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Jason Hickel, Don Kalb, Maria Dyveke Styve, and Federico Tomasone: Reorganize Production to Serve Life, Not Profit

Image 1: Jason Hickel’s research focuses on political economy, inequality, and ecological economics

On 15 May 2025, Jason Hickel – economic anthropologist, leading degrowth theorist and author of popular works such as The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World – delivered a provocative lectio magistralis as the Third Annual Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP) Lecture at the University of Bergen, sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Brussels Office (RFL). In his lecture, “The Struggle for Development in the Twenty-First Century”, Hickel rejected the idea that the development of the Global South can take place within the logic of extractive capitalism and economic imperialism. Only through movements for economic sovereignty and eco-socialist transition will it be possible to escape the traps of neo-colonial exploitation.

After the conference, he spoke with Don Kalb, GRIP director, Maria Dyveke Styve, GRIP affiliate, and Federico Tomasone of the RLF about the struggle for climate and redistributive justice, reflecting on the contradictions of liberalism, the ecological and social crises of global capitalism, and the possibilities for a democratic socialist future. In the discussion, Hickel shared his evolving perspective on Marxist theory, critiqued the limits of horizontalist politics, and underscored the urgency of building new political vehicles capable of responding to the planetary emergency.

DK: Yesterday, you argued that it’s essential to rethink the Russian Revolution and China’s history – not only for international politics, but also for working-class politics and global freedom. It struck me that your narrative has evolved into a more explicit anti-liberal reading of recent history. That wasn’t so clear in The Divide, but it was evident in your lecture. Have you shifted toward a more Marxist interpretation?

Yes, I think that’s fair. Two things are happening. First, my analysis has sharpened over time. Second, when I wrote The Divide, I was addressing an audience largely unfamiliar – and often uncomfortable – with Marxist or socialist language. I wanted to communicate effectively with people working in international development, many of whom are wary of what they think are ideological labels.

That strategic decision had a cost: The Divide largely bypasses the question of socialism, even though many of the countries I discuss were socialist or engaged in Communist revolutions. That absence weakens the analysis. You can’t fully understand the history of global inequality without addressing the attempts of socialist revolutions and the Non-Aligned Movement to break from capitalist imperialism and implement alternative development models, followed by the violent Western backlash that took the form of the Cold War.

Since then, I’ve increasingly used concepts like the capitalist law of value, which I now see as central to explaining our ecological and social crises. We live in a world of immense productive potential, and yet we face deprivation and ecological breakdown. Why? Because under capitalism, production only happens when and where it’s profitable. Social and ecological needs are secondary to the returns to capital.

DK: That’s precisely what struck me. I compared your work with that of David Graeber. You both start from anthropology and expand into politics, but the crucial difference, I think, is that you grasp the law of value – whereas Graeber, as an anarchist, tends to evade it. Would you agree that contemporary conditions compel us to reclaim key Marxist concepts and communicate them to a younger public?

Absolutely. As scholars, we should use the best tools available to explain material reality – and Marxist concepts remain analytically powerful. We’re in a moment where those tools can be reintroduced and popularized in new ways.

David Graeber was a brilliant and wildly creative thinker, and I learned a lot from him – both as a friend and a scholar. But you’re right, he approached political economy differently. In his later work, especially The Dawn of Everything, he began to acknowledge the limitations of anarchist organizing models like horizontalism. He saw the need for functional hierarchies – structures that can actually get things done without betraying egalitarian principles.

DK: That connects to another question. In 2011, the populist left failed to anticipate what I would call a global counter-revolution. What we’re seeing today isn’t just a resurgence of fascism – it’s a broader anti-liberal and anti-neoliberal insurgency. Some forces are anti-woke, others anti-globalist, and they don’t always share a coherent ideology, but some of the undertow is anti-liberal and potentially anti-capitalist, too. How does your work engage with this complex reaction?

It’s paradoxical. In one sense, this seems like the worst moment to talk about socialism. But in another, it’s precisely the right moment – because liberalism is visibly collapsing, and the rise of far-right populism is a symptom of that failure.

Liberalism claims to champion universal rights, equality, and environmentalism, but it also clings to a model of production dominated by capital and profit maximization. Every time those two commitments clash, liberal leaders choose capital – and everyone sees the hypocrisy. That’s why liberalism is losing legitimacy. The danger is that, in the absence of a compelling left alternative, disaffected workers gravitate toward right-wing narratives – xenophobic conspiracy theories, scapegoating immigrants, and so on. Fascists don’t offer real solutions, but they’re filling a void left by liberal and even social democratic parties, which have abandoned any structural critique of capitalism.

