ACFM - ACFM Trip 26: Care

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

How can we care for each other within a system that doesn’t care about us? In this episode, Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn get to grips with birth, death and all the social reproduction in between. When did we start putting our elders in care homes instead of our own homes? What happens […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kear Milbin and today I'm joined by my very careful. friends, Nadia Idle, and Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about care. So I can't remember who thought of this topic, actually. I think it's one that might have emerged organically as we were talking.

But we always start with this question. Why is it come up? Why are we talking about care now? Why is care the issue, one of the issues of the time? Well, partly it's because it's something people are talking about quite a lot. There's been some very interesting books published about it. But I think that's the culmination of a history of people talking about this issue quite a lot over the past 10 years or so. What do you think, Nadia?

I think it's something that we want to talk about because in general, I would say, we're a group of people who care about other people and we care about people. people being cared for. But also the politics of care is a really interesting one and something that I think we've all been in some way involved in, in the various different political groupings that we've been in over the last few years. And also because with the trends of the last 15 years, I think it's safe to say that people don't feel cared for. So it would be interesting to kind of deconstruct like what those different forms of care are, why people are talking about it now, like you both said, but also like what that means and in a practical sense, like where are those spaces in which care takes place and in a very literal sense what it looks like. But also, of course, just the simple kind of economics around late capitalism and jobs and the care industry, so to speak, and automation are all things that are interesting to think about and kind of very close to some of the issues that, yeah, we feel are really ACFM.

So I think that's why we're talking about care. Yeah, it is a very ACFM topic, isn't it, care? It's a bit surprising we haven't talked about it before. But I think you're right as well. I mean, one of the things that's pressing at the moment is the cost of living crisis. And, you know, that will take its effect on people's lives as a crisis of care. There's a sort of crisis of care. There's a gap in care, basically, is people work more and more and have less time for care.

And then there's the other thing, which is that more and more of employment is in care work, basically. So both of those things, push this topic of care. And other sort of related topics, you'll probably talk about social reproduction, which is that we'll introduce what that concept means when it comes up. But those sorts of issues have really risen to the fore of politics. And in fact, if we think about like the history of left politics and left thinking, you'd say that that care work and reproductive work has risen up the agenda because it used to be obscure to a large degree by a focus on production, productive work, etc.

So we'll probably talk about all those sorts of things as well, I think. Well, we should explain what some of those terms mean, I think. I mean, when we talk about care in this, so far when we're using this work, care, we're referring to forms of social activity that involve nurturing or looking after or healing. So everything from parenting to aspects of teaching, to medical work, to looking after people who are infirm in some way. this is all what we mean by care. Yeah, that's important. Like, I think that's,

all of those different things falling within that wide definition, doesn't it? Yeah. And by production, we mean basically manufacturing. I mean, people, you know, when you talk about the fact that historically,

radical economics and political organization was focused on the idea that the really important thing people did in society was to produce stuff, to make stuff. And the focus on care, to focus on care is really about, it's not making stuff, it's about making people and keeping people alive. And it obviously is a pretty important topic from that point of

you. Yeah, the distinction between like productive work and reproductive work, that sort of takes you into a sort of Marxist discourse where this social reproductive work comes up, which I think we should introduce a little bit later actually, perhaps. But like, yes, but care has got quite expansive. There's lots of different jobs and work. There's lots of different types of work which include a caring element, even if it's not the only thing that they do. So nursing, for instance, is just care work, although it's probably quite a bit of admin, isn't there? But it's primarily care work. Whereas teaching is certainly, I think that's care work. But it's definitely reproductive work. But there's also sort of disciplinary aspects to that. And in fact,

there's disciplinary aspects to quite a lot of care work because we're trying to reproduce, maintain, you know, facilitate people staying alive, basically, or perhaps living better. But at the same time, you know, care work takes place within a capitalist society in which there's a disciplinary aspect of trying to mould people so that they fit in current society and I think that's one of the tensions.

Okay, a lot of listeners to the show will be familiar with this concept of social reproduction and a lot won't, but it's an idea that comes out of Marxist feminism. So in the Marxist Feminist Register, the idea of social reproduction is the idea there's all these activities that have to go on just in order for human bodies to be kept alive. And the idea is that understanding society from a broadly Marxist perspective, the function of those activities is to reproduce labour, to make sure that labour keeps being available and keeps being able to labour. And that's what the work of mothering, of keeping house, of medicine and all these things. are doing. But there's always been a feminist critique of that, a little in a way, which says, well, that's, it's not necessarily right to say that those forms of activities should only be

seen as reproducing labour, because they're necessary to reproducing humans, whether humans are laboring or not. And they've always been necessary to reproducing humans. And in some sense, they're actually more fundamental at social activities than they are, of than our almost any form of work is, or other forms of work. I think that's what makes that whole social reproduction framing quite useful, I think, because it says like there's a dual nature to social reproduction. You know, from the perspective of the capitalist economy, there is some work that needs to be done in order to reproduce a commodity called labour,

basically. And as far as the capitalist firm's concerned, that appears as a cost on a balance sheet, the same as all the other commodities. And so that is subject to the pressure of competition to sort of to squeeze that, to reduce that cost, basically. But labour isn't the same as any other commodity because it's made up of like living human beings, basically. And they are much, much bigger that they have bigger needs

than just this commodity called labour. And they've got a huge, much bigger potential than basically any form of labour, basically. And those needs and what those needs are intersect but with how society is organized at the time. So in order to produce, you know, like a male worker who goes to, you know, his job in the factory in a kind of like Fordist sense, then you have to have, you know, the housewife that produces the food and take cares of him and perhaps make sure that he has enough sex that he's expecting to get. So, you know, he doesn't get agitated and all of these things within a certain patriarchal model for example. example, that's not the only way of doing it, but under different kinds of social arrangements

that are economically viable under capitalism, there will be certain needs of what that care is and how it's organised. And apart from all of that, there's the level, as you just mentioned, Keir, where, like, there are just some basic stuff you need to do. Like, there needs to be food and there needs to be somewhere to sleep, and someone needs to sort that out. Yeah, there's the idea that, like, there's a limit to how much you can squeeze the cost of labour because, you know, if you squeeze the cost of labor, those costs get dumped on to other care providers. And so in the Fordist era, you know, the housewife and the family, etc. But I think that what's useful about this dual nature that it's, we're talking about labor, this one thing.

And this labor is made up of human beings, which are much, much bigger, is that like, you know, that means that labor has this very different structure to other commodities, i.e., it's much bigger. it has these needs so it will rebel if it gets squeezed too much or if its expectations get bigger than this category of labour, for instance. So I think that helps us understand something like a teacher has got these two things. Part of their role is to discipline kids, basically, so they fit into the world of work. But of course, the other part of that is to help these kids grow into flourishing human beings.

Those two aspects of care work quite often come into conflict with each other. And within some forms of socialist feminism, you know, they argue like, look, this is one of the inherent contradictions in capital that keep producing various crises of care, basically, because capital's drive is to drive it to squeeze it, squeeze it into the force, reduce people to mere labour and reduce the cost of that labour. And it's just, you know, it's inherent in human beings to be more than that, to try to be as much as they can be and to, you know, to prevent the costs of labor being squeezed because the cost of labor being squeezed produces the result of human suffering. And so capital relies on this reproductive work, but it constantly pushes and strains it and undermines the very thing that it relies on, if you want to put it that way.

And so you continually have these sort of crises of care, and we're definitely in the middle of one now, because that's what the cost of living crisis is. And because, you know, neoliberal capitalism is so clever. dynamic and good at co-opting things, is able to create a discourse around self-care and bringing in all of these sort of different measures into the workplace, which we'll talk about as well in a bit, you know, instead of giving workers the proper care and time and wages that they need. In 2005, Vashti Bunyan released her second album after a gap of 30-odd years, I think,

British folk singer and the album was called Look Aftering which I think is a really lovely phrase I don't think the word actually appears in the lyrics but you know Bunyan famously has this sort of

pastoral vibe to her songs they're sort of childlike and deliberately so and look aftering just sounds like oh it's just a wonderful invented verb to describe a sort of you know act of caring

or you know look after him I'm looking aftering the children, I often think. And the first track from that is called Lately. So we could hear a bit of that. Never was much given to proud. Lately, I'm bleeding full fear to keep you safe. did you think at a basic experiential level

is there something that all of these notions of care have in common because we were talking when we were planning the show we were talking about for example ideas like touch and holding the fact that they're almost all forms of care this isn't the case

with teachers but that's also partly my teachers are conceptually in a sort of grey zone as to whether they care workers or not. Certainly the people we refer to as care workers, they all have to touch other humans' bodies in a way that most kinds of work today don't involve. And I think you wanted to talk about that, didn't you, Nadia? Yes, I do. And I think because, you know, when we talk about these, you know, especially about social, well, not particularly about social reproduction, but when we talk about care and kind of abstracted terms, I think it's often easy to forget that

what we are talking about is if you're taking care of an elderly person, you know, it involves, you know, the physical moving of their body. It involves, you know, cleaning their bodies. It involves giving them food and like the little kind of micro physical interactions that make huge difference to human beings engagement with the world and to their happiness. You know, it's a little pats on the hand. It's like a little bit of a stroke on a shoulder that care work. This is the stuff that care workers in care homes and nurses and mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and people taking care of other people do all of the time without thinking. And when human beings do not have that and, you know, the experiment of the pandemic was a definite, you know, it brought this discourse out into the mainstream. I mean, this is stuff we're talking about, not being able to hug people. It has a huge effect on human beings. Now, different societies might, for cultural reasons, organize the rules about who can touch who in different ways,

but touch is central to babies becoming full cognitive humans. So, you know, as we were saying, we're preparing for this, and I think this is your term, Jeremy, that some of these forms of care are biosocial. Like, it goes back to what you were talking about here. Like, we're not just talking about the reproduction of labor. This is what human beings need. And if human beings don't get that, then you have all sorts of individual, psychological, but also social problems. And you know, and you can have a meta-analysis of the effect of touch on a society that comes up with all sorts of interesting outcomes.

