ON CARE, CARE-GIVING AND PIRACY
‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde
Something disturbing, if bizarrely fascinating, happened as I set out to write this blog/Substack. Deciding to take its title from a think piece I had written in 2020, I had a momentary panic that the wording, which I had acknowledged drew on Lorde’s definition of self-care as political warfare, might have been taken from somewhere else. Such are our times. Putting the phrase into the search engine to check, without remembering to place my usual minus AI at the end, something I find helps maintain my sanity when researching online these days, I found AI was already there waiting to greet me – and happily offering me a synthesis of my own article:
“Care as a Radical Act” is an influential 2020 think-piece and essay written by arts educator and researcher Chrissie Tiller for the social arts agency Heart of Glass. It explores how neoliberal systems commodify care and the arts into rigid, transactional provider-recipient models, stripping genuine care of its political power.
It then continued to summarise what it identified as the ‘Core Ideas from Tiller’s Work‘, offering citations and brief definitions of the ideas presented in the article, ending with the suggestion, ‘If you’d like, I can: Detail how Tiller connects radical care to community arts and co-creation. Intrigued enough to decide to take up this offer I found myself reading a pretty solid summary of the piece, categorising its focus into four bullet points Shifting Power Dynamics, Prioritising Process over Product, Embracing Friction and Dissonance and Centring Collective Well-Being. I was then offered the possibility of digging even deeper into Tiller’s work by being offered a précis of the arguments I had made in what was referred to as my ‘seminal’ and ‘landmark’ book Power Up. This was followed by an analysis of the ways my latest piece for A New Direction Spaces of Possibility and Pockets of Hope draws on bell hooks and Paulo Freire’s notions of critical pedagogy as a way to frame more inclusive approaches to arts and cultural education.
It didn’t take me long to realise I could quickly find myself disappearing into a Tiller rabbit hole. Tiller’s views on everything from social arts praxis, feminism, neoliberalism and cultural democracy to political activism were all captured, often as competently, and even more systematically, than I might have done myself. The skill, and let’s be honest flattery, with which ‘it’ was re-presenting me with my own thoughts and ideas almost made me question my use of ‘it’ to speak about this persona. Especially when ‘it’ was so clearly concerned to treat me, as the researcher, with care and attention, speaking to me in the first person, always asking me if I ‘was interested’, or if I ‘would like to’, before we set off together on our shared journey through the vagaries of Tiller’s mind. It was almost as if we were old friends and colleagues.
I quickly began to understand, although I have never engaged with them myself, how something like ChatGPT or Claude might impact young people and students, when even the word chat or the use of the first name already suggests a caring, reciprocal relationship. Who wouldn’t welcome this ‘someone’ who was there to help make your writing better, express your ideas more clearly in friendly, open tones and without any need to have to plough through the original texts? Especially when that someone was modestly prepared to admit they may have got some things wrong and ask you to forgive them for any errors.
AI’s role in what feels like the destruction of civilisation as we know it has long felt disconcerting. As have growing governmental and big-tech demands to build endless data centres to provide it, despite their uncompromising appetite for human resources such as water and energy being prioritised over the needs of local communities, as in Gary, Orlando. But this personal engagement with AI and its uncanny ability to synthesise and re-present even my own thought processes left me unnerved. It also brought me back with a jolt to my original impulse to re-visit Care as a Radical Act in a time when so many of our ‘needs’ are supposedly being met, or about to be met, by technology and machines.
My original text Care as a Radical Act emerged from an invitation in 2020 to become writer-in-residence for Heart of Glass during the Covid lockdown. I saw my role as partly being to witness and respond to the increasing sense of isolation and vulnerability artists and communities were feeling at this time. It also felt like an opportunity to reflect with the team on how they might preserve the ‘ecology of collaboration, community and collective responsibility’ central to their work when the ‘social was absent’. And to do that without simply moving everything online. The fifty initiatives funded by the resulting open call, ‘Home Work’, were inspiringly diverse and inventive in their search to find new ways of working collaboratively and creating ‘spaces of care’ when people were still constrained by the rules of lockdown. Ranging from a creative gardening initiative in an elders care unit to a mini-circus in the forecourt of a block of high rise flats to work with young mums to turn cliched objects of housework, such as ironing boards and hoovers, into totemic symbols of women’s power, each project saw artists working collaboratively with communities to discover what being together might mean in this climate.
For a while it felt as if this new reality might have given artists and communities permission to dream of new ways of connecting, not only with each other but also with our planet and its resources. We began to speak about rebuilding an arts and cultural sector that would be ‘more collaborative, more transforming and more caring’, that would place artists and communities at its centre, creating spaces (not buildings) where inclusion, diversity and cultural democracy would become real possibilities. Seeking inspirational models of collective action contributing to bringing about social justice we came upon the Pirate Care syllabus: a ‘provocation and an invitation’ to use the current crisis to rescue care from the ‘systems that exploit it’ by ‘commoning’ and sharing our resources, tools, technologies and knowledges. Acknowledging the labour involved in care the syllabus spoke of the invisibility of those who provide it, the unpaid or low-wage status of that labour and the need to challenge the power relations inherent in our current systems. It suggested the possibility of working at the intersection of activism, self-organisation and the commons to reimagine a more collective and radical form of care, and in doing so, to ‘pirate’ it from the grasp of neoliberal cuts and rationalisation and create a more caring, juster world. In a challenging time, it provided us with a momentary beacon of hope and a call to action.
Sadly, the disjuncture between the world we began to reimagine and the realities of artists trying to make work that was more collaborative and survive within a hierarchical arts funding system was also sharply exposed by Covid. It became clear that real change needed to take place at a systemic level.
Returning to Pirate Care’s proposals now, through the prism of the division and inequality fostered by big tech and its oligarchies, it is clear how quickly those hopes of becoming a more radical, caring and connected society were destroyed. Whether it is the unofficial, unpaid care provided by families because the state has relentlessly pulled back, or the self-care Audre Lorde proudly asserted should be an act of political warfare against systems that do not care for us, care has been ruthlessly outsourced, defunded and commodified. On one end of the spectrum ‘self-care’, little more than a concept promoted by a luxury business sector where ‘wellness’ is an indulgence available for those with the money to pay for it. On the other, basic human services, from healthcare to housing to education to social welfare, have been left scrambling for dwindling resources in a climate where the vulnerable are regularly portrayed as undeserving scroungers or an unnecessary burden on the public purse.
Neoliberalism has firmly positioned those in need of care in terms of a perceived lack of financial input to economic growth and development. The contribution of those providing unpaid care in both economic and societal terms is systemically discounted. Care has become something that should only be offered to those who can battle the way through endless complex hoops to prove they are deserving. The notion of an ‘undeserving poor’ mockingly dismissed by Eliza’s father in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion has become a reality. What social, medical and mental health care is on offer has been siphoned off into the hands of businesses whose workers remain some of the most poorly paid while investors and senior management focus on bonuses and profit margins. The mutual aid groups that optimistically emerged as grassroots initiatives during Covid have largely disappeared as capitalism has reasserted its greedy grasp. Even small-scale local initiatives such as food banks have been co-opted by the system, largely it seems to provide camera opportunities for royalty and unpopular MPs.
Those of us providing the limitless amounts of unpaid, unofficial care the system increasingly relies on are becoming more and more isolated from each other as we necessarily spend more and more time in the home. The companionship, allyship and solidarity many of us seek is mostly being met by online support groups, carefully timed by access to big-tech AI resourced programmes such as Zoom or Teams. Any appetite or capacity we might have had to organise the federations Pirate Care suggests will be needed to harness possibilities for change has been undermined by the need to survive within systems that refuse to value those providing the care they are increasingly absenting themselves from. Whether we are artists working to promote wellbeing with communities facing a myriad of complex challenges or simply partners, families or friends voluntarily taking on roles that often require skilled knowledge and understanding of different conditions, we are being left to find the strength and resilience needed within ourselves. It is probably no coincidence that both groups are suffering from exhaustion, burn out and mental health challenges.
Despite all this, Pirate Care’s new book makes it difficult not to have one’s passion for collective action reignited. Thoughtfully curating stories of initiatives from all over the world where communities have successfully challenged their right to clean water, access to knowledge, housing, medical supplies or childcare they set out to offer effective examples of radical and alternative visions of care. They also encourage us to recognise these can be found just as powerfully in unsung moments of ‘anonymous everyday solidarity’ as in ‘bold acts of resistance in the face of ruthless repression’. The power of collective action taken in the face of care denied to those who seen as undeserving or wrong communities is beautifully exemplified in the ‘three tales from the high sea’ offered in the Ouverture to the book. The determination of Captain Carola Rackete to bring the migrants she had rescued from their sinking dinghy to the shores of Lampedusa, the Women on Waves decision to take contraceptive pills to women in countries denied reproductive healthcare and the Freedom Flotilla’s commitment to carry humanitarian aid to Gaza cannot help but capture our sense of what is possible when we come together in solidarity and care for others.
The fact that these acts of collective kindness are progressively being proscribed, outlawed and criminalised by supposedly democratic governments across the globe only further highlights the importance of finding ways to come together and act collectively to nurture and nourish what is left of our shared humanity.
Care, as Lorde so often reminded us, is not something any of us can do alone, whether that is care for others or care for ourselves. By accepting oppressions and trying to manage caregiving by ourselves we are in danger of simply feeding the systems we are struggling against. Care, despite the claims of the post-human world we are entering, cannot, and must not, be separated from the solidarity, mutuality and autonomy needed to resist systems that are already moving so readily towards autocracy and imposing greater division. Care requires connection, it requires community, it requires us to ensure we have the mutual strength to fight for our own care, for those we care for and for those the system has already decided, like the disabled, the old, those facing mental health issues, or those seeking asylum, are no longer worthy or deserving of care.
As Sara Ahmed notes in her response to the epilogue of A Burst of Light from which Lorde’s thoughts about caring for ourselves are taken, ‘We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other. This is why when we have to insist, I matter, we matter, we are transforming what matters. Women’s lives matter; black lives matter; queer lives matter; disabled lives matter; trans lives matter; the poor; the elderly; the incarcerated, matter.’
Self-care in this context is not an indulgence, it is not a privilege. In the uncaring world we live in to insist we matter as caregivers and as those in need of care is ‘an act of political warfare against systemic oppression’. In the fight against growing institutionalised and structural oppressions it is an act that will necessitate us finding new forms of interconnectedness and new models of care that recognise our interdependence on each other and on the planet we live on. One of the sub-chapters in the Pirate Care book is titled Care as piracy, piracy as care. We need to ‘make a pledge to each other’ its authors suggest in their final chapter, ‘to liberate care in all its political joy, and a spell to hold each other dear as we set sails to take us into the gathering storm.’
Liberating care from the grasp of capital, by embracing a collective form of piracy, is inordinately appealing.
* Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity. Authors: Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak. Published by Pluto Press 2025.