We need a democratic socialist alternative that addresses the root contradictions of capitalism, including its ecological irrationality. But building that alternative will require real political vehicles – not just protest movements, but mass-based parties with deep roots in the working class.

DK: Let’s return to the idea of the law of value. You touched on it earlier, but can you explain why it’s so essential to understanding the crises we face today?

The law of value explains why we experience shortages of socially and ecologically essential goods, even in an age of unprecedented productive capacity. Under capitalism, production is guided not by human or ecological needs, but by profitability. If something isn’t profitable, it doesn’t get made – no matter how necessary it is.

Take the green transition. We have the knowledge, the labour, and the resources to rapidly build renewable energy infrastructure, retrofit buildings, and expand public transit. But these aren’t profitable investments, so capital doesn’t fund them. Meanwhile, we continue producing luxury goods, fossil fuels, and weapons – things that actively harm people and the planet – because they are profitable. This contradiction is at the core of our ecological breakdown.

It’s funny, when people talk about shortages, they often refer to the socialist world, ignoring the sanctions and blockades those economies faced, even while their social outcomes were better than capitalist ones. Today, capitalism itself produces chronic shortages – of affordable housing, healthcare, education, and green technologies. This is a direct result of the law of value. We must overcome it if we are to survive.

FT: That brings me to Europe. The European Union tried to push a green capitalist agenda in recent years, but now we’re seeing a major shift towards militarization. What’s striking is that this agenda is being led by self-described liberals. Starmer in the UK, for instance, is at the forefront. The same is true in the European Parliament. How do you interpret this development?

It’s deeply disturbing. For years, European leaders told us there was no money to invest in decarbonization, public services, or social protections – because we had to uphold deficit and debt-to-GDP ratios to ensure price stability. But suddenly, when it comes to militarization, those rules are tossed aside. They’re ready to spend trillions on weapons and defence.

This reveals something critical: the deficit rules were never about economics. They were political tools used to block investment in social and ecological goals while maintaining an artificial scarcity of public goods. Now that military spending is politically expedient and profitable, the limits disappear. It’s a betrayal of the working class and future generations.

Moreover, their analysis is flawed. They seem to think that militarization will bring sovereignty and security to Europe, but true sovereignty would require a complete rethink of Europe’s geopolitical role. It would mean distancing from the United States and pursuing integration and peaceful cooperation with the rest of the Eurasian continent – including China – and the Global South. Instead, European elites remain trapped in the logic of US hegemony. Western Europe has been treated as a forward base for US military strategy for decades. Germany, for example, is filled with American bases. The US wants Europe to antagonize the East – but this is in the US interest, not in Europe’s. We must reject this. Europe’s true interests lie in peace and cooperation with its neighbours.

FT: That’s a perfect segue to my second question: the historical burden of European imperialism. Europe’s ruling classes have inflicted enormous harm over the past few centuries. How do we move beyond that legacy? Is there a real contradiction between the interests of the European working class and those of capital when it comes to foreign policy?

It’s an important question. First of all, yes – policies like the current wave of militarization are clearly aligned with the interests of European capital. That’s why they’re happening. But they run directly counter to the needs of ordinary people and to the stability of the planet. This reveals a deeper truth: there is a fundamental conflict between the interests of working people and those of capital. It forces us to confront the myth of European democracy. We are told that Europe is a beacon of democratic values, but in reality, the interests of capital dominate our institutions.

Democracy was never a gift from the ruling class – it was fought for by working people. Even then, we only got a shallow version of it. The original democratic demands – decommodification of essential goods, workplace democracy, control over finance – were abandoned. Instead, we get elections every few years between parties that all serve capital, in a media environment dominated by billionaires. If we want real democracy, we need to extend it to the economy. That means overcoming the capitalist law of value and redirecting production toward social and ecological needs. That means democratizing the creation of money.

DK: Let’s pick up that thread – money. One of the more original aspects of your work is the focus on the production of money itself. Could you explain how monetary sovereignty fits into your broader critique of capitalism?

Under capitalism, the state holds the legal monopoly over currency issuance, but in practice, it franchises that power out to commercial banks. Banks create the big majority of money in the economy through the process of issuing loans. But they only issue loans when they expect them to be redeemable and therefore profitable – when they serve the accumulation of capital. This means that the power to create money, and thereby mobilize labour and resources, is subordinated to capitalist profitability. It’s a direct expression of the capitalist law of value. Productive capacities are only activated if they yield returns to capital. That’s how banks steer the economy: not toward what we need, but toward what is profitable.

