Care and Capitalism. Kathleen Lynch
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because the ‘brutish pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and the peace of all, to the rhythm of their work and joys – and rebounds on the individual himself’ (Mauss 1954: 98).
Building on the Work of Mothers and Others
As I was working as a sociologist in a school of education in the 1980s, my academic interest in relationality is long-standing. It was informed initially by the philosophical work of Noddings (1984) on the cultivation of caring in education, and the ground-breaking psychological research of Carol Gilligan (1982) and that of Howard Gardner (1983). Not only did Gilligan provide a missing feminist perspective on moral development, but her work laid the foundations for a more generalized care-based theory of moral behaviour, thereby paving the way for the recognition of relationality and caring. In a very different context, Gardner’s pioneering work on multiple intelligences, and especially his recognition of personal intelligences (both inter- and intra-personal), helped move mainstream educational thinking outside its Cartesian straitjacket and a narrow cognitive understanding of rationality.7 I saw his work, and that of Gilligan, as having revolutionary potential for a reawakening of educationalists to the importance of relationality in social, political, personal and economic life.
As love was not an accepted concept in sociology, something I learned when publishing on this subject in 1989,8 Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor (1999) was a reassuring publication. Her critique of Rawls’ theory of justice, and her connection-based concept of equality ‘grounded in our understanding of ourselves as inherently related to others’ (ibid.: 70), resonated not only with empirical research I was undertaking, but also with my personal experience of living with children and young women in residential care, and my personal family-care experience. The capabilities approach of Nussbaum (1995a, 1995b) also informed my thinking, especially Nussbaum’s validation of the rationality of emotions, and her appreciation of the importance of affiliations for human life and well-being.
While Gilligan, Gardner, Nussbaum and Kittay inspired me to pursue my interest in love, care and solidarity, their analysis did not address the impact of wider political and economic structures on the operationalization of care institutions and practices. Their work did not engage with capitalism or neoliberal capitalism in any overt way. Those who did engage, and inspired me to write this book, were care theorists and feminist across different disciplines, who were implicit if not in all cases explicit critics of capitalism (Held 1993, 2006; Nelson 1993, 1997, 2013, 2018; Stanley and Wise 1993; Tronto 1993, 2013; Folbre 1994, 2001, 2020; Sevenhuijsen 1998; Kittay 1999; Fineman 2004; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, 2017; Mies 2014). I was also encouraged by the work of sociologists, such as Archer (2000) and Sayer (2011), who have demonstrated the importance of meaning-making outside of market relations, and by that of critical political theorists, especially Nancy Fraser (1997, 2008), whose work has explored at length the intersectionality of injustices within capitalism and how gendered and raced care-related social injustices are in practice (Fraser 2016).
Given the depth and range of the work of the ‘founding mothers’9 of care theory and research, it is a challenge to identify what this book can contribute that is new. Working at the interface of political theory, ethics and feminist theory, Tronto (1993) was among the first to develop the political argument for an ethic of care, demonstrating the moral significance of human relationships, dependencies and interdependencies. Along with Gilligan (1982) and educationalists such as Noddings (1984), Tronto’s work (and that of Ruddick 1989, Held 1993 and Kittay 1999) played a major role in challenging traditional care-indifferent approaches to morality; in particular, she challenged the universalistic claims of Neo-Kantian theorists of justice within liberal political theory. I owe a huge debt to all of these scholars but especially to Tronto in terms of normative political theory.
Having spent a few years living in residential care settings, with children and young women who were not only poor but also seriously deprived of care, I always felt there was something missing in conventional Marxism’s analysis of social injustice. As the lyrics of John Denver’s song professed, ‘Hearts starve as well as bodies’; people need bread, but they also need roses. Tronto’s early work (1993) on the ethics of care provided the moral foundation for this argument, highlighting how all people are needy at some time in life. This book hopes to build on her work, and especially on her latest ground-breaking book, Caring Democracy (2013), by illustrating sociological challenges that must be addressed.
Like Tronto, I too want to put care rather than the economy at the centre of political concerns. I see the urgency of replacing the ethics of capitalism with the ethics of care. However, while the purpose of Tronto’s book is to define what ‘caring with’ means within a democracy, Care and Capitalism is focused more directly on how the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism preclude caring, not only institutionally but also ideologically. One of the contributions of the book is its close examination of the complex relationship between liberalism, individualism and neoliberalism at an intellectual and cultural level. It demonstrates how creating a care-centric society requires a radical ideological shift from the deep-rooted individualism of liberal thinking, intellectually, culturally and politically. It also explains why contesting care-harming ideologies of neoliberalism, especially meritocracy, competitiveness and metricization, is vital for creating a cultural shift in political thinking about care.
The book also wants to build on the work of feminist economist Nancy Folbre; my contribution is not as an economist of care, but as a sociologist and scholar who shares Folbre’s deep commitment to equality and social justice. Her ground-breaking analysis of how patriarchal thinking and institutions preclude an economic appreciation of the value of care work (Folbre 1994) was something that encouraged me, as I had seen first-hand the impact of that devaluation on women.10 Not only did Folbre identify the economic value of caring as (mostly) women’s work, she also identified the importance of care as a social good (Folbre 2008), making a strong economic case for paying carers well (Folbre 2006). Her critique (and that of Julie Nelson 1997) of individualistic models of thinking about human preferences in economics, especially in relation to the use of time (Folbre and Bittman 2004), and her related identification of the importance of structures and institutions in determining choices and patterns of injustice, are something that has informed the analysis in this book.
I share Folbre’s recognition of the vital importance of care as a public value. As she rightly observed in The Invisible Heart (2001), women know they can benefit economically by becoming achievers rather than caregivers. But they also know that if all of humanity, and especially women, adopt this strategy, society as a whole will become oriented further towards more and more achievement and less and less care.
While Tronto (2013) has made a compelling case in Caring Democracy for placing care, not economics, at the centre of democratic politics, and Folbre, in The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems (2020), identifies the reasons why care rather than the market should be central to economic thought, this book examines the many challenges that have to be addressed intellectually and culturally in a neoliberal capitalist era to create a more care-centric society and, equally importantly, a more care-centric academy. It examines some of the major changes in cultural and intellectual practice that are required to replace the ethics of capitalism with the ethics of care.
The book underscores the primacy of affective care relations in social life, exploring why equality in the doing and receipt of care is a central matter of equality and social justice. It explains why education, both culturally and more formally, is potentially a powerful site of resistance to neoliberal capitalism, and to the racism, sexism, ableism, speciesism and many other injustices on which capitalism thrives. The book investigates reasons why a capitalist-oriented education is a threat to affective equality and social justice more generally. It claims that creating a socially just and caring global order demands challenging not only the economics and politics of capitalism but also its core affective, cultural and intellectual values.
Care and Capitalism focuses attention on creating an ideological platform for change, by mobilizing new languages and narratives around care, social justice and affective equality in cultural and political discourse, especially by educating people