Abstract
The article analyzes the status of care work in capitalist societies. Care is characterized as a requirement in the context of human dependency and vulnerability, and care work is here deemed to be materialized and “thickly embodied” (Lanoix 2013) rather then as being affective labor (Hardt/Negri 2000). This conceptualization of care work is based on an care-ethical understanding and also on feminist leib-phenomenological theory that draws on the distinction between the physical body and the living body (German: Korper and Leib). Relational embodied care is devalued in capitalist societies which are thus built not only on unequal class relations at a very basic level but also on the cultural and economic devaluation and the externalization of elements of care to the private sphere where that care is mostly provided as unpaid and invisible work. The concept of value abjection (German: Wert-Abjektion) aims to illustrate and analyze these structural tendencies and it’s consequences experienced by care workers and the elderly as care receivers.
Highlights
In most capitalist societies care work, such as social services, cleaning, cooking, elderly care and child rearing, are still mostly unpaid or low-paid tasks and are mainly carried out by women in private households
A broad Marxist-feminist debate ensued in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the sexual division of labor, and on the issue of unpaid care work, which remains crucial to theorizations of care work today
In the following I shift the focus from the productivity of housework as the central concern of the domestic labor debate and instead assume a value theory perspective, which enables me to demonstrate that care work is a basic condition and precondition of capitalism
Summary
In most capitalist societies care work, such as social services, cleaning, cooking, elderly care and child rearing, are still mostly unpaid or low-paid tasks and are mainly carried out by women in private households. On a very basic level, the logic of capitalist societies hinges on unequal class relations, and on the devaluation and externalization of elements of care and its relegation to the private sphere where it is performed (mostly) as unpaid and invisible labor (i.e., Müller, 2016). The structural devaluation and externalization of care from the public to private sphere affects (elder) care work in the public sphere and on the market. This impacts the care recipients (in our example the elderly) and the care worker negatively. I develop the Marxist-feminist concept of “value abjection” (German: Wert-Abjektion) to illustrate and analyze the “abjection” (Kristeva, 1982) of care as a necessary condition of capitalism. The fifth section illustrates the central theoretical novelties of the concept of value abjection
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