And I think that's a central part of care and talking about care, and realising what care actually looks like or feels like in quite a practical sense. Yeah, what does care feel like, yeah. And why questions around automation are just, I think, removed from the reality of the human experience, I think. I like the way you put that, though,

about there are different, like historically there are different sort of regimes probably about who can touch people, who can touch someone when. I mean, and as a, as an aging man, I'm very aware of that. Because, you know, it's a big thing around, you know, the reproduction of masculinity about who you can touch,

especially when you can touch other men. I've got a whole set of friends that I know from clubbing, raving, et cetera. And I definitely, I might not have seen them for a long time when I see them. We'd be straight in with the hugs much more than, you know, friends I know from watching football, etc. And which are only allowed to hug in very, very peak experience moments after a goal or something. Well, there are certain class A substances which facilitate that in different environment.

Well, I would never take that. But yes, I get you a point. We would never, we would never, we would never ever condone or even, talk about illegal substances on this show. But yes, and we were talking about this, again, when we were preparing for this and thought, maybe we should need to do a whole episode on touch. But I think for the purposes of what we're talking about, I just think it's important to remember in a practical, literal sense, what we are talking about as we go through this episode, because we will be talking about, you know, a lot of theory and political problems around this,

but a lot of the time it involves touch. Can I just problematize that, though? Because you could expand the idea of like what is care work in particular? Because it's like direct caring, which is sort of, I don't know, embodies is the wrong word, but more of like visceral anyway. It involves like direct human, human to body to body sort of relationships in some sort of way. But then there's all of the stuff, all of the stuff which creates the conditions in which caring can take place of, indirect work such as like you could totally argue that like cleaning work is care or it's part

of care work shopping going shopping that sort of stuff do you know what i mean like that is not directly caring but it is part of it sets the conditions upon which caring can take place so if you include that it expands it a little bit more i think does that make sense yeah it does yeah it does i'm not sure why we want to expand the categories like i mean maybe like why is it useful politically to think about, like, just to be provocative to you care? Why do we need to include teaching and shopping when they're so, like, are those the political junctures? Do they fit in with other care issues? Yeah, if we go back to that idea that, like, one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism is this, is absolutely focused on care work, basically, you know,

and this dual nature of labor and reproducing human beings. But if you expand the category, of care, you can see that more and more parts of work and more and more workers are subject to that contradiction to some degree. And you can help, if that contradiction between, you know, reducing the cost of labour and squashing human beings, etc. And therefore, capitalism keeps undoing the ability of human beings to be reproduced, et cetera. If you say that's one of these inherent crises, if you expand who's included in care work, then you can, then that crisis can be used to help explain some of the, some of the contradictions, apparent contradictions in that work. So I think it's useful when you think about teaching to say, look, there's definitely

care over human beings, right, involving that and trying to let them flourish as human beings and develop as human beings. But there's definitely a disciplinary role. And that comes from that sort of contradiction. I think that's why it might be useful to expand the concept, the category of care work. Yeah, maybe it could maybe then it could be argued that one of capitalism's way of solving, dealing with something that like, you know, needing to shop for food because one needs to eat and in a practical kind of modern society, you need to go get that food because, you know, most of us are not growing it in our houses. Then that's where, you know,

things like Amazon and deliveroo and whatever come in from a recipient's perspective because you're solving the problem of having to deal with care, the need for getting food. which is important for care, in a kind of human social-relationally way because it's kind of making it a much more transactional relationship. But then again, it comes back to the thing that, you know, there are actual real workers involved in ordering those things. Like, are Deliveroo workers, care workers? They're sort of, in some ways, they're doing that, you know,

producing the conditions upon which care can take place. I'm not sure it might be stretching it a bit too. But I think it's, you'd have to take a step back and be like, well, what are the conditions where people can only live off takeaways? I mean, I also think takeaways are expensive and the vast majority of people like actually don't live off takeaways in the way they do in some postcode areas in central London. But there are people who are working in general, there is a trend where people are working ridiculous hours to make the wages that they need and therefore are dependent on other workers to kind of stop in those gaps of time that you have. Yeah, 100%. It's like this long-term stagnation in wages. So wages reducing, in fact, because they can't keep up with the cost of living. And so what do you do? You work longer hours, etc. So that cuts into the time you used to have care work. So you have to put that onto the market,

basically. And that says you can see that as like this, you know, this negative spiral in down. But you can also say, you know, you can see it going in other directions. Like that's part of the reason for this huge trend of migrant care workers. So people brought in from other countries to do child care or even just, you know, other sorts of care work because, you know, you've got to solve that care gap to some degree. That's one of the great things about this, about capital moving into this sort of or more and more of like care work being pushed into direct commodification is that like it has to, like you have to address care needs or you get into human suffering. So it's a bit like, you know, the huge expansion of costs for childcare.

care. The cost of childcare is just absolutely phenomenon. It's going up and up and all the time. But that's because, you know, parents will address that need for their kids to have a good life before they address other needs. Do you know what I mean? So for capital, it's got a real, you know, it's a really attractive market. I think if we're defining care work, then I think what's becoming clear is that the boundaries of it are pretty blurry and it blurs into service work generally. Yeah. And it also blurs into. areas of activity that I would more describe as socialisation. So I think teaching is an interesting example.

I mean, there is an aspect of teaching that is care work. That's what traditionally in the teaching profession is referred to as the pastoral element of teaching. But it's something that's very variable between different countries and different cultures, like the extent to which the pastoral element of schooling is supposed to be a responsibility of the teachers. and there's some countries in which it really isn't. And there are other people in the school who are professionals whose job is actually to look after the emotional needs and to even to discipline children.

So, you know, there's a sort of grey area. Yeah. I'm keen that we're also talking about the stuff that takes place inside the home. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Because it's just so central to bringing up human. beings, you know, and like what neglect of care, if you look, if you flip it round, like what neglect of care is is just, it's so stark. And what happens to a society when, when human beings do not have the capacity both psychologically and physically to be, you know, comforting

other human beings, you know, when, you know, Titanic is sinking. And at the moment, we're in an economic and political situation that is really rough, and it could be argued both ways. It could be argued that what is propping society up is these human relationships, which is all, you know, goes unmonitored, goes on that's unpaid, etc. I'm not arguing necessarily that it should be paid, but it's the human beings taking care of each other in their social groups that props the whole system up. And on the converse side of that, people have less time and capacity and psychological space to give that care to those around them because they're so stressed about their material conditions, right?

100%. Yes. Well, that's right. Well, I mean, I think that does speak to something that is fundamental to practices of care, and that is that they are, and this does also apply to things like teaching, but there's something about them which isn't commodifiable. You can commodifyable. You can commodify access to them, but you can't reduce the relationships between like a teacher and a student or a doctor and a patient or a nurse and somebody there looking after or a child and someone looking after them. You can't reduce that to a retail transaction. It doesn't take the form of a commodity that you can simply buy and sell. All you can buy and sell is access to them. You can buy and sell the time of the workers, what Marx calls their labour power,

their time, basically. You can buy and sell access, but you can't actually commodify the thing itself. And the more you try, to the extent that you try to do it, you basically make it impossible to do. But the more you try to make it take the form of a commodity, the more you make it impossible. Completely. That's a great distinction, I think. Yeah, and I think that actually comes to like a really, like an even big. deeper, more fundamental aspect of human life, which is that everyone, everybody wants to feel

loved and valued. Yeah. Like all human beings do. And physical care and or, you know, you're right in terms of the teaching. It doesn't necessarily need to be physical. It's just the authentic engagement with human beings in the moment and seeing people in a conversation and seeing them in a room is one of the things that makes you thrive as a human being. And if you don't have that, you grow up to be a CEO, I'm a psychopath. I'm going to make

a wild statement there. But you know what I mean? Like, often it seems like these policies are set by people who, you know, are sociopaths or like they, they themselves are lacking. This is a wild generalization, but I'm going with it, are lacking in in the kind of, in the kind of human relations, which make people happy, like the things that make us. happy. I think we should play Lean On Me by Bill Withers from 1972. It's a song about caring. You know, lean on me when you're not strong.

