You call it love, we call it unpaid labour

Why even when we think we're doing our care work out of a gushing fountain of love, we're still doing it for capitalism

Ornament in my parents’ place, bought from Olvera Street market in Los Angeles

I hate the idea that my love for my daughter could be tainted by something as grimy as economics or politics. I’m not sure if this is something you get over as they grow out of the toddler years, but she still makes my heart explode several times a day.

Yesterday we were in our local cafe and Essie started having elaborate conversations with the dream catcher hanging on the wall and the artworks of a bear, an octopus and a shark. The chef and waiter thought it was hilarious and joined in, turning a mundane morning into a spangling community production. Her light lit them up, and almost burst my heart.

Of course, the sleep deprivation probably has something to do with how emotional she makes me. Broken sleep is also something we haven’t quite grown out of, despite Essie now being two and a half. A typical scene in our household: I express sympathy with my husband as he limps down the stairs after a brutal night, eye bags big as potatoes; he wearily replies, ‘it’s my honour and my privilege’.

We care for our loved ones because we love them. We really, really do. Practicing love for our people makes us more human. It’s the stuff of life. But annoyingly, there’s more to it than that. Under capitalism, we cannot divorce our love from our exploitation.

This economic system doesn’t just drain us when we’re droning away at work. It takes over every part of our lives, including our home lives. Capitalism has swallowed us all up, down to our oxytocin. Here’s why.

Screwed in love

You might not have learned this in economics class, but according to Karl Marx (there, I’ve said it) and the mountains of theory that he has spurred over the decades, capitalism is an inherently exploitative economic design. The whole system is set up to funnel wealth to the top. Workers create the value that capitalists then cream off for themselves in the form of profit. So even if you’re one of those rare specimens that actually quite likes their job, you’re still getting screwed.

That’s the realm of production, where people are doing work for wages. But what goes on behind the scenes — what does it take to sustain a worker, to keep a human being alive so that they can go and earn that wage and make that profit for their boss?

To function, a worker needs to eat and drink. They need to be able to sleep. They need enough emotional support to be able to function. They need to be able to take basic ongoing care of their health. They need to have passably odour-free clothes. They need their home to have some degree of cleanliness and order.

That’s just the adult worker from the current workforce. For the profits to keep flowing in, employers also constantly need the workforce to be topped up with new generations of workers. This means that fetuses need to be gestated. Babies need to be birthed. Children need to be kept alive and given a basic level of nurturing. They need to be socialised in ways that align with the needs of the employers.

That is one heck of a lot of work. Women do 75% of it and it’s mostly unpaid. But just because work is unpaid, that doesn’t mean that no-one is profiting from it. We don’t see the process by which our loving care is alchemised into zeros in some CEO’s bank account, but that’s essentially what happens.

I keep harping on about this figure, but Oxfam calculates that women globally do $11 trillion a year in unpaid care work. Where is that money ending up? I certainly don’t see it trickling down into my banking app.

Under capitalism, the work we do, the energy we expend, the value we create, doesn’t ultimately belong to us. Almost everything we do creates a profit for some big cheese, whether we want it to or not. So even when we are doing something out of a gushing fountain of love, even if we find it deeply and unequivocally fulfilling (which, ahem, we definitely all do when it comes to tending to our loved ones), we’re still doing it for capitalism.

Family value

Most of this back-stage exploitation goes on in families. Families aren’t just private spaces; they are core institutions of capitalism. Families are capitalism’s thorny little engine rooms.

I’m going to write more on this and it’s a key theme of the book, Loveconomics, that I’m writing, but capitalism was founded on a wholesale war on pre-existing family structures all around the world, and a reconstitution of families around capitalists’ relentless thirst for profit.

These new families looked different in different parts of the world and among different class strata. But what defined all these versions of capitalist families, more than anything else? Patriarchy, my loves. It’s true that patriarchy existed in various forms in various places prior to capitalism, but capitalism turned patriarchy into its profit-bonanza-generating-machine.

In my post last week I showed how race and racism are hotwired into capitalism. The same is true for gender and sexism. Patriarchy is integral to capitalism, it’s where all those yummy free care-work profits come from. Scholars including Angela Davis, Maria Lugones, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, and Sita Balani (author of What We Make) show us how race, gender and capitalism are all intertwined.

Liberating love

The title of this post paraphrases a slogan of the ‘Wages for Housework’ movement of the 1970s. Using the economic argument that I have outlined above, these feminists argued that women’s care work inevitably ends up making bank for capitalists, and therefore we should be paid wages for it.

The renowned Black feminist scholar Angela Davis was somewhat critical of the Wages for Housework movement. Although she agreed that capitalism subjugates women through unpaid work, Davis argued that the answer wasn’t demanding wages for it, but rather to demand that housework be socialised. That means campaigning for things like comprehensive public childcare services and government investment in automating housework.

Strategically, I’m cool with both these approaches — but not as ends in themselves. Ultimately, I don’t want my labours of love to be folded into an inherently exploitative economic system, even if those labours are paid or given more support from the government.

Call me a brat but I want a system in which love is liberation, not exploitation. I want a lovely new economy in which love doesn’t mean cash bonanzas for the few and potato eye-bags for the many. I want a system that lets us hold each other so that we can all set our love free.

*I wrote this post in response to a comment from a Loveconomics subscriber, P.K. Jayaswal, who kindly said that they would love to hear my thoughts on how love and capitalism are tangled up within families. Thank you, P. K, this is for you! If anyone else has ideas about topics they’d like me to write about, please leave a comment!