Marcela Uchôa

Chapter in Ethics of Care (Braga, 2024) – Advancing Global Bioethics – Springer/Nature Humanities book series

Marcela Uchôa^[1]

Jonas Van Vossole^[2]

Abstract

Abstract: The March 2020 implementation of the Informal Caregiver Statute in Portugal at the onset of the pandemic revives the need to debate the condition of women in caregiver roles, as well as the role of care and domestic work in capitalist societies. Thinking through the feminist lens on primitive accumulation that affects semi-peripheral societies like Portugal helps us to understand ambiguous positions regarding public policies. These policies are still proposed as guarantees for women to perform jobs with minimum security, jobs that actually allow for privatising a responsibility of the State. In this article, we mean to contextualise and problematise the Informal Caregiver Statute through a discussion about capitalism, patriarchy, the sexual division of labour and the demise of the welfare state.

Introduction

In this article, the recent legislative changes regarding the new Informal Caregiver Statute in Portugal serve as a reference point for a much-needed discussion about politics of care, capitalism, welfare and the sexual division of labour. While at first sight the implementation of this statute seems to be progressive (providing vital financial aid, legal protection and recognition to informal caregivers) with some well-known feminists having advocated for similar measures, we will argue that this legal change is problematic from a feminist perspective.

In the first part of this article, we will analyse the context and the legal details of the proposed new statute, as well as some of the problems. In the second part, we will contextualise the legal change within the political, economic and historical context of care. We will particularly focus on the relation between care, patriarchy and the sexual division of labour, which has tended to delegate the unpaid labour of social reproduction to women. We will then analyse the relation of care in the context of the social welfare state and its demise. Finally, we will see how social and economic crises under neoliberalism and the pandemic affect care, as well as potential alternatives for care in crisis.

1. A New Statute of Informal Care

Before the pandemic, in Portugal, approximately 240,000 people lived in a situation of dependence. Like in most places with ageing populations, these numbers have generally increased as people tend to live longer due to scientific advances. If such extension of life is to be accompanied by true concerns about maintaining or improving the quality of life, there must be changes to the existing mechanisms and institutions of care. In this context, profound reflection is needed on the policies accompanying this evolution and their effects, as well as on the logics of social reproduction under capitalism, in general.

This need increased in urgency due to the onset of the pandemic crisis, which occurred around the same time as the official publication of the care statute. In a few months, the number of citizens who provide care for dependent people doubled. With less than 10 million inhabitants in Portugal, the number of informal caregivers was actually expected to be around 1.4 million, according to a survey carried out by the National Association of Informal Caregivers. The number surged during the pandemic, due to the lack of social responses, closure or isolation of existing care institutions, closure of schools, nurseries, restaurants, etc.

Just before the onset of the pandemic, policymakers tried to address this problem through the legislation of the so-called Informal Caregiver Statute. Initially, the legislative proposal would create a legal framework for those people who spent their days caring for others. It had to address economic difficulties for those caregivers by providing a financial subsidy, as well as guaranteeing some social rights. The measure had been supported by the parliamentary left majority, composed of a PS-minority with support from the Communist Party and the Left Bloc. In particular, the Left Bloc Member of the European Parliament, Marisa Matias, had been a vocal proponent of a similar measure for some time. Also, right-wing parties, such as CDS-PP and PSD, gave several contributions to the new statute from a Christian caritative perspective.

The new law

In September 2019, this resulted in a new Informal Caregiver Statute in Portugal, which was legislated and published as an annex to Law No. 100/2019. The ordinance defined the terms and conditions for implementing pilot projects provided for in the Informal Caregiver Statute. Despite having officially entered into force on September 7, this ordinance was only officially published in Diário da República on March 10, 2020, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The new law understands the informal caregiver as someone who provides assistance to another person in a situation of dependency, due to some type of disability. Such support could include, for example, the provision of food, transportation, support with hygiene and medication, as well as daily safeguards. Most of these caregivers are women who carry out this work exclusively, others are overloaded with the accumulation of tasks, in a – so often failed – attempt to reconcile professional life and care for other family members.

