Lifepod S01E01
Pirate Care, with Valeria Graziano and Tomislav Medak
Air date: February 27th, 2026

Adam Greenfield: Welcome to Lifepod, the podcast about taking care of ourselves in a world on fire. I’m your host, Adam Greenfield.

You know, the strapline of this podcast is “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” And I cannot think of a recent book that resonates more perfectly with this theme than a slim volume that’s called Pirate Care, which just came out on Vagabonds, the imprint that Max Haiven is running for Pluto Press. Vagabonds features a number of titles I imagine listeners may already be familiar with, like The Hologram, Cassie Thornton’s book about the self-organized means of care, and We Are 'Nature' Defending Itself, which is about the struggle to preserve 4,000 acres of French bocage against the imposition of an unwanted airport, in a place called la ZAD.

Pirate Care is a splendid addition to the series. It is one of the more interesting books I’ve seen in a while. It is about themes that are very near and dear to my heart, personally, and very closely aligned with the things that we talk about in Lifehouse. So I’m really looking forward to hearing more about the ideas in it from its authors, Valeria Graziano, Tomislav Medak, welcome to Lifepod.

Tomislav Medak: Thank you, Adam, for having us on the podcast.

AG: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. First, you know, can you say just a little bit about what it is that you mean by “pirate care”?

Valeria Graziano: Yes, maybe I can also say hello to all listening in this conversation, and hi to Adam and thanks for having us. In short, what we mean to name through this short term, coupling “piracy” and “care,” are maybe two strategies that for us seem able to maybe hold us through this multiple crisis that we are facing, and also to speak to the multiple scales of how this crisis impacts life — human life, more-than-human life — on the planet right now.

So with the idea of “care,” we want to address the very embodied conditions of violence, disenfranchisement, everything that has been named by various feminisms as a deeply entrenched capitalist crisis of care that has accompanied us and has been long in the making for the better part of the last two centuries, at least. We are attached to care, because — even though there’s a lot of maybes, if ands buts to bring in this conversation, there’s been a lot of carewashing since probably the COVID pandemic brought this term to kind of global mediatic attention — but we still feel care carries a lot. It has a lot to offer, especially because the workers in the sectors usually identify and understand what they do as care, that they understand that they’re careworkers, and there’s a lot of organizing that is amazing going on around care.

With “piracy,” we wanted to bring maybe our own specific interventions, stories and legacies to the table to see how it resonates with folks out there. Basically, we’ve been playing a little bit in the book with this figure of “the pirate” as someone who is connoted on different levels. First of all, the classic-era pirates being somehow, you know, subjects of the empire, they were the first kind of lumpenproletariat that were displaced. They were working in these vast corporations that would bring workers across the globe, mixing them with people they never met in places they they never met, putting them to work for this imperial project, right? And those were the first symptoms of an understanding of this interconnectedness as a struggle — as a struggle not to be a sailor in a colonial maritime fleet, for instance, and wanting out. So there’s that layer.

There’s a layer that speaks about the pirate as a figure that embodies a different set of abilities, and maybe what society then frames as “disabilities.” So it’s an empowered figure that actually commons the necessity for care, and even in the pirates in the children’s books that we have today. Yeah, it’s hard to think of many other figures that became so popular and kind of transversal, as the figure of the pirate in that sense. And this comes from real histories, or at least the fragments that we could think, kind of fish out, that speak of very real ways these people were trying to take care for each, of each other in very dire conditions. I think, in a way, so pirate care speaks to the need of reimagining the the skills, the figures, imaginaries we might need to, through this passing-through, probably the ending and the ruins of this imperial capitalist era that we were gifted to live through, I suppose.

AG: And you describe this, this assumption of both the obligation and the pleasure of taking care for one another as “an act of mutiny.” Do you think that it is the capacity for mutiny is in all of us now? Are we all potentially pirate carers?

TM: Basically, we live in an age of multiple crises of the neoliberal capitalism. Actually, since 2008 we’ve been going from one crisis to another, and that has specifically transformed systems of care so that they are increasingly surplusing certain elements of the population, be they citizens or be they migrants, and that increased need of a part of population that is surplus for various reasons, also to make care cheap, because a lot of care is provided by those who are illegalized. And on the other hand, we’ve been observing that there is an uptick in organizing with these, within these series of crises of various forms of providing care to others who are surplus and denied care. And that in turn, these forms of solidarity towards surplus population is being criminalized.

