Care and Capitalism

Kathleen Lynch

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509543854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The logics and ethics of neoliberal capitalism dominate public discourses and politics in the early twenty-first century. They morally endorse and institutionalize forms of competitive self-interest that jettison social justice values, and are deeply antithetical to love, care and solidarity.

But capitalism is neither invincible nor inevitable. While people are self-interested, they are not purely self-interested: they are bound affectively and morally to others, even to unknown others. The cares, loves and solidarity relationships within which people are engaged give them direction and purpose in their daily lives. They constitute cultural residuals of hope that stand ready to move humanity beyond a narrow capitalism-centric set of values.

In this instructive and inspiring book, Kathleen Lynch sets out to reclaim the language of love, care and solidarity both intellectually and politically and to place it at the heart of contemporary discourse. Her goal is to help unseat capital at the gravitational centre of meaning-making and value, thereby helping to create logics and ethical priorities for politics that are led by care, love and solidarity.

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

As sociable beings do not exist prior to their relatings (Mead 1934; Haraway 2003: 6), caring and relating share ontological roots (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 69). As relatings inevitability create interdependencies (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017: 72), and at times dependencies, care is a necessity, not an optional extra for human survival (Tronto 1993; Collins 2015). Without care, in all its forms, people would not survive, given the high dependency of humans at birth and at times of vulnerability (Kittay 1999; Fineman 2004).¹ To develop a sense of affirmation and recognition as an individual person of value and worth, love is also necessary. It is through love that the individual can grow and gain confidence in her/himself as an incarnated individual capable of feeling emotions (Honneth 1995, 2003). While caring, and especially loving, can be individualistic or dyadic in character, caring is not necessarily individualistic. Caring about the needs of unknown others is foundational to public welfare and to the principle of solidarity; it is a moral and benevolent motivation to alleviate or prevent the suffering of others (Rorty 1989; Halldenius 1998; Arnsperger and Varoufakis 2003).

Despite these care realities, there are doxa-like² ontological assumptions within the social sciences that frame the subjects of sociological and political analysis individually rather than relationally. This has profound implications for the understanding of the politics, economics and culture of social life and social change (Archer 2000). The scope, meaning and normative dimensions of social actions are framed differently depending on whether an individual or relational ontological frame is employed (Mooney 2014: 36–8).

The first ontological impediment is the resistance to recognizing the vulnerability of the human condition. There appears to be a refusal to acknowledge that all humans are subject to events, and to the power and influence of other persons, over which they lack control, regardless of their ‘virtue or rational will’ (Nussbaum 1995a: 366). While dependency may be contingent and episodic, vulnerability is a constant feature of the human condition (Fineman 2008), making even the most autonomous and independent person liable to harm, not least because of the vulnerability of the human body (Vaittinen 2015; Engster 2019).

The scope, intensity and persistence of the non-recognition of vulnerability and inter/dependency has been documented by feminist scholars across many disciplines, (Gilligan 1982; Benhabib 1992; Tronto 1993; Sevenhuijsen 1998; Kittay 1999; hooks 2000; Fineman 2004, 2008; Held 2006; Ferguson 2014). Their work shows how care and love are both endemic to human relationality and have liberatory potential, not least because they generate a motive and desire for justice (Collins 1990: 197) and give people the strength to oppose domination (hooks 2000: 104). Love and care energize and motivate people to act other-wise rather than self-wise, both personally and politically (Boltanski and Porter 2012). However, this scholarship is corralled as ‘feminist’, outside the mainstream. It is often ignored by male scholars (Hawkesworth 2006), including those writing about the significance of affective relations in politics (Hardt and Negri 2005).