I'll be your friend. I'll help you carry on. That's definitely what we've been, what we're talking about. But the interesting thing about Bill Withers is he grew up in a mining town and then he like moves to L.A. to become a musician, etc. So when he writes the song, he's in L.A., and it's sort of in reference to the fact that L.A. does not have this strong solidaristic community that he grew up in in the mining town, and mining towns tended to have.

You know, it's in part a song about the lack of that solidarity in his life now. help you carry on for it won't be long till I'm going to need somebody to lean on, please swallow your I think when we think about care, I mean, fairly spontaneously for a lot of us, the thought of somebody looking after children is one of the most basic and obvious examples of care that human beings really have required to survive. Actually, you know, we keep saying humans, but actually all mammals to some extent require it. There are other animals where, you know, babies, young are born and then they just go out off into the world. But there are no mammals hardly that do that. So they require some care. But on the other hand, humans also are distinct and they require care from older

humans for much, much longer after they're born, much longer than any other animals. So there is something specifically human about it as well. But childcare, the example of the childcare market in Britain, that's always one of my favourite teaching examples of a neoliberal policy, which has been perceived for wholly ideological reasons. So the policy in Britain is historically, back in the golden age of post-war social democracy, there was some extension of just ordinary state-provided childcare. And this is what you get in most countries in Western Europe.

In places like France, you basically just, you send kids to nursery the same way you send them to school. Like it's provided locally as part of education provision and as part of social provision. But the big expansion of childcare in Britain happened as it became clear that women going into the labor market for all of their lives full time had become an irreversible norm when Britain was also at the height of neoliberalism in the 1990s. And the child care regime, which was brought in by the Tories and then supported by New Labor and then extended again by the Tories, it's this voucher system. It's this mad system where the government gives you these vouchers to pay for childcare, but then you use those vouchers to purchase it from private suppliers, private

providers of childcare, and they're supposed to compete with each other. So instead of just having collectively, locally, state-organised childcare, then you have this mad system of a, of this contrived market. And of course, it doesn't work for a reason any economist could tell you whether it's not going to work. It's not going to work because there is a thing that economists call market exit. Market exit is what happens when certain participants in a marketplace are not making enough profit from their activity so they leave the market. And if there isn't a certain level of scarcity in the marketplace, then everybody involved would not be making enough profit. And that will drive some market exit. And so what happens invariably everywhere in the country is that

you end up with a situation where there aren't enough suppliers of childcare for it not to be really expensive and there to be really long waiting list and for it to be really stressful for people. Because if there were enough, the profit margins wouldn't be big enough for the people selling it. So it's not, and the government still spends loads and loads of money on it. Yeah. And that is because this is a great example of how economic policy and all sorts of different social policies in this country and elsewhere are driven by ideology and not logic or practicality or efficiency

because the amount of time and money wasting in some of these systems is just staggering. It's so inefficient. Yeah, and nobody likes it. No parent thinks, no parent thinks, yeah, I want to leave my child with an institution who mainly sees them as a source of profit. Or an institution where they, diversified into that market yesterday, but really what they do is they produce rat poison or some shit.

Like we saw with the pandemic. That happened in the pandemic. Do you know what I mean? It's fucking ludicrous. I don't think it's just ideology though. Okay, go on. No, it is ideology if you think that like the government, that's your government and new labour, their aim was, how do you most efficiently deliver care services in this

country? Was that their aim? That wasn't their aim? No, their aim was, how do we turn care into something, we can be turned into an asset so people can gain profits of it? Because that's how power is distributed in this society. So financial interests, etc., they get their needs addressed. So it's not just ideology, it's also the balance of forces and who's hegemonic sort of thing.

Fair enough. I think I made that point because there is still a strongly held belief amongst people that even if they don't like capitalism, that capitalism is somehow efficient. And capitalism isn't. I did my whole dissertation on this. I'm really passionate about this specific subject. It's completely not. It wastes resources like, fuck.

It's terrible in organizing resources. Yeah, the ideology is this belief that the markets are always more efficient than any other form. It's widespread, but I think it's really under pressure of the last decade in particular. Yeah. Basically because there's no, there's not many competitive markets. There's monopolies and oligopolis, et cetera. And there's price gouging and rent extraction everywhere you look, basically. Yeah, this competition is so not.

It's a good point, actually. We should do a whole thing on competition. I think it was really something we should have pushed a lot harder when we had the leadership of the park. We should have pushed a national childcare service. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Very hard. And that would have been much more popular than the very vaguely defined national education service.

Next time round, guys. Put it on the list. in 20 years, well, possibly nine years, possibly nine. Because everybody hates it. It's one of the features of contemporary capitalism that everybody hates. And people just, and it is sort of capitalist realism. Like it doesn't even occur to people these days. Yeah, this is a stupid way to organise childcare.

Nobody likes it. It is really interesting to think about how those, like, I mean, debates around childcare and like how childcare is organised, what childcare should be, they do touch really profoundly on conceptions of what it means to be human and conceptions of gender. So it's obviously really important. It's important to our understanding of what kind of humans we want to be,

like how do we treat children and how do we raise them and how do we organise it between ourselves. And obviously it's a really, really central issue in feminist debates, like historically. It's a central demand of feminism that the burden of having exclusive responsibility for childcare should in some way should be taken away from women and you know I always used to say this to students that it's really you know I've you know I'm really into like feminist theory I'm really I'm really I'm really I've always been really interested in feminist philosophy and stuff but I would do this series of lectures for students and I would introduce them to all this exciting

like feminist theory and then the end of it I'd say but you know the bad news is like all the historical evidence is that you can have the most exciting philosophers in the world talking about the nature of gender, and that is not what is going to deliver actual feminist outcomes. The really boring news is, if you look at global comparative studies, there is one thing more than any other thing that is going to deliver equality for women across the board, and that is socialisation of childcare and social provision of childcare, which is something in my experience, at least my generation, like, you know, people in their early 20s really

didn't want to hear because usually they think they're never going to have children and it's quite boring. It's much more interesting to talk about the fluidity of your gender and sexual identity than it is to talk about what are you going to do if you want to have kids one day? The reality of having kids, yeah. But then the question of how do you distribute care for children in a way that it isn't just women's responsibility, how you do that is the big political issue. And of course, the thing we've just been talking about, that totally neoliberal child care model, it comes out of a particular. way of answering that question. Like, it is one answer to that question, and it's the answer

supplied by a kind of neoliberal feminism, which says, okay, what feminism wants is to facilitate women competing in the labour market on equal terms of men. And that's the only thing. That's the only thing that we're going to offer to women as a way of resolving that historic set of problems. And the question then is, well, what are the alternatives? What are the other things we want? And I think historically there's probably two main set of answers. There are a set of answers which stress the idea that the state or social institutions or the collective or the commune, the village, whatever, the tribe, however you want to conceptualise it, take responsibility collectively for the care of children. But can we take a step back? I know you're on a role.

But that is a conceptualisation of changing the way that society is organised. what would the answer be for the way society is organized now, which is more or less the nuclear family, if we're talking about the UK. Do you see what I mean? Yeah, well, that's what I was about to say. I mean, the other response is to focus on the question of simply distributing that labor between men and women, at least getting away from the assumption that it's women who will look after children and somehow encouraging or facilitating men

within the, indeed, within the institutions of the established nuclear family, participating more in childcare. That has been a big social change that we've lived through, I would say. Like comrades and colleagues who are now in their 60s and 70s have said to me more than once, actually, people who now have children actually my age and they have grandchildren, the age of my children that have said to me more than once, this is really one of the biggest changes, they think, in terms of how people live their lives,

the way in which men and fathers are expected to be involved with childcare and want to be, and it's been normalised. And that is a really big change. It's a big change. It's really quite fundamental because it's stark when you see it in societies and families where the husband or the matter or the lead man or whatever in the house is completely absent from any engagement with the children whatsoever, which is really common. and, of course, was very common in the UK.

Now, you two know this, but my father wasn't at my birth when I was born. Sorry, this is a therapy session now. I claim my free therapy session. I know that. I know exactly where my dad was when I was born, because Leeds were playing Chelsea in the replay of the FA Cup. And he was watching that when I was born. And that was the expectation, basically.

