Graziano 2025
Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak. Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity. Pluto Press, 2025.
rather than the hypermasculine ideal of a swashbuck- ler, we want to refocus attention on the pirate as a disabled worker (with the eye patch, hook hand, peg leg) cultivating rebellious forms of solidarity and care.
When pirates seized a ship that would other- wise almost certainly have been their coffin, they were appropriating the pinnacle technology of their age and repurposing it as a tool for libera- tion. Therefore, it’s no coincidence that those who used the printing press to disseminate knowledge, against the will of authorities, were also branded as pirates—challengers of the power structures that sought to control not just the seas, but the flow of ideas.
Aboli- tionism and deinstitutionalization, as intertwined traditions of both practical and theoretical inter- ventions in care, foreground repair as a radical and transformative gesture, and as a way of exposing contradictions embedded in existing organi- zations. Repair, in this sense, is not some gentle alternative to conflict; it’s a pragmatic confron- tation with the violent carceral and hierarchical logics embedded within care institutions.
Care has always been mediated by specialized technological means, and in non-exploitative societies, technology could be recognized for what it truly is: a set of tools for expanding our capacity to care.
Recognizing care as labor is essential, but it must go hand in hand with challenging the ownership structures that restrict access to the tools, knowledge, and resources needed to undertake that labor and so to create and sustain diverse care ecosystems.
The creation of the #syllabi within social movements pushes against violent scenarios as a practice of collective care for what radical pedagogy theorists call “really-useful knowl- edge,” or knowledge that can be used to challenge oppression, as opposed to the supposedly “useful” knowledge that is routinely favored by corporate interests.92
With the Pirate Care Syllabus, we worked together with a small crew of pirate care practi- tioners to digitize and preserve their educational tools in plaintext, HTML, and PDF formats (which have proved most resilient to digital decay) using a free software platform we built called Sand- points. It might not last forever, but certainly longer than the self-made websites or social media plat- forms running on corporate server clouds.
Every form of education carries a hidden cur- riculum, shaping behaviors and relationships as much as it trains skills. The sociality of partisan expertise sustains different ways of belonging and differentiating. Partisan expertise yanks the rug out from under the feet of those who tout neutral, professionalized, and supposedly “only” technical interventions.
Practicing new forms of kinship must be rooted in a relentless commitment to structural changes that can also impact those with whom we do not share an affinity. In other words, they must transform society and its material bases, not just immediate social relations; and these goals must be inter- twined. These kinship practices cannot serve us as cozy substitutes for broader struggles. They can and should be micropolitical manifestations where the libidinal drives for a liberated future are rehearsed, nurtured, and made militant.
This condition of shared vulnerability, rooted in the recognition of our fragile bodies, and the abo- lition of systemic injustices, is the starting point for a pirate politics of solidarity.
We need deep pedagogies that do not position expertise as the opposite of political engagement. Alongside advo- cating for access to knowledge, we need to push back against the privatization of education and the compromised terrain of educational institu- tions, but also by refusing to settle for their current limitations and injustices.
One of the central ideas of this book is that mutiny is already a shared reality in the land- scape of care—a recognition that if we truly wish to care for this world and its inhabitants, we must disobey the orders that bind us to its shipwreck.
the everyday defiance of nurses, cooks, friends, programmers, amateurs, tinkerers, librarians, professionals, custodians, and kin who join together to practice care dangerously.
In addition to providing care where it is most needed, and in addition to refusing artificial borders imposed by Empire, they show that the world does not need to be this way and they pre- figure alternatives.
Pirate care is the revolutionary practice of the plebeian multitude against Empire. In potent yet not widely recognized ways, pirate carers are striking back from a position of deep asymme- try. In doing so, they are opening up a space of political possibility. By caring despite the laws and despite all odds, they immanently enact a differ- ent, insurgent world.
