Care has become a hot topic in recent years. My sense is that the COVID pandemic, growing economic desperation, and the widespread experiences of exhausted and overburdened parents have especially contributed to this surge in interest. But whatever the precise reasons, there has 
been a lot of chatter about care – particularly what many call the “care crisis” – in the mainstream press and in scholarly publications. Premilla Nadasen’s book Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, published last year by Haymarket Books, incisively cuts through this chatter, offering an accessible and illuminating examination of caring labor in the U.S.
Nadasen combines the best of socialist feminism with the strongest analyses of racial capitalism. Drawing on her vast knowledge of domestic labor, she traces the history of care work through slavery, immigration policies, the development of the welfare state, and the turn toward neoliberalism. Nadasen persuasively argues that “the care crisis is not primarily one of family politics. Although also located there, it is a particular manifestation of gendered racial capitalism rooted in coercive political, legal, and economic policies.” This leads her to examine the longstanding care crisis for racialized poor people, to look carefully at differences between paid and unpaid forms of care work, and to investigate the development of industries of care that profit off of human need and misery. She also considers the history of organizing around social reproduction and highlights instructive examples of radical care from social movements.
I highly recommend this book!
Here’s one gem from Nadasen:
Although some people have faith that a robust care agenda can remake capitalism, history shows us that care will not remake capitalism. Remaking care requires abolishing capitalism.