Book review: Care and capitalism: why affective equality matters for social justice

Care and Capitalism: Why Affective Equality Matters for Social Justice by Kathleen Lynch is a book that contests capitalism’s stranglehold on humanity, by arguing for care, love, and solidarity as political foundations for organising and relating. In this review, I highlight some of the book's key themes, such as the violence of capitalism to collective welfare. I conclude with my critiques of the book, in hopes of expanding theoretical and empirical understanding of care, to support this fight for humane relating as the wellspring in our groups and institutions. Audiences that will benefit from this book, alongside readers of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, include academics, activists, and community members who are interested in perspectives on care.In the Introduction, Lynch (2022) guides the reader by setting out key features of neoliberal capitalism, such as the rupture to relationality. The author distinguishes this book’s contributions from prior works on care and provides a helpful preview to vital concerns elaborated in later chapters, such as entanglements of capitalist priorities with the state and education. In Chapter 1, Lynch defines “affective relations” (p. 16) and theorises these relations as primary, secondary, and tertiary, drawing upon Lynch’s empirical work. A key point in this chapter is that care is not only a private relational matter – institutions need to be care-led. It is not “care” when institutions operate with profit-centred care discourse. Instead, care needs to materialise through politically valuing, and resourcing, institutions in ways that nurturing relations can thrive (e.g. p. 23).Following Chapter 1, the book is structured in four parts. Part I is Care Matters Inside and Outside Capitalism and begins with Chapter 2, with a key theme of the abjection of care in capitalist-ordered society, facilitated by bureaucratisation and the pathologisation of dependency.Part I continues with Chapter 3, which explores love, with crucial observations about institutions such as education: “The patriarchal and colonial traditions of universities and research institutes make them ill equipped to see love at work, both literally and intellectually” (p. 61). This point demonstrates a challenge to recognising love as a guiding resource for building institutions and shaping relations. Indigenous knowledges are made abject by an individualistic masculinist order, which prioritises markets and structures organisations accordingly.This analysis of education speaks to me because I have been invested in challenging knowledge assumptions in higher education, and have experienced struggles when contesting this white-hetero-patriarchal-capitalist order as a non-majority person. Retaliation against individuals who speak out against this order may erupt as disciplining mechanisms, wielded at marginalised individuals and those who speak for love, for equality, and against capitalism in universities. Love-led foundations for learning can be possible instead and are worth fighting for with the support of collective solidarity and understanding.Part I of this book comes to an end with Chapter 4, “Time to Care”, an illuminating account of speed and competition as capitalist values, which shut out time for love and caring, and the experience of time is marginalised by gender, race, and age. This chapter’s concluding section depicts instances of resistance movements, demonstrating spaces of inspiration and hope amidst the capitalist violent compression of time.In Part II, Challenges, Chapter 5 opens with an explanation of European history of ideas from liberalism sourced into neoliberal political priorities, to fortify capitalist practices antithetical to care. Countering this history’s contemporary violent manifestations presents challenges, such as lack of care, love and solidarity in education, and a focus on individualism in liberal thinking, associated with instrumental relating.The following Chapter 6 explains European religious history in relation to ideas of the individual and views about the state, with important details about 1980s' neoliberalism, such as the role of education in perpetuating neoliberal agendas.This chapter reiterates a key point of this book – that contesting violent ideologies requires valuing care as a political movement and viable organising structure, and there is reference to Lynch’s empirical research as efforts in this direction.Part II draws to a close in Chapter 7 with an analysis of competition ideologies that damage care-led organising, with implications for neoliberal education that revolve around assessments, degrees and classifications. Ideologies of choice, meritocracy, and equal opportunity are linked to racial and class inequalities, and this chapter ends Part II powerfully:Part III, Violence – the Nemesis of Care opens with Chapter 8, depicting the profit-led, globalised, organised, government-supported killing of non-human animals, with language use that masks their existence as feeling beings. This chapter scrutinises the human domestication of non-human animals, who are still subject to human will and dominance.This part concludes with Chapter 9, on themes of violence: violence that is racialised and gendered, violence to natural resources and indigenous communities, colonial violence, institutional and workplace violence and gender-based violence.This chapter returns to a key book argument: that