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Blog All Dog-eared Pages: The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective

The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective (on OpenLibrary)

Page 5

In this manifesto we therefore use the term 'care' to capaciously embrace familial care, the hands-on care that workers carry out in care homes and hospitals and that teachers do in schools, and the everyday services provided by other essential workers. But it means as well the care of activists in constructing libraries of things, co-operative alternatives and solidarity economies, and the political policies that keep housing costs down, slash fossil fuel use and expand green spaces. Care is our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive — along with the planet itself.

Page 42

[...] if the neoliberal defunding and undermining of care has led to paranoid and chauvinist caring imaginaries — looking after 'our own' — adequate resources, time and labour would make people feel secure enough to care for, about and with strangers as much as kin.

Page 43

Promiscuous care argues that caring for migrants and refugees should carry the same significance that our culture places on caring for our own, and urges us to care about the fate of those children forcibly separated from their families at the US border and placed in detention centres, as if they were kin. It recognises that we all have the capacity to care, not just mothers and not just women, and that all our lives are improved when we care and are cared for, and when we care together.

Page 46

As we showed in the previous chapter, such forms of support are often spontaneous and generated from down to up, but they also require structural support to be consistent and survive over time. Second, caring communities need public space: space that is co-owned by everyone, is held in common and is not commandeered by private interests.

Page 52

We need both community spaces and shared resources.

Page 57

To be clear, what 'caring communities' does not mean is using people's spare time to plug the caring gaps left wide open by neoliberalism. It means ending neoliberalism in order to expand people's capacities to care. To be truly democratic will involve forms of municipal care that put an end to corporate abuse, generate co-operatives and replace outsourcing with insourcing.

Page 76

As the feminist economist Nancy Folbre puts it, we should be thinking of 'invisible hearts', not 'invisible hands', when it comes to how care often is, and indeed should be, organised.