Beyond Commodification : The Challenges of Care Work

By analyzing the labor involved in caregiving, this book shows how dimensions of care labor have liberatory possibilities.

Although foundational to human life, the activities of care provision were not considered worthy of serious philosophical and theoretical analysis until feminist theorists argued that care provision was not simply an instinctive act but involved judgment and moral deliberation.

In the first part, Monique Lanoix examines the concept of labor in the writings of Locke, Hegel, Marx, and Arendt. If these authors pay attention to the labor of reproduction and care provision, it is only to shore up the assumption that productive labor is a more worthy human activity. However, the denial of care labor as bona fide labor yields useful insights. Showing the neglect of the relational qualities of care labor implies that the relationality of labor as a human activity is expunged from productive labor. Consequently, such an impoverished concept of labor can only lead to Taylorism and to the complete alienation of the laborer from their laboring activities.

The second part considers proposals to adapt the labor of care to post-Fordist societies: the commodification of care labor, the introduction of immaterial labor to better capture the increasing prevalence of unproductive labor and the recent enthusiasm for robotic care. These proposals, in addition to neoliberal attempts to mold care labor into a productive activity, have failed and increased the oppression of care laborers. Rather, inspired by the writings of Dejours and his concept of labor as a living activity, Lanoix argues that the path to follow is to reinstate the relational aspects of labor for a more complete understanding of productive labor and labor more generally. Therein lies the radical potential of care labor.