capitalism has perpetuated pre-existing inequalities and injustices in new and intensified ways. For instance, capitalist agendas that cause and legitimise violence are protected through domestic and international structures. The conclusion of Chapter 9 has a discussion of women-led movements resisting violence.Part IV, Conclusions, is Chapter 10, which discusses vital knowledge such as Black scholarship about education, referring to Du Bois and hooks (pp. 200–201), and resistance, with reference (p. 213) to Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (2007). The book ends with a “Postscript: Care Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic”, sharing Lynch’s reflexive discussion of privilege and being unaffected by previous virus tragedies. Lynch conveys “Care Lessons” of global interconnectedness, the necessity of touch, benefits and limitations of virtual technologies, and corporatised care contrasted to a “logic of nurturing” (p. 218). I appreciated the acknowledgement of pandemic-related suffering for “people living alone” (p. 216), which I experienced as inadequately recognised in pandemic-related reporting and decision-making.I now proceed to my critique of this book, starting with the book’s opening and the writing approach, which have implications for the scope of Lynch’s arguments about care as an organising framework of resistance against capitalism. From the first page, it would have been useful to set out the contexts underpinning the critiques of capitalism, such as specifying European history as a focus for the analysis and sociology as the theoretical framework of the book. The European focus at times neglects cultural dynamics that provide diverse insights about the topics that are analysed in this work.The book has numerous footnotes and the citation of many authors together after a point, which disrupts the narrative flow of ideas. Much of the text reads as a critical literature review, evoking tremendous skill in historical analysis and contemporary discussion, to demonstrate the breadth of capitalism’s assumptions and violent consequences. This writing approach, however, leaves less space for imagining the possibilities of care as resistance, and for exploring theoretical models and marginalised lived experiences, which connects to my next set of critiques.Lynch’s theorising about human relationships has consequences for how care and resistance to capitalist violence can be imagined and practiced. Lynch presents three different categories of relations, distinguished by features such as dependency: Primary care relations, “Love labour” (page 25), such as the inherited parent-child relationship; Secondary care relations, “General care work” (page 25) such as colleagues; and Tertiary care relations, “Solidarity work” (page 25) (the three categories are discussed, for instance, on pages 23-25 and p. 67). These relational differentiations can be contested empirically and theoretically, and categorising human relationships by attaching love to “primary” care relations is problematic for building care-led international resistance to capitalism. “Secondary” relations may offer love, nurture, and embrace in ways that “primary” relations neglect, damage, or betray. Powerful love experiences and relations may occur in humility-led “tertiary” solidarity work.Lynch acknowledges the possibility of negative primary relations and the existence of power dynamics; however, there is a focus on differentiating the “degree” of intensity, depth and breadth of feeling among these different categories of relations. A “degree” and “levels” (p. 71) conceptualisation suggests separateness among different relations. There are moments of relaxing these distinctions, such as recognising love labour in non-primary relation experiences (p. 71). However, the starting framework of differentiating types of relations takes away from the book’s admirable endeavours, such as the urgent aim of collectively fighting capitalism through care.This approach of theorising categories of relations could be alienating for readers who do not experience belonging in the relationships assigned at birth. More details could have been offered to readers about the cultural approach, guiding assumptions, and evidence base for Lynch’s relational framework. I advocate for acknowledging different perspectives on care in human relationships and how to challenge capitalist intrusions, with resources such as Abolish the Family (Lewis, 2022); Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (O’Brien, ME, 2023); and Radical Intimacy (Rosa, 2023).My concern about distinguishing primary, secondary, and tertiary relations is linked to my critique of this book in not mentioning psychoanalysis as an immensely rich theoretical framework for probing relational themes. Psychoanalytic insights address the tensions of human vulnerability and dependence (Gabriel, 2009), ambivalence in relationships (Glynos, 2014), fantasy and anxiety in education (French, 1997), organisational injustice (Stein, 2001), and transference, the carrying of earlier relational experiences unconsciously into other adult relations (Freud, 1911-1913). Psychoanalytic approaches such as transference challenge theorisation that separates between types of relationships. Although the focus of Lynch’s work is sociological, the arguments for care-led political transformations could be supported with psychoanalysis, offering relational insights to strengthen care-led fights against capitalist structures that are