Recently a friend sent me a link to a policy brief called The Purple Economy (Care-Economy+), written by Chantal Line Carpenter, Silke Staab, and Nicole Bidegain. I read it, I was pleased and wondered why I, a longstanding activist and researcher in the field of a care-centered economy, hadn’t come across it earlier.
Roaming the UN Universe
Reading the Purple Economy led me to another policy brief: Setting the Path towards New Economies for Sustainable Development (NESD), authored by the United Nations Economist Network. Here I learned that the Purple Economy is one of eight “new” (new? – see below) economic concepts which form a kind of circle that should help us reach the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by all United Nations members in 2015: the circular, the (yellow) attention, the (orange) creative, the blue, the purple, the social and solidarity, the frugal innovation, and the green economy. Researching all of these names of types of economies on the internet I found policy briefs for some, but not for all of them. So, I suppose that the whole thing is – luckily (see below) – still in the making.
Another virtual path led me from the Purple Economy to two organizations one of which I already knew: the UN Women. This “entity of the United Nations”, the headquarter of which is located in New York City was founded in 2010 as a replacement for some antecedent entities “for women” which had existed since 1947. As these changing UN entities organized the four powerful Women’s Conferences in Mexico City (1975), Copenhagen (1980) Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), they are known to most feminists albeit often not in detail.
The second organization I discovered through the Purple Economy policy brief is – not accidentally (see below) – much younger. It is called Global Alliance for Care and was founded in 2021. It is based at the offices of the National Institute of Women (INMUJERES) in Mexico City and presents itself as “the first multi-stakeholder community that facilitates and fosters spaces for dialogue, analysis, exchange of experiences and learning about care, its recognition as a need, as work, and as a right.” On its website I found a toolkit on paid and unpaid care work which is a collection of papers arranged according to the 5 R scheme created by UN Women: To properly understand and treat the care-issue, they say, we must recognize, reduce, redistribute, reward, and represent care-work.
Having read through this toolkit I was as overwhelmed as I was confused by the productivity of the complex UN structure which seems to swathe the globe with hundreds of offices, organizations, money flows, topics, people, relationships which have produced thousands of studies, resolutions, papers, conferences, statements about literally every topic relevant to humanity. Puzzled by the highly arcane virtual landscape I had entered, I decided, late in the night, to simply read the Wikipedia article about the United Nations. In principle, I already knew that it is this multi-layered seemingly world-spanning organization which, nevertheless, is located mainly in Western metropoles: New York, Geneva, The Hague, Rome… Concerning my special interest in care-centered economies I got the impression that some of the UN entities including ILO, WHO and UN Women discovered the relevance of unpaid and underpaid care-work for peace and security around 2015. However, the Global Alliance for Care was founded only three years ago. Why so late?
After all, the message that there is a huge hidden economic sector upholding the rest of the economy seems to have reached the actual Secretary-General. On July 18th, 2020, Antonio Guterres said in the 18th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in New York City:
“COVID-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built.
It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere:
The lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all;
The fiction that unpaid care work is not work;
The delusion that we live in a post-racist world;
The myth that we are all in the same boat.
Because while we are all floating on the same sea, it’s clear that some of us are in superyachts while others are clinging to the floating debris.”
Having reached this important insight, I went to bed.
Towards a spirit of mutual support
The next morning, I woke up with a simple question: Why is the UN’s Care-Economy colored in purple?
Purple is the color of the Women’s Movement. So, coloring a topic in purple is a clear sign that it is not meant to be an issue of general application. This framing is actually applied in the case of the UN’s care-economy: While economics as a whole is still usually a male-dominated discipline the policy brief about the Purple Economy (Care-Economy+) is authored by three women. The Global Alliance for Care is located at an Institute of Women and propagated through a short film in which only women speak. In the NESD scheme, the Purple Economy is separated from relevant related questions such as ecology, creativity, attention, or innovation and clearly assigned to the UN Women department.
This allocation, however, is outdated and misleading as it is a matter of fact that all humans of all genders are dependent on care and that most of them are able to do care-work. Historically, indeed, care-work in the narrow sense of the hidden daily chores in private households and close contact services to babies, handicapped and frail people has been understood as women’s business for centuries in patriarchy, that is: in the dualistic social and symbolic orders still prevailing in most parts of the world. From this historical fact, however, does not follow that “new” care-centered economies must be seen as “purple”, reflected on by female theorists and worked on by women only. On the contrary: any economics that claims to be “new” must face the centuries-long externalization of and freeriding on allegedly pre-economic spheres including slaves’ and women’s work, colonies and natural processes as a general problem that must be solved by economics as a whole.
It is no coincidence that decades after the emerging of “female” UN entities a Global Alliance for Care had to be founded to help solve the massive care-crisis humanity has entered. As women’s liberation in the UN – and elsewhere – was clearly modeled “in the spirit of brotherhood” (Art. 1 UDHR), that is: on the patriarchal concept of freedom which refers to the status of the paterfamilias who commands and controls a household, the dependent members of which work for his imagined “independence”. Encouraging, sometimes even pushing women to become like bourgeois men by rejecting care-work, by conquering traditionally male professions, by accepting money, high-tech and competitive lifestyles as “higher” spheres, by cultivating the self-concept of an aloof self-interested homo oeconomicus, by striving for efficiency, hiding their persistent dependency on domestic servants, grandmothers, nannies, nurses, slaves etc. has logically resulted in the present care-crisis. With “successful” women striving to become like detached men, nobody feels responsible for the care-needs of real humans any more.
To overcome this entrenchment in the dualistic structures of patriarchy which again and again leads to the inappropriate distinction between quasi-neutral and “purple” topics, the United Nations could start right away in their own center, replacing the “spirit of brotherhood” invoked in the 1st article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with (for example) a “spirit of mutual support”. This move would be a clear signal to the world that the United Nations are serious about the due shift to the post-patriarchal paradigm humanity needs.
ConFusion 