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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 of love labouring creates a myth that there are market substitutes, thereby allowing the carelessness of capitalism to persist.

Care, love and solidarity work require time and proximity, presence and attentiveness, inside or outside capitalism. Chapter 4 examines the conflicts between the time and space logics of capitalism and those of care, focusing on how a society that prioritizes capitalist values of competitiveness and speeded-up productivity can leave people time poor and spatially distanced from those for whom they care most, often leaving both the carer and those who depend on them under-cared-for. I draw on my own collaborative studies of caring to highlight many of the tensions that arise over time as a resource in a bureaucratized society governed by the ethics of productivity and competition. The limits and possibilities of technologizing care are also examined, showing how the technologizing of care, including the use of affective technologies, is strongly profit-led, and by no means care-enhancing in affective relational terms. Overall, the chapter illustrates how the competitive and appropriative culture of neoliberal capitalism compresses time, making affective relations appear incidental and marginalized, work that is done in leftover time, with leftover energy, after productive (market) work has been completed.

Part II investigates the interfaces between the political values of liberalism, individualism and neoliberalism; it explores how these values have been incorporated and reinvented under neoliberal capitalism in ways that are often contrary to caring and social justice. The goal is to underscore the ideological challenges that neoliberal capitalism poses to care and social justice especially when it is dressed up in the respectable languages of liberalism, individualism, competition, choice and merit.

Chapter 5 examines the methodological individualism that is endemic to liberalism, showing how the lack of a structural and group-related analysis within liberal thinking (Young 1990) leads in turn to a lack of attention to institutionalized, enduring injustices (Tilly 1999), including those in the care field. The chapter examines the rise of self-responsibilization as social reformism in the era of neoliberalism, and how this generates a culture of political carelessness towards the suffering of the unfamiliar public ‘other’. Finally, this chapter investigates how duplicitous thinking within liberalism facilitates capitalism at the psychic level, by celebrating private charity and compassion, while sanctioning policy interventions to address structural injustices that generate a need for charitable giving in the first instance (Muehlebach 2012).

Individualism in its entrepreneurial self-interested manifestations is an integral element of neoliberal capitalism (Mau 2015: 20). Chapter 6 analyses the complex relationship between different conceptions of individualism, how these have evolved over time, and how they interface with the development of neoliberal capitalism and conceptions of care. The chapter shows how religious and secular interpretations of individualism have overlapped through time, moving from individual salvation to self-realization and self responsibilization. The ways in which neoliberal capitalism promotes the concept of the individual entrepreneurial self, the individual as a bundle of human capitals, devoted to the project of developing itself as homo economicus, are also explored. Finally, this chapter investigates how the moral individualism of neoliberalism is care-free and independent, albeit contested by a residual culture of love and care that can challenge it from within.

Chapter 7 analyses the role that competitiveness, metricization and meritocratic evaluation play in generating harms, first by defining many people as failures relative to others, and then by holding them responsible for not competing successfully in competitions they cannot win. The role that metrics play in exacerbating and enabling competitiveness, and in hierarchically ordering people in care-harming ways, is given special attention. The chapter also probes how the immeasurability of care means that it is discounted in the very care-related services where it is the foundational ethic of good practice. The failure to take cognizance of affective relations across multiple settings means that when named and claimed they can become sites of moral generation and resistance to the hegemonic ideals of care as a commodity.

Because it is impossible to pursue affective justice without examining its nemesis, violence, the third part of the book examines the relationship between care, capitalism and violence. As the experience of climate change and the coronavirus crisis demonstrates, life on planet Earth is relational and highly interdependent. Because of this, care is not just an issue for human relations, but concerns relationships with non-human animals and the natural environment. Chapter 8 is devoted to exploring the ways in which the ontological distinction between nature and society in Western intellectual thought has provided a moral justification for the domination, and frequent destruction, of other species, non-human animals and the environment (Patel and Moore 2018). The chapter outlines reasons why social justice theorists should recognize the moral status of non-human animals as sentient beings that can and do experience intense and prolonged suffering at human hands. Chapter 9 opens with a discussion on why debates about violence and care occupy separate academic spaces in sociology, briefly examining the implications of this for understanding the interface between care and violence. While recognizing that war, abuse and violence long preceded capitalism, the chapter explores how agents of neoliberal capitalism and the state are active in the precipitation of violence, both separately and conjointly, especially in institutional contexts. The racialized and gendered character of the violence that underpins profiteering in trafficking, and in both the care and sex industries is explored. The chapter concludes by noting how unregulated profiteering can deprive people of a livelihood, health care, clean water and/or clean air, but is not registered in the calculation of the costs of capitalism. It is regarded as an unaccountable externality rather than a process of violation (Tyner 2016). This chapter tries to draw attention to how an ethic of care could help mitigate violence, not only in the personal relations but in the wider political order (Held 2010), not least because violence, including terrorist violence, is often instigated by those who are experiencing the geopolitical harms of globalized capitalism, directly or indirectly.

Ways in which neoliberal capitalism is imposing an alien market logic on affective relations are re-examined in the conclusions in part IV, and reasons for moving beyond a capitalocentric way of seeing the world are reiterated. As loving, caring and showing solidarity are endemic to being human, capitalist logics cannot be allowed to redefine the meaning and making of humanity itself. The ‘war of position’ (Gramsci 1971) between neoliberal capitalism and the values and practices of love, care and solidarity, and related political, economic and cultural justice, needs to be planned, organized and funded if it is to persist over time. Creating a new narrative will require both formal and cultural education, and ongoing mobilizations across social movements by progressive activists and scholars, and especially by women, carers and those who need care, which is all of humanity at some point in their lives. And it will be important to remember when doing this work that there is no end time in the pursuit of social justice and the creation of a caring world.

The book ends with a short postscript on the care lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic. This postscript examines some of the dangers of ‘privileged’ ignorance (Medina 2013) in defining social justice and care matters that the pandemic exposed, as well as demonstrating how primary care was constrained during the pandemic. The lessons learned from the early deaths and isolation of older people in residential care, and the increased corporatization of care, are also examined, as is how the pandemic demonstrated that both a care/needs-based and a rights-based justice perspective are necessary because one is incomplete without the other (Casalini 2020).