Nadasen — Care
Premilla Nadasen, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2024)
The Argument
Care work — childcare, eldercare, domestic labor, emotional labor — is the hidden foundation of capitalism. The economy runs on care, but care is systematically devalued, underpaid, and disproportionately performed by women and people of color. Nadasen argues this is not an oversight but a structural feature: capitalism requires cheap care labor the way it requires cheap raw materials. The devaluation is productive, not accidental.
The title inverts Lenin: if imperialism was the highest stage for Lenin, care is the latest frontier of capitalist extraction. The care economy has been increasingly marketized — privatized childcare, gig-economy home care, commodified emotional labor — while the people performing it remain among the lowest-paid workers in the economy.
The Care Commons
Nadasen’s constructive argument: care should be organized as a commons rather than a commodity. Historically, care was embedded in communal and kinship networks — not privatized, not professionalized, not purchased. The enclosure of care parallels the enclosure of land: communal practices were destroyed and replaced by market relationships.
She documents grassroots organizing by domestic workers, home care aides, and community care networks that prefigure a care commons — mutual aid networks, cooperative care arrangements, and community-governed care infrastructure.
Relevance to the Project
This is the gendered labor note that Federici — Caliban and the Witch opened and the project hasn’t yet resolved. Nadasen makes the design question concrete: Wellspring will depend on care labor — shared meals, childcare, eldercare, emotional support, maintenance. How is that labor organized?
The care infrastructure question. If care is left to individual households, it will be performed along the same gendered and racialized lines it’s performed everywhere else. If it’s professionalized (hired childcare, contracted cleaning), the community outsources its own social reproduction and loses the relational fabric the care work builds. The third option — care as commons, organized cooperatively, shared across the community — is what the project needs but hasn’t fully designed.
Care and capacity. The Self-Determination Theory note identifies capacity as a finite resource. Care work consumes capacity — enormously. A community that depends on unpaid care labor without acknowledging its cost will burn out its caregivers. The design must make care labor visible, valued, shared, and sustainable — not hidden beneath a veneer of “community spirit.”
The mutual aid connection. Mutual Aid is care at community scale. Nadasen sharpens this: mutual aid isn’t just material support (money, food, rides). It’s care — the relational labor of knowing what someone needs, showing up, following through, maintaining the web. This labor has a cost, and the community’s structures must account for it.