Life Support: An Introduction to Economies of Care

An economy of care emphasizes not what is currently viable but what must become possible in order to ensure a futurity to human life—in and beyond the wages of anthropogenic climate change. It is in that spirit that these essays have been collected; not to merely make an argument about facts on the ground, but to reconceptualize the ground altogether and make a better, more inclusive world possible with a focus on care at its foundation. Care is an interactional process that connects individuals, communities, and their environments; it can be positive and supportive and mutually enlivening, but it can also be marked by neglect and violence and ambivalence. In the United States, care has routinely been placed inside the home, or in other institutions that rely on typically feminized labor, including schools, residential hospitals, and in-home nursing. This feminization of care has historically led to its devaluation in capitalist economies—where masculine labor occurred outside of the home and was governed by competitive wage markets.1 For the patriarchal state and industrial economics, care labor was an afterthought, when it was considered at all, which led to its presumed voluntariness by the patriarchal state and its actors, as in the case of homemaking and childcare. Similarly, caregiving’s status as vocation—as in the cases of nursing and teaching—led to its devaluation because of its presumed extension of natural inclinations of caregivers who labored not because they needed to, but because it was in their nature. The result has been that caregiving labor—and care more generally—has been placed in a structural position where advocates have had to struggle against its devaluation and marginalization.

This marginalization of care’s value has been aided by the racialization of care, both in terms of who gives care and who is worthy of receiving it.2 In the context of settler colonialism and the continued inequities of the postcolonial world order, this has led to care being provided by marginalized and racialized communities for the benefit of white colonizers; it has also led to the deprivation of care to those same communities, from the absence of mothers who are forced to provide care for white children,3 to the lack of state programs to support individuals and communities, to the imprisonment and genocide waged against racialized groups. As Cedric Robinson has demonstrated, such exploitation and deprivation of care implicitly acknowledge care’s value and are possible because of the racial basis of capitalism as a social system.

Care is the basis of the economy and the value of all labor derived from the work of care. Such an awareness accepts the foundational interdependency of life—between humans, between humans and their sociotechnical worlds, between humans and their environments—and starts with the assumption that care is being given and received in any interaction, or that care is being purposefully withheld or obfuscated to uphold specific ideas about who and what are of value to society. How care is obscured or perverted becomes the site of critique—and lays the foundation for experiments in how care can be otherwise.

As a means to recapture the value of care—and labor more generally—a revitalized labor theory of value helps erode the distinctions that uphold certain kinds of labor and laborers as existing apart from the care work that is necessary to make our world livable. Care takes one person’s time and redistributes it. This can occur in direct ways, with one person providing care to directly support another person; it can also occur in indirect ways, with one person’s time being distributed across a number of other people. In this way, the care that a farmer provides to their crops provides time to all the people who consume it, the farmer’s care substituting for their own need to tend individual gardens. Inversely, taking time away from people—through imprisonment or a lack of valuing another person’s time—is a means to take care away from individuals and communities. Situating the time of care at the forefront of its importance acknowledges the futures that care makes possible—for individuals, communities, and environments—and unsettles an accepted truth of American economics, which relies on the uncompensated or undercompensated labor of carers: that the labor theory of value is a dead end. Instead, a revitalized labor theory of value that is based in care and time is positioned to call into question the economic as we have inherited it from North Atlantic liberal traditions.4

Scholars have pointed to how the economic has been produced as a delimited sphere of human activity separate from all the social interactions and institutions that make the economic possible.5 Focus on how caregiving in all of its forms serves to create the economic—derived from the Greek oikos for home—points to how the economic should be conceptualized, not as something outside of the interactions between people that make lives livable and sustain them, but as produced through those activities.6 The oiko-nomic puts the American private sphere of the home and its caregiving activities at the forefront of the economic—it situates care as the basis of society, both that which makes the social possible and as the set of processes that must be protected at all costs in order to ensure that society persists.

In developing an economy of care, extending the “home,” the oiko, becomes a necessary project. As Patricia Owens writes, ideologies of belonging are deeply indebted to ideas about who is part of the home and family and who is not, from kinship networks to the nation-state. The forms of exclusion have created distinctions between those inside and outside of the “home,” and, by extension, outside of the economic. The boundaries of the “home” determine whose labor is valuable and how it is valued. A capacious conception of the “home” that accepts the fundamental interdependency of life would extend the necessity of care provision and the need of its valuation. In so doing, the basis of the economic moves from being extractive and exploitative toward being supporting and generative.7 Such a project of extending the “home” and those who are cared for and provide valued care depends, in turn, on radical forms of democratic inclusion that allow for the possibility of redistributing power and unsettling the contours of the economic in continuous ways.8 Doing so requires attention to the micropractices of care and coming to a widespread conception of how care is enacted everywhere to make life livable through the distribution of time. An economy of care begins with a conception of the time that care takes and the assumptions that everyone’s time is equally valuable in an interdependent community of care givers and receivers.

