Commodifed care fails

From what has been said previously, we hold that various examples of transformative, commonized caring arrangements exist around the world, and that both feminist economics and degrowth scholarship can (and should!) learn from these experiences. We must, however, also be critically aware that caring commons provide conceptual space but by no means an automatism for a gender-just redistribution of unpaid care work. Let us consider the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch nurse-led model of care that is money-mediated, but displays features of care as commons by withdrawing care from market logics and building on principles like time-sovereignty, autonomy, and trust. It shows that commonized care is not necessarily small in scale: In 2017, Buurtzorg covered 75 percent of the mobile care in the Netherlands, and the model is rapidly expanding to other countries (Narbeshuber2017). It also shows, however, that commonized care does not necessarily imply a just redistribution of care work among genders, as the vast majority of the employees are women. It is the very nature of commons and commoning that there are no blueprints or clear descriptions of how to avoid these pitfalls. Rather, the potential of transformative caring commons to dismantle patriarchy crucially depends on how organized and articulate feminist positions are within the respective processes of commoning (Forné, Micciarelli, and Fresnillo 2019).When Christine Bauhardt and Wendy Harcourt (2019: 1f) raise the question: “If care work and care-full relationships are central aspects of the post-growth society, in the realms of paid as well as unpaid care work, how could we revalue traditionally female activities and jobs?”, to us as decolonial feminist degrowth scholars, it is clear that the focus must lie on Elson’s (2017) “3rd R” and Knobloch’s (2013) “4th V,” namely a strategy of redistribution of care work among all members of society. Although a gender-equitable redistribution of unpaid care work has long been a core concern of the feminist movement, a substantial cultural intervention into the gendered division of labor has not taken place (Budlender 2010; Méda 2017). The redistribution of both paid and unpaid care work between genders crucially depends on a profound shift in the “language of valuation” (Martínez-Alier 2008) that dominates our societies, which today is the language of profit, individualism, and competitiveness. Degrowth as a thoroughly transformative paradigm contains the possibility of destabilizing the false dichotomies of capitalist modernity (for example, culture/nature, male/female, rational/emotional, productive/reproductive). This destabi-lization allows for the strengthening of other languages of valuation, which put the sustainability of life at their core – as they still exist in many community-based societies of the South, and revive in the creation of transformative commons all over the world (Gibson-Graham et al.2013). At the same time, degrowth activism and scholarship aims at transforming many of the basic institutions that have been made responsible for the persisting gendered division of labor. A degrowth work sharing proposal that translates to shorter hours spent in wage work each day for everybody (Méda 2017; Dengler and Strunk 2018) combined with decoupling of livelihood security from wage work, for example by means of an ecologically sustainable basic income that is partially paid out in complementary currencies to stimulate regional economies (Hornborg 2016), is one of many ideas of how to transform institutions and liberate time for a structural revaluation of caring activities and all other forms of socially vital work. Again, every single policy requires a critical perspective on class, gender, social origin, and other forms of domination and/or exclusion of the other, as only an inherently intersectional degrowth approach gives leeway for a gender-just redistribution of care. The required transformation will also have to attain modes of gendered subjectification. For example, in a growth paradigm, value is constantly equated with monetary value, social recognition is based on money and other status symbols, which are often connected with narratives of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005). Karla Elliott’s (2016) assessment of “caring masculinities” and Martin Hultman and Paul M. Pulé’s (2018) notion of “ecological masculinities” pave the way for discussions on how relationality and conviviality can shape subjectivities for all genders. This implies acknowledging that life itself in all its forms depends on multiple relations and interdependencies, and that the philosophical assumption of a free, autonomous individual, which is moved by the rationality of unbound self-interest is no more than a patriarchal, capitalist, andro-, and anthropocentric fiction.