To change that, we need two things. First, a credit guidance framework – a set of rules that direct bank lending away from destructive sectors like fossil fuels and luxury emissions, and toward socially necessary investments. Second, we need to expand the role of public finance. The state must directly create money to fund essential goods and services – renewable energy, housing, public transit – even if these aren’t directly profitable to private capital.

There’s a myth that we can only produce what is profitable. But in reality, as long as we have the labour and resources, we can produce anything we collectively decide to. The only barrier is political. Once we democratize money creation, we can liberate production from the profit imperative and organize it according to human and ecological needs.

DK: That’s compelling. Many of my left-wing friends in Europe argue that the euro is the main obstacle. They advocate for returning to national currencies to regain sovereignty. I take a different position: we should democratize the euro itself. These are small, interdependent states. Returning to national currencies risks division and renewed dependence on external powers like the US, who will play us off against each other. What do you think?

I’m very sympathetic to that argument. I understand the appeal of monetary sovereignty through national currencies – it offers more direct control over production and spending. But it also fragments the struggle. If every Eurozone country must independently wage its own class battle for economic transformation, progress will be at best uneven and vulnerable. A more strategic route is to reform the rules of the European Central Bank. That could be done quickly, at the institutional level. We could enable member states to expand public investment immediately by suspending austerity constraints.

Critics will say this risks inflation, and yes, if you simply inject public finance without adjusting the rest of the economy, you may drive up demand for limited labour and resources. But eco-socialist degrowth offers a solution: scale down harmful and unnecessary production – SUVs, cruise ships, private jets – and reallocate labour and resources toward socially beneficial activities. This stabilizes prices while transforming the structure of the economy.

Inflation isn’t a technical obstacle – it’s a political one. The real reason austerity rules exist is to preserve space for capital to accumulate unchallenged. If we shift productive resources toward public goods, we threaten the dominance of capital in the system. That’s what elites are trying to prevent when they invoke debt ratios and deficit limits.

DK: There was a strange moment recently. Trump said, in reference to inflation, something like: “Instead of 18 Barbie dolls, your kids will have two.” His argument was that economic sovereignty is more important than material abundance. I found it thrilling – in a way, he’s articulating a kind of anti-consumerist message. Isn’t that part of the danger of fascism today? It sounds anti-neoliberal, but it’s not anti-capitalist.

That’s exactly right, and I found that moment interesting, too. Some people even claimed Trump was embracing degrowth, which is completely false. Degrowth is a fundamentally anti-capitalist idea. It means scaling down ecologically destructive and unnecessary production while scaling up public goods, ecological regeneration, and social equity. Trump is doing none of that.

But there’s something we can learn from this moment. He managed to sell the idea of material sacrifice – “fewer Barbie dolls” – in the name of sovereignty and national pride. That tells us something important: people are willing to accept limits to consumption if they’re framed within a broader, meaningful vision. Too often, we on the Left assume that people won’t accept any kind of material constraint. But that’s not true. What matters is the narrative. If we offer people a coherent vision of freedom, dignity, economic democracy, and a habitable planet, we can make the case for transformation. The challenge is crafting that narrative in a way that’s emotionally and morally compelling.

Of course, for degrowth to be just, we must ensure that basic needs are met. That’s where a public job guarantee comes in. It would allow us to redirect labour from harmful sectors to beneficial ones, with dignified wages and workplace democracy. That’s the difference between an eco-socialist transition and authoritarian austerity.

MDS: That makes me think about how to build a truly democratic socialist alternative. Especially in the Global North, how do we convince the working class that this future – based on global solidarity, limits, and justice – is like you said, better than what they have now?

It’s a critical question. We must help people understand that consumer abundance in the North is built on unequal exchange – on exploitation of the Global South’s labour and resources. The fast fashion, the cheap electronics, the frequent product replacement – all of it depends on a global system of appropriation. But more importantly, we must show that the working class in the North doesn’t actually win under this system. What they’ve gained in cheap consumer goods, they’ve lost in political agency, autonomy, and collective freedom. Their demands for decommodification, workplace democracy, and control over production have been abandoned.

Capital has used cheap imports to pacify working-class dissent, while consolidating its own power. So, the real prize for workers isn’t another iPhone – it’s democracy, dignity, and a liveable future. We need to reignite that vision, grounded in shared interests with the Global South. The key is to frame eco-socialist transformation not as a loss, but as a liberation – from exploitation, precarity, and ecological collapse. And that’s where solidarity becomes real: not charity, not development aid, but shared struggle for a better world.