Since its legislation, the statute has been confronted with some problems of implementation. The statute, for example, theoretically provides support measures for informal caregivers and their referral to social support networks. But neither these referrals nor support measures have been defined, nor how they will be implemented. Although the definition of social support networks is attached to Ordinance No. 2/2020, there are still no regulations on providing information or referrals. As a consequence, there is no prediction about when and how support measures for informal caregivers will be implemented.

Another problem is the question of training referred to in Article 4, which establishes the generic requirements of the informal caregiver. However, it does not mandate any training on providing care for the recognition of the statute, neither prior nor simultaneous to assuming the role of caregiver. Whereas one would expect that training and qualification is required to guarantee the quality of correct and safe care provision to those in need, the statute only sees it as a measure of support that the informal caregiver can benefit from, rather than a necessity.

Another problem is that although the statute recognises a main informal caregiver may be entitled to unemployment benefits, it is contradictory with the specific requirement prohibiting any type of unemployment benefit from another source of work (Article 5, paragraph “d”). This situation implies that, in the event of cessation of work activity by the main informal caregiver with the right to unemployment benefits, the caregiver must relinquish her (most care givers are women) subsidy status to be approved. But there are more fundamental problems.

Political problems of the law

Some feminists^[3] have welcomed the measure. It contains some of the demands from the Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign that spread across Italy, the UK and the USA in the early 1970s. The campaign was based on the claim that capitalism heavily depended on the unpaid reproductive labour of women, essential for the reproduction of the workforce in general. Their wageless work thus created the conditions for the reproduction of industrial society. This failure to recognise the economic value of women’s work underlies two interrelated problems of capitalist/industrial modernity: the subordination of women to men and the subordination of reproductive care work to industrial production (Barca 2020, p. 28).

Despite the widespread political support for the measure, in this article, we assume a critical perspective on this legislation which we categorise as a palliative, rather than a preventive policy of care. We understand that the promotion and approval of the Informal Caregiver Statute ultimately corresponds to legally accepting the State’s lack of responsibility regarding healthcare and ensuring the quality of life for a growing, ageing and dependent population.

The transfer of care responsibilities, from society to the family, is profoundly reactionary. Behind the measure is the patriarchal logic of the family as a place for the reproduction of the workforce. Thus, in addition to having little effectiveness in actually implementing needed care and guaranteeing caregivers’ rights, it fundamentally devalues the collective and socialised management of responsibilities and tasks of reproduction.

The law – like most ethics of care – appeals to a romanticised, supposedly affective character of housework and caretaking. Under romanticisation, we understand the use of a perspective that seems to portray something as better or more appealing than the reality. In her critique of the ethics of care, Stacy Clifford Simplican (2015) claims that care theorists like Eva Kittay tend to romanticise human capacities to maintain relationships. Kittay romanticises care when she depicts loving experiences of care, thus obscuring the everyday struggles and conflicts of carers and dependents. Thousands of people, especially women, live in despair and waste their lives, being hostages to the bourgeois State’s lack of responsibility for dependent people. It is also relevant to emphasise that mostly poor workers, without the resources to hire care from private entities, are at the mercy of this romanticised bias.

For Amaia Pérez Orozco (2014), in order to break with what she calls a “reactionary care ethic,” it is necessary to understand the capitalist logic that instils a culture of domestic work with a moralistic bias, detached from the real meaning of life:

Femininity goes largely through a construction of itself for others, through, among other mechanisms, the performance of all residual jobs. Here, one of the keys that endow identity and social recognition with its own meaning is the realization of the tasks that make life possible, subjecting it to life itself. This logic operates primarily in the private-domestic sphere, where the responsibility for sustaining life when capitalist markets are located at the epicenter and attacks is subsumed (PÉREZ OROZCO, 2014, p. 168).