So in a way, conditions for mutiny are part of the day and age in which we live. And for us, we come from a certain type of piracy practice ourselves. [Co-author] Marcell [Mars] and I, we’ve been running since early 2010s, with a bunch of friends, a federated pirate library called Memory of the World. And that already made us attuned to a certain aspect of criminalization and illegalization that relates, maybe to social reproduction within the system, within the knowledge economy and contemporary economy, that is so organized around knowledge, employability and various ways that knowledge is commodified through intellectual-property rights. But then, on the other hand, also, we’ve started observing, together with Valeria, a number of social-justice movements that are finding themselves in a similar situation of criminalization, and they are responding by coming together, trying to document their work, pass that knowledge on, learn together from it, invite others to learn with it.

And those are kind of specific conditions where we, as instigators of this project, have been able to see that there is a major shift happening with how people are responding to those inflections of neoliberal capitalism since 2008, no? And then obviously, as Valeria said, 2020 brought something on a very different scale, and also the response of nation states to the pandemic crisis brought something else. So we are really interested in unpacking the friction, the conflictual aspects of how people organize, how they in simple terms, are ready to break laws or are forced to break laws to provide care to whom it is denied and then is essential. That’s one significant aspect of mutiny or piracy that we really want to home in on, and build certain politics out of it — or a framing that that allows us to read that moment, and that wave of organizing, as a political moment. So piracy has something to do with intent of disobedience, but also making that disobedience political.

AG: I mean, this is something that the book is very strong on, that you emphasize, that acts of care are increasingly criminalized, and that makes them inevitably political, right? I mean, it’s something that that, in my own reading, I’ve become just astonished by the cruelty involved in this, that anytime there’s an organized formation, an organized effort made to care for the most vulnerable — if that’s in any way politicized, or if the bodies involved are in any way racialized or subjectivated — that that effort will be resisted by force. That effort will be countered by force. And this is something that the book makes very clear. Can you discuss some of the case studies or the examples that you describe in the book, of occasions on which people trying to enact bodily care of the most vulnerable are opposed by force?

VG: We open with three vignettes that anchor the figure of the pirate carer that I was kind of starting to outline a little bit. The first one, it’s close to home for me, because it looks at an organization called Sea-Watch, which will be known to many people based in our part of the world. They are a civil organization carrying out rescue missions or rotations in the Mediterranean Sea, to basically look out for boats in distress — those boats that are kind of offering a passageway for migrants and people on the move who are illegalized and prevented from entering Fortress Europe. So Sea-Watch back in, in 2019 and even before, became a bit of a international kind of news in the figure of one of their captains, Captain Carola Rackete, who basically was locked out from the possibility of entering an Italian port by, at the time Minister, Matteo Salvini, who is a far-right party member, who basically decided that this was not to be. And there were 53 people on the boat. They were waiting for 17 days for a permission, up until the situation on board became critical, and Carola Rackete decided to force entry into the port. And Salvini publicly condemned her, using misogynistic insults and rhetorics very violently, so that even Rackete after that, she had to go underground for fearing of, like, being attacked. Anyway, one of the epithets was that she is a “pirate” — even though later on, Rackete was able, and Sea-Watch were able, to demonstrate the full legal compliance of their operation and so forth. So that’s like, I think you’ll find more details in the book I know, by heart I cannot recall — and by far, I should add, this is not an isolated episode. These are unfortunately a recurring kind of news in, on, around the European shores.

A second example we kind of started to build our, our imaginary around comes from another organization that sees kind of a female figure on a boat, in this context of actually being in extraterritorial water. So we started with this figure of somebody on a boat 15 miles out from the coasts of Ireland at the time. And this was a doctor, part of a crew put together by an organization called Women on Waves, who basically —what do they do aboard these boats in international waters, they offer the opportunity to have reproductive healthcare for women who, unfortunately, live in countries where these access to safe abortion and related services is not granted, including ultrasounds, contraception, pregnancy test and the like. Women on Waves usually works with these boats in context where this is a kind of a mediatic campaign to draw attention to the issue. They often work, actually always work, in partnership with local organizations, so they’re not parachuting themselves, obviously, in various contexts. But their missions have an incredible legacy of actually provoking very important shifts in legislation, and provoking debate. For example, Portugal, they played a very important role leading to the decriminalization of abortion back in 2007, and so forth. And this is our second kind of pirate example.

