A POWERFUL transfeminist argument for care as political resistance in Argentina, and newly urgent given Javier Milei’s austerity regime.

“What does accompanying mean? Where do we do it from? What do we do it for?” These deceptively simple questions sit at the heart of To Accompany Is Political by Florencia Montes Paez (Formas Press, £15), a fierce, generous transfeminist essay about homelessness, collective care and the possibilities of political resistance.

Montes Paez writes from 15 years of activism with No Tan Distintes (Not So Different, NTD), a social and transfeminist organisation in Buenos Aires working alongside women and queer people who are, or have been, homeless.

She also managed Frida, Argentina’s first round-the-clock centre for homeless women, queer people and their children, helped organise Buenos Aires’s first census of street homelessness, and worked on Argentina’s first national homelessness law.

This matters because To Accompany Is Political is emphatically not charity from above. Its central proposition is much more radical: that solidarity changes both the accompanied and the accompanier. Who gets to help whom? Who has knowledge? And what happens when we replace the vertical relationship between benefactor and victim with interdependence, collective organisation and struggle?

That argument has acquired particular urgency under Javier Milei. Argentina has become an international laboratory for the inhuman chainsaw school of government: slash public spending, celebrate the fiscal surplus and expect society to absorb the wounds. Pensioners have repeatedly taken to the streets; public universities have fought cuts; disability organisations have warned that essential services are being hollowed out. Behind the thrilling rhetoric of “efficiency” lies an old political question: efficient for whom?

Montes Paez offers a different laboratory. NTD’s experiments in collective housing, harm reduction, self-management and what she calls “bureaucratic accompaniment” may sound less spectacular than taking a chainsaw to the state, but they concern the stubborn business of keeping people alive while creating the conditions for them to live differently.

Translated with admirable clarity by Daniela Camozzi, Beth Knowles Casas and Raquel Arreola Casas, the book moves between political essay, feminist theory, practical methodology and collective memory. Occasionally, that mixture becomes overly schematic and didactic. I found myself longing for more mess: more individual voices, encounters and stories from those whose experiences have shaped NTD. A book devoted to accompaniment might have allowed the accompanied to interrupt its arguments more often.

But perhaps its greatest achievement is to rescue care from the realm of sentimentality. Care here is not niceness. It is infrastructure, redistribution, listening, organisation and resistance.

“Let us build from the bottom up, from the top down, in every direction,” Montes Paez concludes, “to confront capitalist patriarchy where it takes most forcefully: in the living fabric of our singular and collective bodies.”

At a moment when governments ask us to become accustomed to abandonment, To Accompany Is Political insists on something beautifully troublesome: nobody survives alone.