MDS: Exactly. That’s the tension I see. Western elites are clearly the main culprits of imperialism and ecological destruction. But in countries like Norway, working-class people also materially benefit from unequal exchange – our welfare state is funded by oil rents, cheap imports, and global extractivism. How do we build anti-imperialist solidarity under those conditions? How do we support revolutionary change in the South while mobilizing the North?

It’s an essential and complex challenge. First, we have to recognize that the landscape has changed since the 1960s. Back then, many leaders in the Global South came to power through mass-based anti-colonial movements. They had mandates for socialist transformation. But over time, those movements were repressed, co-opted, or overthrown – often with Western backing – and replaced by comprador elites who benefit from the current imperial arrangement. These elites are not interested in liberation. They’re aligned with global capital, even if their own populations suffer. That’s why today’s emancipatory movements in the South must confront not only Western imperialism but also their own domestic ruling classes.

This is where national liberation comes in. It’s not a matter of aid or development; it’s about political sovereignty and collective power. Western progressives must support these movements – not through charity, but through solidarity. That means breaking with the logic of the development-industrial complex and backing grassroots revolutions that seek to reclaim control over resources, production, and governance. You’re right: workers in the North do benefit in some material ways. But they are also deeplydisempowered. They’ve cheap consumer goods but not democratic control of production. Capital has used unequal exchange to buy off demands for autonomy and dignity. So, the working class doesn’t really win. They’re offered illusions of prosperity, while their fundamental rights and freedoms erode.

We need a double-front strategy. In the Global South: national liberation movements that dismantle neo-colonial dependency. In the Global North: movements that demand democratic control over production and finance. Together, that’s the path to ending capitalism. It’s not optional – it’s an existential necessity.

DK: That makes sense, but it raises a real problem of political timing. If national liberation in the South cuts off value flows to the core, that would trigger inflation, shortages, and political backlash. Will working-class movements in the North be ready to respond fast enough – with public investment, social protections, and a new vision? Or will the far right get there first?

That’s the critical danger. If we don’t prepare, we could see a very grim outcome. Imagine a scenario where the Global South begins to successfully delink – whether through China’s Belt and Road Initiative, regional trade blocs, or other means. That cuts off flows of cheap labour, resources, and profits to the imperial core. Suddenly, consumption in the North contracts. If the Left hasn’t built a coherent post-capitalist plan, capital will act to preserve its dominance. And what does that look like? Fascism. Crushing labour at home, cheapening domestic wages, repressing dissent. That’s the path I think Trump is preparing for – not because he has a clear plan, but because the logic of empire’s decline demands it.

That’s why we must present a real alternative path. The good news is, we have the data. Research shows that we can maintain or even improve living standards in the North with much lower levelsof energy and resource use. But that requires decommodifying key services – housing, transit, health, education – to shield people from inflation and secure well-being outside of market dependencies. This is the Left’s task: to make sure the collapse of imperial consumption doesn’t become a gateway to authoritarianism, but a springboard to democracy and liberation.

DK: That brings us to a key issue: political organization. I think we all agree that protest alone is no longer sufficient. We saw enormous mobilizations over the past decade – Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion – but they didn’t result in real change. What comes next?

Exactly. The protest culture of the past decade, while incredibly energizing, has hit a wall. Massive climate demonstrations brought millions into the streets. For a moment, it felt like the political class would have to respond. But they didn’t. Nothing substantial changed.

We’re now in a moment of reckoning. People feel disillusioned because they realize these actions weren’t enough. The energy dissipates, and the system remains intact. That’s why I believe we need to return to something that many have been reluctant to talk about: the party. Not the traditional parties that operate within the confines of liberal institutions, but mass-based, working-class parties – vehicles for building real power. These must be rooted in unions, communities, and popular organizations. They must operate with internal democracy but also with strategic coherence. That may mean a return to something like democratic centralism, which proved more effective than horizontalism in achieving structural change.

FT: That resonates deeply. Many of us from our generation saw the rise and fall of the “movement of movements.” We believed in horizontalism – in assemblies, autonomy, consensus. But over time, it became clear that these forms were not durable or effective enough to confront capital. They were easily neutralized or repressed. Now we’re facing a crisis of mass demobilization, especially among the working class. After decades of neoliberal attacks, unions and labour organizations have been hollowed out or co-opted. But at the same time, the promises of social democracy are clearly dead. Capital no longer shares anything with workers. So, the old bargain is over, and the big question is: how do we rebuild?

