Care is Not Enough

Theorizing and practicing care beyond the Infographic Industrial Complex with Joy James' New Bones Abolition: Captive Maternal Agency and the (After)life of Erica Garner

I spent my junior and senior years of college working incessantly on a Food Not Bombs adjacent mutual aid project, and the fact that I was able to keep it funded and going for two years and then successfully pass it off to other people remains one of the things I am most proud of. However, when I passed it off to the people who run it now, I wrote them a manual that included the critique: “My primary critique […] is that I think we sometimes failed to do enough systems change work. In some ways, [this] is a service organization.” I stand by this, and have been grappling with balancing what I see as the necessity of “mutual aid,” “care work,” and “harm reduction” with the ways in which this work can dead end into service. Care and mutual aid, as conceptualized and practiced in the 2020s, is not sufficient to actually meet anyone’s needs or provoke any sort of significant change.

Mutual aid has a long theoretical history, but we live in the age of the Instagram infographic. Enough people have dissected the explosion of the Instagram Infographic Industrial Complex since 2020, and obviously no one should be turning to Big Canva Template for their theory and praxis, but we cannot pretend people aren’t doing just that. At least on my feed, the mutual aid story posts are abundant. Everyone is dreaming about futures that center care, and Venmoing an anonymous account with “solidarity” in the note or going to food distributions constitutes a radical act. This is not to say we should not be engaging in wealth redistribution or work with unhoused communities, but does handing out food once a week constitute liberation? And if that’s all mutual aid is, how is it meaningfully differentiated from charity?

Dean Spade has emerged as one of the preeminent theorists of mutual aid of the last few years, and he writes that mutual aid is taking care of each other and changing conditions via “building new social relations that are more survivable” (136). This is all well and good, but a little light on specifics. It is telling that many of the examples of mutual aid that Spade provides in “Solidarity Not Charity” are disaster relief projects or shelters; these are projects that attempt to clean up the aftermath of mass abandonment by neoliberal policies rather than head them off at the pass. This focus is reflected in the kind of mutual aid that pops up all over Instagram, and asks people to open their wallets or give some time to provide support for people already harmed by imperialism and neoliberalism. While this approach might lead to new social relations in the aftermath of disaster, these social relations do not necessarily create more survivability. Spade writes that "providing for one another through coordinated collective care is radical and generative” (136). But what’s a bowl of soup or a tent to someone who’s sleeping outside in 20 degree weather? Even if the bowl of soup is not funded by a non-profit, and is handed out by someone with the “right” intentions, and the “right” politics is it building new social relations? Even if it does create new social relations and new forms of community, does this concretely decommodify housing? We are living through the first years of environmental collapse and a looming climate crisis; it is not enough to hope we can establish new social relations in the wake of hurricanes.

I am not calling for us to abandon projects that focus on care for the most vulnerable, but I am calling on us to shift our discourse and praxis beyond the current conceptions of “care” and “mutual aid.” In New Bones Abolition, Joy James critiques what she calls “academic abolition” and lays out the concepts of new bones abolition and the captive maternal. According to James,

The marrow and function for new bones in an international and entangled world will be based upon organizing and protective zones offered to the working class, the impoverished, the hunted, and the rebels. (208)

These new bones offer up a vision of care work with more concrete criteria than dreamy statements about new social relations. The focus here is on organizing physical spaces that offer material protection to those most at risk under our current regime. We must be able to offer more than care in disaster zones, we must carve out and defend our own zones of protection from state violence. The idea of a “protective zone” goes beyond the current discourse around another care-adjacent concept floating around online activism: harm reduction. Over the last few years I have seen everything from warming stations that offer critical shelter from cold weather to voting for Joe Biden offered up as “harm reduction.” Thinking through these options with the lens of establishing a physical zone of safety and protection offers a much more material bar than asking if they reduce harm in the abstract. Does a vote for the Democrats reduce harm and offer care? Maybe, for some people, under some circumstances. Has it offered a physical zone of safety and security for the hunted Palestinian people? Absolutely not.

To get to new bones abolition, James points us towards the concept of the captive maternal. James’ conceptualization of the captive maternal comes from her study of Black women like Erica Garner and their roles as caretakers under duress, and she identifies them “by their/our function in service, caretaking, sacrifice, and resistance to dishonor and disposability.” The captive maternal starts by offering care, then moves through protest, movement building, marronage, and finally war resistance (35). Notably, the act of offering care to those who are dishonored and disposable is framed as the first step towards liberation and war resistance, but it is not in and of itself an act of resistance. James explicitly writes “the hubris of the Captive Maternal is think that care can remedy all imbalances” (18). Compare this to the posts that frequently appear on my feed that equate any work done outside of the nonprofit industrial complex with revolution.

Getting our movements to true war resistance, beyond delays and symbolism, is difficult and necessary, but we do not have to start from scratch. The passage in New Bones Abolition that I continue to return to is James’ account of a conference where veteran Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army members sat on a panel attended by academics. James describes this panel as where “The academic/nonprofit epicenter had just met the underground and revolutionary hypocenter” (215). Here, James chronicles the insufficiency of academic abolition which searches for “freedom dreams” without “theory, discipline, and strategic thinking” (214-215). These are the discourses that seep down from academia to our Instagram stories. The academic language of “freedom dreams,” are another way of saying “new social relations,” is not equipped to deal with the battlefield (215) we live in.

Instead of looking to nebulous freedom dreams, James calls us to look to disciplined study of our current and past conditions, and of the freedom fighters who came before us, to create strategies for war resistance and liberation. James writes about challenging the academics at the conference to consider if devotion, demonstrated through action, is more substantial than dream mirroring, and further writes of revolutionary Amílcar Cabral’s assertion that we must provide “material aid to freedom fighters” (216). There are no calls here to imagine a hazy future in the aftermath of disaster. Instead, James challenges us to assess and act on conditions past and present.

Mutual aid, care, and all the other terms of the Infographic Industrial Complex are not sufficient to get us to new bones. James writes that “Agape-fueled care is love disciplined by political will,” (37); it is clear people want to care, and it’s time this care is met with discipline. The displacement and genocide of Palestinians that started decades ago has reached a sickening fever pitch. Immigrants fleeing the abhorrent conditions created by US imperialism are rounded up by the state Texas, are bussed to Chicago, housed in police stations, and then thrown out in the cold. Police continue to kill Black Americans with impunity, and conditions in our jails and prisons are so intolerable a Black man was eaten alive by bedbugs in Atlanta. In these times we desperately need to be offering care, but our current standards for radical care and mutual aid are not high enough and do not push us to consider what comes next. Care may be the first step, but what will it take to make ourselves and our movements disciplined war resisters?