MANIFESTO OF CARES

Commitment to Cares, Why to commit to care?

We are a group of intersectional trans * feminists coming together in the context of Collective Conditions, a worksession organised by Constant, in Brussels the winter of 2019. We gathered around the notion of cares to further understand our relationship to cares in our shifting contexts. We are concerned with the urgency of this moment because we have noticed that many in positions of power are doing little to enact cares. As for us, we are in positions where we can enact contextualized cares and we want to revive our commitment towards cares as a critical practice. We need to talk about cares, not because they don't exist, but because cares are not distributed equally, and because to 'take care' can have multiple meanings depending on positions of privilege, context and who and what we're dealing with. This manifesto is a demand towards those subjects within institutional frameworks to reflect on their relationship towards the giving, taking, receiving cares, to question well worn patterns of cares, and how they can be reinscribed. This manifesto intends to reach the people who haven't thought about the social economical racial gendered implications of cares, and is also for the people who wish to reinvigorate their care patterns.  

Caring requires 

• • active concern, mindfulness and commitment towards humans and nonhumans. 
  • attention to entangled environments: physical, digital, interpersonal, ecological, and those we share them with     
  • attention towards individuals and communities     
  • not presuming and asking for different needs          
  • time and the understanding of time's multidimensional nature         
  • actions not expected services                
  • deep listening*        
  • patience          
  • courage and responsability         
  • multiple interpretations and possibilities         
  • ... not knowing what care might mean         
  • to be taken seriously & to take seriously         
  • acknowledgement        

    
    *Some care IS a trojan horse. ".......withcare.in", for example, is. Beware. Some 'feminist' men who teach workshops on anti-sexism and anti-racism are - beware. Some predators that change cities and countries to escape their reputation and purposefully insert themselves into local activism, in order to make themselves indispensible and build a human shield of new character witnesses are - beware. Some festivals that choose topics like network conditions or exposing systems of power & injustice but do not care to protect their participants or visitors, don't see the necessity to set-up CoCs or awareness teams and re-invite the named assaulters, predators and their allies: they are, too, beware. Let the hope for a careful future not blind you from the necessity that until then, you still need to protect yourself = CARE FOR YOURSELF - if nobody else does...
Hey, Sky and Loren here, we're working on the manifesto right now - we could videocall https://meet.jit.si/ManifestoOfCare if you like and talk?
Oh hi, really nice offer, thanks, but in the middle of work. Possible in the week-end? (And sorry to "mess" with the manifesto, but was exploding to add something like this...)
Lets definitely find another time! Who are you btw? We can email about setting up another work time to include all the exclusions we can think of! 
Will mail you tomorrow night - is that ok? I always have a tiny window only when talking about this tpoic before I start heavily shivering, which doesn't
make it impossible to speak about, but makes it impossible to continue work (which i have to do today and tomorrow...)
we totally hear you, its a difficult topic. and tomorrow evening for an email is good. who should we expect it from? :)
lol, not saying it publicly, yet. ;) (no distrust in any of the workshop people, just really bad experiences each time i try to talk about this.)
Okay! Np 
Cool, thanks, speak later

[from the group who worked on the 8.01: those comments are important, it feels like we need to discuss more with the writer but we understand the need for anonymity. It the mean time, we realized using the metaphor of trojan horse is not helping our argument so we might just formulate it differently] 

The state of cares 
Care is:

• • • Care is deeply entwined in power relations and not equally distributed.                                 
    • Care is currently hegemonic: some have the agency to impose a constricting meaning and practice of care, on behalf of others. 
    • Care is subsumed within capitalist frameworks that create the conditions for care workers to have less agency and not be represented in what they are employed to do.                                                           
    • Care is in a false dichotomy of productive/reproductive labour.                                 
    • Care is chronically undervalued.                       
    • Care is deeply entwined in institutional engagement or lack thereof.                                 
    • Our society produces vacuums of care in places where it'd be needed.                                 
    • Care is underdeveloped in institutional contexts.                                 
    • Care is something that cannot be outsourced.  

   Caring is not a tool
    Cares cannot be instrumentalized 
    Cares cannot be generalized 
    Cares cannot be constricted by normativity  
    Caring cannot be conditional              
    Caring is an antimanifesto     

          
Outlook of cares       
If things stay this way....                 