That’s the question of the century, and it begins with clarity about what the working-class movement should be fighting for. Right now, many unions are trapped in a defensive posture – trying to preserve jobs by aligning with capital, hoping that growth will trickle down and keep their members afloat. But this logic is a trap. It’s embarrassing, frankly, that unions in 2025 still see capitalist growth as the solution to working-class precarity.

We need to move beyond shop-floor struggles for wages and conditions and reclaim the transformative ambitions of the labour movement. That means fighting for public job guarantees, for universal public services, for democratic control over production. Unions should be at the forefront of the ecological transition, not an obstacle to it. They must break from the logic of capital and align with the broader interests of humanity and the planet. Imagine: we can bring hundreds of thousands of people into the streets for wage demands. But why not go further? Why not demand the decommodification of higher education, or worker control over industry? We have the numbers. We have the power. What we need is the political vision.

MDS: I want to build on that. If we’re serious about rebuilding mass parties, how do we ensure that they’re internationalist in outlook? The far right has no problem organizing across borders. They collaborate. They strategize globally. But the left often retreats into national frameworks — especially in places like Norway, where people tend to focus on just protecting the welfare state. How do we organize transnationally, especially across global supply chains, where most of the world’s labour exploitation actually happens?

That’s such a crucial point. The Left’s political imagination is still largely confined by the nation-state, but capital is global. Supply chains are global. Fascism is increasingly global. Our response must be, too.

We should be organizing along supply chain lines – coordinating strikes and campaigns not just within countries, but across them. Global South workers, especially women in factories and agricultural sectors, are the backbone of the world economy. If we build solidarity between them and workers in the North – based on shared struggles rather than pity or charity – we can disrupt the system at its core. Imagine the power of coordinated actions across production nodes – from Bangladesh to Germany, from Mexico to Norway. That’s the level of strategic vision we need to develop. It’s not just possible – it’s necessary, and it begins with rebuilding internationalist institutions of working-class power.

FT: Yes, and to bring this home – our movements are facing a major generational question. We’ve seen waves of mobilization crash, time and again. The old forms don’t work anymore. But how do we reconstitute organization under current conditions, when the working class seems demobilized, and the Left’s institutions are still captured by liberalism?

It’s true. We’ve been through a long process of disorientation. The neoliberal assault dismantled the organizational infrastructure of the working class – its parties, its unions, its media platforms. So, we’re not starting from zero, but we are starting from a much weaker place, and you’re right: many institutions that still exist are stuck in a defensive mind-set. They’re clinging to social-democratic promises that no longer hold. Capital no longer needs to compromise. It’s offering nothing to the working class – not even stability.

The challenge is to rebuild —-not just react. We need a new organizational paradigm. That means clarity, discipline, long-term vision. It means being unapologetically political. And yes, it probably means a return to mass-based parties – but rooted in contemporary conditions, learning from both the strengths and the mistakes of the past.

DK: That reminds me of something from an earlier generation. In the Netherlands, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we had massive horizontalist squatter movements – tens of thousands of people willing to take the streets, occupy buildings, and physically resist police repression. It was revolutionary in energy, if not always in strategy. But we had no party structure. And eventually, the state responded with brutal repression and a cross-party political crackdown. The movement was dismantled, and within a few years, the Netherlands became one of the first “third-way” neoliberal democracies. That history is a warning.

Exactly. We’ve seen this pattern again and again. Horizontalism is great for mobilizing people quickly, for creating moments of radical imagination. But it’s not enough. When push comes to shove, it gets swept away. We need durable structures – organizations capable of holding ground, advancing demands, and taking power. We must learn from past failures, but also reclaim past strengths. Organization, discipline, clarity of vision – these aren’t authoritarian. They’re necessary. If we don’t build vehicles that can carry the struggle forward, we’re leaving the field open for authoritarian reaction.

FT: Finally, to loop back to the beginning – this really is a bifurcation moment, isn’t it? As Immanuel Wallerstein used to say, world-systems eventually reach points where their trajectories split. Either we find a way forward through transformation, or we spiral into fragmentation, repression, and ecological collapse.

Exactly. That’s what makes this moment so serious. Even if the far right isn’t fully aware of what it’s preparing for, the logic of global decline is pushing us in that direction. As the imperial core loses access to cheap labour and resources, the ruling class will respond by turning inward -crushing domestic labour and militarizing society. We’re already seeing this happen and if the left doesn’t offer an alternative – a post-capitalist vision rooted in justice, democracy, and ecological stability – then capital will manage the transition through violence and repression.

