Care and Capitalism. Kathleen Lynch

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1 Care and Capitalism: Matters of Social Justice and Resistance

      As the creation, repair and maintenance of human life cannot be undertaken without care (Tronto 1993), the affective relations that produce (or fail to produce) nurture are structural matters that are central to social justice and politics. This chapter examines ways in which the failure to substantively engage with the intellectual, political and economic significance of affective relations of love, care and solidarity has contributed to their misrecognition as sites of injustice (Folbre 1994; Federici 2012; Oksala 2016).

      Affective relations are those nurturing-oriented care relations, and nurturing dimensions of other social and species relations, that humans engage in to co-create, support and enrich each other and the non-human world. There are three sociologically distinguishable contexts in which affective relations operate in the social world: the primary sphere of intimate love relations; the secondary sphere of professional, neighbourly and community care relations; and the tertiary sphere of solidarity-led political relations with largely unknown others (Lynch 2007). Care of other species and the environment is a further site of affective relations, albeit not a social-specific one. While each set of care relations is discrete, they are built on mutual trust. When they are broken or defaulted on, they are potentially harmful and abusive. Like all human relations, affective relations are embedded in relations of power, status and wealth that generate conflicts and contradictions within (Lynch, Baker and Lyons 2009; Care Collective 2020).

The chapter opens with a discussion of how affective relations of love, care and solidarity have been peripheralized across different disciplines in the social sciences. It examines the implications of this neglect for sociological and socio-political understandings of nurturing as a site of praxis and politics. Following this, an analysis of the different dimensions and forms of affective relations is presented, and the reasons why affective inequalities matter for social justice are explored. The third section is devoted to analysing how neoliberal capitalism promotes carelessness and affective injustices by undermining people’s capabilities and resources for nurturing work. Finally, the chapter explores how the unincorporated and previously silenced political character of affective relations makes it a residual space (Williams 1977), a site of resistance for radical political thinking at an ideological level.

      The neediness of the human condition leads to interdependencies that generate feelings of belonging, appreciation, intimacy and joy, but also feelings of ambivalence and anxiety, tension and fear. It is only when we acknowledge the challenging reality of our shared dependence, and the irreducible differences between us, that we can fully appreciate what a new politics of care might involve (Care Collective 2020: 21–31).

Neglect of Affective Relations

      From Hobbes and Locke to Rousseau and Kant, and up to and including Rawls, Western liberal political theorists upheld a separatist view of the person, largely ignoring the reality of human dependency and interdependency (Nussbaum 1995a). As contractual models of social relations tend to inform dominant moral theories, and as these are built on liberal models of social relations between strangers (Held 2006: 80), the role of moral judgement and concern for others is marginalized in political understandings (Benhabib 1992). The separatist concept of the person and the focus on contractual models of social relations have combined to blind political theorists also to the material significance of care relations as central matters of social justice (Tronto 2013: 7–11).

Within classical economics, the core assumption has been that the prototypical human being is a self-sufficient rational economic man (sic) (Ferber and Nelson 1993; Folbre, 1994, 2001). Within sociology, neither Marxist, structural functionalist nor Weberian social scientists identified any major role for the affective system of social relations independent of the economy, polity or status order. The affective domain was defined almost exclusively in terms of the heterosexual family, as exemplified in the work of Talcott Parsons. Caring was assumed to be ‘natural work’ for women, not an autonomous system of social relations that operated both inside and outside families. In Marxist, and even neo-Marxist feminist, traditions, domestic work and care labours were defined as unproductive, creating use value but not exchange value (Engels 1942; Mitchell 1971).

      The indifference to matters of vulnerability and inter/dependency in the human condition led to the framing of social injustices primarily in terms of the coercive political relations of the state and the economic relations of market economies, and thereby in terms of inequalities of income and wealth, status and power. This is exemplified in the three key conditions Nancy Fraser lays down as essential for realizing the social justice principle of participatory parity, namely equality in economic relations, political relations and cultural relations (Fraser 2005). The ways in which affective relations operate as a discrete and relatively autonomous site of social relations that impact on participatory parity is not conceptualized within this framework, as it is not defined as a key site of politics. As the production and reproduction of labour power are integral to the survival of capitalism (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2012), and as they cannot be completely commodified and ‘brought into the sphere of market transactions’ (Oksala 2016: 299), any theory of justice must take account of how care relations impact on participatory parity in everyday life.

Ontological impediments to recognizing affective relations

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