Thursday, 25 June, 2026.

The air blowing at me through the ornate swirls of my balcony railing carries pieces of dried leaves, like a desertic offering. The black metal I am leaning against is equally scorching, having spent the day absorbing the unforgiving rays. It is a small price to pay for a semblance of wind, however unsatisfyingly hot, to come and wipe the sweat off my upper lip.

One room in our flat – my parents’ – has air conditioning; yet I sit here, partly because my nephew is sleeping there. His daycare had to close and his parents’ workplaces are not especially child-friendly. He is blissfully unaware that this exceptional summer is one of the coldest of his life.

I sit here, too, because I feel I must take in the heat to write about the heat. Upstairs, my eyes just kept closing – the last few nights have not been restful. Balls of what looks like tiny tumbleweeds roll through the nearly empty streets, like in a Western movie. I had never seen those here. I did not even know what they were called until today, I had to look it up.

I choose to sit in the heat and indeed I have such a choice. Many don’t. “Stay in cool places. Drink water. Shut the blinds. Check in on your relatives. Avoid effort-heavy activities”. Those were the government’s recommendations to us this week. Who do those work for? As always, self-sufficient, well-off adults with no significant care responsibilities. It is not easy to shut the blinds when you have none, to stay in a cool place when your apartment is a thermic bomb or your school’s only solution to the unbearable heat is parents showing up with white paste and emergency blankets to cover the south-facing windows. It is not easy to drink water often, as disabled people have been quick to point out, when you cannot pour a glass of water for yourself. It is not easy to avoid effort when you work on a construction site surrounded by nothing but concrete, and nothing is done to ensure you do not have to stand outside during the hottest hours.

Times like these really force us to look our priorities in the face. Offices are modern, insulated, ventilated. Schools, hospitals, most homes are not. Prisons are overflowing, some are at three hundred percent capacity; the number of incarcerated minors has gone up by nearly a third in two years, and yet yesterday five police vans were dispatched to a council estate to stop the unfolding of dangerous criminal activity: children playing in a makeshift pool. Those responsible for most of this heat, however, are left unbothered. What they do is perfectly legal.

We still treat “the economy” as though it were a many-headed hydra, begging to be fed and grow, grow, grow or else it will eat us alive. But “the economy” is not an end in itself. It is not even a thing in itself. It is a metaphor we use to refer to the proper allocation of resources among a given group such that, in theory, everyone be given the opportunity to lead a good life.

In her 2018 Eastern Division Dewey lecture, the great philosopher Virginia Held, who passed away last month, writes:

“The economy can allow quite a number of people to pursue their own economic interests, but only after or within an economy organized to serve the needs of care first of all. (…) Various political and legal institutions may well be asked to reflect an imagined social contract yielding democratic norms between self-interested and relatively self-sufficient adults. But these should be understood as dependent on and located within an adequately trusting society in which interrelated and cooperative persons are committed to providing the care needed by all (…). And our efforts should aim not only to respond to the needs of our own societies, but to extend the values of care to meet our global responsibilities”.

Dependent on and located within a framework of relationships, in service of them, not the other way around. Someone commented on a note of mine recently that “labour rights are a drag on the economy”. Why yes, thank you, that is quite precisely the point of them. Rights exist so that the proverbial needs of “the economy” do not rob people of their ability to lead a good life. Abolishing slavery was also “a drag on the economy”.

This heatwave has made it once again painfully obvious that vulnerability and interdependence are at once the most universal and least planned-for features of our collective existence. “We cannot stop the country when it is thirty degrees” said our minister for work. (How we wish it were only thirty degrees). Stopping what? For who? Suspending non-essential work so people may go help their disabled relatives, pick up their children from their fifty-degree classrooms, take them to the pool, supervise them as they play in water so they do not drown, lend a hand to distressed friends, reorganise their time so as not to be outside when the heat is most unforgiving, mobilise air-conditioned offices for those who are homeless and those who are fainting from the heat and saturating our hospitals — that would not be “stopping”. But we are light-years from such rational, intelligent, common-good leadership, or else we would have shaved off a few degrees.

I saw yesterday that stations d’équarrissage — animal carcass processing plants — across the country are struggling to keep up with mass batches of dead bodies. Animals in factory farms are dying in troves and we do not have the means to properly dispose of them, so we bury them underground, risking the spread of extremely toxic bacteria in the soil.

I look at my four-month-old nephew. Pouring all the softness I can muster onto him is the best way I have found to channel the helplessness of this moment. I sing Edelweiss from The Sound of Music, which I have been humming to him since he was born.

Edelweiss, edelweiss...
Every morning you greet me
Small and white, clean and bright
You look happy to meet me
Blossom of snow
May you bloom and grow
Bloom and grow forever...

Edelweiss, edelweiss...
Bless my homeland forever…

I think of the other four-month-olds, and five-month-olds and however-many-month-olds here and elsewhere who will suffer from this mess. Of the children whose schools closing will mean leaving the only place where they feel safe. Coming home and knowing that what awaits them behind the door has been made all the more on edge and ready to snap by the heat.

I long for a blossom of snow. Maybe the snow will come and we will all forget. Maybe we won’t, and we will do better, protect each other, understand when to let go of what is accessory in order to save what is essential. Most likely we will fall somewhere between the two. And the tumbleweeds will once again roll through the streets, and it will be just a little more normal, just what things have become. Those who can will flee to where the edelweiss grow. Most will not. And we will keep going, for of course good people know we cannot stop the country for to sing songs to our children. That would be ridiculous.

ps: to caesar what is rightfully his, inspiration for this letter (in case it wasn’t clear by now, I was too hot to come up with any good ideas) came from reading the very aptly named ’s essay “On sweating my ass off in my 90 degree apartment”.

with love and care,

MM

This letter was supposed to be about the desire to mother. Then, the enterprise of writing about hypothetical children was significantly derailed by the reality of caring for two firmly non-hypothetical children. This letter is now a jumbled mess.

In The ‘Problem’ of Maternal Desire (2021)1, psychotherapist Daphne de Marneffe writes:

“There is something unvoiced about the experience of motherhood (...). It sways our choices and haunts our dreams, yet we shy away from examining it with our full attention. Treated both as an il­lusion and as a foregone conclusion, it is at once obvious and invisible: our desire to mother.

The desire to mother is not only the desire to have children, but also the desire to care for them. It is not the duty to mother, or the compulsion to mother, or the concession to mothering when other options are not available. It is not the acquiescence to prescribed roles or the result of brainwashing. It is the long­ing felt by a mother to nurture her children; the wish to participate in their mutual relationship; and the choice, insofar as it is possible, to put her desire into practice.

(...)

Even to pose the question is to invite almost instant misconstrual. It’s as if this would recommend to women to live through others, forsake equality, or relax in the joys of subsidized homemaking. But that reflexive misinterpretation is itself evidence of how difficult it is to think about maternal desire as a positive aspect of self.”2

I sit on the floor next to his playmat. I read pages of Marguerite Duras’ Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein out loud to him. He doesn’t seem to be understanding much, but then again neither am I, so I at least do not feel judged. The book’s rather disagreeable narrator is largely making up the story as he goes, stalking a woman he knows exactly four facts about and hypothesising as to her next moves. His experience is in fact not too unlike that of caring for a baby: following the steps of an unpredictable person with puzzlingly impenetrable intentions, attempting to best plan for any contingencies.

You, my children, do not exist.

You might never exist — I do not know what life, what my body have in store for me. You do not exist, you might never exist and still I long for you. How can I long to meet someone I know nothing about? I know not when or how you will come, whose hands will welcome you among us. Kind, gentle hands, I hope. I selfishly wish for at least one of you to have eyes blue like mine, but that is not something I can control. Very little about you is within my control, and that makes the prospect of meeting you all the more vibrant.

