Читать книгу Care and Capitalism - Kathleen Lynch - Страница 43

Capitalist societies are driven by the demands of the accumulation process, where production is oriented to exchange, not use or provisioning (Nelson 1993; Mies 2014). Production matters in so far as it can be monetized; the use value of products is a non-market consideration. Capitalism, while it benefits from the use value of unpaid family-care labour in particular, does not see itself as having any obligation to pay for it as it is not defined as real work (Dalla Costa 1972; Folbre 1994; Hochschild 1997; Federici 2012; Fraser 2016).

Love and care live and produce life in the underground of political and economic life, creating use values that are invisible in the exchange market. They are concealed beneath comings and goings, doings that only become visible in their absence, when they fail to happen, or happen badly over time. The absence of care or love is not defined as a political or a structural problem. Instead, it is individualized and reconstructed as a responsibilized failing of ‘dysfunctional’ families, ‘poor parenting’, a signifier of the immorality of the class, race and/or gender and marital status of the carer (Dodson 2010).

Care’s centrality to life is further invisibilized when resolutions to care deficits are framed in terms of supplying care on market terms, as a purely technical service, through monitoring, recording and surveillance in a supply-chain management system. The emotionally demanding character of hands-on care work is not recognized for the time it takes and the demands it makes on those who are expected to do it (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010). The assumption is that people can be organized and compelled by market rules to care well, and if that care is not available, e-health care or robotic care will suffice. The limitations of commercialized (Dowling 2021) and digitalized health care are frequently overlooked (Moisil 2019). Care is constructed as a technical product, a package to be delivered in minutes and hours, as if counting time on task makes care happen. But care is not reducible to a product that can be bought and sold as it involves ethical and relational dilemmas and ‘the maintenance of life for itself’ (Dowling 2021: 45).

Yet there is a growing corporatization in which for-profit businesses are increasingly entering the world of care, seeking ‘to impose business rationalities and the corporate logic of profit-making and (labor) cost-cutting upon the whole sector’ (Farris and Marchetti 2017: 110). In this corporatized model, there is no time allowed for the relational work that is so central to caring; it ignores the voluntary human engagement and mutuality that is at the heart of caring, even when it is paid (Müller 2019). Care is made abject by being reduced to a package of marketable, measurable products, in which time for relational work is not named or granted.

As care is not a product like others, it cannot be mass produced cheaply. It is inherently labour intensive, requiring face-to-face, and sometimes hands-on, contact. It is generally not substitutable by capital and does not offer easy productivity gains, given its labour intensiveness (England, Budig and Folbre 2002). Given that the time logics of care, and the disposition of engagement and attentiveness that it requires, are at variance with capitalist logic, care crises are inevitable when care is placed on the market (Dowling 2021: 137–8).