Radical Care und die Zukunft des Wohlfahrtstaats: Konturen einer paradoxen Politik der Sorge

In the face of a global crisis of social reproduction, welfare states have consistently failed to produce social security for the majority of the world’s population. In this context, collective and grassroots practices of radical care have gained meaning as non-state strategies for enduring an unequal and insecure world. Through the lens of welfare state theory, this paper explores both the emancipatory potentials as well as the structural limits and pitfalls of radical care. Its focus lies in contemporary socio-material articulations of communities of care/‘care-citizenship’ and their paradoxical relations with the welfare state. This paper seeks to avoid the reductive dichotomy of communities of care vs. the state that it identifies in the approach taken by many protagonists as well as critics of radical care. To this end, it conceptualizes a paradoxical politics of care-citizenship that is not radically opposed to but rather is engaged in a strategic tension with state institutions, a means of contributing to a democratic and solidary renewal of the welfare state from below.