How do I know whether I will love you?

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You will have nothing but a phenomenal hunger for life. You will be persons so full it will take personhood itself by surprise. You will step through mud and make huts for bats with injured wings. You will be life and beget life, whole words in lost tongues, secret conduits to each other that I will be at a loss to decipher. You will shout at the trees asking to play, you will show us unfound roots and then close back the dug-up hole because nature should not be so wounded. You will bear wonders the likes of which the poets did not care to write about, because they did not know you and did not care to try. My body will shape itself to your mouths and you will smile. Mystics will give in to the enigma of your birth.

We will trim leaves and read dog-eared pages and sometimes try to eat the pages too. We will lead a thick and meaningful existence, move through the city like we own it.
I will fail you. Time and time again.

Or maybe we will do none of those things. You will render all of these words obsolete because nothing I write can prepare me for meeting you, for who you will choose to become. That humility fascinates me. There is a particular burn within me for the day I get to meet you.

A little girl stretches herself out on one of the curved green benches of this Paris park. My nephew stares at the trees above his stroller, though there is not much movement to amuse him. The air is scarce. A leaf falls and nestles itself into the arms of his stuffed bear.

Another child nearby falls from a tiny bicycle. She doesn’t cry. She is looking for an adult presence to signal her pain to. Locks eyes with one. Now she is hurt.

Children spray each other with water guns. A small boy, wide-eyed and barely walking, comes towards me and just stares. I say hello. He does not respond.

“O children, open your hearts to me
And tell me your wonder-thoughts
Who lives in the palace inside your brain?
Who plays in its outer courts?
Who hides in the hours To-morrow holds?
Who sleeps in your Yesterdays?
Who tiptoes along past the curtained folds
Of the shadow that Twilight lays?

O children, open your eyes to me
And tell me your visions too;
Who squeezes the sponge when the salt tears flow
To dim their magical blue?
Who brushes the fringe of their lace-veined lids?
Who trims their innocent light?
Who draws up the blinds when the sun peeps in?
Who fastens them down at night?”

— Edward Elgar, The Starlight Express, Op. 78: To the Children

He writhes in my arms, sticky, confused, as I try to rock him back to sleep. I wipe his forehead with a towel dipped in cold water. I say it is three a.m. and his parents will be back tomorrow and I love him and I know it is too hot and there’s nothing I can do about it. I think about how many of us there must be right now in the world doing this exact thing, many in way worse conditions than I, feeling helpless in the face of this nonsensical weather.

I remember a friend telling me her climate consulting firm made corporate clients go through a simulation where they had to put a crying newborn to bed on the top floor of a poorly insulated social housing building amid a forty-degree heatwave. Some clients complained it was too alarmist. I’d like a word.

I stand still in the dark as his eyes finally begin to close.
I am not interested in the book you wrote about global fractures and the Great Powers™. I want to know if you have held a child. Hold the baby and only then might you get to make the rules.

The crinkle of his sensory toy, akin to the wrapper of a takeout burrito, is making me hungry. I move to the only free bench that remains in the shade, closer to the park’s other attendees. It is Wednesday afternoon. I hear French from the children and Spanish from the women. I hope they have not had to forfeit their own desire to mother in order to care for someone else’s child. Unfortunately, I suspect it may be so.

There are no men.

The necessity for children is the stuff of policy briefs; the desire to mother is not. It occupies an odd place in our understanding. The world has rarely looked approvingly on our sexual desires; it has only recently and reluctantly begun to make space for our ability to choose not to be mothers; and it is certainly ambivalent even to our enthusiastic want of motherhood. Even when we do want it, it cuts and restricts us in ways beyond what is needed, often in vile ways, often without asking for permission.

De Marneffe writes: “We often resist thinking through [the] implications [of maternal desire] because we fear becoming mired in clichés about woman’s nature, which will then be used to restrict women’s rights and freedoms. But if we resist thinking about [it], or treat it as a marginal detail, we lose an opportunity to understand ourselves and the broader situation of women.”

I recently told someone that my current professional and creative path was largely impulsed by an early intellectual fascination with motherhood. She replied, even without having children! It struck me as strange. We do not so wonder why Victor Hugo became impassioned with misery or capital punishment, having never been threatened with either. It is merely human.

In fact, my children, I have met you. I have seen you in the eyes of others I fed, rocked, bathed, soothed. I have glimpsed you amid wrinkled smiles and fresh ones alike. Those I fed, rocked, bathed, soothed, I did so with my heart already full with the thought of you. And if I am not to meet you, or rather if you should come to me through means other than those I have envisioned, I will do my best to care for whichever of you crosses my path. I cannot promise I will not cry; in fact, I most certainly will. But I will try to be strong, as there are many of you out there, many more I could ask to share in this journey with me. I will love your cousins who already make my life so full; I will love the man who would have been your father with a renewed intensity. I will study and learn how to place my hands between you and the ground when you arrive.

I had set out to write to my children. But squeezing past my timid thoughts of an inexistent progeniture came real, fleshy, incessantly moving children in striped shorts and collared dresses, compelling me to look at them instead. So I did.

Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice, wrote in 1991:

“I owe it to myself, to my little sister on the train, to all of the daughters yet to be born, to push beyond my rage and articulate an agenda. (...) My involvement must reach beyond my own voice in discussion, beyond voting, beyond reading feminist theory. My anger and awareness must translate into tangible action.

I am ready to decide, as my mother decided before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of women. Each of my choices will have to hold to my feminist standard of justice. To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of my life. It is to search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand power structures with the intention of challenging them.

While this may sound simple, it is exactly the kind of stand that many of my peers are unwilling to take. So I write this as a plea to all women, especially the women of my generation: (...) the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives.”

For years I have looked to this quote for inspiration and drive. Staying loyal to it, today I also want to add that I am ready to decide, as many have before me, to devote much of my energy to the history, health, and healing of children. To denounce those who seek to use, exclude, mock or dismiss them. To shed light on the harm they incur, both obvious and hidden; to welcome what they have to teach us. To imagine spaces that work for them, write new rules that protect them.

I owe it to myself, to the little girl on the green bench, to all of the sons and daughters yet to be born.

Previous letters:

What is a good society?

Whatever one’s political positioning, any answer to that question must grapple with two central matters: protection, and punishment. Who does a good society protect? How? Does it respond to violence with punishment, and if so, by what means? What is the central purpose of punishment: preventing further harm, or addressing a perceived injustice by inflicting proportional harm? And what of the purpose of protection: is it to shield individuals from being on the receiving end of violence, or does it go further, setting out to equip them with what they need to flourish?

Around those questions emerge political and ethical fault lines. Everyone sees themselves, often in good faith, as protecting certain values or groups — but who to protect, what from, and by punishing whom are where camps start to form. It is pretty consensual, for example, that a good society prides itself on protecting its children: but from what? Widespread sexual abuse at home, or being taught about sex at school?

Progressive accounts of the role of the state emphasise its responsibility to nurture, to create the necessary conditions for individuals and communities to thrive — or, at least, to grant those disadvantaged by their circumstances no less of an opportunity to try. Conservative accounts point to the state’s role in preserving the social order, notably through the punishment and/or removal of those perceived to threaten that order. It’s the inevitably gendered “Mommy-Daddy divide”, it’s ‘hugs not bullets’ versus the ‘war on drugs’.

Notions of protection and punishment are uniquely effective rhetorical tools because they immediately trigger our moral heuristics — the cognitive shortcuts we use to make rapid ethical judgments. Protecting the innocent is good, letting the guilty run free is bad. At least until the advent of post-carceral societies, achieving one typically calls for doing the other: protection and punishment are inextricably linked. Different political forces simply make different cases for who to place in different categories: those who need protecting; those who protect; and those who must be punished.