Time is the one resource all humans have. Some of us have more of it than others—longer lives to anticipate, more freedom in how we use our time in any given day—but we are all faced with how we will allocate our time, for our needs and those of others. Disability, impairments, age, and maturity all shape our experiences of time in ways that make it fast and slow, precious and seemingly disposable. In capitalist economies that rely on exploitation through the arbitrary construction of market values, the value of individual time is contaminated by the valuation that the market provides: Some forms of expertise are more valuable than others, some labor time is more valuable than others. Similarly, how we spend our time is differentially valued: time at work rather than time with one’s family—or time spent sleeping and taking care of oneself. But time might be valued otherwise. With awareness that our time as individuals, as community members, and as a species is limited, an economy of care points to the value of prolonging time for others and how the sacrifice of one’s time in support of the time of another person, community, or ecosystem, is a form of exchange that acknowledges our universal access to time as a resource and emphasizes that giving time is an essential feature for the reproduction of society and the sustainability of our institutions and environment. Maximizing time becomes a metric for conceptualizing what might be valued, how it is valued, and what effects that valuation has for those who give and receive. In attending to the maximization of time as the basis for a renewed labor theory of value, the qualities of care as they create and redistribute time are vital to focus attention on.

There are four qualities of care that the assembled essays demonstrate—connection-making, facilitating the achievement of specific ends, animating relations between participants, and modulating to meet emergent needs, desires, and capacities of care recipients. These qualities are often obscured in debates about care, which often reduce caring professions to being health-related in their desire to achieve certain outcomes, or being caregiving in the form of spending time with children, disabled people, and the elderly. The devaluation of care allows for the low pay—and low cultural value—associated with caring professions, as most of what is done under the rubric of care is accepted as being low-skilled and allows for the interchangeability of one caregiver with another. Physicians and other high-valued positions stand in contrast to these low-paid roles precisely because they are cloaked in cultural expectations that they have mastery over the cures that end the need for ongoing care provision; in one act, they can end the need for ongoing caregiving and make an individual independent from their afflictions. Inasmuch as some cures are available, for most people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, they require ongoing support from family members, employers, the state, and healthcare professionals to ensure that there are not relapses and that outcomes remain positive. Moreover, when scrutinized, the everyday care practices that comprise the interactions between any two individuals—and care of the self in the rising attention to “self-care”—are more manifold than cure and copresence imply. Instead, it is important to consider how care builds connections between people and their social worlds, how care facilitates interactions between people and their environments and social others, how care changes over time to allow for new possibilities in response to changing needs and desires, and how care animates people through their interdependence upon others.

Care builds connections between people and the things they care about, including other people, institutions, nonhumans, and their environments. In this sense, care is fundamentally about supporting individuals through building communities of relations. Classically, community has been conceived of as something that is shared between individuals with shared interests, although they may be in conflict at times;9 but connections are not necessarily communities. Instead, care focuses attention to how connections can be as various as connecting people to the food they eat, to the physical support they use to move around, to pets and other emotional supports, to the technologies that people use as distractions, hobbies, and means to sustain life. In this way, care is infrastructural. Care builds the worlds that individuals exist within and the absence of care limits the kinds of connections an individual can make. This can mean immediate threats to one’s life in the case of a restriction of access to food or life-saving medicine and it can also mean a “slow death” through lack of access to connections that support well-being in less immediate ways,10 as in exposure to conditions that exacerbate feelings of loneliness, stress, and depression. The conditions that lead to connections between people and what and who they care about create possibilities for sustaining lives and making new ones possible.

Care can be a means to facilitate desired ends.11 This is the case for the recipient of care and the caregiver, both of whom are in a relationship with each other to mutually support their achievement of a particular goal. This can be as simple as helping someone to the toilet and as complex as aiding a family in the end-of-life care needed for a terminally ill family member; it can be as simple as providing a meal to a child in public school so they can attend to their day of classes without a gnawing sense of hunger and as complex as building a network of farmers, schools, and families to distribute agricultural produce that would otherwise go to waste; it can be as simple as listening to a person’s account of their medical history to ensure they receive the right kind of care and as complex as reforming the structures of health care to ensure that outcomes for whole populations are equal to more privileged communities. These situations demonstrate how changing the expectations about who is giving care to whom align with the desires and needs of the communities they aim to serve and how this facilitates ways of being in the world and in relation to one another that leads to shared outcomes. Care-as-facilitation attends to what we are hoping to get out of care—and how it can meet the needs of both those who receive care and those who give it.

