevent harm and improve preparedness for the coming disasters.
When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in twenty seventeen, it
was the existence of food justice efforts that made it
possible for many people to eat when the corporate food system,
which brings ninety percent of the island's food from off

(30:14):
island sources, was halted by the storm. Similarly, it was
local solar panels that allowed people to charge medical devices
when the electrical grid went down. By looking at what
still works in the face of disaster, we can learn
what we want to build to prepare for the next
storm or fire. In the Battle for Paradise, Naomi Klein

(30:36):
authors that locally controlled microgrids are more desirable for delivering
sustainable energy given the failures of energy monopolies that currently
dominate energy delivery. In the wake of the devastating twenty
eighteen California fires, the public learned that the fires were
caused by Pacific gas and electric companies mismanagement, and then

(30:56):
watched as California's government immediately offered the company, meanwhile failing
to support people displaced by the disaster. Klein describes how
large energy companies work to prevent local and sustainable energy efforts,
and argues that in energy, as in other areas of survival,
we should be working toward locally controlled, participatory, transparent structures

(31:18):
that replace our crumbling and harmful infrastructure. Doing so helps
us imagine getting rid of the undemocratic infrastructure of our lives,
the extractive and unjust energy, food, healthcare, and transportation systems,
and replacing it with people's infrastructure for social movements working
to imagine and build a transition from quote dig burn

(31:40):
dump economies to sustainable, regenerative ways of living. Mutual aid
offers a way forward, and that's chapter one. The author
Dean Spaede continues in chapter two, which is called Solidarity
not Charity, and contrasts the ways that mutual aid is
different to charity work. Actually, it's not called solidarity not charity.

(32:00):
It's called solidarity not charity because there's an exclamation mark
in the chapter I'm sorry for Ivan misread that. I'm
terribly sorry quote This is me reading from the book
for a quote, because yeah, we're only doing excerpts, but
we're doing excerpts from part one today, and we're going
to do excerpts from part two next week anyway. From
chapter two, quote, mutual aid projects in many ways are

(32:23):
defined in opposition to the charity model and its current
iteration in the nonprofit sector. Mutual aid projects mobilize lots
of people rather than a few experts, resist the use
of eligibility criteria that cut out more stigmatized people, are
an integrated part of our lives rather than a pet cause,
and cultivate a shared analysis of the root causes of

(32:44):
the problem, and connect people to social movements that can
address these causes. And then in chapter three, we're all
We've got where all we need. There's no exclamation mark there,
but there could be. You could imagine one. This chapter three,
it's about a lot of different things, but mostly different
examples demonstrating that the state isn't going to save us,

(33:05):
and we need to be brave enough to rely on
each other if we want to make it through the
many crises at hand. Quote. Mutual aid is only one
tactic in the social movement ecosystem. It operates alongside direct action,
political education, and many other tactics, but it is the
one that most successfully helps us grow our movements and

(33:26):
build our people power because it brings people into coordinated
action to change things Right now. As mutual Aid expands
in the context of the COVID nineteen crisis, in climate change,
cause disaster zones, and during economic crises, we have a
chance to cultivate millions of new resistance fighters, to teach
ourselves to work together in long term ways, and to

(33:47):
develop our ability to practice solidarity based co stewardship in
all areas of collective life. Yeah, and so next week
we'll get into part two and Dean Spade's advice for
organizing on your own, whether that's a Mutual Aid project
or something else. And I want to end on this
last quote though, because it's just one of many beautifully
succinct and motivational tidbits in this book. Quote. What we

(34:11):
build now and whether we can sustain it will determine
how prepared we are for the next pandemic, the climate
induced disasters to come, the ongoing disasters of white supremacy
and capitalism, and the beautifully disruptive rebellions that will transform them. Yeah,
and Dean Spade's bio. Dean Spade is an organizer, writer,

(34:31):
and teacher. He has been working to build queer and
transliberation based in racial and economic justice for the past
two decades. He is a professor at the Seattle University
School of Law. He's the author of Love in a
Fucked Up World. Well, actually it's in an f asterisk
cked Upworld, but I think it's pronounced fucked another book

(34:52):
called Normal Life, and this book Mutual Aid, which is
getting an updated reissue from Versa with new chapters, updated
k studies, and retooled writing for a new political context.
Dean is also the host of the Love and a
Fucked Up World podcast. You can keep up with his
projects online at Deanspade dot net, d E A n

(35:13):
SPA d e dot net, or by following him on
Instagram at Spade dot Dean or Blue Sky at Dean Spade.
If you like this reading, let me know that you
want more like it, because you know we mostly do fiction.
You can find me Margaret on Blue Sky at Margaret.

(35:33):
Because I got Margaret because I was an early adopter,
I didn't actually use it for a very long time,
but I got Margaret dot b Sky dot app or
whatever the fuck it is. You can find this book
club on the feeds for it could Happen here and
cool people who did cool stuff, or you can find
it on its own feed with its own art if

(35:54):
you like Dean. I did an interview with him on
mutual aid and disaster preparedness on another podcast that I
work on called Live Like the World Is Dying, which
you should also listen to. Hazel helps me with the
scripts and research. Eva does our audio editing, and that's
it for us tonight. There's so much I want to
say about this, but the episode is already running along
because I wanted to get as much of Dean Spades
writing in. Honestly, mostly I want to just like underline

(36:16):
things and say like, yes, but stay safe, stay dangerous.
Fuck Ice, I love you some of you maybe probably Bye.
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the

(36:37):
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources where it could happen here, updated
monthly at coolzonemedia dot com, Slash sources, Thanks for listening.