The successful
campaign spearheaded by Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen to expropriate
real-estate giants is now spreading beyond Berlin. In a number of different
places, alliances are emerging that seek to bring services of general interest into the public
sector, as
years of ruinous privatization policies have made it clear that these elements
cannot
be entrusted to the market. It is no coincidence that many of these struggles take place in the domain of social reproduction. Housing,
hospitals, energy supply, and local transportation are essential forms
of infrastructure that can only be used locally. The capital employed in these
areas cannot simply be relocated, creating favourable conditions
for struggles to re-municipalize or socialize such infrastructure
(cf. Hoffrogge 2021).
At the same time, the pandemic has
shown which forms of social labour are truly essential,
in the strict sense of the word, and should, therefore, be considered ripe for socialization. In addition to those already mentioned,
these include all types of care for the elderly,
sick, and children, , education, food provision, cooking and cleaning. These are all tasks that have traditionally been performed by women and, largely, in the private-domestic sphere.
Yet somehow the notion of
socializing care work in a broad sense has still failed to
make it onto the agenda of anti-privatization coalitions.
Why is that? Why is this necessary? How could we develop campaigns for a Caring City that would
further propel the socialization of all forms of care work?
Who Cares?
In a capitalist
society, care work is deemed a private matter and women’s responsibility. While historical struggles to professionalize such labour have
indeed proven successful, the majority of unpaid
domestic care work remains an individual responsibility. [1]
Neoliberal policies have only made this situation
worse by applying additional pressure on both wages and the working and
reproductive conditions of households. Professional
services are barely able to meet the demand that has arisen due to the fact
that the majority of women now need to be gainfully employed. Here, too,
market control and economic rationalization have worsened conditions: there is currently a shortage of all types of social services, as well as of
qualified personnel to meet demand. Consequently, care work is once again being
transferred to the private sphere—this time in a
double sense. Certain gaps can be filled by hiring babysitters, tutors,
cleaners, or 24-hour care through either formal or informal channels, although this work is often carried out in very precarious conditions. Those who
are unable to afford to outsource such services are forced to rely upon family
or social networks for assistance. In both cases, the financial and emotional
costs are individualized. This became clearly visible
on a daily basis during the
coronavirus pandemic: single parents lost their jobs, elderly people became
isolated, and women ended up particularly shouldering
the burden of paid work, education and child-care duties, all from the kitchen
table at home. The crisis of social
reproduction is intensifying and is impacting ever-increasing swathes of the
population (Winker 2015). Existing stopgaps
are being pushed to their limits.
The
Private Is (Not Yet) Political
The fact that care work has
traditionally been considered a private matter and the supposed innate
responsibility of women has historically made it difficult to effect change in
this area. Physical isolation, a lack of organizing experience, and a lack of workplace power often make it difficult for those
who perform unpaid or precarious care work to stand up and demand better
conditions—whether it be in the form of wage increases or a redistribution of
labour.
This is further compounded by the
fact that the enemy in this struggle is less easy to discern than, for example,
in the area of rental policy, in which financialized real-estate companies
offer a much more clear-cut political target. On the
contrary, there is a rift that cuts through the class itself. The prevailing gender hierarchy, as well as disparities in
terms of residency status and access to the labour market make it difficult to
establish a collective subject capable of intervening
politically. This is because certain sections of the class benefit from the
current arrangements, or at least have a less pressing desire to effect change:
the low-paid or unpaid labour of other people makes it easier for them to
organize their own reproduction within the existing system.
However, there is a tremendous
opportunity here to expand anti-privatization
struggles into the entire field of care work, and to develop this into a
strategic point of departure for a unifying class politics. Labour struggles in the domain of professional care work have achieved significant successes in recent years. Why not take
the next steps collectively? Feminist and anti-racist issues, as well as
struggles for decent work and social justice, can be mutually
reinforcing—particularly when they share a transformative perspective: namely
that of an infrastructure socialism (cf. IfG 2020), according to which
both professional and private care are made the responsibility of society as a whole, stripping away the foundations of the profit-driven and
patriarchal system. In opposition to this system, it proposes an
orientation toward the good life.