And the third one — and I’ll stop there, maybe — is another kind of example that I am keen to share because of the moment we are in, that is unfortunately very present again, which was kind of anchoring our storytelling around the coming-together of the Freedom Flotilla, that kind of started to come together again as an activist initiative from various countries, putting together vessels that would attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. There were various attempts, starting from 2008, the most well-known case was the 2010 attempt, because the Israeli army actually fired on the boats, killing ten activists. Even then. Yes, we are again witnessing history repeating itself and maybe spiraling with the more recent initiatives around the flotilla. And I know this would not be the last attempt of having a flotilla reaching Gaza.

AG: Yeah, I mean, we can see the force that the state is willing to bring against these very, very vulnerable and very brave activists who are trying to reach the shore in Gaza with anything they can bring to the aid of people there. I want to draw out the commonality — a point of commonality — between the efforts that Tom was talking about, and Sea-Watch and, and Women on Waves, which has to do with the politics of knowledge. You know, it isn’t simply the criminalization of certain acts. It isn’t simply the propensity of the state to bring its violence to bear on those bodies, but it’s also about control of the right to know and the right to share knowledge, through, you know, as that knowledge is embedded in, in texts, but also as that knowledge is embedded in tools.

One of the things that you say in the book, in fact, is that one of the central contentions of the book is that the opposition between care and technology is misleading. And I think that in all of these examples, we see that the ability to deliver care is predicated on the know-how of fairly extensive and complicated pieces of technology. It’s not a trivial or a simple thing to captain a boat in international waters, especially against opposition. It’s not a simple thing to provide reproductive healthcare services at sea, you know, when you’re in international waters. It’s not a simple thing to organize knowledge so that it’s available for people, and that the tools themselves can be broken down and made understandable and shared in that way. If, in fact, the opposition between care and technology is misleading, what can we do to bring those two relatively disparate ways of thinking, and bodies of practice and communities of practice, together? How can we get people to see more, that there is no real opposition between care and technology, and that they in some ways, they’re two sides of the same coin?

TM: We do open the book with these three brave, heroic examples of managing relatively complex piece of technology, both, and intervening with it. But throughout our book, we we also do want to say that in our world, where technologies are ubiquitous and they command various aspects of our life, from work to communication to social reproduction — not to speak of warfare — there are more more modest ways of engaging, and not giving in to cynicism and despair and resignation, to find people already organizing various forms of solidarity and care and joining them or starting your own.

From very simple things — I don’t know, we got examples how people share open-source seeds. So if you are into gardening, that’s already a way to start, and that’s already a form of technology, and some form of technological knowledge that you can wield to organize together. In our understanding of various examples of pirate-care technology and, sort of, knowledge, knowing technologies is essential to being able to come together with maybe people who don’t know necessarily technologies, but helping them out do the work of organizing. And knowing technological surrounds can go a long way in how we can organize better, how we can intervene, how we can disobey better.

It’s very hard knowing, and in the current moment, we are working with a lot of black-box technologies, but in our own work with various pirate-care organizers, we’ve tried to create tools for collective writing and learning and archiving that can help social movements learn together. And learn from each other, but also bring on board new people, and get them the sort of practical knowledge of how you contest and how you counter, powers that be. So that opposition set aside, we feel there is a division of labor within social-justice movements that we, sort of...specific knowledges that we have to recognize and try to work with that division of labor. And it frequently involves people who are technologically savvy. But they don’t need to be engineers. They need to be maybe just people who can commit to learning up a bit of technological skills and technological environments that can help with the specific act of organizing.

So that’s how we understand the role of technologies. You start with tinkering, you start with the experiential, you start with what’s needed and necessary for the political organizing of care that you are involved with, and you try to help each other in that. In that sense, fighting technologic...or countering technological deskilling to which we are subject in the present is not necessarily at the individual level. We don’t have to necessarily command highly sophisticated technologies that we are forced to use in the everyday. But still, collectively, we...do need to take care that somebody does that in, in in the collective work that we do.

AG: Your invocation of “the black box,” and some of the language that you’re using strongly reminds me of something that I know that you’ve taken a lot of inspiration from in the past: the, the practical utopianism that’s embedded in the Four Freedoms of the free software movement. Could you speak a little bit to that relation, and to the inspiration of free software? Because it’s something that, curiously, I don’t think listeners of this podcast will be familiar with, despite it kind of lying right beneath the surface of some of the things that you’re talking about.

