Control Makes Institutions Brittle

In work, governance, healthcare, and resource distribution, the rules that shape our lives assume the people they govern can’t be trusted. They’re built on coercion. Punitive laws, surveillance, and exclusionary policies are presented as safeguards for stability, and the harm they do is passed off as efficiency.

What if coercion fractures more than it fortifies? Systems built on domination erode trust, alienate people, and keep doing harm.

Coercion is often defended as the only option that works. Throughout history, care-based systems rooted in equity, trust, and repair have offered real alternatives. Worker cooperatives in Spain, agroecological movements (farming that works with local ecosystems) in India, and mutual aid networks during COVID-19 all show that mutuality, abundance, and shared accountability are possible, and necessary.

Coercion fails on its own terms. If care is built into labor, governance, healthcare, and resource management, dignity, equity, and flourishing can become collective rights instead of exceptions.

Here, coercion means power that compels people through the threat of harm or deprivation, without their consent and without a route to contest it: forced treatment, punitive sanction, withheld food. A binding constraint on an institution is something else. The power to halt and reverse what is done in care’s name binds the people who hold authority, not the people it serves, and the argument rests on that difference.

Care is not just an alternative—due to its unique effect on coercion, it is a revolutionary praxis for liberation.

Coercion breaks what it controls

Coercive systems can look strong, but choosing control over trust costs them adaptability and makes them brittle.

Modern labor systems commodify time, autonomy, and relationships, and build extraction into daily life. Workers are treated as disposable tools of productivity, stripped of creativity and dignity. The pattern is old. In 16th-century England, the enclosure movement privatized communal lands, displacing farmers and cutting communities off from mutual aid. Pushing them into exploitative labor markets marked the beginning of extraction as a systemic norm, and colonial powers copied the model globally, expropriating Indigenous lands to fuel imperial economies. In Scotland, the Highland Clearances’ forced evictions of tenant farmers to make way for sheep grazing repeated the enclosures’ effects, wrecking community cohesion and entrenching economic inequality.

Amazon is the model of modern coercive labor. AI-driven surveillance penalizes inefficiencies as small as bathroom breaks. Injury rates are double the industry average, and turnover exceeds 150% a year.1 Garment workers around the world face similar exploitation, working in hazardous conditions for subsistence wages. Work doesn’t have to run this way. Cooperatives like Spain’s Mondragon Corporation share profits and decision-making power among employees, which shows a business can do well without exploitation. Agroecological movements in India and Brazil tie labor to ecological restoration and put sustainability and dignity ahead of profit.

Coercive governance confuses accountability with punishment. It treats harm as individual failure and ignores its systemic roots, and the punitive logic destabilizes communities and keeps cycles of violence going. During the 1943 Bengal Famine, British authorities put grain exports ahead of feeding local people. Millions starved, not from scarcity but because governance chose control over care, and the famine exposed the violence built into imperial policies of extraction and punishment. The United States incarcerates about 1.9 million people, disproportionately Black and Indigenous. Australia’s offshore detention centers isolate and dehumanize migrants, compounding harm instead of repairing it. Algorithms increasingly enforce the same punitive logic: predictive policing and automated decision-making systems disproportionately target marginalized communities and make the coercion invisible.

Transformative justice puts repair ahead of punishment. Oakland’s Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) works through dialogue and systemic repair, and in Rojava (the Kurdish-led autonomous region in northeastern Syria), participatory governance models rest on care-based accountability.

Psychiatric care still leads with force

Mental healthcare institutionalizes coercion through forced hospitalization, compulsory medication, and compliance-driven therapies, putting control ahead of trust and healing. The asylum model that took shape in the 19th century cast patients as threats to society. Its 20th-century descendants justified coercive interventions like forced lobotomies, sold as “therapeutic” solutions for mental illness, and sterilizations, presented as public health measures. These fell disproportionately on marginalized people and made social control part of mental healthcare. Coercive practices remain entrenched worldwide. Neurodivergent and economically disadvantaged people face disproportionate rates of involuntary hospitalization, which erodes trust and worsens outcomes. Rights-based care already exists: Finland’s Open Dialogue therapy is built on trust and collaboration, and Italy’s Trieste Model ties mental healthcare to housing, education, and employment and rejects institutionalization for care of the whole person.

Scarcity is often managed, or left in place, in ways that serve exclusion, commodification, and inequality. During the 19th-century Irish famine, blight destroyed the potato crop. British authorities, committed to laissez-faire, let food exports continue and limited relief while about a million people died. About a third of the world’s food is lost or wasted every year while more than 700 million people go hungry, and corporate monopolies keep scarcity narratives alive to put profits ahead of human needs. Movements like La Via Campesina reclaim land for regenerative agriculture, and Kerala’s community-led water governance ensures equitable access and takes apart privatized scarcity.

Care makes defection survivable

Care takes coercion apart by building equity, adaptability, and mutuality into systems. It treats power as relational. Trust and resilience follow when defection (breaking a cooperative agreement) is survivable because repair, not punishment, is the default.

Where coercion isolates harm and assigns blame, care treats accountability as relational and aims at repair and systemic change. Oakland’s Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective builds long-term spaces of accountability, healing and resilience for survivors, bystanders and those who have caused harm, and Indigenous land-back movements join ecological restoration to reparative justice.

Care-based accountability still has to answer for the person who keeps causing harm. Transformative justice practice puts the safety of the people harmed first, sets conditions on the person causing harm, and keeps a path back to repair open. Separation can be part of that. What it refuses is punishment as the default and exile as the only outcome.

Care-based systems treat abundance as regenerative, with reciprocity and shared stewardship as the operating principles. Agroecology in Cuba turned scarcity into sustainable abundance during the Special Period, the economic crisis after Soviet aid ended in the early 1990s. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid networks moved resources faster and more equitably than many governments.

Care also reaches past survival to joy. It’s easier to run coercive systems on people who are isolated from one another, so shared joy works against them. At Standing Rock, art, music, and ceremony sustained the resistance and held people together.

Scaling care without neoliberal co-optation means growing without losing the relationships that make it care. Federated, decentralized models show how. Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting let communities allocate resources directly from 1989 until the city suspended it in 2017. It shows both that the model can last for decades and that a city government can still end it.

Care shifts power only when the people it’s done to can halt it, have it reviewed, and reverse it. A patient who may object to forced treatment but can’t stop it has been consulted, and consultation leaves the decision with whoever already held it.

From systemic to personal

1. Support Mutual Aid Networks and Worker Cooperatives—Contribute to organizations like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief.
2. Advocate for Rights-Based Mental Healthcare and Transformative Justice Policies—Push for consent-based mental healthcare and restorative justice.
3. Invest in Agroecological and Regenerative Systems—Back movements like La Via Campesina.
4. Center Joy and Creativity in Activism and Governance—Make room for art, music, and community-building; they hold movements together.