Overthrow
the System of Property Ownership – Abolish Gender Relations
Such a socialization of care has a
twofold effect:: socialization seeks to structure important social sectors in a
way that serves the public economic interest and to overturn
the dominant order of property ownership, which is a crucial aspect of class
relations. In the case of care work, this means not only abolishing the private
ownership of hospitals and the market-based organization of geriatric care, childcare, and domestic services; it also involves
extricating care work from the family and the household, as well as from
the gendered division of labour with which it has historically been
entwined.
A socialization of care would
therefore also aim to transcend the gendered division of labour that implies a
binary configuration of gender and as such constitutes an essential foundation
of hierarchical gender relations in general. The care sector must therefore
fully become the responsibility of broader society in the sense that
care-workis no longer delegated to women (unpaid and in private), as this often
robs women of (economic) autonomy and opportunities for personal development.
In Janine Brodie’s terms, what we need here is a kind of “double de-privatization”.
Care
as Society’s
Responsibility
What exactly would it mean to make
care a social responsibility and thus reorganize it democratically? First, new
public infrastructure would need to be established and expanded. We need more
day care centres, more neighbourhood, family and healthcare centres, more care
support centres, canteens, youth clubs, and homeless shelters, etc. These need
to be designed to accommodate people’s needs as
they evolve over the course of an individual’s lifetime. A one-size-fits-all social policy is a thing of the past; we need
arrangements that cater to specific needs and local conditions, and that
provide access for historically neglected communities.
This applies, for example, to families with more than two parents or care
communities, as well as offering comprehensive healthcare to undocumented
people and to trans people. It is therefore crucial that practical support be
provided for self-organization and collective solutions, without these being
instrumentalized as a stopgap for inadequate public services—as is currently
the case with the German government’s promotion of “volunteerism” (Haubner
2017).
The socialization of care does not
merely entail a transfer of ownership from private to public hands; it is not simply “nationalization”. On the
contrary: it is about ensuring that the means of social
reproduction are at the disposal of the many, rather than the few. This would require determining social needs via a
process of democratic planning involving all those who are directly impacted by
it. Appropriate consultation and decision-making structures would first need to
be established—for example in the form of local care councils. Ultimately, all
of this will only have a chance of succeeding if we also see a change in the
overall social division of labour. It is only by radically reducing the number
of hours spent on wage labour that care work can be performed without leading
to exhaustion.
A
Caring City – Why Not?
Comprehensive care
structures must be available locally. Even when they are organized
collectively or as part of the public sector, which means that they are taken
out of the private household, they should always remain in the immediate social
environment. For movements against
privatization at the local level, the concept of the Caring City might offer a
vision, a productive model that combines a number of different approaches,
demands, and actors. A few questions remain to be clarified: how can municipal
and non-profit organizations, employees, residents, and local politicians work
together to develop care structures in their local area? How can the existing
infrastructures be democratically transformed and brought under collective
control? What exactly would a city adapted to meet the needs of all its
inhabitants look like? How can we start working at the local level to overcome
the logic of privatization and open doors to a project of
transformation that is both feminist and socialist in nature?
Pioneers in
the Struggle From All Over the World
The good news is that there are
already approaches and experiences that we can learn from, and which may prove
fruitful for local projects (in Germany). Some of the most
interesting examples come from the municipalist movements in Spain.
Barcelona
In 2017, the left-wing city
government of the Barcelona en Comú platform proposed a “set of measures to
democratize care in the city of Barcelona” as a fundamental pillar of its
“rebellious governance”.[2] The
plan draws on insights from a Marxist feminism that also emphasizes the
economic importance of care work for national economies. As such, the measures
seek to position care work at the centre of a municipal economic policy,
instead of treating it as either a
private affair or merely an aspect of a paternalistic and pacifying social
policy. Accordingly, economic
policy measures must extend
beyond questions of business and labour market policy, be expanded to encompass
the entire (also unpaid) care sector, and prioritize approaches of
self-organization, cooperatives, and an economy rooted in solidarity. This would also aim to
counteract the increasing gender imbalance seen
in the fact that ever more women live in poverty.
