I agree with this, and would add that mutual aid is also when we help each other to address the political causes of our problems, to learn from each other, radicalise each other and support each other's struggles: https://twitter.com/NOT_INTO_IT/status/1352394512706883584

Like, giving away food to strangers is charity. Cooking for someone who drives you the next week is mutual aid. Cooking for someone who drives you the next week while you both talk about how to get free school meals off the government is a mutual aid movement.

Another trend I'm bothered about is the idea that just giving money to things, or redistributing piles of money, is mutual aid. It's not: that's reimplementing charity with faux-radical branding. If that's all we feel able to do, something's gone very wrong.

Organising to get money to people in need is necessary, and can be part of mutual aid work. But it needs to be combined with both *mutuality* (doing things for each other, not one-directional help) and *movement* (political co-learning and organising).

Dean Spade's book is a very good primer on all this: https://www.versobooks.com/books/3713-mutual-aid

Josie Sparrow's essay is brilliant on the limits of the mutual aid wave and its incorporation into the capitalist state: https://newsocialist.org.uk/mutual-aid-incorporated/

Something middle-class people (also white, abled, &c) often need to address in themselves is their urgent need to *help*, driven by guilt on the one hand and desire for power on the other. That undermines mutual aid. Mutual aid means accepting help, learning, and solidarity.

I think also of how what Táíwò calls "deference epistemology" plays into this for people with class power and the help impulse: if you don't see my struggle as your struggle, then you might donate money to a crowdfunder but never do political work. https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-taiwo 

That is, if you're anxious about your privilege and want to Do Something, but you've learned you're not *allowed* to be part of the struggle, then you salve your conscience with donating money and helping, but you never address your actual participation in power structures.

So: mutual aid isn't about how you can help other people, or about paying for their liberation. It's about how working with other people liberates all of you.