Kathleen Lynch - Care and Capitalism

Migrant care workers and domestic workers generally work without labour protections. They share common challenges including irregular hours of work and precarious working conditions, low wages, problems with immigration status and experiences of discrimination (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Glenn 2010; Romero 2018). Although the ILO convention on domestic work (Domestic Workers Convention, 2011, No. 189), 7offers protections for domestic workers, it has only been ratified by thirty-one countries, and is not ratified by several European countries (including the UK, France, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands), by Saudi Arabia, by the United Arab Emirates or by the Federal government of the USA. For those who migrate to do care and domestic work, there are also emotional and personal challenges in adapting to living in intimate family settings, especially where they do not share the family’s cultural values or practices (Lutz 2016). Paid care work is not just classed and gendered, therefore; it is also racialized, especially given the role that migrant labour plays in care provision.

We live within a gendered global order in which the overall subordination of women to men is one of the principal axes of power. Gender relations are a major component of social structure, and gender politics play a central role in determining our collective fate (Connell 1995: 67–86; Folbre 2020).

While patriarchy is facilitative of capitalism (as are other hierarchies, including racism), it did not originate within capitalism. The enslavement of women, combining both racism and sexism, preceded the formation of classes and class oppression, while patriarchy as a social system of norms, values, customs and roles preceded capitalism by a few thousand years (Lerner 1986: 213). The historical subordination of women as a social group originated in the shift from a matrilineal/matrilocal (mother-right) social structure to one that was patrilineal/patrilocal (father-right). And while women were again domesticated and subordinated much later in history as a result of agricultural enclosures and the divisions that ensued between unpaid and paid labour under industrialization, their original subordination was not generated in capitalism. For many hundreds of years, women were used as a form of family currency in marriage arrangements; they were frequently proffered as a peace offering, or to create alliances, between warring tribes. While men were often killed after conquests, women were taken as slaves for reproduction and sexual work. Their so-called ‘sexual services’ were part of their labour although their children were the property of their masters (Lerner 1986: 212–29).

The use and abuse of women that operated in prehistoric times, and that found expression during colonization and at times of war, have continued into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, often on a deeply racialized basis. The organized sexual enslavement and rape of between 100,000 and 200,000 Korean teenage girls (so-called comfort women) by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, where they were forced to have sex with several men (raped) each day, exemplifies this (Hicks 1997). More recent studies of Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Algeria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, all demonstrate the continued widespread abuse and rape of women at times of military conflict (Ní Aoláin, Cahn, Haynes and Valji 2018).

The North Atlantic gender order has its roots in the European colonial period beginning in the later 1400s. Empire building was a highly gendered enterprise (Connell 1995). The domination, control, use and abuse of women were endemic to colonization, justified on the dubious philosophical and moral rationale that women were part of nature rather than society, especially if they were women of the colonized peoples (Patel and Moore 2018: 111–37).

While a commercial dividend was paramount in driving colonization and exploitation, including the exploitation of care work, the role that ideas played in both framing and legitimating the cheapening of things, including caring, was also crucial. Moral concepts and ideas were deployed that not only named the world but created it ontologically, implicitly prescribing as well as describing who and who was not fully human (Patel and Moore 2018: 47).

One of the sources of inspiration was the work of Descartes (1991). He drew a philosophical distinction between mind and body, between thinking things and extended things, res cogitans and res extensa . Not all humans were defined as thinking, including women and indigenous peoples, and non-humans, so-called extended things , or nature . Nature was subsequently defined as something to be possessed and used by humans; it was to be controlled and dominated by society (Patel and Moore 2018: 45–55). The two laws of capitalist ecology, one distinguishing between man ( sic ) and nature, and the other classifying nature as a thing to be dominated and controlled by man, provided moral justification for the exploitation of swathes of humanity and the destruction of much natural life. 8

To justify making care cheap it had first to be defined as worthless, part of nature rather than society. This was achieved through the equation of care labour with femininity and women, people who were not fully human: as women were exploitable things, then by default their caring ‘ nature ’ was exploitable. Like water, trees and clean air, care was defined as freely available from the nature of women, regarded as being produced without effort or work. Within the binary Cartesian mind/body logic of value, as carers were part of nature , exploitable things, so caring was not an individuality-defining or citizenship-defining activity (Sevenhuijsen 1998; Hobson 2000).

While the concept of hegemonic or idealized masculinity changed over time from rule by physical violence, and the threat of violence, to rule by male-promulgated laws operated within the machinery of the state; and while it changed location, from the colonies to the factories, from the high seas to the financial markets, the boardroom and the stock exchange (Connell 1995: 185–203); the governing principle of control has remained in place as a defining feature of hegemonic masculinity.

The idea that it is natural and legitimate for men to dominate women informs structures, policies and practices across social, economic, affective and political life (Connell 1995: 73–8). Though hegemonic masculinity is not singular in form, changing with history and culture, from imperial times to neoliberal times, taking localized and globalized forms, and being contested as well as accommodated (Connell 2016), it remains extremely powerful including among the younger generation (Harvey, Ringrose and Gill 2013).

The patriarchal codes that are bound up with hegemonic masculinity do not just create boundaries between women and men; they also create hierarchies between men, external and internal hegemonies that define some forms of masculinity as subordinate (Demetriou 2001). In neoliberal capitalist times, the powerful transnational business elite epitomize a strong form of entrepreneurial masculinity not just in the Western metropole but in China, India and wider Asia (Connell 2016). Hoang’s (2014) research in Ho Chi Minh city shows how wealthy men demonstrate their status and power over women and other men by socializing in expensive bars and sex venues, while research in multinational-controlled garment factories in Malaysia (Elias 2008) exemplifies the deeply gendered forms of work in these export zones, in which women are persistently subordinate.