For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity―Reflections from Greece (CareNotes: A Notebook of Health Autonomy)

“Here, the treatment of pathologies—such as cancers or viruses—is considered as important as dismantling the causes of pathologies, including the social problems of debt, homelessness, police violence, and isolation. We must grasp how the de-individualization of care, what we might refer to as the communization of care , is central to fighting state and capital’s racialized and gendered forms of abandonment.” For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity—Reflections from Greece explores the landscape of care spaces coordinated by autonomous collectives in Greece, including clinics, social spaces for health, social kitchens, and safe spaces liberated from the state and capital. The significance of autonomous spaces is intensified in the very moment the state, capital, and their complicit institutions attempt to penetrate their power via austerity and state violence. In tandem with the broader anticapitalist movement, these spaces have ruptured the legitimacy of the state and capital, and reclaimed care beyond the limits of the biomedical, nonprofit, and capitalist frameworks. The experience of Greek autonomous care spaces encapsulates care within, as well as beyond, the biomedical; where addressing pathologies, such as cancers or colds, are as important as dismantling the causes of the pathology, including debt, homelessness, police violence, and social isolation. The collected essays grasp how emotional and physical distress is preventable—where ensuring access to antibiotics, vaccines, or herbal remedies is as relevant as liberating unused space for housing or de-policing a neighborhood. The subjects of this collection include a network of users of psychosocial services, defending their right to autonomy within mental healthcare systems; a healthcare center organized and maintained by an anarchist collective; a worker’s clinic founded by a coalition of factory workers and healthcare solidarity activists; among others. The Greek contribution to autonomous care work emancipates labor, space, and resources towards a form of life that sustains the bodies and well-being of the collectives directly involved in this process, and the broader network of autonomous communities that rely on such care spaces to reproduce other modes of noncapitalist life. Efforts to defend and expand the very elements necessary for the survival of our bodies and ecology are in tandem with efforts to rupture from hierarchies, profits, and institutionalized singularities. For Health Autonomy is a powerful collection of first-hand accounts of concrete alternatives that are replacing our need for police and prisons based on the collective power of communities and care workers. These reflections have merged from within and beyond healthcare institutions. The present way of life is a war against our bodies. Nearly everywhere, we are caught in a crumbling health system that furthers our misery and subordination to the structural violence of capital and a state that only intensifies our general precarity. Can we build the capacity and necessary infrastructure to heal ourselves and transform the societal conditions that continue to mentally and physically harm us? Amidst the perpetual crises of capitalism is a careful resistanceorganized by medical professionals and community members, students and workers, citizens and migrants. For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond AusterityReflections from Greece explores the landscape of care spaces coordinated by autonomous collectives in Greece. These projects operate in fierce resistance to austerity, state violence and abandonment, and the neoliberal structure of the healthcare industry that are failing people. For Health Autonomy is a powerful collection of first-hand accounts of those who join together to build new possibilities of care and develop concrete alternatives based on the collective ability of communities and care workers to replace our dependency on police and prisons. ABOUT CARENOTES COLLECTIVE Intensifying inequality and violence have heightened the need to deepen our capacity to resist, offer concrete alternatives, and reproduce ourselves in the process. CareNotes Collective organizes directly on this terrain and seeks to record and amplify the experiences of those struggling for health autonomy in their own communities. Our challenge is to imagine how to expand these practices while defending our communities from the risks of cooption, state violence, and emotional trauma as well as financial domination. Despite the continued violence of the state and private sector, efforts to protect our bodies and environment continue to emerge from those of us left with few other means of sustaining daily life. Yet those who are excluded from the basic right to housing, health, food, safe spaces, emotional wellbeing, and so many other needs, are vilified. Simultaneously, the efforts of care workers committed to our general well-being (educators, healthcare, farm workers, social workers, neighbors, mothers, autonomous networks) are also devalued in an endless restructuring of crisis. One strategy is recognizing the centrality of care workersmothers, the elderly, the pathologized, migrants, LGBTQ+ communities, and autonomous networksin creating sites of counterpower where we can collectively defend and care for one another while resisting the violence of capitalist life. Such collective care has the potential to liberate space and time, to transform workflows within and beyond traditional care spaces, and to link networks otherwise separated by wealth, race, expertise, and geography. For Health Autonomy: Horizons of Care Beyond Austerity--Reflections from Greece' explores the landscape of care spaces coordinated by autonomous collectives in Greece, including clinics, social spaces for health, social kitchens, and safe spaces liberated from the state and capital. The significance of autonomous spaces is intensified in the very moment the state, capital, and their complicit institutions attempt to penetrate their power via austerity and state violence. In tandem with the broader anticapitalist movement, these spaces have ruptured the legitimacy of the state and capital, and reclaimed care beyond the limits of the biomedical, nonprofit, and capitalist frameworks.0The experience of Greek autonomous care spaces encapsulates care within, as well as beyond, the biomedical; where addressing pathologies, such as cancers or colds, are as important as dismantling the causes of the pathology, including debt, homelessness, police violence, and social isolation. The collected essays grasp how emotional and physical distress is preventable--where ensuring access to antibiotics, vaccines, or herbal remedies is as relevant as liberating unused space for housing or de-policing a neighborhood. The subjects of this collection include a network of users of psychosocial services, defending their right to autonomy within mental healthcare systems; a healthcare center organized and maintained by an anarchist collective; a worker's clinic founded by a coalition of factory workers and healthcare solidarity activists; among others.0'For Health Autonomy' is a powerful collection of first-hand accounts of concrete alternatives that are replacing our need for police and prisons based on the collective power of communities and care workers. These reflections have merged from within and beyond healthcare institutions