The 1AC invisibilizes the structures of care work and social reproduction that undergird modernity.

In feminist economics, the overarching goal of recognizing unpaid care work as a socially vital and necessary basis for the functioning of our societies was often connected to the strategy of shifting unpaid care work to the paid care sector, either by outsourcing it to the market (for example, with respect to eldercare) or, much more frequently, by calling for public provisioning (for example, of childcare). The feminist economic policy position on care is doubtlessly more nuanced and multi-layered than a mere transformation of all care work to paid care work, and the 3R (recognize, reduce, redistribute) strategy shows that the shifting and the redistributing strategy are complementary rather than mutually exclusive (Himmelweit 2007; Elson 2017). However, we still consider the strategy of shifting as problematic when reasoning about feminist degrowth visions. To underpin this argument, we need to do some conceptual groundwork. Ecofeminists and feminist ecological economists have been at the forefront of discussing the (feminized) social and ecological reproduction, that is, what Maren Jochimsen and Ulrike Knobloch (1997) call the “maintenance economy,” Maria Mies (2007) refers to as the underwater part of the “iceberg model of the global economy,” and we will henceforward call the “economy of socio-ecological provisioning” – as the devalued (in the case of unpaid care work) and destroyed (in the case of ecosystem functions) other. By drawing on different articles published in the 1997 Ecological Economics special issue on Women, Ecology, and Economics, Corinna Dengler and Birte Strunk (2018) conceptualized a boundary between the monetized economy (that is, what is counted in GDP) and the economy of socio-ecological provisioning (that is, the unaccounted caring activities and ecological processes). This boundary is a manifestation of a deep “structure of separation” (Biesecker and Hofmeister2010)in economics. Dengler and Strunk confirm agreement among feminist economists that, as a prerequisite for gender justice, “the boundary between the monetized and the maintaining, the productive and the reproductive, the valuable and the valueless, the counted and the unaccounted, and the visible and the invisible needs to be overcome” (2018: 163f).

Figure 1 Strategy of shifting formerly unpaid parts of the economy of socio-ecological provisioning to the monetized economy. Source: Authors’ own depiction drawing on Dengler and Strunk (2018).

We draw on this conceptualization in order to discuss how to overcome both this boundary and the underlying deep separation structure against the background of the question how to organize care in degrowth societies. With regard to strategies for overcoming the boundary, we schematically distinguish between transformative demands and affirmative demands of inclusion (Fraser 1997, 2016). In the case of care work (the right side of the triangle in Figure 1), we hold that while transformative demands aim at overcoming the boundary and hence the deep separation structure in economics, affirmative demands such as the strategy of shifting unpaid care work to the paid care sector only move the boundary downward.3 For example, the 1972 international Wages for Housework campaign brought forward by radical Italian feminists (Dalla Costa 1972; Federici 1975) meant to make housework visible and subvert capitalism (Toupin 2018). The wages for housework demand was a transformative demand, as instead of seeking actual wage payments it proactively aimed at disrupting and overcoming the boundary between the monetized economy and the economy of socio-ecological provisioning. Later on, affirmative demands of inclusion into GDP were brought up by some feminist economists, either calling for recognition of unpaid care work by means of its commodification, or – a demand rather widespread in FE since the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing – for an inclusion of unpaid care work into national accounting (Elson 1998; Hoskynsan and Rai 2007; Albelda, Duffy, and Folbre 2009). Time-use surveys as empirical basis of these monetary calculations have played a crucial role in making the huge amount of unpaid care work visible and bringing it to the agenda in the first place. While decidedly acknowledging the methodological usefulness of measuring time use, we argue that the strategy of “translating unpaid work into a language governments understand: money” (Hoskyns and Rai 2007: 302) is affirmative toward the dominant economic paradigm rather than transformative, since it widens the realm of money- and accumulation-driven social relations and reinforces the centrality of GDP by giving recognition only to what is included in the monetized economy (Méda 2017). In terms of social justice, it certainly makes a difference whether carework is shifted to the market sector or to the welfare state. Hence, our argument requires a more nuanced account of the organization of care. Against this background, Table 1 schematically highlights categories that we deem relevant for assessing our research question, namely spheres and sectors where care is organized, visibility in the current economic system, payment, commodification, and social recognition. With regard to the spheres care work is organized in, the common distinction is public versus private. Linda Nicholson (1986) and Ann Jennings (1993) have long pointed out two different manners of conceptualizing these spheres, so to say a double public/private split: The first strand (which is arguably more common in feminist economics) distinguishes the private household from the public outside of the household and hence draws the line along visibility in the current economic system. The second strand (which guides our systematization in Table 1) resembles materialist state theory in distinguishing the public sphere of the state from the private sphere, which is excluded from the democratic possibilities to influence decision making through public deliberation (Jennings 1993). As to the sectors care work is organized in, we draw on Shahra Razavi’s (2007) well-known “care diamond,” which schematically distinguishes four sectors, namely the state (column 1 in Table 1), the market (column 2),the not-for-profit (column 3), and the household (column 4) sector, as well as Luise Gubitzer’s (2012) fifth sector, namely the illegal-criminal sector, as forms of “coerced labor” (van der Linden2016). However, we understand this last sector as a crosscutting one, which is present in all sectors where care is organized, as Table 1 exemplarily shows for the market and the household sector. As to the other categories in Table 1, it is clear that monetizing care (which is, as column 1 illustrates, not synonymous to commodifying care) makes unpaid care work visible in the terms set by the current economic system. But it is well established in feminist economics that the feminized paid care sector is commonly characterized by precarious working conditions and poor salaries (Folbre 2006). While (under-)payment provides visibility and at least relative recognition, in many cases the shifting process leads to care being “valorised but not valued” (Dowling 2016: 452; see also Fraser [2016]).

