Capital cannot make people, but its need for more and different labor power is balanced by an impulse to disinvest from the costs of social reproduction and disrupt or abandon the spaces of solidarity and community that are grown therein. The political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that this dynamic creates a “crisis of care” in each capitalist epoch. Our current crisis is marked by the state’s retreat from the responsibilities of care and the stagnation of wages for much of the working class, leading to a “dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it, privatized for those who cannot—all glossed by the even more modern ideal of the ‘two-earner family.’”

I would add, following the radical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that the state has not so much retreated from care but shifted those capacities into punishment—particularly for the working and workless poor—and that this is complemented by capital’s retreat from providing training within the firm. Capital has shifted the burden of skills training onto individuals so that they must now have all the skills necessary to succeed at jobs they do not yet have. To carry the burden of skills training, individuals take on debt, access to which is also racially differentiated, in order to pay for college or coding boot camps. If they are on the fringes of the labor market, they are forced to enter a constant cycle of job search, job applications, and skills training—the replacement of welfare with workfare. Police and prisons are tasked with handling those individuals who will not or cannot shoulder these burdens.