Unpaid care work has always constituted the hidden infrastructure of social reproduction, quietly sustaining the rhythms of everyday life while enabling the continuous production of labor power. Its contributions extend beyond the intimate confines of the household: it undergirds the entire process of surplus value extraction by ensuring that workers return to the sphere of production fed, nurtured, socialized, and emotionally stabilized. Without the invisible energies invested in child-rearing, elder care, domestic maintenance, and affective labor, no economic system could reproduce itself across generations. Yet, despite this indispensability, unpaid care work has been systematically relegated to the margins of political economy. Its forms, visibility, and contradictions have shifted across historical epochs, each restructuring the family system in ways that both reinforced and undermined broader structures of power. From the communal subsistence of feudal households to the privatized domesticity of industrial capitalism and the fragmented transnational networks of the neoliberal global order, care work has undergone successive dialectical transformations. Each stage reveals a distinct balance of cohesion and decohesion, showing how systems rely on care to maintain stability while simultaneously devaluing it in ways that generate tension and crisis.
In this regard, the conceptual lens of Quantum Dialectics offers a uniquely powerful framework for analyzing unpaid care work across historical time. By viewing family systems and gendered labor as layered quantum fields, we can recognize the evolution of care as a succession of quantized contradictions, each stage embodying both continuity and rupture. Just as physical systems undergo phase transitions—shifting from solid to liquid, or from coherence to decoherence—so too do social systems reconfigure their reproductive structures under the pressure of historical contradictions. Care work, therefore, is not a static or “natural” domain but a dynamic field of energy shaped by the interplay of cohesion (which stabilizes households, communities, and economies) and decohesion (which fractures these systems through invisibility, asymmetry, and exploitation). This dialectical process generates new contradictions at each historical layer, contradictions that are not merely destructive but also transformative, opening the possibility of revolutionary reorganization of how societies recognize, value, and distribute the labor of care.
In the feudal order, the family system was inseparably tied to a subsistence-based agrarian economy. The boundaries between household production and reproduction were fluid, with survival depending on the integration of both spheres. Women’s labor in this context was indispensable: they bore and raised children, prepared food, produced textiles, tended to the sick, and provided healthcare through herbal knowledge and communal practices. These activities were not seen as supplementary but as integral to the functioning of the peasant household and, by extension, to the feudal economy itself. The cohesion of feudal society was sustained through this deeply embedded system of care, which was carried out in close relation to kinship networks, guild obligations, and the hierarchical structures of the manor. Care was not simply a private matter but part of a broader communal order, linking individual households to larger systems of feudal obligation and reciprocity.
Yet, this cohesion was structured within rigid systems of domination that ensured women’s autonomy remained limited. Despite the vital necessity of their contributions, women’s labor was subordinated to patriarchal authority within both the household and the wider feudal hierarchy. Unlike later capitalist economies, the invisibility of women’s work was not primarily a matter of monetary valuation, since the money economy remained relatively underdeveloped. Instead, the devaluation was expressed in terms of status and recognition. Care was naturalized as an extension of women’s biological and social duty rather than acknowledged as labor with its own intrinsic worth. This subordination rendered women’s contributions simultaneously indispensable and unrecognized, producing a contradiction that remained largely muted within the cohesive framework of feudal society.
From the standpoint of Quantum Dialectics, unpaid care work in feudalism can be understood as a low-energy cohesive layer within the political economy. Its function was to stabilize peasant subsistence and maintain the continuity of life, yet it did so within a tightly bound system where the forces of cohesion overwhelmingly outweighed decohesion. The contradictions embedded in women’s unpaid care work were therefore real but contained, kept in check by the rigid structures of kinship, religion, and feudal authority. In this sense, care in the feudal epoch exemplifies how cohesion can sustain systemic stability even while constraining individual autonomy, preparing the ground for future transformations that would unfold with the advent of capitalist social relations.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries marked a profound restructuring of the relationship between production and reproduction. Where once household and communal labor had been woven into a subsistence economy, early capitalism introduced a radical separation between these domains. The emergence of wage labor and the spread of industrial production redefined value strictly in terms of monetized, market-oriented activity, relegating unpaid care to the margins. This transformation created a new dialectical landscape in which the family system was reconfigured as both a site of cohesion and a locus of intensifying contradictions.
