“In this moment of crisis, we have to understand how the care economy functions.… I think we have to ask ourselves, do we want someone to profit from our pain? Do we want our loved ones to be for sale? I think it is imperative upon all of us to push back on the system of profit from care and to find alternative ways of thinking and doing care,” says author Premilla Nadasen. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Nadasen and host Kelly Hayes discuss the role of care work in the U.S. economy, the exploitation of care workers and why the profit-driven dynamics of the care industry must be upended.
Music by Son Monarcas & Heath Cantu
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the politics of care work, and what we mean when we use the word “care.” We will be hearing from Premilla Nadasen, author of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In her latest book, Premilla acknowledges the power of radical care work, but also troubles the use of the word “care” as a catch-all concept that can sanitize harmful capitalist dynamics and obscure our own culpability in the exploitation of others. We live in a time when gig work, orchestrated by apps and algorithms, has left workers who provide home health care assistance, deliver food, or clean or repair people’s homes, at the mercy of alternating employers. As consumers, many of us engage with services that cast us as employers, even if the power and control we wield over individual workers is fleeting. This crowd-sourced oppression is taking place in a society that has clarified that, when it comes to labor, “essential” is code for “disposable.” So, over the next hour, we are going to talk about what care work is, who does it, what it means to us, and how we might live differently. This is a complicated subject. As Premilla writes in Care:
The notion of care seems simple enough. Care is about nurturing, feeding, nursing, assisting, and loving human beings. It is “the work that makes all other work possible” — a slogan first used in the early 2000s by the New York City–based advocacy group Domestic Workers United and later adopted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Although it is historically unpaid or underpaid and un- accounted for in gross domestic product (GDP) and other economic measures, without care work, things would simply shut down. Yet, while care is essential to our survival, care as a politics, as discourse, as policy, and as labor is complicated, nuanced, and contradictory.
So we’re going to dig into those contradictions today. If you appreciate this episode, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
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Premilla Nadasen: My name is Premilla Nadasen, I’m a historian at Barnard College, and a longtime activist and community organizer, and have been engaged in movement building for almost four decades. And my pronouns are she/her and I live in New York City.
I recently published a book called Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. This book in a lot of ways builds on the work I have done, the academic and the political work I have done over many years. My first book was on the welfare rights movement in the 1960s. It was about Black women in particular who were on welfare assistance, who were fighting for state assistance to be able to stay home and care for their children. My next book was about domestic worker organizing and the demands that domestic workers, mostly Black domestic workers, made in the 1960s for the same rights and protections as other workers. So in many ways, this book builds upon a body of scholarship that I’ve done and organizing. I’ve worked closely with local domestic worker rights groups, with the National Domestic Workers Alliance. I worked with welfare rights organizations to really try to think critically about care, the meaning of care, the language of care, what care looks like in practice, and the intersection between care and state support systems, and the kind of organizing that’s happening in local communities.
During the pandemic, we saw growing concern about care and care work. There was a discourse, what I call the care discourse about universal investment in care, about mutual dependency. But one of the things I saw during the pandemic is how some people’s care is privileged over other people’s care. So there was a kind of very visible public recognition of essential workers and care workers here in New York City. People would open their windows at 7:00 p.m. when the nurses and the doctors were getting off their shift and would bang their pots and pans in appreciation. So we talked a lot about the value of this work, but we also know that these workers didn’t always get the pay and the benefits and the protections that they needed and deserved.
So very often that care discourse was framed in terms of the service that these workers provided. That is people were considered important to the degree that they took care of other more privileged people. Their own wellbeing was either not mentioned or it was dependent upon the work they did. So the logic is if we need them, if they care for us, then we should ensure that they are taken care of. But of course, we should be concerned about all people, whether they provide a service or not. And the language we use matters because it shapes how we see and treat these workers. But at the same time, even as it was a celebration of care and care workers, during the pandemic, we also saw increasing financial interest in care. There was a growing market for care for corporations, nonprofits, the state, care.com, which is a digital platform company sold for $500 million in 2020. Care.com connects people in need of care with people who are doing care work.
