Mutual Aid 101: Articles and Resources
Everything all in one place! And in eBook form!
Buy the full course in eBook form for $9.99 here.
Hey everyone! Last week marked the end of our 8-week long Mutual Aid course. If I read an on-topic book or find another person to interview, I will happily publish more. But for now, I’m planning the next course, which is going to be much bigger, and probably a bit more on-brand for all of the people who found me via TikTok. More on that next week.
On this page, you’ll find:
A complete list of the course’s articles
A further reading list
Links and resources
A Q&A comments section which I will regularly respond to.
The Mutual Aid 101 Course
Here is the course in full. I will add new articles as they are published! Note that half of these are paywalled — you can get access to all of them by subscribing for $5 a month (I won’t be mad if you immediately cancel after reading the articles, every bit helps). Also, buy the whole course (plus some extra content/notes) in eBook form here.
Intro to Mutual Aid: What is Mutual aid? • Definitions • Kropotkin and scientific alternatives to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”
Mutual Aid in the Real World (paywalled): Mutual aid vs. Charity • The Black Panthers and the People’s Free Food Program • Mutual aid among the undocumented • Black churches and mutual aid • Mutual aid as a way of life among the indigenous • Everyday mutual aid
Is Mutual Aid Inherently Revolutionary?: Mutual aid on the margins • What the Mafia has in common with mutual aid societies • Mutual aid as a gateway drug to identifying structural inequalities • Unions and mutualism in the age of the New Deal • Cooperatives, Worker-owned companies, and mutual aid within the capitalist system • The Mondragon Corporation as a model for a mutualist future
“Disaster Utopias” and Spontaneous Mutual Aid (paywalled): What people do during disasters • Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell • The heroism of bystanders in 9/11 and the Manhattan Boatlift • The myth of looting • Violence in the media after Hurricane Katrina • Disasters as a portal to change • The 1985 Mexico City earthquake and the toppling of dictators
Mutual Aid in the COVID era: How COVID was different from other disasters • Were ‘people’ in general terrible during COVID? • The Auntie Sewing Squad and mask-making mutual aid groups • Food insecurity and mutual aid during the pandemic • How the pandemic forced some nonprofits to look to mutual aid to fill in the gaps • How the negativity bias influences our view of human nature
Where is Mutual Aid Happening Today? (paywalled): The history of mutual aid in churches and unions (and what we do now that most of us belong to neither) • Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People and why social infrastructure matters • The mutual aid potential of libraries • Why physical shared spaces are better than virtual ones • The potential of mutual aid online
Mutual Aid in Practice (Interview with Chelle King): Community fridges to fight food insecurity • Taking need and hierarchy out of the equation • The ugly NIMBY phenomenon • Lessons learned in feeding your neighbors
Effective altruism vs. Mutual Aid (paywalled): Understanding mutual aid as opposed to a different ethical school • Utilitarianism, Peter Singer, effective altruism, and “earning to give” • Why charities struggle to address structural inequalities • Using charity as a PR fig leaf for fraud and wrongdoing • What good can be done within the system? • Building tomorrow’s better world in today’s bleak present
A Mutual Aid Reading List
Find the whole thing on Bookshop.org here. Affiliate linked, so if you buy through any of these links, I get a small kickback, which is a huge help!
Mutual Aid: History, Theory, and Practice
Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Pyotr Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread
Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play
James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed
Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor
adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States
E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic’s Wobblies & Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia
Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
Mutual Aid within the System
Eric Klinenberg’s Palaces For the People
Gar Alperovitz’s What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution
Gar Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism
David France’s How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
Sara Horowitz’s Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up
Disaster Utopias & Mutual Aid during Crises
Fiction & Comics
Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed
Becky Chambers’ The Monk & Robot Duology
Janet Biehl’s Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS
Mary Talbot’s The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia
Nate Powell’s Save it For Later: Promises, Parenthood, and the Urgency of Protest
Links and Resources
The Anarchist Library: This site contains thousands of free eBooks and articles on anarchism, and damn near everything of any importance written about mutual aid.
A Visual History of Mutual Aid (Bloomberg)
The Rad Comms Network has compiled a massive localized list of mutual aid resources from across the country.
Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and activist Mariame Kaba created this Mutual Aid 101 guide for the COVID-19 era.
Mutual Aid Hub tracks many (not all) mutual aid groups nationwide (US)
The American Friends Service Committee (managed by the Quakers) has a guide to starting your own mutual aid projects.
Food Not Bombs is a great place to start if you want to find out what’s happening in your area.
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is a network of grassroots activists working to provide relief on the many disasters around the globe.
Freedge.org has a list of known community fridges and resources for starting your own.
Little Free Library has resources for finding and starting a free book share library.
The comment section below is an open discussion
What questions do you have about mutual aid? Anything you’d like to discuss more in depth? Keep it respectful, please! I will ruthlessly moderate1 jerks and trolls.
I’ve been campaigning to make “Ruthlessly Moderate” the motto of the United States Democratic Party.