The Covid-19 pandemic has underlined forms of interdependence, while laying bare the stratifications, divisions and inequalities that structure society. We’re all in this together but some are more in this than others. The Care Manifesto, collectively authored by the ‘care collective’ – Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg and Lynne Segal – argues that the pandemic brings into focus the paucity of existing systems of care and proposes alternatives.

The collective identify what they call the ‘systemic carelessness’ of a profit-driven society organised around ‘competition rather than cooperation’, contending that ‘care and capitalist market logics cannot be reconciled’. Privately-run care homes staffed by underpaid workers without sick leave would be one example of systemic carelessness, but the term could also describe a lack of empathy towards migrants drowning at sea, or towards children being denied access to free school meals. Caring means looking after one another ‘across difference’, which relies on giving a shit about the well-being of others in the first place.

But what exactly is care? For the care collective, care is both practical and emotional. Care can sometimes seem to refer to a narrow set of activities – what Marxist feminists might call socially reproductive labour – but it also has an affective dimension, which the manifesto stipulates should include ‘caring for, caring about, and caring with’. Though the collective claim care was historically associated with women – both in terms of their assumed emotional proclivities and in terms of the mostly ‘invisible’ unwaged work they traditionally performed – their discussion extends beyond the domestic sphere to include ‘communities, markets, states… transnational relationships’. Some of the solutions they propose involve time, infrastructure and resources, implying a quantitative understanding of care, but their definition is also always qualitative – it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Care is not only about how humans treat each other, but also extends to how people treat the earth and everything on it: ‘Care is our individual and common ability to allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive – along with the planet itself.’ Care can be ambivalent, they acknowledge, and many forms of actually existing care they discuss are woefully inadequate or actively harmful, but they ultimately assume that if it’s wrested from the profit motive then care would be straight-forwardly good. Care is a moral category.

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?

Kathi Weeks describes manifestos as ‘exercises in thinking collective life and imagining futurity’, identifying the manifesto as a utopian genre that reaches beyond the confines of the present to envision a better world. But in shuttling between grandiose abstractions and granular specificities, The Care Manifesto can’t quite make up its mind whether its demands are revolutionary or reformist. Sometimes it sounds bombastic and utopian, at others cautious and realist. The abrupt gear changes between calls to end neoliberalism and those for more buildings with public foyers in which people can spend time without spending money can feel jarring and bathetic.

The Care Manifesto makes clear that care exists at multiple scales, but the upshot of focusing on global economies and infrastructures is that care as an interpersonal experience recedes into the background. An alternative to looking to the abstract future might be to dwell longer with examples from the past. The care collective declare their desire to ‘build on historic formations of ‘alternative’ caregiving practices’ and mention various historic initiatives: from caring networks set up during the AIDS crisis to childcare groups organised by the Women’s Liberation Movement, from improvised welcome centres for refugees to the Black Panther Party’s free clinics.

Exploring these autonomous experiments in care in more detail could give glimpses of how life in a world organised according to different principles could be lived, as well as proposing methods for survival and solidarity within but against current regimes of carelessness. Care in times of crisis remains fraught and compromised, but focusing on alternative models of care in the present frames care as a component of struggles against capitalism, rather than as their ideal outcome.