Social reproduction and Collective Care

Our new text for Occupied Times:

A Horizon for Struggles and Practices

The Radical Collective Care Project is a small research group investigating the politics of collective practices of care. Our aim is to explore different methodologies from small self-organised experiments (such as mutual legal aid and housing cooperatives), to substantial movements (such as the PAH and Occupy Sandy) and models for policy (such as the historical one-kitchen house and proposals from feminist economics). On our website we’re putting together a modest showcase of examples from across this spectrum, to ask and learn about the specific challenges they face. We hope to map out a set of common knowledges and frequently occurring problems within this horizon. In the future we hope to find resources to expand the project and open it up to wider participation.

Struggling around social reproduction

The crisis we are in is a profound one. It’s not just the economic system facing a crunch but also the mode of social organisation and reproduction, as well as ecological systems, reaching a tipping point. It’s a deep crisis, one that isn’t about to be resolved but rather will keep erupting, leading to new breakdowns at economic, societal and environmental levels. Our survival and flourishing on this planet can no longer be managed via abstract chains of exploitation because those chains increasingly break down. We in the Global North – at least those of us with northern papers and skin colour – have been able to get by thinking that we don’t depend on anyone, that we are our own masters. This is in line with the liberal subject that structures our societies and relations, which fetishises independence and thinks of itself as universal. Well, in fact, we do all depend on one another in global capitalism – we cannot think of societies as islands (whether at a national, ethnic or other level) because we depend on Chinese factory workers and Congolese miners as much as on Polish plumbers or Indian IT workers (to reiterate some major national industry professions).

It is time to transform these interdependencies into more sustainable and friendly ones, and the site of this struggle is social reproduction.

THE BLACK PANTHERS' FREE BREAKFAST FOR SCHOOL CHILDREN

'In October of 1966, in Oakland California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers practiced militant self-defense of minority communities against the U.S. government, and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizing and community based programs. The party was one of the first organizations in U.S. history to militantly struggle for ethnic minority and working class emancipation — a party whose agenda was the revolutionary establishment of real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines'.¹

>>The Panthers' ten-point plan, 'What We Want' can be found here.

The Breakfast Program
This free breakfast for school children program was set up in Berkeley 1968 by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. It was the first significant communty program organised by the Panthers, and perhaps the most significant.

After a few months spreading to churches, community centres and auditoriums in Berkeley, San Francisco and Oakland, it was announced that the program would be set up across the US.

„The Breakfast Program has already been initiated in several chapters, and our love for the masses makes us realize that it must continue permanently and be a national program. But we need your help and that means money, food, and time. We want to turn the programs over to the community, but without your efforts and support we cannot.“

- The Black Panther, 1969²

Serving Broadly

By the end of 1969 free breakfast was served in 19 cities, under the sponsorship of the national headquarters and twenty-three local affiliates. More than 20.000 children received full free breakfast (bread, bacon, eggs, grits) before going to their grade or junior high school.³ While programs operated in predominantly black neigbourhoods, the program also fed children of other groups, even operating in a partly middle-class neigbourhood in Seattle. It was also used to raise public consciousness about hunger and poverty in America, and the importance of nutrition for learning.

“[there are] millions of people who are living below subsistence; welfare mothers, poor white people, Mexican-Americans, Chicano peoples, Latinos, and black people.“

- Bobby Seale⁴