The ‘crisis of care’ is currently a major topic of public debate.footnote¹ Often linked to ideas of ‘time poverty’, ‘family-work balance’, and ‘social depletion’, it refers to the pressures from several directions that are currently squeezing a key set of social capacities: those available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally.footnote² Historically, these processes of ‘social reproduction’ have been cast as women’s work, although men have always done some of it too. Comprising both affective and material labour, and often performed without pay, it is indispensable to society. Without it there could be no culture, no economy, no political organization. No society that systematically undermines social reproduction can endure for long. Today, however, a new form of capitalist society is doing just that. The result is a major crisis, not simply of care, but of social reproduction in this broader sense.

I understand this as one aspect of a ‘general crisis’ that also encompasses economic, ecological and political strands, all of which intersect with and exacerbate one another. The social-reproduction strand forms an important dimension of this general crisis but is often neglected in current discussions, which focus chiefly on economic or ecological dangers. This ‘critical separatism’ is problematic; the social strand is so central to the broader crisis that none of the others can be properly understood in abstraction from it. However, the converse is also true. The crisis of social reproduction is not freestanding and cannot be adequately grasped on its own. How then should it be understood? My claim is that the ‘crisis of care’ is best interpreted as a more or less acute expression of the social-reproductive contradictions of financialized capitalism. This formulation suggests two ideas. First, the present strains on care are not accidental, but have deep systemic roots in the structure of our social order, which I characterize here as financialized capitalism. Nevertheless, and this is the second point, the present crisis of social reproduction indicates something rotten not only in capitalism’s current, financialized form but in capitalist society per se.

My claim is that every form of capitalist society harbours a deep-seated social-reproductive ‘crisis tendency’ or contradiction: on the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. This social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism lies at the root of the so-called crisis of care. Although inherent in capitalism as such, it assumes a different and distinctive guise in every historically specific form of capitalist society—in the liberal, competitive capitalism of the 19th century; in the state-managed capitalism of the postwar era; and in the financialized neoliberal capitalism of our time. The care deficits we experience today are the form this contradiction takes in this third, most recent phase of capitalist development.

To develop this thesis, I first propose an account of the social contradiction of capitalism as such, in its general form. Second, I sketch an account of its historical unfolding in the two earlier phases of capitalist development. Finally, I suggest a reading of today’s ‘care deficits’ as expressions of capitalism’s social contradiction in its current, financialized phase.

Most analysts of the contemporary crisis focus on contradictions internal to the capitalist economic system. At its heart, they claim, lies a built-in tendency to self-destabilization, which expresses itself periodically in economic crises. This view is right, as far as it goes; but it fails to provide a full picture of capitalism’s inherent crisis tendencies. Adopting an economistic perspective, it understands capitalism too narrowly, as an economic system simpliciter. In contrast, I shall assume an expanded understanding of capitalism, encompassing both its official economy and the latter’s ‘non-economic’ background conditions. Such a view permits us to conceptualize, and to criticize, capitalism’s full range of crisis tendencies, including those centred on social reproduction.

My argument is that capitalism’s economic subsystem depends on social reproductive activities external to it, which form one of its background conditions of possibility. Other background conditions include the governance functions performed by public powers and the availability of nature as a source of ‘productive inputs’ and a ‘sink’ for production’s waste.footnote³ Here, however, I will focus on the way that the capitalist economy relies on—one might say, free rides on—activities of provisioning, care-giving and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds, although it accords them no monetized value and treats them as if they were free. Variously called ‘care’, ‘affective labour’ or ‘subjectivation’, such activity forms capitalism’s human subjects, sustaining them as embodied natural beings, while also constituting them as social beings, forming their habitus and the cultural ethos in which they move. The work of birthing and socializing the young is central to this process, as is caring for the old, maintaining households, building communities and sustaining the shared meanings, affective dispositions and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation. In capitalist societies much, though not all, of this activity goes on outside the market—in homes, neighbourhoods, civil-society associations, informal networks and public institutions, such as schools; and relatively little of it takes the form of wage labour. Non-waged social-reproductive activity is necessary to the existence of waged work, the accumulation of surplus value and the functioning of capitalism as such. None of those things could exist in the absence of housework, child-rearing, schooling, affective care and a host of other activities which serve to produce new generations of workers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds and shared understandings. Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society.footnote⁴

From at least the industrial era, however, capitalist societies have separated the work of social reproduction from that of economic production. Associating the first with women and the second with men, they have remunerated ‘reproductive’ activities in the coin of ‘love’ and ‘virtue’, while compensating ‘productive work’ in that of money. In this way, capitalist societies created an institutional basis for new, modern forms of women’s subordination. Splitting off reproductive labour from the larger universe of human activities, in which women’s work previously held a recognized place, they relegated it to a newly institutionalized ‘domestic sphere’ where its social importance was obscured. And in this new world, where money became a primary medium of power, its being unpaid sealed the matter: those who do this work are structurally subordinate to those who earn cash wages, even as their work supplies a necessary precondition for wage labour—and even as it also becomes saturated with and mystified by new, domestic ideals of femininity.