• • • the tyranny of self-help models of survival will undermine the formation of solidarity and collective power.                 
    • We'll suspended in precarious modes of surviving, in which our failures are capitalised on.                             
    • The continued burning out of those who do the caring will exhaust the possibilities of care that still currently exist.                                
    • Care will continue to be performed by those who are exploited by contemporary slavery.                              
    • Slavery will continue to be reproduced as the insidious institution that it has alway been.   
    • There will be a proliferation of ego-centric hedonists and hoarders of goods, wealth, status and power.                               
    • We will all become facsimiles of whiteness: greedy, extractive and exploitative.             
    • The logics of extractivism will continue to intensify creating a void in our base spurring manmade ecological disasters disproportionately impacting certains geographies, geosystems and ecosystems [parts of the world or ....]                                              
    • Persons, groups, ecosystems, identities will continue to be subjected to the violence of categorisation, victimization, commodification and marginalisation. 
    • The end of humanity and the destruction of the eco-systems is inevitable   

          
      
Envisioning Cares 
Challenging the current trajectory of care, we demand a future now in which ....       

• • • • all humans and non-humans are acknowledged as valuable and worthy of care.             
      • the emotional, physical, philosophical and social realities of humans and non-humans have abundant expressions. 
      • consent is not presumed and crucial to all relationships
      • living matters  will have space to discover their own agencies.    
      • trees, plants, lands, oceans, river, water, rocks, mountains are acknowledged in reciprocal caring relationship 
      • there is committment to the work of making ecologically conscious desicions         
      • value is shaped in do-it-together (DIT) collective bottom-up modes.      
      • touch implies adress to the problematization of consent                                                          
      • institutional, governmental, corporate agents of power will be transformed into self-determined agencies.
      • desire, love, sex, relationships and cares are liberated with modes of enthusiastic consent and freedom to abstain.                 
      • care is mutual, shared across groups and individuals according to varying needs, skills and possiblities. 
      • care roles exist outside normalised powerdynamics
      • notions of care continue to be dicussed, to change and to be adapated. 
      • nation states, borders and advertisement will be abolished in the service of equal opportunity for all humans and non-humans.

                    

Crafts of Cares
Possible practices:
       

• • • cultivate curiousity; to care is to be curious, curious enough to ask                
    • be humble, humble enough to abandon assumptions                 
    • cultivate gentleness, gentle enough to be asked move towards disassembled and loosely structured, interchangeable meshworks of enacted comunities               
    • acknowledge and deconstruct privileges          
    • be open about failures    
    • cultivating practices of abundance where rather than hoarding in fear of scarcity        
    • value those who do the caring.                  
    • pay salaries to those who do the caring. 
    • Value / pay for Restorative care to heal deficits of care
    • value/pay all forms of feminized labour                
    • value/pay those who do domestic work                 
    • value/pay those who do the child rearing                 
    • value/pay those who do the teaching                 
    • value/pay those who are the caretaker of spaces    
    • illegalize shareholder models and corporations              .                 
    • denormalise existing structures and power relationships         
    • place care at the center of healthcare, sex, housing, income, education, art and culture
    • Root power directly within communities to counter historic hoarding of power
    • multiply agencies for new interpretations of care
    • commit to activist, sensitive lives, nurturing and facilitating each other's talents and dreams.                 

  
  
  
         
               
Accountability towards Care 
[not sure about this part, the crafts to care is already somehow adressing the "how-to"] Why and how is this topic important?  Suggestion: could it be possible to find this lines in previuos section? Not convinced by focus 

• • • Starting principle : pedagogy                   
    • Use pedagogical tools to acknowledge the damage                  
    • Allow an environment for the 'victimizer' to learn                     
    • Integrate the 'victim' in the pedagocical process                 
    • Reparations?                         

Resources informing our thinking

• • • http://www.pa-f.net/basics                                                  
    • https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/matters-of-care                                  
    • http://wiki.erg.be/m/                                               
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDh6mMTqORQ                                                
    • https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship                                             
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People%27s_History_of_the_United_States                                   
    • About deep listening  ( https://www.csh.umn.edu/education/focus-areas/whole-systems-healing/leadership/deep-listening)                                  

  

Notes 

There should be a note about not mentioning identity groups specifically, we should think about the decision of not talking about queer, disabled, indigenous + perspectives.
          
we are only considering touch as sensorial approach (see 80), should we consider sight also? what about other senses?

 time_quantity/quality, economical, productivity makes time being fragmented  

What are the limits of empathy? Instinct can be tricky, we have to realize biases 

mind aysmmetries 

these parties take advantage of collective (non)shared vulnerability