Obligations and Care Income for a New Just Multispecies Value

Class struggle, feminism and ecology are intertwined issues. Here, we want to bring out this entanglement by paying attention to reproduction as a paradigm.

By reproduction we mean what aims at the regeneration and care of live and all those environments within which this very life unfolds.

Starting from the assumption that the absence of care is biocidal (De la Bellacasa), and recognizing that capitalism necessitates the everyday vitality of the bodies it puts to work (Cooper), we will read reproduction as both the unpaid and invisibilized labor of women, racialized subjects, nonhumans and ecologies, and a revolutionary horizon to think transformative justice practices.

In 2020, following the Wages for Housework Campaign of the 1970s, the Global Women's Strike platform proposed to establish a care income aimed at all those people who provide for other vulnerable human beings, for the urban territories within which many of our communities are developed, and likewise for the rural and not fully anthropized territories that guarantee locally and planetarily the biodiversity that ensures the regeneration of our worlds (Barca, D’Alisa, James, López).

This would allow wealth to be brought where life is regenerated for communities and not where it is reproduced to be put at the service of financial growth. And it would at the same time make it possible to recognize the importance of the work of all those subjectivities (humans, no-humans and ecologies) that reproduce life-value (Massumi) that cannot be appropriately valued according to the market’s logics.

Relying on theories that consider the nonhuman as part of the exploited class (Balaud, Chopot; Battistoni; Guilbert; Hribal), we wish to consider care income as a eco-logic/-nomic tool, as a circuit of responsibility (Haraway) and multispecies restitution, which materially settles the obligations (Stengers) between human and non-human communities in a horizon of ecological materialist justice.