BOOK Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity (Pluto Press, 2025)
2025-07-20 by

These are heavy times. Cracks are deepening in the toxic systems surrounding us, and the forces of violence and enclosure are rushing to fill them. Against this, we need stories that remind us of what’s possible matter more than ever.

Pirate Care: Acts Against the Criminalization of Solidarity, authored by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak, is a book born in this spirit, from years of collective inquiry and struggle. Released by Pluto Press as part of their Vagabond Series, it completes the arc of the Pirate Care’s trajectory: a process that began with the launch of the collaborative syllabus just days before the COVID-19 lockdowns and concludes wit the book itself being rolled off the press the day after the second Trump inauguration. It is as if these dates sketch an astrological chart, a constellation under which the pages of this book came together, carrying the moods and tensions of their time.

The text gathers stories of stealthy rebellions and acts of solidarity deemed illegal: people crossing borders to rescue each other, communities creating access to forbidden medicines, networks protecting knowledge from the hands of power, and many more.

This is not just a catalog of refusals. It is an invitation to conspire. It is about reproductive justice in its broadest sense: tending to each other while dismantling the conditions that make care impossible. Within its pages, readers will find reflections on:

β€’ How the law criminalizes grassroots, autonomous solidarity initiatives that refuse to conform to the charity-industrial complex. β€’ How proprietary technologies subtly warp and gatekeep our social connections. β€’ How knowledge, tools, and resources for care are locked behind patents, paywalls, copyrights, and inaccessible institutions. β€’ How care, at its most intimate, is taken for granted within patriarchal family structures as free, infinite, and always available.

The book ends with a call for mutiny and federationβ€”an echo of those golden age pirates who dared to defy the imperial age at its dawn, as we must do now, as the structures of old empires crumbles and new ones gather on the horizon.

Pirate Care began as a collective syllabus (https://syllabus.pirate.care/), a tool to find each other and build a repertoire of life-sustaining acts. The book is a continuation of this collective spirit, drawing strength and insight from countless militants and organizers, to whom we owe a profound and public gratitude.

Endorsementsβ€”voices that hold us:

β€œPutting the words pirate and care together already produces a spark of excitement… A most nourishing and encouraging little book.” β€”β€―McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto; Capital is Dead

β€œIn times of rampant institutionalized cruelty and neglect… Pirate Care is a breath of fiery courage against the suffocation of hope.” β€”β€―MarΓ­a Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds

Find the book HERE

Read an excerpt of the book on e-flux journal