---
Title: Against the so-called ethics of care
Date: 05/05/2021
Category: Critique of ideology
Tags: feminism history-of-feminism ideology
URL: https://marxismo.school/communia/en/against-ethics-of-care
---


The _ethics of care_ have migrated from feminist theory to the language used both by the Spanish government for pandemic management and by the political parties in their electoral campaigns._Care_ and the _vulnerable_ have become terms of use, the maternal status of female candidates has been turned into an electoral issue and _vulnerability_ has been turned into a synonym of the condition of precarious workers. What lies underneath this language trying to become state ideology?

### In this article

## The ethics of care become _mainstream_

![Ethics of care started with the definitions: 'physician, mother and candidate'](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/mas-madrid-800x1101.jpg)

Ethics of care started with the definitions: 'physician, mother and candidate'

The election campaign in Madrid has been even more infamous than usual. The [letters with threats to some candidates and ministers of the national government](https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20210430/policia-encuentra-fabrica-adn-cartas-balas/2088339.shtml) helped the tired and false [anti-fascist discourse precooked by Iglesias and the Sánchez government](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/pablo-iglesias-podemos-madrid) to confront the [the diffuse violence encouraged by the fear-mongering and the covid-denialist temptations of the Madrid PP, increasingly influenced by Vox](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/far-right-outlawed), expression in turn of an [increasingly frustrated and politically adrift](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/the-petty-bourgeoisie-explodes) petty bourgeoisie .

The biggest novelty of the Madrid election campaign consisted of one of the main candidates insisting over and over again that she was _[a physician and mother of three children](https://www.elmundo.es/papel/lideres/2021/05/01/608bec24fc6c8331088b45b0.html)_. Errejón's party, vanguard of the [most reactionary ideological innovation](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/las-32-horas-de-errejon), put the _ethics of care_ in the mainstream.

To do so, it resurrected old clichés about how femininity/motherhood are naturally loving and _caring_, reinforcing these sexist clichés with a permanent nod toward a medical profession that pandemic propaganda and its conversion into _[experts](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/the-experts-crisis)_ has given hypocritical lip service to.

The fact that Vox and PP presented women candidates mattered little to Más Madrid. The discourse hammered during the years of _compulsory civil service_ by the _female section_ of the Francoist Falange on the existence of a supposed innate ethic to women, centered on care and _common sense_, was once again [expressed in all its shameless and unabashedly sexist vulgarity](https://twitter.com/MasMadridCM/status/1386274095327760392).

At first glance it might seem that this latest contortion of errejonism toward the _ethics of care_ is nothing more than a way to valorize the health system and _social spending_ by borrowing a stale and unfortunate analogy. But no. The _ethics of care_ is an elaborate ideological construct with a long history in the USA. And it is well on its way to becoming part of the state ideology in Spain and Europe.

## Ethics of care, commodification and institutionalization of community relations

!["The personal is political", an old idea from the revolutionary puritanism of the 17th century, which reappeared in the feminism of the 1960s, is the origin of the ethics of care](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/personal-es-politico.jpeg)

"The personal is political", an old idea from the revolutionary puritanism of the 17th century, which reappeared in the feminism of the 1960s, is the origin of the _ethics of care_

The _ethics of care_ discourse was born in the 1970s as part of the totalitarian drift of American _second wave_ feminism. It is a further development of the puritan principle _the personal is political_, in a framework in which the women of the American petty bourgeoisie, [coming out of tremendously classist universities](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/feminism-and-world-war-2), were expanding the spaces of power to which their mothers had already had access within business and the state.

Hitherto the main thrust of American feminism had been _saving the petty-bourgeois family_ and its differentiated economic status vis-à-vis workers by giving wealthy class women access to managerial and executive positions. Along the way feminism had become part of the ideology of mobilization for war and swept away labor protections for working-class women, laboriously wrested away in the 19th century.

