The inclusion of the right to care in the document of the new Constitution, which will be submitted to an exit plebiscite on September 4, as well as the announcement in the Public Account of a National Care System, places us in the need to reflect on what we understand by care and how we want this issue to be addressed.
The word Care it opens us to a constellation of meanings, actions, responsibilities, jobs, affections and more. In its most restrictive sense, care implies a situation of dependence, that is, there are those who need to be cared for – a girl, for example – and those who provide that care – the mother, a relative, an organization or an institution, for example. But, in particular, is it only so that care is developed? We think not.
From our perspective, people are ontologically vulnerable, fragile and interdependent, since we all require care and can provide it. Moreover, we are one of the most dependent living beings from birth, requiring other people and the link with a series of social and community institutions that sustain our life and its development to survive.
For this reason, we must place care as part of the work of reproduction and sustainability of life, which recently the Overflowing Feminist Economy Cooperative defined, in the Care Manifesto, as a strategy of resistance and sustainability “composed of those actions that allow life to go from being a possibility to a reality” (2022, p. 4).
In the social organization of care, families, the State, the market and the community participate and here we are especially interested in referring to that provided by families and communities in various contexts.
In recent years, the feminization of care has been revisited and the need to redistribute and reduce this work has been evidenced. It is the care that is carried out outside the homes by the community, by neighborhood networks and social organizations, also feminized, that have become more invisible. This type of care is deployed in collective actions such as common pots, picnic areas, health brigades, workshops, among many other forms. These are very heterogeneous and self-managed experiences of cooperativism, which result from hybrid processes between the family, the community, the State and the market, to produce and receive care (Vega-Solís et al., 2018), which usually deal with the privatization of the market or with the state public and its often homogenizing definitions. This type of care becomes visible in contexts of crisis and natural disasters, as its activation becomes more socially evident. However, it is a socio-cultural articulation that sustains daily life and that is often only thought of as an intermittent and marginal actor of the system, despite its historical power.
In different contexts of precariousness and in recent years of socio-health crisis, especially in Latin America, we see the proliferation of community responses to basic needs, as a strategy of resistance that is being configured in relation to the presence or absence of the State and the weakening of protection systems, as evidenced by the hunger epidemic that accompanied that of COVID-19.
We believe that ad portas of the design and creation of a National System of Care for Chile, social organizations and community networks, have much to say and contribute. It seems very relevant to us that it is debated openly and together with the dense community network that resists and sustains life on a daily basis, on what will be the role of the community? and how will communities participate in the design of such a System?
The new stage that began in the country, which has been pushed and sustained in large part by social movements, feminisms and women, require incorporating in the design and definitions of policies, those who have made changes possible.
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