Their forms of solidarity, new and old, large and small, are important because they challenge tradi- tional notions of care, offering alternative ways to address living needs, often in the service of people neglected by what we call the neoliberal capital- ist Empire’s “matrix of care.” This matrix insists and enforces the enclosure of care by an oppres- sive triumvirate of the state, the market, and the family.
Uncaring Empire does not simply ignore care. It seeks to monopolize it and divide it between the state, the market, and the family. In building care in defiance of all three, pirate care practices challenge this order fundamentally, demonstrating that another world of care is possible.
Autonomously organized pirate care practices help us take a nuanced position vis-à-vis the problem of the role of the state, which has plagued the left for many generations. When these grassroots practices, for instance, make undocumented migrants legiti- mate subjects of care, they put pressure on public institutions to grant people needed resources and protection from legal and extralegal violence. Thus, citizen activists are refusing to be reduced to cheap substitutes for welfare provisions that should be accessible to all. Rather, they are exposing the public sector’s contradictions, toxicities, and rou- tinized mishaps, engaging state institutions while declining to normalize nationalistic logics and administrative harm.
We know that the idea that an individual can “own” a part of the world, of the common wealth created by a society, and that they can be legally protected in their exclusive use and enjoyment of it (even when it has terrible consequences for others), is a very par- ticular and dangerous aspect of the neocolonial system that today manifests as Empire.
Pirates have always been enemies of the imperial property regime, not only because they raid and plunder, but because they refuse to be the property of the navies that conscript them.
The practices of pirate care emerge specifically against this criminalization of solidarity and help people generate the courage to disobey.
In this sense, pirate care builds on a legacy of civil disobedience, but not to make a spectacle of transgression to shame the powerful. Rather, these practices disobey in order to show that it is possible to organize care for those to whom care is denied and intervene where care is no longer legal. In this, they imagine new ways of instituting care, starting from the compro- mised realities of our tangled relations under the punitive order of Empire.
In this book, we propose pirate care not as a distinct definable protocol but a concept to help those already involved and those looking to get involved in defiant practices of solidarity find one another and discover a common vocabulary for what we are doing in a myriad of ways. Unlike those institutions of Empire’s matrix of care, the strengths of pirate care are its multiplicity, plas- ticity, opacity, and capacity to adapt to local conditions, contexts, and opportunities.
Pirate care, as a radically feminist proposition, is an ecology of practices where the figure of the carer is also the cared-for, and where interdepen- dence is a core tenet.
Instead, we embrace a pragmatics of pirate carers: those who work in the messy, queer, and radical spaces where care grows not from compliance to protocols, but from tender, rebellious acts of collective survival.
We need to activate the carer in the pirate, and vice versa. To be a pirate without also being a carer risks being co-opted into a regime of property, even as its enemy, opportunistically plundering the world as it is without building one that is differ- ent. To be a carer without also being a pirate risks having one’s care held at ransom by Empire and channeled into the state, the market, or the family.
Critical discourse of care is often inhibited by an unfortunate dichotomy that tends to place care in opposition to tools, techniques, and tech- nologies, an approach stemming, in part, from simplistic patriarchal paradigms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Care was viewed mainly as fluid and unquantifiable, an inherent aspect of affection and intimacy, while technology was associated with rationality, instrumentality, calcu- lability, and systemic order. Care was relegated to the domestic realm, while technology was cham- pioned as a tool of unbridled productivity for the public world of commerce and civilization. One of the central contentions of this book is that the opposition between care and technology is mis- leading. Pirate care initiatives whose stories we tell in this book, use and misuse various technologies, appropriating and adapting them for the purposes of instituting care.
The ethics of pirate care emphasizes the need to resist extractive practices of our digital overlords and to reclaim or build our own tools and infrastructures to sustain complex organiza- tional ambitions. If care and technology are seen as opposed, we are not imagining broadly enough.
This book introduces pirate care through five defining aspects: disobedient instituting, critical usership of tools, commoning of private property, pedagogies of partisan expertise, and queer kinning.