Despite the efforts that futuristic industrialists are making, we cannot robotize “care” except at a terrible cost for the people involved.

For the distancing of production from reproduction and consumption leads us to ignore the conditions under which what we eat or wear, or work with, have been produced, their social and environmental cost, and the fate of the population on whom the waste we produce is unloaded.

the neoliberal attempt to subordinate every form of life and knowledge to the logic of the market has heightened our awareness of the danger of living in a world in which we no longer have access to seas, trees, animals, and our fellow beings except through the cash-nexus.

For what differentiates the reproduction of human beings from the production of commodities is the holistic character of many of the tasks involved.

“affective labor” is a component of every form of work rather than a specific form of (re)production.

in the present phase of capitalist development, the distinction between production and reproduction has become totally blurred, as work becomes the production of states of being, “affects,” and “immaterial” rather than physical objects.36

What is needed is the reopening of a collective struggle over reproduction, reclaiming control over the material conditions of our reproduction and creating new forms of cooperation around this work outside of the logic of capital and the market.

Staples correctly points out that work is inexorably drawn to the home by the pull of unpaid domestic labor, in the sense that by organizing work on a home basis, employers can make it invisible, can undermine workers’ effort to unionize, and drive wages down to a minimum.

The second factor that has recentered reproductive labor in the home has been the expansion of “homework,” partly due to the deconcentration of industrial production, partly to the spread of informal work. As David Staples writes in No Place Like Home (2006), far from being an anachronistic form of work, home-based labor has demonstrated to be a