Problems arise when we are confronted with the fact that these categories are deeply permeable.

For example, we might realise that those we’ve always painted as protectors — the ‘good family men’ — are perfectly capable of predation. #MeToo triggered a societal shift of planetary magnitude precisely because it flipped on their heads our traditional categories of respectability and abuse. That shift was then met with immense anger, as is customary any time an “old idea system from which the energy is gone but which has the heaped-up force of custom, tradition, money, and institutions behind it”, as Adrienne Rich brilliantly put it, is questioned.

That old idea system so begrudges any attempts to dislodge it that it has an unfortunate tendency to protect those who commit harm, and punish those who ask for protection. In 2025, the European Court of Human Rights condemned France for “secondary victimisation” during a trial for sexual assault; the defense lawyers had treated the woman who came forward as if she was herself guilty. Last month, the ECHR issued another condemnation, regarding a case where a French court gave a formal warning for libel to a young girl whose rape case against a classmate was dismissed.1 Ask the state to protect you, they say.

Going back to our categories, we might also realise that those who we have declared must be punished turn out to need care. This presents another unwelcome blurring of boundaries, which usually results in our desire to punish being stronger than our responsibility to protect. This was evident with the recent news that UK prisons are still handcuffing and shackling women who give birth while in detention, among other grave human rights violations recorded by the Birth Companions charity.

Finally, perhaps most damningly for the credibility of our institutions, we might realise that among those we punish is an over-representation of individuals we failed to protect. Incarcerated women are extremely likely to have been victims of domestic violence, and by extremely I mean basically guaranteed.2 Children who went through foster care are much more likely than their peers to end up in prison. And though clear research is still scarce, roughly a third of incest victims (which as a reminder concerns at least one in ten people worldwide) were abused not by an adult but by a fellow child, themselves often victims of incest by an older relative. Cycles of abuse and victimhood intertwine in ways our neat categories cannot possibly capture.

Now, the state is not exclusively responsible for the violence that takes place in people’s homes: but it is responsible enough to put into question its monopoly on punishment. Indeed, how legitimate are our justice systems if they primarily function to palliate our failures of care?

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The ethics of care offer a transformative new way to approach these failings. As an ethics of the particular, they force us to understand the complex and specific circumstances that surround human behaviour, rather than applying blanket logics.

Thinking about protection and punishment through the lens of care yields at least three very important shifts:

One, needing protection — and vulnerability more broadly, though not all vulnerability calls for protection — is neither a moral failure nor an injunction to passivity. Our societies treat deviations from the norm of being male, white, able-bodied, autonomous and economically productive almost like offences: ‘it’s a bit annoying that you’re having children, not great for company finances’; ‘it’s a shame you’re being abused, sure you aren’t a little responsible?’; ‘it’s too bad you’re homeless, but could you not sleep on that nice bench?’. By showing vulnerability and interdependence to be universal features of the human condition rather than anomalies, care ethics seek to address the enduring stripping of agency that still comes with receiving care. The title of a recent piece by anti-ableism journalist says it all: “Will you please treat me like a person?”.

Two, relatedly, being in a position to protect others is not an invitation to dominate. It is, rather, a responsibility to put one’s abilities at the service of others’ needs, building with and for them. As philosopher put it, “asymmetry doesn’t automatically create hierarchy”. The spaces most meant to welcome vulnerability — schools, hospitals, nursing homes, maternity wards — will not stop being spaces where harm is perpetrated against those who seek care until they shed this paternalistic attitude. All the empowerment in the world cannot make a labouring woman’s dignity be respected, be she imprisoned or not, if the people in charge of assisting her are not inherently convinced of her equal humanity3.

Three, having caused harm does not strip one of their right to basic protections. In progressive spaces, rejoicing at countries who introduce the death penalty for pedocriminals or joking about animal testing on rapists because “what are they going to say, no?” is counter-productive. It is merely indulging a deep-seated and understandable desire for vengeance, but it is not practically helping to protect anyone. It also once again flattens reality into ill-fitting boxes, omitting the fact that people have complex relationships even with those who abused them — something that an ethic of the particular does help to take into account.

These shifts all boil down to one overarching horizon: moving from a logic of control to a logic of care. The latter logic doesn’t entirely eschew the possibility of punishment, which can still be necessary. But it treats punishment as a mere means to the central end of protection, rather than a goal in itself; and as only a legitimate one if the avenues of prevention and care have been meaningfully invested in.

That might sound naïve to our ears trained on centuries of punitivism. But it is, in fact, the more rational way to do things. In an interview with Le Monde about former French prime minister Gabriel Attal’s proposal to harshen the sentencing of youth delinquency, historian of childhood and youth Véronique Blanchard said:

“We are witnessing a form of irrationality, decorrelated from all statistical and sociological reality. Like magical thinking. But what we don’t hear as much is that the history of repression and punishment when it comes to youth delinquency is much longer than the choice of education and protection (...), and it has never worked. Our society could make another choice, that of support, education and time. As a former educator, I know how much that allows children to find their place in society and to accept its rules.”

We can choose the logic of care. Millions of people already do, in their thinking, their practice, their activism. We can choose a future that does not throw around vague calls for more “security” for political clout without actually committing the resources that keep people truly safe.

This choice is not a simple one: care is the opposite of the easy way out. It crumbles under any attempt to make broad, sweeping statements; it is not readily grasped through number-crunching. And as Rich said, the logic of control has the weight of centuries propping it up. But it is a choice we can make, and one that has the potential to radically transform how we exist with one another.

Dear all,

Apologies for skipping last month’s letter. These have been intense weeks for a variety of reasons, including a peculiarly human mix of grief and joy, a lot of auntie-ing, and an overdue restructuring of my professional life. But then our April decided to masquerade as July, and Paris now stretches its legs out on the terraces, apricot juice in hand. All is well.

In practice, this restructuring means the care think tank I’ve been working towards — now Cara, soon-to-be a registered nonprofit — will focus on advancing the care society specifically in France, through previously mentioned research and ground action projects. This newsletter, The Fifth Wave, will remain what it has been: a space to imagine a future where care sits at the heart of our lives and our cities, and to explore the transformations needed for caregiving to get the support and recognition it deserves.

I spent a while making sense of the above thoughts, as I considered how the control-heavy ways in which our societies approach protection and punishment limit our ability to develop true logics of care. I hope they resonate — your reflections are always welcome, don’t hesitate to share them.

Finally, on the topic of exiting logics of control in relationships of care, I highly recommend ’s posts about authoritative parenting (and all of her writing, really, it is always deeply thought-through and leaves one looking at the world in a refreshed way.)

Thank you as always for being here,

— MM

Based in Marseille, Spina is a journalist, writer, and the founder of media outlet Manifesto XXI. He is the author of Manifeste pour une démocratie déviante: Amours queer face au fascisme [Manifesto for a deviant democracy: Queer love in the face of fascism; éditions trouble, 2023, untranslated], in which he proposes pathways to resistance rooted in the radical power of tenderness and care.

In the below essay, of which a version was originally published in his newsletter, he examines care and its practices in light of his own experience of vulnerability, in the perspective of a left that would make true space for all lives and all bodies.

In 2022, a degenerative disease — scleroderma — upended my life. The following year, after an unexpected heart transplant, I found myself living with a disability. This pushed me to rethink my life and make significant decisions: I reconfigured some of my relationships, left a job that had become unbearable.

During my hospital stays, sharing daily life with other “fractured” bodies, I noticed the lack of solidarity networks — within my own circle and certain queer communities but also in public spaces.

