The article analyzes the status of care work in capitalist societies. Care is a necessity in the context of human dependency and vulnerability. Here I understand care work as materialized and “thickly embodied” (Lanoix, 2013) rather than as affective labor (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Lanoix, 2013). On a very basic level, capitalist societies are founded upon unequal class relations as well as on the cultural and economic devaluation and externalization of relational embodied care. This can be seen, for instance, as certain elements of care work are relegated to the private sphere and remain largely unpaid and invisible. This great amount of unpaid labor is a basic condition of capitalism. I introduce the concept of value abjection (German: Wert-Abjektion) here to illustrate and analyze these structural tendencies and their effects on care workers and the elderly care recipients.
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