Care-centered politics – from the home to the planet

It’s difficult to disagree with the underlying premise of Robert Gottlieb’s latest, wide-ranging and ambitious book Care-centred politics – from the home to the planet (MIT Press, 2022). It’s clear, as he suggests, that the neoliberal turn of the last few decades amounts to a kind of anti-care politics. A political and social turn that is antipathetical to the very notion of care.

It’s difficult too to deny the tragedy of that turn or the profound impact it has had on care workers everywhere. It’s easy to recognise that these were also the people who quite literally saved our lives during the pandemic. ‘Who exactly are the care workers, other than the people we need most right now?’ wrote Nancy Folbre in April 2020. Purely for these reasons, it’s tempting to applaud this book.

Nonetheless, there is something of a labour of love required in reading Care-centred politics. The core of the book is a rambling defence of a multitude of social causes. Race, class, gender rights. Decentralisation, decriminalisation, demilitarisation. Cause after cause is elaborated with a rich enthusiasm that will have every like-minded liberal nodding in agreement. And every sceptical neoliberal muttering – or perhaps even raging – about ‘woke left-leaning snowflakes’.

In one chapter, we are treated to a colourful history of the ‘wages for housework’ movement and the struggles across successive waves of feminism to defend the value of ‘social reproduction’. In another we find a potted history of the civil rights movement, from the extraordinary personal sacrifices of John Lewis and Charles Sherrod in the 1960s to the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. There is a chapter too on ‘earth care’ in which the reader is offered a rough guide to the inadequate progress made against climate targets and a largely US-focussed account of recent campaigns for a Green New Deal.

Much of the richness of the book flows from Gottlieb’s own experience as a campaigner for environmental justice. It suggests a mind filled with a maze of colourful corridors, each filled with archive material of huge contemporary relevance. Sometimes the writing feels like an act of reflection on building, nurturing and wandering through these corridors. And perhaps that’s where the book’s value should properly be located. For those unfamiliar with these causes, it offers an informed, fly-on-the-wall tour through half a century of progressive thought.

But in offering us this personal encyclopaedia, I couldn’t help feeling that something has gone missing. Most notably, the book lacks any clear definition of terms – even of care itself. It’s a ‘simple yet evocative word that has multiple reference points and meanings’, he tells us, in a section entitled ‘defining care’. So far so good. But the beginnings of clarity then dissolve into a maelstrom of descriptors designed to emphasise just how undefinable care is. It’s a process, a practice, an ethic, a form of labour, a form of solidarity and interdependence, a politics, we are told. And we’re left with nothing quite solid enough to provide foundations on which to build a care-centered politics.

The book fares slightly better in defining the ‘care economy’. The term is usefully introduced by the claim that it reverses the objective of ‘careless and reckless accumulation’ of growth-obsessed capitalism by focussing on ‘a system of production based on the infrastructure of daily life and a form of consumption based on the idea of sufficiency’. Here is something from which we could begin to visualise not just a different economy but a different economics.

But a chapter dedicated to the care economy follows the same frustrating formula of aligning itself with every like-minded cause under the sun. There is a long section on the foundational economy, the wellbeing economy, the solidarity economy and the post-pandemic Build Back Better movement. But it ends up asking rhetorically: ‘[w]hat would a care economy look like? What does it share with these other approaches?. And what would make it distinctive and transformative?’ Questions which I had rather hoped the book might elucidate for me.

Perhaps most frustrating of all is the inability, almost a refusal it seems, to anywhere precisely define care-centered politics itself. True, there are descriptions of policies which Gottlieb clearly favours, drawn mainly from those that might support his favourite causes. But I searched in vain for any real description of the politics of a care-centered politics.

Where would its legitimacy reside? What would its institutions of governance look like? What precedent do we have for them in the history of western thought? Are they compatible at all with early 21^st Century (late) capitalism? And, if they are not, then where should we turn for transformation?

None of these questions is answered, or even asked in the book. And that omission appears at first to be mission critical. Those looking for a definitive understanding of care-centered politics are apt to feel a bit cheated by the time they get to the end. Particularly if they had skipped over the crucial Acknowledgments section as I did.

Had I properly read that oft-overlooked section the first time round, I might have understood that the author’s intentions were actually quite precise: to collate the mass of experience from his own immersion in this collection of pressing social causes under the banner of an emerging idea: that what has gone missing most crucially from the neoliberal turn of the last half century is the centrality of care to the human experience.

Realising this doesn’t necessarily excuse the chaotic nature of the book. For care simply to become a motherhood and apple pie label for all the good causes supported by the progressive left, seems to me to be almost as exploitative as to ignore its value entirely as capitalism does. But knowing where the book came from gives you a way of reading it that is at least a little more sympathetic and offers a kind of redemption for what might otherwise be construed as an indulgent lack of clarity.

When I returned to the text with this insight in hand, I began to see, elliptically as it were, what the author was pointedly refusing to tell me. That this collection of causes can in itself be construed as a form of grounded politics. The pre-figuration of possible futures perhaps. And given that insight, the task of a care-centered politics may just be to create the conditions under which these ‘social experiments’ can be nurtured.

‘How can those spaces grow.?’ asks Gottlieb somewhere in the middle of the book. ‘[H]ow can social movements and a new politics overcome the type of cynicism that assumes that no change is possible.’ It’s the closest he comes to defining the challenge of a care-centered politics. Without ever quite answering the question, he suggests that it requires ‘a political project in the next decades that is the reverse image of the neoliberal political project that emerged during the 1970s and 1980s.’ The book is a call to arms for such a project.