What do socialists say about childcare?

The laundry is never truly finished under capitalism

Many woman find themselves locked into working to pay for childcare, and paying for childcare to be able to work. Nursery fees are exorbitant, while nursery workers are paid a pittance. 

Today, private companies control around 80 percent of under-fives childcare. The “childcare industry” is worth around £6.7 billion.

Caring for children is seen as the responsibility of an individual or a couple. But capitalism needs children for a constant supply of labour. We’re criticised for having too many children, or not enough. As we cope alone, having a child forces women to depend on their partners, private childcare or meagre state benefits.

Class has a huge impact on childcare. Some women can afford to employ working class women, many from the Global South, to take care of the boring, irritating and isolating aspects of childcare.

Or they get rid of the problem by dumping their kids in abusive private schools. Today’s crisis in childcare is rooted in the industrial revolution.

Working class women in the 1830s and 40s were the first to be systematically pushed into working outside the home, in mines, mills and factories. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were among the first socialists to develop a theoretical and practical response to this crisis of childcare.

As Engels wrote, “The employment of women at once breaks up the family— for when the wife spends twelve or thirteen hours every day in the mill, and the husband works the same length of time there or elsewhere, what becomes of the children? They grow up like wild weeds, they are put out to nurse for a shilling or 18 pence a week, and how they are treated may be imagined.”

Engels quoted from Manchester coroners’ reports to demonstrate how many children died from accidents and narcotics while being cared for. He described how women returned to work just three or four days after giving birth. They had to rush home in the dinner break and spend the day with painful breasts leaking milk.

But Marx and Engels were not nostalgic for the family of the past. They and other socialists wanted the family to be replaced by the collective provision of childcare. Engels also developed a historical understanding of childcare.

Human societies developed many ways of caring for children in extended family or diverse kinship groups. There was nothing natural about a family based on a heterosexual couple.

In 1915, socialist Alexandra Kollontai described the widespread fear that falling birthrates were threatening the supply of fresh labour. She argued that working class women could not reconcile the demands of arduous work and caring for children, so they had no choice but have less babies.

The immediate cause of what Kollontai called the “problem of motherhood” was the failure of the state to provide for mothers and children. Fundamentally, this “problem” was rooted in methods of production which force women to choose between earning a wage and caring for children.

Overcoming the contradiction between capitalist production and caring for children was at the heart of the Bolsheviks programme after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Collective The new workers’ state immediately introduced new laws to give women paid maternity leave.

These legal changes were just a step on the road to providing collective and endlessly flexible alternatives to privatised childcare. Such alternatives could include 24-hour creches, nurseries based in workplaces and housing which supports different ways of living.

Parents would cease to own and control their children. Biology would be one aspect of the relationships between adults and children—but other relationships would have the space to flourish. Children would be loved and nurtured by family, friends, professionals and the wider community. We want to create a whole society which values care and love not profit and competition.