I encountered a form of inhumanity that deeply shook me. In activist circles, even those claiming to be left-wing, I violently felt the gaze that reduced me not to a living, thinking, loving subject, but to a disabled body, a burden, almost unworthy. More than the illness itself, it was this ableist dehumanisation, sometimes well-intentioned but always brutal and controlling, that traumatised me.

The sense of existing halfway between life and death does not come solely from my transplanted heart, but from the way the social fabric around me stripped me of any legitimacy to fully exist within the spaces that were once mine. Day after day, my mental health deteriorated. I faced severe burnout, followed by medicated psychiatric care.

What I am going through — physical pain, fatigue, loneliness — is a profoundly widespread and shared experience. As the months passed, I discovered that while unique in some ways, my journey resonated with that of many others; including people with whom I would never have imagined forming connections. I met elderly people, isolated patients, activists from diverse political backgrounds, all united by the same ontological vulnerability.

Yet despite this undeniable reality, everything unfolds as if vulnerability always belonged to someone else. An unbounded hubris leads us to believe we will never find ourselves in that position. “Your able bodies are ephemeral,” chant the anti-ableist, feminist, and queer collective Les Dévalideuses1. This structural lack of empathy is entirely contradictory to any attempt to embody left-wing ideals.

For years, I had been passionately interested in the ethics of care and love as a political force. Nothing suggested I would be marked in my own flesh by the experience of permanent physical vulnerability. This experience pushed me to reassess the ableist bias through which I had viewed the world until the age of twenty-seven.

For while the transplant and disability transformed my daily life, they also offered me a new understanding of the fragilities many encounter — whether physical, psychological, social, or economic. During my lengthy stays at the clinic, including a month-long hospitalisation following the 2024 legislative elections, I had time to reflect on the left, its obstacles, and these essential questions:

Why does the left struggle to find its place within the ultra-liberal democracies of the West? Have fundamental mistakes been made in assessing the contemporary cultural landscape? Why do we fail to offer a compelling existential vision to many voters? What do our representatives lack to convey a message capable of convincing? How can the left reconnect with the realm of emotions to propose unifying and emancipatory perspectives, and thus inhabit differently the fears and feelings of abandonment that the far-right exploits?

As I explored in Manifeste pour une démocratie déviante, the far-right promises to eradicate insecurity and isolation while fuelling them. The ‘capitalocene’ — a term proposed by Italian essayist Marco Bersani2, which I prefer to that of ‘anthropocene’ to specifically designate the capitalist era — perpetuates this pandemic of loneliness by imposing a fragmented, primaverist3 temporality. This vicious cycle feeds on the very fragility it creates.

One possible path to overcoming the deadlocks of contemporary resistance lies in organisations rooted in care and an ethics of vulnerability. Political scientist Joan Tronto, a pioneer in care studies, defines care as the set of gestures, attentions, and practices that enable us to “maintain, perpetuate and repair our world”: our bodies, our relationships, our environments4. It is a collective effort to support everything on which life depends.

In the continuity of this thought, sociologist Judith Butler approaches vulnerability not as a marginal or shameful state, but as central to life itself. To be vulnerable is to be exposed to others, affected by them, dependent on material, emotional, and social support networks. Primarily corporeal, this exposure is also political: certain bodies and lives are made more vulnerable by social, economic, and racial structures that determine who deserves protection, care, or compassion5. To recognise this shared vulnerability is to found an ethics and politics of solidarity.

The precarity we experience throughout our lives, which I have felt in my own body, thus stems less from our physical conditions than from how society chooses to ignore or marginalise them. It is through the work of a long genealogy of queer, crip, and feminist thought that I have begun to accept and love this revolutionised life.

Anti-ableist author Alison Kafer defines ‘crip studies’ as a militant and theoretical field emerging from ‘disability studies’, which challenges social norms related to the body, autonomy, productivity, and validity. The term ‘crip’ — originally a slur derived from ‘cripple’ — is here politically reclaimed to describe ways of living and knowing that subvert an ableist order.

These studies draw on the experience of disability and illness to imagine new ways of inhabiting the world, valuing interdependence, slowed temporalities, care relationships, margins, and bodily dissidence. The aim is not to add disability to a list of oppressions, but to radically critique what society expects from a ‘normal’, capable, and performing body.

For the left to be more than a mere circle of belonging, it must once again become a proposal for evolving ecosystems. I advocate for a social movement that transports us into a new era, regardless of how long it takes. In this sense, the ethics of care (which align with the concept of romantic revolution I discuss in my first essay) and crip studies offer powerful levers for renewal.

Sometimes adopting harsh methods, akin to neo-populisms, the so-called ‘radical’ left seems trapped in a logic of confrontation that stokes tensions and fuels ambiguity with the very hierarchies it claims to oppose: vertical and patriarchal power relations, polemical use of social media, militant purity, purges, attacks on mental health, whiteness, ableism. The left in Europe struggles to make itself heard. It appears more focused on rhetorical techniques than on the strength of its vision and embodiment.

Yet, capitalism as an anthropological phenomenon is not merely an economic system: it is also a culture, an imaginary, a way of being in the world that is consubstantial with fascism. It permeates behaviours, shapes affects, transcends partisan divides, and defines who we are far beyond our political affiliations. Being ‘radically left-wing’ is therefore not enough to avoid being ‘capitalocentric’ — primarily concerned with the pursuit of social, material, erotic, reputational, and other forms of capital.

If we move beyond the narrow framework of mere political advocacy, often devoid of concrete embodiment, what does it still mean to ‘be on the left’ in our daily actions, our relationship to power, to the collective, to otherness? Even if we momentarily set aside the quest for power, what does it mean to practise and choose ‘the left’ every day as an ontological horizon?

The left today has a precious opportunity to enter a fertile phase of reinvention, where it could rethink its promises, representations, and the political alternative it offers in the face of the right.

This vision, extending my work on love as a social force, materialises in the construction of a ‘care society’, which would shift the centre of gravity of our priorities from economic performance to care relationships — and the professions that make them possible, often performed by marginalised individuals.

Like many, I see the rise of fascism, the genocidal wars waged with near impunity, the increase in social precarity. Yet, I feel the need to go beyond a stance of mere opposition to the far-right. The role of the left, I believe, is to open up horizons, to imagine an alternative social project, a world where life and its transmission would be fully possible. It is about accompanying a lasting transformation rather than a revolution that goes in circles — the literal meaning of the word ‘revolution’ implying something circular and repetitive. The left must be capable, even within its own ranks, of denouncing the powers in place and the deadly logics they perpetuate.

This echoes the critiques levelled by communist filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini against the Italian left of the 1950s, which he accused of betraying the working classes by allying itself with the establishment. He denounced its bourgeoisification, its proximity to Christian Democracy, and its failure to truly transform the nation after fascism. Later, in his Scritti corsari (1975), the intellectual lambasted a left incapable, in his view, of understanding new forms of power — particularly consumerism, which he saw as a tentacular and impalpable totalitarian force. For him, fascism had never been as fertile as under the Republic, within which it became institutionalised and definitively normalised.

Politics is often the ambition of domination — the imposition of certain values and ways of living on others, with or without their consent. It is, in other words, the struggle to hold the monopoly of the norm. Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci spoke of cultural hegemony. This goes beyond a simple ‘quest for power’, which is not in itself necessarily harmful: in the word ‘power’ also lie deeply vital values, the power to be, the power to do, as activist Starhawk writes.

And what, ultimately, is the role of the radical left, if not to detect all forms of domination, even the most insidious?

Vulnerability is an experience inherent to earthly existence, affecting each of us at different times. I deeply believe in its unifying power. Similarly, care is too often reduced to a soft aesthetic or an individual sympathetic behaviour. Instead, it should be conceived as a principle of collective organisation, a social architecture in its own right.