But we do have a chance. We know that human needs can be met with dramatically less energy and material throughput. We can build universal public services. We can stabilize prices without growth. We can reorganize production to serve life rather than profit. That’s the vision we must fight for. Not in the abstract, not one day, but now. Because the world we could live in is still possible, but it’s slipping away.

This interview was first published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Our gratitude for the right to republish.

Jason Hickel is a professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the author of several books including The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions and Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.

Don Kalb is founding editor of Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology and FocaalBlog, a professor of social anthropology at the University of Bergen and director of GRIP.

Maria Dyveke Styve is a Max Weber Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence and GRIP affiliate. Her research interests span the political economy of development, dependency theory, economic anthropology, decolonial epistemologies, racial capitalism, critical race theory and economic history. 

Federico Tomasone is Project Manager for Social Rights and Labour Policies at Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Brussels Office

Cite as: Hickel, J., Kalb, D., Dyveke Styve, M., & Tomasone, F. 2025. “Reorganize Production to Serve Life, Not Profit” Focaalblog 8 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/07/08/jason-hickel-don-kalb-maria-dyveke-styve-and-federico-tomasone-reorganize-production-to-serve-life-not-profit/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds

Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies, I have been frustrated to see hegemonic ideals about care, kinship, and residence distract attention from empirical realities and adequate solutions. Examples range from the ubiquitous representation of care as embodied by women health workers and mothers to the shocking silence about disproportionate burdens of coronavirus illness and death born by men, and the wildly incorrect assumption that most humans live in and are cared for by nuclear family households.

Covid masculinities

Much attention has been drawn to vulnerabilities of women nurses, health aids, and caretakers. More gender awareness is needed for millions of men performing essential jobs as sanitation workers, truck and bus drivers, agricultural workers, miners, fishers, and loggers. These occupations are absolutely vital for public health, yet were already among the most dangerous and deadly before adding exposure to coronavirus. Around the world, they are performed overwhelmingly by men, in patterns of workplace violence so highly gendered that, in countries like USA, men suffer 92% of occupational deaths. The workplace, then, is a realm that calls urgently for improved care.

Data from countries around the world show that coronavirus infections tend to be much more severe among men than women, with death tolls as high as two times greater for men (Bhopal and Bhopal 2020). In the US, the death rate from coronavirus for men is 1.6 times that of women. This intersects with disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and underlying conditions among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who are less wealthy and less educated. In many contexts, then, it is poorer less-white men who are most vulnerable to suffer critical illness and death from coronavirus (Rushovich et. al 2021). Care for these groups needs to be much more visible in news and policy responses.

While analyses of structural inequalities in occupation, residence, and healthcare rarely address masculinities, some airtime has been dedicated to men’s behavior. Studies in various contexts found men to be much more likely than women to go without masks and to break quarantine. How can criticism of the behavior of individual men shift to societal commitments to supporting self-care among all humans, including variously positioned men?     

Is it useful to blame men for getting sick? Feminists have struggled to motivate compassion for women whose conditions constrain the development of skills and confidence needed to establish dignified lives for themselves. Transitions to care-full worlds will also require compassion for boys and men whose gender expectations push them to demonstrate their manliness by performing dangerous labor in hazardous conditions, by exercising and enduring violence, and by taking risks with their health and their lives. Perhaps the devastating gendered impacts of the virus can spark mobilization against gender-linked violence that harms men and women in different ways.

While some people find safety and comfort at home, others face conflict and crowding, or lack homes altogether. Reports from diverse countries indicate that domestic violence has intensified during lock-downs, impacting women disproportionately. People who don’t even live in homes face different kinds of vulnerabilities. In most countries, women outnumber men among residents in long-term care centers, while men make up majorities as high as 90% in prisons, jails, migrant labor camps, homeless shelters, immigrant detention centers, and military barracks, all of which became hotspots for the virus. In these residential patterns too, the forms of violence and discrimination borne by men intersect with ethno-racial and class inequalities. Demands of care for those not living in households call for moral and institutional shifts away from private family responsibility toward community and commons.

Normative households

Kinship and sexuality are also fundamental in the organization of care. Many public health messages, exemplified by those pictured below, reinforce the widespread—and incorrect—assumption that contemporary populations live mostly in heteronormative nuclear households. In the US, however, only 20% of households consists of nuclear families, as measured by the US Census Bureau. Can we do better at supporting the other 80% to respond to this pandemic and conditions of life beyond?

