A recent interview with Nancy Fraser points up the “crisis of care” in societies like our own.

It’s assumed that there will always be sufficient energies to sustain the social connections on which economic production, and society more generally, depend. This is very similar to the way that nature is treated in capitalist societies, as an infinite reservoir from which we can take as much as we want and into which we can dump any amount of waste. In fact, neither nature nor social reproductive capacities are infinite; both of them can be stretched to the breaking point. Many people already appreciate this in the case of nature, and we are starting to understand it as well in the case of “care.”

The controversial bit is where Fraser says,

But there’s still a deep and disturbing question about what role feminism has played in all of this. Feminists rejected the ideal of the family wage as an institutionalization of female dependency—and rightly so. But we did so at just the moment when the relocation of manufacturing kicked the bucket out from under the idea economically. In another world, feminism and shifts in industry might not have reinforced one another, but in this world they did.

What I would like to worry is the proximity of “relocation” and “in another world.” Of course by “another world” Fraser means “in another possible world,” calling on a Leibnizian or Wheelerian imaginary of differently branching causal series, but there’s an overtone in “relocation” that suggests where the space of the “we” lies.

Given the acuteness of this crisis of social reproduction, it would be utopian, in the bad sense, for the left not to be focusing on this. The idea that we could somehow bring back manufacturing, that’s what’s utopian—again, in the bad sense. Unlike the idea that you could build a society that assumes every adult is a person with primary care responsibilities, community engagements, and social commitments.

Bring it “back”? Shorthand for “bring it back from China and other low-wage places.” It would be good to investigate what kinds of “crises of care” people are undergoing in the places where manufacturing has certainly not taken a vacation–and where it is often women who are doing the manufacturing, not for a very heavy wage. Fraser isn’t negligent: her answers in the interview often come back to the plight of people in the countries where financial capital is not domesticated. But perhaps as an effect of this being an election year, when our minds are concentrated on the issues that keep being mentioned, often to the accompaniment of a wagging finger, I think Fraser’s good universalism could be spread a little more thickly.