In order to ensure a genuine
paradigm shift—including in terms of administrative procedures—Mayor Ada Colau
made the strategic decision to not leave the
drafting of the set of measures up to the Office for Feminism, but rather
entrusted it to the Office for Social and Solidarity Economy, which
collaborated closely with the Office for Labour and Economic Policy. The aim
was to work together with all the other departments concerned to set a
“precedent for a public care policy” (Ezquerra and Keller 2022, 4) that would
encompass all areas of care work and provide for it to be redistributed among
the various actors—that is, the state, the market, private households, and
public service structures. At its core, the objective was to combine tangible
improvements in everyday life with the long-term goal of establishing a
gender-equitable care economy.
Most of the projects pertaining to
the 68 individual measures set out in the plan concerned a “socialization of
care work” (ibid., 16) and were geared towards establishing new public
infrastructures such as family centres and crèches, expanding those that
already exist, and increasing access for vulnerable groups. The newly introduced tarjeta cuidadora (care taker
card) provided relief to people with special domestic care-giving
responsibilities by granting them privileged access to urban care
infrastructure and social services. Another set of measures focussed on
providing logistical and financial support to projects serving the public
economic interest, and self-organization initiatives such as multi-generational
houses. Private providers, especially in the field of geriatric care, would be impacted by changing the requirements for
receiving contracts, in order to improve the quality of care and working
conditions in their establishments. Finally, in each municipal district a post
was created for a care economics expert in order to provide concrete guidance
for this restructuring and to ensure it was accordingly supported through
public relations work.
However, one shortcoming of the project is that none of
the measures explicitly envisaged a re-municipalization of the companies that
currently run on a for-profit basis, especially in the domain of geriatric care.
Madrid
Similar approaches were also
employed by municipal governments in other Spanish cities. In Madrid, for
example, the left-wing government headed by the Ahora Madrid (Madrid Now)
coalition passed a similar action plan entitled City of Care (Ciudad del
Cuidado 2015) during its term in office (2015 to 2019).[3]
In order to achieve gender equality, it also focussed on increasing the broader
societal and municipal responsibility for care work. In addition to redistributing care work and improving the services
on offer, the plan placed a particular emphasis on questions of democratic
participation and supporting instances of local self-organization. Pre-existing
social clinics and initiatives for shared care work received practical
assistance in order to further develop their work, exemplified by a pilot
project aimed at combatting “involuntary loneliness”. Neighbourly relations and
social connections in the local area were actively and deliberately fostered in
an attempt to overcome the social isolation experienced by members of the
community. The project aimed to reinforce
the social fabric as a whole—a move predicated on the idea that, as components
of a Caring City, (grass-roots), democratic decision-making processes and
participatory requirements planning cannot function without a strong social
fabric.
The Madrid action plan also
incorporated a number projects and initiatives grounded in feminist urban
planning. Laying out a city in a gender-
and care-sensitive manner transforms how public space is used, which in turn
facilitates a shift in terms of people’s everyday lives and social
relationships: for example, parents get to know one another in the playground.
If the playground is not tucked away in a hidden corner, but is rather an
integral component of a city square or park where there are also facilities and
activities for people of other age groups and interest groups, then parents
will also come into contact with their neighbours and elderly people. Wide,
well-lit footpaths with open, visible greenery work to ensure that women and
queer people in particular feel safer in the space; they can move more freely
and use the public space for their own purposes. Feminist urban and transport
planning (see Alljets 2019) has the potential not only to improve the quality
of life of marginalized and vulnerable groups, but also to facilitate other
social relationships. It can serve as a basis both for collective care work
beyond public infrastructure and for direct democratic co-determination and
planning.
Latin America
In Latin America, too, in the
aftermath of the mass feminist
mobilizations, we saw an intensification of debates around care relations and
the conditions of social reproduction—which also took place recently under the
term “caring cities”. These are
reflected in both municipal and federal policies. As a result, initiatives with
different focal points have been established that aim to re-appropriate the
social infrastructure necessary to sustain life. The
self-organization of residents in collaboration with the left-wing city
council, in Valparaíso and other cities in Chile, made it possible to set up pharmacies that offer
important medications at prices far below market value.[4]
In a similar collaboration between grassroots initiatives and left-wing
political parties, a previously informal settlement in Rosario, Argentina that
was facing eviction is currently being developed into a fully integrated
neighbourhood with its own water supply, sewerage system, and internet, as well
as social infrastructure like schools, parks, and a sports ground. This is being
funded by the federal government, the funds in question raised through a
one-off wealth tax imposed by the centre-left government. Yet the project is
being designed, planned, and managed by local residents in cooperation with the
staunchly feminist Ciudad Futura (City of the Future) party, which is
represented both on the city council and in the regional parliament.
