Capitalising babies

Under Labor's system, there was no cap on the number of long day care centres that private operators could set up. The Howard government intensified Labor's market focus, ending operational subsidies to community-based care in 1997 and then in 2000 introducing the Child Care Benefit (a more generous version of Labor's child-care assistance scheme). ABC Learning cares for 120,000 children and employs 16,000 staff so clearly there are many casualties to this system of childcare. It exploits children, parents, and workers in the interests of profit.

The failure of commercial childcare and the disaster of the melamine toxic milk episode lead us to examine how 20th century capitalism has exploited women and their babies and children. Women’s dissatisfaction while caring at home has been amply described by Betty Freidan and others. Their factual reports of the unhappy lives of many a suburban mother and housewife contributed in some part to the mass co-option of discontented women into the workforce.

And what a bonanza for capitalism! Yet another hoard of consumers. Once women left home and hearth in exchange for the money and recognition that could be found at work, baby formula companies readily filled the void vacated by the decrease in the production of breastmilk, and childcare operators solved the problem of who would care for the offspring.

This consumptive cure for domestic discontent was the easy option and was not what feminism was about. Feminism did not advocate giving up breast feeding and handing babies over to commercial operators. Instead, feminism sought to improve the lot of those mothers who wanted to remain at home caring for children and among its plentiful aims was the struggle to fight domestic violence and male domination, and to provide “the village” to bring up the child.

What the conversations around these current disasters lack is the acknowledgement that our society's abuse of women and capitalist economics has lead to a society which accepts that cheap formula feeding is a valid substitute for breast milk, and that commercial childcare is indispensable to modern life. In short, all things are commodities to be exploited for the profits of capitalism.

Anne Manne, author of Motherhood, says that all the “mother wars” regarding paid work and stay at home mothers avoid discussing the new capitalism.

She quotes German social theorist Jurgen Habermas, who calls this the colonisation of our life world by the values of the market. The penetration of the values and assumptions of the market place seeps inexorably into every port of every relationship, however intimate.