Network meeting on 20 April and 10 years of Care Revolution

Our next national online network meeting will take place on 20 April 2024. We will come together again for half a day, exchange ideas and plan our next activities. The focus will be on the prospect of joint appearances and campaigns, which are at the heart of our work: We do not accept that the framework of our care work and our caring relationships is determined over our heads. We are also concerned with cooperation within the entire care movement.

Register for participation at: carenetzwerktreffen@posteo.de. You may then receive important information and the access link approx. 2 days in advance.

You can find more information about the network meeting here, and to get participants and anyone else who is interested in attending in the mood, you can find an article written by Matthias Neumann for 'Wir Frauen' in March on ten years of the Care Revolution here. Many thanks to the 'Wir Frauen' editorial team for making the text available to us!

10 years of the Care Revolution network. Join us into the next decade!

The Care Revolution network has been asked to contribute to this year's tenth anniversary, just as Gabriele Winker was asked to contribute to the fifth anniversary in 2019. The email from the editorial team said: "Our readers know what Care Revolution is" - which honours and pleases us.

But in a nutshell: The Care Revolution network was founded in 2014 as an association of feminist and trade union groups, self-representations of paid and unpaid care workers and other organisations and individuals. We are united by the fact that we want to bring paid and unpaid care work, which suffers from cost pressure, to the centre of society.

The key points that characterise the Care Revolution remain valid even after ten years: Firstly, with the exception of the large hospitals, the individual groups of care workers are too weak, too isolated and too vulnerable to fight for substantial change. This is why we need alliances between professional and unpaid care workers and users of the facilities all the more urgently. Creating these remains a key task. Secondly, needs, especially care needs, are non-negotiable. Therefore, this society must be changed until these needs can be met by everyone without exclusion. Thirdly, care work is not a women's issue, but it is very much about gender relations. This is why not only the quality of social infrastructure is an issue, but also patriarchal norms - in laws and in people's minds. Fourthly, the fundamental ignorance of unpaid care work in particular is inscribed in the capitalist social formation. On the one hand, this means that it is not possible without a critique of capitalism; on the other hand, this ignorance continues to make itself felt in cooperation in left-wing alliances and is being addressed.

During the COVID pandemic, the possibility of taking to the streets to assert demands in social alliances was initially lost, especially in the particularly affected care sector. This made up a large part of the activities of Care Revolution groups. On the other hand, the interest in a cross-movement perspective became clear during this time, when many political activists first became acquainted with the Zoom tiles. We took part in such endeavours and also initiated them locally.

Our biggest project in the coronavirus era was the small campaign "Space for Care", which took place in 2021 and spilled over into 2022. The importance, but also the overworking of employees in hospitals, care homes and daycare centres became apparent during the pandemic, as did that of unpaid care work, which came to the attention of the public, particularly in the combination of daycare and school closures and working from home. In eleven cities, local alliances organised smaller and larger actions in public places. Many of these alliances were organised by Care Revolution groups. The everyday pressures and necessary fundamental changes became clear in the stories and demands. The unifying feature was the renaming of central squares as "Platz der Sorge" and the common logo. The supra-regional framework helped to strengthen the local alliances, but we learnt once again that alliances need a concrete goal that they agree to achieve. Especially those whose everyday life in care is precarious or unbearable must be able to feel that it can be changed through joint action.

Once coronavirus was over, at least as a pandemic that disrupted everyday life, the perceived state of emergency nevertheless continued. We not only have to deal with the precariousness and exhaustion that comes with the structural carelessness of capitalism. This means that our environment is becoming increasingly confusing, rapidly changing and threatening in a very real way, and that we must stand up for global solidarity against attempts at isolation. In a world that is changing for the worse in so many respects - climate catastrophe, warfare as normality, ethnic-authoritarian currents within reach of power, etc. - care can no longer be negotiated separately from the issues of other social movements. The social system driven by competition and profit maximisation overburdens ecosystems and care workers alike. Wars over resources and a lack of empathy towards refugees and the poor are on the rise, and all of this naturally has an impact on care relationships. We need success in "small" care struggles, but if we ignore the big picture, we have already lost. So, as always, Care Revolution is about coming together, but this time also across movements. Care Revolution groups are therefore increasingly taking part in climate or peace campaigns or in actions to support migrants. Such alliances are currently being considered from many sides - still tentatively, but increasingly intensively.

This is an initial task that the Care Revolution network is currently facing. Others will follow. First of all, we will have to continue to anchor the importance of unpaid work and those who do it, especially women*, in such alliances, as was and is necessary in hospital alliances, for example. As frustrating as this task often is, it remains with us.

We are also faced with questions that go beyond care in the narrow sense: How do we position ourselves in wars in which there is obviously no good side, but to whose victims we cannot remain silent? What is a "care-centred", globally shareable, solidary way of life, translated into something tangible? How do we deal with the fact that masses of people we want to reach are drifting to the right - how does uncompromising behaviour towards authoritarian resentment go hand in hand with serious empathy towards those who express it? We need to seriously discuss these and other questions in order to remain capable of acting. We also need debates if we want to remain a decentralised network and still be able to intervene more audibly in the upcoming major conflicts.

In mid-October, we will be celebrating 10 years of the Care Revolution with a two-day event in Leipzig. There we will certainly not only look back, but also forward. It is becoming apparent that socialisation will be a major topic, as other groups are also thinking about democratisation and de-privatisation of institutions and collective solutions for unpaid care work, including the concept of the caring city. All of these would be steps towards the disposal of the conditions of our care relationships in a society based on solidarity - in other words, exactly what Care Revolution campaigned for 10 years ago. We hope to work on small successes and large alliances at the same time.

Get involved! Find out more on our website www.care-revolution.org. There you will also find reports of our actions. Or get in touch with us at koordination@care-revolution.org!