Katie Tobin

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Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care, Lynne Segal, Verso, pp. 256, £17.99.
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Your book, Lean On Me, explores the concept of radical care. It’s an idea – through various names and forms – that we’ve seen a lot of recently within publishing over the past year, They Call it Love by Alva Gotby, and Radical Intimacy by Sophie K. Rosa. I was wondering if you could elaborate on what this idea means to you, and why there’s such a palpable urgency around these kinds of conversations at the moment.
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It’s not surprising. What’s more surprising is how rarely we hear that there’s no life without care: we all need care, from cradle to grave, if we are to survive and flourish. Yet, with their mantra of “individual autonomy” and denial of basic human vulnerability, governments, especially in recent decades, like to hide this fact. Today, we do hear more about care, and especially the lack of it, from all sides, but that is because we live in such very uncaring times. Failures of care are evident at every level, all the time. We might start with the impossible burdens placed upon mothers or those caring for children or other more vulnerable people at home, all tied in with the lack of adequate resources and provision in our local communities, which further reflect decades of systemic attacks on and privatisation of public welfare at state levels. In the background, there is some troubled awareness of climate change, yet a dangerous denial of what needs to be done to ensure our long-term future on our one and only home, the planet itself.
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My notion of “radical care” involves registering and responding to the interconnections between all these levels of carelessness. It means promoting the changes we need to build any sort of caring world by placing this expanded notion of care at the very heart of our politics. Thus, while it begins from seeing and valuing the importance of hands-on care, it takes us well beyond our immediate familial ties to embrace caring for, and caring about, the world we inhabit, building up the essential services that encourage each of us to support and nurture each other in the best ways possible all our daily interactions.
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The intersection of the personal and the political is a key theme in both the book and your work more broadly. How have your personal experiences shaped your research and activism?
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I often say my books are all sequels. I address different topics, but they usually involve certain core commitments, even as differing historical moments throw up their own distinct issues. This is because I’m always looking out for ways of belonging and resistance where we can act together, relying upon each other in working for our mutual well-being. Unsurprisingly, it started when I entered the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, with its now familiar adage of the personal as political. As women then, we learned more about ourselves by reading and listening to each other, seeing our own problems as far from unique.
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As I argued in my political memoir Making Trouble, it’s often easier to connect with others by starting from our own experiences. We reach out with the hope of sustaining forms of collective action and political engagement. In the earlier years of my adulthood, I was busy pondering the complex nuances of sexual freedoms, as evident in Straight Sex: The Politics of Pleasure, while trying to sustain more communal living arrangements. Employed in higher education, I was equally immersed in working with other radical teachers attempting to broaden and connect differing forms of knowledge. It meant cherishing education for its own sake while encouraging people’s understanding of their place within differing historical axes of power. This was especially challenging within the individualistic underpinnings of my own academic discipline, mainstream psychology. However, accounts of psychic ambivalence and conflict underpinning much psychoanalytic reflection, at the outer reaches of psychology, were often useful, never more so than when addressing sexuality or gender matters. Entering old age, I was soon pondering the differing pleasures and perils of our ageing lives in my book Out of Time, battling the increasing social fears of people’s growing longevity.
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Your work also emphasises the need to confront various forms of interdependence and care. How do you think that fostering a sense of radical care contributes to addressing pressing global issues, particularly the impending climate catastrophe?
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Like many feminists before me, everything I have written begins from the understanding that autonomy and independence as two sides of the same coin. Our ability to care well, both for ourselves and for others – the two interconnect – requires concern and support from those around us. However some people can access care far more easily than others; indeed, people seen as more vulnerable are often the most marginalised and least able to find adequate care.
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Disability activists have always usefully emphasised this. They know that seeing the “disabled” as intrinsically vulnerable routinely served as a pretext for their exclusion from public life. They stress that what those with distinct physical or psychic needs most require is diverse resources to facilitate their inclusion in social life, in all ways possible.
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It’s also true that addressing the needs of others through broader more caring outlooks can help us move beyond our frequently gloomy self-preoccupation, enabling greater attention to the state of things. This is what climate activists or war resisters all know, especially when taking to the streets together to persuade others to pay more heed to destructive policies and practices that endanger us all. Mutual care, not simply self-care, can help secure better futures for us all, in the process usually providing a firmer sense of our own belonging, even moments of collective joy. It’s important to understand that we all need to care, as well as be cared for, especially if we are to avoid the plague of depression and loneliness that apparently befalls so many today – one in four on official estimates.