I would like a left that places these questions of vulnerability, care, and horizontal relationships at its core. An anti-ableist and anti-racist left, which would enable us to reflect on what, in our society, is considered fully human.

To think about the left and care is to question the presence or absence of death in our habitats. To contemplate mourning, to analyse how we hierarchise existences, render some deaths invisible, and mourn others. These burning questions permeate current events, where thousands of lives are erased in a chilling media normality.

Philosophers like Myriam Bahaffou propose moving beyond the humanist framework, so that we no longer have to measure the value of life through a utilitarian lens6. Instead, we should adopt a molecular vision of our political models, as imagined by Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso with his ‘plant democracy’. A society rooted in an underground, indestructible fabric because it is self-regenerating, nourished by attention and connections. The time is ripe for a political discourse that places all living beings, in their diversity, at the centre — far from the necropolitics of the far-right and the blind spots of the left.

Care allows us to rethink the left in its existential dimension, as a set of movements aimed, above all, at granting all lives the dignity of being lived and all deaths the dignity of being mourned.

I do not claim to open and close the subject of the left’s re-enchantment; simply to contribute a small stone to its edifice. What I sketch here is largely an invitation to widen the imagination, but many others work to craft concrete solutions that bring these principles into reality. One just has to be willing to look for them7.

The challenge is to make our struggles exist beyond the reductive logic of the conquest of power, turning away from regressive dreams of domination. Redesigning the left, its ambitions, its political programmes; enriching its methods of action, meditating on its very essence and how to embody it. Envisioning other forms of presence, other ways of inhabiting this world — other ways of fighting, together.

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Caregiving is often posed as the last bastion of life that should remain untouched by technology. Even traditionally tech-friendly news outlets are routinely concerned with the impact of AI and automation on our medical and interpersonal care systems:

The Economist: How AI is rewiring childhood
The Economist: Millions are turning to AI for therapy
The FT: Why your AI companion is not your friend
BBC: Is this the year domestic robots come into our homes?

Many see the application of technology to care as cold, sterile and removed of the essential humanity that care requires. But is this intrinsically true? Are technology and care truly incompatible, or is it our applications that need figuring out?

My master’s degree is in computer science, and my thesis was in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). HCI is a multi-disciplinary area which studies how people interact with digital technologies in order to make those interactions useful, adequate, meaningful, and ethical. I focused on building play technologies – think interactive toys – to encourage social play in mixed groups of neurodiverse and neurotypical children. Play is essential for early development, but autistic children are often excluded from social play groups due to differences in social and communication preferences. Building the right kinds of toys can facilitate social play within groups, leading to more positive play interactions for all children.

An uneasy pairing
Technology is pervasive throughout caregiving: from toys for children and baby monitors to telephones and personal alarms (which detect falls or shaking motions and help access emergency care) as well as medical technology (x-rays, MRIs, ultrasounds) and accessibility tech (wheelchairs, hearing aids, prosthetics, and in the near future, self-driving cars). We use technology to extend human capacity and reduce unnecessary suffering, but also to facilitate connection where physical restraints preclude it. A loved one can be on the other side of the world, hard of hearing, or still inside the womb, and technology can help to connect us.

Despite this long history of compatibility, the addition of modern technologies to social wellbeing and care solutions often feels deeply uncomfortable. Even as someone who has spent time researching and building in this field, I feel a persistent unease when reading headlines about AI in schools, robots in houses, or surveillance technologies introduced into care homes for older people.

This discomfort reflects more than a fear of novelty. Instead, it points to an underlying awareness that modern societies are already struggling to provide care in ways that feel sufficiently humane and relational. We intuitively perceive that technology is being introduced not to deepen care, but to compensate for its absence. Care systems are overstretched, so technological solutions act as substitutes for true time and presence.

Maternal care is one such system. Modern obstetric technologies such as continuous fœtal monitoring have undoubtedly saved countless lives and remain essential in high-risk situations. Yet their routine and sometimes unnecessary application has also led to significant harm1. Over-medicalising a typically healthy physiological process tends to reduce the autonomy of those giving birth2, and marginalise midwifery and community-based birth practices. It is not surprising, then, that many people working at the frontiers of obstetrics respond by calling for a return to older or “lostˮ practises, forms of care grounded in community or embodied knowledge built up through generations of human experience. Yet once again, while the majority of women who have doula-assisted or home births feel empowered by the experience, a more extreme though fringe tendency to reject modernity altogether can have fatal consequences.

Similarly, the recent use of AI to address pervasive loneliness in society feels disturbingly miscalculated. The concern many of us experience when confronted with AI companions, chatbots designed for emotional support, or “friendshipˮ technologies that provide artificial intimacy stems from a recognition that these are being positioned as remedies for structural failures rather than as complements to a healthy social life. They fail to distinguish between supporting care and overriding it. If our patterns of work, urban design, digital use, and economic incentives have produced widespread isolation, fracturing communities and leaving people with little time or energy for relationships, introducing artificial companions merely risks compounding this harm.

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Money is of course a big factor here. It is much cheaper to offer someone a chatbot than to hire a care professional; and unlike relational care therapies, one can get very wealthy selling tech solutions. Technological tools facilitate the privatisation of care, allowing the state to outsource part of its responsibilities. This can be a good thing, enabling national institutions like the UK’s NHS to access ground-breaking treatment technologies they would not have had the capacity to develop themselves. For example, FLOW headsets used to treat treatment-resistant depression through stimulation of specific brain regions have shown really promising results, and are now used by the NHS in a number of areas. However, private companies’ growth imperative means they often need to continuously push these tools towards new users, even those who would be better served by relational therapies.

Like other societal failures of care, mental illness and loneliness at scale are the outcome of decades of policy choices and cultural shifts. Addressing them meaningfully will require slow, contested, and deeply political changes, along with significant investment whose returns will not be visible within one electoral cycle. Technological solutions, by contrast, can be developed and scaled rapidly by a small number of people. They offer the appearance of action without demanding structural change, and in doing so risk us dismissing loneliness as an individual condition rather than a collective failure. By investing in a technology, a company or government can say, “We are actively working to tackle loneliness and improve mental health” without actually having to make any difficult decisions or long-term changes. This is easy to see in the workplace, where companies will buy a subscription to apps like Headspace in the name of protecting employee wellbeing, without addressing the structural issues contributing to stress and burnout. We are adding plant food and hoping to see flowers bloom, while the roots continue to rot beneath the surface. Without looking at the underlying conditions that sustain human connection, technological interventions risk producing superficial growth while accelerating the decay below.

Given this, it might seem like the inclusion of tech in the future of care is exclusively problematic. Yet the benefits touched on above remain real, and there are constructive ways to harness them. To understand what a more balanced approach could look like, I spoke to Elaine Czech and Rachel Keys, two researchers from the BIG (Bristol Interaction Group) lab, which works to improve peopleʼs lives through the design and study of technology.

To trust or not to trust your smart watch
Rachelʼs motivations to work in HCI began as deeply personal. Her husband became unwell with a heart condition that doctors would not take seriously. Through a wearable device (think smart watches), he was able to gather data and use it as evidence that further investigation was needed. He was eventually rushed to hospital for treatment.

Following this experience, Rachel chose to do her PhD research on the use of wearables in the diagnosis and support of people with heart conditions. She has lived experience of the fact that technology can provide invaluable data that allows people to access the appropriate care. This has been particularly important for women and minority groups, whose self-reported symptoms are still not taken as seriously by medical professionals. Women’s health has historically been shockingly underresearched3, and the widespread use of digital trackers is helping to address this imbalance faster than the medical research community could do alone4.

