Mutual Aid was first published in October 2020, and was translated to Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, German, Czech, Italian and Korean. The second edition includes a new section with reflections on what I have learned since 2020, and updates to various sections throughout. You can buy the book directly from me here, and proceeds will go to benefit my podcast.
Check out the free Teaching Guide that goes with the book, and this free Study Guide created by Radical in Progress.
Here’s a draft of a Spanish translation free, made by Study and Struggle for reading with people inside US prisons. Here is a translation of the Leadership Qualities chart from the book in Spanish, and here is a translation of the chart about Qualities of Mutual Aid Projects in Spanish. These were made by @multiversidadlibertaria.
Watch the launch event video where I was in conversation with Whitney Hu, this conversation with Mariame Kaba and Ejeris Dixon, and this one with Mia Mingus.
Read this excerpt that was published by Truthout in October, this other excerpt published in Roar Magazine in November, this interview about the book with In These Times, and this interview with The Nation. Read this review by Rori Elliot, and this review by Paul Centorame.
This workshop series may be useful to mutual aid groups and other organizing groups running into common problems in working together, as might this workshop on conflict.
Published October 2020, by Verso Press. Mutual Aid is now available in Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Czech, German, Portuguese, Korean, and Thai.
ABOUT MUTUAL AID
Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.
Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.
Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.
This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.
Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.
This book is part of a series from Verso focused on COVID and care. Read them all!
