To date, care theory and research has focused strongly on human relations, and while this book is within this tradition, it tries to move beyond it by extending the discussion about care to the environment, focusing especially on the care and suffering of non-human animals. If we are to have a rich and inclusive concept of care, then care of the Earth itself and all living species are all part of the relational world that must be considered. The book argues that one cannot fully understand care without exploring its nemesis, violence. Human capacities to show love, care and solidarity are always shadowed by their opposites: the capacities to be care-indifferent, neglectful, abusive, hateful and even violent. Which capacities are called out and lived personally and politically is not accidental; it depends on what values and capacities are nurtured and enabled culturally and economically. While violence is not the preserve of capitalism, it is frequently exacerbated by it, as is evident in sexual violence, the violences of war and trade, the passive violences of letting people die through neglect and indifference, and the many violences humans inflict on non-human animals in the interests of profit and pleasure.
It is a call to action in terms of bringing care talk out into the public spheres of formal and informal education, cultural practices, and community, professional and party politics. As Raymond Williams observed, there are always residual sites of resistance because of the fact ‘that no mode of production, and therefore no dominant society or order of society, and therefore no dominant culture, in reality exhausts human practice, human energy, human intention’ (1973: 12). While recognizing the realpolitik of capitalist economic and political power, Care and Capitalism suggests that there are strong residual values of care in most cultures that could be ignited politically and intellectually, especially given what humanity has learned about the primacy of care during the Covid-19 pandemic. While making political culture care conscious is a major struggle, even within democracies with strong care traditions, we must start building resistance to the hegemony of economic-centrism under capitalism (Gibson-Graham 2006; Engster 2010; Tronto 2013; Alcock 2020; Folbre 2020). The book takes Iris Marion Young’s (1990) critique of liberal political egalitarian thinking seriously, highlighting the primacy of structures, including ideological structures and institutions, that must be contested if there is to be a reframing of contemporary intellectual and political thinking based on social justice.
One of the reasons for writing this book was to draw attention to the importance of relational justice and affective equality (Lynch, Baker and Lyons 2009; Lynch, Ivancheva, O’Flynn, Keating and O’Connor 2020; Lynch, Kalaitzake and Crean 2021). It not only explores why affective equality matters, but, building on the work of Fraser (2008, 2010) and many others, it investigates how relational justice is deeply embedded with re/distributive justice, recognition-led justice and representational justice arising from the intersectionality of group-based identities, and the continuity of structural injustices institutionally through time. My long-standing commitment to teaching and researching about equality and social justice (Lynch 1995, 1999), and my previous theoretical and empirical research with colleagues (Baker, Lynch, Cantillon and Walsh 2004; Lynch, Baker and Lyons 2009; Lynch, Grummell and Devine 2012), inform the analysis throughout.
The Text
The book opens in chapter 1 examining ways in which the failure to substantively engage with the politics of affective relations, including the political economy of domestic non-care work in which care relations are embedded in classed and racialized ways (Duffy 2005), has contributed to misrecognition of their pivotal role in generating social injustices in the production of people in their humanness (Federici 2012; Oksala 2016). It explores how focusing on affective (care-related) inequalities would facilitate the politicization of care relations (Tironi and Rodríguez-Giralt 2017) and provide an intellectual frame for challenging the care-indifferent immoralities of capitalism (Müller 2019).
The first part of the book is devoted to examining care matters inside and outside capitalism. Because being vulnerable and needy is defined as a sign of weakness in pre-market (Nussbaum 1995a) as well as market societies (Fraser and Gordon 1997), the work of caring for needy and dependent others is not regarded as citizenship-defining (Sevenhuijsen 1998; Lister 2003). It is lowly work undertaken with lowly people. Chapter 2 explores how women, as society’s default carers (and carers generally), are made abject by association. The devaluation of care, especially hands-on care and the hands-on manual labour that is intrinsic to it, and the devaluation of women are not just inextricably linked; the devaluation of care is a major generative reason why women are disrespected and undervalued within and without capitalism.
As the production and reproduction of social classes require care labour, both the care of people, and of those parts of nature that are available for exploitation and commodity production (Patel and Moore 2018), to get this work completed, capitalism builds on and exacerbates pre-existing gendered care exploitations (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Folbre 1994, 2020; Federici 2012), in classed and racialized ways (Duffy 2005, 2011).
As women are strongly socialized and morally impelled to do hands-on care (Bubeck 1995) in a way that men are not (Hanlon 2012), women live at the point of convergence between care and capital, the point where the conflicts between doing caring and serving capitalist values are felt most acutely, especially if they are poor. Given this structural positioning, carers and those for whom they care go on co-producing each other relationally, often in the face of adversity. They experience the conflicts and contradictions between the instrumental, exploitative, homo economicus logic of capitalism (Brown 2005) and the cooperative, nurturing and non-exploitative values that are intrinsic to caring labour (Tronto 1993; Robinson 2011; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). They undertake necessary nurturing, relational work, labour that has no assigned market value and a very low voice politically. The ethics and values underpinning their work are not political incidentals, however, but cultural residuals (Williams 1977) that have the potential to be named, claimed and mobilized to confront the hegemonic values of neoliberal capitalism.
Chapter 3 explores the ways in which the making of love, through love labour, is a very particular form of intimate caring work that can be distinguished analytically from other secondary and tertiary forms of care labouring, owing to its inalienability and non-substitutability (Lynch 2007; Cantillon and Lynch 2017). Drawing on empirical research by the author on love and care, this chapter demonstrates how love labour’s non-substitutability, as a social and personal good, means that the logics of love labouring are at variance with market logic, as love is non-commodifiable. It cannot be assigned to others without undermining the premise of mutuality that is at the heart of intimacy (Strazdins and Broom 2004). Given its uniqueness as a form of labouring, love labouring can be claimed as a political and sociological place of resistance. Staying silent about the uniqueness and non-substitutability