CareNotes Collective in Conversation with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis

The present way of life is a war against our bodies. Nearly everywhere, we are caught in a crumbling health system that furthers our misery and subordination to the structural violence of capital and a state that only intensifies our general precarity. Can we build the capacity and necessary infrastructure to heal ourselves and transform the societal conditions that continue to mentally and physically harm us? Amidst the perpetual crises of capitalism is a careful resistance—organized by medical professionals and community members, students and workers, citizens and migrants. For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity—Reflections from Greece explores the landscape of care spaces coordinated by autonomous collectives in Greece. These projects operate in fierce resistance to austerity, state violence and abandonment, and the neoliberal structure of the healthcare industry that are failing people. Join members of the CareNotes collective in conversation with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis for an analysis of the first-hand accounts of care workers and community members who have joined together to build new possibilities of care and to develop concrete alternatives to replace our dependency on prisons and the police. About the authors CareNotes Collective organizes directly on this terrain and seeks to record and amplify the experiences of those struggling for health autonomy in their own communities. Our challenge is to imagine how to expand these practices while defending our communities from the risks of cooption, state violence, and emotional trauma as well as financial domination. Silvia Federici is a feminist writer, teacher, and militant. In 1972, she was cofounder of the International Feminist Collective, which launched the Wages for Housework campaign internationally. Her decades of research and political organizing accompanies a long list of publications on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education, culture, international politics, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons. Her steadfast commitment to these issues resounds in her focus on autonomy in what she calls self-reproducing movements as a powerful challenge to capitalism through the construction of new social relations. George Caffentzis is a political philosopher and leading thinker in the development of autonomist thought. He founded the Midnight Notes Collective and is a founder member of the coordinator of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa. Caffentzis is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. His publications include No Blood for Oil: Essays on Energy, Class Struggle, and War 1998-2016 (Autonomedia, 2017) and In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Common Notions/PM Press, 2013).

Silvia Federici is a long-time feminist, writer, and teacher living in Brooklyn, NY. Her most recent book is Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions/PM Press, 2012). Born in Italy, Federici has lectured and taught widely in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the U.S. She has participated in numerous international movements and social struggles, including feminist, education, anti-death penalty, as well as anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements.

George Caffentzis is a political philosopher and autonomist Marxist. He is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine and a founding member of the Midnight Notes Collective. His most recent book is In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Common Notions/PM Press, 2013).