In many places, initiatives work through a combination of self-empowerment, organizing,
co-determination, infrastructure, and government programmes that support and
finance projects. What is required here is a
redistribution of resources, rather than—as is so often the case—initiating
self-government with the mere aim of providing cheap alternatives to compensate
for government failures or gaps in service provision. In this way, other levels
of state policy can also be incorporated—whether initiatives to reduce working
hours, or financial aid and pension benefits, which affect the scope for care
activities in myriad ways.
In countries like Uruguay and
Argentina, centre-left governments have also been and are currently working on
implementing Sistemas integrales de Cuidados (integrated care
structures) at the federal level. Existing programmes and services are being
expanded and better connected. Taking unpaid care work into consideration
allows for better tailoring services to specific needs and making up for
existing deficitis.In Uruguay, for example, a time-use study was commissioned that
also covers domestic care work, a campaign was initiated in response to the
gendered division of labour, and unpaid care work was incorporated into an
expanded gross domestic product in order to generate public awareness of how
crucial care work is for society, and the extent to which it is devalued as “women’s
work”. In both countries, government plans were drafted in close consultation
with local actors and combined with appropriate demand assessments.
Is
the Grass Really Greener On the Other Side?
Germany has also had its own
initial experiences with collective co-determination in the political
organization of basic service provision. Attempts to establish care councils
are still in their infancy, but ideas are being developed—for example in
Freiburg[5]—with
regard to how organizational approaches might be combined with democratic
requirements planning. In stark contrast to this, civil-society councils for
food sovereignty and climate action in some cities and municipalities have
already achieved a level of institutional cooperation with policy-makers and administrative
bodies. An essential orientation for the process of democratizing care
structures is provided by the IniForum[6]
in Berlin—an independent coalition of rental policy initiatives that was
financially subsidized by the senate administration.[7]
The goal was to establish independent bodies that would still be able to have
an institutional influence on parliamentary politics, for example through
regular hearings.
However, these structures are not
necessarily accompanied by guaranteed decision-making powers. As the successful
yet largely inconsequential Berlin referendum Deutsche Wohnen and Co. Enteignen
recently reminded us, the binding force of direct-democratic elements sorely
needs to be enhanced.
Action Plan
Politically speaking, a project to
foster a Caring City in Germany is not exactly uncharted territory. For a number of years, protests and self-organizing have
been on the rise in relation to
the issue of care: from union strikes in the care sector or in social and
educational services to action groups for better conditions in geriatric care,
to ”Medi-Büros” that provide access to medical care for undocumented
immigrants; from local outpatient healthcare centres (polyclinics) that also
incorporate the social elements of health, to feminist strikes that also
encompass private households. A great many of these had already come together in 2014 atthe
Care Revolution action conference and had established a network in which local
campaigns converged and transregional campaigns were initiated.[8]
A number of these concrete
approaches and ideas for socializing basic services could also be combined into
an “Action plan for a Caring City”in Germany: a set of measures
comprising projects to be implemented in both the short and long term, and
others that are socially transformative in nature. These include starter projects such as the demand to re-municipalize private
service providers in geriatric care or to reduce full-time hours in the care
sector to six-hour days as a starting point for a reduction in working hours to
be mandated in collective bargaining agreements. This includes expanding
healthcare centres and neighbourhood centres that provide support services for
elderly people or leisure facilities for children and young people, as well as
spaces where communal care work can be performed in parents’ groups or
community kitchens. This includes measures designed to ensure the city is
accessible to everyone, such as free public transport or a health insurance
card that would grant undocumented people access to
health insurance. But it is also a question of creating a city in which
everyone feels safe and at ease; a city with green spaces and wide footpaths
that are well-lit at night, additional measures to prevent sexual harassment in
public spaces, and a ban on unwarranted police checks. It also requires restructuring public administration so that gender equality and the guarantee of good care relationships
become central to its operations, and that constant reviews are conducted to
assess whether public services are truly accessible
to everyone.