On the side of cohesion, the bourgeois family became the ideological anchor of capitalist society. Women were increasingly idealized as guardians of the “private sphere,” charged with preserving moral order, nurturing children, and ensuring the daily reproduction of labor power. Cohesion was maintained less through communal or feudal obligations than through powerful cultural constructions of domesticity and motherhood. These ideological frameworks presented women’s unpaid care work as natural, noble, and indispensable, thereby masking its economic function as the hidden foundation of waged labor and surplus extraction. The image of the mother as the moral center of the household provided a stabilizing narrative that shored up capitalism’s social fabric during its turbulent emergence.
Yet beneath this ideological cohesion, processes of decohesion were rapidly unfolding. Industrialization drew men, women, and even children into the expanding factories, creating acute crises of social reproduction. Women entered wage labor in significant numbers but were consistently paid less, their contributions devalued in line with prevailing patriarchal assumptions. Their unpaid domestic responsibilities, meanwhile, were stripped of communal supports that had existed in feudal society—such as collective childcare or shared subsistence work—and instead privatized within the nuclear family. Care work lost its visible social dimension while receiving no recognition in the capitalist wage system, becoming doubly invisible: naturalized as “non-work” and simultaneously indispensable to the reproduction of labor power. This double bind inaugurated what feminist theorists would later call the “double burden” of women—working in factories or workshops for wages, while still carrying the full weight of unpaid household labor.
From a Quantum Dialectical perspective, early capitalism represented a decohering phase transition in the history of care work. The forces of cohesion were preserved primarily at the ideological level, through narratives of domesticity and motherhood, but materially they were under enormous strain. The family became a paradoxical site: it reproduced labor power and upheld social stability, yet it also embodied alienation and exploitation, particularly for women. In this sense, the nuclear family was both a stabilizing quantum field and a zone of decoherence, a contradictory node where capitalism’s hidden dependence on unpaid care collided with its structural refusal to recognize or remunerate it. These unresolved contradictions, born in the industrial era, would continue to reverberate through subsequent stages of capitalist development.
The neoliberal era, beginning in the late twentieth century, has fundamentally transformed the organization of care work by embedding it within the dynamics of global markets, transnational migration, and privatized service industries. Under the twin forces of neoliberalism and globalization, care work has become increasingly commodified and transnational, while also growing more contradictory. Families continue to bear the responsibility for reproducing labor power, but this responsibility is now mediated through partial outsourcing to paid domestic workers, childcare centers, eldercare services, and other marketized institutions. Instead of being confined within a single household or community, care has been stretched across borders and stratified by class, race, and global inequalities. The emergence of global care chains—where women from poorer regions migrate to wealthier nations to perform domestic and caregiving labor—illustrates this new configuration. Migrant women from the Global South often leave behind their own children and families in order to provide care for households in the Global North, creating a system of interlinked dependencies that both sustains and destabilizes reproduction worldwide.
At the same time, processes of decohesion proliferate within this system. For women in the Global South, migration often produces a double displacement: they lose cohesion within their own families and communities when forced to migrate for work, while also experiencing systemic undervaluation in the global economy as their labor is cheapened and rendered invisible in relation to formal economic metrics. Meanwhile, in the Global North, neoliberal austerity measures have systematically reduced public investment in care infrastructures such as childcare subsidies, public health systems, and eldercare support. As state services contract, the burdens of care are shifted back onto individual households, typically onto women, reproducing the asymmetries that feminist struggles had long sought to challenge. The family, once idealized as the cohesive unit of moral and social order, increasingly appears fragmented—caught in a superposed state between commodified services and unpaid domestic labor. Cohesion is maintained, but only precariously, through fragile transnational networks and privatized arrangements that heighten systemic vulnerability.
From the standpoint of Quantum Dialectics, neoliberal globalization constitutes a superposed quantum layer of unpaid care work. It is cohesive in the sense that transnational flows of care labor sustain the reproduction of global capitalism, but it is simultaneously decohesive in its reliance on exploitation, fragmentation, and precarity. The contradictions here are no longer confined to the boundaries of individual households or national economies; they are globalized and entangled across borders, amplified by intersecting inequalities of class, gender, race, and geography. Care work becomes both everywhere and nowhere: essential to the functioning of the world economy yet persistently excluded from recognition, rights, and equitable remuneration. This fragmented superposed state intensifies contradictions that cannot be resolved within the neoliberal framework itself, pointing instead to the necessity of systemic transformation in the organization of care at a planetary scale.
