AUTHOR=Müller Beatrice 

TITLE=The Careless Society—Dependency and Care Work in Capitalist Societies

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology

VOLUME=3

YEAR=2019

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2018.00044

DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2018.00044

ISSN=2297-7775

ABSTRACT=<p>The article analyzes the status of care work in capitalist societies. Care is a necessity in the context of human dependency and vulnerability. Here I understand care work as materialized and “thickly embodied” (Lanoix, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B43">2013</xref>) rather than as affective labor (Hardt and Negri, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B28">2000</xref>; Lanoix, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B43">2013</xref>). On a very basic level, capitalist societies are founded upon unequal class relations as well as on the cultural and economic devaluation and externalization of relational embodied care. This can be seen, for instance, as certain elements of care work are relegated to the private sphere and remain largely unpaid and invisible. This great amount of unpaid labor is a basic condition of capitalism. I introduce the concept of <italic>value abjection (German: Wert-Abjektion)</italic> here to illustrate and analyze these structural tendencies and their effects on care workers and the elderly care recipients.</p>