This talk is in three sections. The first outlines The Care Manifesto which I co-wrote with other members of ‘the Care Collective (2020). This book argues for putting ‘care’ at the centre of life, on different planes and levels — from the interpersonal to community to the state to the planetary environment – and draws on a range of past and present examples in the process. The Care Manifesto was published in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when talk of ‘care’ bloomed across a range of registers and politics. These ranged from grassroots mutual aid to state pronouncements to ‘corporate carewashing’.

The second section of the talk picks apart these manifestations and offers a typology of corporate carewashing, which it argues needs to be understood as a political act, as involved in a wider social struggle. In the Gramscian sense, it argues, carewashing is part of a ‘passive revolution’ in that it is attempting to claim and demarcate the realm of care for corporate capitalism and against social democracy. Yet today, in the wake of the ascendancy of the new right, corporations are increasingly divesting themselves of the imperative to show that ‘they care’, and are giving up being ‘woke’.

The third section therefore considers our present conjuncture: where increasingly swollen corporate power can ‘care’ or not according to their whim and in which carewashing seems to be giving way to something altogether more brutal. In this context, what are the odds for care?

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