2. Capitalism, Patriarchy and Care

 

To start our critique of privatised care work, we should briefly inquire about the relation between capitalism and patriarchy. Friedrich Engels (2010) famously considered the establishment of the patriarchal family as intimately linked to the establishment of private property in sedentary societies. The patriarchal family established the supremacy of men over women in order to produce children of undisputed paternity; children who later become the heirs of their father’s property. The legal constitution of women as patriarchal subjects and property culminated in modern capitalism and the State. In most modern civil codes, women (bourgeois, proletarian and peasant women alike) are legally made more or less dependent, placed in the guardianship of a husband or father. The modern law awarded the husband with controlling property, as well as the right of moral and physical dominance over women. (Kollontai, 1978) Deprived of public and citizens’ rights, the woman is given a choice between the bondage of marriage or the embraces of prostitution – a trade despised and persecuted in public, but encouraged and supported in secret. Bourgeois society “crushes woman with its savage economic vice,” (Kollontai, 1978, p. 64) by restricting her activity to unpaid reproductive labour or paying very low rates through super-exploitation in the labour market.

A popular contemporary reference regarding the historical relation between accumulation of capital and gender is the work of Silvia Federici (2004). In Caliban and the Witch, she argues that the State-sponsored terror of the 16th- and 17th-century “Great Witch-Hunt” played an essential role in the patriarchal disciplining of women under modern capitalism. Like other Marxist authors, such as Maria Mies (1994), Harvey (2005) and others, Federici argues that the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the workforce was the third pillar of “primitive accumulation” or “accumulation by dispossession,” along with the expropriation of workers and commons, and the enslavement of native Americans and Africans. Under this “primitive accumulation” – which is not “primitive” at all, but rather a continuing and contemporary logic of capital as Luxemburg famously asserted – we understand the continuing logic of use-value accumulation through violence at the capitalist system’s frontiers (Van Vossole 2023).

Federici recognised the role of female procreative activity, particularly in relation to the population boom under capitalism since the 19th century, as a form of “primitive accumulation” rather than a simple consequence of economic development. According to Federici (2004, p. 91), procreation should not be approached as a “natural effect,” but rather as “a social, historically determined activity, invested by diverse interests and power relations.” She argues that the West-European women’s destiny of enslavement for procreation was not dissimilar to that of female slaves in the American colonial plantations. The witch-hunts, as well as the subsequent maximisation of gender differences through feminine and masculine prototypes, were necessary to differentiate power between women and men, concealing women’s unpaid labour under the guise of natural inferiority. Without this differentiation, capitalism could not have immensely expanded the “unpaid part of the working day” or used the (male) wage to accumulate women’s labour.

Women’s work, like that of peasants, the colonies or other “non-capitalist economies,” as Rosa Luxemburg (2016) called them, is available as “free of charge” as nature. Under the capitalist patriarchy, the female gender is not the result of a congenital male misogyny, but a structural necessity for the process of capital-accumulation. A “never-ending process of capital accumulation, cannot be achieved unless patriarchal man-woman relations are maintained or newly created” (Mies, 1994, p.38).

Care and the sexual division of labour

The result of this necessity is a sexual division of labour. Labour is reserved for (predominantly) men’s productive work under capitalist conditions: meaning work for the production of surplus value. Women’s contribution to the production and reproduction of life – care – has been literally defined as a function of their biology or “nature.” Even the human body has been divided between the “human part,” meaning the hands and brain, versus an “animal part,” meaning the genitalia and womb. Much of women’s productive activity has thus been “naturalised” and does not appear as labour, such as giving birth, raising children and domestic work. It does not appear as an activity interacting “with nature,” but as an activity “of nature” – like the produce of plants, happening “unconsciously,” without control by the involved subject. “Female productivity is animal fertility” like found in nature, so the subject finds itself in a relation of domination, with the activity usually unpaid or underpaid. The feminist approach to labour focusses on the whole of the invisible spheres of labour, particularly of unpaid labour, mostly done by women and/or racialised people (Dombroski 2020; Gibson 2020; Salleh 2004). Most of these forms of labour are care work. This includes care for people, for the natural environment, domestic labour and reproductive work in general to ensure the subsistence conditions of the community. This unpaid labour, like taking care of children or parents, cooking, sorting waste, etc., is an important part of social and environmental reproduction.

