Crisis of Care? On the SocialReproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism
护理危机？论当代资本主义的社会生殖矛盾

We hear a lot of talk today about "the crisis of care."1 Often linked to such phrases as “time poverty,” “family/work balance,” and “social depletion,” this expression refers to the pressures from several directions that are currently squeezing a key set of social capacities: the capacities available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally. Historically, this work of “social reproduction” has been cast as women’s work, although men have always done some of it too. Comprising both affective and material labor and often performed without pay, it is indispensable to society. Without it there could be no culture, no economy, no political organization. No society that systematically undermines social reproduction can endure for long. Today, however, a new form of capitalist society is doing just that. The result, as I shall explain, is a major crisis-not simply of care, but of social reproduction in this broader sense.
我们今天听到了很多关于“护理危机”的讨论。1 这个表达通常与“时间贫困”、“家庭/工作平衡”和“社会消耗”等短语联系在一起，指的是来自几个方向的压力，这些压力目前正在挤压一组关键的社会能力：可用于生育和抚养孩子、照顾朋友和家人、维持家庭和更广泛的社区以及更普遍地维持联系的能力。从历史上看，这种 “社会再生产 ”的工作一直被塑造成女性的工作，尽管男性也总是做一些工作。它由情感劳动和物质劳动组成，而且通常是无偿的，对社会来说是必不可少的。没有它，就没有文化、经济和政治组织。任何系统性地破坏社会再生产的社会都不可能长期存在。然而，今天，一种新形式的资本主义社会正在这样做。正如我将要解释的那样，其结果是一场重大危机——不仅仅是护理危机，而是这种更广泛意义上的社会再生产危机。

I understand this crisis as one strand of a general crisis that also encompasses other strands-economic, ecological, and political, all of which intersect with and exacerbate one another. The social reproduction strand forms an important dimension of this general crisis, but it is often neglected in current discussions, which focus chiefly on the economic or ecological strands. This “critical separatism” is problematic. The social strand is so central to the broader crisis that none of the others can be properly understood in abstraction from it. However, the converse is also true. The crisis of social reproduction is not freestanding and cannot be adequately grasped on its own.
我认为这场危机是一场普遍危机的一条线索，它还包括其他方面——经济、生态和政治，所有这些都相互交织并相互加剧。社会再生产链构成了这场普遍危机的一个重要维度，但在当前的讨论中，它经常被忽视，这些讨论主要集中在经济或生态链上。这种“批判性分离主义”是有问题的。社会层面在更广泛的危机中是如此核心，以至于无法从中抽象地正确理解其他任何一个层面。然而，反之亦然。社会再生产的危机不是独立的，无法单独得到充分把握。

How, then, should it be understood? My claim is that what some call “the crisis of care” is best interpreted as a more or less acute expression
那么，我们应该如何理解它呢？我的观点是，有些人所说的“护理危机”最好被解释为或多或少的尖锐表达
of the social-reproductive contradictions of financialized capitalism. This formulation suggests two ideas. First, the present strains on care are not accidental but have deep systemic roots in the structure of our social order, which I characterize here as financialized capitalism. Nevertheless, and this is the second point, the present crisis of social reproduction indicates something rotten not only in capitalism’s current, financialized form but in capitalist society per se.
金融化资本主义的社会生殖矛盾。这个表述提出了两个想法。首先，目前的护理压力不是偶然的，而是在我们的社会秩序结构中有着深厚的系统性根源，我在这里将其描述为金融化资本主义。然而，这是第二点，目前的社会再生产危机不仅表明资本主义目前的金融化形式，而且资本主义社会本身都已经腐烂了。

These are the theses I shall elaborate here. My claim, to begin with the last point, is that every form of capitalist society harbors a deep-seated social-reproductive “crisis tendency” or “contradiction.” On the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other hand, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies. This “social-reproductive contradiction of capitalism” lies at the root, I claim, of our so-called crisis of care. Although inherent in capitalism as such, it assumes a different and distinctive guise in every historically specific form of capitalist societyfor example, in the liberal, competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century, the state-managed capitalism of the postwar era, and the financialized neoliberal capitalism of our time. The care deficits we experience today are the form this contradiction takes in that third, most recent phase of capitalist development.
这些是我将在这里详细说明的论点。从最后一点开始，我的主张是，每一种形式的资本主义社会都隐藏着根深蒂固的社会生殖“危机倾向”或“矛盾”。一方面，社会再生产是持续资本积累的可能性条件;另一方面，资本主义对无限积累的取向往往会破坏它所依赖的社会再生产过程的稳定性。我认为，这种“资本主义的社会-生殖矛盾”是我们所谓的护理危机的根源。尽管资本主义本身是固有的，但它在每一种历史上特定的资本主义社会形式中都呈现出不同而独特的伪装，例如，在 19 世纪的自由、竞争性的资本主义、战后时代的国家管理的资本主义以及我们这个时代的金融化新自由主义资本主义中。我们今天所经历的护理赤字就是这种矛盾在资本主义发展的第三个、也是最近的阶段所表现的形式。

