Care and Capitalism. Kathleen Lynch
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work, are not value-producing in capitalist terms. They have vital use values but not an exchange value.2 Affective care relations exist as a different order of values, values that are jettisoned within the ethics of capitalism.
The globalization of capitalism in the neoliberal financialized era has exacerbated this trend. The instrumental exploitative logic of homo economicus (Brown 2005) contradicts the logic of being homo curans; it undermines cooperative, nurturing, non-exploitative ways of relating to other humans and the natural world (Tronto 2017). In economic terms, care is defined as a private value for which capital is not responsible. And capitalism especially devalues relational embodied care, by treating it as both a cultural and an economic externality (Müller 2019). To pay for care directly would reduce profit (hence the persistent resistance to paying for public childcare in most countries, and, increasingly, resistance to paying for eldercare). In cultural terms, caring is associated with dependency, the vulnerable other who threatens productivity (profit) by either needing care or being tied to caring. Those in need of embodied care are treated as abject, as is the hands-on work of bodily caring, especially in societies that see both death and bodily fragility as problems to be eradicated (Banerjee and Rewegan, 2017).
At a wider cultural level, 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. This coldness is not the preserve of any one class or group, though the power to exercise coldness is most available to those with the capacities to exclude, and with most to gain from exercising indifference towards the vulnerable other. In the twenty-first century, the upper classes, especially the oligarchic elite, reflect these capitalist values as they live without allegiance to any nation state or people. In many respects, ‘their fate and that of their families have become independent from the fates of the societies from which they extract their wealth’ (Streeck 2016: 28). They can ‘buy’ political majorities through advertising and campaign contributions at election times, while gaining social legitimacy through philanthropy. They provide charity for their chosen ‘causes’, frequently funding public institutions, such as higher education and hospitals, impoverished by the elite’s failure to pay taxation commensurate with their personal and corporate wealth (Winters 2011; Browne 2013). And although a small number of women are among the oligarchic elite and the upper-middle-class professionals who service them, and thereby benefit from their class dividend, they are rarely the leaders or those who exercise controlling power over capital.
Patriarchy and Capitalism Interface
Capitalism is not simply a form of hierarchical organization; it is a hierarchy in which people from particular backgrounds fill particular positions. Gender and racial hierarchies feed into the class hierarchies, playing a major role in determining who fills the empty class places. The capitalist economy works in and through a gendered and raced division of labour, including care labour and domestic labour, building on and exploiting pre-existing divisions of race, gender and status (Duffy 2005, 2011; Glenn 2010; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2014; Romero and Perez 2016; Folbre 2020). In so doing, it is not only a classed accumulation process but also a gendered and raced accumulation process.
Racialized care
While there is an internal, classed care economy within most wealthy countries, much of care labour supplied to the rich North/West of the world involves mining the care ‘gold’ (Hochschild 2002) of other countries, especially that of poorer countries. Care has become an export, not unlike other raw materials,3 often extracted from former colonies, especially from women (Hochschild 2003; Mahadaven 2020), a twenty-first-century ‘mining’ of poorer parts of the world to supply the needs of the rich. In the United States, women from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean account for much of the growth in domestic workers, cleaners, personal care workers and childcare workers since 2000 (Duffy 2020), while nurses from the Philippines,4 and to a lesser degree India (Brush and Vasupuram 2006; Garner, Conroy and Bader 2015; WHO 2018), fill many nursing positions in the UK. Although men comprise the majority of migrants globally,5 women comprise the majority of migrants to Northern, Southern and Western Europe and half of those to the US (IOM 2020), a very large proportion of whom are working in care services, including in the highly unregulated home care and domestic sectors (Misra 2003; Da Roit, González Ferrer and Moreno-Fuentes 2013). These globalized care workers do benefit from their employment, as do their families in the sending countries through emigrant remittances. However, their involuntary migrations often leave care deficits behind in their country of origin (Anderson 2000; Hochschild 2002).6 When women with young children migrate without their families, it is other women who are left behind who take on informal family caring, while the women who migrate suffer the loss of intimacy of their own families (Anderson 2000).
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),7 offers 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.
Patriarchy: historical considerations
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 role of ideas