The Politics of Care

The Invisible Infrastructure

We are conditioned to view “care” as a private sentiment: a soft, domestic obligation reserved for mothers, wives, and volunteers. In the brand story of democracy, care is what happens after the real work of the economy and politics is done. It is treated as an infinite, free resource, a “natural” product of the household.

But as the People’s Democracy Index (PDI) reveals, this devaluation is a structural lie.

Care is not a feeling; it is the infrastructure of survival.

It is the invisible scaffolding that allows the “productive” economy to function. Without the uncompensated labor of raising children, tending to the sick, and maintaining the household, the “formal economy” would collapse overnight.

According to the International Labour Organization, women perform 76 percent of all unpaid care work globally. Oxfam estimates that women and girls put in 12.5 billion hours of it every day, worth at least $10.8 trillion a year at minimum wage, more than three times the size of the world’s tech industry. In the U.S., specifically, the AARP estimated that unpaid family caregivers provided $600 billion in care in 2021, surpassing total Medicaid spending on long-term care.

Feminists have been saying this for half a century. In the 1970s, Silvia Federici and the Wages for Housework movement argued that capitalism runs on a hidden subsidy: the unpaid labor of women. Care was never free; its cost was simply billed to women’s bodies, time, and dreams. A democracy that ignores this subsidy is not gender-neutral. It is gender-blind, and the blindness is the policy.

To reclaim democracy, we must move from Care as Charity (a favor the strong do for the weak) to Care as Governance (the central duty of the state to sustain life).

1. Care as Governance, Not Charity

The Vertical vs. The Horizontal. The current model of care is Vertical: it flows downward from the wealthy (philanthropy) or the state (welfare) to the “deserving poor.” It is often conditional, means-tested, and stigmatized. Listen to the language: “means-tested,” “welfare check,” “handout.” Each phrase carries a quiet accusation, a demand that the poor prove their poverty and perform their gratitude.

The absence of that infrastructure has a texture, and I met it in the weeks before my cancer surgery.

Amber’s father and brother lived nearby. Through the diagnosis, the job loss and the run-up to the operation, they were ghosts. No offer of food, no offer of a lift, no offer to sit in a room. It was not hostility. It was simply that nothing in the surrounding culture told them that any of this was theirs to carry.

I had grown up inside a different assumption. Ubuntu, the Nguni idea usually rendered as I am because we are, is not a slogan in South Africa so much as a working expectation: when something breaks, the village turns up, and the village is often poor and always imperfect and it still turns up. In America I found that the village had been privatised along with everything else. Family here could mean a set of individuals who share a surname rather than a group that shares a burden.

What filled the gap was chosen. A small group of friends raised money to keep the lights on. Lisa Manos made sure quietly that we did not go under. My mother, seventy-eight years old and on a pension eight thousand miles away, converted rands into dollars at a punishing rate and sent what she had.

I am not telling you this to praise them, though they deserve it. I am telling you because of what it says about how a society allocates care. None of those people were responsible for me. Every one of them was doing work that a functioning system would have done as a matter of course, unpaid, at their own cost, on top of their own lives. When we call that heartwarming we are describing a transfer of labour from the state to a pensioner in Pretoria, and calling it love so that nobody has to call it a policy failure.

The Politics of Care demands a Horizontal shift. Drawing on the principles of Mutual Aid, it views care as a reciprocal obligation among peers. It operates on the logic of “Solidarity, Not Charity”: the recognition that my survival is bound up in yours. This mutual arrangement not only relieved burdens but transformed abstract solidarity into a tangible reality.

The Policy of Care: The 5R Framework. Transforming care into governance requires specific policy mechanisms. Adopting the International Labour Organization’s 5R Framework is an urgent necessity for navigating pandemic recovery and aging populations.

1. Recognize: We must make invisible labor visible. This means including unpaid care work in national statistics and GDP calculations.
2. Reduce: The state must invest in infrastructure (water, electricity, childcare) to reduce the drudgery of survival that disproportionately falls on women.
3. Redistribute: We must share the burden. Care is not a “woman’s job”; it is a collective responsibility shared between the state, the market, and the household. Equitable sharing builds a more resilient economy.
4. Reward: “Essential work” must earn a living wage. We must end the exploitation of the care workforce by enforcing decent pay. Ask any care worker what respect means, and the answer is rarely abstract: it is a wage you can live on, a schedule you can plan around, and a boss who knows your name.
5. Represent: Care workers must have a seat at the table in policy design, ensuring that those who sustain life have the power to shape it.

2. The Litmus Tests: Disability, Trans, and Immigrant Dignity

If care is the engine of democracy, then the most vulnerable bodies are its stress test. A democracy that fails its “outliers” is not a democracy; it is a system of managed disposability.

A. Disability Justice: The Anti-Capitalist Politic

• The Test: Does the system value you only when you are “productive”?
• The Insight: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023 only 22.5% of persons with a disability are employed, compared to 65.8% of those without. Furthermore, laws still allow “sub-minimum wages” for disabled workers. Disability Justice (DJ) challenges this logic, asserting the principle of Wholeness: that a person has inherent worth regardless of economic utility.
• The Shift: Move from the Medical Model (fixing bodies) to the Social Model (fixing barriers). A care-based democracy asks, “What barriers have we built that exclude you?”

B. Trans Liberation: The Bodily Autonomy Test

• The Test: Does the state own your body, or do you?
• The Insight: Trans liberation is not a culture war; it is a fight for survival. As we saw in Chapter 8, the 2022 JAMA Network Open study found that access to gender-affirming care was associated with 73 percent lower odds of suicidality among trans youth. When the state bans this care, it engages in Necropolitics.
• The Shift: We must reject Oppositional Sexism and establish the precedent that bodily autonomy is not subject to political veto.

C. Immigrant Dignity: The Human Rights Test

• The Test: Is your humanity conditional on a piece of paper?
• The Insight: After the public charge rule was proposed in 2018, one in seven adults in immigrant families reported avoiding safety-net programs like food stamps out of fear. This is Administrative Violence.
• The Shift: We must move from Nationalist Exclusion to Sanctuary. This means rejecting the Monstrous Other narrative and recognizing that migration is often a response to the “Colonial Matrix of Power” and climate displacement.

3. The Practice: Who Holds Whom Up

The Work of Hope Practice: The Reciprocity Map

Goal: To audit the everyday economy of care in your life. The Pod you built in Chapter 20 is for emergencies; this map is for the ordinary weeks in between, where care either flows or quietly runs dry.

The Exercise: Draw a circle with your name in the center. Around it, write the names of the three to five people whose lives touch yours most often.

Step 1: Draw the Flows. Draw an arrow for each direction care actually moves. Inward: who brings you soup when you are sick, lends you money, checks on you after a hard day? Outward: who relies on you for those same things?

Step 2: Read the Map. Is the flow balanced? If your arrows point mostly outward, you are on the road to burnout; care is labor, and unpaid labor exhausts. If they point mostly inward, someone in your circle may be carrying you at a cost you have not seen.

Step 3: The Access Intimacy Check. Circle the one person who understands your needs without explanation: they know not to book the early meeting, they text before they knock. That ease is called access intimacy, and it is the gold standard of care. Now ask the harder question: for whom are you that person?

Step 4: One Deposit. Choose the most unbalanced relationship on your map and make one concrete deposit of care this week, without being asked. Not a grand gesture: a covered shift, a school run, a delivered meal.

Reflection: Authoritarianism relies on atomization, on the belief that we are each alone. Every balanced arrow on this map is a small act of resistance. Friendship is a feeling; reciprocity is infrastructure.