Leeds lost in a very contentious match. Two-one, very, very fierce. battle, lots of fowling, and Lees United still have the song that we sing about that match that commemorates my birthday. I couldn't imagine not being there for my daughter's birth. It would just, like, I couldn't imagine it. It would just be unthinkable. And yet for my dad, it was, you know, even if you'd wanted to, and, you know, he was a lefty, et cetera, et cetera, the hospital wouldn't have him in there for a start, you know. That sort of idea of like in one generation, that sort of shift illustrates your point. And I managed to get my Leasie

United Story. Perfect. One of the things is interesting about some of the kind of wave of feminine and kind of women-led rock music in the 70s, the second half of the 70s, people like Patty Smith and Kate Bush is the way they are talking quite openly about experience of motherhood and maternity. And Kate Bush's first album is called The Kick Inside, which was an explicit reference to the feeling of pregnancy, which is very interesting, given that rock music as a form up to that point, had been so completely male dominated. It had really, the only form of

embodied experience it had been interested in was the experience of adolescent male sexuality. It was pretty much that was all it was interested in. And then you start getting pretty clearly directly under the influence of things like women's liberation, you start to get people working mostly in the rock idiom and they're singing about very different experiences and experiences which have something to do with maternality and the way in which maternity is absolutely bound up with an experience of the self and the body which isn't just, you know, which isn't wholly individualised and which is inseparable from relations of care. And one of the most memorable songs from that album is The Man with the Child in His Eyes,

which again is a really interesting, lyrically, it's a really interesting meditation on the ways in which relations of dependency, passivity and activity can shift and modulate beyond the very classical kind of mid-20th century idea of the active and responsible, man and the passive, infantilized yet maternal woman. And, of course, it's always good to play a bit of Kate Bush. I hear him before I go to sleep and focus on the day that's been. I realize he's there when I turn the light off and turn over. Nobody knows about my man

They think he's lost on some horizon And suddenly I find myself Listening to man When my first daughter was born I got all kinds of advice From colleagues and comrades About how one should raise children And it was really interesting to note

like had the extent to its theories of theories of appropriate child care and child rearing were really important sites of ideological contestation. So I got told by people who both identified as anarchist, actually. I got told on the one hand that we should do that thing, but you just leave the kid to cry for hours. So they just learned to control, yeah, to control, I got told to do control crying. I found that so stressful. You're supposed to leave the door? leave we tried it and it's like you have to put put my daughter made down you go out of the room

and she cries for like 30 seconds you go back in comfort they come out and she cries from yeah oh my god all the most traumatic things I thought about shit I know nobody I mean yeah I mean let's let's not get into like criticizing some whatever parents need to do to cope with the fact that bringing up kids you're right no just being slightly aware of that like it's fine to like talk about the different things but I don't want us to be like you know well I did it I did it you know I found it traumatic but the other theory I got told was the opposite edge is attachment parenting where you're supposed to leave you're supposed to attach yourself to the child you're supposed to carry the child all the time but also I mean there's two sides to it the thing everybody remembers and freaks out

when you hear about it is well you're supposed to just carry the child all the time until they're like four something but the other side of it is because it's all based on on studying the way indigenous people raise children, you're also supposed to not just be having just a mum and dad raise the child. You're supposed to have this whole tribe. You're supposed to have a whole community of friends do it. So you can pass the child around. So somebody's holding the child all the time, but it's absolutely not supposed to be just mum and dad. It's supposed to be a whole kind of collective thing. And the children are supposed to grow up in these large social groups where they're mingling with other children who are not just their siblings all the time.

I mean, from my observations, you know, as a fairly experienced parent now, I totally buy that. I totally buy, yeah, we're social creatures, you know, with the nuclear family and bourgeois individualism are basically suboptimal institutions or negative ideologies. But those aren't the conditions under which the actual material and physical conditions under which most of us have to do our caring and to bring up children and to care for others. Don't facilitate that. I mean, I was always, I've always been really jealous of people who managed to, like, bring up their kid in a collective house. And I do know people who've done it, but they all had trust funds. Well, there's the answer, then more resources. Well, no, no, I mean, this is the point, since we're on this topic, like, I don't get to talk about my upbringing very much on this show.

But I, I've always had this kind of, I don't know, like superiority complex. over having grown up, maybe for good reason, or maybe just because, you know, is that kind of child, but for having grown up in a, not in a nuclear family. So you've both grown up in nuclear families, is that right? Yeah. And you both now have nuclear family. So that's how you arrange. Yeah. Mostly. I mean, it was a single parent household from some of the time. Right. Okay. So I grew up in a extended family. And I remember consciously thinking as a child and as I grew up, how valuable it was to have different adults in the house with different opinions on things. And it wasn't at all a mother-father situation. Like I grew up in a household of five,

but it was arguably a household of about 12 because it was a kind of central family house. So I had uncles and aunts and cousins and cats and dogs and whatever, like coming in and out of the house all of the time. And that's how I grew up. I grew up with like lots of other people around me. And it freed my mom to not be the person who was always doing my homework with me. She was not always taking care of me. She was not always, you know, providing the food. There were loads of people who were doing that stuff in and out. And I felt like there was quite a difference between me and other people I knew who grew up in nuclear families. I mean, this is slightly going off topic, but this idea that, because I think one of the stark things there is what

It's like growing up with the man of the house, quote, unquote. And I didn't grow up with that. It was my grandfather, but it was mostly a massive matriarchy of women. And I think that made a big difference to me, because I can compare it, having grown up, you know, like in an Arab patriarchal country with other families where there was, you know, the father and the father capital F, like had a massive influence on what people could do and not do and like the development of what was okay and what wasn't. I mean, that's just my experience.

with that. And I, yeah, I think it made, I find the idea of growing up with both parents in a house very strange. I know that's what happens to most people in the West and it's what, you know, a lot of my friends in Egypt as well grew up under. But I can't imagine it. If you know what I mean? Like when you didn't grow up with it, I just think, fucking ill, just me and my parents in the house, that'd be really weird. I can't, you know, and it's given me a completely different view, I think. You know, when I had my daughter, May, my partner, Alice, is in the band Chumbabwamba.

We've always, we've always hidden that fact from you, dear listeners. But basically, when we, everybody in Chumbabhwamba had babies about the same time, right? Because there was literally a gap of two years between one album and the next, and we all have to squeeze a baby out quick, basically. You had to. The women had to. I had a role to play. I don't want to get, you know, a bit explicit for radio.

But basically, when me and Alice were discussing, it was like, well, perhaps it won't be so much like a nuclear family because we'll have all our friends, we'll have kids of the same age. And, you know, when she was young, May did interact with those of kids a lot. But, like, you know, the structures of capitalism and the structures of life just means that you fall back into a nuclear family, unless you really, really push it against it. You know, it's that water rolling downhill sort of thing.

You know, everything's set up to you to fall into a nuclear family structure. No, but there's loads of people in the UK. mostly like non-white British people who grow up in extended families. It's not only about resources. We're talking about two different things there to some extent. You're talking about extended families. I'm talking about just sort of...

You're talking about communal, like a choice. Yeah, intentional communities or whatever. But the effect, if we're going back to the subject of care, you know, politically it's viewed differently. But if you're going back to the fact of like how many adults are there in a ratio per child? because I think, and I know this is what everybody has to cope with, so I'm not sneering at it, but the ratio of two adults to a newborn is crazy.

Like, there needs to be at least four or five. So for, you know, those two people, especially the woman, to be able to, like, go for a walk or have a shower. Like, you know, if you're able to have more than a shower a week, like, it's amazing if you're a nuclear family. Do you know what I mean? It's really tough. And, I mean, I'm saying this to you guys, and you know this. you know, I don't have kids, but it's definitely something that I've observed. So in terms of going back to your point, like whether it's an quote-unquote intentional community

of people that you choose to be living all in one household or connected households, or whether it is your extended family, so you've got grandma, granddad, aunt, uncle like I did, you know, in the same house, you've still got loads of adults. Somebody can hold the baby. Somebody can, you know, cook this. Somebody can get food out of the fridge. Like, it doesn't matter if it's your friends or someone. when it comes to that specific care function.

One of the interesting things is that, like, patterns of child rearing is really quite central to, like, right-wing explanations of how the world is. Yeah, that's true. And it's sort of, it might go something like this, is that, you know, that famous, there is no such thing as society, Thatcher quote. Yeah. She says, there's just individuals, but there's also families. There's only men and women and their families. Yes, okay, yeah, yeah, exactly.

But, like, so the family is that is one of the, if you've just got, individuals and families and families is one of the things you can use to explain things you know and so yeah that's why the family is such a focus of of political attention for the front from the right as well as the left you know it's child rearing patterns so like right wing explanations of generations and generation gaps they're all focused on on like changing fashions of child rearing it's like a child rearing determinism now they are well it's the only it's the only form of of community that the right is willing to acknowledge exists yes So therefore, if you can explain the world, you've not got a lot of resources to draw on.

I mean, that's the sort of neoliberal right, but also the traditionalist right, including people, you know, in the Conservative Party, etc., who don't identify as Thatcher rights, they also, is absolutely one of their repeated tropes, that the family is the basic unit of society. And so everything has to start from the family, and the family has to be seen as the irreducible thing. And indeed, the problem, exactly the contradiction where they're set of ideal. is always fall in on themselves if you try to poke them. Is there any recognition that forms of family life are historically variable? Exactly, yeah. On our dependent on wider social arrangements. Exactly.

And then they always have been. And even though that has changed and morphed over time in terms of the statistics, like there's always been loads of single moms. There's always been people who have like lived and arranged in different ways because human beings are complex and shit happens. Yeah, but they've been more or less visible and more or less penalised those sorts of arrangements during different historical periods. Well, they have. And also, I mean, it's worth thinking about, well, what is, we talked about

this a bit already with the voucher stuff, but what is the hegemonic normative form of the family today? But actually, the hegemonic normative form of the family, which is basically the only one we're all allowed to participate in, isn't, it's not the quote unquote traditional family, which was only normative for most people from like literally from the 30s to the 70s, like the 1930s and 1970s. But, you know, where the mother does most of the care work and, you know, the father goes out to work, it's not that. What it is now is the dual income family where both parents have to go to work full time. And if they can possibly afford it, things like cleaning and child care have to be outsourced to low-paid workers. And even, you know, I know, I've known

people who were cleaners, who themselves had hired a cleaner. I mean, it was just, I know, Christ, it's cleaners all the way down. You know what I'm saying? It's like, that's the model. And I think, you know, I observed it from the kind of early 2000s, like, among some of my students. I mean, among some people, there was a sort of pushback against that and a sort of valorization of the idea, like, maybe you can just stay at home and be a housewife, like, which wasn't really coming from as a reactionary place for some people. It was coming from a sense of that. Practical.

Yeah. And it was coming from a sense that was the only. Economic. Yeah. It was a sense of resistance. So the compulsion to go participate in the labour market. You could probably put the Great British Bake Off and all of those cookery programs. That's meant as porn for things that we can't actually do anymore.

We don't have time to do, you know. Well, we've been talking a lot about childcare. So I thought we'd play George McCraise, Rock Your Baby, which is a classic. I think it's the first disco record to get into the British charts. Woman, take me in your arms like you, baby. Woman, take me in your arms like your baby. There's nothing to it. Just say you want to do it.

Paul McCartney's jaunty little tribute to the popular music of his parents and grandparents' generation was this quite unlikely track from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band, 1967, called When I'm 64. And it evokes an idea of ageing. Of course, when it was written, 64 would have been the, I think it was the retirement age for men, I think. It would have been younger for women. Of course, now 64. now you'll be very lucky to imagine you're going to have time to need and feed anyone when there's 64 and you're still going to be at work but when it was written the image that he evoked was the image of a happy retirement and the song you know asks asks the beloved will you care for me when i'm when i'm 64 which is a really um is an interesting interesting way of framing the question and i guess it does speak to the way in which

it does speak to the way actually in which people's ways of imagining their life course were changing and we're starting to take account of the possibility of retirement which of course we only had old age pensions from the early 20th century and to some extent the whole idea of a really comfortable retirement was a relatively recent invention when I get older losing my head many years from now Will you still be sending me Valentine? Birthday greetings, bottle of wine. If I'd be out till quarter to three, would you lock the door? Will you still need me?

Will you still feed me when I'm 64? So do we want to answer the question? Can the state be caring? Is there such thing as a caring state, which is a different inn on the role of the, state in care? Well, I think, obviously, to some extent, an implication of the things we've been talking about is that one way of responding to a lot of the issues that have been raised by changes in patterns of care and the need for care and the need to pursue certain kinds

of social equality has been the state undertaking provision of certain kinds of services. And I don't think any of us would disagree that to the extent that the state has to be, be the provider of things like childcare, healthcare, etc. It generally seems to be best when it's done in a relatively universalistic way so that everybody has access to similar services. There's the usual set of issues around any kind of public service, aren't there, that you can make them more or less democratic, more or less responsive to local collective needs. But, I mean, this speaks about what we were saying about the attitude of the right to the family,

I mean, generally speaking, traditionalist conservatives, part of the discursive and philosophical function of their veneration of the family is precisely, I mean, the state is one of the things they counterposed to the family, actually. And they tend to concept, they tend to make the assertion that the family is this sort of autonomous organic institution. One of their alibis for not really supporting the idea of the state extending its function. They tend to see, in fact, the state taking on caring functions as part of a general sort of socialist totalitarianism, which they want to bravely stand against a lot of the time. And what they don't take into account is the extent to which the state, the forms of family life, have always been dependent upon institutional arrangements, forms of governmentality, economic relations, et cetera. And I guess our position would always be, well, look, actually, political relations, institutional relations, are always shaping the forms of care which people can get and that people can have access to,

whether it's being done through the direct provision of nurseries in a local area or not. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does, yeah. But I think there's strategic questions about what do you demand in that case or what you do, perhaps. A friend of mine, Christine Berry, wrote this really great article, which ends up advocating for the formation of, like, co-ops around care,

are commonly owned and commonly governed co-ops, basically. And she gets there because the article's about how the care sector's been heavily financialized over the last sort of five to ten years. So there's a huge chains run by private equity firms, basically, who are just extracting more and more sort of rents out of it, about 10% of the sector's income these days goes towards rents, etc. And so her thing is, look, we have to focus not just on how much money the state is spending, Like, how is it controlled?

So that takes you to the mode of ownership. How is it owned and governed, basically? Do you know what I mean? I work, she works with me and Christine work together on public common partnerships. This is one of the things we've sort of been looking into. But it's that thing of like, if you start from what's going on in the care sector, the thing that's really driving, like the absolute collapse of standards is this, it's a mode of ownership at the moment, which is not just private, but assetized.

It's been turned into an asset. set upon which you leverage, you leverage things, etc. And part of the reason for that is that it doesn't matter. You know, it's one of those things where you will have to pay for care it's a thing you pay for before anything else, the care of your children. And for older people, of course, it's care most often paid for by selling a house or draw inequity. Something that struck me as you're talking about that here is, you know, if we think about carers, if we're talking about like carers infrastructure, what are we actually asking for?

Something that I was thinking about as you're speaking is that care is conducted in physical space because it's conducted between human beings, IRL in reality, it's conducted in space and therefore... But it's conducted in buildings, which is one of the reasons it's so attractive for that, this financialise things. So you get this practice, I'll let you back in in a minute.

Basically, these big private equity firms, you know, they buy the care home, another part or another bit of them buys the building, then it rents the building to the care home for like massively exhaust huge rents because it's a way of extracting money out of it. It all goes to the same place. They're charging themselves distorted rents in order to extract. That's the sort of thing that goes on. All of that has, the only place it can come from is like worse care and worse conditions for workers. No, no, that makes sense. I guess I was thinking about it from the perspective of like, what are we asking for or the imaginary of what we want things to look like?

And so I was trying to think about that within the, through the prism of actual physical spaces. Like, if some care is conducted in the home, okay, that's one thing. And, you know, there are all sorts of visions that we have and imaginaries about what we want the home to look like and how we want to organize, you know, our families and our relations. But also, if we're imagining a care home, what could that care home look like? But also, I think, importantly, like, what are we asking for to facilitate care to be able to take place in public spaces? And where are the blind spots of things that perhaps we still can't see? So, for example, if you look at it historically, you know, in the way that, you know, women's public bathrooms, like, didn't exist. And, you know, there was a whole like men's rights movement over history where, again,

against women having places to relieve themselves in public. But what women's bathrooms then expanded to be able to do is to have baby changing facilities, for example, which now have been extended into some men's bathroom, you know, men's toilet blocks, which is also great. But in, you know, in women's bathrooms as a spontaneous public space that exists, you know, like definitely all around Britain, like that is a caring space. There's a lot of caring that takes place there, whether it's changing kids' clothes or or helping them go to the toilet or helping elderly people, etc.

So because I was thinking about that, I was wondering, like, what other kinds of spaces could you have in a public space that facilitates the caring, whether spontaneous or organized, of human beings? What are the public spaces that we would be demanding that could organize things in a way that would kind of undercut or try to, like, pre-address and a preemptive strike fashion, some of those problems of being, you know, having care homes co-opted by private equity,

etc. Well, I think the answer to that question is always going to be, it depends like at what horizon we're looking to, you know, are we thinking about what would be the completely ideal situation in a libertarian communist utopia? Or are we thinking about what could realistically be part of a reforming government's program in a couple of years' time? And those are all going to be different. Yeah, but you might take one into account in the other. Yeah, yeah, you've got a vision. If you've got the long game, you know, what we're going to get in 50 years. I mean, one of the implications of a lot of what we've said already today is that, well, the first

demand towards any of this stuff is nothing to do with the direct provision of care or facilities for care is to do the reduction of workloads. That is the first thing because I think we all agreed when we were talking about this that most people have a pretty basic desire, like to be able to be caring towards. their friends, their family, their children, their parents, their neighbours. And the number one problem is simply people not having enough free time to be able to do it at all. That what's happened is, in fact, what's happened to the labour market is women have been

put into the labour market and have not been given any real way of sort of, nobody really has been given the time to do the work women were doing like 50 years ago as the carers in homes. But it's also been feminized. It's also been feminized conceptually in society due to patriarchy that there is a lot of men that have not been brought up knowing how to care for themselves or other people.

Well, that's true. We're saying it's not a, it's not a, it's not a female thing, it's a human thing. That's right. But I'm just saying, but the actual history is, we were at a situation 50 years ago where there was a real historic peak of that sort of gender division of labour,

that the idea of the housewife, which, again, it only really becomes normalized in the 30s, had become completely normalized. And, I mean, actually, actually the low point of married women participating in the labor market was before that. It was actually the 1900. So you can really debate.

It's an interesting debate. Really? I'm surprised about that. It was. It was. Where in the UK? In the UK and the US. I don't know about anywhere else. No, it was. Because what you've got between the 30s and the 70s

is you've got these two different trends. You've got the actual demographic trend of more women, more married women going back into the workplaces, especially as light industry grows. You've got new kinds of factories for things like toys and stuff like that, where they employ a lot of women. And that's growing. But there's this ideological valorisation of the idea of the housewife in the media, in the press.

And that, I mean, that really peaks in the 50s. But that's partly, this is why it all exposed in the 60s, because in the 50s is the high moment of the ideology of the housewife. But the lived reality is actually more women are going out to work. And they can't, they can't live the ideal of the housewife, even if they want to. And that all comes upon. in the that all comes apart of the 60s. The model of the housewife, the unstressed model of the housewife,

that just doesn't reflect how huge amounts of people have to, the real huge stresses of being a housewife and doing reproductive work in that era. It does explain Valium though. If you're on shift work, if your husband's on shift work, you're doing that reproductive work

of preparing dinner, etc., in the middle of the night. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't, yeah, well, of course, yeah, that's absolutely right. And the whole idea is only invented in the 30s, because before the 30s, if you're a middle classwoman, then being the lady of the house means managing the servants. And if you're a working class woman, you're still going

out to work. So it's really, it's a sort of invention of the 30s and the decline of domestic service as much as anything else. But anyway, the point is, the point is from where we are now. Okay, we've come out, you know, that, there was this sort of high moment in the mid-20th century of the ideal of this highly gendered division of labor, whereby all care work was entirely feminised, was completely feminised. I mean, the idea of women's role in society being as mothers and mothers being sort of passive, private, domestic carers and caring therefore, essentially just being something that mothers did and anybody who was a carer was something a bit like a mother. All that peaks about 50 years ago. And then what we've transitioned into out of that

is a situation in which the women who would, in a generation or two ago, have been in that role, now working full time. But what hasn't happened is their workload and those are their partners, be they male or not, have been reduced so that they can all, they can share that labour of caring. They can share that work of caring at home and in the wider family. Instead, what's happened is, you know, people have just been subject at higher and higher levels of stress. And then, you know, commercial care work has been, as you just said, been financialised and been turned into this huge sector of extremely low pay work and extremely undervalued work. And that's, it's completely suboptimal.

But I would say that this is just coming back to the question of what do we want. We want all that to change. But I would say just number one first demand, the easiest demand and the one that most people would immediately exceed to is just, you know, this, all this, this extraordinary obscene amount of work that men and women are now having to do just to pay the rent and pay the mortgage and pay the bills, has to be reduced. Then we can start asking questions about, well, how much, okay, once we're all working a 25-hour week or even less, once we're there, do we need institutions that provide care? Do we still need? What kind of institutions do we need?

I sort of feel like it's almost impossible to answer that question. It's almost impossible to answer the question. Because you have to remove the barriers to justice first. Yeah, well, we just have to find out because I don't really know. Like if I only had to work a 20-hour week, you know, through my whole working life, I would want to spend quite a lot of time with my kids and like other people's kids as well, like for quite a big chunk of my life, I'd have been quite happy. You'd be doing eight hours of role-playing games a day. You would be, both of you. You would both be stuck to the computer going, no, but I really need to do this. Yeah, I can't believe you guys having any time, quote-unquote, free time doesn't

work. I'm really good at free time. I'm a Mediterranean, and I can really do free time. Let me pose a question, right? In the 1960s in the US, at the height of sort of Fordism, 30% of the population are employed in manufacturing. In the US now, about the same, 28% are employed in care work. Staggering, isn't it? Yeah. So, like, in terms of, like, the numbers of employees, it's really, really dominant care work. But, like, it is not hegemonic in the way that, like, that manufacturing work or in alliance with, like, manufacturing capital was sort of hegemonic at that point. Like, why not? All right, I'll answer my own question. Oh, go on then. No, it's because it's really hard to exercise power in care work. In manufacturing, the strike is the way you exercise power, basically. You stop that.

But with care work, in fact, this is why I think it's useful that teachers are brought into care work, is that this applies to them. In care work, if you withdraw your labour, the immediate effects fall on to those you care for, and like normally care about. So it's really difficult to exercise your power in that way. And so perhaps if the ways are found to exercise power, then care work becomes dominant.

Then you see that some of the affects of care work that we've talked about before, you know, becoming an ethic for a new sort of economics. But then maybe a demand is, in terms of the level of policy, is that it becomes a government department, a state-run department, of care workers, because then you have everyone quote unquote under one roof, and then you can organize them and unionize them, which is completely impossible at the moment because of the way care work is organized. Yeah, well, I think, like basically, I think people are working out how you struggle around care work. And that's also one of the reasons I want to defend this idea

that teachers are care work, because this argument works better. If you look in a US, like the big strikes have been around and organizing has been around sort of care work and also service work. but care work as in, like, big teachers strikes, huge organisation around nursing and janitors, actually. And then things such as Starbucks, you know, the big wave of unionisation there. And the way people have thought about it is that... That's not care work.

No, I know. That's service works. It is service work. I don't think this works. I don't think it works. Well, let me do it with teachers then, right? Let me make this argument with teachers. Is it like, how do you win as a teacher?

How have teachers won, so the Chicago teachers, union, etc. They've adopted this thing called social unionism. And it's like the only way your teacher can win is to get the parents on side. Yeah, yeah, that is definitely true. Yeah, you have to include the parents in the coalition. And the way you do that is by, you know, also addressing, trying to struggle around the other grievances that parents have. So, you know, making connections with like, you know, around rents and so forth and all that sort of stuff. This is all true. I just, I was going to say, I don't think this is this new. I mean, for decades, In countries where it's not illegal, for example, public transport workers have won strikes in the same way by making common cause with, by presenting themselves as like the tribunes of the customers, the users of the service.

Yeah, or doing goodwill strikes, etc, where you don't collect fares, but you provide the service. So the idea that service workers have to build relations of solidarity with the people who use their services is not a new idea, really. And I don't think it's exactly the same as identifying care workers. as a specific category. I just don't, I don't, but it's not, but it's a really minor technical thing. I mean, it doesn't obviate anything you're saying at all. No, nothing's new, but it is that what is new is that the prominence of care work as a sector of employment is much, much bigger.

So all of a sudden, this becomes a bigger problem. That's absolutely true. And of course, it's something we haven't mentioned yet. It's partly a function of an ageing population. Yeah, that's a really good point. And we haven't talked, we haven't talked about social care. We've talked a lot about childcare, but of course, elder care is the really expanding sector, is the hugely expanding sector, and the politics

of elder care and the question of who will care for the elderly, completely central, imminently, implicitly to British politics, because it's central to the sort of generational and quasi-generational struggles that have taken place and are taking place. And I think absolutely central to the way in which the right has effectively won over the pensioners is the engineering of a situation. whereby you had better make sure the value of your one asset, the house you've paid off your mortgage on, is protected. Because if it isn't, you are fucked. You are going to die in a gutter, practically.

