In a system that measures the value based on productivity and profit, what happens to everything that cannot be quantified in money? Emma Holtenwriter, activist and Danish feminist economist, explores this question in his last essay Deficitin the library for the turtle. A book that invites us to radically rethink the way we consider care, body, tiredness and relationships. Starting from a personal experience, Holten builds a criticism of contemporary capitalism, which exploits the invisible work of millions of women and considers it a “deficit” in public accounts. But Deficit It is not just an act of accusation: it is also a declaration of love for what keeps us alive: mutual care, solidarity, shared time. Because re -evaluating the cure does not only mean protecting those who deal with it, but imagining a different world.
Emma Holten, will be present on June 11, at the XXVI AC Milan editionconceived and directed by Elisabetta Sgarbi. The meeting will take place in Milan (Volvo Studio, 9 pm), on an evening entitled The intelligence of agaustizia, Where the author will intervene together with the Pulitzer Percival Everett and Matthew Desmond prizes.
What pushed him to write Deficit? Was there a specific experience that triggered something?
«It is something that has grown within me for years, but in 2019 I was hospitalized for an autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis. That disease forced me to compare myself with my vulnerability and with the need to be cared for. Then, in 2020, an article was published in Denmark in which it was stated that women represent a deficit for society, because they spend too much time dealing with their children and working undergoing the care sector. That vision of value was absurd for me. Those doctors and those nurses saved my life. Why were we measuring the cost of their work instead of its content? ».
In the book he explores the idea of ​​debt by going beyond the money. What does “emotional or body deficit” mean and why are these forms of debt often invisible?
“From an economic point of view, it is more” precious “for a country to have a banker who earns 10 thousand euros per month than an nurse who earns 2500. Taking care of the bodies and minds has always been the Achilles heel of the economy, because it is difficult to quantify with economic methods and to understand in its real impact. It is a job that projected into the future, it is different for each body, expands and slips from one person to another. For this reason its value is considered too complex, reduced to zero, and therefore not worthy of time or money. When we lose the cure, it literally seems that the country becomes richer. But what seems a profit in the accounts can be a deficit for the body and mind ».
He writes about care work as something exploited, especially in capitalist systems. How can we recognize its value without transforming it into a goods to sell and buy?
«For me, the great error of the classic economy is to think that the value can only be described through prices. But the economy is not like chemistry: it is political. In my opinion we do not live in a world where prices evaluate some things and “bad” others. Instead, we should recognize that value is always a political question, not something that can be decided by a bureaucrat in an Excel sheet. What we evaluate depends on the type of world we want, on what we find beautiful and important ».
How Deficit He expands the connection between genre, economics and power?
«The economy is the language of power. The classic economy sees the market as an extension of the natural world, a dynamic and perfect system that shows us the real value of things. This legitimizes the hierarchies that the market itself creates: at the top what costs so much, after all what is economic or is priceless. Economic logic also becomes the logic of culture. Low price means low status. The lack of respect for the care work becomes lack of respect for the people who do it: mostly women. This is the central paradox of our economy: the cure is the most important and at the same time the least respected and paid “.
One of the strongest ideas of the book is that tiredness can be political.
«I think the example of the environmental crisis is useful. Let’s imagine a beautiful forest, not owned by anyone. In GDP, which measures the size of the economy, that forest is worth zero euros. Without value. But if you cut the tree and sell it as a chair, then it becomes precious. What did we do? We have extracted value from nature as long as we could. And it seemed that very enriching us, because we had no way of describing what we were losing. The same thing happened with the human body, the cure and our free time. We continue to extract value from people without realizing what we are losing. For me, saying “I am tired” means listening to something that the economic system constantly ignores: the limits of the human body and also of the natural world ».
See real alternatives to the system that describes or moments of change that give it hope?
«Yes, absolutely! I am deeply inspired by the people who work every day in the treatment sector. They tell us that humans are moved only by money and that it will be impossible to build an economy that does not revolve around consumption. But every day those who work in the cure shows us that it is not so, that taking care of others is a complex competence and something on which we could base our future. When we put the workers of care in the history of humanity at the center, we discover the immense beauty of the ordinary ».
Many people feel the pressure of being productive in every area. What do I wait for a more “mutual” society?
«This is a central theme of the book: the language of productivity and economic efficiency has also shaped our relationship with ourselves. We behave like small companies, “we invest” on us, we count our steps and hours to become the “optimal” version with the highest market value. We do it because we know we live in a world where not all people have the same value. In a sense, we are fighting for our own humanity when we try to be thin, beautiful, perfect, rich. There is an immense horror in all this, the profound fear that we all have not to be worthy. To break this cycle, I try to love others in an unconditional way, and to show them that I do it. It helps me to think that I too could be loved like this. In my little one, I try to do things just for the pleasure of doing them, without a goal. Reading narrative is my purest joy.
If I could leave a phrase to make everyone read, what would it be?
“The care work is what makes any other job possible.”
Source: Vanity Fair
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