Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

Introduction 15
personal connections.” Reinforced by social media, there isaslow corrosion of
interrelational values like attentiveness and care.
The outcome of this shift invalues is the reinforcement ofasymmetrical
power relations between those who cannot successfully participate in the market
and those who are economically empowered. The fringes of societyare mostly
occupied by women and people of color, constituting neoliberalism as both a
raced and gendered process. In apatriarchal society, care and the value of care
are usually associated with (often unpaid) women’s work, creating not only a
binary gender distinction, but also adivide between aproductive economy and
areproductive economy, the latter associated with feminization of poverty.
Gouws then introduces the concept of “precarity”: “Precarity is caused and
fueled by neoliberalism and the way it assigns value to human interactions, with
large numbers of people now living outside asafety net that would ensure their
survival. It is now widely acknowledged that we have acare crisis,” partially
attributed tothe privatization of care and the scaling back of the welfare state.
To address this crisis, she turns in the second part of her chapter to highlight the
importance of care ethics in late modern societies. Care ethics is incompatible
with neoliberalvalues of individualization and acompetition imperative, as care
ethics promotes principles of interdependence, relationality, and acknowledging
the “affective turn” where emotions supporting solidarity are nurtured. Care ethics
builds on anotion ofanontologically constituted relational moral subject
dependent on acollective community and afocus on distributive justice that
seeks to overcome precarity. The argument for a feminist ethics of care is based
on the gendered nature of the “robust masculine market” in general, but more
specifically in relation to the taskofcaring. “Afeminist care ethicsocializes values
such as attentiveness (to the care recipient), responsiveness, responsibility,
and relationality,” and it applies such values on apersonal, interpersonal, and
planetary scale. What is needed are different types ofsocialization agents “that
[focus] on relationality, community, and care.”
Gouws concludes her discussion with the question why care isnot in the
forefront of late modern societies if thereisindeed acare crisis?The answer lies
in the fact that care istaken for granted; “care is something without which humans
cannotexist,” and we live by the assumptionthat we all know how to care,
including honoring the emotional and affective dimensions of care. Yet care is
devalued because it is embedded in the value dominance of the neoliberal market,
where care is relegated, undervalued, and feminized. There are thus no
proper socialization options for care that relate from the individual to the state
and to the global community. “We ignore acare ethics at our own peril,” is her
concluding remark.
“Ethics’ Political Imperative: Moving Toward Better Institutions” is the title
of Andreas Glaeser’schapter. The discussion aboutcharacter formation and moral
communication in late modern societies is directed away from the merely