Or you are going to die in a horrible, underfunded, profit-driven care home, you know, with insufficient facilities. And everybody over 60 knows this and is scared of it. I mean, it was really, this was on new Labour's watch. this was on Gordon Brown's watch that all this happened, you know, the occupational pensions were allowed to be completely flushed down the toilet for everybody,

for the people who were in their 50s and younger then in the 90s and 2000s, and that there was absolutely no attempt made to build a properly socially provided, nationally provided care service means that now we are in the situation where old people are not going to vote for the left, like for a generation,

And they're not going to for purely logical, rational reasons, that they don't want to die in a gutter and there's no provision that they're going to have to pay for their own care. And the only way you can pay for it is by remorgaging your house because no one else is providing it. So, I mean, Andy Burnham's big schicks is to say that one of Labor's big programmatic policies should be a national care service. And I think he's totally right. He's totally right. But I also say, I said this in an interview with Alex Dewey on his show last year sometime, he's totally right. But the only way we're ever going to win back, like older voters actually now,

would be by getting into government and creating that institution because they're never going to believe us that we're going to do it now. But it absolutely should be. And also just the treatment of the elderly, this is a cliche, like from anthropologists, from people from other countries. But, you know, historically it's something that really, really shocks people from other cultures from around the world about the way in which people are treated, especially in the kind of liberal capitalist Anglo sphere, America and the United

States, Australian, New Zealand, really, really shocking, the way in which we don't treat it as obviously, just obviously, a responsibility of the community to fully support, fully support and care for and make, have as nice lives as possible, people who have lived out their working lives and have worked all their lives. It's just absolutely appalling. Well, the only discourse in which that kind of exists is the people who are, the discourse around the people who have quote unquote fought for this country. So the only space where you can talk about that. Yeah, no, no. I'm a Second World War veterans. No, but you know what I mean? Like they're not all dead. Well, I think you've hit on a good point.

But that is the discourse in which we were able to talk about caring for old people is about the people who have served in the war, not just because they're human beings. No, no, you're right. I've never thought of that. Now, you're completely right. We all make fun of this phenomenon, of the boomer who thinks they fought in the war. But there's a reason for that. It fulfills a social function.

Well, you're right. That's the point, because the discourse of I fought in the war is the only discourse we have, like, widely available in the culture for somebody saying, look, I have been like a functioning member of society, you know, for a certain length of time. It counts for the whole of that, you know, I thank you for your service in the US as well, basically. Yeah, yeah, that is the way. Like basically being in the army is the way you can get into college if you're poor, you know. You need a different language.

We need just some notion of basic reciprocity. I mean, this is what happens when you get any, you void the culture of any concept of fundamental reticprosity, and you replace it with a purely transactional model, according to which individuals only have claims on the community if they've done something to deserve it, if they've done something to earn it. And also, I would say, in properly factional terms, that that is an argument that has been going on between the left and right of even the Labour movement in this country since the 30s. And the right, let's never forget, the right wing of the Labour Party did not want the National

Health Service. And if you get them drunk enough and off the record enough, they'll still tell you they hate it. They think Atley should never have made the concession to Nye Bevan. Why are these people in fucking labour? Well, because, well, that's a whole other question. There's a whole very good... Because they

say that about us. They say Nye Bevan should never have been let back into the Labour Party. Should never have been readmitted in the 30s after he was suspended for supporting a popular front against fascism. Should never have been let back again. They should never have done the National Health Service. They should have done what they did with the rest of the welfare system, which is a contributory social insurance model, where you only get service

if you have somehow earned it. You don't get service. You don't get care just because you're a human being who happens to live in the country. So that has always been their fucking position. And the left, we have always said it's socialism or barbarism. We have always said if you do everything on that contributory model, you don't end up with a society of responsible, respectable subjects who who, you know, work hard and earn their keep and fulfill their responsibilities, what you end up instead with is a society based entirely on transactional relationships where nobody cares for anybody, where the very idea of caring is seen as somehow pathological. Unless it's self-care.

Unless it's self-care. You need to take a moment, self-care. Nadia, I've told you before, don't mention a Labour right in his... Don't mention the Labour Right. We should play Hold On I'm Coming by Simon Dave just because it's a great song and I like it. There is two ways of, I mean, I'm not sure, I'm just trying to think on a hoof about like what the politics are of saying the state should provide. And, you know, I think it's the right thing to do for me not to care for my elderly parents as a state that cares for the elderly parents or the idea that, you know, my elderly parents come and live with me or there's various ways of doing it. in the UK, again, mostly in non-white populations, but informally, you know, I'm not saying

like it's one or the other, but, you know, like the idea that you would put your parent in a care home is just still quite bizarre to a lot of people, but you have to have the resources to make that work. And also it means that there will be people in the household who are effectively 24-hour carers for someone who's very old. And that means all of the things. It means washing their bodies. It means wiping their bum. It is all of that. No, I think you're right. It's a really nice way of framing the question as to what we want. Like, what do we want when we're old?

I don't want to have to live with my kids when I'm like 70. Like, fuck that. I don't want to be that. I want to live in a state-funded holiday home where me and care can play role-playing games all day. I thought you were going to say golf for a second. We're too affritic to roll the dice and then we'll call it a day. That's what I want. Is care and the sort of attributes of care, does that provide an ethic upon which we'd want to reform

society, except people have suggested that. There's a book by Joan Tronto called Caring Democracy. And like she says, democratic politics should only be, should only be about assigning responsibilities of care and then making sure that everyone is able to participate in that assignment of responsibility. So that puts a, you know, that makes that means that like caring is suddenly a social responsibility and in fact it's the main focus of all democratic deliberation. Does that work?

Yeah, I mean, I'll take it. It's not... Say the same thing. I'd be like, yeah, all right. This is what happens because Keir's working on public-private partnership, so he's used to talking in this policy language. It's like, yeah, all right, yeah, go on. Well, there's a profound philosophical tradition,

which in some ways go back to Heidegger, saying that the idea of care in its most abstract sense is just the basic relationship to the world of a subject who is engaged with the world, like to care, like caring about something is just the basic form of a kind of meaningful relationship to the world. And so there's a philosophical tradition that draws on those kind of ideas and also draws on feminist ideas and on the observation that indeed the forms of social activity

we've historically associated with things like mothering are in fact that just the basic form of social activity full stop. And all of the, and that tradition of thought does make some very profound claims that indeed we should make care and an ethics of care the fundamental orienting ideas of some kind of progressive libertary romantic romantic politics. But my response is, yeah, well, fine, we could do that and I'd be up for it. You can make similar claims about ideas like democracy or freedom like we've talked about. Like David Graber's, he's got one of the definitions of care. He says care workers about enabling the freedom of others. He's got the parent, child involved in that, you know,

caring for elderly people or perhaps disabled people, differently abled people. Is there no comforting in that definition? Yeah, because comfort somebody to build them up so they can be a bit more autonomous. That's the definition. And therefore, if you add that to like the caring democracy. I like its functionality. I just don't know it's true. But it's also, I think his argument would then be if care work is expanding in the numbers

of people employed in it, if care work can be made hegemonic, then you are going into a society in which, which is focused on enabling the freedom of others, which is much more of an attractive thing than just saying, you know, getting in meetings and deciding who gets cared for and how is the aim of the whole of society. Yeah, what about umbrella by Rihanna, you know? That is, the central metaphor is come and stand under my umbrella,

you know, and it's like collectively will weather, we'll weather the tough times or something like that. It's very potent. It's important, try it, umbrella. I mean, it more or less consolidate. That's the track I always say consolidate a form of pop music, which will remain pretty much dominant until

very recently, at least. It was a really long time. It's one of those, I love playing that track to students and like pointing out when it was recorded because it could have been any time in the past 25 years. Because when the sunshine, we'll shine together. Told you, I'll be here forever. said I'll always be a friend

took a note I must to get out to the end Now that it's raining more than ever Know that we'll still have each other You can stand under my umbrella You can stand under my umbrella Ella Well of course, as we said,

The only form of care That advanced capitalist society tolerates Or doesn't regard us in some way demeaning to be rewarded at best with very low pay and ununionised labour or in some sense pathological is self-care. So what do we think about the prevalence of the discourse of self-care, even within progressive politics to some extent? Well, first I think let's talk about, I don't know the answer to this, when this kind of discourse came about, because I feel like this discourse is in the in the in the in the 2010s like this is only like you know less than 15 years

old it might be more than that but the prevalence of talking about the importance of self-care and you can only care for other people if you care for yourself which by the way I think is bollocks is like it's very it's very very strong and prevalent it's a hegemonic discourse now I mean one of the popularizing sources of it was is foucae one of the fucho's late books is called, the English title is the care of the self. And I don't even know if that phrase, to what extent that phrase, self-care was used. Really? I didn't think those things were related, but maybe that's not, I'm thinking this is a, this is a, this is a, it's come out because capitalism has recognized that it needs a coping mechanism to convince workers that on an

individualized plane of where they're supposed to seek the resources in order not to go mental so they can continue to be productive workers? Yeah, it has, yeah. I just think the fact that that book, the care of the self, is on like a thousand liberal arts reading lists in the States. I'm sure it's contributed to the popularisation of that specific phrase. That is interesting. I'd sort of locate it more in like wellness communities,

and you can trace that back, you know, into not quite counterculture, but that, you know, sort of new age sort of scenes from the late 1970s. Yeah, but the specific phrase self-care, You never heard it. You didn't hear it. We never heard it 20 years ago. But it's the same with wellness, is that it's like there's a, there's a, there's a continuum, isn't it? With like if you're talking about like Buddhist meditation on one end and then you've got like Gwyneth Paltrow's like wellness industry on the other hand, it's a continuum between like the importance of like on a philosophical level like the position of the self, you know, in in the world.

