Disucssants: Emina Bužinkić and the authors Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak. Co-organized with the Free Palestine Initiative.
The book will be available at a discounted price, all the proceeds go toward the Free Palestine Initiative.
In many places around the world, the freedom to simply care for one another is under attack by the powerful, and acts of solidarity are being made illegal. In a moment of struggle defined by wars and genocides, the criminalisation of migration, the rollback of social welfare programs, and the right-wing clampdown on bodily autonomy, radical networks of care are fighting back.
From volunteer rescue boats in the Mediterranean to underground labs for preparing gender-affirming hormones, from the sharing of copyrighted health knowledge to the provision of abortion and contraception, people are reclaiming the means to care for one another in defiance of a system that devalues and exploits the labour of care.
Against atomised despair, Pirate Care shows that fighting back isn’t only about legal and legislative changes but also about organizing, direct action, and disobedient care.
Excerpt from the book
We propose pirate care not as a distinct definable protocol but a concept to help those already involved and those looking to get involved in defiant practices of solidarity find one another and discover a common vocabulary for what we are doing in myriad ways. Unlike the institutions of Empire’s matrix of care, the strengths of pirate care are its multiplicity, plasticity, opacity, and capacity to adapt to local conditions, contexts, and opportunities.
Still, we contend that organized acts of disobedient care constitute a political formation that is more than the sum of its constituent parts. We join many radical thinkers in insisting that social and ecological reproduction will be the crucial theater of struggles to come. Pirate care is a frame within which to observe corresponding forms of militancy and to make new alliances. By federating together various forms of disobedient care, we can build our capacity to break free of Empire’s failing care regimes and grow autonomy in social and ecological reproduction, creating a virtuous circle that fosters new insurrections. Our understanding of federation is inspired by anarchist ideas of alliances between decentralized and nonhierarchical groups from which no one is excluded, as well as the examples of democratic confederalism in Kurdish Rojava and in Zapatista territories.
We understand the act of federation as starting from different realities we inhabit to come together in order to overcome the shared structural conditions of Empire that undermine collective human and nonhuman survival, thereby creating different trajectories into a liberated world.
This vision requires different ideals and models than the ones we often associate with radicalism. Pirate care practices have a way of asking more of who we are, and on whom and on what we depend. Pirate care, as a radically feminist proposition, is an ecology of practices where the figure of the carer is also the cared-for, and where interdependence is a core tenet.