VG: When we speak of technology, we should always use the plural. I think we’re all a bit lazy when we say “technology.” I understand — like we all do that. But I think in the book, we also try to — quickly, quickly — just always say “tools, technology and techniques.” It’s a compound. It speaks to our capacity to be active agents in complex environments. I mean, it’s not a manifesto position in technosolutionism, obviously, and it it comes with a lot of kind of sensitivity to the fact that there’s the technology itself requires maybe a million more books to be taught and imagined.

But we wanted to use that as an entry point to understand property relations, because in the end, when we’re talking about tools, technologies and techniques, we are immediately going into the terrain of things that are private property. They’re not put in common — even, even techniques are often trademarked these days. It costs a lot of money to acquire specific knowledges that we might want to get better versed at using. So this was just a bridge I wanted to offer, before we maybe kind of explore what private property does when we think about the Four Freedoms of free software, etc.

TM: Abolishing private property is the core of our theorizing of pirate care, but we’ll come to that. And free software is a proposition that was initially developed by Richard Stallman, a researcher at the time — so late ‘70s, early ‘80s — at the MIT AI Lab, who was indignated by the fact that software, which was a component of computing systems that would come for free with a piece of hardware that you buy all the way into the ‘70s, and then toward the end of ‘70s, beginning of ‘80s, becomes a product, onto itself, becomes commodified, becomes property and becomes closed.

So you have computer code in two forms: one is written in a programming language which is human-readable, and the other one is compiled into binary code, so zeros and ones that is executable on a computer. So once software comes commodified, you are no longer able to gain access to that human-readable code, which in Richard Stallman’s early years in computing, was freely shared between, mostly, scientists and then also engineers, developers who would work together to improve the code, to add functionalities and this and that. So in response to that process of commodification, he came up with the idea that we can use the legal framework of copyright to say that nobody’s allowed to privatize a piece of code that was collectively written.

And then he introduces four freedoms. The first freedom is to run the software. The second freedom is to be able to access open-source code in written programming language, so that you can understand it. You are allowed to improve that code, and finally, you are allowed to share that code, to distribute it, on the proviso you do it under the same terms that you receive the code. So it needs to stay a commons. And there is a form of hack there, a legal hack, whereby he overturns the private property relations being introduced into the sphere of code — which is language, it’s cultural at some point — and counters that. So we come a little bit from that legacy as well. But it’s just one aspect of private-property abolition that we think is essential to understanding what the political horizon of caring means in the present world.

AG: What I find so interesting is that you take that seed very seriously indeed, and pursue its implications in domains that certainly I don’t think Stallman ever had in mind — the bringing together of these two notions of piracy. You know, the one of, the “piracy” of which is the label that’s applied to what we do when we open up a piece of software and share it for freely by the people who are invested in property relations, and the all-but-literal piracy of, say, Women on Waves, like, operating on the high seas, you know, in a rather swashbuckling manner. It is one of the things that I really take away from the book, that these things are brought together so resonantly and so beautifully.

I want to ask about solidarity as a wellspring of motivation. And there’s actually a sentence in the book that I recognize in part, but not entirely, and I wanted to kind of unweave some of the implications of this. You say “It is often the case” — and I think it is often the case, but — “It is often the case that those who are illegalized organize to support each other. Squatters support other squatters. Welfare recipients help other welfare recipients. Migrants help other migrants.” We do. We have abundant examples of this. There are examples all over the ground, and I think it speaks to one of the, you know, if — to the degree that we can speak to anything like human nature at all — one of the wellsprings of human motivation is always cooperation. We know this.

But I have to say, having some experience of squatting myself, I have not invariably found this to be the case. [Laughter] And I think that we can probably, each of us think of our own exceptions, where no matter how vulnerable and precarious people are they act to undermine the, not merely the, the individuals around them, but the possibility of a collectivity, the possibility of, of a survival with solidarity. What do you think we might do to tilt the balance a little bit, to press, you know, to place our thumbs upon the scales and to improve the chances that acts of comradely solidarity under pressure were actually more consistently the rule, and not perhaps something that, you know, happens regularly, but not as often as we might wish?

