Care
The Highest Stage of Capitalism
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
An eye-opening reckoning with the care economy, from its roots in racial capitalism to its exponential growth as a new site of profit and extraction.
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, care work has been thrust into the national spotlight. 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.” But as historian Premilla Nadasen argues, we have only begun to understand the massive role it plays in our lives and our economy.
Nadasen traces the rise of the care economy, from its roots in slavery, where there was no clear division between production and social reproduction, to the present care crisis, experienced acutely by more and more Americans. Today’s care economy, Nadasen shows, is an institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit.
Yet this is also a story of resistance. Low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of color in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for Black Lives have continued to fight for and practice collective care. These groups help us envision how, given the challenges before us, we can create a caring world as part of a radical future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barnard College historian Nadasen (Household Workers Unite) takes an incisive look at the evolution of the U.S. "care economy" over the last 50 years, with a focus on how care work has become a source of massive profit for corporations and a major contributor to economic and social inequality. Responding to recent feminist and liberal activism extolling a "politics of care" as the best way to advocate for a strengthened social safety net, Nadasen argues that this valorized notion of care obscures the fact that care work has historically been highly exploited labor. She contends that a half-century of emphasis on individualism, private industry, and the dismantling of the welfare state has established a care economy that does not effectively care for people so much as it creates opportunities for businesses to profit by providing services such as health care, education, welfare, sanitation, infrastructure maintenance, and security—regardless of quality and effectiveness, which are often lacking. Instead of looking to the state and to traditional progressive and liberal legal reforms and social programs to solve these issues, Nadasen instead encourages activists to consider examples of nonhierarchal and collective mutual aid movements that have historically sustained African American and Indigenous communities. Crisply argued, rigorously contextualized, and approachably written, this is essential reading for those interested in social justice and working-class politics.