A public health announcement banner shows a photograph of a man and woman seated on either side of two small kids. Text reads: Covid-19. Es en serio! #QuédateEnCasa. AUS: Asociación de Usuarios Sanitas
Image 1: One of many COVID prevention posters depicting nuclear family households that dominate public health messages in the world

The false portrayal of residential life as reflecting a normative kinship model limits support for the actual residential and kin arrangements through which care and provisioning are organized in today’s societies. Inaccurate assumptions that all people live like the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Jetsons seriously limit public health efforts by obscuring empirical realities, which are plural. Those public messages also operate to demean and delegitimize other ways of living, and to stifle creative responses to coronavirus and other challenges.

An illustration of a Black person, wearing comfortable clothes, seated and reading a book with a houseplant in the background. Text reads: Stay Home, Yew Yorkers. Do your part to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
Image 2: New Yorkers Stay Home poster

Across wealthy countries, the most common household category is a single person living alone (27% US and Canadian households, 40% of Swedish households). This New Yorkers Stay Home poster taps into possibilities of nourishing companionship in uni-person households through literature and interspecies relations (human & plant). Another creative response to needs for care and conviviality is found in queer dance parties organized online with scopes ranging from local communities to celebrity-filled global gatherings. This is not a trivial example; opportunities to dance, laugh, move together not only provide care and acknowledgement needed in quarantine (and other isolating conditions), they can also build values and pleasures outside the realm of economic competition, consumption, and profit. Alliances with LGBTQ and related social movements help to honor the diverse household and kin arrangements that people are already living, and to support innovations provoked by the pandemic, as well as those motivated by desires for positive transformation.

Where did this ill-fitting model come from?

Generations of anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a rich variety of arrangements for care, protection, provisioning, and regeneration of human communities. These are often lumped together under the term “extended family,” reinforcing the false assumption that all kinship is based on the nuclear family, from which other relations may “extend.”

Today, much public discourse, together with a surprising amount of academic work, ignores the diverse realities of kinship across cultures and through history, and instead features an ideological model of (re)production that was established and disseminated with the rise of colonial capitalism, through the following historical processes:

  • conceptual and institutional divorce of market-oriented activities identified as “productive labor” from other activities identified as “reproductive care“   
  • designation of the first as “masculine” and the second as “feminine” allocation of disproportionate monetary value, resources, and power to masculine-associated production 
  • 20th century push toward nuclear family households as economic and residential unit
  • media, political, and educational messages convey expectations that human organization be based in heteronormative nuclear family households where men are excluded from care work
Images of three families from classic cartoons: The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and the Jetsons. All three family images include a father, a mother, one or more children, and at least one pet.
Image 3: Images from cartoon series suggesting that humans have always and will always live in single-family homes among heteronormative nuclear families with man bread-winner and woman care-provider. Audiences worldwide have watched the Flintstones since 1960, the Jetsons since 1962, and the Simpsons since 1989.

What drives ongoing pushes to keep imposing this model on populations that it so poorly represents? Why continue allocating responsibility of care to putative nuclear families in strategies that overburden some and fall short of needed care for many?

One key motive is the role this model has played as an instrument of industrial capitalist growth, adapted to engineer and to justify forms of appropriation that support profit and accumulation. The model has also been instrumental to the militarization of domestic and international conflicts related to this push. For me, then, challenging normative assumptions about this gender-kinship model is a vital move to curb and to heal eco-social damages provoked by the drive for growth.

What policies, practices, messages can support and motivate people of all identities to organize care with healthier arrangements of care?

A silver lining can be found in the potential of historical crises (like COVID-19 and climate break-down) to destabilize established orders, opening possibilities for new alliances toward healthier and more equitable worlds.

While respect for planetary boundaries demands degrowth of the total quantities of resources and energy transformed each day by the global economy, some features need to be nurtured and developed, namely infrastructures and institutions of care that enhance the well-being of more people in more places. Care-full paths forward are being explored by Degrowth and Feminism(s) Alliance (FaDA), in contexts including the coronavirus pandemic (Paulson 2020).

Amid the pandemic, we have been happily surprised to see governments experimenting with policies proposed in our book The Case for Degrowth (Kallis et al. 2020): companies and governments have reduced working hours, implemented work-sharing, and subsidized workers during quarantine and business closings. Enhanced public services have supported household and community economies, and mechanisms such as the US Defense Production Act have been mobilized to secure vital supplies and services.

Can we think about these moves as anticipatory strategies that may secure ongoing care for populations, and slow down the rush toward future disasters? For example, can provisional cash payments to sustain residents through the crisis lead the way to basic care incomes? Can defense budgets shift emphasis from updating military armaments toward protecting and regenerating human resources?

