‘Mutual aid is present in every crisis’: An Interview with Dean Spade

The Covid-19 pandemic unravelled a crisis of the modern state, and its legal institutions on the one hand, and on the other hand of our interpretive frames—both philosophical and scientific. It is here that the idea and practice of mutual aid gains significance, both to think about how we can respond to acute crises of planetary scales as well as to the crisis of critique in the discipline of law. The task of mutual aid is not to rehabilitate law out of its crisis or to restore conditions and systems back to a state prior to a crisis. This is because, as Dean Spade says in this interview, ‘they are not broken systems needing to be fixed. They are working exactly as they were designed to work, constantly sharpening violence against targeted populations and enriching a very few people.’ Spade—Wismer Professor of Gender and Diversity at the Seattle University School of Law and a founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project—is a key scholar-activist voice on mutual aid in North America and Europe. He is author, most recently, of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (And the Next). In this conversation with Oishik Sircar, Spade discusses his theoretical and political influences, how he relates the idea of crisis to critique, his sobering assessment of the limitations not only of law reform but of the role of legal education in radical transformation, his own understandings of mutual aid, his favourite words, why and how he does not see himself only as a legal scholar-activist, and his vision of hope and hopelessness in times of acute and intense crises.