Care and Capitalism. Kathleen Lynch
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they can and do influence current cultural processes (Williams 1977: 122). It is for this reason that they should be claimed, named and made visible intellectually and politically. The dilemmas and contradictions of doing loving, caring and showing solidarity10 are spoken of daily in kitchens and bedrooms, in crèches and schools, in staffrooms, in union meetings, in canteens, tea rooms, coffee houses and pubs, in hairdressers, in cars, buses and trains. It is time to open this affective cultural residue of hope to provide a countervailing narrative to subvert the neoliberal message.
Affective relations of love, care and solidarity: unincorporated residuals
Because no dominant social order can erode and erase all human practice, energy, and intentions (Williams 1977), neither can neoliberal capitalism. While capitalism has commodified much of the care world, it has not been able to incorporate it completely, not least because certain forms of care relations are non-commodifiable; they are based on intentions and feelings that are voluntarily given and/or are non-substitutable (Lynch 2007; Mol 2008; Flores 2013; Cantillon and Lynch 2017).
Care relations are unincorporated residuals in Raymond Williams’ terms; they remain outside and, for the most part, in opposition to legitimated cultural and party politics. Because these relations have not been fully incorporated, they lack status as political subjects, being regarded as apolitical, private and personal family matters (Okin 1989; Kittay 1999; Held 2006). It is because they have been disregarded, unaligned and unincorporated that affective care relations matter as potential sites of resistance. They are waiting to be articulated politically, to be mobilized and organized, as the co-creation and nurturing of relational life are dependent on them. Affective justice is an everyday concern for many, many millions of people owing to the care crises of the twenty-first century (Fraser 2016; Dowling 2021).
While the power of capitalism to reinvent itself and incorporate resistance is ubiquitous (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005), and seemingly overwhelming (Streeck 2016), meaning-making does not take place solely within markets. People live extensive lives outside the capitalist economy where non-market meaning and values are also materially created, especially through caring. There is scope for developing alternative thinking, new paradigms of justice and social action built around affective relations (Gibson-Graham 1996). If we put capital–labour relations at the centre of all meaning-making (Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy 2016: 194), we undermine our capacity to think outside that framework.
Notes
1 1 Indeed, all living species, and the Earth itself, cannot survive without care.
2 2 Doxas are unarticulated assumptions, powerful but hidden from view, because they are taken for granted and accepted. They are ‘that undisputed, pre-reflexive, naive, native compliance with the fundamental presuppositions of the field’(Bourdieu 1990: 68).
3 3 Emphasis in the original.
4 4 To make the text less cumbersome, the collective noun ‘care’ will be used regularly to refer to the three different forms of care and the contexts in which care happens, namely primary, intimate, love labouring relations; secondary relations of care, both paid and unpaid, professional and non-professional; and tertiary relations of solidarity at the political level with personally unknown others. For a more detailed discussion on the different forms of care see Lynch (2007) and Lynch, Baker and Lyons (2009).
5 5 Though the rise of capitalism is commonly associated with the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of the financial and infrastructural apparatus that we associate with capitalism, in the form of debt, banks, bond markets, shares, brokerage houses and speculative bubbles, preceded factories and wage labour and even the science of economics itself. Capitalism had found very visible expression in the age of European-led capitalist empires from the late fifteenth century onwards (Graeber 2011). European powers, ravaged by plagues, the Black Death and war, sought wealth and the alleviation of war debt through conquest and invasions especially in the Atlantic region (Patel and Moore 2018). The capitalist mantra of ‘growth’ was realized in the form of profit-led slave trading, arms trading or drugs trading that was (and is) deeply abusive, long before factories were established in the industrial cities of Europe (Graeber 2011: 307–60). I would like to thank my UCD colleague Ruben Flores for bringing Graeber’s work to my attention.
6 6 The reasons for the rise of new-right politics are complex, varying from country to country, and across time. For a review of research on these movements see Mudde (2007, 2014); Golder (2016); Muis and Immerzeel (2017).
7 7 The EU is a prime example of a political and legal institution that has implemented deep forms of neoliberalization. Since the late 1970s, ongoing welfare-state retrenchment and a decline in redistributive solidarity are a salient European development (Korpi 2003). Social protections are increasingly marketized and outsourced, with an attendant lack of protection for those who are most vulnerable in a pay-as-you-go welfare system (Frericks 2011). What has emerged is a new ‘post-industrial welfare support coalition’ predominantly rooted within the professional and managerial middle classes (Gingrich and Häusermann 2015; Mau 2015). State supports have shifted from compensating people for income loss and vulnerability towards labour activation policies and human capital investment programmes. Welfare supports are increasingly commodified and social protections are tied to market processes. The individualization of responsibility for one’s own welfare is central to this process (Lynch and Kalaitzake 2018).
8 8 There are now moves at EU and OECD level to introduce some type of global taxation. The finance ministers from the world’s seven leading economies (the G7), at their meeting in Cornwall on 5 June 2021, agreed on the principle of introducing a global minimum effective tax rate of at least 15 per cent in each country in which a business operates. How this will be translated into practice is as yet unclear, but it is a hopeful sign in terms of global tax reform. https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/tax/articles/g7-finance-ministers-agree-on-taxation-of-digitalized-economy-global-minimum-rate.html.
9 9 It has been through such protest movements that progressive and ‘left’ politics have found expression (De Chiro 2008; Casalini 2017), while the ‘right’ has organized more through political parties (Hutter 2014).
10 10 For a full discussion of the similarities and differences between love, care and solidarity see Lynch (2007) and Lynch, Baker and Lyons (2009).
2 Care as Abject: Capitalism, Masculinity, Bureaucracy, Class and Race
Capitalism does not survive solely on exploitative class relations. The production and reproduction of classes require care labour, both the care of people and of those parts of nature that are available for exploitation and commodity production (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2012; Patel and Moore 2018). Humans, non-human animals and the Earth itself require attentiveness to survive and flourish, and capitalism requires caring to happen, even it does not pay for it directly and exploits it indirectly.
While care is central to capitalism’s survival materially, the devaluation of care is also endemic to capitalism. There is a value disassociation within it through which the labour of caring and reproducing humanity itself is ‘dissociated from value and abstract labor’ (Scholz 2009: 127). The severance of production from reproduction and caring in modernity has created a deep dichotomy of values. ‘The commodity-producing civilizational model’ that is glorified under contemporary capitalism is underpinned by a system of care and domestic relations built around the marginalization of those who do the care work, mostly women, and the neglect of the natural and the social world (Scholz 2009: 130).1 Unpaid