ABSTRACT
Central to the feminist critique of care is that it is externalised and marginalised by the main/male-stream economy. It is marginalised by being low paid and associated with low social status. Where economies rely on and exploit unpaid or underpaid work, this results in social injustice and inequality. Women are not closer to nature, but care work is largely concerned with the daily cycle and lifecycle of human existence. A minimal level of internalisation would be some recognition that care work is a charge upon the economy. Neoliberalism was able to turn the initial entitlement approach to welfare into a system where ‘social assistance was not a right but, instead, intrusive, conditional, inadequate and often punitive’. Social money is often described as local, parallel or complementary to the official currency. The weakness of most proposals for payment of a basic income is that they envisage funding through general taxation based on rolling up current welfare payments.