And then you've got it all the way down to, you know, like. Like, self-care is me going to a spa, which is, by the way, something that I would quite like to do. But where that positions itself in society and who takes responsibility for making me not feel burnt out, which is another concept, which is a modern concept, right? I suppose the most egregious examples of self-care is when self-care is using an excuse not to care about other people. You know, like, as in, I'm not going to care for my friends because, you know, I need to take a bit of me time, etc. which sort of self-care falls over into selfishness. But then again, you two always say, I'm not very good at self-care.

I mean, I think you're right, but I guess what I'm interested in is how that manifests itself on a meta-level in society. I'm interested in the analytical point there. What's going on if there is a discourse which allows people a kind of get out of jail card because what's actually happening in terms of like caring for other people or paying attention to other people,

what that tells me is that there's a population of people or a group of people who are frazzled and burnt out and overstimulated from social media. I mean, that's a caricature, but that's what happens when you go, I just need to lie down and I can't, you know, do this thing or whatever or care for this person. Like that's what we're talking about here.

and what the self-care discourse does is basically it's telling people that's your time out. It's like a time out for kids. This part of the whole infantilization discourse that sits above that, in my view, where you're saying what you need is you need, you know, like you need quiet time on the step to like cope with the world around you. When actually in a kind of more, what I would say normal or healthy rhythm of life, like you would have the headspace to be able to like go out and want to see your friends and be in crowds and whatever because you're not working and under those kind of pressures. Yeah, there's no question the discourse and rhetoric of self-care rises in a direct index to the decline of types of social relations, which would produce the sense of people of being cared for.

And socialising as well, like forms of socialising, especially after the pandemic. And just not even feeling necessarily like you need to be careful. I mean, if you're not overworked and you and your friends have enough time and energy to do nice things together and help each other look after the kids and look after sick relatives and all that stuff, then your general stress levels are going to be much lower and you're not going to think about how you need self-care so much. I mean, the trouble with the discourse of self-care is it both normalises the stress levels, which are typical of advanced capitalist societies. And then it tells people, well, the way to deal with,

with that is even more individualized, privatized forms of activity. That normalization point is a huge thing. And what really pisses me off is the way that the discourse goes and talks about it then extends into mental health and says the reason why, you know, that we've got all of these people who have all of these mental health problems is because now we can talk about it. It was the same number before, but we just didn't realize it. But now we're talking about it. It's like, no, actually, the discourse is just a reflective of the fact of what's happened in society and where we've got to

and we shouldn't accept that as normal. I've got a T-shirt that my sister gave me that says, demolishing patriarchy is self-care. I think that would be pretty much sum up our attitude, I think, a lot of the time. But, I mean, the other side, though,

is that, as we said when we were preparing the show, I tend to think that self-care is, it's like the nuclear family. It's an institution and a set of practices which are clearly suboptimal from an objective perspective, but also the reality of life in the world that we actually live in is that frequently they become the only things that will keep someone alive. Just because you recognise objectively that it would have been preferable

if various social institutions hadn't been dismantled doesn't mean they have been, you know, it doesn't alter the fact they've been dismantled and we can't just wheel ourselves into sort of autonomous mutually caring collectives, like even if we want them to be. there. So from that point of view, I think it is true. I think the discourse of self-care within the left, I think is quite important a lot of the time. I think it is, you know, it does often fulfill a useful function of encouraging people, you know, not, I mean, I think actually there's a, there's a bad discourse of self-care and there's a good discourse of self-care. I would say,

actually, thinking about this, like one reason why Mark, you know, Fisher's became this, like, huge sort of cult figure. I actually think the thing that so many people responded to, there was sort of implicit in some of what he was saying, and the thing that really made people have this emotional relationship to it was, he was sort of fumbling around for something that would be something like a positive discourse of self-care that would start from the point, the first point, the first thing you have to do in order to undertake self-care under these circumstances of advanced neoliberalism is to realize that it isn't your fault. The first thing you have to do, and that is, and that does, and that does,

quite profound. You have to accept that it isn't your fault. I mean, it's profound. It wasn't in any way original. And, you know, it was, it was original, it was only original to people who had not had the privilege of being exposed to, you know, a whole set to radical ideas. But for the people, for the people to whom it was new, you know, it's very, if it's, if it's the first time somebody said that to you, then yeah, it's hugely profound and it's hugely liberating. And, and that is, I mean, And just inescapably, unfortunately, because of how we live in advanced neoliberal society, it does have to sort of start as a form of self-care. The first, you do have to start, whether you like it or not, in theory, with that observation

that you have to move away from the ways in which neoliberal ideology will try to make you feel like everything that happens to you is your own fault. And that does have to be experienced, exactly. and that does have to be experienced as a form of self-care where it doesn't work, I think. If we're talking about the practices that you will engage in as a human being, probably on a daily level, to keep yourself, and I don't necessarily want to talk about it

within the frame of like a coping mechanism. But, you know, we've talked about exercise before, we've talked about sleep before, we talked about meditation, we've talked about, you know, seeing and engaging with other people. Like those would all fall under what is now called practices of self-care. I think all of, and you know, eating well, you know, engaging with nature, all of these things. These are things that I definitely, for one, and I know you guys feel the same way, I think are crucial and form part of like my daily routine, which I'm actually quite strict about, to make sure that I am happy.

but the discourse of the discourse of self-care and the way that it delinks this from the economic and cultural reality that we're living under as some kind of like it's a fete, a complete set of conditions is the problem and what continues we need to continue to problematize.

I think you're right about all of that and I also think, I've said this before on the show, I think we do have to accept that they are just coping mechanisms. I think that's the you have to be realistic about that with a lot of things. You have to, because otherwise, I mean, one of the problems, I think it's a, it's actually a weakness of a certain kind of left discourse. You have to sort of justify everything you do with reference to the fact that it's radicalising or it's resistance or something. And I think it's more helpful a lot of the time just to accept that we do need, it takes an awful lot just to cope with this shit right now, given how bad it is.

But I'm sorry, it's also biological, like eating well and sleeping enough is something that human beings need. like you might need to not have to do that for a few years in your life. That's true. Yes, you're right. But, you know, like, that's what being health, the left also has had a culture or parts of the left of like, you know, this like work, this work hard, die young sort of thing, which I'm not into. No, I agree. I agree. It's a legacy of a certain kind of puritan masochism. It's a revolutionary masochism and it doesn't. Self-sacrificing militant. which a lot of the time is it comes from a cultural Christian background

which I have a big issue with it's a good point actually I think you're on some of a Christian background I also think it comes from this is one of my bug bears that people don't know any history apart from the history of the Russian Revolution so everybody wants to be Lenin

and what I'm saying is yeah if we're in a pre-revolution when we are in a proper pre-revolutionary situation then yeah let's all not sleep for three years and devote ourselves to the revolution fine I mean it won't take that much Because we did that in 2019, so for six weeks.

All the history shows, if you try to live like that when you're not in a pre-revolutionary situation, is you have a breakdown and go mental. You'll kill all the intelligent people, which is not what we want. I mean, what do we ultimately want? What do we think we ultimately want out of all this discussion? And what would we as a progressive movement want? I think what we would want is, firstly, we want a reasonable distribution of care. We want a situation to be achieved whereby no one person has too much of a burden of caring for others fall on their shoulders, such as it becomes intolerable and painful and not enjoyable and exploitative.

And we also want a situation in which those who, when it is necessary that care be conducted by professionals who are doing it full time or part time, that care work be absolutely valued. I mean, one of the most obscene features, I think, think, about society, is the fact that nurses are so underpaid, the teachers are underpaid, the child carers are incredibly underpaid. And again, in my experience, this is something that people on the right just cannot argue with. And they do, even people quite far to the right of us do share that intuition. If you say to them, look, is it not obscene how little nurses get paid and the people looking after our kids get paid, given how important the work they do is, very

few people will argue with that. Some will try to argue with it in terms of supply and demand of labour, but it's only the really hardcore neoliberals that do. And I think it's a really powerful emotional argument that does resonate with people. So I think that should be our position that, you know, caring, it should be the conditions necessary for caring to be joyful should be available to everybody. And when we do need it to be conducted by professionals, they should be the most highly valued members of our society, not the least. Thank you.