VG: I think this is a great point to also maybe draw some connections with Lifehouse, which is a great book in turn that I wanted to mention, was extremely helpful to read and, and maybe to think the segues and some of our preoccupations. Look, in short, maybe going back to the question of private property: what does it do? Private property, I mean: it’s many things, and we can define in a million ways, but on a very kind of layman, everyday experience of that is that it creates scarcity out of everything. And it is so...perhaps one of the ways, I think, in your own trajectory of thinking with these problems, I also noticed that you were quite impacted by your experiences with Occupy Sandy and noticing the kind of great spontaneity of how people really are drawn to care and in different ways in expression of solidarity, makes a lot of it’s a human labor.

It’s a form of human labor that also brings this instant capacity of recognizing our own agency in this world, right? However, I do think that what private-property relations does is that we are now traversing life, going through institutions and organizations that systematically hump and train us to understand scarcity and then to filter like, to navigate that scarcity as through means of competition. I mean, this is what the philosophers will name “subjectivation,” right? So we become who we are also through the encounters we go through in our lives, right?

So, I suppose, well, we think pirate care through these experiences of trying to imagining different ways of organizing care and solidarity, mutual aid, be it specific, be it emergential, be it, in a longer term, organized through more gentle rhythms and rituals. It really does allow us to imagine and experience different kinds of organizational structures that will make us differently. They will, you know...and so the way we name it again, for the sake of argumentation, we were saying: just try to think of care is organized, always in private terms, either it’s states, market or family. And each of these ways of thinking, how we provide for each other at some point, is failing. It’s failing badly. It’s failing specific populations a lot more than others, for sure, but definitely, what is interesting for us is to see them as a, as a matrix. So the family is called in to scoop up the ruins and the, and the shatters of anything that the market is not interested in paying for, and the state is not interested in terms of kind of its logics, and and so forth, so...And the state will intervene to scoop up some, intervene mildly, when other two systems logics fail.

So I think, for me, a way to practice this mutiny, that’s why we end up with this idea of “mutiny and federation” as these two...I think it’s, like, micropolitical and macropolitical, if you like. But so mutiny is recognizing that when we’re thinking about care, we’re talking about stuff that intimately impacts us, right? It’s almost hard to find the right language in any podcast or public occasion to speak about this, because it really hits close to core emotions and drives and libidinal attachments and what have you. I think what’s changed and accelerated is the degree to which we know that this attaching ourselves to family, state and market is no longer viable, so we need to create mutiny not as an individual choice. Oh, I’ll, you know, it’s not a consumer choice or a lifestyle to see that these are very meek, I think, starting points.

Whereas a mutiny, what it puts on the table in a playful, hopefully, naming that a mutiny, what it does is that you immediately need to think, “OK, we’re all in this, and we need to kind of build trust and kind of opening up some possibility of commoning those anxieties before we can actually acknowledge how our organizations are largely toxic for us. So we need to disinvest.” That’s what I’m trying to say: collectively disinvest from these attachments, at the level of mutiny. And at the level of federating, maybe that also speaks to a more macro idea of what is a problem of scale, which a lot of cooperative, solidarity, mutual-aid initiatives face, which is burnout, and yeah, having been a bit in the squats myself, there’s a lot of fatigue and reinventing things from scratch. So we need to also think about federating as a way to enlarging the circles of care, so in a way that we can, like support each other in various constellations, perhaps, and what that would look like. I think in Lifehouse, there’s a lot of interesting seeds and ideas and how that might also be like a blueprint for thinking that.

AG: Oh, well...thank you, I mean, I’m delighted that it lands that way. I mean, I think, you know, indeed, there are ways in which I feel Pirate Care is sort of a fractal expansion of Lifehouse’s, chapter on, on mutual care. It’s like everything that I didn’t have the time to get into, you know, in the interest of space, you know, unfolds gorgeously in Pirate Care. And I think you’ve just spoken to this, you say something really important, which is that when considered in isolation, individual pirate-care initiatives may not seem to offer a comprehensive political solution. And of course, they don’t. And we can talk later, perhaps, about problem/solution framing and the problems with that. But it is true that, you know, when you respond to things tactically, in front of you, it doesn’t perhaps satisfy this desire to transform everything, in the way that it needs to be transformed if we are to survive.

What you go on to say, though, is “What we hope to have demonstrated, is that through the very practice of formulating, reformulating and continuously calibrating the responses that are involved in pirate care, a political horizon is emerging,” and that, to me is, you know, very consonant with the project of Lifehouse. And the key there is in this idea of emergent structuration, you say, you know, “Autonomously-organized care initiatives with the ambition to federate present a terrifying prospect to capital accumulation, because they give us the capacity to reproduce life and resistance under expanding conditions of freedom.” Which goes back to something you offered early on, which is David Graeber’s framing of care as “something that increases the degrees of freedom available to another” — a very beautiful definition, there. They allow us to remove ourselves from a reliance on, on what you call Empire’s matrix of care — the state, the market or the family. This is so very exciting to me, because, again, this is where the project of Lifehouse really begins: in the cultivation of collective power. The idea is to expand the volume inside of which insurgent care can be enacted.

