International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW Asia Pacific) International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW Asia Pacific) Malaysia over 1 year ago Confederación Nacional de Funcionarixs de Salud Municipal (CONFUSAM) Confederación Nacional de Funcionarixs de Salud Municipal (CONFUSAM) Chile over 1 year ago

Within this context, regressive national tax policies, often encouraged or imposed by international financial institutions, undermine States’ responsibility to provide public services that ensure rights. The Covid-19 pandemic has dramatically—and dreadfully—exposed all of this, highlighting not only the violence perpetrated by neoliberal markets, but also our enduring interdependence, while revealing, as well, that vulnerability and our need for care are part and parcel of the human condition. It has laid bare the horrors of neoliberalism and the profound falsehood of its ideal subject—the self-sufficient entrepreneurial individual. It has also begun a conversation about care. Meanwhile, deregulation, privatization, fiscal consolidation (austerity) and crushing neo-colonial debt burdens further entrench these extreme power imbalances between women and men, Global South and Global North, workers and corporations. This depletes global and local resources to fund quality public care services and allow for decent, well paid care work and universal social protection.

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I liked the section on kinship, and alternatives to the family, and found much of the content interesting.

This could include a minimum wage and working conditions across the sector, initially on an opt-out basis; however, Labour has said it wants to legislate for binding sector-wide fair pay agreements. The manifesto contends that understandings of care have been ‘diminished’, but in this little book the concept is so expansive that it seems to encompass almost everything. What is gained by considering all forms of flourishing and suffering – human and ecological, emotional and physical – under the rubric of care and carelessness? Is carelessness just a euphemism for capitalism?Union Nacional de Empleados UNE - FNT. Union Nacional de Empleados UNE - FNT. Nicaragua over 1 year ago Central Autónoma de Trabajadores del Perú Central Autónoma de Trabajadores del Perú Peru over 1 year ago It’s the same argument made, in more robustly analytical language, in The Care Manifesto, a slim volume by a group of five authors from different academic disciplines under the name of the Care Collective. Written in response to the pandemic, it asserts: “Dependence on care has been pathologised, rather than recognised as part of our human condition.” They lay the blame for this squarely at the feet of neoliberalism and argue that in response “we must elaborate a feminist, queer, anti-racist and eco-socialist perspective” that rethinks our understanding of care on a broad scale. Beyond the theoretical underpinnings, their proposals – for greater community responsibility, a more ambitious rethinking of the welfare state, better international cooperation and environmental protections – seem to be stating the obvious to most people with broadly progressive values. Their optimism lies in the historical precedent that moments of upheaval – the second world war, for example – paved the way for new ways of thinking about community and interdependence. All three of these books make the same point: the current crisis has forced the always urgent issue of care into the spotlight. The question is how we respond, both on a personal and structural level. Overall some good concepts, but nothing new or particularly groundbreaking for me. So close, but yet so far !!! Not radical enough ! by The Care Collective (Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg and Lynne Segal), London and New York: Verso, 2020