Red in Tooth and Claw

The Struggle to Care in a Careless World

Today I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I cancelled a book talk because I was feeling sick.

Earlier this year I lost a tooth from bad gums, and now my gums are inflamed again, yesterday I was running a fever and a little dizzy. I would strongly prefer not to lose another tooth. I have heard that there are people out there who have studied dental and periodontal care, they even have entire clinics set up, and yet for some obscure reason, even people who have healthcare are not allowed to go to those tooth and gum experts for free.

An aside on dentistry not being considered part of healthcare: tooth loss is actually a major cause of death among many animal species. Without enough teeth, they starve to death. In fact, members of a species being able to survive after they’ve begun losing their teeth is a huge biological marker. It means other members of their species probably help to feed them. Considering the apathy built into healthcare under capitalism, perhaps we’re going full circle. Certainly, leaving people to starve or suffer has been normalized. But it’s not the full story either.

It’s easy to internalize the dominant story, to treat ourselves like we aren’t worthy of care, but there are people in our movements who have been trying to develop and center other practices of care for a long time, often without all the support they’ve needed. This is silly to admit, but cancelling the talk wasn’t even my idea. When my partner suggested I not embark on a full day’s drive to give an intensive talk while I was feverish and my jaw was burning, only to have to make the long drive back the very next day, I was surprised by how nice that option sounded. Instead of lingering in that pleasant feeling, though, I immediately shifted into stressing out about disappointing the comrades who would be hosting me. When I got in touch with the person who had done most of the work setting up the event, letting her know how I was doing and gingerly suggesting I was considering different options, she responded as though the answer were obvious.

A couple hours from now, I am supposed to be in Madison, Wisconsin, talking to friends and strangers about the ecological crisis and what some people are doing about it. Instead, I’ll be sitting in my new home, watching the snow swirl out the window, and calling in on some digital platform to do the talk virtually.

I’m already feeling better than I was yesterday, probably in large part because I got a good night’s sleep after deciding not to make the drive, to stay home and take care of myself instead. Feeling better makes me feel a little guilty, like maybe I could have made the drive after all, while another part of me is wondering if perhaps I should feel proud of taking this step of putting theory into practice, of not separating care work from organizing and outreach. On the other hand, I don’t want to celebrate staying home, because care work in our society often becomes an individualized practice that justifies the alienation we were already starting with.

I know the story of me cancelling an event is a trivial illustration of the kinds of patterns and value systems I’m trying to talk about. There’s a certain didactic form: buffoon learns obvious lesson, underscoring how obvious said lesson should be. The whole time, though, I’ve been thinking about another friend, and a much more serious story of care and neglect. They’re someone who is such a loving person, an unending fountain of support for their circles and the movements where they live. They’re also someone who frequently ends up abandoned when they need the most help. I think this is partly because our movements reproduce the patriarchal pattern of exploiting rather than recognizing people who do the most to care for others. It’s also, partially, because this friend can be hard to support.

One reason is that they’re stubborn like me, and don’t always ask for or accept help. An interjection: with this comparison I don’t mean to suggest I’m everyone’s guardian angel, the way this friend is. There’s also a very common mode in our society that involves not accepting care and not giving it either, and while I’ve certainly been talking about care and support with increasing frequency these last few years, I don’t actually know how many of my friends and comrades feel like I’m someone they can go to, or someone who looks out for them. And I do know that, for example, when I’m pretty sure I have a correct analysis about something important, I can share it in a way that’s not very careful of how it might be received.

Another reason it’s so hard to take care of this friend is that they have some extreme chronic health problems that we really don’t have the resources for. However, it shouldn’t be up to their friends and neighbors to take care of them. There are, allegedly, people in our society who spend their lives studying all of those health problems, and there are—again, allegedly—institutions with a great deal of resources that are putatively intended for healthcare. Yet on the few occasions we can get access to those experts and those resources, it’s always in a framework of scarcity, and never in a way that makes our wellbeing a priority.

I grew up middle class and thus with access to healthcare until I dropped out of college once my one year scholarship had ended (I was aware at that point that debt and depression are a fatal combination, so it was very much a survival decision, and one that points back to the thread of scarcity running through this whole essay). That fact shows up again in the periodontal health problem that led to me cancelling the Madison event: tooth health is largely a function of childhood nutrition, so I’ve never had a cavity (knocking on wood), but with no visits to the dentist since I was a teenager my gums are pretty fucked. It turns out they can get so bad that you lose a tooth over it.

I got healthcare back, though, once I attained residency in Catalunya, which has a pretty good public healthcare system (though they still uphold the bizarre exclusion of dentistry from healthcare). However, we need to qualify what “good healthcare” means under capitalism. It fucking sucks.