At the same time, it is important not to neglect social class in this division of labour. Feminist questioning of poverty has been a powerful ally in the conceptual elaboration of a political understanding, that allows breaking with an economist view of poverty as only the absence of income or lack of access to consumption, while showing the gender dynamics behind its recreation. The Brazilian philosopher Suely Carneiro (2003, p.50) brings an important reflection on the hegemonic assessment regarding the dynamics of oppression and power for precarious women: “When we talk about the myth of female fragility, which historically justified the paternalistic protection of men over women, what women are we talking about?” Certainly not those that have to combine a stressful underpaid job with the care of children, the elderly and other household tasks.

Most precarious caregivers living in Portugal would never recognise themselves in the fragility myth, particularly those in the most fragile position, like peasants, women of colour, etc. The justification is simple: these women were never treated as fragile. Rather, they are part of a large number of precarious workers who have probably never understood when certain feminist discourses suggested or told women that they should take to the streets and work. The bodies of these women have always been subject to exhausting work and a condition of subalternity.

As a consequence, a majority of women do not recognise themselves in certain liberal feminist speeches which emphasise overcoming the romanticism that permeates images of beautiful delicate young women who inspire the poetic fado music of elitist university cities like Coimbra. A huge contingent of women have never been muses of anything, on the contrary.

Therefore, rethinking care policies involves the need to democratise the feminist movement. Concretely, this change is only possible by establishing and incorporating guidelines that consider the impact of class and how violence disproportionately affects a significant portion of the female population, particularly those who are not daughters of the elite. Given that capitalism is characterised by precariousness, undervaluation, and the unrecognition of labour, it is crucial for working-class women to organise politically, strengthen bonds and build bridges towards alternative horizons within social reproduction.

Towards the end of care?

Female domestic work was not always what it is today. Like all social phenomena, it is a fluid product of human history. In Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis (1983, p. 223) asks: “If it were at all possible simultaneously to liquidate the idea that housework is women’s work and to redistribute it equally to men and women alike, would this constitute a satisfactory solution?” Although many women welcomed the advent of the “household man,” the “desexualisation” of housework is unable to change the oppressive nature of work itself within the capitalist system. Ultimately, Davis concludes that neither women nor men should waste precious hours of their lives on work they find neither stimulating nor productive.

The rapid expansion of the female workforce has meant that more and more women found it difficult to continue exercising their role as free caregivers according to traditional patterns of exploitation. The “industrialisation” of domestic work, together with its socialisation, became an objective social necessity – albeit not immune to capitalist alienation. At times, the task of care as an individual private responsibility of women, carried out under primitive technical conditions, seemed to approach historical obsolescence. Nevertheless, it has prevailed in social attitudes that continue to associate the female condition with social reproduction, domestic work and care for family members.

A substantial part of the tasks inherent in housework and care work could be – and often already is – actually incorporated into the public and private economy. Angela Davis (1983), in the light of Marxist theory, argues that domestic work no longer needs to be considered necessary and unalterably private, particularly given the technological advances that could radically transform the nature of housework. Teams of trained and fairly paid workers, shifting between residences, using technologically advanced means for cleaning, could quickly and efficiently accomplish what today’s “housewives” do in an arduous and primitive way. The same logic applies to other aspects of healthcare, guaranteeing both qualified jobs and working conditions to trained, competent professionals, as well as a more dignified life for the sick person and their family.

