Neoliberalism also builds on the idealization of choice in classical liberalism, prioritizing freedom over equality. In cultural terms, it is assumed that the market can replace the state as the primary producer of cultural logic and cultural value. The citizen mutates from a person with rights vis-à-vis the state to a market actor, a consumer, an economic maximizer, a free chooser. As neoliberal capitalism endorses a form of entrepreneurial individualism that is highly competitive and self-referential (Harvey 2005; Bröckling 2015; Mau 2015), and as it regards these traits as natural and desirable (Friedman 2002), it is antithetical to caring and affective justice in deep and profound ways (Federici 2012; Fraser 2016; Oksala 2016).
To create a new narrative to challenge the ethics of capitalism in its current mutation, it is necessary to move beyond the non-relational, self-referential ontology that underpins neoliberalism’s culture and politics. This means building a care-centric, relational concept of the individual person and of the wider economic, socio-political and legal order (Folbre 1994; Tronto 1993, 2013; Fineman 1995, 2004; Herring 2020).
While it would be foolhardy not to recognize the power of markets and the economy in determining the dynamics of social life, it is equally important not to place ‘capital at the gravitational centre’ of all ‘meaning making’ (Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy 2016: 194). A new paradigm is required, one that moves beyond the narrow capitalocentrism3 of current thinking about social change (Gibson-Graham 1996). People have a care consciousness (Crean 2018) that gives purpose and meaning to everyday life. Their relationalities are central to their identities, impacting on their ambitions and priorities (Lynch, Baker and Lyons 2009) in ways that could and should be harnessed intellectually and politically to drive egalitarian and care-led social change (Care Collective 2020).
Creating a Care-Centric Narrative
Because neoliberalism provides not only an analytical but also a normative framework for understanding the world, explaining it and prescribing how it should be, it has an ideological power that is deeply embedded culturally and politically (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). One of the aims of this book is to help create a counter-narrative to neoliberalism, one that does not simply critique its harms but helps challenge capitalocentric modes of thought that have crowded out narratives of care and social justice in thinking about social change.
As the atomistic vision of the self is closely aligned with neoliberal capitalism, one of the first tasks is to put the relational self at the centre of meaning-making, to move beyond the idea of the separated, bounded and self-contained self. The goal is to develop a political and cultural appreciation of how the self is co-created, through struggles and negotiations in relationships, for better or worse, both collectively and individually (Herring 2020).
People are not only economic and political agents, but cultural and relational actors; they are involved in nurturing, loving, hating, fighting, relating and co-creating each other. The selves they become ‘can only exist in definite relationships to other selves’ (Mead 1934: 164).4 Recognizing relationality and interdependency helps reclaim the language and logics of care that make people up in nurturing terms. It helps enhance an appreciation of affective relations in giving meaning and purpose to everyday life, and it enables an appreciation of the interdependencies of humans, not only on each other, but also on non-human animals, other living species and the Earth itself.
The affective care domain of life gives people direction and purpose in their daily lives and is central to how they define themselves. The primary love relations within families/households are what first create people in their humanness. This primary nurturing and co-creating work (what I have called love labour: Lynch 1989a, 2007) is complemented by the secondary caring relations of schools and local communities that are created, in turn, by adults caring for each other as friends, neighbours, colleagues and, ultimately, as strangers at the political level, through showing solidarity for the unknown other (Lynch and Kalaitzake 2018). A society that is not caring cannot create people who are flourishing, as ‘citizens are produced and reproduced through care’ (Tronto 2013: 26), and individuals cannot flourish without love, as it is fundamental to their ‘subjective and objective well-being’ (Gheaus 2017: 743).5 Although the nurturing values that underpin care relations are generally politically domesticated and silenced, naming and claiming them can help reinvigorate resistance to neoliberalism. It can create a new language and a new set of values and priorities for politics.
As became evident during the Covid-19 pandemic, even in a capitalist society people are often moved by motives arising directly from consideration of the claims of others. Because relationality feeds into morality within people, this enables them to identify morally appropriate behaviour in themselves and others that orients and regulates their actions (Vandenberghe 2017: 410). They act from a sense of justice, from concern, friendship, loyalty, compassion, gratitude, generosity, sympathy, family affection and other such relational considerations (Midgley 1991: 5). Though these latter motives are not necessarily dominant at a given time (Sayer 2011: 172), they are living, and there to be named and claimed politically and intellectually.
While humans are replete with contradictions, having the capacity to be altruistic and self-interested, kind and cruel, thoughtful and thoughtless, which dispositions are encouraged, developed and prioritized is contingent not only on their personal circumstances but also on the cultural and political values of their time. As Folbre (1994: 250) observes, ‘altruism does not emanate from our genes or fall from the sky. It is socially and culturally constructed, economically and politically reinforced.’ Research by epidemiologists Wilkinson and Pickett (2009, 2018) has demonstrated the truth of this claim: the more caring societies are in terms of re/distributing wealth more equally, the lower the rate of poverty and violence, the fewer the status distinctions, and the more likely people are to enjoy better physical and mental health. If people are to thrive, they need to thrive not only as individuals, but as members of communities, and as political persons. Because of this we ‘need to pay attention to the conditions that foster people’s capacity to form caring, responsible and intimate relationships with each other – as family members, friends, members of a community, and citizens of a state’(Nedelsky 1993: 355).6
To bring homo curans (‘the caring human’; Tronto 2017) to life politically, however, it must also be brought to life intellectually. This requires extending the narrative about equality and social justice ‘outside the master’s house’ of mainstream thinking about social change, and about politics and sociology, and recognizing the salience of affective justice (Lynch 2014; Lynch, Kalaitzake and Crean 2021).
While economic and political self-interest play a key role in determining people’s political priorities, focusing on these alone fails to do justice to the ties and commitments that bind people to one another relationally. As Mauss (1954 ) observed, the ‘gift economy’ exists and underpins much of social and political life; it contests the logic of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. It incentivizes people to collaborate to help, care for and support each other in a reciprocal manner. But the morality that drives reciprocity extends beyond it as even the gift giver knows that some gifts cannot and will not be reciprocated at the individual level. There are many affiliations, affections and commitments that bind people to one another ‘in defiance of self-interested calculation’ (Nussbaum 1995a: 380). Care, in its multiple manifestations, matters not only for intimate relations but also for community and political relations; it is a public and political matter and a personal one. Resistance to the ethics of carelessness