On October 10, 2023, Premilla Nadasen, professor of history, published a new book, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which explores care work — the nurturing, feeding, nursing, assisting, and loving of human beings that “makes all other work possible.”
In her book, Nadasen meticulously examines the care economy, from its roots in racial capitalism to its exponential growth as a new site of profit and extraction. Nadasen explains that care was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and argues that we have only begun to understand the incredibly important role the field plays in our day-to-day lives and economy. Nadasen shows that today, the care economy has evolved into an institutionalized, hierarchical system in which some people’s pain translates into other people’s profit.
Amid the inequitable reality of the care industry, Nadasen highlights the voices of the low-wage workers, immigrants, and women of color in movements from Wages for Housework and Welfare Rights to the Movement for Black Lives who continue to fight for and practice collective care. As Barbara Ransby, professor and director of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Social Justice Initiative, says in her review of the book, “Premilla Nadasen is a pathbreaking scholar of Black women’s labor and welfare organizing, as well as a radical feminist activist in her own right. She has a passion and a powerful talent for telling the complicated truths that define working-class women of color’s lives.”