Recently, during a public event, I got into a discussion regarding grandparents assuming obligations and responsibilities towards their grandchildren. I have been a grandmother myself for a few years now. So, I was able to speak from experience:
I said that I don’t look after my granddaughter regularly as she lives far away from me, and that I probably wouldn’t look after her regularly even if she lived in my neighborhood. After all, I am busy with other caring activities in a political sense. My daily work as a theorist gives me fulfillment and pleasure. It revolves around care given to the world.
When the official event was over, some grandmothers approached me, noticeably affected, even upset by my comments. They told me how much they loved looking after their grandchildren and that they hadn’t even thought of not wanting to support the family’s younger generation.
We didn’t resolve the difference that night, but I kept on thinking about it. Above all, the emotionality of the situation struck me. I had the feeling that I had been cold and calculating, recklessly disturbing the other grandmothers’ joy. At the same time, I was still irritated by the unquestionability of their commitment that seemed to be a kind of automatism. Eventually I came to this conclusion: Grandmothers who assume that their role as voluntary caretakers is self-evident, feel both right and wrong to me.
Caring grandmothers: right and wrong at the same time
It’s always good to care for each other, whether you are a woman or a man or queer, old, or young, within families, neighborhoods, or across distances. So, what could be better than passionately caring grandmothers?
The problem begins when the grandmothers’ voluntary service is not seen as one free care-giving activity among others, but taken for granted: Certain people use the grandmothers’ traditional “female” tendency to work for free to help the state save money and capitalists make profits. So, not critically questioning their role in offering a cost-saving solution for the labor-intensive task of childcare in a system that still follows patriarchal and capitalist norms feels wrong to me.
In order not to appear greedy, the profiteers sometimes call the care-workers “heroines of everyday life” or write praising newspaper articles about them. Well-off grandmothers who can afford free work without falling into poverty may be happy about that, but it does not enable the less well-off to earn a living and ultimately results in wealth being shifted from bottom to top. Moreover, caring grandmothers are often too strained physically and emotionally by their circumstances to initiate critical debates about patriarchy and capitalism.
All in all, their service is an advantageous deal for the privileged, following the common capitalistic logic that the rich get richer.
Community Capitalism
In a book called «Community Kapitalismus» (Community Capitalism) the social scientists Silke van Dyk and Tine Haubner have analyzed the ambivalence of voluntary care work of which the grandmothers’ automatic caregiving is just one example. They plead for vigilance: The energy of caring people should not be exploited to increase the wealth of the wealthy. As grandmothers are not only members of families, but also part of the transformation humanity is undergoing in the 21st century, they must think about the context in which they do their work: about state finances, tax systems, human rights and the question of what humanity wants to put at the center of life: wealth for a few or a good life for everyone?
Many grandmothers are not used to political and economic self-reflection. Many feel they have nothing to do with economics and politics – a feeling that is of major practical use for the exploiters. However, it’s just the critical thinking of the supposed outsiders that is most needed to change the situation.
In Germany, for example, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, a special fund of 100 billion euros was approved for the expansion of the army, despite the constitutionally prescribed debt ceiling. As far as I know, not many grandmothers asked where so much money was coming from whereas the question of finances is regularly asked first and foremost when it comes to investments in social cohesion, for example in paid childcare. – In March 2023, a second major Swiss bank was “rescued” by the state. Here, too, the National Bank and the government quickly had a lot of money available to ensure Credit Suisse’s liquidity. At the same time, parliamentarians must fight for every franc when it comes to cost-of-living compensation for pensioners or better-equipped daycare centers.
Incorporating and externalizing
In a book called “Einverleiben und Externalisieren” (Incorporate and Externalize) the sustainability economist Anna Saave has investigated the inside-outside relationship of the capitalist mode of production. She analyzes how conventional economics systematically externalizes unpaid forms of work, including the “automatic” responsibility of grandmothers for childcare, by defining them as pre- or extra-economic non-work. According to Saave, this trick of intentional misperception enables a specific form of predatory incorporation of so-called “labor of love” by capital and state.
A comparable power of definition is exercised over other supposedly non-economic areas, for example smallholder subsistence agriculture in former colonies or the pollination services of bees. We have been taught to carefully distinguish between «social» and «ecological» forms of exploitation, but as Anna Saave shows, they are structurally related: unpaid care work is positioned outside the capitalist mode of production as is oxygen production through primeval forests. As long as grandmothers don’t openly discuss and try to change such connections, their silent work ultimately facilitates a system that destroys human coexistence in the fragile cosmos Earth.
Cannibal capitalism
In her book “Cannibal Capitalism” the American philosopher Nancy Fraser bluntly portrays capitalism as a monster that consumes everything it can attain: the riches of ex-colonies, unpaid care-work, natural substances and processes, and finally state institutions and democracy. She advocates a transformation that no longer focuses on individual self-optimization like, for example, an aspiration for “work-life balance”, that figures out systemic links between seemingly isolated symptoms of crisis instead. According to Fraser, the commitment to the good life of all becomes effective when the interconnectedness of supposedly isolated crisis phenomena is recognized: System change instead of climate change!
Nancy Fraser calls the desired future form of society “socialism”. In the last chapter of her book, she describes how this historically charged term can be reinterpreted in the 21st century. I decide differently, calling the condition that I would like us grandmothers to prophetically anticipate, “care-centered economy”.
What political grandmothers can know
The mentioned three key texts suggest that grandmothers think beyond their traditional family obligation and publicly express their will to care not only for individuals but for our common future. Doing so, they unhinge a deadlocked dogma:
On July 16, 2020, for example, the economist Bernd Raffelhueschen explained in an interview:
“We don’t live by taking care of each other, we live by generating economic and technical progress.”
(Quote see Ina Praetorius/Uta Meier-Gräwe 2023, 28)
On February 22, 2023, the current German Finance Minister Christian Lindner tweeted:
Both quotes represent the dogma that growth, measured by the gross domestic product (GDP), is necessary to eventually afford the secondary luxury of care. In other words, that only by producing more and more cars, freeways, financial products and tanks we can finally fulfill our basic need to be cared for. While this dogma has long since been refuted, most states have not yet decided to introduce more reasonable methods of measuring and organizing well-being. Indeed, there are attempts to do this in many countries, but they have not yet levered out the mechanisms of externalization and incorporation. Political grandmothers will insist on just that, proclaiming that they are not doing care-work in the interests of industrial production and the profit of the rich, but as heralds of an economy that puts care at its center.
What political grandmothers can do
An association called “Grandmothers’ Revolution” has existed in Switzerland since 2010. It sees itself “as a social movement that takes up socially relevant topics and concerns about age, womanhood and generations, works on them and makes statements about them.” This network – as well as similar organizations all around the world – can become louder, better connected to other movements and more focused, guided by theorists such as Silke van Dyk, Nancy Fraser, Tine Haubner and Anna Saave.
Grandmothers can bring a new, groundbreaking dogma into the world:
The more expensive the welfare state, the more extensive the investment in care work, the more livable, sustainable and peaceful the world will be!
Concretely they can suggest that the states they live in join the Wellbeing Economy Governments Partnership through which Canada, Finland, Iceland, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales have already started to create care-centered policies.
So, ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether we grandmothers look after our grandchildren regularly or work in other ways towards a good future of humanity in the vulnerable cosmos Earth. Either way, it is important that we recognize, say out loud and implement what we stand for politically: a future for our offspring that is worth living. The children we (don’t) look after can be our teachers as they do not distinguish between play and work. As long as they are well cared for, life is just fun for them.
ConFusion 
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