These tools allow users to conduct long-term research on themselves, tracking symptoms over months and years. This, Rachel pointed out, is especially useful for women whose hormonal changes mean symptoms can appear over the course of many months, and present atypically. Wearables allow people to see what their “normalˮ is and track detailed information over extended periods of time. For women with POTS and long Covid, wearable-generated data can offer especially meaningful insights.

Here, technology helps people advocate for themselves and receive support tailored to their needs, without medical practitioners making potentially biased assumptions about which categories they fall into. We shouldn’t be in a situation where many people still have to fight for their symptoms to be taken seriously – but seeing as we are, we should make use of the tools we now have at our disposal as part of the push for substantial change.

The major downside at the moment, Rachel explained, is that “health care professionals donʼt know whether to trust the dataˮ. Wearables often cannot market themselves as medical devices, which would subject them to different product legislation – so they call themselves “wellnessˮ devices. They often function as black boxes, meaning we donʼt know exactly how the data is being collected and processed, and therefore struggle to assess the quality of the measurements. “It puts doctors in difficult situations, because the data is so medicalised that they feel they have to act on it. Research coming out of the US is showing that wearables lead to excess use of medical resources and over-intervention5”. We are all naturally concerned with our health – but having access to a constant feed of information risks encouraging us to needlessly investigate perfectly normal variations.

Building with those we are building for
Elaine Czech’s research currently focuses on building tools for people with Parkinsonʼs. She has been designing a study that uses a wearable device triangulated with home cameras to monitor the progression of the disease over time. We spoke about the importance of people working in HCI acting as “translatorsˮ between the engineers and end users.

“End users can’t necessarily articulate what they want really clearly or in computer science terms”, she explained, “and so the engineers are stuckˮ. Translators are therefore vital in making sure that the needs of caregivers and care receivers are heard, while mitigating expectations of what a technology can truly deliver. Elaine emphasised the importance of engineers and researchers beginning to look at “care ecosystemsˮ. Care is, at its core, relational: it is never received or delivered in isolation. Yet most research is still focused on solutions for individuals. Elaine is lobbying for more research on dyads – mostly couples. Her research mainly centres on older people living with long-term health conditions, most of whom live with a partner, so any technological support needs to work for both people. Like physical spaces, care technology must be designed to center interpersonal exchange.

Giving people agency in the kinds of technologies available to them is an essential step towards this goal. Part of my own research focused on the importance of including the people you are building for as an essential part of the design process. In developing toys for social play, we designed activities that encourage children to come up with games that get everyone involved, including people with specific sensory or social preferences. These game designs were then used as foundational in the technology design phase. Co-design values lived experience alongside technical and design expertise, and involves actively listening to care recipients and practitioners to understand the heart of their concerns. As such, it stands a much better chance of addressing the root causes of failures of care.

To achieve co-design at scale, various groups need to be willing to participate in research and work with developers. This highlights another barrier researchers face: participation. Researchers fight an uphill battle in recruiting participants for studies. In the UK, one of the best ways to recruit from a diverse pool of people is to get NHS ethics approval, which allows you to advertise your study through hospitals and GP practices, and lends reassurance to wary volunteers. However, many researchers wonʼt even apply for NHS ethics because the approval process takes too long – up to 18 months, which on a 3-year PhD program, just isn’t viable. If we are going to build technologies that really work for the people who need them, we need to change the systems that prohibit this research from happening.

People also need to be willing to partake. It is a big ask to open your life up to potentially invasive research with no promise that it will be successful. This is further hampered by a history of unethical research programmes: Elaine pointed to the Tuskegee syphilis study, a shocking example of medical malpractice where known treatments were purposefully withheld from 400 African-American men with syphilis in order to observe the progression of the disease6. More than a hundred of them died as a result.

Stay in your lane
In many ways, our discomfort with the application of technology to care is less about the tools themselves than about what they reveal. The use of tech functions as a microcosm for our systems at large, making visible the absences and inequities already present in them. At its worst, tech can be used to dehumanise, isolate, over-intervene, and mask serious flaws in our delivery of care. At its best, it allows people to gain back their autonomy, and provides life-saving information or intervention.

The main issue seems to be a lack of what we could call ‘technological humility’. Tech enthusiasts are famously very good at claiming that tech will overtake our lives and solve all of our problems, and very bad at admitting that it makes some of the latter hopelessly worse. A welcome example of humility came from Arthur Mensch, the founder of Mistral, France’s AI giant. At a conference given last month to students of the country’s top engineering school, he said:

« We don’t believe in the techno-solutionism that seems to prevail on the US West Coast, which consists in thinking that all the world’s problems will be solved by artificial general intelligence. (…) It will not solve climate change — it objectively tends to make it worse — and it won’t solve our issues with care, with contact, with our ageing populations. There is an entire class of care and relational jobs where AI only has a minor role to play. »

Such pragmatism is refreshing. For tech to work in care, it has to accept being a supportive background player, instead of trying to take over the entire field. Public care systems need leadership that is extremely clear-eyed about the limitations of technological tools, and extremely ambitious about investing in people. That means higher salaries, better working conditions, more relational training, improved communication between designers and end users, and reduced barriers to essential research. It could also mean radical measures: France’s national agency for the social economy recommends the exclusive delegation of all care activities to the state and to mission-oriented private companies by 20507. Paradoxically, by bringing our failures to light, the technological revolution might be the very thing that forces us to confront what good care truly requires.

That violence is learned is one of the central contributions of the social sciences to our understanding of human behaviour.

We know, by now, that aggressive and dominating attitudes are progressively acquired through a number of social models, rather than primarily the product of an innate drive.1 We know there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between cultural, structural and interpersonal violence2, that becoming numb to one type of violence makes one more likely to engage in others – the way a slaughterhouse opening in a town drives up the local prevalence of domestic abuse.3

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici recounts how French Jesuit missionaries sought out to dictate to the Montagnais-Naskapi, an Indigenous nation of mid-17th century Canada, how to govern themselves:

“[The French] were scandalised by their ‘lack of morals’; they saw that the Nasapki had no conception (...) of authority, of male superiority, and they even refused to punish their children.” (...) A missionary recalled in his diary an exchange he had with a Nasapki man: “I told him it was not honourable for a woman to love anyone else except her husband, and that this evil being among them, he himself was not sure that his son, who was present, was his son. He replied, ‘Thou has no sense. You French people love only your children; but we love all the children of our tribe.’ I began to laugh seeing that he philosophised in horse and mule fashion.”4

The Jesuits eventually succeeded in persuading the Nasapki to whip their children by conditioning their fur trade agreements to such practices. We know, in other words, that violence is taught and continuously enforced, and not the spontaneous manifestation of our state of nature.

By contrast, we know a lot less about how care is learned. We infer it, to an extent, as the mirror image of the apprenticeship of violence – but the symmetry only goes so far. Only relatively recently have we begun to research care as a practice, with principles, which can be done well or badly, and therefore taught. Western philosophical traditions inquired at length into the nature of the self and our moral obligations to one another; yet their proponents rarely connected these questions to the everyday reality of those who cared for them, and how well – unsurprisingly, mostly how badly – they cared back. Domestic work and dependency care were of the realm of the mundane, the practical, unfit for philosophical reflection. They just… happened.