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The book delves into your own experience of motherhood. How has the concept of radical care influenced your views on motherhood?
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Lean on Me opens with reflections on motherhood, which provides the most basic blueprint for caring. My own mother, a busy gynaecologist in Sydney, actually spent little time at home, and I was an apprehensive mother when I accidentally fell pregnant in my mid-twenties. However, happily for me, fighting to overturn what we knew of the frequent frustration, even misery, evident in many women’s post-war experiences of motherhood was quickly a key struggle of the Women’s Liberation Movement I joined as a young mother in London. We were aware of domestic miseries from our own mothers’ troubled lives, plus knowledge of the frequent Valium addiction of many full-time housewives back then – encouraged to rely upon what was marketed as “mothers’ little helper”. Many feminists have since written movingly of the inevitability of a certain maternal ambivalence, those disowned, confused emotions mothers are not allowed to have, making it all the more important that mothers (and indeed all carers) feel appreciated and supported in the work they do.
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There were early feminist victories: women’s increased reproductive rights; combatting sexism in the medical establishment; giving women a greater sense of control in maternity wards. At the same time, we fought for and won more funding for nurseries, while achieving some success in increasing women’s financial independence, alongside demanding men’s greater involvement in domestic work. However, what is now so shocking is how quickly such victories could be snatched away, post-Thatcher and the later arrival of austerity regimes – slashing welfare and impoverishing so many, with cuts always affecting women first.
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Indeed, it’s hard to ignore the distress of so many mothers today. Routinely pressed for time, money and resources, we read that hardly any mothers nowadays feel they are doing an adequate job of parenting. Even affluent stay-at-home mums mention constant anxieties raising children in our ultra-competitive world while displaying that same sense of isolation and exclusion reported by those full-time housewives at the birth of second-wave feminism. Scholars such as Jacqueline Rose and Eliane Glaser have recently distilled the effects of a chilling heartlessness towards mothers. Half of all British mothers suffer mental health problems before or after giving birth, 50 per cent of new mothers report chronic loneliness, and suicide is the leading cause of death for mothers during their baby’s first year.
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More broadly in your exploration of care – and how typically undervalued it is within history – you talk about the different forms it takes: in the home, on the street, at work, etc. How do you think that recognising their interconnectedness can lead to a more collaborative approach to caring communities?
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Yes, ‘care’ itself has always been undervalued because it’s always been seen as “women’s work”, conducted in the women’s sphere, which traditionally went unpaid – a “labour of love”, barely seen as work at all. Even today care work is still often viewed as “unproductive”, however often feminists have pointed out that care is essential to the maintenance of all existing and future workers, and hence at the very heart of our economy.
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So, caring has been definitively gendered. Yet, in today’s world where women and men alike are working ever-longer hours in paid jobs, we are increasingly hearing of the resulting huge ‘care deficit’, especially in richer countries. It’s met by a global care chain of predominantly poor, immigrant and non-white women who nowadays perform much of our caring work. Underpaid care workers can provide vast profits for private companies, especially the global equity firms, now running our care homes. Meanwhile, racism combines with traditional sexism and global inequality to further devalue caring.
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However, once we start de-gendering and de-racing care, understanding its necessity not just for maintaining economic activity overall, but for establishing healthy communities in a sustainable world, we have the basis for rethinking everything. It must begin with fairer tax systems, and commitments to rebuilding our welfare systems, beginning the ‘insourcing’ of those services that have been “outsourced” for profit. It means funding our local councils adequately to enable this process. As we’ve also been hearing from some trade union leaders, most memorably Mick Lynch, representing many transport workers, we need to build alliances between workers of every stripe, whether nurses in our hospitals or unpaid domestic workers.
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Additionally, once we start truly valuing care, and seeing its significance for maintaining healthy communities, we know why we see the importance of calls for a shorter time in paid work to enable care in the home and engagement in community life. As with mothering, caring work can indeed be arduous and challenging, often generating conflicting emotions, which makes it all the more important to replenish our communities to assist those performing the demanding work of hands-on caring, wherever it is performed.
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You’ve talked a little bit about the idea of ‘carewashing’ by corporations before, and the challenges faced by paid care workers due to intolerable working conditions. How can individuals and communities discern genuine care initiatives from mere marketing strategies, and what steps can be taken to improve the conditions of care workers?