The question then arises: why is there such a lack of interest in radically redefining the nature of domestic work and care? The answer probably lies in the fact that the capitalist economy seems to be structurally hostile to the “industrialisation” of domestic work. The primary reason is that maintaining the logics of accumulation by dispossession, of violently robbing free labour (similar to what occurred for so long through the maintenance of colonies and slavery) contributes to a free increase in profits. Eco-feminist scholar Ariel Saleh (2019) has called care tasks – such as childcare, elder care, forest nurture – a “meta-industrial” labour. This type of labour produces no exchange value, but instead a “metabolic value form” that flows into and sustains the essential bio-infrastructure of the capitalist system. She argues that by global population numbers, meta-industrials make up the global majority of workers.

Another reason is because people dependent on care – excluding those rich enough to hire full-time servants – are usually not the wealthiest customers. A commercialisation of most care work would result in little profit. Like all unprofitable businesses, it forms an anathema to the capitalist economy. Often, it is the government that needs to intervene in such cases. But if care work is socialised, this usually implies the need for large government investments to guarantee access to working-class families, whose need for such services is more evident.

3. Socialised Public Care

 

The welfare state model, which was only fully implemented in Western Europe after the Second World War, did socialise some aspects of care work. The pillars of that welfare state included some aspects that, for a long time, had been a family affair or voluntary religious works. Governments started to guarantee the right to healthcare, through the implementation of national health services and the expansion of hospitals, which not only relieved many women from tasks of caring for sick family members at home, but also created an enormous increase in the quality of care through massification and scientific advances. The same holds for the right to education, when a massive expansion of the public education system guaranteed education, as well as food and entertainment, from nurseries to universities. The welfare state would go on to guarantee social protection – including the set of benefits that cover risks from not having a job – and assistance in some situations of dependency, with the creation of public elderly homes, etc.

Over the years, all have been subject to criticism from a feminist point of view, on issues of applicability and effectiveness. The lack of applicability and effectivity is often not recognised because of the presumption that women and families still fill in the gaps. By assuming women belong to such a family role, they are prevented from sharing the same conditions as men in the labour market. For Amaia Pérez Orozco (2014, p. 130), it is necessary to demand that the State assumes responsibility for what has been called the “fourth pillar of the welfare state”: assistance in situations of dependency.

From a feminist perspective, we need to question the extent to which the welfare state protects against the risk of decreasing well-being levels when the unpaid care work – historically assigned to women – ceases to exist. We are talking about the demise of the family. To what extent can (women in) families can stop doing their free care tasks without people who need care losing quality of life? This aspect, can be a starting point for interpreting welfare systems as a conjunction of State-market-home spheres that provide resources. Depending on which priority is given, we can say that well-being is more or less (de)commodified and (de)familiarised (Pérez Orozco, 2014, p. 131).

Health and education systems do not cover full care needs related to health and illness, nor childhood. A large part (in fact, most of it) is covered by families. Across the world, women and girls are performing more than three-quarters of the total amount of unpaid care work (ILO, 2018, p. v). Likewise, it is recognised that hospitals would not be able to handle all the labour inherent in care if there were no relatives of hospitalised people to provide home support. The situation is considerably worse in cases of precarious patients for whom the State denies responsibility to feed, clothe or even provide medication.

The welfare state was conceived as the express attempt to build society under the tension between capital and life, in which the State can establish norms that redistribute what capitalist markets barely distribute, guided by principles of solidarity, recognised as universal rights. However, these measures do not eliminate the fact that the welfare state is built upon a sexual division of labour. Taking the capital-life conflict seriously, implies recognising that capitalist markets are central to the debate and that an extensive lack of collective structures persists for guaranteeing life-sustaining processes. This underlies the various models and their variable conjunctions with capitalism and heteropatriarchy – also the welfare state.

The responsibilities assumed by the welfare state in this regard are not only partial and incomplete, but also extremely fragile, being called into question during times of heightened tension, as seen in the current crisis. Positioning the markets at the epicentre inhibits the existence of a collective responsibility when setting conditions for the possibility of life. At the same time, life must go on. How and where? This responsibility is transferred to networks of intimacy (households), with privately available means, which fundamentally consist of two: unpaid work and money market consumption. Responsibility is privatised because it remains inserted in the private-domestic sphere, therein becoming invisible and feminised (Pérez Orozco, 2014, p. 132).

