Care Under Siege: Violence and Solidarity in Democratic Life

Elke Krasny

Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Care is under siege. The conditions through which human and more-than-human life is sustained are increasingly strained, privatized, commodified, and unequally distributed. The time required to care is compressed by demands for productivity; the labour of sustaining households, communities, and ecosystems remains undervalued; healthcare, housing, education, and other essential forms of provision are subjected to market pressures; and the soils, waters, forests, and other ecological systems upon which collective life depends are depleted, enclosed, or allowed to deteriorate. War, displacement, ecological destruction, political exclusion, and deepening inequality further expose some human and more-than-human lives to forms of vulnerability from which others remain protected. But these conditions are not simply a contemporary crisis. They intensify a much longer history in which the work and conditions of sustaining life have been unequally distributed and organized through relations of power. Care is under siege wherever the conditions that make life possible are subordinated to extraction, competition, and accumulation rather than organized around the time, resources, and relationships needed to sustain life with dignity.

The histories of democracy have to be understood and studied as histories of care: histories of whose voices counted and whose labours sustained life, whose bodies mattered and whose bodies represented other bodies. Democratic societies have never existed outside these arrangements. The capacity to participate in public life has always depended upon practices and infrastructures of care, from the intimate labour of raising and sustaining human beings to the collective maintenance of homes, institutions, cities, and the ecological systems that make life possible. Care encompasses the work of sustaining human life, but also the broader practices through which social, political, institutional, and ecological worlds are maintained. Democracy has been enabled by forms of care that it has simultaneously marginalized, privatized, exploited, or rendered invisible. The unequal organization of care is therefore not only a social injustice; it is a democratic problem. When the burdens of sustaining life fall disproportionately on some, their time, resources, and capacity to participate in shaping collective decisions are diminished. When the conditions that sustain life are privatized or commodified, matters that concern everyone are recast as individual responsibilities. And when the ecological systems upon which collective life depends are degraded or enclosed, the material basis for shared political life is weakened. Democracy depends not only upon formal rights, representation, and political institutions, but upon the material, social, and ecological conditions that allow people to live, participate, and act together as equals. Those who bear the greatest burdens of sustaining life often have less time and fewer resources to shape the decisions that govern it, while those most insulated from these burdens are better positioned to exercise political and economic power. This is why the crisis of care is also a crisis of democracy.

Care has historically been treated as if it belonged elsewhere: in the private sphere, in enslaved and indentured labour, in informal networks of mutual aid, or in supposedly non-political acts of maintenance and reproduction. Yet the histories of care are inseparable from the histories of extraction. Colonial economies depended upon the appropriation of reproductive labour as much as productive labour. Enslaved women were compelled not only to work but to sustain households, communities, and future labour forces under conditions of coercion and dispossession. Systems of indenture likewise depended upon forms of social reproduction that remained largely invisible within dominant accounts of economic and political life. These histories continue into the present. As Joy James writes of “captive maternals,” they are “most vulnerable to violence, war, poverty, police, and captivity; those whose very existence enables the possessive empire that claims and dispossesses them.”¹ Global care chains move migrant workers across borders to care for the children, elderly, and households of others, often leaving their own families dependent upon another layer of undervalued care. Care is repeatedly treated as an inexhaustible resource to be extracted, transferred, outsourced, and consumed.

Democracies have therefore inherited the violent and unequal histories of care, yet they have rarely confronted these histories in ways that redistribute power or provide reparations for the conditions they produced. The wealth accumulated through slavery, colonialism, and other forms of coerced and appropriated labour has not been accompanied by adequate forms of reparative justice. Nor have those who cross borders to sustain the lives of others necessarily acquired the political rights of the communities they sustain. Migrant care workers may raise children, support households, care for the elderly, and maintain the everyday infrastructures of social life while remaining excluded from citizenship, political representation, or the right to shape the decisions that govern the societies in which they work. Those who care for a society are not necessarily recognized as belonging to its political community.