I had another chronic health problem, partly related to bad work conditions driving a taxi, partly related to the diet the half year I spent in prison, partly related to earlier things I’m not really ready to talk about yet. What it meant was that I had an open wound and a lot of pain sitting, standing, or lying down for… several years. Until I got access to healthcare in Catalunya. So I have to say, I am extremely grateful for shitty healthcare. There’s also something else I’m grateful for: the love of friends. At the hospital in Barcelona, they cut a troublesome piece out of me and sent me home as soon as I woke up. I would later realize the only reason I could walk out of there is because they pumped me so full of drugs I couldn’t feel anything. The next weeks were excruciating. If I ate anything, it was only thanks to my partner at the time.

That person was also a comrade, and also someone who dedicated a lot of attention to questions of care in the movement until she finally dropped out, disgusted by how people who talk about anticapitalism and the abolition of patriarchy treat each other.

There’s an important detail there. Even in our movements, most care and support tend to occur in patriarchal structures like the family, the couple. Let me add a nuance, though: I’m not a dogmatist when it comes to these structures. I think they could transform into elements of a liberatory society. But I’m not sure that transformation can come about if the rest of our social relations don’t also transform, and friends and comrades still tend to leave each other in a state of neglect, meaning the family and couple form are left to pick up the slack.

In the mirror world of an anarchic society, maybe we would still have experts tend to us when we needed something more extreme like an operation, and our friends and families would still be the ones to give us aftercare, but both moments would be ones of abundance, centering our needs, rather than moments of scarcity and suffering. Imagining that might help us work towards it, and also highlight our current conditions: as long as friendships and the solidarity of comrades are qualitatively weaker than family bonds (with all the trauma and disappointment that accompany many families) then those who don’t even have a couple or a parent to rely on are going to end up abandoned in their worst moments.

As I finish up this essay, two days have passed since I took the tongue-in-cheek monumental step of cancelling that event. I’m still really worried about my friend, and plenty of other comrades I haven’t checked in with recently, who might be doing fine, who might be on the precipice. I’m also thinking that as I learn to take better care of myself, I might get better at showing up for those I love.

Amidst this reflection, a funny memory resurfaced. It’s 2010, another city in the Midwest. I’m a sight younger, and at the tail end of a speaking tour encompassing 70 talks in 50 cities, some of those with some comrades from Greece and others on my own. At this one city, I rolled up to my own talk a full hour late. The few people who had stuck around to see if I would show up probably thought I was a total d-bag, strolling in late like some apathetic hotshot, when really I was just so fried I had completely misremembered the event time.

There’s a perverse, quantitative part of my brain, a part that I know is wrong, that feels proud about doing 70 talks in a couple months, as though we could measure our contributions to the struggle in such a demeaning way. And yet, it wasn’t until the writing of this essay that I connected that memory, that self-critique, with another one: the time I read about Emma Goldman doing an even more multitudinous tour at her prime, what a boss! (Un jefe, una màquina, the part of my brain that still speaks in Catalan chimes in with, even though it knows, I know, none of these things should be a fucking compliment!) How odd that, given the meaning of her life, I should revere her for that, adding another little token of awe and alienation to the altar of her godlike status, rather than feeling compassion for how stressful such a damned long speaking tour must have been.

We know this by now, don’t we? That’s not what struggles are about. We have our heroic moments, sure, but those are nothing without the long, cold seasons before and after when we need to survive, when we need to show up for each other, and for ourselves. We deserve it.

With so much love, until next time,

peter

Postscript: Citations and Tangents

We Are an Image from the Future, the alluded to book on the 2008 insurrection in Greece.

One of the most cited books for questions of care in our movements is Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work.

An important book on questions of health, healthcare, and social justice is Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel.

Texts of the Week

Alexander Dunlap, “The green economy as counterinsurgency.”

The Banshees of Inisherin is a devastatingly beautiful, piercing film. It quickly moves from comical to heretical, the acting and cinematography are superb, but above all the writing and plotting are as spare, precise, and damning as in classical theater.

Don’t read this paragraph if you haven’t seen it yet! The morality it presents is complex, heartrending, and perhaps hopeless, except in one moment of clarity like sunlight rending the clouds: that’s the moment it all went wrong, when God didn’t care about the life of one little donkey, and if you can’t wail on a feckin policeman, what the feck have we come to? I also think, regarding the morality of forgiveness and forgetting, it’s one of the few things to come from high budget cinema that says something meaningful about the Irish independence struggles. I want to go back to check but I suspect the boom of artillery announces each new act, with the commented on silence, the portending silence with which the banshees speak now, ushering in the end.