Reimagining the left through vulnerability and care
Towards "molecular visions of our political models"
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Based in Marseille, Constant 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.
In the spirit of what this essay calls for, the collective initiated a practice of “proxy protests”, where able-bodied women attended the annual 8th of March feminist protests across the country holding signs that said “I am here in the name of …” — with the names of disabled women unable to attend who had entrusted them with standing in their place.
Author notably of La rivoluzione della cura: Uscire dal capitalismo per avere un futuro (The care revolution: Exiting capitalism to have a future), 2023, Edizione Allegre.
That which gives the illusion of a permanent, spring-like renaissance without changing anything about the deeper conditions.
Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003070672
Butler, J. (2005) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso Books.
Bahaffou, M. 2025. Éropolitique: Écoféminismes, désir et révolution. Éditions Passager clandestin.
If you’re looking for a good place to start, I dare suggest digging through the articles published on The Fifth Wave Institute.
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