Even the idea that caregiving can be learned at all is a relatively new one. Attention to others, the capacity to nurture, reassure, comfort, were long considered innate qualities that come with being born female. Yet contradictorily, they were also thought to be fragile forms of knowledge that could be lost if one learned other things. The gradual opening of university examinations to women in 1870s England led to heated debates between proponents of ‘educational assimilation’ and those of ‘educational pluralism’, who preferred to keep boys’ schools and curricula separate from those of girls. Their central claim was that giving girls a “boys’ education”, with subjects such as physics and history, would result in the loss of their ‘natural sensuality’ and in “the creation of a new race of puny, sedentary and unfeminine students”. This would “destroy the grace and charm of social life, [and] disqualify women from their true vocation, the nurture of the coming race and the governance of well-ordered, healthy and happy homes.”5 One doctor even claimed that after a period of higher education, “flat-chested girls” would be “unable to suckle infants.”6

This marginalisation and long-lived misleading beliefs about the nature of care mean that unlike violence, we don’t have good mental models of what ‘structural care’ or ‘cultural care’ look like, or how they trickle down into interpersonal care. As a result, much of the way we structure caregiving in society is not, in fact, done with any deep understanding of how care works. France’s 2015 paternity leave reform, which I wrote about last July, is a good example of this: it failed to provoke any significant uptake among new fathers because it did not factor in that the ability to take care of a child is developed over time, rather than simply turned on and off.

As wisely pointed out, learning to care – in the broadest possible sense, of how we maintain our world and each other, how we build strong webs of interdependence without losing our unique selves – is mostly not an information problem. You do not learn it the way you would the date of a famous battle. You see it modelled all around you. At home, where you learn who does what kind of care, how much it is acknowledged and valued; whether it is an expansive force that spills out to all who pass through or an exclusive rarity, granted with conditions. At school, where you internalise authoritarian cultures that center punishment and hierarchy, or on the contrary, where healthy relationality to others and to nature is intentionally embedded in the curriculum.

None of these sites of learning operate in isolation. Cultural narratives, artistic representation, linguistic changes, our webs of weak and strong ties to the people in our lives – all of those shape our perception of how important care is and who is responsible for it. A child can be taught non-violent communication at their forest school yet see domination modelled at home every day. Teenage boys can be given anti-misogyny classes, but those are unlikely to mean much if they receive constant messaging that paints women as lesser humans.7

This is why care systems are such a central focus of The Fifth Wave’s work: they are the overarching structures that either support or suppress our learning of care. They have the power to keep vulnerability alien, dependency shameful, respect a sign of weakness, and hierarchy natural – but they also have the power to make them something else entirely. They can be built to make interdependence an utterly basic part of our social fabric, such that care flows with much fewer barriers.

They could mean every city center has somewhere people can come to with those they care for, so that a man who cares full-time for his wife with Alzheimer’s can get a few hours of rest and some warm conversation. They could make it possible to take a ‘care day’ off to support a sibling with their new baby; make alloparenting so banal that prenatal classes are almost superfluous; they could make dying at home, surrounded by relatives, a much more normal end to a person’s life. Once we stop accepting the systems we have today as the best we can get, a world of alternatives opens up.

These systems are costly and difficult to build; they require grit and imagination. Rita Thapa, who I interviewed in November, had to push through the skepticism of many a foreign donor and government official to transform Nepal’s primary care system and put mothers at its core. Cambodian Children’s Trust, whose pioneer ‘Village Hive’ model Bethany Hansel analysed last month, will have to mitigate the effects of corruption and antiquated charity structures to make it the country’s default child protection system. And in another analysis, Bethany showed the challenges faced by New Zealand in scaling its national ‘pedagogy of care’ rooted in Māori principles.

Despite these obstacles, such systems exist, and more of them are emerging. The ‘institutional paradox of care’ I wrote about in September, which seems to make rigid policy structures or profit-making companies incompatible with good care provision, can be overcome. My mission over the next few decades will be to help design institutions with care built in – that make care so supported, so obviously central to all of our lives that learning it simply becomes a normal part of being human.

Further reading:

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

This quote by Octavia Butler has infused my work since the birth of Cara and The Fifth Wave, a little over five months ago. It captures a dual reality behind their creation.

First, the current organisation of care in our societies is a broken one. It’s disproportionately shouldered by certain groups of people. It fails to provide the adequate care all of us need to thrive. It denies that vulnerability and interdependence are essential dimensions of our shared human condition, treating them as odd glitches. It prioritises clinical and short-term economic outcomes over a holistic understanding of well-being. It siloes care into separated segments of our lives, rather than grounding it at the heart of community, work, and family life. It is ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of substantial ongoing demographic changes.

Second, this isn’t a fatality. There are new suns. Better systems exist and are being built across the world. Others are being imagined by researchers, activists, organisers, and can be made a reality. Better ideas about care exist, new ones are continuously emerging, and they can be made to reach many more minds than they currently are.

This dual reality is our ‘why’. The way we structure and understand care is inadequate, and we need to envision bold and interconnected solutions to fix it.

As the first month of this new year comes to a close, and in the spirit of building in public, I wanted to make our ‘how’ a bit more explicit. To clearly lay out the different areas of our work, and give you an idea of what’s to come. As I set out to do so, I was reminded – by the lovely – of another quote, this time by a thoughtful scholar of Butler, :

“We need to move from competitive ideation, trying to push our individual ideas, to collective ideation, collaborative ideation. It isn’t about having the number one best idea, but having ideas that come from, and work for, more people.”1

The association felt fitting. Black feminists have already said much of what we need to change the world. So that’s our ‘how’: grounded in the insights of care ethics and feminist care studies2, we work to a) apply those insights to transform our understanding of care and b) scale them into replicable policy solutions. In other words, we aim to take the products of collective ideation, and use them to build care systems that work for more people.

This work is organised as follows:

Analyses

We analyse local and national alternatives to current care systems, in order to learn from, adapt, and replicate them. These are incredibly useful for three reasons.

One, the necessity of care and the essence of what constitutes good care transcend borders: care systems need to be tailored to their specific cultural, social, political and economic context, but the broad principles that make them successful and the lessons extracted from their challenges can inform systems-building across the world.

Two, when it comes to social innovation, the “local initiative —> replication —> integration into the national infrastructure” pipeline is a tried and tested way to drive society-wide change. We believe in starting small, and scaling what works.

Three, ‘care systems’ is a huge umbrella: it includes spaces like schools, hospitals, birthing homes, domestic violence shelters, families, nursing homes, foster centers, community health centers or even public housing, as well as the institutions, laws, and economic forces that determine how those are organised. We don’t claim we’ll know how to transform them all — and much specialised knowledge already exists. Rather, our value lies in taking a connected look at how care flows within and across these systems, in order to inform better, integrated solutions.

Analyses we’ve published include:

Interviews

We publish interviews with people building the futures of care, whether through their practice or their thinking. People who try their hardest to make up for the harshness of our systems with creativity and passion.

And because the best insights on care come from caring, I ask all my interviewees: “Who do you care for, and who cares for you?”

Essays

We publish writing which helps us understand what our relationship to care is lacking, why it matters, and envisions another way forward. We aim to elevate the importance of caregiving in all its forms, as essential public infrastructure, as a structuring principle of social life, and as a central concern of political decision-making.

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This dual goal of thinking and acting will mean we’ll often have to help build things under this sun while we imagine life under new ones. I don’t see that as a contradiction. The spectrum of social change ranges from a radical reinvention of our existing structures — radical in its primary sense of ‘at the root’, not necessarily most extreme — to incremental progress within existing constraints.

We want to do both, even if that means often having to make do with the trappings of bureaucracy, politics, and human stubbornness. Even if that means helping to build imperfect systems; as long as they’re systems that work for more people.

This is going to be an exciting year. Again, we welcome collective ideation. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us, topics you’d like to see more research on, or innovative systems we could analyse. Moreover, if you know caregivers, midwives, researchers, journalists, organisers, local officials, anyone who cares about care, anyone building the care society who you think would benefit from engaging with our work, don’t hesitate to share it with them too.

