Kathleen Lynch - Care and Capitalism

The abjection of care has been closely linked to the abjection of domestic work, where women also predominate. Although care work and domestic work are analytically distinguishable, in the embodied world of lived material reality they overlap (Duffy 2011). Because they do so, the lowly status of domestic work compounds the lowly status of caring. When care involves body work, it is often dirty work; it involves cleaning and managing the leaking fluids from the orifices of the body that are often uncontrolled and even uncontrollable. 15The leaky body smells, soils, and demands a huge amount of time and energy to keep it managed without harm, to keep it under control; the management of this human waste adds to the designation of hands-on caring as low-level life work (Hughes, McKie, Hopkins and Watson 2005: 266–8). The abject status of body work and domestic work is reflected in the fact that it is work very few people choose to do. Paid carers for frail older people in Europe are disproportionately migrant workers who often have no choice about doing this work (Da Roit, González Ferrer and Moreno-Fuentes 2013), as are domestic workers in many wealthy countries (IOM 2020).

While feelings of disgust and abjection at leaky, disintegrating bodies are not a modern phenomenon, the achievement-led, competitive individualism that characterizes contemporary culture is premised on the managed, contained, intact, cleansed and controlled body; bodily disintegration and leaking threaten this (Twigg 2000: 396). There is a ‘dematerializing tendency’ in how the vulnerable body is interpreted in contemporary Western culture; excretions, especially where they are involuntary and uncontrolled, and death and decay are distanced and sanitized in a way that hides the body. Status, especially professional status, is inversely related to the amount of body work involved, especially work with vulnerable, frail bodies (Twigg 2000: 391). Those who do hands-on body care work are made abject by their association with vulnerable bodies in a society that valorizes individualistic independence and productivity.

As Simone de Beauvoir observed in 1948, domestic work is governed by endless repetition (De Beauvoir 1993). In so far as domestic work is part of care work (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2014), it is repetitive work, a remark we heard frequently in our care conversations for Affective Equality (2009). 16It goes on incessantly in cycles of hours, days and years. And when one cycle ends another begins, be it in the meals that have to be produced, the cleaning that is required, or the cycles of age and illness that follow each other as life ebbs and flows.

Yet many tasks in life involve endless repetition: teaching the same school syllabus or fixing the same parts in cars year on year, meeting patients in surgery with the same illnesses time and time again or answering the same queries about computing on a software support line. What makes domestic work abject is not the repetition, but the conditions under which it is undertaken. Cleaning is not demeaning per se, but it becomes so when it is unrecognized, underpaid or unpaid. This is something women spoke of a great deal in our care conversations studies for Affective Equality , 17as did the minority of men who were primary carers. 18

There is no doubt that the demanding, at times dirty, and thankless character of unpaid care labour and related domestic work helps explain its abjection. However, it is also made abject by the deep cultural assumption that this necessary work is not citizenship-defining labour; it is not the kind of work that those who are fully human (part of society rather than nature) have to do. This problem is greatly exacerbated in capitalist society given the deeply classed and gender-stratified division of care labour.

Capitalist societies are driven by the demands of the accumulation process, where production is oriented to exchange, not use or provisioning (Nelson 1993; Mies 2014). Production matters in so far as it can be monetized; the use value of products is a non-market consideration. Capitalism, while it benefits from the use value of unpaid family-care labour in particular, does not see itself as having any obligation to pay for it as it is not defined as real work (Dalla Costa 1972; Folbre 1994; Hochschild 1997; Federici 2012; Fraser 2016).

Love and care live and produce life in the underground of political and economic life, creating use values that are invisible in the exchange market. They are concealed beneath comings and goings, doings that only become visible in their absence, when they fail to happen, or happen badly over time. The absence of care or love is not defined as a political or a structural problem. Instead, it is individualized and reconstructed as a responsibilized failing of ‘dysfunctional’ families, ‘poor parenting’, a signifier of the immorality of the class, race and/or gender and marital status of the carer (Dodson 2010).

Care’s centrality to life is further invisibilized when resolutions to care deficits are framed in terms of supplying care on market terms, as a purely technical service, through monitoring, recording and surveillance in a supply-chain management system. The emotionally demanding character of hands-on care work is not recognized for the time it takes and the demands it makes on those who are expected to do it (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010). The assumption is that people can be organized and compelled by market rules to care well, and if that care is not available, e-health care or robotic care will suffice. The limitations of commercialized (Dowling 2021) and digitalized health care are frequently overlooked (Moisil 2019). Care is constructed as a technical product, a package to be delivered in minutes and hours, as if counting time on task makes care happen. But care is not reducible to a product that can be bought and sold as it involves ethical and relational dilemmas and ‘the maintenance of life for itself’ (Dowling 2021: 45).

Yet there is a growing corporatization in which for-profit businesses are increasingly entering the world of care, seeking ‘to impose business rationalities and the corporate logic of profit-making and (labor) cost-cutting upon the whole sector’ (Farris and Marchetti 2017: 110). In this corporatized model, there is no time allowed for the relational work that is so central to caring; it ignores the voluntary human engagement and mutuality that is at the heart of caring, even when it is paid (Müller 2019). Care is made abject by being reduced to a package of marketable, measurable products, in which time for relational work is not named or granted.

As care is not a product like others, it cannot be mass produced cheaply. It is inherently labour intensive, requiring face-to-face, and sometimes hands-on, contact. It is generally not substitutable by capital and does not offer easy productivity gains, given its labour intensiveness (England, Budig and Folbre 2002). Given that the time logics of care, and the disposition of engagement and attentiveness that it requires, are at variance with capitalist logic, care crises are inevitable when care is placed on the market (Dowling 2021: 137–8).

The capitalist economy works in and through a gendered division of labour, including care labour; it is a classed, raced and gendered accumulation process that distinctly advantages men within each class, especially within the household economy. Given this, many men are vested in the patriarchal-capitalist nexus, and as the rise of male-right groups shows, they have developed a sense of entitlement to power and are likely to contest its erosion (Kimmel 2013).

But hierarchies of power are not the preserve of capitalism. Bureaucratic organizations play a central role in the organization of everyday life, and while bureaucracy and capitalism are constitutionally linked, bureaucracies exist outside capitalism and are neither gender neutral (Acker 1990) nor race neutral (Ahmed 2012). The development of bureaucratic institutions, including the bureaucratic institutions of the nation state, has played an important role in institutionalizing pre-existing hierarchies of class, gender and race (Malešević 2010a) to the detriment of women and their care work. Because most large bureaucratic institutions are designed and run by powerful men, men who are free from daily hands-on care work, care work is often invisible at the centres of power. The strong instrumentalism that is endemic to output-driven bureaucratic organizations further invisibilizes the care infrastructure that lies underneath them and enables them to survive.