The work of care ethicist and political theorist Joan Tronto has been central to bringing this insight into democratic thought. She understands care as a collective practice through which societies maintain, continue, and repair their shared world. Her thinking on migrant care labour also opens onto a more expansive conception of democracy, one that unsettles the assumption that democratic life is contained within the boundaries of the nation-state. Tronto argues that “citizenship is a relational idea.”² In the example she offers, “if you hire a Filipino woman to take care of your grandmother, she becomes a citizen.” The point is deliberately provocative: the migrant care worker is not simply providing a service within a national community but is already participating in the relations through which that community is sustained. Yet her relations of care do not stop at the border. She is also in a caring relationship with her children in the Philippines, just as the person employing her is implicated in these transnational relations of interdependence. As Tronto puts it, “the notion of citizenship loses its national meaning and becomes an idea about relations and about who is in relation with whom.”³

Taken seriously, this proposition asks us to rethink not only citizenship but democracy itself. If democratic life depends upon relations of care that routinely cross borders, then the political community cannot be adequately understood as a territorially bounded national community. The infrastructures of everyday life are already transnational: care workers move across borders, households depend upon remittances and distant relations of support, and the labour of sustaining life in one place is often performed through networks that extend across many others. Yet political rights and democratic representation remain largely organized through national membership. Those who participate materially in sustaining a society may have little or no say in the decisions that govern it, while those who benefit from their labour remain politically insulated from the lives and communities on which they depend. Tronto’s relational conception of citizenship therefore points toward a conception of transnational democracy counteracting borders and centering care.

A feminist politics examines the historical conditions of care produced under democracies and analyses care under siege in order to reimagine democratic life around the conditions under which people and environments can flourish. This means historicising care through the forms of labour, extraction, exclusion, and violence by which some lives have been sustained at the expense of others, and through the political arrangements that have determined whose care counts, whose lives are protected, and whose futures are made possible. Care is under siege not only because it is depleted, commodified, and unequally distributed, but because the social and ecological conditions that make care possible are not organised according to democratic principles. The siege is therefore also a struggle over democracy: over who sustains life, who belongs to the communities sustained by it, and who has the power to decide what is protected, repaired, and shared. Placing care at the centre of democratic thought means confronting the violence through which care is organised and developing forms of solidarity capable of transforming it.

Care Violence and Care Solidarity

Care is often imagined as the opposite of violence. Yet violence can operate through care. We call this “care violence”.⁴ It appears not only in the destruction of bodies, places, and infrastructures, but also in the histories through which care itself has been extracted: through slavery, racial capitalism, and the asymmetries of patriarchy; through turning bodies into sites of medical experimentation; through withholding adequate healthcare and denying ancestral knowledges the status of spiritual and medicinal care; through insecure housing, hunger, environmental degradation, displacement, exclusion, abandonment, and neglect. Human and more-than-human lives can be placed at risk through policies and institutional arrangements that determine who is protected, whose needs are recognised, whose environments are sustained, and who is exposed to harm.

From the perspective of care, violence can therefore take the form of organized indifference. It occurs when the labour required to sustain life is devalued, when institutions depend upon care while refusing to support those who provide it, when ecological systems are treated as expendable, and when responsibility for survival is shifted onto those with the fewest resources. Violence is structural precisely because it can appear ordinary: as a housing policy, a border regime, a workplace expectation, a neglected public service, an exhausted caregiver, or the gradual degradation of the environments upon which life depends. Care can also be used to enforce the violence of domination. Colonialism, patriarchy, and paternalism have repeatedly justified power through claims of protection, welfare, improvement, or benevolence. To define another person’s needs can become a means of exercising authority over them; to claim responsibility for another’s wellbeing can become a justification for controlling their choices. Care therefore cannot simply be presumed to be emancipatory. The political question is always: who defines care, whose care is valued, whose care is heard?

The question is therefore how relations of care and interdependence can be organised otherwise: not through domination, abandonment, and extraction, but through care solidarity. Care solidarity is the foundation of a feminist practice of democracy because it makes interdependence, unequal vulnerability, and responsibility matters of collective political concern. If care violence is produced through the unequal organisation of the conditions that sustain life, care solidarity counters it by reorganising those relations around shared responsibility, democratic equality, and collective repair.

Care solidarity cannot be based on sameness or identification. Solidarity, too, has often been organised through exclusions, boundaries, and claims about who belongs within a collective we. Aruna D’Souza’s notion of “imperfect solidarities”⁵ is crucial here because it refuses to make identification a prerequisite for political responsibility. We may never fully understand another person’s experience, history, or position, yet we can still decide that their freedom, safety, and flourishing matter. Solidarity emerges from a commitment to remain responsible across difference. It extends beyond human relations to the places, waters, soils, and other living systems upon which our interdependence rests.
Care solidarity offers a foundation for reorganizing democracy around responsibility across difference: recognizing interdependence without erasing difference, remaining accountable without claiming mastery, and extending democratic responsibility to the human and more-than-human worlds that sustain us. Democracy, then, is not only the right to participate in collective decisions; it is a struggle over the conditions of collective life itself—and over what, and whom, we are prepared to sustain.