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  5. Critical Perspectives on Care, Carceral Systems, and Capitalism
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Critical Perspectives on Care, Carceral Systems, and Capitalism

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)

J.W. Marriott New Orleans, Rosalie/St. Claude
Hosted By: Union for Radical Political Economics
  • Chair: Anastasia Wilson, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Caring or Carceral: Understanding the Work of Social Reproduction

Anastasia Wilson
,
Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Abstract

In this paper, I theorize that under the domination of capital, forms of socially reproductive work often take on a carceral logic, rather than one of care. Carceral logics rely on the threat or imposition of punishment to coerce, including coercing work. The family, as well as schools and social services, work to produce and reproduce the worker whose labor is ultimately coerced by capital. Are these forms of socially reproductive work then caring or carceral? To understand this contradiction, I examine the intersection of the waged work of schools and social services, as provisioned by the state, and the unwaged work of the household in the form of the family. By analyzing how carceral systems such as school and family policing are enmeshed in such forms of socially reproductive work, I argue that these sites of reproductive work- schools, social services, and the family- interlock under the domination of capital to reproduce gendered and racialized forms of coerced "care" that regulate and reinforce the unwaged work of the family. In tandem these forms of coerced work reproduce fragmented, gendered, and racialized workers to be exploited by capital. I argue that liberatory ruptures beyond such carceral forms of "care" then require both an abolitionist method and critique of capitalist society.

Critiquing “Economies of Care”: Care Work and Capitalism

Hannah Archambault
,
California State University-Fresno

Abstract

This paper analyzes the increasingly pervasive invocation of "economies of care" or "communities of care" in contemporary academic and activist circles, and in broader economic and social locales. Care work is frequently elevated to a special category of work that embodies an inherent moral and social value. In reality, care work reproduces oppressive systems, and the work itself is often drudgerous and draining in similar ways as exploited and alienated work is in racial post-Fordist capitalism overall. Capitalism also creates the conditions in which so much "care" is necessary via the linked racialized and gendered processes of accumulation and exploitation, and capital then benefits from this provision of care. The processes of care provided in prisons, hospitals, home health care and other state and private institutions, all demonstrate that practices of care and care work are embedded in our current global racial and patriarchal post-Fordist economy. Liberatory social practices and potential work regimes need to do more than uncover the "hidden abode of care", but to break it apart-in this way "revaluing" care is inadequate in the same way that paying higher wages is inadequate to create a liberatory economic system. I argue that reducing the sheer amount of care work performed, as well as changing the social conditions it is performed in, is a fundamental liberatory goal, and political economy analyses of care work should be oriented towards this.

Social Reproduction During the Pandemic

Samantha Sterba
,
University of Redlands

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze policies that emerged from U.S. institutions to respond to the pandemic as a set of social reproduction policies. Following Fraser's framework on the internal contradictions of social reproduction in the financialized neoliberal form of capitalism, I explore the ways in which the U.S. pandemic response has both stabilized and destabilized capitalist accumulation. I will argue that the litany of rapidly changing guidance from the U.S. government on the pandemic is best understood as contradictions within the structural form of capitalism, not simply a failure of public relations communications. This analysis of the complex relationship between class struggle and social reproduction in periods of global instability.

From Labor Discipline to Labor Segmentation: The Evolving Labor Market Consequences of American Mass Incarceration

Geert Dhondt
,
CUNY-John Jay College

Abstract

While the empirical literature on the effects of mass incarceration on labor markets is vast, most of it focuses on the economic trajectories of those individuals and groups who most frequently experience incarceration. It largely neglects macroeconomic analyses that assess the effects of a large incarcerated population on broader labor market dynamics. The penal system as a labor market institution," posits that mass incarceration has become a labor market institution in that it produces the short-run effects of lowering official measures of unemployment and the long-run effects of increasing unemployment by rendering former prisoners less employable. In so doing, it does a great service in opening up a mainstream sociological discourse that treats mass incarceration as a labor market institution worthy of study as such. I make use of survey data on recidivism, pre-incarceration employment and income, and parole revocation to argue that while mass incarceration initially functioned primarily to discipline labor, undermining the bargaining power of workers through hyperdisciplinary periods of unemployment and its threat, it has increasingly functioned to segment labor, coming to warehouse a largely unemployable,
high-recidivism population that has a small remaining attachment to labor markets, in effect sizably shrinking the reserve army of labor. Throughout its life course, mass incarceration's broad labor disciplinary wage-depressive effect has come to be steadily replaced by its labor segmenting effect, which places upward pressure on wages for those workers who have not become its semi-permanent inhabitants.
JEL Classifications
  • B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches
  • P1 - Capitalist Systems