Care, Racial Capitalism, and Social Reproduction | Premilla Nadasen

Drawing on her most recent book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Premilla Nadasen traces the history of the care economy and analyzes its roots in racial capitalism. She argues that the profit extraction from care that we are currently witnessing under neoliberal capitalism is characteristic of the long history of racial capitalism and colonialism, where capital accumulation resulted from both extraction of profit from life as well as exploitation of labor. Many of the contemporary programs and entities presumably designed to support and sustain families and communities and to ensure people’s well-being have served as sites of economic growth and capital expansion, including the health care industry, antipoverty nonprofits, guardianship programs, welfare state programs, and housing assistance. And there is widening interest in care as a new horizon of investment and entrepreneurship in the corporate sector. Although capital still relies on the paid and unpaid social reproduction to produce labor power, the growing profit from care indicates a new relationship between people and capital and between the welfare state and capital accumulation.

Speaker Bio

Born in South Africa and raised in the United States, Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is most interested in the activism and visions of liberation of poor and working-class women of color. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, the inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize, a former Fulbright Fellow, a member of the Society of American Historians, and a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar. Nadasen has been involved in grassroots social justice organizing for many decades and has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Most recently she published Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba.