much political credibility is that it has managed to colonize public discourses on morality in a way that makes winner-takes-all profit-making virtuous. In lieu of solidarity, globalized capitalism offers unique forms of excitement and liberation (especially from the local) and opportunities to realize personal ambitions. The enticement and excitement of capitalism culturally are that it offers choices, especially in consumption terms. Even if such choices are between equally valueless goods, choice symbolizes that one has access to the power and autonomy that the market offers. The poor and not-so-poor are incorporated into society via credit and indebtedness, while ideologies of consumer power, consumer protection and consumer goods create the illusion of power and sovereignty (Soederberg 2014).
Neoliberal capitalism also lays claim to servicing social justice and the common good by rewarding the meritorious, the ‘intelligent and hardworking’. To be a winner is to be entrepreneurial in a self-interested way. Winning is framed not only as virtue, a social good, but also as a game that simultaneously offers adventure and excitement without human cost. An actuarial spirit of calculation is normalized for all classes in a way that was unthinkable a generation or two ago (Peters 2005). For those who ‘fail’ in the merit stakes it offers charity. While charity long predates capitalism, contemporary philanthrocapitalists have framed it in a new corporate form as a politically appropriate method of redistribution; they regulate charitable ‘giving’ on their own terms in a highly strategic and business-like manner, a giving that reinforces rather than challenges the injustices of capitalism (Giridharadas 2019). Yet their charity provides them with a valorized public persona and a sense of pride in their own generosity, no matter how unwarranted that may be (Browne 2013).
Security is a prize also available to those who behave responsibly, and who are active in managing themselves and availing themselves of opportunities within neoliberal capitalism. ‘Moral’ people are those who secure their futures by regular reinvention, mentoring and retraining. They also manage their privileges responsibly by securing their transfer intergenerationally via property, including cultural capital, the management of education and money, and social networking. Solidarity with the more vulnerable is replaced by the ethic of self-responsibilization, especially among the middle classes, as they fear the loss of class standing in increasingly precarious work and welfare regimes (Mau 2015). Solidarity has become more and more conditional on self-responsibilization (Paskov and Dewilde 2012; Frericks 2014).
Unlike the early years of organized, European-led, colonial capitalism, when powerful oligarchs and monarchs sought moral approval prospectively and often retrospectively from their marauding and murdering in the acquisition of wealth (Patel and Moore 2018), the accumulation of wealth is now a universally approved precept for the labourer as well as for the venture capitalist. Not to follow this precept is to be deemed foolish and irresponsible. It is the universalization of self-interest as virtue, and the related distancing and invisibilization of harm, that make neoliberal capitalism particularly care-less.
Conclusion: Contradictions, Residuals and Resistances
The deregulation of capitalism, especially financial capitalism, since the 1980s, aligned with the exponential rise of digitalized communication technologies, has given corporate globalized capital untrammelled power in a world order where effective regulatory governance remains the preserve of nation states (Streeck 2016).8
As global competition intensified under the winner-takes-all-provisions of monopoly capitalism, by the end of the twentieth century the human detritus created by growing hierarchical divisions started seeping out of the cesspit of capitalist democratic neglect. It did not always arrive in the expected and manageable, individualized (nation-state-controllable) forms of drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and petty crime, or even in a coherent party politics of socialism. It arrived unexpected and uninvited in the form of desperate and frightened asylum seekers and refugees; it found collective expressions in ethnic and religious-induced nationalism, xenophobia and welfare protectionism reflected in the rise of new-right movements across Europe and the US (Mudde 2007; Golder 2016). The internal contradictions of capitalism (Polanyi 1934) began to erode its political and moral façade in a neoliberal era producing cynicism, violence, anger and revolt, as well as a new populist politics of nationalism and anti-immigration. The cultural residues (Williams 1977) of nationalism and racism that were latent within already existing neoliberal capitalist states were awakened.
But the contradictions of capitalism do not generate dissent solely in negative terms through violence, war and terrorism, managed and orchestrated for the greater part by powerful men. They are not the only makers of dissent historically or contemporarily. Capitalism is not homogeneous even when defined in its own terms (Hall and Soskice 2001; Bresser-Pereira 2012). In every society there are alternative forms of economic and social organization that stand outside the capitalist nexus, be these voluntary and community associations, worker and producer cooperatives, or cooperative banks (Sánchez Bajo and Roelants 2011; Roelants, Eum, Eşim, Novkovic and Katajamäki 2019). These are living proof of institutionalized dissent from neoliberal capitalist values. There are also many sites of resistance to capitalism outside the market economy, as exemplified in civil society movements as diverse as the Occupy campaigns, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, the International Women’s Strike 2017, land struggles in South America and Africa, and community gardens.9
Recognizing the multiple sites of human productivity, politics and cultural engagement compels us to recognize the household as a major site of production of non-market services. It produces goods and services that are arguably equivalent, in volume of outputs and numbers of people involved, to the formal economy (Folbre 1994); the unpaid care work undertaken in the world by women aged fifteen and over was estimated in 2020 to be worth three times the value of the entire global technological industry (Oxfam 2020: 8). Capitalism, and especially the capitalist economy, may be hegemonic but they are not monolithic and incontestable. Neither is the capitalist economy (specifically the relations between labour and capital) the only political and social space for the generation of action or resistance to the social injustices of capitalism (della Porta 2017). Classed and related inequalities are produced and reproduced not only in the market economy, but in the multitudinous economic, cultural and social sites that are aligned with it, and sometimes against it. There is more than one economy in a capitalist economy (Ferber and Nelson 1993; Folbre 1994, 2001, 2020; Gibson-Graham 1996; Federici 2012). And meaning-making is not confined to economic relations alone. People have a care consciousness (Crean 2018) as well as a gender, class, racial or sexual consciousness that informs their decisions. Things matter to people outside of formal politics and the economy (Midgley 1991; Sayer 2011).
There is a need to examine the possibilities of socialism (Streeck 2016: 234) and ‘envision [both] local and proximate socialisms’ (Gibson-Graham 1996: 264) and new feminisms, new types of revolutionary action that are built on foundations that must involve challenging exploitative relations within the economy in practice but are not confined to these.
There are many sites inside and around the capitalist nexus where transformative interventions can occur. One of those sites is affective care relations, those relations that produce, reproduce and repair the world relationally (Tronto 1993). These operate not only at the micro level of the local environment or family, but also at the meso and macro level of public institutions, multilateral agencies, community and voluntary organizations and the state. While the care relations that have coproduced humanity over thousands of years vary in cultural form, they have cultural purchase. Even if they are not named and claimed in public or celebrated, they exist in the realms of the care underworld in the form of care consciousness (Dodson 2010; Crean 2018) even among children (Luttrell 2020); people know what care relations matter to them. In many respects care is a kind of ‘cultural residual’, an area of human life, experience and achievement that the dominant culture neglects, represses and cannot even recognize for its political salience (Williams 1977: 123–4). Care relations are active in the subaltern world; they are the relations wherein people coproduce each other as human beings. But they operate in a subterranean sphere, without political ‘citizenship’,
