Against the Crisis

Naming the Conjuncture

What is the nature of this crisis? It's not just a passing series of events.
What's its history, where does it come from? We started to discuss it as the
"neoliberal conjuncture." - Stuart Hall

We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people's lives on the
sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces thirty-five years in
jail; where people risk charges for flying drones bringing contraceptives to
those who otherwise couldn't get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving
food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the
homeless. At the same time, flying drones to kill people is praised as the
state of the art of current warfare techniques; border policing and vigilantes
willfully pushing back migrants like they were animals are encouraged; the
fattest profit margins are achieved through the relentless enclosure of
publicly funded science. Our heroines care, disobey, and they are pirates.

"Pirate care" is a concept that the soci­ologist Herbert Blumer (1954) would
have called "sensitizing," that is, a phenomenon that is still emerging. In our
case, it is a constellation of processes that are shaking up the practices,
institutions, and imaginaries of the politics of social reproduction.

While the processes that we define as "pirate care" can be very different, they
share important commonalities that allow us to think them together: they are
all practices developed in reaction to the profound changes introduced in the
field of welfare by global neoliberal governance and they are willing to risk
prosecution to uphold the right to wellbeing for all.

The Plural Crisis of Care

The monetary value of women's unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and
over is at least $10.8 trillion annually – three times the size of the world's
tech industry. - Clare Coffey et al., "Time to Care," Oxfam Briefing Paper, 2020

The welfare state has become a dominant developmental horizon of the capitalist
countries at least after the WWII. Through the system of taxation and public
spending, the state took charge to partially remedy the most harmful effects of
capitalism, by levelling some of the economic inequalities existing between the
social classes through a form of indirect income. At the same time, a publicly
funded and organized welfare infrastructure has been the core political horizon
of socialist and communist countries too. Welfare is a model that assigns to
the public sector the task of guaranteeing to all of its citizens those
services that are indispensable for life, such as healthcare, education, a
home, and social benefits for those unable to get an income. These rights have
been framed by political commentators and perceived by public opinion as
fundamental and as evidence of social accomplishment and civilizational
progress. A vast array of institutions that organize contemporary social life,
such as hospitals and care homes, kindergartens and schools, youth and leisure
centers, public libraries and museums exist today as a result of struggles
around welfare rights.

The welfare model of governance was not exempt from criticism however.
Feminists, black, and disability movements, for instance, attacked
paternalistic and discriminatory arrangements of services, rejecting those
components of the welfare system that most involved coercion and control, while
still insisting on publicly funded provisions of care.

Neoliberalism, arising in the 1970s as a reaction to the growing portion of
social wealth taken by workers and their families through direct and indirect
wages, framed the function of the state differently: instead of having to
guarantee welfare, the role of the public is to reorganize every institution
and area of life to make it adopt the appearance of a "market." The belief of
the neoliberals was that the market is the most efficient mechanism of
allocation and consequently the best form of provision of social welfare too.
Fortunately, not everyone agrees and neoliberalism has been widely criticized
and opposed by social and political movements globally. During the past fifty
years, however, it has continued to dominate the political horizon, leading to
growing inequalities between rich and poor 01 and expanding neo-colonial
extractivism in the poorest regions of the planet. Moreover, neoliberal
governance has been blamed for repeatedly failing to confront the grave
environmental ca­tastrophe that we are now facing. As many feminist
commentators have noted, climate change can be thought as one of multiple
dimensions of the capitalist "crisis of care" that impacts the quality of life
of billions of people on this planet.

Despite the fact that theorists of neoliberalism have often declared themselves
in favor of extreme cuts to tax and public welfare systems, in practice their
reforms have often achieved quite a different result. They served (and still
serve) to justify not so much the dismantling of state interventions, but the
advent of a different "role" of the public services: away from an ideal of
collective wellbeing towards a system of workfare in which basic resources for
life are administered as a tool of punishment of the poor, and of regulation
and control imposed upon the most weak. The responsibility was shifted from the
failings of the capitalist market to the individuals, blaming them for not
being able to resolve on their own the problems that were still structural.

