Imagining Collective Care in Our Future: A Conversation with Premilla Nadasen

Premilla Nadasen is a historian of social change. Nadasen’s work has focused on organizing among poor and working-class women of color and alternative labor movements in the US. Nadasen currently serves as the Anne Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Co-Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism(Haymarket Press, 2023) is Nadasen’s latest scholarly work. Combining various threads from her previous work on alternative labor movements and welfare, Care paints a broader picture of the “care economy” that encourages all people living under capitalism to expand how we think about social reproduction. In December of 2023, Premilla Nadasen spoke with BCRW Research Assistant Sydney Johnson (BC ‘25) about this work. In their conversation, Nadasen explains how she moves past Marxist feminist theories that view care (in particular, women’s household work) as essential only for producing and sustaining labor power. Nadasen uses a lens of racial capitalism to understand how care has always been a site of both production of labor power and financial profit, especially when examining the lives of Black and Brown people. Nadasen also discusses the importance of bringing into the scholarly canon perspectives that may not traditionally be considered academic, such as those of community organizers. By encouraging academics to “find their ears,” as Nadasen says, not just their voice, this push supports a future in which activists are recognized as theorists.

Sydney Johnson: I loved the book. It felt really easy to engage compared to some other historic work, and that was exciting for me. I know your past work focused on women of color organizing for welfare rights and household worker rights. Why was Care the best next step in your work as a historian?

Premilla Nadasen: A lot of my earlier work was also about care, although not explicitly. My first book on the welfare rights movement was about African American women on welfare who had historically experienced discrimination and a very stringent welfare state. When the program started in the 1930s, it was designed to support white widows who didn’t have a so-called breadwinner. But when Black women came on, the design changed, and the welfare system had instituted a number of work requirements. The idea was to get Black women off welfare and into the workforce because Black women’s work to care for their own families had been historically devalued. So, that book was about African American women’s struggle for the right to care for their own children and the right to have state support in order to do that. The argument of my book on the domestic worker rights movement was that although domestic work is often understood as care, it is in fact a job, and exploitation and dehumanization are common and central to domestic work. So I think care is a thread that has woven throughout my work, leading me here.

SJ: I think so too. I felt like Care tied a lot together. I was captivated by your statement in the introduction: “[C]apital has always assessed value in human bodies, but the formula for determining that value has shifted.” Could you elaborate a little bit on that, and some ways that the formula has shifted?

PN: Part of the argument I’m making in the book is about how we are seeing a shift in real time in capitalist logics of value and the sources of capitalist profit. Historically, capitalists have made profit from manufacturing, commodity production. Marxist feminists have made powerful and insightful arguments about the importance of the labor of care and social reproduction to produce the bodies that are necessary to work in the factories for commodity production. But what we’re seeing now is profit extracted from care itself, from people’s need to feed themselves, from childcare, from people who are ill, from the elderly or disabled who need assistance. Those are becoming sites of profit. And so in that regard, if you are ill, or disabled, or elderly, capital sees you as a potential source of profit.

SJ: On that point, you emphasize the importance of specifically analyzing racial capitalism, rather than just the broad idea of capitalism, especially when studying social reproduction. Can you speak a little bit more about how this analysis of racial capitalism changes the discourse?

PN: Historically, Marxist scholars, and Marxist feminist scholars in particular, have seen a tension between care/social reproduction and capitalist profit. They understand care and social reproduction as a necessary precondition for capitalist profit but not a source of capitalist profit. They argue that capitalists want to extract as much profit as they can and supporting reproduction cuts into those profits. But a lens of racial capitalism shifts our understanding of the relationship between profit and social reproduction.  For most Black and Brown people, their social reproduction has always served as a site of profit. The clearest example of this was slavery, where enslaved women produced profit for slave owners by having and raising children. In addition, capitalists have rarely fully supported the social reproduction of Black and Brown people, even when they relied on their labor. The New Deal welfare state, for example, was not racially inclusive, and many Black and Brown people were excluded from its benefits and privileges. So we don’t see the same tension between capitalism, care, and social reproduction in Black and Brown communities as we do in white communities. This is important because it helps us understand that the model of capitalism emerging and the public attention given to the extraction and precarity embedded in the care economy have been characteristic of the lives of Black and Brown people for generations.

SJ: That makes a lot of sense. I noticed that throughout the book you come back to ideas about the abolition of capitalism, the carceral system, and ultimately, the care economy in conversation with abolitionist scholars like Dorothy Roberts and Mariame Kaba. And I just want to know, what does abolition mean to you?

PN: Abolition to me means creating a society that includes an economic system, forms of social organization, and new patterns of relationship-building that are collective and non-hierarchical. Where everyone’s needs are met, where everybody provides care and is taken care of—outside of the profit economy. Kathi Weeks encourages us to imagine a future where there is no work, where we can pursue our individual interests and desires and find our own passions. But I think that care will always be a part of any world we live in, even the ideal world, because people have different needs. We will all have different care needs at different points in our lives. And so a future society, a post-capitalist society, will also require us to do care work, to assist one another. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But what that means is that it will be a collective society where we have to figure out together how care will be a part of that world.

SJ: What are some things that give you hope for an abolitionist future?