A second impediment arises from the disrespect for how central emotions are to social and political life, and particularly the emotional work involved in producing human beings through nurturing. The concept of rationality that dominates much of public life, namely economic utilitarianism, defines people as ‘rational maximizers of satisfactions’ and presumes that emotions are distinct from rationality (Posner 1997). Yet reason and value are not polarized concepts analytically (Vandenberghe 2017), something economists (Kahneman 2003; Loewenstein 2010), sociologists (Barbalet, 2002) and political theorists recognize (Nussbaum 2001), while contemporary neuroscience demonstrates how the neural mechanisms for reason and emotion are not entirely separate in the human brain: feelings aid reasoning rather than being its antithesis (Damasio 1994). Furthermore, empirically established facts can be both empirically true and normatively and emotionally engaged (Sayer 2011: 36–41). Failing to recognize the link between reason and emotion has contributed to an incomplete and even alienated view of social life (Sayer 2017: 474), including an appreciation of how emotions matter in politics (Ahmed 2004).

A third impediment arises from the presumption of self-sufficiency as an ideal human state. Western political theorists have idealized independence as a sign of maturity and growth, placing a premium on a human condition that is never fully realizable (Kittay 1999; England 2005). The presumption of independence mutates from an analytical presumption into an ethic of good social practice; what is presumed to be typical becomes desirable. In so far as it downgrades relationality, this type of political thinking has glorified a concept of the person that is potentially unethical: it is assumed that to be detached, and accountable primarily to the separated self, represents the ideal form of self-realization.

The fourth impediment to recognizing the significance of affective relations arises from the way principles of value neutrality have exercised axiological standing in social scientific analysis generally, and in sociology in particular (Sayer 2017; Vandenberghe 2018). While maintaining the separation between fact and value is vital to avoid representing a priori assumptions and values as empirically valid ‘facts’, the dichotomy also presents unique problems for research because the analytical distinction between fact and value is a false binary in sociological terms, not least because facts are ‘entangled’ with values (Gorski 2017), and values, when transformed into subjective beliefs, are also factual realities (Fuchs 2017).

The failure to recognize the role of values as constituting social life, and not just regulating it (Vandenberghe 2018), has led to a situation where it is often assumed that social actors are maximizing utilitarians, leading to the analytical neglect of the other-centred normative social actions (Archer 2000; Sayer 2011). Indifference to others is taken as normal, leading to a wider political understanding of indifference as both ‘standard and appropriate’ (Held 2006: 83).

In sum, the failure to appreciate the role of nurturing work as a politically salient dimension in the production of social life, the resistance to recognizing the full vulnerability of the human condition, the lionizing of self-sufficiency as virtue, and the failure to appreciate the complex ways in which values, especially those arising from other-centredness, are not just regulatory but constitutive of social life comprise four ontological impediments to recognizing the importance of love, care and solidarity for the production of people in their relationality. The summation of these ontological influences has led to a failure to appreciate the significance of the relational self, thereby missing ‘a whole dimension of moral life’ (Kittay 1999: 51) that is central to research on social justice.

Affective Equality

As the experience ‘of being needy³ is shared equally by all humans’ (Tronto 2013: 29), theories of justice must take cognizance of the endemic inter/dependency and vulnerability of the human condition. Relationality has both distributive and contributive implications for justice: the neediness and vulnerability of life make love, care and solidarity crucial for su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Care and Capitalism: Matters of Social Justice and Resistance
• Part I Care Matters Inside and Outside Capitalism
• 2 Care as Abject: Capitalism, Masculinity, Bureaucracy, Class and Race
• 3 Making Love: Love Labour as Distinctive and Non-Commodifiable
• 4 Time to Care
• Part II Challenges
• 5 Liberalism, Care and Neoliberalism
• 6 Individualism and Capitalism: From Personalized Salvation to Human Capitals
• 7 Care-Harming Ideologies of Capitalism: Competition, Measurement and Meritocratic Myths
• Part III Violence – the Nemesis of Care
• 8 The Violation of Non-Human Animals
• 9 Violence and Capitalism
• Part IV Conclusions
• 10 Resisting Intellectually, Politically, Culturally and Educationally
• Postscript: Care Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement