The care crisis is a term that describes the deliberate breakdown of infrastructures that sustain life driven by neoliberal government policy.

It names the processes of state abandonment that designate which lives are worth protecting materially, and which are simply unwanted excess.

Needs that can and should be met socially have been displaced onto individuals, while corporations produce profits from the care economies that exploit workers.

Rather than seeing care as a personal virtue, feminists seek to reclaim its political dimensions.

They have long asked how and why exploited, unpaid care work – in and outside of the home – becomes central to the function of a political economy, particularly in times of crisis. That means identifying how states neglect their duties: how things like housing, food, shelter and medical care have become the responsibility of individual citizens and their communities.

Historically, the need for care was a major politicising force for Black and women of colour feminist formations in the UK.

These explicitly Marxist and socialist endeavours sought to create networks of care via political organisations that kept communities alive and provided the resources that were withheld from people due to their status as working class, racialised migrants.

The creation in 1978 of umbrella group the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) was a catalyst for the creation of mutual aid groups across the country that placed care at the centre of their political work, via community defence and resistance.

They understood stopping deportation, resistance to police violence and securing safe housing as forms of care – a collective refusal of the terms of existence set by a racist nation-state, in favour of the cultivation of dignified life.

Spaces for nurture, growth and connection

The group’s first national conference, held at the Abeng Centre in Brixton, London, in 1978, brought together Black and South Asian women from across the country to fortify existing links and strategies.

They aimed to build organisations that could defend against state violence while simultaneously creating spaces for nurture, growth and connection. These groups supplied one another with childcare provision, immigration support, help and educational spaces that enabled the growth of radical political consciousness.

Black Action Against Street Harassment (BASH) fought against stop-and-search laws and the presence of specialised policing units across the country used to terrorise the racialised working class. The ‘Black’ women’s centre in Liverpool, established by a group of women of colour in the 1970s, arose out of a community response to the lack of childcare provision, mental health support and inadequate recruitment of African, Caribbean and Asian foster carers.

The Black Education Movement and the Black Supplementary School Movement emerged in the early 1970s as a means of Black self-organisation against a racist education system that deemed African and Carribean children educationally subnormal. When banks and lenders refused to give loans to Black tenants in Manchester and exploited their need for mortgages as house prices rose, informal networks formed for the purposes of finding alternative methods to acquire credit in order to secure housing collectively.

The Abasindi Co-operative, based in Moss Side and formally known as the Manchester Black Women’s Cooperative, began partly as a space to help Black mothers gain employment. It grew to provide daycare for the young and the elderly and hosted a community health centre. Many involved in the co-operative were also involved in international solidarity campaigns for the Anti-Apartheid Movement and supported socialist resistance against state repression in Nicaragua in 1979.

Amid the onslaught of the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts of 1962 and 1968, and the Immigration Act of 1971, the Brixton Black Women’s Group and others actively resisted deportations, mobilising communities using rallies, political education and forms of direct action. In the context of mass migration of workers of colour who were used to fortify Britain’s post-war economy, who faced housing and workplace discrimination and who were often concentrated in the lowest paid, least protected forms of precarious work, these networks were a lifeline in a hostile environment intent on exploiting and expelling people. Continuing a legacy of resistance against the colour bar ushered in by the work of Claudia Jones and other communist thinkers, these networks enacted a politicised practice of care that saved lives.

Despite the shifted political, social and economic terrain today, understanding this history – and how the ‘care crisis’ has been deliberately manufactured – can sharpen our analysis and strengthen our resolve to create the grassroots formations that might enable us to withstand it, and demand more. Members of the Abasindi Co-operative recall Kath Locke, a founding member, saying: “The state does not pay you to oppose it.”

If, as the theorist Tina Campt argues, care is a refusal to look past the precarity of others – an attempt to reimagine a society in which interdependence is key – then this radical history can inform our own rejection of the neoliberal logic that got us here.

Care work, in this context, is the ongoing defence of each other against the crushing forces of dispossession.