If war is capitalism by other means, then the criminalization of care is its domestic front. As perpetual war reshapes urban space through militarization, surveillance, and enforced precarity, access to care – like land, shelter, and movement – becomes a matter of private property: hoarded, policed, and extracted for profit. This talk takes up the argument of Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press, 2025) to ask how, in the face of securitized cities and the expansion of high-tech containment zones from refugee camps to public housing, it is possible to extend the ethic of care into a strategy for abolition—of property, of borders, of Empire’s enclosures themselves?
Valeria Graziano is a cultural theorist working across academic research and independent cultural production, whose practice is rooted in the legacies of Italian operaismo, institutional analysis and materialist transfeminism. Recent publications include Figure It Out: The Art of Living Through System Failures (Drugo More, 2024) and Cure Ribelli. Tecnologie aperte per una cura come bene comune (WeMake, 2019).
Tomislav Medak is a researcher and activist with a focus on technopolitics, commons and planetary environmental crisis. He is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, a co-initiator of the Pirate Care project, and a policy coordinator for Možemo! – a green-left political party in Croatia.