In fact, these "redundant" populations – that is, people not interesting enough
for the markets neither as workforce nor as consumers – are the new target
groups of punitive neoliberalism. People who are in most need of care
(unemployed, precarious, working poor, ex-prisoners, elderly and young, sick
and disabled, minorities and asy­lum seekers … ) are today immersed in the most
bureaucratic environments, and subjected to endless processes of evaluation,
made to prove again and again both their potential value (for markets) and
their moral character for accessing basic rights as rewards.

The reorganization of welfare has led to a re-conservatization of societies.
The church and other faith-based organizations were allowed to become providers
of services in what has come to be known as the "charity-industrial complex,"
while the family was asked to assume its role as the primary place of care and
responsibility for depend­ents. The well-known consequence of this is that an
increased portion of the necessary reproductive labor is expected to be
performed for free and in large part to fall on women's shoulders, stiffening
reactionary gender roles and hierarchies.

While introducing punitive market dependence for social reproduction in welfare
states, neoliberalism collapsed the prospects of development for postcolonial
and socialist societies across the world, leading a growing global population
to seek ways to flee misery, hide from war, and find a better future in more
affluent nations. This has led to a hardening of border controls and
criminalization of migrant fluxes. As we approach the conditions of runaway
climate change, the lives of the global surplus populations are so deprecated
that the cheapest way to deal with migration has proven to suppress them by
military means.

Caring as Disobedience

The crime-wave of being too nice to the wrong people. - Bruce Sterling

Caring labour is aimed at maintaining or augmenting another person's freedom. -
David Graeber

We have thus sketched some of the historic developments that allow us to
understand the necessity behind the emergence of practices that we have named
"pirate care." The term condenses two processes that are particularly visible
at present. On the one hand, basic care provisions that were previously
considered cornerstones of social life are now being pushed towards illegality,
as a consequence of geopolitical reordering and the marketization of social
services. At the same time new, often technologically-enabled care networks are
emerging in opposition to this drive toward illegality and marginalization.

Against the background of institutionalized negligence, a growing wave of
mobilizations and resistance around care can be witnessed addressing a number
of fundamental needs: the recent Docs Not Cops campaign in the UK, with doctors
refusing to carry out documents checks on migrant patients; migrant-rescue
boats (such as those operated by Sea-Watch) that defy the criminalization of
NGOs active in the Mediterranean; the growing resistance to homelessness via
the reappropriation of houses left empty by speculators (like the PAH in
Spain); the defiance of legislation making homelessness illegal (such as
Hungary's re­form of October 2018), or municipal decrees criminalizing helping
out in public space (e.g. Food Not Bombs' volunteers arrested in 2017).

In Greece, a growing number of grassroots clinics set up by the Solidarity
Movement have responded to the draconian cuts to public services by providing
medical attention to those without a private insurance. In Italy, precarious
parents without recourse to public childcare are organizing their own pirate
kindergartens. In Spain, the feminist collective GynePunk developed a toolkit
for gynecological self-diagnosis, to allow all those excluded from reproductive
health services (such as trans women, drug users or sex workers) to perform
basic checks on their own bodies. Meanwhile, the collective Women on Waves has
been providing safe contraceptive and abortion options to women in countries
where these are not available, at times using boats harbored in international
waters, like veritable care pirates.

We felt the need to map and think these practices of pirate care together,
because we feel they are opening up a potent political imaginary for the
present times, although they are a continuation of long-standing practices of
solidarity and mutual aid. Our project also attempts to offer them some degree
of protection by means of visibility. These initiatives are frequently acting
in expressed non-compliance with laws, regulations, and executive orders that
impose exclusions along the lines of class, gender, race, or territory. They
are not shying away from the risk of persecution in providing unconditional
solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against, and
condemned to the status of surplus population. We also wish to push
institutions, including cultural institutions, to find ways of supporting,
rather than stifling, such bottom-up collective care provisions.

We are interested in learning from and together with practitioners that share a
pirate care approach, that is, from and with those practitioners who mix
ethical concerns for the wellbeing of all – and especially of the most
oppressed groups – with an experimentation with tools and techniques for
collective organizing. We noticed that too many cultural and academic spaces
often arrange discus­sions around a "single issue." Instead, we wanted to
provide a space for some of these conversations to take place following a more
transversal approach to social reproduction.