You finish the book with a chapter called “Swearing an Oath.” This resonates with the things that we learn from the histories of actual piracy, right, in the Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean and elsewhere, where the pirates aboard pirate ships ostensibly swore egalitarian, democratic articles of self-governance. They swore their affirmation of — and I was hoping that you could articulate a little bit more about the kinds of structures or agreements of federation you imagine, if it’s possible to do so: what it might look like in a world where, you know, despite the diversity of our struggles, our fortunes do remain bound to one another by our affirmation of a commons and a common oath. Is that a fair question? Do you think? Can you can you describe for me a little bit more about what you think the federated world looks like?

TM: It’s an emergent world. So it’s hard to, in a way, hypothesize how it counters the shared conditions of neoliberal capitalism under which all of these initiatives emerge, and try to intervene. So: hard to say, no? But maybe going back to the discussion of squatting, what we really have to understand is that the conditions under which housing is provided have radically changed over the last, maybe century — that we have gone from collective housing provision to individualized housing provision, be that private or public housing. And increasingly people are owning, and that ownership entices us into possessive individualism, where our capacities to sustain ourselves depends on property.

So countering those conditions where you no longer have collective landlords, be they private or public, you need to find different ways of engagin. And for instance, la PAH — the movement that countered foreclosures in Spain in mid ‘10s — it aimed at the new collective proprietor, which are the banks. And by squatting housing owned by banks, you open up a situation that didn’t exist necessarily in that way before, by sort of devising that new form of squatting, which is very different than squatting a sort of disused building, but something much more dispersed. And you need to prop up that effort with a number of other forms of collective organizing, to sustain people who, who are squatting — who are infringing on the property owned by banks.

And in the second step, it also opens up a larger contestation, which is political, over how housing is provisioned, how it drives inequality, and how the sort of collective proprietors, the new form of collective proprietors’ financial capital can be acted against. So that’s a specific form of federation, of various forms of commoning that emerges out of that specific struggle. That’s a form of worldmaking, or world-opening, from a very basic need, and just a very, in a way, specific struggle. It’s not a generalized struggle against the capitalist world as such, but to provide housing to those who are evicted from from their homes, given the very specific situations of ownership of property, of property relations within Spanish society at the time.

So I don’t know, maybe Valeria has a better example. Obviously, we take some shared inspirations in Democratic Confederalism and efforts in Rojava or efforts in Chiapas, but our work is largely based and focused on Europe so that where, where we can see that world-making effort.

VG: Yeah, perhaps I can just add more in general terms about a federated or federation horizon. I think I should be like — I don’t know. I imagine an active, a very weird, but like wonderfully weird kind of world where everything maybe is slightly different because different collectives and constituencies are creating their lifeworlds, but also that feels hospitable so you can actually be a foreigner and a stranger and not a identity subject or a subject of identity. So that’s my hope for that.

But I guess more in terms of political strategy, I imagine it’s everything networks are not. It’s another way to think of building capacity transversely that is now predicated on number of followers, and these nodes that are extremely important for attention-grabbing but they’re not accountable to anyone, and there’s, like, a whole set of kind of sameness that flickers but looks like spectacle. It’s hard to get. So I imagine federation to go back to some kind of ways to organize encountering across these different amative distances, and encountering strangers and strangeness in ways that feel that we can use politically. And that it’s on equal terms, and it’s predicated probably in very different tempos and rhythms and conditions.

I’m very interested now, how in the last years, there seems to be these explosions of like movement schools and, just, gatherings. There’s an immense pleasure in just spending enough time thinking with others, figuring things out. And I love to see more of these kind of repeated rituals — I think you speak in the book about the church, and I was often kind of, with Tom also, speaking about, like, we in the left, we are very good at organizing events, but we should maybe get a bit better at structuring more ritualized kind of forms of being together? So that’s the direction I was thinking that maybe might be, yeah, just fun to think more with people and have conversations around, rather than trying to come with the definition of a federation — yeah, which, even in anarchist thought, is not perhaps the most well-cooked political concept. And this is for another podcast, I suppose.

