On the economies that sustain us
Sarah gets a text at 3pm. Her neighbour's back has gone again. She's halfway through a deadline but stops, picks up groceries, climbs three flights of stairs. Later, she wonders if this is the fifth time this month. Later still, she wonders if she minds.
We care in spirals, not straight lines. The same hands that carry shopping bags, also close doors. The same voice that checks in, also gossips. We feed each other and starve each other, sometimes in the same conversation.
Watch how care moves through a street. Mrs X waters not just her plants but the ones outside the empty flat next door, while the ivy slowly reclaims the abandoned building's walls. The teenagers who everyone complains about help her carry her shopping, then scatter seeds from their pockets for the birds. The man who never speaks to anyone still puts his bins out quietly, never waking the baby upstairs, always checking the fox family hasn't been disturbed. The woman who organises everything leaves passive-aggressive notes about noise but also feeds the stray cats that no one claims to own.
In the spaces between what we track and what we count, something else operates. Here lives the economy of relation, where exchange transcends transaction. The babysitting swap that works until someone keeps score. The tool library where the good tools disappear. The community garden where some people weed and others just harvest, and somehow things still grow. The soil doing its patient work regardless of our politics, the mycelium crossing boundaries we draw in chalk.
The vacant lot transformed slowly, one planted seed at a time. Children learned tomato names in three languages whilst grandmothers shared soil wisdom across fence lines. Teenagers painted murals between the beans, office workers stopped for mint tea during lunch breaks. When developers arrived with demolition notices, suddenly everyone had opinions. But who was caring for whom? The gardeners tending plants, the neighbours sharing harvest, the developers providing housing, the city managing land use, the earth holding everything together? All of it necessary, none of it neat.
Care disguises itself as other things. The book club that's really about checking everyone's still alive. The planning meeting that's really about having somewhere to belong. The argument about parking that's really about being seen. We organise bake sales and petition drives, community gardens and tenant unions, not because we're good but because we need each other, and need is complicated.
In Argentina, recovered factories operate as worker cooperatives after economic collapse. Employees took over abandoned plants, learned management collectively, built solidarity economies. Extraordinary examples of worker self-organisation, though they emerged from crisis rather than choice, creating democratic workplaces that both challenge capitalism and remain precarious within it.
Kerala's women's self-help groups pool savings, start enterprises, transform villages. Extraordinary networks of mutual support, though they also navigate India's complex social hierarchies, sometimes challenging them, sometimes reflecting them. The same circles that lend money also weave together lives in ways that both sustain and constrain.
Time banks promise equality: an hour of anyone's time equals anyone else's. But whose time is flexible enough to bank? Who has skills that others want? Who feels comfortable asking for help? The lawyer's hour of legal advice trades instantly, while hours of addiction recovery support go unmatched. Even our attempts to flatten hierarchy reveal the hills and valleys we're building on.
Community land trusts keep housing affordable forever, until they don't. Until the community changes and new voices want different things. Until affordable becomes relative and forever becomes negotiable. Until preservation becomes exclusion wearing a friendly face. The land itself patient beneath our plans, hosting whatever we build upon it, outlasting our certainties.
We care imperfectly, partially, paradoxically. Like forest canopies that share nutrients through root networks whilst competing for light above ground. Like rivers that both nourish and flood. The mutual aid network that feeds hundreds during crisis but fractures over whose crisis counts. The housing cooperative that works beautifully until someone wants to move their mother in and discovers the occupancy limits nobody thought to question. The community garden where vegetables flourish and relationships wither, where the slugs and the volunteers both do exactly what they need to do.
This isn't failure. This is how care works across species, across scales, across time. Policy papers draw clean lines; life creates tangled webs of interdependence. We care badly and well, sometimes in the same gesture, just as forests care for some species while crowding out others, just as weather systems bring both rain and storms. We build alternatives that reproduce the problems they sought to solve, then build new alternatives to address those problems, like succession in an ecosystem, each stage creating conditions for the next.
The question isn't whether these experiments work. They work and they fail, often simultaneously. The question is what we learn from the working and the failing, how we tend our gardens and our capacity to keep gardening when the slugs eat the lettuce and the committees argue about compost.
Every mutual aid network, every cooperative enterprise, every time bank, every community land trust carries within it both the seeds of transformation and the DNA of the systems it seeks to replace. We can only build from where we are, with who we are, carrying what we carry.
The economy of care operates in contradiction. It feeds and controls, liberates and constrains, includes and excludes. It's the parent who gives everything and expects gratitude. The neighbour who helps and keeps track. The community that welcomes newcomers but never quite lets them in. The movement that speaks of solidarity while reproducing hierarchy.
This is how we really take care. Not perfectly, not purely, but persistently. In the gap between intention and impact, between caring for and caring about, between what we say we value and what we actually do. In the space where our best impulses meet our deepest fears, where our generosity collides with our scarcity, where our love gets tangled up with our need to be loved.
We care because we must, and we care awkwardly because we're part of systems larger than ourselves, and we keep caring because the alternative is isolation, which nothing survives for long. In the trying, in the failing, in the trying again, something else becomes possible. Something closer to ecology: the messy, necessary, impossible work of being alive together.