The question of which ideas should
be foregrounded for each individual Caring City project should be discussed and
decided at the local level. Although this may initially be entirely
self-organized, past experience has shown that in the medium term,
institutional and financial protection will be necessary. Such protection
enables the creation of a collective space for different interest groups and
stakeholders in the field of care work—for healthcare workers, private
caregivers, and recipients of care. This constitutes both a challenge and an
opportunity for Die Linke in both city councils and state parliaments,
especially where the party forms part of the government. It would have the
capacity not only to provide infrastructure and material resources, but also to
campaign for demands to be implemented and to develop projects with
transformative impact, that are regional in scope but have an impact on a
national level, such as the Mietendeckel (rent cap) in Berlin.
The long-term objective should be
the establishment of a care council that would permanently ensure the
collective determination of needs and negotiation of interests. The council in question would have to exert organized
pressure on political decision-making processes—that is, it would also have to
establish a democratic mediation point between political movements and
parliaments.
But
Socialism Is Inherently Feminist, Right?
Movements for a Caring City
therefore have the potential not only to connect a variety of initiatives from
the care sector and from urban policy and anti-racist contexts; they also have
the potential to introduce a feminist and intersectional perspective into the
current anti-privatization struggles and debates about socialization. This
would constitute an initial starting point for a possible socialization of care
relations, which would in turn lend a concrete form to an important
transformative project of a class-conscious feminism, for which broad swathes
of the population could be mobilized.
[Translated by Louise Pain & Marty
Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective, Edited by Liz Mason-Deese]
References
Alljets,
Jana, “Raum Nehmen! Warum Wir eine Feministische Verkehrsplanung Brauchen”, LuXemburg, May 2020, https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/raum-nehmen-warum-wir-eine-feministische-verkehrsplanung-brauchen.
Ezquerra,
Sandra and Christel Keller, 2022, “Die Regierungsstrategie zur Demokratisierung
der Sorgearbeit der Stadtverwaltung von Barcelona: Erfahrungen mit einer
Feministisch Inspirierten Lokalen Care-Politik” (forthcoming).
Haubner,
Tine, 2017, Die Ausbeutung der Sorgenden Gemeinschaft, Frankfurt/New
York.
Jiménez,
Sofía and Esther Moreno, 2022, “Das Projekt ‘Saragossa als Sorgende Stadt’:
Eine Umfassende Feministische Vision” (forthcoming).
Salobral,
Nieves, 2022, “Madrid als Sorgende Stadt: Eine Feministische Bilanz” (forthcoming).
Statistisches
Bundesamt, 2015, Wie die Zeit Vergeht: Ergebnisse zur Zeitverwendung in
Deutschland 2012/2013, Wiesbaden.
Winker,
Gabriele, 2015, Care Revolution: Schritte in eine solidarische Gesellschaft,
Bielefeld.
[1] According to the latest
time-use study conducted by the German Federal Government in 2012/13, this amounts to approximately
30 hours per week for women in Germany and 20 hours per week for men.
[2] The Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
has commissioned an evaluative study on this project, which will be published
in March 2022 (Ezquerra and Keller 2022).
[3] As with comparable
initiatives in Zaragoza, evaluative studies were also conducted for this
project: Salobral 2022 and Jiménez/Moreno 2022 are forthcoming.
[4] https://www.latercera.com/nacional/noticia/valparaiso-se-convierte-la-primera-comuna-chile-constituir-una-red-farmacias-populares/744238/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3821885
[5] https://careratfr.wordpress.com/
[6] https://iniforum-berlin.de/struktur/konzept/
[7] Unfortunately, it is
currently unclear whether IniForum will be able to continue under the new
Berlin state government headed by Franziska Giffey (Social Democratic Party).
[8] https://care-revolution.org/kampagne-platz-fuer-sorge/
Foto: Phil Hearing / unsplash
