Caring as piracy in a bureaucratic hellscape

Neoliberalism has mutated state provisions into a tool for surveillance to punish and alienate the vulnerable. But the people behind Pirate Care are taking the battle for a common care structure to the high seas. 

Brought together by scholars and activists Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, Pirate Care is a research project and network dedicated to opposing the state’s bureaucratic negligence. The project invites care initiatives operating in the ambiguity of legal grey-areas to reflect on, and share, their own practices of pirate care as part of a wider web of care initiatives acting transnationally in Europe. This includes collectives such as The Freedom Flotilla Coalition, Women on Waves and Sea-Watch, just to name a few. The practice of pirate care is people keeping banned anti-fascist books in circulation, offering meals to the homeless, organising pirate childcare within their communities; finding the ways to keep solidarity alive and thriving. 

Pirate Care will tell you very quickly that this care isn’t nicety, but that caring is labour, that this labour is not shared equally and that the labourer needs access to tools, resources and methodologies to carry out care. Pirate Care is committed to equipping those curious about care labour with the best they can give.

Their website pirate.care is host to their past events, exhibitions, interviews and articles (all exceptionally archived). It’s also the home of their pledge to the future. 

By far the largest element of the site is the collective’s syllabus: an archive of writings on the ideology and practice of pirate care written collectively by scholars, activists and practitioners between 2018-2021. Its breadth could be overwhelming in less careful hands, but this syllabus invites your consideration on matters ranging from housing struggles, transhackfeminism, and psycho-social autonomy, to racialized policing and the impact of COVID-19 on care, and more. 

Their work shows what a future common care structure could look like, and what it looks like now on a smaller scale. It’s a carefully crafted call for more people to dwell in the shadows, to be creative, to take risks, to inconvenience yourself for the sake of caring for another person. And of course they encourage a more literal take on the concept of piracy, with their peer-to-peer library project Memory of the World, which includes free downloads of all the syllabus reference texts and more. 

It’s a carefully crafted call for more people to dwell in the shadows, to be creative, to take risks, to inconvenience yourself for the sake of caring for another person.

In early 2025 Graziano, Mars and Medak collectively published Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press, 2025), which is described on their site as ‘[completing] the arc of Pirate Care’s trajectory’ and ‘an invitation to conspire’.  There hasn’t been much activity from them since their book, but this is not the kind of movement that just ends. Their role as facilitators of pirate care practices will continue with their book, and their syllabus. 

It’s now on the rest of us to be radicalized into caring—into weaving care webs—even as laws and legislation against solidarity become ever more palpable and the fight against fascism is steeped in bureaucracy, let yourselves be inspired by the action Pirate Care have documented. It’s easy to feel like there’s nothing we can do, but that’s only if we’re playing by the rules.