When viewed through the lens of Quantum Dialectics, the historical evolution of unpaid care work does not appear as a linear sequence in which older forms simply disappear. Instead, it unfolds as a process of dialectical layering, where each stage represents a distinct quantization of contradictions between cohesion and decohesion. In feudalism, unpaid care work operated within a cohesive subsistence layer, tightly bound to the survival of households and communities, yet subordinated within patriarchal authority and feudal hierarchies. In early capitalism, this cohesion fractured as production and reproduction were radically separated: care work was privatized and invisibilized, confined to the nuclear family, stripped of communal supports, and denied recognition within the wage system. Contradictions intensified as women were simultaneously drawn into industrial wage labor while still bearing the full weight of unpaid domestic responsibilities. With neoliberal globalization, care work entered a new phase as a superposed fragmented layer, transnationalized and commodified, outsourced through global care chains while rendered precarious by austerity and market logics.
Crucially, Quantum Dialectics insists that these historical layers do not vanish as new stages emerge. Rather, they persist in superposition, entangled across time and space. Elements of feudal subsistence care continue to survive in rural economies and kinship-based networks; the ideological residues of early capitalist domesticity remain powerful in shaping cultural expectations of motherhood and family life; and the commodified, precarious arrangements of neoliberal globalization coexist alongside these older forms. This superposition generates what may be called historical entanglement, where multiple epochs of care intersect and overlap, creating a complex field of contradictions. Care work today thus embodies a palimpsest of past and present: subsistence, privatized domesticity, and commodified global services all coexisting, often within the same household or community.
As contradictions accumulate across these layers, the system becomes increasingly unstable, approaching the conditions for a potential phase transition in the social organization of care. Just as in physics, where matter under pressure undergoes transformations from one state to another, so too in political economy unresolved contradictions reach thresholds that compel systemic reorganization. The entangled contradictions of unpaid care work—its indispensability and invisibility, its cohesion and decohesion, its simultaneous localization in families and globalization through markets—signal the approach of such a threshold. The future of care, therefore, cannot be understood as a simple reform of existing arrangements; it requires a dialectical transformation, a synthesis that revalues, redistributes, and restructures the very foundations of social reproduction.
Unpaid care work must be understood not as a timeless or “natural” aspect of family life but as a historically dynamic and evolving quantum layer of political economy. Each epoch has reorganized the structures of care according to its own particular balance of cohesive and decohesive forces. In feudal society, care was embedded in a cohesive subsistence framework, indispensable to survival yet tightly bound to patriarchal subordination. With the rise of early capitalism, cohesion fractured into a decohering industrial layer, as production and reproduction were separated, care work was privatized within the nuclear family, and women’s contributions became systematically invisibilized. Under neoliberal globalization, care work has entered a superposed fragmented layer, simultaneously cohesive—through global care chains and partial commodification—and decohesive, as it is rendered precarious, undervalued, and destabilized by austerity and transnational inequalities.
The framework of Quantum Dialectics allows us to see that unpaid care work operates as both the invisible foundation of surplus reproduction and a charged site of contradictions that continually destabilize social systems. Its invisibility is not accidental but structural: capitalism requires the hidden subsidy of unpaid care in order to maintain its apparent productivity and profit, while simultaneously suppressing its recognition as labor. Yet this invisibility generates contradictions that accumulate across historical layers, producing crises in the reproduction of labor power, fractures in gender relations, and tensions within households and communities. Far from being a static background, care work emerges as one of the most dynamic and contradictory forces shaping the evolution of political economy.
Transforming this field requires more than surface-level reforms; it demands a dialectical reorganization of care itself. Recognition must be the first step—acknowledging unpaid care work as socially necessary labor that underpins the entire economy. Redistribution must follow—ensuring that the burdens of care are shared equitably across genders, classes, and institutions rather than falling disproportionately on women. Finally, the construction of universal care infrastructures—public childcare, eldercare, healthcare, and social support systems—must institutionalize care as a collective responsibility rather than a privatized duty. These steps are not only matters of gender justice but systemic imperatives for the sustainability of any future economy.
The future of political economy, therefore, lies in sublating the contradictions of unpaid care work, moving beyond its status as a hidden substrate of exploitation toward its transformation into a consciously organized field of social cohesion. Only by addressing the contradictions embedded within care—its indispensability and invisibility, its cohesion and decohesion—can society progress toward a higher synthesis in which the reproduction of life itself is liberated from structures of subordination and recognized as a central, collective foundation of human flourishing.
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