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As with the state’s outsourcing of welfare, so much of our social and cultural life has been steadily subordinated to market logic of value. Meanwhile, the financial corporations continuously swallowing up smaller markets are nowadays using a language of care to legitimise their role in our uncaring world. For instance, despite the environmental damage of flying, we hear one airline promoting itself as “Wizz cares”; Primark (notorious for exploiting child labour in India) has launched various “Primark cares initiatives”; the constant deliveries from Amazon stores often arrive labelled “packaged with care”, despite many of its workers currently on strike globally for better pay and conditions.
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However, I doubt people are confused by these ‘carewashing’ practices, least of all those employed on minimal wages to perform actual care work. It’s not so hard to distinguish genuine care from its commercial banalisation in our dealing with others. For instance, in my book I describe how we all rely on the kindness of strangers when out in the world. Some studies even suggest that it is the kindness we may find in casual encounters, such as a daily “hello” from the stallholder we regularly pass on our way to work – whether or not stopping to buy anything – that can serve to revitalise us quite as much as the effects of enduring friendships. Meanwhile, improving the conditions of care workers involves not only increasing their pay and conditions, continually undermined by competitive market logic, but foregrounding care and insisting on its value in everything we say and do.
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Finally, your work highlights the need for an expanded notion and language of care. In practical terms, how can we cultivate this expanded understanding of care in our daily lives, communities, and societal structures, moving beyond symbolic gestures to bring about tangible improvements in the quality of care provided, whether paid or unpaid?
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The expanded language of care many of us now promote is certainly ambitious, as discussed in our earlier The Care Manifesto (Verso). One place to begin expanding our notions and practices of care is in schools. Indeed, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum suggests: “An education in common human weakness and vulnerability should be a very profound part of the education of all children … they should be able to decode the suffering of others, and this decoding should deliberately lead them into lives both near and far, including the lives of distant humans and the lives of animals.”
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Today, with ever greater emphasis on competitive achievement, both within and between schools, the opposite is often the case. Boys in particular feel pressure to deny fear and weakness competing for success, and ending up without even an adequate language for understanding themselves, let alone others. Yet, there are always alternative currents more responsive to the difficult issues of our time, encouraging more supportive practices to ensure every child feels included. This is despite teachers themselves nowadays being pressurised by constant inspections monitoring official syllabuses.
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Equally, the growing awareness of climate disasters, already devastating certain communities globally, has led to greater social involvement and protest, especially from the young. Indeed, data collected from some 7,000 people from differing countries found that people’s involvement in conservation work, whether by reducing waste or buying green products, connected with higher rates of personal satisfaction across different income brackets. Of course, it’s possible that a personal sense of well-being may be what drives ecologically caring behaviour, as much as the reverse. However, it does seem possible that engagement in any form of personal and collective agency around environmental issues encourages greater confidence and belief in at least the possibility of better futures.
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Similarly, while the emergence of the COVID pandemic proved devastating for many people, hitting certain communities far harder than others, it also instigated numerous mutual aid and supportive grassroots activities. We know such networks often decline as emergencies recede. However, even temporary involvement in caring networks teaches us much about how to organize more sustainable communities. We see this occurring at local levels with the growth of food banks, local cafés providing free food, and other grass-roots centres offering more diverse resources. Yet, while applauding such volunteering at resource centres, we urgently need changes in state policies for such community building to continue to flourish.
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In particular, there should be universal access to welfare benefits and social care, as well as some form of minimal income for all to meet personal needs and help build sustainable communities. These measures are affordable once governments commit to a fairer tax system when we know that the absurd profits made by the very few today are barely taxed at all. We also need to combat our excessive work culture, welcoming those pilot projects now offering a 4-day week, both in the UK and some parts of Europe. Most workers involved in such projects reported less stress and increased well-being, without a significant decline in overall productivity.
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Thus, despite the carelessness still so prevalent, calls for a more caring future grow louder all the time. We need our collective demands and visionary imagination to keep working for the total transformations some of us have been fighting for all our lives. I called my book Lean On Me as my way of affirming our interdependence and highlighting the recognition, care, and support we all need from each other if we are to create better futures for everyone. Surely, it’s past time to respond to the persistent perils of the present and fatalistic forebodings of the future by deepening our commitment to a compassionate, inclusive sociality, placing care at the heart of our lives and politics.
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Hopefully, my words merge with others pursuing any sources of hope wherever they can find it.
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Image courtesy of Lydia Goldblatt/The Guardian
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Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. Her books include Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men; and Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. She co-wrote Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright.