Care-Centered Politics by Robert Gottlieb

Author:Robert Gottlieb [Gottlieb, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: care economy; care politics; care work; care workers; social reproduction; wages for housework; essential workers; care ethics; care and the pandemic; care and racism; care and climate change; redistribution; reparations; care and repair; care and connection; care and solidarity; degrowth; Universal Basic Income; 30 hour work week; compulsive consumption; sufficiency; anti-care politics and meanness; André Gorz; Ai-jen Poo; National Domestic Workers Alliance; domestic workers; inequalities; Build Back Better; care and the Green New Deal; Medicare for All; Health for All
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-07-13T00:00:00+00:00

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Pathways for Change: A Care-Centered Politics Agenda

There are periods of history in which order is dislocated, leaving behind nothing but constraints bereft of meaning. Realism no longer consists in managing what exists, but in imagining, anticipating, and initiating fundamental transformation, whose possibilities already lie in existing transformations.

—André Gorz, Les Chemins du Paradis

The Process for Change

If care is about what we do, and how we interact with each other and the world around us, then the task of a care politics agenda, particularly in the wake of the events of 2020–2021, is to identify where the opportunities for change can be located in what we do and how we do it. Even as a care-centered politics is able to move the United States beyond a Trumpian anticare politics, the possibilities for a radical shift toward a different culture of care, a more democratic type of governance, and a change in racial, gender, and class relationships remains challenging at best. Despite the enormity of the changes required, a care politics agenda may need to initially seek changes less radical or transformative, but that nevertheless provide a direction for achieving far greater change than initially anticipated. Some of those types of changes could be found in the early actions of the Biden administration seeking to undo the anticare damage of the Trump years. At the same time, the 2020–2021 crises of a pandemic still not controlled even with the arrival of vaccines at the time of the January 20, 2021, change of the US government, a climate crisis that continues to intensify and pose severe threats around the globe, and systemic racism and deep inequalities that appear intractable—all of those made the need for transformative change more compelling than ever, despite the obstacles. The dilemma of what type of change to pursue suggests, at the extremes, differences between two distinct pathways: an incrementalism that fails to meet the challenges required versus the 1960s’ imaginary and utopian slogan of transformative change: be realistic, demand the impossible.

A care-centered politics is well positioned to address that dilemma. It draws on nearly two centuries of care-related research, writing, advocating, and organizing around both immediate and structural daily life and social reproduction issues. It has accomplished small and more substantive changes while still pursuing a transformative household, community, national, and global shift. Care politics, moreover, can become associated with a wide array of constituencies, institutions, and issues, from earth care to health care, violence prevention to policing reform and criminal justice, and environmental justice to food sovereignty and climate justice. The vast majority of the people in the United States and throughout the world engage in some form of care or being cared for, from childhood to adulthood and elderhood. This fact can help stimulate a majoritarian movement while also helping change language, behavior, and the value of community and public action as opposed to anticare, profit-seeking market approaches. It elevates the desire for solidarity rather than the self-serving individualism that had become the norm in a neoliberal order.

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