The issue of domestic work and care has been fundamental in the proposal for the liberation of working women, so the importance of its resolution is undeniable. Therefore, placing the issue within the capitalist social relationship and implementing struggle processes to overcome it is a major task.

With this text, we intend to address the limits of the monitoring proposals, both of professional politicians and of social partners. Without wishing to enter too much into theoretical debates, from a critical attitude, we intend to address strategies and organizational forms based on the demand for a public and community surveillance system.

The context of crisis is characterized by the inability to accumulate profit, a basis that affects all areas, making the bourgeoisie more difficult to maintain its class position. Limiting the capitalist crisis to increase economic performance and accumulate it requires internal restructuring of the same system. For this, for a new cycle of accumulation, reforms and adjustments are carried out, within which we understand the economic and political offensive that the bourgeoisie has opened against the working class. Decision-makers in the global productive process are the ones who drive these measures through different institutions. These institutions, as has been said, devalue the working class, thus generalizing the proletarian character as our way of life.

With regard to domestic tasks and care, this process raises two questions: the first, the downward trend in the working conditions of the sector, mostly of the female sector, and the quality of the same services, and the second, the privatization of care and cleaning services, which ultimately depend on public investment by public institutions, are controlled and managed by private companies. And it is important to highlight the collaboration of the institutions, which play a fundamental role: they outsource these companies, set working conditions and strengthen privatization.

This situation, incapable of generating salary improvements and guaranteeing access and quality of services, generates a growing social concern about the decrease of services essential for the reproduction of the working class. As a result of this inability, some sectors on the left have drawn up a proposal for a programme to address the issue of household and care tasks. Regardless of the form of organization they adopt, they place care as a base for transformation in the face of the declining living conditions of society, and it is articulated through three axes: the right to receive care, the right to care under equal conditions and the right to work under worthy conditions. Thus, they intend to try to construct a new culture of care, that is, by means of a fundamental change in the organization of life, they propose a progressive transformation towards a more just society. The collective right to surveillance becomes a strategic slogan based on the symbiosis between the State and the community, granted under the criterion of capital and which ultimately establishes the nature of any social relationship.

In order to restructure surveillance, from a Community perspective, a partnership between different actors is proposed. Institutions that should strengthen public benefits, cooperatives that would work for a transformative social economy, commit themselves to fair working conditions, and social groups that would form the social basis of all this. All of them, in one way or another, demand the response from the base of the crisis of care and demand that the State expand rights, that is, the strengthening of public policies and their complementation with voluntary networks of local level based on solidarity.

This approach presents the state as a neutral agent, as if it had economic and financial decision-making capacity. The problem, therefore, does not place the nature of the state in classicism, but in a purely technical problem that could be solved with a change of will from government politicians. In other words, they intend to strengthen the institutional aspect that these policies would carry out and to manage their implementation, in the confidence that these parties will carry out their demands through social pressure.

At the same time, economic funding is required to strengthen public policies. A fair redistribution of profits through tax reform is therefore proposed. Thus, through this perspective, it leads us to distinguish between good and bad capitalists, thinking that some capitalists, in their goodness, can protect the interests of the proletarians, but for this they should avoid their privileges, denying their own existence of class.

In summary, all the proposals derived from this concept are based, on the one hand, on the institutional demand and, on the other hand, on local welfare measures or works that complete the function of complementing the lack of work of public administrations. In addition, in times of crisis, formal desires continue to have a greater inability to apply them, since maintaining the profits of the owner classes requires limiting the investment associated with the reproduction of the working class: reducing health, education, surveillance services...

They complement the discursive rhetoric, in addition, with the creation of community surveillance networks, such as those in the neighborhood or in the villages. They bet on the construction by the edges as resistance, which ultimately leads to the creation of small oasis without capitalism. The revolution, the socialization of the means of production, including the socialization of care, moves away, imposing the strategy of the “commons”, that is, the self-organized actions that think outside capitalism acquire centrality in this proposal.

Those who place the change of custody in capitalism carry out the one-off changes through formal demands. Thus, political action and the possibility of struggle are situated at the borders of the State, in the game between what allows and what does not allow it. This removes all political will that needs to revolutionize the situation and is organized within the framework of class independence. In this way, these reforms become a means of maintaining current living conditions rather than increasing political capacities: the misery and domination of workers.

These actions or political orientations, which in principle could have the intention of constructing an alternative to the current surveillance model, do not assume a revolutionary basis because they do not assume the practical implications of the analysis. In short, the work carried out by these political declarations is capitalized by the professional political parties and their leftist parties, and their sole objective is to maintain their position in the management of capital, obtaining votes.

The issue of domestic work and care requires a comprehensive vision that guides the political struggle in clear strategic concepts. We believe that the solution is, on the one hand, to end the sexual division of labour, which in turn requires an end to the social division of labour based on economic benefit. On the other hand, it is necessary to ensure the universal socialization of domestic tasks, which is the only possibility to guarantee quality and free services for all, whose proposals for statalization or publication, as has already been mentioned, depend on the dynamics of capital, so that they cannot and cannot guarantee a quality and free service for all people, which would mean leaving aside their privilege of class for the benefit of general welfare.

These strategic lines are essential to ensure quality living and working conditions for all people, ending the hierarchy of work processes by qualification and ensuring equal social recognition for all work processes. Likewise, they are a premise to be cared for in a dignified and humane manner, guaranteeing both the realization of these services and the quality conditions of the people to whom they are destined. Thus, many prolarian women have to put an end to the workload we do in their families, in those of others, even if we manage to free some middle-class women from these functions, because not all women have freed themselves. It would also protect the services necessary for all proletarian families to have a quality life, since many of them today cannot guarantee these services due to lack of resources, time and strength.

The critical analysis of previous experiences in the field of surveillance can be the appropriate starting point for determining possible initiatives and institutions in the construction of socialism. Cots, kindergartens, canteens, laundries, sports institutions or leisure organisations are examples of various socialist processes throughout history. These processes gave a first impulse to the socialization of these works and facilitated the integration of the working woman as a political agent in the militant work. However, it is important to place the political struggle today. The organization and the socialist struggle cannot limit society’s anger to the level of denunciation, it is necessary to articulate the strength of the workers as a whole and make political proposals in this regard. For this, it is necessary that, even in the care setting, processes are carried out to fight this problem. These struggles and experiences must serve to guarantee the survival of the proletarians in the best conditions for the development of the political struggle and to carry out the experimentation of a socialist power, always as a complement to the process of dismantling capitalism. This whole approach must therefore lead to a political activation of working women, while at the same time contributing to the construction of an independent power in favour of a society that guarantees the well-being of all.