This can be seen most clearly when unpaid care work is shifted to the market sector (column 2 in Table 1). First, it has been argued in feminist economics that marketized care work is subject to constant pressure for profitability and efficiency, with serious consequences for the direct caring relationship between caregiver and care receiver (Andersson and Kvist 2015; Winker 2015). Secondly, paid care work tends to be systematically underpaid and is still mainly performed by women, which means there has been little progress in social recognition through its commodification (Folbre 2006; Budlender 2010). Thirdly, as research on global care chains shows, shifting unpaid care work to the market in many cases reinforces intersectional and neocolonial power asymmetries (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004). In the cases of precariously employed Polish 24-hour nurses with live-in arrangements in Germany (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010) or care migrants from Latin America in Spain (Benería 2008), the boundary between the monetized economy and the economy of socio-ecological provisioning does no longer divide white, middle-class women from men, but mainly racialized women from the Global South and semi-peripheral countries from those who are able to externalize their caring responsibilities through purchasing power (Dengler and Strunk2018). Hence, while the feminist demand to make unpaid care work visible is partially met by a strategy of shifting unpaid care work to the market sector of the monetized economy, the boundary itself and the lack of social recognition largely remain intact. But what if unpaid care work is shifted to the state sector (column 1in Table1) by calling for publicly-provisioned care? This strategy usually emanates from an understanding of the state in the terms of the ideal type of the welfare state. In this case, monetization is not synonymous with commodification, as in the ideal type of the welfare state, public provisioning is monetized but not commodified and provided to all citizens as quality public service. In the Fordist era from 1945 to the early 1970s, this shifting strategy often implied a shift of unpaid care work from households to welfare states (Benería 2008; Krenn 2014). Today, many feminist economic policy positions on care entail a call for public provisioning, a strategy that – in terms of social justice – certainly is to be favored over marketized care by feminist degrowth scholars. However, assessing this strategy in light of our broadened intersectional framework, including coloniality and social nature relations, leads us to three arguments why we think that feminist degrowth visions have to venture beyond public provisioning: First, the boundary between profit-oriented market forces and public-benefit-oriented state services have been increasingly blurred by neoliberal state reforms from the 1980s onwards. Against the background of neoliberal restructuring, the state itself has undergone a series of reforms which have subjected public services to market logic, prioritizing efficiency and competitiveness over pursuing the public interest of citizens, even in countries that have been welfare state flagships (Morrow, Hankivsky, and Varcoe 2004; Andersson and Kvist 2015; Penz and Sauer 2020). Second, the welfare state was enabled by very specific historical conditions and must be regarded as historical privilege of a few countries, while most of the Global South has never known stable public welfare arrangements. The Cold War, cheap energy prices, and most importantly colonialism and huge resource transfers from the South to industrialized countries have been central to its construction (Bhambra and Holmwood 2018). Feminist discussions around shifting care to the welfare state cannot ignore these strong historical inequalities shaped by coloniality when aiming at building horizons of global social welfare (Lang and Lander 2015). Third, when taking a closer look at the ecological implications of the Fordist welfare period, it also proves impossible to simply replicate it throughout the world. Literature holds that Fordism built its stability on an expansion of mass consumption in the Global North, which turned out to be ecologically highly problematic and led us to the current overshoot of several planetary boundaries (Steffen et al. 2015; Koch and Mont 2016; Brand and Wissen 2018). Hence, while in some specific contexts, demanding a shift from the household to the state (or even more: preventing shifts from the state to the market) might be a strategy worth pursuing, taking coloniality and planetary boundaries into account shows that this can by no means be a blueprint for organizing care in a feminist degrowth society.