Thank you,

With care,

— MM

This week, I am sharing this beautiful, if alarming, text by Rebecca Mack – who writes the newsletter ‘This Woman’s Work’.

The impetus behind The Fifth Wave came partly as a result of my reading ‘Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution’, by Adrienne Rich, sitting on the steps of the Bodleian Library during my last few days in Oxford.

Reading that book, and diving into the world of thought that subsequently revealed itself to me, was probably one of the single richest intellectual experiences I’d had up until that point. In it, drawing on extensive research as well as her personal experience in her first heterosexual marriage and then as a lesbian mother, Rich picks apart how the figure of the mother – imagined, fantasised, imposed, enforced, all but defined by its actual embodied experience – has for millennia been a central tool of the subjugation of women.

In the below, Rebecca writes of her experience as a midwife in the UK’s NHS, and the systemic failures that ultimately led her to seek a different way to care for women. I’m sharing it here (it has been slightly edited) because it deeply resonates with the Institute’s vision for a different, care-centered world. It also feels appropriate as C-section rates have recently surpassed those of vaginal births in England.

Both this essay and ‘Of Woman Born’ exemplify two of our deeply held beliefs: our systems are broken, and they can be rebuilt. “The fields need to be radically dug up and new ones sown”, as Rebecca puts it – in midwifery as in all other spheres of human activity that involve people taking care of each other.

As Rich writes in her 1977 essay of the same name,

“We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world, women will truly create life, bring forth not only children (if we choose) but the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence — a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy, will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed.

This is where we have to begin.”

I came late to midwifery. I was twenty-seven, earning 25K a year as Personal Assistant to a group of corporate directors. Free gym, nice offices, lovely boss. It wasn’t enough. I had a calling. Possibly a catholic or middle daughter thing, I don’t know – I just knew I wanted to help people.

Midwifery looked like the perfect job: women-centred, empowering work and oodles of babies to cuddle. Whilst training, I did a two-week placement on a special care baby unit where my main job was to sit, skin-to-skin-cuddling preemie babies in my cleavage. After the two weeks ended, they practically had to escort me off the ward. It was joyous.

I knew instantly at my university interview that this was the career – or rather, the place for me. Not long after, I was called back to the office of the midwifery lecturer who had just interviewed me. She sat at her desk, swinging on her chair, shoes off, chatting animatedly to her colleague who was curled up on the sofa. ‘I’m home’, I thought. ‘I want to stay in this world forever.’

The training lasted 3 years and was hard going from the start. We spent half the week working on the wards and the other half studying in classrooms. There were no long holidays like other students and if you missed a shift, even due to illness, you were required to make up the hours in your own time – meaning most ‘holidays’ were spent back on the wards. We were paid a small bursary (not meant for anyone to live on) which has since been terminated for new cohorts. The real payment came in the satisfaction of learning and experiencing the craft you loved.

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Lovestruck I was. Many a time, I walked on air as I bounced home, remembering the beautiful newborn that had just been miraculously pushed into my hands. But as time progressed, I missed – or ignored – the emerging red flags.

The wards were permanently short staffed. By the second year, I found myself being used as ‘staff’ instead of ‘student’ in low-risk areas. ‘Breaks’ on an eight- or twelve-hour shift were a luxury, not an essential. A quick dash to the loo whilst running in between patients and finding sustenance from the ‘thank you’ chocolates left in reception became the norm.

Shifts never ended on time – typically due to a lack of staff to hand over to. The fear of litigation loomed large, and practice often felt more ‘defensive’ than ‘responsive’. The constant requirement for documentation interrupted the flow of organic relationship building and care providing.

As students, we were shielded to an extent from the negative sides of midwifery. Kind mentors would insist we take a break or encourage us to go home before our legs gave way. Unqualified, we were free from the threat of losing our registration, and we could spend time building relationships with our women and their families instead of documenting our every breath. Alas, we would not remain students forever.

With the thrill of qualification came the terrifying removal of the protective mentor’s shield. Caring for women and their families was still the ultimate high for me; but unfortunately, the anxiety around their safety – and my sanity – became the ultimate low. The system wore me down, not the people I cared for. The lack of staff, the overcrowded wards, the constant life-threatening juggling act. I was permanently anxious. I would frequently leave a shift exhausted, back literally breaking, bladder bursting and spirit just a tiny bit more broken.

The unpredictability of each shift terrified me. I can remember starting a night shift on the postnatal ward, being moved to the antenatal ward – while still caring for my postnatal charges – and then delivering one of my antenatal women on labour ward. After 14 long hours with no break, I emerged from the delivery room with a fresh newborn wrapped around my neck, begging to go home to my own children.

Yet barely through the door home, I was back on the phone. ‘Has that baby in bed 3 fed yet?’, ‘Can someone check the CTG on the woman in bed 6?’. My husband removed my shoes, I drank a longed-for cup of tea, then another, and then another.

This was not the exception but the accepted rule. I would have loved to spend that night providing life-changing care to all those women and babies. Instead, I was gasping for air just trying to keep everyone safe. Too many women, too many babies, not enough staff.

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The professional cost of giving the ‘bare bones’ of care was a constant source of frustration and anger to me. Job dissatisfaction corrodes morale. I have a friend who is a decorator. He painted my living room last year. He is a perfectionist, prides himself on his smooth finishes and straight lines. He offers sage advice when I get carried away with clashing colours and he leaves every house he paints a better place to live. Each job he completes fires him up for the next. He is proud to show his customers his work.

Imagine if he was a midwife. ‘I’ve slapped some colour on the walls – if you squint a bit, you can’t see the dodgy lines; sorry I didn’t get a chance to do the skirting boards, you can hide them with the furniture; didn’t do the ceiling but it’s not so bad, just try not to look up. Anyway, got to go, didn’t want to say but I’ve been decorating two other houses at the same time, and I’ve not finished them either.’

It would be demoralising, embarrassing, sad. Not what he trained for.

During my last shift, I attended to a distraught mum as she delivered a 20-week-old, much-wanted baby in the maternity reception bathroom. The desperate mum was waiting for a bed. There were no beds. And not enough midwives to staff one even if one was available. It was 3 a.m. in the morning. Ten years from that inspiring interview and seven years on since qualification, I was done.

Sadly, I was not alone. Approximately one-third of my cohort of 30 had left the profession by the time I hung up my stethoscope. Some stayed within the NHS (I did). Some could not get far enough away and went into other roles, as diverse as overseas property management and cake making.

The solution appears simple – hire more midwives. But like me, so many just would not go back, and so many newly qualified just will not stay. Changing the landscape of midwifery goes far deeper than throwing more hands into the fields. The fields need to be radically dug up and a new fresh and women-centred field sown.

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Answer me this… would midwifery be in this dire a state if men gave birth? I can’t see that men would be expected to tolerate a maternity system that struggles to provide safe, never mind (don’t make me laugh), holistic care if they were the pregnant ones.

The way we treat our pregnant, labouring and postpartum women is a tragic indictment of the way society too often treats women, and mothers in particular. Second-class, disposable, put up and shut up, vessels for male folly, unworthy of care. That women and their bodies don’t matter is no more evident than in maternity wards worldwide.

My love affair with midwifery will never end. I can’t go back to the trauma of the wards, but I can’t completely walk away either. My passion for the care of women is still as unshakable and necessary as it ever was, if not more so. Grassroots change is needed, and my pen is mightier than my stethoscope at this point.

So, I sit here, shoeless, swinging on my chair, animatedly chatting to Substack, writing about midwifery, misogyny, mental health, and more. Advocating for women, for mothers, for families. I never wanted to leave midwifery; midwifery is my home. I cannot deliver babies anymore, but I am working on delivering the truth about the treatment of women and mothers. I would love for you to join me.