When care needs piracy: the case for disobedience in struggles against imperial property regimes

Abstract:The aim of the Pirate Care project is to put the politics back into caring and to disrupt the global property regime that is colonising public welfare services and turning them into privately traded assets. Piracy refers to all the practices of survival and solidarity that disobey unjust legal and social rules that have as their primary goal the enforcement of an entrenched division of labour and the expansion of property at the expense of living beings. It evokes the resistance of pirates in an earlier age of empire. Three specific practices are examined, all of which have intensified during the pandemic: the platformed division of labour; the marketisation of health care; and the global land grab that creates refugees and a supply of cheap migrant labour. The idea of piracy enables the foregrounding of the need to expand the realm of conceivable responses to the crisis - and for coordinated action that questions the normalisation of current property and labour regimes.