CARE

Can care be a strong political tool? “We all depend on other people. We are all vulnerable”. Felipe González Gil, from ZEMOS 98 Collective, remember it in this podcast. Care should be implemented in a public level, follows Felipe, because “we live a precarious life”. He talks about the Indignados Movement from Spain and how this historical fact changed the form of doing and thinking. And the importance not only of taking action and fight but there are also spaces for healing our injures, physical or mental health: “Care is political, and It’s not just a fancy concept.”

She talks about the socialisation of Care, a socialist feminist perspective with a particular definition of Care that considers social class, power distribution, race, or hierarchical structures: “Care is needed in order to achieve individual and collective emancipation/ When we talk about the feminisation of politics, it would involve broader participation and better representation of women and women’s particular problems in politics”.

“Nowadays, there is a lot of theorizing about the concept of care”, said Manuela Zechner, and many ways of approaching it. She understands it at different levels that explains in this podcast. “Maybe we are so busy with the tasks, schedules, aims and ignore this dimension of needs and put interdependency on the first place. What feminism has done in organizations is bring caring as a fundamental aspect of organizational culture”.

Manuela Zechner has also written a book: Commoning care and collective power. Forthcoming with Transversal Texts in September 2021 (in print and as free Pdf)

Let’s try to define the concept of care. Care as something simple as respect for others. And so difficult to find, sometimes, within the traditional patriarchal structures of public institutions. Sharing power is not easy in these environments, said Ana Méndez de Andés (urban commons researcher and municipalist activist in Madrid). Care is one of the values of the feministisation of politics, argued Antonija Komazlić (Zagreb je naš). In this podcast, both explain their own experiences with the concept of care in two different cases in which municipal initiatives take political power.