2025-03-25, Between care and control

In this moment of accelerated crisis — legal breakdown, visible state violence, the fast erosion of institutional legitimacy — there’s a growing wave of calls for action. Much of it comes from people who, until recently, insisted that electoralism or procedural reform was the only viable path. Now they’re calling for general strikes, mass occupations, coordinated disruptions. On the surface, this looks like a pivot: away from state trust, toward confrontation. But if you look closer, a particular logic is being carried over. These calls for mass action are often framed in terms of legitimacy through size. People argue that mass action is necessary because it is safer. Because it has weight. Because there is, implicitly, protection in numbers.

At the same time, we’re seeing another kind of response — also emerging from that same social terrain. As people share small, local, individual actions — shoplifting banner materials, organizing unpermitted aid work, refusing to comply with public health abandonment — others respond with caution. They say: be careful what you post. That’s dangerous. You’re not being honest about the risk. You’re leading people astray.

The two sets of responses — the call for mass legitimacy and the reflex of warning against individual initiative — seem opposed, but they’re not. They’re both responses shaped by the logic of late liberal harm governance: the idea that political action must be managed in order to be legitimate. That risk is something to be administrated.

What’s revealing in this moment is not just that many people hold this logic. It’s that they mistake it for care.

Care, in this framework, becomes synonymous with risk management. And management is only seen as legitimate when it scales — when it reflects the imagined practices of a state, a union, a campaign. When someone acts outside of that — alone, early, without announcing it — the instinct is to ask whether it was properly authorized.

That instinct doesn’t go away when people lose faith in the state. What happens instead is that they begin to reproduce the role of the state in how they interact with each other. They become the administrators of the discourse. They warn, contextualize, preempt, and correct — not always because they want to, but because they’ve been trained to understand responsibility as a matter of managing the behavior of others.

We see this in how people respond to masking. When someone says “you can evaluate a person’s political consistency by whether they’re still masking,” the immediate pushback is that this is too judgmental. That it ignores nuance. That it fails to consider personal context.

But these replies don’t contest the claim that the abandonment of masking has caused real harm. They don’t deny that immunocompromised and disabled people have been excluded, that COVID continues, that collective safety has collapsed. What they do is reframe the conversation: away from harm, and toward whether the judgment of the unmasked has been ethically justified.

This is exactly what Elizabeth Povinelli names as a defining feature of late liberalism in Economies of Abandonment. Harm is not denied. It is tolerated, as long as the actor can be shown to have been constrained. If a choice can be framed as non-choice, if behavior can be understood as economically or emotionally rational, then harm becomes acceptable. Because it becomes ungovernable through traditional moral metrics — and so the question shifts from “what happened?” to “how do we feel about what happened?”

The same logic governs responses to small direct action. When someone shares a minor disruption — something deliberately scaled to the moment, careful, precise — the pushback is almost never about the target or the consequence. It’s about the terms under which it was shared. Was it safe to post? Will someone misinterpret it? Did the actor properly disclose the risk?

Again, we’re not talking about critique from within an organizing context. We’re talking about a discourse environment shaped by internalized governance. It’s not strategy being asked for. It’s supervision.

And when someone proposes a general strike — an action known historically to trigger state repression, with no infrastructure currently in place to support it — the same logic reverses itself. Suddenly, the action is defended on the grounds that its very scale makes it safe. That enough people doing it together will make it real.

This is how governance logic works: individual action is dangerous unless it’s been validated, mass action is safe because it feels legitimate, and risk is judged not by its material content but by how well it aligns with the imagined responsibilities of the responsible political actor.

In this model, the role of “the good political actor” is to manage harm in a way that feels administratively plausible. To delay judgment until all contingencies have been mapped. To withhold action until it looks collective. To criticize behavior based on whether it has been governed appropriately.

And this is why so many people are deeply uncomfortable with political practice that begins without permission.

The people who continue to mask are not morally pure. They are simply acting in alignment with an analysis they already held. They didn’t stop when the mandates ended because they were never masking out of obedience. They were masking because they understood the system had already abandoned them — and others. And they understood that action didn’t require consensus to be valid.

The people still stealing supplies, organizing unapproved aid, avoiding superspreader events, refusing to perform normalcy — they are not doing this to provoke or inspire. They’re doing it because it’s necessary, and because they no longer believe anyone is coming to make it safe for them to begin.

They are not reckless. They’re just no longer oriented around permission.

What this moment reveals is how many others still are.

People want mass action because it feels legitimate.

They reject individual initiative because it feels ungoverned.

They describe both impulses as “care,” but the framework is governance all the way down.

Care is not governance.

Care does not wait for consensus.

Care does not require everyone to understand.

Care is not afraid of smallness, or inconsistency, or discomfort.

Care is practice.

And people are already doing it.

The task now is not to coordinate everyone into legitimacy.

It’s to stop mistaking legibility for alignment.

And to start recognizing that many of the people acting earliest, and with the most clarity, are not deviating from care — they’re embodying it.

And they are not early.

They are simply not waiting.