This is why we believe that the sexual division of labour continues to exist in these invisible and feminised jobs, inherent to the welfare state. Everything that is built on the capital-life conflict is also based on the sexual division of labour. Living under capitalism means being subject to the process of accumulation. Maintaining the welfare state means maintaining this mechanism. Our own ethical and political conception of life is colonised by capitalism, limiting our interventive priorities in the game of accumulation, without going beyond the welfare state. Understanding these dynamics of oppression is a crucial strategy for us to resignify care as a component that generates, not imprisons, life.

To achieve this, it is necessary to go beyond creating metanarratives that explain history in a favourable way for women. Instead, it is essential to recognise that many culturally denied aspects, if explored, could allow for a radically different understanding of the one that has been told. This history must be necessarily situated and created collectively, putting partial truths in dialogue in the search for collective cartographies. In this sense, creating knowledge from hegemonic positions does not serve us, as they impose themselves as the only possible truth and prevent the transformation of reality.

 Care in crisis

Feminist theorists have long considered capital accumulation by dispossession as a process fundamental and socially guaranteed by capitalism. The phenomenon becomes even more flagrant in times of crisis, when markets need to expand beyond their existing limits in the entire socioeconomic structure to overcome contradictions and compensate for losses. Since the establishment of the welfare state, the crises of capitalism have often been expressed through transfer mechanisms in a fiscal and or social crisis (Habermas 1975, O’Connor 2002). The crisis affects care activities in both public and private dimensions. A state undergoing a fiscal crisis tends to cut crucial social services to reduce costs. For instance, the Euro-crisis following the Global Financial Crisis and the ensuing austerity measures led to reduced public spending on education, healthcare, social benefits, etc. When the state fails to provide access to care services, meeting unavoidable needs quickly becomes unpaid work. These unpaid jobs increase, replacing the public services that the state no longer provides.

Additionally, the degradation of living conditions becomes more evident, negatively impacting health and increasing care requirements, while also worsening conditions for domestic work. This increase is evident from cuts in public spending on dependent care and childcare. The scope of this increase in unpaid work is extensive: from spending thousands of hours cooking cheaper and less elaborate meals, to the time spent looking for and offering palliative healthcare.

According to Antonella Picchio (1999), in the context of crisis, the subsistence strategies of many families suggest that well-being does not depend exclusively on the situation of its members in the labour market. Their well-being also hinges on a complex and diverse network of activities that occurs in an unaccounted number of spaces and times. While production is globalised, the reproduction of the working population remains local. This makes it easier to hide the growing tensions between production and reproduction, “[…] even when their effects are dramatically visible” (Picchio, 1999, p. 225).

Care in the pandemic

Rarely has care been so central in a crisis as in the case of the recent global coronavirus pandemic. Many authors have argued that the COVID-19 crisis is not an external shock, but a crisis of capitalism itself. The crisis not only originated from the increased pressure and interaction between society and nature due to capitalist expansionism, with the transfer of pathogens between wild animals and the human food chain. The risks of contagion were also multiplied by industrial meat-production and the concentration in urban centres, while the speed and global reach were thanks to the capitalist globalisation of trade and transport.

As a consequence of the pandemic, care came to occupy a central position. Healthcare systems and hospital services crashed due to the peaks of sickness and deaths provoked by the pandemic. Economic and social systems were disrupted by governments and protest movements alike, in a global attempt to protect and care for life. At the same time, people had to stay at home, which meant a huge increase in household care labour, as schools and care institutes were sealed from the outside world. For this reason, philosopher Silvia Federici (2020) points out that the advent of the pandemic reinforces the need to rescue the sphere of labour connected to life.

In early 2020, Oxfam published a report entitled “Time to care.” It centred the discussion on unpaid and underpaid care work and the global crisis of inequality, the demand for public policies and actions to strengthen new forms of feminist economics and care that operate outside capitalist logic. The report scrutinised the gap between rich and poor, highlighting how the contemporary economic system plays an important role in producing these inequalities.

