Marcela Uchôa

The March 2020 implementation of the Informal Caregiver Statute in Portugal at the onset of the pandemic revives the need to debate the condition of women in caregiver roles, as well as the role of care and domestic work in capitalist societies. Thinking through the feminist lens on primitive accumulation that affects semi-peripheral societies like Portugal helps us to understand ambiguous positions regarding public policies. These policies are still proposed as guarantees for women to perform jobs with minimum security, jobs that actually allow for privatising a responsibility of the State. In this article, we mean to contextualise and problematise the Informal Caregiver Statute through a discussion about capitalism, patriarchy, the sexual division of labour and the demise of the welfare state.

The result of Hannah Arendt’s study of bourgeois revolutions reflects not only the contradictions and dichotomies of her thought, but is an important diagnosis of the impact of liberal policies, their contradictions and evolution within the history of democracy. Modern republicanism, although critical of liberalism, assimilated elements inherent to liberal democracy, for example, the importance of the law, always imputed based on ideological political precepts of its time. The relevance of this analysis allows us not only to understand the bases of the philosopher’s political thought, but its development in what she calls: public space. This must be a place for the expression of opinions, and therefore, for Arendt, without plurality, politics and public freedom are compromised to the extent that they make it impossible to maintain a space for the realization of freedom. However, in an unequal world, who can exercise their citizenship freely in public space? Was the liberal promise capable of providing these guarantees? In dialogue with Habermas and beyond, we intend with this investigation to outline the weaknesses of a bourgeois notion of the public sphere and to enunciate the urgency of building an ideal of republicanism based on popular demands.