Kathleen Lynch - Care and Capitalism

Even a cursory glance at the leaders of the G20 or the EU 27 highlights the hegemony of White male political power. Outside of politics, men are twice as likely to be managers as women within the European Union: only 6.3 per cent of CEO positions in major publicly listed companies were held by women in 2019 (European Commission 2019: 5). Women’s lower status is reflected in their earnings: around 25 per cent of the top one per cent of wage earners in the EU are women, though in some countries it is lower, with just 17 per cent of the top one percent of earners being women in the UK (European Commission 2019: 20). Men’s dominance of senior posts and their higher earnings are likely to continue, especially with the rise of globalized corporations where geographical mobility and 24/7 availability are expected (Vahter and Masso 2019). A long-hours’ work culture is not conducive to good caring, simply because it takes time from care.

Kate Millett’s assertion some fifty years ago regarding the persistence of men’s patriarchal power remains largely true organizationally today:

the military, industry, technology, universities, science, political offices, finances – in short, every avenue of power within the society, including the coercive force of the police, is [almost] 13entirely in male hands. … What lingers of supernatural deity, the Deity, ‘His’ ministry, together with ethics and values, the philosophy and art of our culture – its very civilization – as T.S. Eliot once observed, is of male manufacture. (Millett 1971: 25)

What underpins White male control is a very particular concept of what it is to be a man, what it is to be masculine. Because we become what we live, the work that we do, and what and who we value while doing it, have a major impact on our character and who we become (Sayer 2009: 5). By practising the norms of competitive masculinity, it is inevitable that most men will absorb related capitalist values over time (Hartmann 1979: 21). By filling the places created by other powerful men, each new generation of men is engaged in enacting the practices and codes of hegemonic masculinity that make these posts what they are (Connell 2000). What happens in parallel with living out hegemonic, dominant-led masculinity is the denigration of the qualities associated with its opposite, namely social need and dependency. Despite the emergence of hybrid masculinities, and the selective incorporation of elements of identity associated with various marginalized and subordinated masculinities as well as femininities into hegemonic masculinities, the new hybrids do not signal the end of male dominance (Demetriou 2001; Messerschmidt 2010). Combining toughness with tenderness in a male public persona often masks the perpetuation of male systems of power and inequality (Messner 2007). Borrowing some ‘soft’ feminine symbols and practices may even conceal male power by giving it a symbolically acceptable face. Much research on hybrid masculine practices shows that they often work in ways that ‘fortify symbolic and social boundaries, perpetuating social hierarchies in new (and “softer”) ways’ (Bridges and Pascoe 2014: 255). The principle of dominance that is central to masculinity remains intact; it is defined against femininity and its perceived vulnerability and dependency. As it is men who carry capitalism’s torch, and define its parameters in elite positions, capitalism and hegemonic masculinity are deeply embedded with each other.

Independent of bureaucracies, capitalism produces moral dispositions of indifference to the interests of others, what Adorno (2005) termed ‘bourgeois coldness’ in the pursuit of one’s own interests. While upper-class women negotiate the services of cleaning, caring and catering for the family, upper-class men generally do not meet poor women in person, but only know them as the providers of abstract, invisibilized services as cleaners, caterers or childcare workers. These men are not confronted by the in-person feel of poverty. Even in average-income households, men do not manage the household harms of capitalism as much as women, especially where they are felt most keenly and cannot be ignored, namely in poor families (O’Neill 1992; Dodson 2010). The moral imperative to do hands-on caring does not apply to men as it does to women (Bubeck 1995; Glenn 2000; O’Brien 2007). Men are allowed to be ‘cold’, to be careless (in hands-on care terms), more than women.

While there are developments in Europe promoting a caring masculinity model to replace the hegemonic ideal of male dominance, especially in the academic field (Ruby and Scholz 2018), how and when that will translate into familial, organizational and state politics remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, unless caring and hegemonic concepts of masculinity are better aligned, it is hard to see how a caring world order can be part of a new political imaginary.

To date, the overlap between the constituencies of capitalist and patriarchal interests, not just in maintaining the hegemony of men in heterosexual families, but in the developing of hegemonic constructs of competitive, controlling masculinity in employment and within the machinery of the state, means that capitalism and patriarchy are inextricably linked. And the same can be said of the relationship of capitalism and racism; the success of the capitalist project globally is not only deeply classed and gendered; it is also deeply racialized and tied to a long history of colonialism (Patel and Moore 2018).

As noted in chapter 6, the Cartesian philosophical distinction between mind and body , between thinking things and extended things , had important implications for women and indigenous people. Within that paradigm, not all humans were defined as fully human thinking beings, and this included slaves, women and indigenous peoples; they became part of the non-human, so-called extended things, part of nature rather than society . Thus, Cartesian logic was built on and legitimated the exploitation and domination of nature , and of those things equated with nature, among them women (Patel and Moore 2018: 45–55).

Given the conceptualization of women as an object of use, it was inevitable that their caring work would also be open to exploitation. What was feminine was inferior, and what the feminine character produced was of less value simply because it was produced by a woman (De Beauvoir 1993). Even when women entered into the work of animal rationale or homo faber , they still found that their work was not granted equal standing (Smith 1987). Women poets were not seen as writing about matters of universal interest (Boland 1996). 14There is no profession or job that women dominate that is comparable in status and power to that of men, even when that job of work is in the public domain (Witz and Savage 1991).

While the intellectual denigration of care work as natural to women, part of their essential nature , facilitated the exploitation of colonized women/carers, care was denigrated whether women did it or not as the dependency that called for care was seen as an aberration in the adult human condition, ‘a sign of incompleteness in an adult’, in neoliberal thinking (Moynihan 1973: 17). Being an adult and a citizen was closely aligned with the ideals of independence and autonomy in the post-industrial era; there were no ‘good’ dependencies for adults (Fraser and Gordon 1997: 135).

As being dependent is shameful in a society where productivity and ‘active citizenship’ reign as superior values, by extension, caring for non-citizens (adult dependents and children) is shaming by association, with significant political and economic consequences (Müller 2019). The abjection of dependency, carers and their caring work is not just a psychic matter however; it has had material and violent consequences, especially as reflected in the violence that women experience during pregnancy when they are likely to be more dependent (Tyler 2009: 87–94).