Warning strike in front of the Nuremberg Nord Clinic. Nationwide, 2.5 million employees work in the medical and nursing sectors, the majority of whom are women.
Photo: dpa/Daniel Karmann
Let’s remember: During Corona times there was suddenly talk of systemically relevant professions. And completely contrary to the norm of market-based democracy, this did not mean bankers, car manufacturers, coal and energy workers, IT experts, military personnel or even civil servants. This meant employees in health care, nursing, kindergartens and educational institutions. They received plenty of applause from balconies and many photos in the media. It was still a time of missed opportunities. Because what would have been possible if those responsible for the system had recognized their actual power? It can be assumed that, given their importance to the functioning of a democratic, caring society, these professional groups have much greater power than is generally assumed.
One could only imagine how powerful resistance activities by the system-relevant health and social professions can be, even if they are much smaller in number than in traditional worker protests. Malika Guellil shows that feminism does not have to be interpreted additionally here, but can only be thought of from the outset in feminist terms and in the context of climate justice. With her master’s thesis on care protests, which she defended at the University of Vienna in 2022 and for which she won the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Berlin sponsorship award, which has been awarded for over 20 years, Malika Guellil is helping to ensure that essential questions are asked, the prerequisite for the search for right answers, which in turn can lead to right action. The academic report from the University of Vienna already stated “that the author extracts a political ‘useful value’ from the study of her subject and puts forward concrete suggestions for action.”
The author is concerned with the possibility of transforming many protest actions into a movement that strives for fundamental changes. Empirical individual studies such as protest actions limited to individual professional groups are not unimportant, but can hardly make a contribution to overcoming the situation in society as a whole that is characterized by neoliberal capitalism. The “classic” left-wing theoretical approaches also often had difficulty understanding ecological, social, anti-racist, feminist, revolutionary theory and economic policy approaches as dialectically intertwined parts of a complex whole. If the many individual protest actions only make it into the traffic reports on the radio stations (“Due to a demonstration on the Vienna Ring, temporary closures and loss of time must be expected.”), then this suggests that there is still a long way to go before there is a movement across society Is away. Without a well-founded and sensually comprehensible criticism of capitalism that aims at the whole, the Strabag employees who are stuck in a traffic jam because of a demonstration by care workers will hardly see nurses as allies. Isolation, the hallmark of contemporary capitalism, is working.
Malika Guellil had already submitted her master’s thesis when the book »The Omnivore. How Capitalism Devours Its Own Foundations” by Nancy Fraser was published. It’s worth reading the two books at the same time. In both epistemological terms, it is about overcoming a view that is content with merely depicting the given world and thereby believes that it has explained everything. Both see their task as expanding the critique of capitalism and showing alternative perspectives. Malika Guellil wrote her work part-time. She works in Volkshilfe Vienna, comparable to Volkssolidarität in Germany. The practical relevance is evident in the text.
In an original way, Malika Guellil refers to historical precursors of the care debate and to current discussions (Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Frigga Haug, Ulrike Knobloch, Oliver Marchart, Joan Tronto, Gabriele Winker and others). Also impressive is the combination of empirical results and theoretical work based on discourse analysis in the spirit of the Essex School, its continuation of the approaches of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe with the aim of reducing the economic reductionism that is still partly common in classical Marxist theory overcome, and their contemporary reinterpretation of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
The core idea is that revolutionary potential for changing society can only unfold when corresponding concepts or theories not only objectively meet the needs of the majority, but are also perceived as an expression of their own experiences. Just as Malika Guellil brings together the experiences of care workers with theoretical analyses, the possible meaning of these professional groups in the context of an anti-capitalist movement becomes visible from a perspective that is emotionally and logically understandable.
Malika Guellil: Heroes on the barricades. Care protests as a starting point for a social transformation strategy. VSA, 124 pages, br., €12.80.
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