For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greece by CareNotes Collective

Abstract

Reviewed by: For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greeceby CareNotes Collective Heath Cabot (bio) CareNotes Collective, For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greece. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions. 2020. Pp. 110. Paper $15.00. For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity, Reflections from Greeceis a collection of essays and interviews focused around radical healthcare [End Page 571]movements in Greece. Initiated by the CareNotes Collective, the book is grounded on the premise that—in the ongoing crisis of capitalism—there are crucial lessons to be learned from individuals and collectives in Greece that have responded to entrenched economic downturn, and the violence of austerity, by reconfiguring how care is conceptualized, organized, and (re)distributed. As the Collective notes in Chapter One, the book seeks to "illuminate the radical imaginings and creation of new care spaces that will allow us to build power to confront the systemic crises we face collectively" (12). As I write this review, the United States is closing in on 80,000 deaths from Covid-19. Who knows where we will be once it is published? Covid-19 has thrown into relief the extraordinary (if not unexpected) costs of privatized, profit-driven healthcare; the flows of people, goods, money, and contagions that accompany global capitalism; and the ways in which a constant focus on the health of markets renders lives expendable (Stuckler and Basu 2013)—even on a massive scale. In the past few weeks, municipalities and communities across the United States have responded in highly variable, often contradictory, ways. My own small neighborhood in Pittsburgh is a microcosm of these variations, as well as the entrenched individualism through which ideas of health and the good are almost always inflected in this country. I hear guidelines to "shelter in place" met with frustration as an infringement on freedom (individual freedom, of course—I cringe to think how my neighbors would respond to the lockdown measures that stereotypically noncompliant populations of the European South have followed with great self-sacrifice). Neighborly requests that people wear masks in businesses and on the street engender not just friendly compliance but also responses like, why don't you stay home? Or, if you don't like how we conduct things go somewhere else. Getting back to business is persistently framed as more urgent than cutting down on infections and deaths. But there has also been an explosion of networks of mutual aid, a term that I myself first encountered in Greece, in Greek, and which I heard increasingly frequently when I began research on the social solidarity initiatives that began to emerge in Greece in the early 2010s. These initiatives focus on horizontalized forms of redistribution (of medicines and care, food, education, and other crucial resources). While described as a form of mutual aid (αλληλοβοήθεια), solidarity in Greece has a much longer history—often cited as a core value in Greek rural life (Friedl 1964; Du Boulay 1972), which transferred later to urban contexts (Bakalaki 2008) and has been revivified and granted new meanings under austerity. Clearly, Covid-19, like many events codified as crises, is engendering forms of widescale critique and questioning ( krisi) challenging even us here in the United States, that bastion of individualism, to reimagine aspects [End Page 572]of health and community. Among those reimaginings are micropractices of commoning (such as those described in the preface to For Health Autonomyby Silvia Federici), either through more organized networks or informal modes of exchange and redistribution that groups of neighbors and friends have instituted. All this is to say that the premise of this collection—to learn from radical imaginings that challenge us to rethink health and care in terms of collective notions of human, multi-species, and planetary flourishing—is particularly relevant and even urgent now. This volume is quite short (just 110 pages), and the contributions are overall relatively free of jargon and engaging to read. Contributors range from engaged visitors to Greece (Cassie Thornton and Marta Perez) who seek to narrate what they learned from their meetings with local activists and stakeholders, to a variety of key figures (individual and collective) in the solidarity-based healthcare...