The Universal Caregiver Society

Abstract

The Universal Caregiver Society is an essay reimagining the world from the perspective of a repaired and progressive society of 2029 and how we got there. The task was set by the ‘Assembly of the Future’ held in Australia in 2020, a gathering organised for progressive thinkers to imagine how we might create a better world, by the novel device of thinking back from the future. I draw on Arundhati Roy’s suggestion that the Covid 19 pandemic can act as ‘a portal, a gateway between one world and the next … ’ through which we could step, ‘ready to imagine another world’. In the essay, I imagine a transformation from the unequal and unjust ‘Universal Breadwinner State’ of neo liberal capitalism, which has created a widespread crisis of care, for those who give it, paid and unpaid, and those who receive it. My imagined future in 2029, is a new, radical, just and equal ‘Universal Caregiver State’, a term coined by the feminist Nancy Fraser, where the value of care, not profit and exploitation, is placed at the very centre of our world. The Universal Caregiver state prioritises fighting for justice for First Nations people, dismantling racial and gender inequality, taking care of our common world by radical action on climate change, enacting a new crime of Ecocide, and introducing a Universal Basic Income. How did we get there, to 2029? I imagine a General Strike of Caregivers in 2027, a new Care and Justice Party holding the balance of power and a new March for Care each year. The new mantra is Recognise, Respect, Redistribute and Remunerate; Recognising care as valuable, Respecting care work as the life giving and sustaining low carbon activity that it is, redistributing it more fairly between genders, and Remunerating – at last paying carers what they are truly worth.