(Un)alienated Care

This paper critically engages with Marx’s vision of unalienated production, understood as a form of production that is motivated by satisfying another’s needs, through the lenses of feminist and critical race theory. It focuses on the practice of unpaid caregiving and argues that there exists a productive tension at the heart of this practice: unpaid caregiving harbours the potential to constitute unalienated activity in Marx’s sense. The realization of this potential is, however, systematically undermined in dominant caregiving practices due to oppressive social meanings that are embedded in the political economy of capitalism. Social meanings, in addition to markets, present an obstacle to unalienated relations, yet one that tends to be overlooked by Marx and Marxist theorists of alienation. Understanding how dominant caregiving practices undermine the possibility for unalienated activity provides insights into the concrete conditions for realizing unalienated activity.