 Social reproduction consolidated as a fundamental ground of dispute. While the rest of societies collapsed, the public care services appeared as the fundamental core of society. These essential services had been underfunded over the decades, with the unpaid invisibilised work in households or by marginalised and often racialised precarious workers.

4. Alternatives from Crisis

 

The first “alternative” seemed to continue at full throttle on the paved neoliberal road. Governments often refused to intervene in industrial production, while outsourcing fundamental services for the public management of the pandemic. It suffices to mention how the vaccination programs were totally dependent on private pharmaceutical companies, with intellectual property (patents) being prioritised over free access for poor countries. The objective need made care prone to profiting certain individuals and large corporations. Most of the political and economic measures that were enacted in response to the pandemic crisis have this objective.

Ironically, the efforts to create an Informal Care Statute, like in Portugal, could be included in this drive to further privatise the remnants of the welfare state in a period of crisis. In Portugal: A Singular Portrait, Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1993) explains the country’s the permanence on the periphery of Europe as being the equivalent of a Global South in the Global North. This position of ambiguity highlights both Southern and Northern epistemologies. Wage relations and social well-being in semi-peripheral regions like Portugal explain many of the contradictions and intersections between the hyperlocal and the transnational. This reflects a combination of the World-System dynamics with regulations applied to local realities. The Portuguese Welfare State was only implemented after the revolution of 1974, a moment when the rest of Europe’s welfare states had already entered a downturn. Public care was, therefore, always less effective than recognised in the constitution. Santos attributes a certain “flexibility” of care in Portugal during periods of crisis, as informal social networks and families – particularly in the countryside – tend compensate for State failure. Also now, at a moment when States refrained from investing in public institutions of care, the Informal Care Statute institutionalises a privatisation of care practices in the family sphere, which had already been present.

These contradictions go a long way towards explaining the maintenance and acceptance of public policies that are still so “rudimentary” in terms of domestic work and the perspective regarding the sphere of care as a whole. The management and applicability of Law No. 100/2019, establishing the Informal Caregiver Statute, makes us reflect on how the romanticisation of care is responsible for maintaining women in caregiver roles, while removing the State’s responsibility of providing citizens the means to have a more dignified life. Rather than romanticising this position as a form of solidarity, a critical perspective should recognise this as a return to a peripheral condition of primitive accumulation.

What is the alternative then? Angela Davis proposes a full socialisation of care work as the only way for an anti-capitalist emancipation of women. For Davis (1983, p. 243):

The abolition of housework as the private responsibility of individual women is clearly a strategic goal of women’s liberation. But the socialisation of housework – including meal preparation and child care – presupposes an end to the profit-motive’s reign over the economy. The only significant steps toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken in the existing socialist countries. Working women, therefore, have a special and vital interest in the struggle for socialism. Moreover, under capitalism, campaigns for jobs on an equal basis with men, combined with movements for institutions such as subsidized public health care, contain an explosive revolutionary potential. This strategy calls into question the validity of monopoly capitalism and must ultimately point in the direction of socialism.

Based on Davis’s reasoning, the demand for a truly socialist care economy can only be conceived through: nationalisation of the entire private network of homes and institutions that care for dependent people; immediate nationalisation of the entire network of public-private (often church-related) care sector; extinction of orders of health professionals, which make it difficult to allocate human resources within the health sector due to their corporatist nature;  creation of national training programs for geriatric assistants and similar professions; and unionisation of workers in homes and other care institutions, etc. Society should provide free collective cleaning services, collective canteens, nurses that accompany patients at home, nurseries etc., while offering quality jobs and decent salaries for the people working in those care services – equivalent to other economic sectors in society.

Only when the vast majority of care work is socialised and the remaining care work is done out of love, rather than necessity, can we achieve true emancipation for women and establish free and healthy relationships with those who currently depend on others. Care for others should be approached in the same way as those who cook at home, as a hobby rather than need. Only then can one abolish the alienation inherent to care work.

