I used to meet a woman in the street occasionally. We both knew somebody in common but were more strangers to each other than anything else. Her first words were always ‘How is your care’? It is a translation from the Irish I think. Conas tá an chúram? An bhfuil do chúram go maith? I think about all that was held in that question, about that woman and her family care, which she carried inside but in fact rarely spoke about.
In this book, Kathleen Lynch speaks to and of her care for the world, line by line, page by page, chapter by chapter. The author presents convincing evidence and arguments on the redemptive power of care and the purposive undermining, disregarding and neglect of ‘affective relations’ in the constitution of who we are and how we are as humans.
In placing relations of care, love and solidarity at the very centre of human life, the force of this book demands that the reader viscerally engage with the destructive and life-threatening ideas, values, practices and consequences of capitalism and its servant neoliberalism, for human subjects, for non-human beings and the planet.
Lynch presents readers with a new language for social change. The task set before us is to place the care order as primary to life. Lynch invites us to vigorously contest the centrality of neoliberal capitalism, as it occupies our very psyches, informs our values, shapes conventions and daily practices that separate us, one from the other.
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The ‘harms’ of neoliberal capitalism include the ‘defeating’ of race, class, gender and disabilist interests, for example. Affective relations are undermined at every turn, generating violences and exclusions; when intimate care knowledges remain private, silenced and separated from the public domain, social injustices are generated for individuals, families, communities, locally and globally.
Lynch writes: ‘Because we become what we live, the work that we do, and what and who we value while doing it, have a major impact on our character and who we become’. In joining care and social justice together, Lynch creates an alternative narrative of who we can become, of what is possible.
The reader is presented with strong theoretical arguments and empirical evidence of the human cost of neoliberal capitalism across economic, cultural and political systems. Inequality is legitimised, democracy eroded, community broken, militarism justified, as the state cedes to and endorses the values and logics of the free market. The concept of rights-bearing citizenship is dismissed for those not recognised as productive, exchange value generating workers.
To survive and succeed in neoliberal capitalism, a disinterested, cold, careless persona without needs or vulnerabilities or dependencies, focused on speed-driven, profit-oriented outcomes, emerges. The neoliberal persona is indifferent to the values of care and nurturing. It is as if their absence poses no threat to our survival.
The consequences of neoliberal capitalism are finely and relentlessly drawn out in this book. For example, public services are restructured; welfare is limited and neglected; hostile environments reshape health and education as managerialism, metricisation, performance metrics and evaluations are ruthlessly and carelessly applied to public settings in which affective relations operate but are not recognised.
The arguments in this book point both to the possibility and impossibility of excluding affective practices from our lives; love, care and solidarity are the very basis of sociality, relationality and how we come into being, as significant as our group identities and the political, cultural and economic structures that constrain and enable us. Neoliberal capitalism cannot ever deliver on the radical structural changes required for social justice.
In detailing the conditions for a new care order, Lynch offers an urgent and radical vision for change. Care is work, a matter for public concern and a residual space for wisdom and resistance. When support and care are absent, abuse, neglect and damage to the person are evident; resource poor, competitive work environments in which self-interest is rewarded, negates concern for colleagues; war, violence and economic inequalities disrupt trust in and solidarity with other humans. These are some of the key messages that Lynch delivers throughout this book. Neoliberal capitalism undermines love, care and solidarity. The question is can we repair this now? What must we do to survive?
Separatist and activist movements for social justice form and reform (civil rights, anti-nuclear protests, anti-war protests, anti-racism movements, reproductive rights, animal rights, environmental movements, contesting and protesting ‘against the carelessness underpinning capitalocentric, patriarchal, racist and disablist perspectives on the human and natural world’.
Lynch is clear about the nature, shape and extent of the challenges to be confronted and the intellectual, ideological and political work required on a local and global level to think and act in solidarity with others from a care and justice perspective. I want to live in a world that values universal caring, equality and social justice don’t you?
Anne Byrne is Emerita Professor of Political Science and Sociology at University of Galway
