The Care Collective

WHAT WOULD A WORLD ORGANISED AROUND CARE LOOK LIKE?

The Care Manifesto is the fiercely argued demand to place care at the centre of our politics. Our lives are always interdependent. It is by nurturing these ties that we cultivate a world in which every one of us can not only survive but thrive. Care must be at the heart of the state and the economy, promoting collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. It should inform how we work, interact with each other, and plan our cities. It is part of how we can rebalance our relationship with the natural world.

The Care Collective - Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal - was formed in 2017, originally as a London-based reading group aiming to understand and address the multiple and extreme crises of care. Each coming from a different discipline, we have been active both collectively and individually in diverse personal, academic and political contexts.

The Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care—childcare, healthcare, elder care—to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.  

The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.  

The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more 'promiscuous care'. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.