ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that we have reached a new phase of capitalism where people—their bodies, their wellness, their life-making, their disabilities and vulnerabilities, their ability to survive—have become sites of profit and extraction. It signals a shift away from overwhelming reliance on capitalist profit from the exploitation of labor power to capitalist profit from people. This iteration of capitalism, which has accelerated in recent years and outpaces the industrial economy in the US, is rooted in earlier forms of racial capitalism where the life-making of Black and Brown people was a site of profit. A lens of racial capitalism suggests that what we might identify as a crisis of care might be an economic asset to capital rather than deficit. In the current moment, rather than the care crisis generating a crisis of capitalism, capital has turned the crisis of care into an opportunity to remake itself by embracing the care economy as a new site of profit. This was most evident during the COVID pandemic.
