Care work has consequences, and recognizing those effects—the burden it places not only on individuals and households but also on the social fabric of a community—is essential for changing how we view and value social reproduction. Without this recognition, we consign ourselves to a version of the good life that demands much more than it gives, especially for those on the margins of power and privilege. This is one of the central arguments in Shirin M. Rai’s insightful and often compelling recent book, Depletion: The Human Cost of Caring. For Rai, it is not enough to argue that social reproduction should be valued, that life-making should not be subordinated to profit, or that the labor involved in caring, whether paid or unpaid, is a resource upon which capitalism depends for its survival. Instead, society should acknowledge that the work of social reproduction causes harm; it carries a cost. As Rai explains, care work is draining, even when it is consented to, and this depletion must be accounted for and reversed; otherwise, it will only worsen. Our lives and the quality of our living depend on it. In that sense, Rai is making not just a conceptual claim but a political one. Depletion is a call for change.
Throughout the book’s chapters, especially in the carefully crafted empirical sections that form its foundation, Rai skillfully develops this argument. She demonstrates that harm is experienced in various ways and to differing extents on the level of everyday life, based on factors such as race, gender, class, generation, and localized experiences of time and space. All harm is not equal. Therefore, any analysis of depletion’s effects, of “how” it occurs (and not just that it happens), must be intersectional and rooted in the specific context in which life is lived. Yet despite the need to attend to difference, a process Rai calls “decentering,” depletion through social reproduction remains a universal reality that crosses borders and boundaries. It is a planetary problem. The reason? Capitalism, with its legacies of racism, slavery, colonial plunder, expropriation, and environmental degradation, along with the unequal social relations it fosters—particularly in its hypermarketized neoliberal form—is a global system prone to crises. During moments of crisis, including the crisis of care that motivates Rai’s analysis, the complex effects of depletion intensify, and our capacity to mitigate the damage diminishes. That makes care a site of struggle, and it must be recognized as such if we are to prevent catastrophe, especially on an ecological level, and move toward a world where depletion is reduced, toward a caring world.
What makes Rai’s portrayal of depletion so vivid is that, at its core, the book is about storytelling. It’s about creating space, through narrative, for the lived experiences of women and children—those in both the Global North and South—to reveal the effects of depletion, along with strategies used to manage and, in some cases, to try to change the material conditions that cast a shadow over their daily lives. By offering us stories, using the words of her interlocutors, and providing us with images—including the visual analysis in the sixth chapter about the Amadiba community in South Africa—Rai gives emotional weight to her political and conceptual claims. In short, the book presents not only an argument about depletion and why recognizing it matters, but also, through storytelling and the beauty of its writing, it conveys and evokes the truth behind that message. She shows us what’s at stake.
Given the range of methods Rai employs, including what she calls the “Feminist Everyday Tool Kit,” the book promotes a level of methodological creativity and experimentation that is often lacking in more traditional approaches to political science, especially those that rely solely on quantitative methods. It is not that numbers aren’t useful, but they can mask texture and nuance. Our methods must stem from the questions we ask, rather than our questions being driven by normative assumptions about methods within the discipline. For a study focused on understanding the negative costs of caring, its intensity, and on clarifying the intersecting regimes of power that shape the present and future of those who bear the burden of social reproduction, developing a more creative methodological framework is not only necessary to accomplish the work, as Rai emphasizes, but it also makes the book more powerful and persuasive than it might otherwise be.
Having said that, Depletion does not completely escape disciplinary norms. Aside from her theoretically integrated analysis of the “anticipatory harm” experienced by the Amadiba community mentioned earlier, the stories that animate the empirical chapters are often weighed down and sometimes overshadowed by her decision to persistently review existing scholarship in a way that feels disruptive to and unnecessary for the narrative arc of her argument. This is unfortunate for a writer of Rai’s skill, although it’s not unique to her. Depletion is an academic book that could have reached a wider audience had she given more space for her stories to breathe. Politically, scholars on the left might also be disappointed by Rai’s conclusions on how depletion can be reversed, especially regarding her comments on transformation. Despite the book’s consistent critiques of capitalism and its suggestion that capitalism and its social relations are responsible for depletion’s harms, it surprisingly avoids stating the obvious: that capitalism, as a global system and what Sylvia Wynter calls its “mode of domination,” must be abolished. Saying this does not mean we need to “wait” for the revolution, as Rai seems to suggest early in the text. To the contrary, it means undertaking the challenging task of making the transformation of our sociopolitical totality a shared horizon, which entails a form of social (re)production at the cultural and ideological levels. For me, such an abolitionist project embodies the essence of a transformative approach to world-making and defines an ethics of care.