And so the motto of these companies is doing well by doing good and they are doing well, yes, but because they’re benefiting from people’s hardship. But they’re actually not doing good for the world or for any of us.
KH: The provocative title, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, is a reference to Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which the Russian revolutionary discussed finance capital, monopolies and the exploitation of colonized people. While Lenin broke down the realities of a monopolistic stage in the evolution of capitalism, Premilla’s book explores the rise of a financial era defined by corporate cash grabs, the splintering of worker power and a politics of disposability that have defined the COVID era.
PN: Capitalism is premised on profit as a goal, but in the care economy, some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit. So the title of my book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, really speaks to the shift both in terms of how I see care operating in the marketplace. Care, at one point in U.S. history might have been understood as connected to the welfare state as a system of support for people. Care increasingly today is a site of profit and a site of extraction, although of course there was always a level of extraction in care, but a sizable chunk of the U.S. economy today makes money from the hardship, illness and disability and family crisis that many people are experiencing. And so the title also speaks to how I see the U.S. economy shifting away from manufacturing and toward the care and service economy more broadly.
Care today is crucial to the US economy. So if we look historically from about 1980 to 2020, so in 1980, the percentage of American workers employed in manufacturing was about a quarter, and that dropped to about 8% in 2020. The percentage of people in healthcare and education during that same 40 year period doubled from about 8% to 15%. Of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies defined by revenue today, 4 are part of the care economy. In contrast, in 1980, the top 10 included 6 oil and gas companies, 2 tech firms, and 2 auto manufacturers. So what does that mean and why is care the highest stage of capitalism? Well, I think it means that care is really fundamental to the US economy today. And it means if we are all healthy, if we had support systems of care, if we’re non-impoverished and unhoused, the American economy would collapse because even though the pandemic was devastating on so many levels, some people, some CEOs, some stockholders, some investors actually did very well because of the pandemic.
KH: One aspect of Premilla’s book that I really appreciated was her intervention around the term “care work.” As someone who believes that community care is deeply important, and that care work is essential to our movements, I really valued Premilla’s discussion of the way discourse around “care work” has sometimes been weaponized in the service of neoliberalism. Concepts that are important to us are often twisted and abused by the ruling class, and the concept of care is no exception. As Premilla writes:
By masking unequal racial and economic access to care and the drive for profit underpinning the care economy, the care discourse transforms the paid and unpaid labor necessary to maintain and reproduce life—what Marxist feminists have called social reproduction—into a category disconnected from its larger economic and political significance.
PN: I talked a little bit about the problems with the language of care and the care discourse, and feminists have been writing and talking about care as a framework for social policy and for governance for more than 30 years. Yet as we know, that care discourse is most often focused on the needs of middle-class families. There’s no discussion of cash assistance programs, and there was a dismantling of welfare in the same period. So care as a discourse is often centered on the needs of middle-class families and what care workers can do for those families.
Socialist feminists and Marxist feminists have really pushed us to broaden how we think about care. In fact, they don’t use the term “care.” They use the term “social reproduction,” and that’s a more expansive term. It is not only about paid care work, it is not only about unpaid household labor. It looks at both paid work and unpaid work and understands that the care work, if we want to call it that, or the labor of social reproduction, is necessary for the maintenance of human life and the reproduction of human life. And that includes the reproduction of human life. And that includes education, healthcare, food service. It is the work that is essential for society to function, but it is also essential whether paid or unpaid for capitalist profit because it produces the workers who produce the products. So the labor of social reproduction, according to Marxist feminists, creates labor power for capital.
And I find this term very useful because it allows us to think not about individual households or even individual workers, but to think about a system of sustaining and reproducing human beings and what the purpose of that system is.
So Marxist feminists, I think, have done important intellectual work, and it helps us think about how the labor of social reproduction creates the conditions of possibility for capitalist profit.
But I also think that we have to move beyond that or build upon that. If we shift our gaze to Black and brown people, we actually........