To develop this thesis, I first propose an account of the social contradiction of capitalism as such, without reference to any specific historical form. Second, I shall sketch an account of the unfolding of this contradiction in the two earlier phases of capitalist development I just mentioned. Finally, I shall propose a reading of today’s so-called “care deficits” as expressions of capitalism’s social contradiction in its current, financialized phase.
为了发展这个论点，我首先提出了对资本主义本身的社会矛盾的解释，而没有参考任何具体的历史形式。其次，我将简要说明这一矛盾在我刚才提到的资本主义发展的早期两个阶段中的展开。最后，我将提议将今天的所谓“护理赤字”解读为资本主义在当前金融化阶段的社会矛盾的表现。

Most analysts of the contemporary crisis focus on contradictions internal to the capitalist economy. At its heart, they claim, lies a built-in tendency to self-destabilization, which expresses itself periodically in economic crises. This view is right, as far as it goes, but it fails to provide a full picture of capitalism’s inherent crisis tendencies. Adopting an economistic perspective, it understands capitalism too narrowly, as an economic system simpliciter. In contrast, I shall assume an expanded
当代危机的大多数分析家都关注资本主义经济内部的矛盾。他们声称，其核心是固有的自我不稳定倾向，这种倾向会周期性地表现在经济危机中。就目前而言，这种观点是正确的，但它未能提供资本主义固有危机倾向的全貌。它采用经济学的观点，将资本主义理解得过于狭隘，认为资本主义是一种经济制度的简单化者。相反，我将假设一个扩展的
understanding of capitalism, encompassing both its official economy and the latter’s “noneconomic” background conditions. ${}^3$${}^3$^(3){ }^{3} Such a view permits us to conceptualize and to criticize capitalism’s full range of crisis tendencies, including those centered on social reproduction.
对资本主义的理解，包括其官方经济和后者的“非经济”背景条件。 ${}^3$${}^3$^(3){ }^{3} 这种观点使我们能够概念化和批评资本主义的所有危机趋势，包括那些以社会再生产为中心的危机趋势。

My argument is that capitalism’s economic subsystem depends on social-reproductive activities external to it, which form one of its background conditions of possibility. Other background conditions include the governance functions performed by public powers and the availability of nature as a source of “productive inputs” and a “sink” for production’s waste. ${}^4$${}^4$^(4){ }^{4} Here, however, I will focus on the way that the capitalist economy relies on-one might say, free-rides on-activities of provisioning, caregiving, and interaction that produce and maintain social bonds, although it accords them no monetized value and treats them as if they were free. Variously called care, affective labor, or subjectivation, this activity forms capitalism’s human subjects, sustaining them as embodied natural beings while also constituting them as social beings, forming their habitus and the cultural ethos in which they move. The work of birthing and socializing the young is central to this process, as is caring for the old, maintaining households and family members, building communities, and sustaining the shared meanings, affective dispositions, and horizons of value that underpin social cooperation. In capitalist societies, much, though not all, of this activity goes on outside the market-in households, neighborhoods, civil-society associations, informal networks, and public institutions such as schools; relatively little of it takes the form of wage labor. Unwaged social reproductive activity is necessary to the existence of waged work, the accumulation of surplus value, and the functioning of capitalism as such. None of those things could exist in the absence of housework, child-raising, schooling, affective care, and a host of other activities that serve to produce new generations of workers and replenish existing ones, as well as to maintain social bonds and shared understandings. Social reproduction is an indispensable background condition for the possibility of economic production in a capitalist society. ${}^5$${}^5$^(5){ }^{5}
我的观点是，资本主义的经济子系统依赖于它外部的社会生殖活动，这构成了其可能性的背景条件之一。其他背景条件包括公共权力履行的治理职能以及自然作为“生产投入”来源和生产废物“汇”的可用性。 ${}^4$${}^4$^(4){ }^{4} 然而，在这里，我将重点介绍资本主义经济如何依赖于——可以说，搭便车——供应、照顾和互动等活动产生和维持社会纽带，尽管它没有赋予它们货币化的价值，而是将它们视为自由的。这种活动被称为关怀、情感劳动或主体化，它塑造了资本主义的人类主体，将他们维持为具身的自然存在，同时也将他们构成为社会存在，形成他们的习惯和他们所处的文化精神。抚养年轻人并使其社会化的工作是这一过程的核心，照顾老年人、维持家庭和家庭成员、建立社区以及维持支撑社会合作的共同意义、情感倾向和价值视野也是如此。在资本主义社会中，这种活动的大部分（尽管不是全部）都在市场之外进行——家庭、社区、公民社会协会、非正式网络和学校等公共机构;相对较少的劳动形式是雇佣劳动。无薪的社会繁殖活动对于有薪工作的存在、剩余价值的积累以及资本主义本身的运作是必要的。 如果没有家务劳动、抚养孩子、上学、情感照顾和许多其他有助于培养新一代工人和补充现有工人以及维持社会纽带和共同理解的活动，这些东西都不可能存在。社会再生产是资本主义社会经济生产可能性不可或缺的背景条件。 ${}^5$${}^5$^(5){ }^{5}

Since at least the industrial era, however, capitalist societies have separated the work of social reproduction from that of economic production. Associating the first with women and the second with men, they have remunerated “reproductive” activities in the coin of “love” and “virtue,” while compensating “productive work” in that of money. In this way, capitalist societies created an institutional basis for new, modern
然而，至少从工业时代开始，资本主义社会就已经将社会再生产工作与经济生产工作分开了。他们把前者与女人联系在一起，把第二个人与男人联系在一起，他们用“爱”和“美德”的硬币来补偿“生产”活动，同时用金钱来补偿“生产性工作”。通过这种方式，资本主义社会为新的、现代的