In the 1970s the tension between the American petty-bourgeois nuclear family model and participation in ever-increasing quotas of corporate power ruptures. Domestic wage labor - the _service_ - grows in cost faster than cadre wages rise and its cost accounts for a growing share of the extra income generated by the joint earnings of spouses. Maintaining the _dual role_ of domestic manager and industrial cadre was increasingly difficult and the _professional cadre_ couple begins to have to devote time to daily housekeeping and child-rearing. _Service_ becomes _help_ on an hourly basis.

The solution? _Freeing_ the petty-bourgeois family economic unit from the hourly cost of child and home care in order to encourage its _competitiveness_. Do away with the communitarian basis of the family and recognize it for all purposes as a productive unit... with salaried workers. That is to say, to commodify it even further. To recognize the tasks of the domestic environment, the _cares_, always turning them into paid activities, into salaried work... that would have to be entrusted to salaried workers or, failing that, to charge the spouses according to their contribution.

This was not about promoting or accelerating a cultural change - which was already independently underway - regarding men's responsibilities in child rearing and domestic responsibilities, but about **affirming the mercantile nature of family and couple relationships**. This happened at the same time [and in the same environment](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/feminism-in-the-us-and-the-biden-era) in which the new tendencies of feminism moved from traditional prohibitionism to the vindication of prostitution as _sex work_. A [new feminist morality based on extreme commodification](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/prostitucion-y-gestacion-subrogada) was emerging then.

But one question remained: who was to pay these _caregiver_ wages?

Pretending that it should be done by the state without further ado seemed utopian to say the least, although a whole branch of feminist economists will be advocating it for decades. The solution will require a slightly more elaborate argument coming from [feminist psychology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Gilligan), allowing one to equate domestic _care_ with the "public goods" provided by the state itself: health, education, dissemination of _values_.... Thus _care_ ceased to be conceptualized as a communitarian expression and became a **personal** responsibility and then... **political**, institutional... that is to say, it must be guaranteed by the state. The discourse of the _ethics of care_ is emerging.

This cultural shift is at first marginal yet visible. The social offshoots of the US New Left of the sixties abandoned in the eighties and nineties the welfarist logic in the neighborhoods. Encouraged by the _ethics of care_, they begin to organize _time banks_ in which neighbors exchange _care_ by using hourly vouchers. The idea is to expand the idea that traditionally decommodified community relationships have become interchangeable goods.

## Caregivers and the vulnerable

![Under the ethics of care lies the same "protective homeland" (national capital) which makes us precarious in the first place.](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/assets/errejon-lepen-patria-protectora.jpg)

Under the ethics of care lies the same "protective homeland" (national capital) which makes us precarious in the first place.

But the _ethics of care_ generates its own categories as it moves from slogan to public policy. Categories which are far from innocent. The passage from a state _guaranteeing_ certain minimum conditions of exploitation -health, training, infrastructures, freedoms- to the _caregiver_ state means conceiving state policy from a division of society into two new groups: _caregivers_ and the _vulnerable_.

The pandemic has helped the debut of these categories in Spain by all means. It's not just marketing and linguistic bias. It's not just the [Peronist stench liked so much by Errejón, Iglesias and Sánchez](https://marxismo.school/communia/en/confinement-and-the-limits-of-social-justice) nor the _caretaker_ epic of a [_social shield_ that turned out to be made of cardboard](https://marxismo.school/communia/es/sepe-inss-erte-imv-escudo-social). Turning workers, made precarious en masse by the temporary layoffs and unemployment, into _vulnerable_ passive people expels half the population as a conscious and active part of society... while reconverting their gravediggers into protector-caretakers.

Redefining us as the _vulnerable_, as a part of the _social body_ paralyzed by the _disease_ of crisis and pandemic, the _ethics of care_ orients any claim we make to the need to _be cared for_ by others, by _social physicians_ and the _mothers of the vulnerable_.

Mónica García, _physician, mother and candidate_, dedicated her _golden minute_ to _her children_, telling us through what she wished for them. It may be coincidence, but the fact is that she is an anesthesiologist. And after the anesthesiologist, when the patient loses consciousness, comes the surgeon.