AG: One of my conceits, I guess, is that — first off, I completely agree, this idea that we could use a little bit more ritual in our lives, simply to mark life stages. I mean, every, every human culture, it seems to me, has some way of marking people’s passage through life stages, in the joys and the griefs. And I kind of feel sometimes like we’re asked in our political work to be disembodied. And, and to be detached from the things that happen in the course of a life — both the encounter with other people who bring you immense joy, and you want to join your life with them for some period of time, or the the converse of that when, when you lose somebody that’s meaningful to you, and it is, you know, there’s no joy like a shared joy, and there’s no sorrow that’s as easy to bear as a shared sorrow. So I completely endorse this idea.

In practice, it’s a difficult ask, because — I have a very strong aesthetic sense of what I think I mean when you say “ritual,” you know, I have something in mind that is profound and meaningful and resonant for me, that somebody else might regard as woo, or corny, or hokey. And, you know, obviously, conversely, there are people, I know there are people, you know, in my world, who are...they want to use what they think of as “plant medicine” or something, in a ritual that I personally find culturally appropriative, and, you know, not super-tasteful, you know. I hope that if they’re listening, I hope they forgive me for saying so. So these rituals, you know, it’s, it’s difficult to elaborate them, I think.

VG: I think that it’s great that we also acknowledge that a federation is not a place where conflict will cease to exist. It’s offering a different blueprint for how we carry each other through conflicts. And also, allegedly decouple a little bit an idea of a conflict from an idea of violence, which is a completely different scenario — or abuse, even. Having said that, I suppose, for me, there’s the specificity why we’re proposing, like, also — like this idea of pirate care as a figure for like, contemporary activism, militancy, what have you — is that I think it feels we are kind of getting further and further in time from maybe previous kind of imaginaries, figurations, kind of ideas that we have, of what it feels like and looks like to be politicized or politically active in movements, in organizations, bottom-up or more formally structured, parties, even unions, like all of these.

I think we we inherit this sense of, maybe from the ‘60s and ‘70s, even going up to more recent ‘80s, and then alterglobalization movements, where a lot of the, like the imaginary is — at least to me now, again, like, I’m sure many listeners might disagree, and it’s a personal standpoint here — but there’s a lot of that that feels like, you know, it’s immediately joyful. It’s a carnival. It’s something that feels immediately like passing through a threshold that allows you, through commoning, some experiences, through entering a space of struggle that you can, yeah, really have access to a set of affects that are energizing. “Let’s go. Let’s do this,” etc. A sense of belonging, if you like. What I think is maybe something to like plant as a little seed in an idea of federation that I love to cultivate a bit together with others is this idea that we need to start from a very different affective and embodied place, and we can’t go back to that repertoire so easily.

Because starting to be — seriously wanting to commit some part of our lives to political projects of change — it feels like disquiet, awkward, difficult conversations, mistrust...And so I think there’s, like, some hidden in there. I suppose I’m trying to hint to a kind of ethical commitment, which becomes political when it’s used right, to also gentleness in, in — kind of a paying attention to how divergences are done, playing a part in in our politics, yeah. Keeping things soft rather than hardening up and tensing up very quickly, which I find that maybe, in my circles, it’s maybe something we need to untangle with patience.

AG: Yeah. I mean, to me, it goes back to what Chantal Mouffe was saying so many years ago, about the necessity for agonism without antagonism. I find that to be a very useful formulation, I try to keep it close — that you’re not going to somehow magically eliminate conflict over difference, but that we can elaborate structures in which those conflicts can be resolved without damaging people.

As you, as you say, like, I scarcely have any personal experience of what that would look like. I don’t have models for that. In your book, the part of it that I find, I found most challenging — and therefore, probably has the most to offer — is the material on what you call “queer kinning.”

Why I bounced off it initially is because the very word and idea “kin” for me is so charged. Like, already I feel, like, that something is living all over me, or trying to kind of assert its prerogatives into the most intimate of spaces when I hear the word “kin.” And so that’s why I slowed down there and I paid very close attention. You talk about “the reciprocal expectation of durable care” in a way that doesn’t draw on the logics of the patriarchal family — that subverts, inverts those logics, but that also opens onto the radically new. And to me, this is, this is very exciting, but it’s also something that it’s, it’s very, very hard for me to, like, imagine my own body and my own life unfolding in that template. What would you suggest to somebody who wants very badly, perhaps, to make that kind of kinning the core of their practice, but wouldn’t even begin to know how to get there from here?

