Care and Capitalism

Abstract

It was a pleasure to read Care and Capitalism by the sociologist Kathleen Lynch. As the lessons of the COVID-19 global pandemic have clarified the many ways our care crisis has played out—in our homes, classrooms, and our workplaces—this book provides an important sociological perspective. Drawing on the multi-disciplinarity of care theory, Lynch reminds us that care is relational, operating at all levels—personal, community, and political— and traversing the public and private spheres. In the first part of the book, Lynch provides a cogent and comprehensive account of neoliberalism and outlines what care is, how it operates, and how it is deformed by neoliberal capitalism. Lynch clearly shows the ways that care is routinized, marketized, digitized, and based largely on efficiency and expediency. While neoliberalism has demeaned care, at the same time it idealizes and glorifies it. Care becomes a powerful site of further exploitation in very gendered, racialized, and class-based ways. Lynch then historicizes this discussion, expounding the ideological roots of liberalism and neoliberalism and offering insights into the rise of capitalism and its relationship to care. The book’s third part focuses on deformed care, especially violence, both toward humans and nonhumans, an important contribution to the discourse. Seeking to claim an important theoretical space to discuss violence and care, both of which have been marginalized in our philosophical and sociological imaginations, she offers an intersectional analysis as fundamental to care, recognizing the parallel inequalities that have emerged and with which we must contend. The final section is devoted to the future framed as resistance, turning again to the lessons learned from the pandemic. Lynch has written a timely book for those who have been theorizing and researching care as well as for those who are new to its complexities. Boldly challenging Rawls’s veil of ignorance, a philosophical ideal ‘‘not grounded in sociological or political reality,’’ Lynch asserts that the centrality of freedom over equality in liberalism has meant that matters of social justice, where care is situated, are nearly impossible to realize. Without addressing social and political inequalities that exist, equality is narrowed to equalizing the right to compete, rather than the right to choose alternatives with equal value. As such, liberal reforms continue to be severely compromised. Rather, an alternative relational framework, centered on care, makes affective justice possible, a thread she weaves throughout the book. In the final chapter, reflecting on perhaps the most important lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lynch illuminates the travesty of the privileged indifference in not knowing the lives of others, a reality enabled by neoliberal ideology where matters of care have been demeaned and subordinated to those of justice. Another important consideration is how she addresses the thorny question of the individual. Tracing its historical roots in European Christian traditions, Lynch demonstrates the changing definitions of individualism. In this latest stage of neoliberalism, individualism has been reduced to self-responsibility, which Lynch argues is problematic and deeply antithetical to caring practices. Instead, she makes the case for salvaging some aspects of individuality, extending Tronto’s notion of homo curans (2017) to the realm of affective justice as a counternarrative. The discussion of violence in Chapters Eight and Nine, especially the violence that we perpetrate against nonhumans, is particularly strong. Lynch adeptly pushes us to consider whether a truly caring society is possible, given the ways in which we normalize and legitimize violence against nonhumans. Disregarding the suffering of others makes 458 Reviews