On Tuesday evenings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, the mutual aid network that formed during the first weeks of COVID meets to coordinate the week's food distribution, talk through who needs what, and — since the acute crisis passed three years ago — run the tenant organizing trainings that have become its second life.
It wasn't supposed to still be running. Mutual aid networks form in crises and dissolve when the crisis passes; that's the normal arc. Crown Heights Mutual Aid did something different. When the food emergency eased, the people who had been doing the work had found each other — had learned who knew what, who showed up, who could be counted on, who had been carrying what for years before COVID made carrying it visible. They had built, inside the emergency, the thing that emergencies make temporarily possible: the knowledge of each other.
They stayed. They kept meeting. They expanded from food to tenant support to the slower, harder work of community governance. The crisis passed. The infrastructure remained.
This is the care commons: a network of relationships within which care flows without being mediated by a market transaction or a bureaucratic determination of eligibility. Neighbors knowing each other's names, and deciding that knowing means obligating.
Silvia Federici was organizing for wages for housework in New York in the early 1970s when she started asking the question that would become Caliban and the Witch: where did this arrangement come from? The work women were doing — cooking, cleaning, childcare, care of the sick and elderly, the entire reproductive infrastructure that made wage labor possible — had always been work. Why had it become invisible as work? When? How?
She theorized the witch trials while running workshops with women who were naming their housework as labor for the first time. The book that resulted, Caliban and the Witch, published in 2004, thirty years after the campaign, carries the organizing's urgency in its analysis.
Start with what they burned.
Between roughly 1400 and 1700, between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed as witches across Europe and the American colonies — roughly half of the 100,000 or so brought to trial. About eighty percent of those killed were women. Most were over forty. Many were widows holding land or income of their own. Most were healers, herbalists, midwives — women whose knowledge of bodies and plants and birth made communities less dependent on the emerging market.
The body count understates the impact. The women killed were already the ones most likely to be holding what the new economy needed to take: communal knowledge, autonomous land tenure, the practical knowhow that let villages reproduce themselves without the wage. Two hundred years of trials systematically removed that demographic from the European landscape. The terror reached far beyond the executed: every woman watching learned what knowing too much, owning too much, or living too independently could cost.
The standard historical account treats this as mass hysteria overcome by Enlightenment.
Federici's argument: it was policy. Divination — naming what the surface concept had hidden.
Not a centralized conspiracy — the persecutions were conducted by local authorities, church courts, secular courts, neighbors denouncing neighbors. But the pattern across three centuries is consistent: the targets are women who hold knowledge that makes communities self-sufficient. The executions destroyed that knowledge. The terror contained the women who survived — made them afraid to practice what they knew, afraid to gather in the ways women had gathered, afraid to be seen as the kind of woman who knew too much.
Alongside this: the enclosure of common land, happening in the same centuries, converting shared fields and forests into private property, displacing peasant communities, creating the landless workforce capitalism needed. The two enclosures were part of the same transformation. The enclosure of land made communities dependent on wages. The destruction of communal care knowledge made communities dependent on the market for the things they had produced themselves. The domestic sphere was never outside the economy. It was the economy's unacknowledged foundation.
In 1972, an American activist named Selma James launched the Wages for Housework campaign with a pamphlet that made the argument in its simplest form.
James had come to feminist analysis through the Black radical tradition: her partner was C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist historian whose analysis of the Haitian Revolution and Atlantic capitalism had insisted that the labor the visible economy refused to count — enslaved labor, colonial extraction — was the labor it most depended on. She brought that tradition's understanding of invisible foundational labor to the question of housework. The two analyses converged: the slave's labor and the housewife's labor were both the foundation the visible economy ran on without counting.
The demand — pay women for housework — was designed to be impossible. Not because the organizers expected it to be met, but because the impossibility revealed the structure. If you had to pay market rates for all the care work currently being extracted for free, the profit margins on everything else would collapse. The demand makes visible what the system needs hidden: that every wage, every profit, every GDP number is calculated on the assumption that the reproductive labor that makes production possible will be performed for free by women.
Federici adds the historical mechanism: it was not always this way, and it was made this way deliberately, through the destruction of the knowledge networks that had organized care as communal responsibility.
The campaign never won its demand. What it won was the question: why does care work cost less than other work? The answer — because care has been defined as women's natural duty rather than economic labor — is now named. The naming hasn't ended the arrangement. It has made it available to be contested.
The mechanism Federici traced — care knowledge destroyed, care work made private, care rendered invisible so the market can extract it — is not historical. It is operational.
A home health aide in the Bronx — one of roughly two million in the United States — works twelve-hour shifts caring for an elderly client with advanced dementia: bathing, feeding, managing medications, providing the continuity of presence that is itself a form of care. The median wage for home health aides in New York is under $18 an hour, with no health insurance, no paid sick leave, and no pension. When the aide gets sick, she doesn't get paid. The client's family may pay $8,000 to $12,000 a month through the agency; the aide receives a fraction of that.
This is not an anomaly. It is the structure of the care economy: the work is real, the need is urgent, the skill required is genuine, and none of that translates into compensation adequate to the labor. The $10.8 trillion in unpaid care work is the shadow economy that the visible one runs on. The paid care sector, at wages that push workers into poverty, is its visible edge.
This is care under enclosure: the labor made to look like love, priced below its cost, extracted from people with few other options, generating profit for the institution that mediates between the care worker and the family that needs her.
The commons response is being built, as it always is, by people who decided the alternative was unacceptable.
Childcare collectives where parents share the labor, the cost, and the knowledge of caring for children together — outside the market, governed by the families who depend on them. Cooperative home care agencies where the workers own the business, set the terms, make the decisions — and where the quality of care improves because the incentives that degrade it under conventional employment are gone. Community care networks where neighbors organize systematic support for elderly and disabled community members, keeping people in their homes rather than in institutions. In over 350 communities across the United States, the Village to Village Network has organized exactly this: older adults and their neighbors building mutual support systems outside institutional care, on the organizing principle that the community takes responsibility for caring for its members.
Mariame Kaba has spent thirty years building the infrastructure that makes care possible when the state has decided certain people don't deserve it.
She grew up in New York, the daughter of a Guinean immigrant activist who taught her that social change was institutional work, not just individual commitment. She has organized around criminalization, domestic violence, sexual assault, and the connections between them — building youth programs, training survivor advocates, developing the community accountability processes that address harm without calling the police.
Her insight is that abolition is care. The demand to build the world that doesn't need prisons is the demand to build care infrastructure: housing, mental health support, economic security, the community relationships that make people less likely to cause harm and more capable of addressing it when harm occurs. "We keep each other safe."
Four words that contain an entire theory of public safety. We Do This 'Til We Free Us. Not surveillance. Not punishment. The network of relationships that knows you, that you are accountable to, that has invested in your wellbeing.
That network is the care commons: the accumulated relational intelligence — who can be trusted, who knows what, who shows up — that capital did not produce and cannot reproduce, but has always depended on. The enclosure of it is not metaphorical. The pricing-out of communities, the underpayment of care workers, the criminalization of mutual support: these are mechanisms for capturing what communities built, by making it legible as a service to be purchased rather than a commons to be governed.
The enclosure made care invisible — a private problem, a personal obligation, the natural duty of women who love. The commons makes it visible — shared, social, the organizing principle of communities that intend to sustain themselves.
Before we ran the restaurant, there was the Wednesday potluck. A group of us, every week. Everyone brought a dish and we dug in. There were always days of leftovers, and all of us together spent less than any one of us would have spent eating out alone. We used to joke that we should start a restaurant. Little did we know. And on the weeks someone couldn't cook, they brought what they had instead — they watched the kids, they washed the dishes. Everyone arrived with something. The table held for years.
Then someone brought friends whose idea of a dish was a handle of liquor, and whose idea of conversation was pitching their real estate brokerage. That was all it took. The magic was gone.
The work is local, intimate, and unglamorous. It doesn't scale to infinity or generate returns. It only works if people care about each other.
That is not a weakness. That is the point.