care-work

I think the best way of understanding class is as a process. Harry Braverman says that although we tend to resort to a shorthand when describing the working class, in fact, when you look closely, you're always looking at something more fluid than solid — ­the constant transformation in both the forces and the relations of production.

That's to say that although there is a hard, non-negotiable conceptual core of what it means to be in the proletariat, there is a wide belt of contingency around that. Take unemployment — this is a classic intervention over the last couple of decades: to explain un- and underemployment, as an important part of global proletarian experience, the forms of contingent attachment to the labour market.

And it's once you allow for these kinds of empirical and to some degree, conceptual flexibilities around the harder Marxist core of class analysis that you also gain new tools for thinking about the relationship of gender and class of race and class.

But it does require new forms of empirical investigation, it requires conceptual adjustment, it requires Marxists to take on insights from feminism, most importantly in this case. Then the reason these things become controversial is that it then raises new questions about political agency and possible sites of solidarity, which I think is what's generative about this approach of describing.

It seems to me that it's actually quite difficult to see how that that could be from a reading of and fidelity to Marxism; how it could be that you could imagine a kind of stable ordered concept of class? It seems that the whole dynamic of the transformation of the forces and relations of production and the genesis of the industrial reserve army, once you begin to really flesh that out sort of sociologically and empirically in a way that Marx only sort of does, requires this sort of openness.

Both gender and race are phenomena of the material base, if you want to use a base and superstructure metaphor, that's to say, they are forms of organisation of the forces of production, or of one force of production in particular — labour power — which they render available in particular forms for which they set the cost of reproduction, and at particular levels, again, all contingent, contested, all of that.

It’s for this reason, with a few further theoretical steps that you’d need to fill in, that service work in general including housework (we can see housework as an unwaged subset of service work) is resistant to productivity increases and is therefore typically relegated to the margins of the capitalist mode of production: either entirely non-commodified as in the home or only partially incorporated into the money economy by means of state subsidy.

And to show that from any given kind of point in the development of capitalism there are not necessarily immediate possibility of social transformation, but that the material bases are always developing in ways that can give rise to struggle. Those struggles can be generative and can take you somewhere. And that this is as characteristic of a post-industrial service economy as it was of an industrial economy although differently so.

Less generously, I suppose, I would say that the conflation of those three points that I just laid out — the collapse of the strategic and the material questions into a f humanistic question — bespeaks a kind of nostalgia. And nostalgia in general seems like completely at odds with Marxism.

Because it does seem to me that institutions of social reproduction don't analytically pre-exist the capitalist social relations that are around them. They are produced in and around and through the kind of development of capitalism in ways that permeate them much more powerfully than I think that kind of shorthand analysis would suggest.

This is speculative, but it seems to me that the ongoing decomposition of normative gender that we can all see around us, is in some ways, a kind of automatic development, or rather a kind of mechanical development almost, of the ways in which the capitalist mode of production is not able to reproduce itself that effectively anymore through a strictly gendered division of labour.

There is a wider variety of genders that are becoming kind of possible and needed, but that's extremely politically fraught and contested. This argument is to link the question of how human beings are gendered and gender themselves to the question of the division of labour.

But nevertheless, as I always tell my students, it used to be that in many shops, when a manager entered the shop, the workers would all put down their tools and stop working, that you would not work while the manager was looking at you.

When I have worked in workplace organising this was always the thing I tried to find out about workers and about their jobs and about their relations with each other. What are those little moments where they have identified just a tiny sphere of autonomy, a tiny practice of resistance? Do they talk about that with each other? Do they share those? And often you find that they do. You know, “Hey, I found a way of listening to music while working in the warehouse, if the boss doesn't know. I have a hat on over my earbuds”, things like that.

And certainly, in the care economy, which I study, there's a perverse way in which that goes the other way, where workers actually have to break the rules in order to make sure patients are taken care of sufficiently. Because management is sort of tacitly expecting and banking on workers own kind of, let's call them democratic practices.

I’m always trying to get people to recover the term “busting the rate” for when you go too fast. In graduate school, I used to say to people who finish their PhD too fast “What are you doing? you're busting the rate! We take seven years in this shop!”.

Parallels between care and ecology are instructive. ‘No society, capitalist or otherwise, that systematically cannibalises social reproduction can endure for long.’ Both constitute ‘free riding on the lifeworld’, but whereas ecological destruction has been a feature of fossil capitalism since its inception, the care crisis is distinctively modern, a result of the movement of women and care into the sphere of labour. Observing that the end of the ‘family wage’ – earned by the male ‘breadwinner’ – and the diminution of the male share of the labour market brought only a partial emancipation from kitchen and nursery is to stress that feminism’s triumph is far from total.