Conclusions

 

Throughout this article, we have analysed the concept of informal care, based on the practical example of legally institutionalising informal care in Portugal at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the very progressive reasoning behind the law’s implementation, a short analysis brought forward some practical problems in terms of implementation and effectiveness, as well as some more fundamental theoretical problems. We have argued from a feminist perspective that the implementation of the Informal Caregiver Statute in Portugal should be seen as the institutionalisation of inadequate State intervention; effectively privatising care work and reproducing the already patriarchal sexual division of labour. We have argued that under capitalism, care work in households is a form of primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession of unpaid and invisible labour done by women. This kind of dispossession is stronger in (semi-) peripheral societies with deficient welfare systems, especially in times of economic and social crisis.

The attempt to reform capitalism and make it more humane has failed to provide us any guarantee that inequalities will disappear. On the contrary, the repeated assistance and emergency measures in cases of crisis and extreme scarcity have alienated and silenced struggles for alternatives, leaving a relevant gap in the fight for social and economic justice for all. If we want a structural, human alternative to care that can overcome the sexual division of labour, it is necessary to overcome the capitalist system. Capitalism alienates us from a true policy of care and inserts women into a system that depletes women’s emotional energies, bringing the alienation of the market economy within family relationships, between dependent people and their caregivers.

 

 

References

Barca, Stefania. 2020. Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878371.

Carneiro, Sueli. 2003. Enegrecer o feminismo: a situação da mulher negra na América Latina a partir de uma perspectiva de gênero. Racismos contemporâneos. Rio de Janeiro: Takano Editora 49: 49–58.

Davis, Angela Y. 1983. Women, Race, & Class. Vintage.

Dombroski, Kelly. 2020. Caring labour: Redistributing care work. In The handbook of diverse economies. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Engels, Friedrich. 2010. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Reissue edition. London: Penguin Classics.

Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

Gibson, Katherine. 2020. Collectively performed reciprocal labour: reading for possibility. In The handbook of diverse economies. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis. Beacon Press.

Harvey, David. 2005. The New Imperialism. Revised edition. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.

ILO, International Labor Organization. 2008. Care work and care jobs for the future of decent work. Geneva.

Kollontaĭ, Alexandra. (1978). Selected writings of Alexandra Kollontai (A. Holt, Trans.). Lawrence Hill.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 2016. The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Theory of Imperialism. In The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume II: Economic Writings 2, ed. Peter Hudis and Paul Le Blanc, Reprint edition. New York: Verso.

Mies, Maria. 1994. Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: women in the international division of labour. 5th ed. Third World Books. London ; Atlantic Highlands, N.J., USA : Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Zed Books ; Distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Humanities Press.

O’Connor, James. 2002. The fiscal crisis of the state. New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction.

Orozco, Amaia Pérez. 2014. Subversión feminista de la economía: aportes para un debate sobre el conflicto capital-vida. Traficantes de sueños Madrid.

OXFAM – Brasil. 2020. Tempo de cuidar. O trabalho de cuidado não remunerado e mal pago.

Picchio, Antonella. 1999. Visibilidad analítica y política del trabajo de reproducción social. In Mujeres y economía: nuevas perspectivas para viejos y nuevos problemas, 201–244. Icaria.

Saleh, A. 2004. Sustainability and meta-industrial labour: Building a synergistic politics. The commoner 9: 1–13.

Salleh, Ariel. 2019. Planetizing the Labor Movement. Great Transition Initiative.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1993. Portugal, um retrato singular. Vol. 5. Edições Afrontamento.

Van Vossole, Jonas. 2023. Marx’s Primitive Accumulation as a perspective on Nature, Race and Gender. Preprint. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/nrbgp.

---

^[1] Institute for Philosophical Studies, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Coimbra University, Portugal

^[2] Ecology and Society Lab, Center for Social Studies, Coimbra University, Portugal

^[3] Silvia Federici has been involved in the International Wages for Housework Campaign since 1972.