Decapitalising Residential Child Care – really radical reset strategies
This analysis applies the lens of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism to the English residential child care sector, a landscape where the privatisation of stress and the commodification and marketisation of care have created a system that feels impossible to replace, despite its evident dysfunction being documented in many ways.
Fisher variously defined ‘capitalist realism’ one such being as “more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”
In the field of Residential Child Care the inability of thinkers to come up with an alternative economic/funding model in response to the rise of neoliberal capitalism has created a vacuum that has facilitated the birth of a project with a capitalist realist perspective, Regional Care Co-operatives, as a control of variables notably needs and funding. In Fisher’s view capitalist realism has the potential to outlive such neoliberal capitalist projects, but that the opposite would not be true.
Fisher raises the idea of ‘business ontology’ in which purposes and objectives are understood exclusively in business terms. In such uniformly business-oriented social conditions he explains there is no place for the ‘public sphere’ and its only chance at survival is by means of extinguishing the business framework in public services
The tendency to large formations, the co-operatives or large providers, is a current feature but unlikely to be permanent, decomposition and further recomposition will be necessary and inevitable, and so we may now start to imagine what this stage beyond the current stage might look like. We do this after having considered the conjuncture of current Residential Child Care.
- The “Market-Saturated” Reality: Residential Child Care as Capitalist Realism
In another definition Mark Fisher defines capitalist realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
In the context of English residential child care, this realism is absolute. Despite the dominant critique of ‘profiteering’, where private equity firms often extract 20% profit margins from local authority (LA) budgets, the system continues to expand. The fact that approx. 85% of the sector is privately owned is not seen as a policy choice, but as an naturalistic reality. Even as the government implements “Family First” policies aiming for a 33% reduction in placements, the private market continues to multiply quicker than state alternatives. This is the hallmark of capitalist realism: the state acknowledges the system is broken but acts as if it is powerless to operate outside of market logic.
- Reflexive Impotence and the “Regional Care Cooperative”
Fisher spoke of ‘reflexive impotence’: the condition where people know things are bad but feel they can do nothing about it. Local authorities are trapped in this state. They might attempt to curb providers through Regional Care Cooperatives (RCCs), yet likely these structures will function merely as more efficient procurement hubs for the same private providers.
The strategy of LAs outsourcing care while providing the building, then claiming it as their own, is a classic Fisherian ‘simulation’. It is a bureaucratic performance designed to satisfy Ofsted, as care auditor, while maintaining the underlying neoliberal structure.
In such a way the state is all but no longer a provider of care; it is a “broker” of contracts, unable to imagine a world where it directly manages the messy, expensive reality of residential life without a profit-motivated intermediary.
- Market Stalemate: The Threat of Price Capping
The threat of price capping of providers is frequently used by the government to signal action. However, within a capitalist realist framework, these threats are often toothless. Private providers holding the majority of the beds hold a dominant position in a transactional relationship. the state to ransom. Regional care co-operatives are designed to reverse the dominance in the relationship. However that is for a future, currently if a price cap is too low, private equity potentially exits the market, a reality that would leave thousands of vulnerable children without placement.
The state is thus forced to subsidise the very profit making it critiques. This mirrors the 2008 bank bailouts Fisher cited: the private childcare market has become too big to fail, or more accurately, too integrated to replace.
- Alternative Futures: Decapitalising Care
To move beyond capitalist realism, Fisher argued for the “re-politicisation” of mental health and social structures. Decapitalising residential child care requires moving from “market logic” to “solidarity logic.”
These arguments reveal that the ‘radical reset’ of children’s social care, as proclaimed by the Minister, is nothing of the sort. Radical action would be well beyond that being enacted.
- The Public-Communal Model (Commoning Care)
Instead of the slow expansion of traditional LA homes, an alternative future involves “commoning.” This would mean the state funding community-led, non-profit trusts where the surplus is legally required to be reinvested into the children’s outcomes and staff wages. This breaks the private equity extraction model.
- Decoupling Care from property
Currently, one reason for private homes multiplying is because the guaranteed income from placements made goes to fund the acquisition of are attractive property assets. A decapitalised future would see the state reclaiming the land and buildings as social infrastructure. If the building is owned by the public, the care provided within it can be tendered to small, local cooperatives or public teams, removing the rent-seeking element that attracts extractive capital.
- Really radical “Family First” via Economic Support
A true alternative involves providing direct, radical economic support to families through de-commodifying family life, giving parents the time and resources to care, rather than pathologising their poverty. This decommodifiying argument is one NCERCC has promoted consistently as being aligned with good parenting creating conditions for an emotionally secure childhood. It involves putting care at the centre of economic thinking and planning (NCERCC summer planned document)
- Conclusion: Escaping the Loop
The ratio ever widening between private and public care is a symptom of a state that has forgotten how to build.
To decapitalise residential care, involves first breaking the psychological spell that says only the market can provide efficiency.
As Fisher famously noted (following Jameson and Zizek) , “the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.”
In England, we must make it easier to imagine a child’s home as a place of sanctuary (a subject NCERCC is preparing thinking on and around for later in the year), rather than an entry on a private equity balance sheet.
Further reading
Fisher, Mark (2022) [2009]. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2nd ed.). Winchester, UK: Zer0 Books
