Visions of a Caring Economy

( Photo by RDNE Stock project / Pexels)

What if care’s relationship to value were inverted, so that care was the basis of the economy and the value of all labor derived from the work of care?

Doing so would accept the foundational interdependency of life — between humans, between humans and their socio-technical worlds, between humans and their environments — and start with the assumption that care is being given and received in any interaction. Or, that care is being purposefully withheld or obfuscated to uphold specific ideas about who and what are of value to society.

To recapture the value of care — and labor more generally — a revitalized labor theory of value helps to erode the distinctions that uphold certain kinds of labor and laborers as existing apart from the care work that is necessary to make our world livable.

Care takes one person’s time and redistributes it. This can occur in direct ways, with one person providing care to directly support another person; it can also occur in indirect ways, with one person’s time being distributed across a number of other people. In this way, the care that a farmer provides to their crops provides time to all of the people who consume it, the farmer’s care substituting for their own need to tend individual gardens.

Inversely, taking time away from people — through imprisonment or a lack of valuing another person’s time — is a means to take care away from individuals and communities.

Situating the time of care at the forefront of its importance acknowledges the futures that care makes possible — for individuals, communitie, and environments—and unsettles a seemingly accepted truth of economics: that the labor theory of value is a dead end. Instead, a revitalized labor theory of value that is based in care and time is positioned to call into question the economic as we have inherited it from North Atlantic liberal traditions.

Focus on how caregiving in all of its forms serves to create the economic — derived from the Greek oikos for home — points to how the economic should be conceptualized, not as something outside of the interactions between people that make lives livable and sustain them, but as produced through those activities. The oiko-nomic, puts the private sphere of the home and its caregiving activities at the forefront of the economic; it situates care as the basis of society, both that which makes the social possible and as the set of processes that must be protected at all costs in order to ensure that society persists. Not so much a social safety net as the firmament that everyday life is made possible through, an economy of care emphasizes not what is currently viable but what must become possible to ensure a futurity to human life — in and beyond the wages of anthropogenic climate change.

It is in that spirit that the essays in the new book “Proposals for a Caring Economy” have been collected; not to merely make an argument about facts on the ground, but to reconceptualize the ground altogether and make a better, more inclusive world possible with a focus on care at its foundation.

In developing an economy of care, extending the “home,” the oiko, becomes a necessary project. As Patricia Owens writes, ideologies of belonging are deeply indebted to ideas about who is part of the home and family and who is not, from kinship networks to the nation-state. The forms of exclusion that have created distinctions between those inside and outside of the “home,” and, by extension, outside of the economic. The boundaries of the “home” determine whose labor is valuable and how it is valued.

A capacious conception of the “home” that accepts the fundamental interdependency of life would extend the necessity of care provision and the need of its valuation. In so doing, the basis of the economic moves from being extractive and exploitative toward being supporting and generative.

This may present itself as too utopian of a claim, too naïve in the face of contemporary politics that thrive on racist xenophobia, gendered forms of exploitation and exclusion, and ableist expectations about who can give and receive care in ways that promote individual livelihoods and community values. But utopian horizons serve as a foil to help imagine what is possible and how it might be achieved.

Such a project of extending the “home” and those who are cared for and provide valued care depends, in turn, on radical forms of democratic inclusion that allow for the possibility of redistributing power and unsettling the contours of the economic in continuous ways.

Doing so requires attention to the micropractices of care and coming to a widespread conception of how care is enacted everywhere to make life livable through the distribution of time. An economy of care begins with a conception of the time that care takes and the assumptions that everyone’s time is equally valuable in an interdependent community of care givers and receivers.

How do we redraw the contours of the “home,” of the oiko, to remove its walls and include more people in those who are cared for by the institutions that comprise our everyday lives?

In reprioritizing how resources are allocated, consider not just the use of money in the strict sense — which can be used as a source of motivation or remuneration — but resources like the attention of institutions to one practice instead of another. This reallocation of attention serves to realign priorities to different outcomes. Their targets and outcomes are different, but each shows how a focus on institutional attention limits the economic in ways that create disparities in outcomes and concretize existing forms of inequity and prejudice.

In reconceptualizing what, fundamentally, the state can do for its citizens, who counts as a recipient of the care of the state, and what the forms of that care might be, the state itself needs to be reconceptualized. Building that state might be the next act of care and it is clear that an emergent state must act without a scarcity mindset and an acceptance of the possibility of radical transformation in the lives of humans and nonhumans, including an attention to sustainability, equity and inclusivity. It’s time to bring to life a post-neoliberal economy and its possibilities for building a new house of caring.

Excerpt adapted from the introduction to Proposals for a Caring Economy, edited by Matthew Wolf-Meyer. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2025. Proposals for a Caring Economy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Used by permission.

This post was originally published on Next City.