damaging human and non-human animals and our planet.In order to explore possibilities for cultivating care to fight capitalism, this book could give more space to learning from the lived experiences of marginalised groups. For instance, the specific barriers and violence experienced by migrant groups are neglected. In Chapter 7, there is a discussion that I contest: that political use of physical violence is less acceptable in “democratically organized capitalist societies” (p. 135). Border controls by EU democracies, the UK, and the USA enable, through state mechanisms, various forms of violence against migrants (e.g. Bradley and de Noronha, 2022; Kingsley, 2016; Trilling, 2018). Migrants’ experiences of inequalities in daily life challenge statements like “No one is legally excluded from competing” (p. 147), as migrants face legal barriers to participating in life, such as in UK asylum and visa regimes.There are difficult, complex topics in the book that are mentioned briefly, and could instead be probed with more depth, to analyse and debate how to develop care politically in resistance to capitalism. Violence is one of these topics with tensions that I will address. Lynch presents violence as the breach of love and care in Chapter 9, but this approach avoids challenging discussions about the role of violence in activist and rebellious movements against injustice. There is a brief acknowledgement of violent resistance in a footnote to Marx’s work (p. 183), but these complexities could have been explored more within the chapter discussion rather than set aside as a brief mention in a footnote.Chapter 9’s short section “Sex industry violence” is problematic in discussing the violence of trafficking, together in the same section with an example of legalisation of sex work. This discussion does not address decriminalisation movements to protect sex workers, and does not acknowledge sex worker-led voices and activism. A resource for learning from sex workers is provided by Smith and Mac (2018), who illustrate powerful historical and international insights about sex worker-led community movements of sharing and fighting social injustices. Learning from sex workers' lived experiences, Smith and Mac’s analysis of the violences of whiteness and carcerality provides urgent insights for thinking about and cultivating care.Addressing the importance of resistance is one of the book’s key aims. However, tensions and inequalities in experiences of solidarity and resistance are uncomfortable topics that could have been examined with more space and depth. Lynch’s work (2022) tends to present solidarity positively, although there is a promising, important brief mention in Chapter 9: “when solidarity actions become exclusionary” (p. 176). I would have liked to see more unpacking of these difficult dynamics, for nuanced analyses of resistance actions that are ostensibly taken for caring reasons. Facing these difficult realities, such as mixed or questionable motives in care, solidarity, and “love”, is important for working through these problems to strengthen the fights against capitalist violence. A psychoanalytic perspective is a powerful framework to help probe these motives.On themes of resistance, there could have been more space to explore barriers within resistance movements, and alternative theoretical inroads to resisting capitalist destruction. With regard to barriers, there is a fleeting reference to challenging masculinity in resistance (p. 192) in Chapter 9, a crucial point that would benefit from further discussion, such as the alienating white masculinity of some far-left UK movements. In Chapter 10, there could be more analysis of how affective relations can be a place for building resistance (p. 203), without depending upon assumptions of care relations as “predominantly nurture-centred” (p. 202) in juxtaposition to market relations. Here, psychoanalysis can again provide a powerful intervention by theorising the ambivalence of relationships, offering nuanced resources for contemplating relationships and their possibilities of resistance to capitalism. With this core book theme of resistance, I also would have liked to learn if Lynch considered non-state alternatives for ending the inhumanities of capitalism. Bradley and de Noronha (2022) provide abolitionist imaginings and practical actions for humane relations.In summary, the positive points of this book centre on the importance of care as an organising foundation against violence, enabled and legitimised by capitalist ideology and its state structures. There is crucial attention in this book to neglected topics, such as the normalisation of violence towards non-human animals. The unanswered questions of this book arise from my critiques about insufficient attention to marginalised experiences and uncomfortable topics, such as tensions within resistance movements. A main takeaway of this book is that individualism, instrumentality, and violence are historical human experiences, but they are not inevitable ways to live and organise. Care-led organising, and actualising love as foundational in areas such as education, are possible and necessary for humanity.I recommend Care and capitalism: Why Affective Equality Matters for Social Justice by Lynch (2022). This work provides resources, ideas, and debates for readers of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal and all who are searching for authors concerned with care-led relations as structural and political priorities for a loving world.