The Green New Deal prioritizes green growth at the expense of feminized labor.

Following contemporary analyses of the crises of capitalism—the crisis of overproduction, the banking crisis, the environmental crisis—current voices in feminist economics speak of the crisis of social reproduction. Feminist economists use the term to denote the under-provision of care, which is above all time-consuming and inaccessible to the rationalisation efforts of the capitalist mode of production—and which in principle should not be accessible to rationalisation because of the nature of the reproductive work. Social reproduction work is performed both without pay in private households and—usually for little pay—via the labour market (including cash-in-hand work). Important characteristics of this work include that it cannot be postponed and that it requires interpersonal empathy and high levels of reliability and commitment. The ‘crisis of social reproduction’ indicates that the expansion of the capitalist logic of exploitation also reshapes care labour through the economic imperative of acceleration, rationalisation, and intensification of work. Both sides, those providing and those receiving care, perceive the crisis of social reproduction in the overwork and the excessive demands placed on those people responsible for care labour. Under the prevailing circumstances of the gender-hierarchical division of labour, the vast majority of caregivers are women: women perform by far the greatest share of unpaid familial labour, not only caring for children, but also ensuring that males’ labour is available to the labour market, even though the women are gainfully employed themselves. It is also women who take on most of the social reproduction occurring in the sphere of paid labour, be it in raising and teaching children or caring for the sick and the elderly. An often-used way out of being overburdened because of the crisis in care is delegating reproductive labour in one’s own household to migrant women or racialised women—also known as the ‘global care chain’ (Salazar Parreñas 2015). This is a clear sign of the fact that despite a long-standing debate about the gendered division of labour, men have not taken on their share of unpaid work in everyday care labour. Feminist economists of different schools of thought agree that it is key for the feminist analysis of capitalism to view social reproduction as a realm that is (at least) equivalent to and just as relevant in economic terms as market-based ‘productive gainful employment’—productive because it produces goods and surplus value. From the perspective of the economy overall, investments in social infrastructure—that is, education, care, nursing, etc.—are considered to be consumption expenditure, and unpaid work in private households, to the extent it is viewed as work at all, is considered to be re-productive. These terms and concepts and the premises they involve are the subject of a lively debate among feminists, which I will go into briefly. The concept of re-production was already contradicted by feminists early on: why should only the manufacture of goods for exchange be considered ‘productive’, but not the ‘manufacture’ of life and the maintenance of living processes? On further consideration: why is only the processing of nature considered productive, but not nature as such? These questions are the starting point for ecofeminist analysis of the relationships of society to nature under capitalism. This links the ecological criticism of the exploitation and overuse of natural resources with the feminist criticism of the exploitation and societal appropriation of the (unpaid or underpaid) work performed by women in social reproduction (Mellor 1997). This work is invisible economically, and for this reason it is grossly underestimated because it is work performed by women, which puts it in proximity to nature: because of their potential ability to give birth, women are assumed to be predestined as if ‘by nature’ to care for people who cannot care for themselves. In other words: it is assumed that women are born with competencies for care ‘by nature’ and that they do not need to learn and develop them and thus do not need to be paid. Such competencies are taken for granted—and in fact no society, whether capitalist or not, could survive without women’s social reproduction labour. So, from an ecofeminist perspective, the relationships of society to nature under capitalism are characterised by dual power relations: by subordination and exploitation of nature and of women’s labour which has been declared socially and historically part of nature. Thus, strategies for an environmentally sound and socially just transition to a post-capitalist era must consider the gendered power relations in human–nature relationships: ‘Central to feminist ecological economics is the normative claim that gender equality should not be achieved at the expense of ecological degradation or the exploitation of nature and other species and that environmental sustainability must not be achieved by exploiting feminised labour’ (Cohen and MacGregor 2020: 8). The entire economic sector of the care economy, which includes both paid and unpaid labour, is still disregarded in the debates around the Green New Deal. If the care sector were also discussed under the guiding principle of ‘public investments in infrastructure policy’, then the debate would have to be conducted in a completely different way. After all, the expansion of the care infrastructure would also imply a fundamental change in how the economy is organised in a post-fossil society. There would be a commensurate focus on the overexploitation of women’s labour as the overexploitation of the fossil resources. The creation of jobs in social infrastructure would provide secure livelihoods for women and create new ones—for all genders!—and the labour conditions in these occupations would have to be discussed. Ecofeminist Political Economy of the Green New Deal But what would happen with the unpaid care work in the so-called private households? This is the fundamental weakness of the Green New Deal: it focuses on the public sector of economic activity; the private sphere of people’s ‘own four walls’ and the work performed there are still disregarded, as in the traditional economic debates and theories. So far, the fact that the participation of women in the paid labour markets of industrialised societies has constantly increased in recent years has not resulted in men and women sharing unpaid housework. Since this work must be done, however, private housework and care work have been shifted within middle-class households to migrant women workers. This has been described as the ‘global care chain’ and is discussed critically from a feminist perspective. From an intersectional perspective of dividing care work into paid and unpaid sectors of economic activity, the Green New Deal is to be viewed especially critically because it is limited to the public realm and leaves the power relations in the private sphere untouched.