Labour Relations and Relational Labour: Care, Ontology and Social Reproduction

What the paper says

Abstract As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated capital’s inherent carelessness, notions of ‘care’ continue to underpin political struggles and invigorate the Marxist tradition. This article examines how we might conceive of care and the labour of care – carework – in a present defined by intersecting economic, ecological and epidemiological crises. What might a historical-materialist concept of care reveal about contemporary capitalism? Does such a concept have any emancipatory potential? Care or the absence of care suffuses the myriad labour-processes that make ourselves and our world. Recognising the ‘dual nature of care as relation and labour’ is politically and theoretically imperative. How broad care’s remit is, and how and where it intersects (or does not intersect) with Marxist theory and practice, are vital contemporary debates within the historical-materialist tradition. This article argues that just as social-reproduction theory represents a necessary extension of historical materialism, ‘care’ likewise represents a necessary extension of social-reproduction theory, an extension that also addresses theoretical gaps within Marxism. Contemporary social-reproduction theory involves ‘decentring housework … and foregrounding the contradictions posed to capital by the reproduction of life’. In this article, I will argue that the very root of life’s reproduction is care. More than merely a means of decentring housework, care is both the ontological ground of human relationality and ground zero for radical action and thought.