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Anne Barton's avatar

This is awesome! Caliban and the Witch is such a dense book to unpack. One thought which I’ve had recently (due to the US government whining about deficits and Social Security again) is a consideration of the way in which culture has shifted away from viewing children as having a responsibility to their parents in old age. The new attitude is that parents should be supported by investments in their elder years. Failure to create adequate investments is coming to be seen as a failing, and as an unfair burden upon the younger generations. Which has a couple of interesting implications:

1) The reproductive labor of parents (primarily women) is performed solely as a hobby. There is no reciprocal obligation of mutual aid.

2) The labor of the old is worthless. If Grandma watches the kids, it’s a hobby, not economical vital labor.

3) We can/ should entrust our futures to capitalism rather than to our next of kin. The parents kick their kids out at 18 with a bootstrap lecture and their kids dump them in a nursing home at 80 and move on.

I don’t know, I’m short on time to really think hard enough about this. It just seems to me that there’s something precious being lost when people no longer plan to hand a business off to their kids, or when they are getting a reverse mortgage instead of their kids inheriting their home. Of course, these are privileged positions to be in, to have that kind of wealth to hand down. And then there is the reality that the elderly phase of life will look more and more different for rich vs poor. Poor Grandma will watch her grandkids so her kids can work and be shamed for being a burden while performing economically vital work (daycare is running $1000+/ month with a desperate shortage of providers in the US). Rich Grandma will die of loneliness in a five star nursing home staffed by immigrant women whose mothers are watching their kids at home and being shamed for not having independent retirements.

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Julie Bond's avatar

It is pretty clear that capitalism doesn't lead to 'liberation' at all for most people; it needs to keep exploiting and most people (and the natural environment) end up exploited. It's always a case of 'jam tomorrow' but never 'jam today'. The 'jam tomorrow' is held out as a sort of lure which theoretically anyone can get to as long as they 'work hard enough', but which few people do get no matter how hard they work. The few people who do have the jam seem to have inherited it and not got it through 'working hard enough'. Seeing as this has been going on for so long with centuries of evidence I'm surprised that people still fall for the capitalist lure, just as I'm very surprised that people fall for the 'privatisation lure'; better services, more choice, lower prices; when time and time again they've ended up with the exact opposites of these.

'Globalisation', always hailed as so very great for everyone, has just been a project of finding more people to exploit and more natural resources to take and sell.

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