A New Politics of Care

Seen via The Appeal:

Global health scholars propose a jobs program to ‘put millions of Americans to work caring for one another’: Gregg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, directors of the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale, write that “the coronavirus pandemic illuminates the need “for a new politics of care, one organized around a commitment to universal provision for human needs; countervailing power for workers, people of color, and the vulnerable; and a rejection of carceral approaches to social problems.” The challenge is “to aim at ‘non-reformist reforms’-- reforms that embody a vision of the different world we want, and that work from a theory of power-building that recognizes that real change requires changing who has a say in our political process.” Gonsalves and Kapczynski argue for the launch of a “massive new jobs program,” a community health corps that “would put millions of Americans to work caring for one another, and with far more sweeping goals than just turning around the sky-rocketing unemployment figures we see today. It would serve our needs for a vast force that can track and trace the virus, but add to it workers who can support those in need, all while securing our health and building real solidarity among us.”