TM: In our reading of the matrix of care, there’s very simple and overdetermining ways of belonging — either you have citizenship or not, either you have money and capital or not, either you’re a member of a family or not. If there is a sort of ethical aspect to, to the project that we are trying to develop — though we are more concerned with politics, with immediate responses, strategy and tactics — but if there is an ethical aspect, that’s then how do we take care of those who fall through the cracks? That’s where solidarity comes into place, because we live in a heterogeneous world dominated by a homogenous system, and that heterogeneity makes us sometimes alien to each other in ways that we grapple with, and then have hard times of overcoming.

So it’s it’s hard to be in solidarity with somebody who’s politically at the opposite side of the spectrum, but just at times, sometimes there are fundamental aspects of their survival that you can organize with. And this is where we have to not cede ground to to the right, that is trying to take that ground, by organizing with the same kind of people, with the same group, with the same nation, with the same family. We need to try to find ways to counter that. And so just seeking out people who already do work of solidarity and who might need solidarity in their term is a good way to discover that queer situation, where you might not be with your own folk, and where you might be supporting people who are different than you. I think that’s where, at most immediate level, you can you can start to find that queer kinning: outside of the structures of the ethnic belonging, outside of the structures of class belonging, outside of the structures of family belonging, I guess also of religious belonging. I think that’s where that messy terrain opens up, and we are very much interested in messy terrains.

Sometimes it’s institutions, no? Like: you act in institutions. Institutions, unlike communities, are heterogeneous organizations, and they sometimes have a universal mission that covers that heterogeneity, and being able to insist on their universal provision is sometimes encountering that heterogeneity face on, and it can be uneasy encounters. So that’s also a terrain where that can, that can happen, where you can just play against the institution, within the institution, to create different ways of creating durable care and other affective registers within which that happens, other forms of investment where you kind of open up forms of solidarity that are not necessarily about homogeneity.

AG: Yeah, opening up onto that difference, and solidarity across difference, is a very exciting prospect. But as you know, it’s it’s also something that, that, you know, enacts a cost in the body. It takes a lot, takes a lot to do that.

That is a great place to land. I want to ask if either of you have any concluding comments for the audience and anything that you want to leave them with, either about the book or about the conversation or about other matters entirely.

TM: I think we covered a lot of ground already in this interview, but if people are interested, they can go seek out the book. It’s available out in the internet as well, and shadow libraries. But also, you know, you, if you prefer a bound copy, that’s also available in some countries and some bookstores.

AG: And you can plug your Pirate Care Syllabus as well.

TM: Yeah, that’s what I wanted to say, no? Kind of our segue into, into this book has been longer research that we’ve done around the complex of pirate care, and that includes a syllabus we have collectively written, with fifteen practitioners of various forms of pirate care. So if listeners are, you know, finding out more, they can go to syllabus.pirate.care, and then explore there for themselves. Very much unfinished work in progress, the syllabus, but there is a lot there on various forms of organizing, with some materials how, how to organize and how to organize specific aspects of working collectively to provide care.

VG: This always sounds very solemn, but — I hope not to sound solemn — but to really say if anybody wants to reach out, we’re very happy to have conversations. I think we have more questions than answers at this point, I am grateful to anyone who is actively opposing the genocide that is going on in Gaza, in any part of the world, risking also some new rounds of criminalization on that, and I suppose, the ongoing militarization of our societies. So shout out to all of those who are out there organizing around that in the immediate. Thank you for Lifehouse, again, and for this conversation — I feel I have a million other things to say, but, yeah, an hour flew by.

AG: We can, we can certainly come back for another round of conversation, you know, at the appropriate moment. I’m really grateful for your voices, for having shared your tales of mutiny with, with me and with the audience, and above all, for showing us possible ways out of what you call Empire’s matrix of care. Tom, Valeria, thank you so very much for being on Lifepod. And I look forward to speaking with you again some point in the future. Take care and be well.

If you’re interested in what we’ve been talking about today, you might just enjoy my book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in A World On Fire, available directly from Verso at versobooks.com. Editing and audio engineering for Lifepod are by Laurence Green. The typography and graphic design are by Chris Lee. Thanks so much to Agriculture for permission to use their music. I’m Adam Greenfield. Until next time, remember: we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.