Modulation is also a central feature of care; it captures how care practices respond to the ongoing change in conditions and expectations that recipients of care desire and how those desires can be facilitated by caregivers. When one considers the needs and desires of a person over their life course—from infancy through childhood and adolescence, to young adulthood and adulthood, through middle and old age, and death—especially alongside periods of acute and chronic illness, what care constitutes changes. When care is imagined as fixed or finite—the provision of cures or the ongoing presence of a caregiver—it obscures how the needs of care’s recipients change over time as do the forms of care that providers give. Modulation points to these changing contours of care and the necessity for care to provide a variety of means for its delivery. Added to this is the complexity of not all recipients needing the same form of care: For example, one child in a classroom needs different things than another, and the challenge that teachers and administrators face is providing a diverse array of support to ensure that all students receive the care they need to be successful students. The failure to be appropriately modular in their approaches leads institutions to fail to account for the needs of the communities they serve—and leads to the perpetuation of inequities of care that have local, national, and, potentially, global consequences.

Animation is the lively interaction that care givers and recipients participate in through their mutual facilitation. Care without animation tends toward objectification, where the recipients of care are treated as if they lack full personhood and are mere objects to be maintained as best as possible, given their situation and social context. But care with animation depends upon the reciprocal interaction of participants who accept each other as giving and receiving care, although this exchange may be asymmetrical in its effects. Instead, animation is often an end in itself; it can be playful or serious, deliberate or implicit, but it accepts that the participants in an interaction have needs and desires that are being met through the interaction. That a participant can be moved or changed through an interaction is a hallmark of the interaction’s foundation in assumptions about animacy. Yet, animacy does not depend upon a mutual sense of interiority or recognition. Instead, humans might animate and be animated through their relations with nonhumans, from the care for an animal or plant, or the care for an inanimate object; this can be the outcome of a variety of intents of the participants or the lack of intent altogether, and a side-effect of a caring practice that is founded in an acceptance of animation. Animation, in this way, is central to the care of the self and the care of the world, and points to the ways that care of the self and care of the world collapse into each other in robust and inclusive forms of caring that make care’s economy more expansive and generative.

Each of the essays that follows is meant to provoke. In some cases, they provide recommendations that are straightforward and applicable now, given the will of people to enact them; in other cases, they are more utopian and aspire to help readers reconceptualize the horizons of what is possible. They range across the United States to consider how care as a framework for our attention provides ways into creating more robust support for people throughout society, throughout the life course. Fundamentally, they suggest that we redistribute the wealth of our society to prioritize practices that create solidarities and communitarian forms of belonging. They work against the strains in neoliberalism that conspire to individualize our experiences and divide communities from each other in an effort to alienate and dominate; instead, the proposals here seek to build new alliances and bring already existing forms of connection and belonging into the foreground.

In the following, the assumption of each of the contributors is that we exist in a world of abundance and that resources need to be reallocated in order to achieve the needs of individuals and communities. Fundamentally, they ask us to redraw the contours of the “home,” of the oiko, to remove its walls and include more people in those who are cared for by the institutions that comprise our everyday lives. In reprioritizing how resources are allocated, they ask us to consider not just the use of money in the strict sense—which can be used as a source of motivation or remuneration—but resources like the attention of institutions to one practice instead of another. This reallocation of attention serves to realign priorities to different outcomes. Their targets and outcomes are different, but each shows how a focus on institutional attention limits conceptions of the economic in ways that create disparities in outcomes and concretize existing forms of inequity and prejudice. In reconceptualizing what, fundamentally, the state can do for its citizens, who counts as a recipient of the care of the state, and what the forms of that care might be, the authors herein implicitly argue for a reformation of the state. Building this emergent state might be the next act of care. It is clear that an emergent state must act without a scarcity mindset and an acceptance of the possibility of radical transformation in the lives of humans and nonhumans, including an attention to sustainability, equity, and inclusivity.12 These essays are provocations toward that end, but it will depend upon readers to bring them to life and conceptualize the post-neoliberal economy and its possibilities for building a new house of caring.