Author's Response

I am grateful to the editors of Labor for providing this forum and my interlocuters for their insights. One of my motivations for writing Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism is to consider how a lens of racial capitalism requires us to rethink fundamental assumptions about care and social reproduction; to understand race not as an add-on, as symbolic inclusion, or simply providing additional evidence that reinforces what we already know about hierarchy and labor exploitation in domestic work. Taking race as central to capitalism, as countless scholars have argued, should encourage us to rethink the organization of labor, the role of the state, and the relationship between profit and social reproduction. What taking race seriously makes clear in this case is that capitalism's recent reliance on profit accrued from social reproduction (life itself, not just the labor of care) has roots in slavery and racial capitalism.Recognizing this is crucial, especially now, because liberal discourses claim care as an unqualified social good and have obscured it as a site of capitalist profit. Care can be a social good and a site of radical possibility, or it can be a site of exploitation and extraction. The challenge before us is to distinguish between the two. In this essay I will clarify, first, what I mean by care and social reproduction, which extends beyond the labor of care to include multiple entities with stakes and investments in care as profit. Second, I will address the role of the state in bolstering the for-profit care economy, thus calling into question the likelihood that the state might upend the care economy. Finally, I will address strategies of resistance and reimagining care.Social reproduction extends beyond care workers, the gig economy, and labor exploitation. To understand it only in terms of labor relations is to miss the bigger picture of a care economy that includes the healthcare system, the welfare state, government anti-poverty policies, and the financial and nonprofit sectors. It is a system that enables the “maintenance of life,” as Bhattacharya argues. Defining social reproduction as a system of consumption, debt, labor, public support, investment, and production allows us to better see how profit is reaped not only from care workers but also from people who are cared for, including middle- and upper-class households. The “affluent middle-class families” that Olcott references are both employers and sources of capitalist profit for big capital. Because of its investments in care, capital has an interest in perpetuating pain, for it is in moments of crisis that people don't comparison shop and are not preoccupied about the cost of procedures: we are often willing to do anything to ensure our loved ones are cared for.Capital's interest in “people as profit” is not new. Indeed, the history of racial capitalism and enslaved people's treatment as commodities is an example of how profit has been extracted not just from people's labor but also from their lives. Historian Stephanie Smallwood brilliantly distills, in her book Saltwater Slavery, how the mechanisms of enslavement and captivity turned people into commodities.1 Even after the end of slavery, the nature of paid domestic labor saw echoes of this, with the re-creation of a system of servitude in which the employer not only controlled the products of a worker's labor but also retained bodily and emotional control.Today people are not commodified in the same way, but their lives are monetized: children in foster care have become sources of profit for private companies that subcontract with state agencies, and elderly people are preyed on by guardians looking to control their resources. I argue that neoliberalism has intensified labor exploitation and transformed how capital sees social reproduction as both a precondition for profit and a source of profit. Once understood as a drain on profits, public programs are now viewed as financially beneficial for capital.The adult guardianship system alleges that certain individuals—usually disabled and elderly people—are incapable of managing their personal, health, and financial affairs and decision making, and so those responsibilities are transferred to another person. The system has been fertile ground for fraud, with “professional guardians” under the guise of care securing court orders and deceptively placing people under guardianship to seize their assets. The adult guardianship system is not about social reproduction as labor power, but rather about social reproduction as life making and as a source of profit. This parasitic behavior profits by sustaining life for some people, as well as using up what Neferti Tadiar calls “life-times” of domestic workers.2 Consequently, alongside exploitation, we must also add expropriation and extraction as characteristic of social reproduction.For studies of care and social reproduction, the public/private distinction—between home and workplace, paid and unpaid labor, dependent and independent—is a foundational framework that has contributed to and justified the devaluation of care work, even as it disrupts that binary. Those distinctions have always been blurred for Black and Brown people. For families of color, labor might be distributed differently and lines of care unpredictable and flowing in multiple directions. Simmons's research about children engaged in emotional and physical care work who also must learn how to “self-soothe” troubles the ostensibly distinct categories of carer and cared-for. Similarly, Flores-Villalobos's discussion of the social reproductive labor performed by Black migrant women both for white employers and Black workers allows us to see the multiple ways care work is performed.A lens of gendered racial capitalism similarly disrupts the presumed divisions between the state, the nonprofit sector, and capital and foregrounds the crucial role of the state both to ensure the reproduction of labor power and more recently to bolster profit from care. The state has always served the interests of capital: that is well documented by historians. During much of the twentieth century, the state regulated and reined in capital, instituted programs to ameliorate the harshest aspects of capital exploitation and provided social supports to sustain the social reproduction of white families for the purposes of labor production for the industrial workforce. With the shift from a manufacturing economy to a service economy in the latter part of the twentieth century, the relationship between the state and capital began to lean more heavily toward social reproduction