Composing a Syllabus

We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes
a habit. - Audre Lorde

The syllabus is the manifesto of the twenty-first century. - HyperReadings.info

To connect various practices of pirate care and to bring their analysis and
organizing experience to closer attention of the public, we have decided to
explore and present them through the angle of radical pedagogy and to develop
together with practitioners a syllabus on pirate care.

We found our inspiration in the recent phenomenon of the #syllabi that started
to appear around 2014, when educators connected with social justice movements
had begun using the hashtag as a means to gather teaching resources to respond
to a number of violent events: the #FergusonSyllabus addressed the racist
police killing of Michael Brown; the Syllabus on Gaming and Feminism by The New
Inquiry was a reaction to the misogynist attacks of some parts of the gamer
community to Zoë Quinn, Brianna Wu, and Anita Sarkeesian (the so-called
#gamergate). Shortly after, the Trump 101 and Trump 2.0 syllabi were compiled
to help make sense of the political implications of his election to presidency,
while the #StandingRockSyllabus provided a powerful tool for communicating the
stakes of the largest gathering of Na­tive Americans in the last 100 years,
against the ecological devastation wrought by the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Many more online syllabi have been circulating since, both as crowdsourced or
single-authored documents responding to various political crises around the
world with a call for a renewed political pedagogy, both within and outside
official educational venues. This phenomenon has been an important source of
inspiration for our work, because it helped us bring into focus the idea that
many of the big societal issues we are confronting need to be addressed through
pedagogical processes that involve situated commitments and long temporalities.
There is a shared social need to build opportunities for shared political
analysis of the conjunctures we inhabit and to reflect on our current
conditions.

In November 2019 we organized a writing retreat hosted by Drugo More (Rije­ka,
HR), to create the first version of a Pirate Care Syllabus. It was drafted
together with Laura Benítez Valero, Emina Bužinkić, Rasmus Fleischer, Maddalena
Fragnito, Mary Maggic, Iva Marčetić, two members of the Power Makes Us Sick
collective, Zoe Romano, Ivory Tuesday, and Ana Vilenica. These contributors are
active in feminist approaches to reproductive healthcare, autonomous mental
health support, trans health and well-being, free access to knowledge, housing
struggles, collective childcare, migrant solidarity, community safety, and
anti-racist organizing.

The Pirate Care Syllabus is not a crowdsourced document emerging from a social
movement, but, more modestly, a collaboratively created resource that brings
together those texts and documents that practitioners found most useful for
activating a collective learning process about the crisis they have responded
to in their organizing. It's not the, but a Pirate Care Syllabus, and a
document that will keep evolving during our residency in Vienna. By making it
shareable and re-mixable document, we hope that further cross-pollination
across practices will be generated that might, in turn, strengthen each other.

On the technological side, developing tools and workflows for syllabus is an
extension of our work on the Memory of the World shadow library. As amateur
librarians, we want to provide universal access to a meticulously maintained
catalogue of digital texts, making available those that are behind paywalls or
are not digitized yet. (It is worth noting that shadow libraries themselves are
a pirate care practice: in contravention of the copyright regulation, doing
what public libraries are not allowed to do.) With the tools and workflows for
the syllabus, we want to offer a technological framework and pedagogical
process that can allow others to activate these resources for their own
learning processes and also to adapt them to their own conditions. We want the
syllabi to be easily preserved – so they include digitized documents relevant
to the actions of specific struggles – and to come integrated with
well-maintained and catalogued collections of reading materials.

To achieve this, we have made certain technological choices. In our framework,
a syllabus is built from plaintext documents that are written in a very simple
and human-readable Markdown markup language, rendered into a static HTML
website that doesn't require a resource-intensive and easily breakable database
system, and which keeps its files on a git version control system that allows
collaborative writing and easy forking to create new versions. Such a syllabus
can then be equally hosted on an internet server and used/shared offline from a
USB stick, while still preserving the internal links be­tween the documents and
the links to the texts in the accompanying searchable resource collection.

We are thinking about syllabi as forms of more differentiated manifestos to
survive the perilous future that is in the making. While the most rewarding
aspects of care are being privatized for the few, and its most oppressive
components, such as surveillance, conformity and coercion, are being
technologically redistributed for the many, we will need to educate ourselves
in the knowledges that can help us to make care practices a distributed
insurgent common instead.