PN:  I work with a group in Mississippi called the Mississippi Low-Income Child-Care Initiative. Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. It has the lowest welfare benefits. And the vast majority of people in Mississippi who need assistance don’t get it. When I took a class down to Mississippi, the students and I witnessed grassroots efforts of people coming together to fill that gap to provide care for the community. Hundreds of ordinary people, who are poor themselves, were working on a relatively small scale to provide childcare for their neighbors and create systems of support for homeless youth. We saw this during the pandemic as well, with mutual aid programs that emerged. Again, this was—and is— a moment when the state was unable to meet people’s needs and ordinary people were coming together and providing care. However, that in and of itself is not enough. We need to think about societal transformation and not just voluntary care efforts. But, still, these local efforts are a basis for building a new society and a model for how we can work collectively.

SJ: In your book, I was really struck by your commitment to telling the stories of care workers and on-the-ground labor organizers. Why is it so important to you to include the histories and theoretical work of grassroots organizers, in addition to academic scholars?

PN: Very often when we think about theory, we think only about academics. Academia is a very exclusive space. A guiding principle of my work has been to listen to people on the ground, ordinary people who we don’t consider theoreticians or academics, who are not writers, but have been central to helping develop theory. I have learned a great deal from my collaborations with domestic workers and with welfare recipients. They offer a perspective on important issues about care–“Why does care matter?” “How can we care for one another?” “What is the role of the state?”—that you don’t always get from traditional theoreticians. There is value in the work of academic theory. We need to read and think about what scholars and academics are saying. But our perspective is stronger when it encompasses many different viewpoints and many different ideas. And out of that, new synergies will develop.

SJ: Do you think that, in general, academia needs to expand how we think about theory?

PN: Yeah, absolutely. The social justice work that BCRW has done, since its founding, has also been premised on that idea. How can we bring into academic conversations not just activists but also students? How can developing new ideas be a collective process? I think it’s very important to expand the scope of who gets to define theory and who gets to germinate new ideas to understand the world and envision a new world.

SJ: You include a lot of contemporary examples in the book in addition to history and I wondered, do you think that approach is different from other historians?

PN: All academics, even historians, are influenced by the political moment in which we’re writing. The questions we ask and the issues we decide to study or research can’t be extricated from who we are and what we’re thinking about our present moment. This book very much came out of my thinking about care in the middle of the pandemic and my ongoing partnerships with various organizations. It gave me the opportunity to bring an historical lens to questions that were relevant to the here and now. And as such it draws on a very large body of historical scholarship and theory. I tried to think about the relationship between past and present: how the present can help us think differently about the past and vice versa. So is it different from how other historians approach their work? I don’t know. It might be different from some other historical scholarship, but only because I make the links between past and present very clear.

SJ: From your book, and your remarks at the Ella Baker symposium and other BCRW programming, I know you have a lot of experience with organizing. Can you speak a little bit about your own experiences as an organizer and how they impacted your work on this book?

PN: Sure. As an academic I have been collaborating with low-income women for a very long time, since the 1990s. The very first conference I organized was on my graduate student fellowship at Williams College. Part of my fellowship involved teaching a class. It was 1996, which was the year that welfare was being dismantled. And so I thought that my students should be learning about what’s happening now, in addition to reading history. I assisted them in organizing a panel discussion that included a welfare recipient who I cite in the book, Theresa Funiciello, who worked with a group in Albany. Academic and activist work have always been intertwined for me. I became an academic because of my own activism and organizing. So those questions about social change, about how knowledge and learning can better position us to contribute to social change, have been central to my academic work.

At the same time, as you just mentioned, we have a lot to learn from activists and organizers about the theories and the ideas that have shaped academic work and our thinking around social change, inequality, justice, care, labor. And so I continue to learn from them. I learn every day from the organizers and activists who I work with. Last semester, my class completed a project with Damayan Migrant Workers Association. We constructed a historical timeline of Damayan’s work over the past twenty years and in the process students learned a tremendous amount about the organization and I think we provided an important service for the organization. We were able to look at their primary source documents or archival material and students interviewed members and labor trafficking survivors. There is something unique in that model of learning, where students get a firsthand account of a social movement. It enhances our academic work greatly to  be able to have conversations with people who are living the lives that we are theorizing.

SJ: Do you think there are certain ways, as academics, to go about engaging with activists so as to not be exploiting their time?

PN: That’s a great question. Absolutely. Sometimes researchers, whether they’re students or professors, go into communities or develop partnerships, and it is really for the benefit of the professor or the student. We want to learn. We want to use them as a laboratory. We want to understand what they’re doing in order to write something. My partnerships have been centered on a commitment to furthering the work of the organization itself. So the work I’ve done has been in support and in service of the activists who I partner with. That requires a great deal of respect for the work they’re doing. It requires listening to what they’re saying, thinking about the ideas they’re sharing. And it’s okay for us as academics to sit back and not be the center of attention. To be listeners rather than teachers. One of the things I always tell my students when they enroll in my community engaged courses is, although Barnard teaches you to find your voice, I want you to find your ears. Because in these kinds of partnerships, the most important thing is to listen.

SJ: I really love that. In your last chapter, you define radical care as “a horizontal practice that is nonhierarchical, anti-capitalist, and collective.” How do you practice radical care in your own life?

PN: I try. I strive for that. I’m not always perfect about it. But I do try to show care to people when I can, whether it’s my colleagues and coworkers, or the staff at BCRW, or my students, or my family members—I have an elderly father who’s 86–or whether it’s another group of relatives or friends. It is hard under capitalism to practice the kind of care you want to practice, but I think we all should strive in that direction.