as a site of profit. The state has rarely served as a “public good” in the lives of Black and Brown people and more often treated their lives and labor as potential sources of profit. It regulated and taxed the slave trade, organized and managed coercive sterilization programs, and invested in a carceral system that literally tore communities apart.In contemporary US capitalism there are few clear boundaries between government, the nonprofit sector, and the for-profit sector. We can no longer uncritically equate the state with the public good and the market with private wealth. Over the past few decades, and especially during the pandemic, money earmarked for social welfare programs or “the public good” has been funneled to individual politicians, their political supporters, or private for-profit contractors, while people in need are left to fend for themselves. The combination of the dismantling of federal public policy programs and politics driven by financial interest and personal gain, for example, has created a situation where state programs have become a source of profit and fueled the care economy. This calls into question Bhattacharya's distinction between productive and unproductive labor, which her analysis relies on. How salient is the distinction between an employee in the public and private sectors when the public sector has become a source of private wealth accumulation and profit? How do we categorize a public sector employee who is embedded in a system that outsources much of its labor and benefits private capital? Or a nonprofit sector employee whose work leads to capital accumulation because of tax breaks and other benefits to the wealthy?Rather than ameliorating poverty, public and private investment in the care economy have exacerbated it. Calls to valorize care or support a care agenda are often bound up with neoliberal metrics and the ethics of making work (narrowly defined by a capitalist wage) pay. The mainstream care agenda seeks to account for and value unpaid caring labor in capitalist economic terms. And it embraces a care economy that pays workers well and treats them with dignity. Making the demand for decent and well paid work a cornerstone of the care agenda is laudable, but it also reinforces the privatization and commodification of care to an outsourced labor market (often to migrant workers) and thus is tied to an unequal international labor market. The American Families Plan and most care infrastructure proposals are intended to invest in care, strengthen capitalism, and get people back to work. But there are few checks and balances for how public funds will be spent, and little goes directly to families.The universal discourse of care masks the inequity that sits at the heart of the care economy, where some people provide care and other people are cared for. Moreover, better wages for care workers does not create space for the possibility that these workers may want to stay home and care for their own children. Where is the push for an expanded welfare state for poor people who are hurting more than ever? Insisting on a feminist political ethic of care is necessary but insufficient. Seeing care as a public good does not make it a public good under capitalism.The question remains whether the interests of the public good can best be protected and defined by the state or state actors when the state is deeply implicated in the care economy. A market-oriented care economy funded by public dollars may alleviate the crisis for the middle class, who benefit from market solutions, but it will not address the crisis of care for poor people, especially Black and Brown people. In its current form, the state has little interest in the actual care of people and, in fact, transfers wealth from public to private, from Black and Brown people to white people. It's not clear that the public good is good for the public any longer. With the widespread graft in Mississippi's welfare program and massive state contracts with for-profit companies like Maximus, I have little faith in a state-driven project to provide care. With talk of a federal care infrastructure program, investors, with their powerful lobbying network, are salivating about the potential for profit in the care industry. The benefits and costs of any public policy must be weighed, and we must put in place guardrails so it doesn't become a feeding trough for the rich.The crisis of care is not new. Although exacerbated by the dismantling of the welfare state, it has a longer history and is a product of racial capitalism, as Simmons's and Flores-Villalobos's work shows. Despite or perhaps because of this, workers and nonworkers have for generations forged strategies to counter the power of capital by carving out spaces to produce life and care for themselves. Even under what would seem to be the most totalizing of circumstances—slavery—people sought autonomy and maintained a degree of independence from capital.Finding spaces of radical possibility, taking agency seriously, and considering how people were seeking freedom, as Flores-Villalobos puts it, is crucial. Creating a transformative care agenda requires situating and practicing care outside the marketplace and taking the profit out of care. Grassroots organizing and resistance by Black, Brown, and Indigenous people offer a model for how to cultivate collective and radical care outside of capital and the state, when both the state and the market fail to meet care needs. Practitioners of radically inclusive care recognize differential needs and abilities to provide care. When Damayan Migrant Workers Association provided care for the Filipino community during the pandemic, they didn't ask for citizenship papers or a driver's license or even a permanent address. They didn't question how long someone had been in the country or insist on income verification. They removed the hurdles and expanded the boundaries of who would benefit from community care. We have the most to learn from communities that have the least access to systems of care, people who find themselves on the margins with few supports. Immigrant communities, disability justice activists, and incarcerated people are developing care ethics that are an alternative to capitalist forms of care.3 There is the problem of how those models can be scaled up. But before we approach scaling up, we have to determine which models to emulate. Groups like Damayan that consciously try to create new systems of care outside of profit-making are worth learning from. They may be small-scale, but they can help us radically reimagine care and move toward creating a different kind of caring society.