You have been told that the economy is production and exchange. Markets and labor. Wages and consumption. That is a lie. The economy is care. All production depends on a workforce that has been fed, clothed, sheltered, healed, and taught. All of that happens in the domain of care — and it is still, mostly, done by women, without compensation, treated as love rather than work.
The economy runs on care. Capitalism cannot exist without it. But capitalism cannot pay for it, because if it had to pay market rates for all the care work currently being extracted without compensation, the entire profit structure would collapse. That is the secret at the center of the system. And it is also where the leverage is.
What care work actually is
Cooking. Childcare. Teaching. Healing. Elder care. Emotional labor. Cleaning. Maintaining relationships. Community building. All of this is work. All of it requires skill and knowledge and effort. All of it is necessary for any society to function.
For centuries, it was organized as commons — shared responsibilities within communities, split according to what people knew and could do, with no accounting of debt or obligation. You helped because the community expected it and because the community would help you when you needed it.
Capitalism enclosed care. Moved it first into the private household, where it was performed by women without compensation. Then into the market, where it became a service to be bought and sold. Then into the state, where it became bureaucratized and insufficient. Care became a commodity. And a crisis — because you cannot commodify the basis of human life without destroying it.
Who performs it and what it costs them
Alexandra Kollontai named this in 1909: the cooking, cleaning, childcare, elder care that women performed every day — capitalism ran on it, got it for free, and the profit margins on everything else depended on that theft.
Silvia Federici’s extension: the witch trials of early modern Europe were not hysteria. They were the deliberate destruction of communal care infrastructure — midwifery, healing, collective child-rearing — to force that care into the private household, invisible and uncompensated, performed by women legally subordinated to men. The enclosure of care and the enclosure of common land were the same movement, happening simultaneously, each enabling the other.
The cost to the people who perform this work is systematic. Unpaid care work is the largest sector of the global economy by volume. The people who perform it are more likely to be poor, more likely to be excluded from formal labor markets, more likely to have their economic security dependent on the goodwill of someone else. This is not accidental. It is structural. The system requires care labor to be performed for free or cheap. It enforces this through legal arrangements, through cultural norms, through the material conditions that make alternatives inaccessible.
What the commons looks like here
Some communities are rebuilding care as commons. Childcare collectives where parents share responsibility and costs. Care cooperatives where the work is shared and compensation is distributed fairly. Community kitchens that feed neighborhoods and rebuild the knowledge of cooking. Elder care networks where community members share the labor of looking after people who cannot look after themselves.
These are not sentimental throwbacks. They are rational responses to a system that has made care simultaneously indispensable and economically impossible. When the market price of care exceeds what most workers can earn, and when the state has systematically defunded care provision, the commons is not an ideological preference. It is the only available answer to how people actually get cared for.
The cooperative care model also produces something the market version cannot: relationships. Care delivered through ongoing relationship, within a community that depends on each other, produces wellbeing that care delivered as a market transaction cannot replicate. This is not a soft argument. It is a structural one. The relationship is part of the care. Marketizing care destroys the relationship and degrades the care.
The work of rebuilding care as commons is local, intimate, and requires building trust with specific people in specific places. It cannot be scaled to infinity. It cannot be profited from. It only works if people care about each other. That is not a weakness. That is the point.