Labours of Love

Capitalism was built on ignoring and marginalising the care work of women. This much has been the history of centuries, but a further insidious shift has taken place in the last few decades, as market principles have been introduced into the care relationships from which they were once explicitly excluded. We have ‘begun to think and define ourselves and everything else in terms of market values’, warns the philosopher Michael Sandel. He points out how monetary terms crowd out other meanings, such as ethical and political considerations; the person involved is lost to sight, and what was seen as a vocation is commodified as purely an employment contract. The result is that a set of cultural contradictions are now endemic in many forms of care work. The market depends on measurement so that it can analyse efficiency, productivity and competitiveness. To apply this to care requires redefining it as a series of tasks with specified outputs and then allocating those tasks to the lowest level of skill possible. The model is that developed for the manufacture of Ford cars in the early twentieth century by the management theorist Frederick Taylor.

‘Pain is a sensation and suffering is a practice,’ argues the philosopher Ivan Illicit, his controversial thesis was that ‘the medicine which convinced people that all pain is curable, has made pain unendurable’. He suggested that pain can be borne with dignity by ‘duty, love, fascination, routines, prayer and compassion’, but the cultural authority of medicine with its false promises to abolish pain, suffering and death, had robbed people in the West of their ability to suffer with dignity and meaning. More recently, James Davies developed a similar argument in The Importance of Suffering, suggesting that in contemporary understanding ‘much of everyday suffering is [seen as] a damaging encumbrance best swiftly removed’. This belief is ‘increasingly trapping us within a world view that regards all suffering as a purely negative force in our lives’, and he argues that ‘the contented life is not solely attained through rational advancement and direct pursuit of happiness but through our being willing to confront experience and learn from our suffering’. He quotes the Swiss philosopher Henri Frédéric Amiel: ‘You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.’

Along the way, what is lost is the understanding of the power of care relationships, their capacity to forge some of the deepest and most meaningful connections. Care is a set of activities which, like music, poetry and art, makes us human: it reflects our capacity for tenderness and generosity, to reach beyond our own self-interest to serve the flourishing of another. The faith we are now in danger of losing is in ourselves. The risk is that we turn on ourselves the capitalist strategy of exploitation and extraction, offering our lives for public entertainment on social media. Capitalism is restless, constantly in search of new frontiers where it can establish monetary transactions from which profit can be extracted. In mature economies, one of the last frontiers is intimate relationship – both with ourselves and with others. There has been a slow abandonment of territory to a set of market values which are incompatible with care – a dismantling of barricades designed to defend the possibility of dependence, vulnerability, responsibility and generosity in human relationship.