It would be hard to think of a more influential book over the last 5 years than Dean Spade's "Mutual Aid." It's a perennial bookclub pick, there’s an even chance it comes up in any conversation about local organizing, and we regularly hear customers enthusiastically recommending it to each other.
It’s also a book that’s worth revisiting, and Dean does just that in this new edition, starting with a 38-page preface that’s good enough to print as a standalone zine. When the book was first published in 2020, part of its incredible appeal was that it emerged directly from urgent conversations and collective actions that readers themselves were part of. This new preface again brings the text into our moment and serves as a critical intervention against the cooptation and pacification of mutual aid 🔥
https://firestorm.coop/products/23866-mutual-aid.html
From the new preface: “My hope is that ‘Mutual Aid’ helps more people join with others in taking risks to care for people in crisis and dismantle the violent systems that are endangering all life and have already prematurely ended the lives of so many. What we need is not just individual or small-group acts of redistribution and care-which are no doubt meaningful-but to create entire voluntary, horizontal, decentralized systems of living together that do not operate through profit, scarcity, and extraction…
Our only chance at freedom is to break from the liberal hope that elites will act for us, and begin to take direct action and care for each other right now… Any particular part of the work we take up will, inevitably, be inadequate to address the crisis-we can't possibly give out enough money, tents, water bottles, masks, hormones, babysitting shifts, abortion pills, or bowls of soup for the level of crisis that the systems we are living in are creating. But we can do this care work with a focus on bringing more people into the struggle, creating new ways of surviving that are autonomous from our opponents' deadly supply chains, and building more capacity for our fights on every front, so that more of us are ready to join every riot or strike in reach and to risk everything for each other.”
#MutualAid #FeministBookstore #FirestormCoop (- L)
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