Basic income redefines what is defined as valuable work by providing everyone compensation for their labor which is a form of care

My aim here is to open up the notion of the ‘postmaternal’ through bringing it into some kind of proximity with Weeks’ (Citation2011) concept ‘postwork’. ‘Postwork’ is a rather different attempt to respond to some of the same problematics that Stephens identifies in the ways work and care (or social reproduction) have become so separated from one another, and draws on 1970s Marxist feminist texts about wages for housework to reanimate a utopian demand for a postwork politics. In bringing these two terms into relation with one another I’m seeking to think with and against the postmaternal, by suggesting, with Weeks, that there is a strategic need for making certain demands in the name of both social reproduction and work, that go beyond the neomaternalism (albeit a feminist one) that underpins Stephens’ analysis of the postmaternal discourses that surely do surround us. However, the thrust of my argument is that we also need to continue to prize open the implications of using mothering to signify the tripartite conjunction of care, nurture and the management of states of dependency when we make arguments about work and care in public life. Mothering may include practices of care and nurturance, but it also concerns the daily management and experience, for those who mother, of hatred, aggression, guilt, fear, frustration, violence and despair, that have some relation, even if a retroactive and indirect one, to early experiences of being mothered (Kraemer Citation1996; Lewis Citation2009; Parker Citation1995; Stone Citation2011). I aim, therefore, to track across psychoanalytic and social theory, trying to keep open the meanings of ‘the maternal’, not simply in order to de-gender or denaturalise care, but to remind ourselves of the implications of ‘forgetting’ that love and hate are always bound up with one another. If we think about the maternal as a principle or model in social and psychic life that speaks to this impossibility of love without hate, an impossibility that has the potential to mobilise guilt, gratitude, and reparative wishes (if we follow Melanie Klein’s thinking about early object relations), then we might instigate a pathway from a social analysis of the ‘unmothering’ of society, to a more nuanced understanding of both motherhood, and broader ideas about the social good. Weeks seeks to address the problem of waged labour, and its implications for social reproduction by exploring the notion of a basic income for the common production of value. ‘Postwork’ undoes the relation between wage and labour through an analysis of social reproduction in neoliberal conditions, calling not just for the common production of value but for a basic income for the common reproduction of ‘life’ (Weeks Citation2011, 230). Weeks’ appeal to sharing the responsibility for reproducing ‘life’ rather than value maintains a relation between work and reproduction that is neither maternalist, nor occludes the possibility of such labour emanating from a demand for a form of reparation, understood both in the sense of financial recompense and in the sense of ‘repair’. This may provide us with a more radical model for rethinking a feminist maternalism that includes, but is not subsumed by, a politics of care. One element of my argument is that whilst the notion of sharing the reproduction of ‘life’ may serve us well as a figuration of the maternal that allows care to circulate as everybody’s business, we need to make sure that such a project also entails an engagement with what works against life, the ‘hostility to life’, as Derrida (Citation1995) puts it, or in Freud’s terms, simply the death drive.