• Presenter location: Athens, Greece
• Language: English

The death of God did not free us from domination. It tore the social fabric, emboldened the profiteers, and left us alone in front of a silent, cold, and indifferent universe: the capitalist universe. Traditional communities were dissolved, and what replaced them was not the insurgent commune but the depression of the isolated nuclear family and the loneliness of the careerist. Our societies have not rejected the need for tenderness and care.

They have covered it with a hard irony that makes it look unnecessary, naive, obsolete. Anxiety, precarity, debt and exhaustion are handed back to us as individual failures, and the loneliness that follows is not an accident of the system but one of its products. This talk proposes that care, when it is born not as charity or duty, but as shared resistance to oppression, is a revolutionary act.

Drawing on Kropotkin’s ethics of mutual aid, on Anselm Jappe and Christopher Lasch on narcissism as the psychic form of late capitalism, and on The Care Collective, bell hooks and Judith Butler, it traces how diffuse fear is converted into hatred of the weak, the foreigner and the different, and how that individualism, neo-conformism, indifference and social apathy are the engines of contemporary fascism. Freedom that ends where the needs of another begin is not freedom. It is privilege. Against this, the talk proposes Anarchist Politics of the Living: open coexistence, full symbiotic inclusion, reciprocity, radical interdependence, equality of all living beings, and an attack against all authorities of this world. The working class today includes everyone losing the right to exist, to breathe, to move, to protest: the poor stripped of healthcare, trans people stripped of legal rights, migrants held in camps, rescuers of shipwrecked refugees prosecuted as criminals, students arrested inside their universities for opposing genocide. After thirty and forty years of separated single-issue struggles, feminism, queer life, anarcho-communism, labour, autonomy, radical ecology, counterculture, a generation is now looking for the points where these struggles converge. Care is one of them. Care does not aim to fix. It aims to accompany. It is the embodied reminder that nothing human is small or unworthy. The talk is based on the essay “The Revolt of Care”, written by Tasos Sagris as a member of the revolutionary symbiotic community Void Network and growing directly out of the collective’s long-running discussions on mutual aid and collective love. Void Network has organized political and cultural counter-institutions, festivals, occupations and free public gatherings in Athens since 1990.

The essay is not the position of an author or a theoretician but an attempt to formulate what a community has been working through together, and it comes to the fair in that spirit: unfinished, open to challenge, and meant to be continued in open assemblies.

The Open Discussion

The second half is a collective, non-hierarchical conversation. Proposed openings: How do we build structures of free care that do not reproduce hierarchy, professionalism or charity? How do we care for those who carry the work of caring, in occupations, squats, collectives and communities of struggle? How do we practice care as antifascist infrastructure rather than as private virtue? What do we do with our own hardness? Participants are invited to bring concrete experiences from their own projects. The aim is not conclusions but a shared inventory of practices.

Bio

Tasos Sagris is an anarchist poet, theater director and political essayist, born in Athens in 1972. In 1990 he co-founded the international anarchist collective Void Network. He is co-editor, with A.G. Schwarz and Void Network, of We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008 (AK Press, 2010), which he presented on a book tour across thirty US states. His poetry books include About Human Love in the Western Metropolitan Cities (2008), Phenomenology of the Guillotine (2018), The Ocean of Chronos (2026). He has directed theater shows (The Maids by Jean Genet, Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane) and festivals in occupied and public spaces. For the last 15 years, he has participated in the open assembly of the occupied Free Self-Organised Theater Embros in Athens. He tours regularly in Europe, Asia, Mexico, and the USA for talks and spoken-word performances. He has participated in social movements in Greece and internationally for almost four decades.