Are you right-wing if caregiving irritates you?
Michel Foucault proposes a very apt dichotomy to define our ambivalent relationship with what we have called "the welfare state." While the pre-modern state "kills and lets live," the contemporary state "makes live and lets die." I also recall another one that always makes me think: "Health has replaced salvation." These are memorable summaries that show us that the Leviathan is no longer an impersonal and distant force that merely punishes those who break the law, but has become a solicitous agent whose main function is to watch over the population, and which incorporates a function that was formerly the monopoly of the Church: caring for souls. All this may seem quite abstract, but it becomes concrete if we think about the conflicting feelings that almost everyone has experienced as a result of the country's lockdown due to the storm and the proliferation of mobile phone alerts. What should we do about the irritation we feel toward the state's excessive care?
Criticizing care work is not at all fashionable. In the realm of progressive theory, care has become, in recent years, a catch-all concept on which all hopes have been pinned. The intentions and reasons were good: for centuries, the work fundamental to the continuity of society has been kept out of public debate, placing the responsibility on private citizens, almost always women, while culture, economics, and politics only valued and allocated resources to industry, entrepreneurship, and creative work. Not only that: as we have seen in the most abject episodes of capitalist history, an ethic that ignores care inevitably ends up producing destructive and unjust situations. On the one hand, this analysis has served to put a noble and motivating objective on the agenda: "politicizing care." But on the other hand, we have ended up with a problematic division of labor that assumes the revolutionary agent must be the right, which is currently the one making things happen – particularly, leading major technological changes – while the left must limit itself to trying to preserve the rubble of a handful of institutions that are not designed.
The problem with this cultural environment is that care, like any great political idea, such as equality or freedom, also has its downsides. And if the left sacralizes care, it foolishly hands over a crucial aspect of human nature to the right. In fact, those who have best pointed out these downsides are key thinkers for the left itself, such as Foucault and Hannah Arendt. For Foucault, we must be wary of reducing politics to the administration of bodies, a shift that allows power to infiltrate all areas of existence, normalizes surveillance as care, equates any dissent with a threat to public health, and turns citizens into cogs in a system designed to perpetuate itself.
Arendt did not speak of carefulbut of tasksand feared the reduction of man to one animal laborans trapped in the cyclical needs of life such as eating, working, and consuming. An obsession with tasks—which we would call care—, the philosopher contrasted the notion ofaction, the only truly political practice that takes as its model the Greek agora and revolutionary councils, and which consists of the members of a community leaving the private sphere and meeting in a public space to recognize each other, deliberate and decide to do something new beyond maintaining thestatus quoThe same great philosophers of the 20th century who warned against fascist totalitarianism wanted to point out that there is a totalitarianism that is much more difficult to combat because it disguises itself as technical neutrality and benevolence, but which is equally harmful to the space of freedom inherent in politics.
The country's paralysis caused by the storm cannot trap us in the same deceptive dialectic between freedom and security that has bogged everything down during the pandemic. The left must not identify with a sugar-coated definition of care, nor can it renounce articulating values such as freedom, value creation, or the willingness to take risks without guarantees for the sake of a future different from the present. Much of the success of the conservative revolution (a phrase we must not lose sight of) that we are experiencing stems from a very subtle effort to articulate the very human desire to lead a life that goes beyond mere survival. Rather than denouncing this yearning as an irrational and crypto-fascist impulse, the left should recognize the emancipatory potential of these desires and simply try to channel them with better diagnoses and proposals than those of the right. A good starting point would be to bring care down from the cultural pedestal on which it sits, knowing how to point out its dark sides and ambivalences.
