When care needs piracy: the case for disobedience in struggles against imperial property regimes

Abstract

The aim of the Pirate Care project is to put the politics back into caring and to disrupt the global property regime that is colonising public welfare services and turning them into privately traded assets. Piracy refers to all the practices of survival and solidarity that disobey unjust legal and social rules that support property at the expense of living beings. The idea of piracy enables the foregrounding of the need to expand the realm of conceivable political responses to the crisis.

Organizing the precarious: Autonomous work, real democracy and ecological precarity

“…Here care is very different from the empty signifier of emotion that was so prevalent in recent political mobilization of care in the Covid-19 pandemic. Care in transition movements is a form of embodied transformative practice, a form of 'pirate care' (Graziano et al, 2020), which can be read in relation to histories of hackspaces that de-privatize knowledge, to local and translocal community networks of health and social support, or to ecological projects that try to mitigate the effects of environmental destruction and ecological precarity. These movement's ability to produce wider imaginaries for these very situated and targeted struggles could be a counternarrative to populist and far-right attempts to politicize similar community acts of self-sufficiency.…”