Policies like these may work in very different ways, depending on the degree to which they are institutionalized to stimulate economic growth or to promote equitable wellbeing; to prolong productivism or to support reproduction; to provide charity for vulnerable people or to replace hierarchical and exploitative social systems that produce those vulnerabilities.

Beware that these crises also nourish divisive and reactionary alliances. Amid the ongoing pandemic, powerful actors continue pushing to reconstitute the status quo, and to shift costs to others. There is danger that abilities to ally for change will be undermined by politics of fear, xenophobia, and blame; intensified surveillance and control; and isolation that constrains political organizing and all kinds of common efforts. Campaigns to discredit vaccinations and masks synergize with attacks against climate action, gender equity, and racial justice. All are rallied in the name of political economic stability and defense of geopolitical interests. On personal levels, this allied resistance to change is fueled by understandable fear of losing identities and relations that have been construed and experienced as natural, meaningful, and morally correct (even as I understand them as historically adapted to support growth). In the face of polarizing narratives and blame, what strategies can support shifts away from divisive competition toward mutual collaboration?

Conclusion

I would like to see economies slow down by design, not disaster, in ways that support societies to become more caring and equitable. However, it looks like transitions may be unplanned and messy, like those we are living through now. Finding ourselves amid global pandemic and climate change, we must seize opportunities to build healthier priorities, policies, and sociocultural systems. Such transitions depend on alliances among differently positioned actors. And they must involve attention to gender and kinship systems that honor diverse contributions, and that assure care and minimize vulnerabilities for all.

Susan Paulson is Professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She studied and taught about human-environment relations during 15 years in Latin America, and taught sustainability studies during 5 years in Europe. Paulson contributes to theory and practice in political ecology; degrowth; and gender, masculinities and environment.

References

Bhopa, Sunsil and  Raj Bhopal. 2020. ‘Sex differential in COVID-19 mortality varies markedly by age.’ Lancet 396 (10250): 532-533.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Paulson, Susan 202. ‘Degrowth and feminisms ally to forge care-full paths beyond pandemic.’ Interface: A journal for and about social movements. Volume 12 (1): 232 – 246. https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Interface-12-1-Paulson.pdf

Rushovich, Tamara, Marion Boulicault, Jarvis T. Chen, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Amelia Tarrant, Sarah S. Richardson, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn 2021. ‘Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Vary Across US Racial Groups.’ Journal of General Internal Medicine 36: 1696-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-021-06699-4.

Cite as: Paulson, Susan. 2022. “Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds.“ FocaalBlog, 26 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender-aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds/

Anticipatory Perspectives on the Post-Corona Crisis Economy, Blog, Features

Andrew Flachs, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas: Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies

There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. – John Steinbeck

Midway through The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck turns away from the dispossessed Joad family to consider the injustice of a farm system that values profit over a flourishing rural economy. The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted local food economies and supply chains, and these disruptions have been centuries in the making: beginning with the privatization of commons, settler colonialism, redistribution of labor, and efforts to intensify the capitalization and technification of agricultural work. Like any agrarian crisis, the pandemic reveals cracks and opportunities amid hegemonic order (Flachs 2021). Although all stakeholders want to shift labor and production, their post-pandemic visions for the future differ: some advocate for an agrarian degrowth, yet others see the pandemic as a chance to better position themselves in a post-COVID hierarchy.

Food Regime (Friedmann and McMichael 1989) and Capitalocene (Moore 2015) analysts roughly agree in seeing agrarian capitalist crises emerging from industrializing Europe (Araghi 2000; Kautsky 1988) as a combination of colonialism and enclosure. As land in the colonial periphery was made cheap and exploitable, common land and labor relationships were severed back in the metropole through a slow process of privatization. In much of the world since the mid-20th century, farms became increasingly consolidated and production increasingly specialized as technology and capital appropriated discrete elements of farm production (Goodman, Sorj, and Wilkinson 1987).

Current pandemic-induced agri-food anxieties in the US stem from a century of agrarian change that has embraced productivism: the ideology that production yields and profit growth are and should be the key drivers of agriculture (Buttel 1993). In the decades following the Great Depression, US farm sizes have steadily increased while the number of individual farms has plummeted (Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel 2000), destabilizing land tenure, work, and rural institutions (Goldschmidt 1978).

A phone screenshot of a spreadsheet tab labeled "2021 Onions" with columns of data including "Market", price, quantities, and percentage calculations.
Image 1: This screenshot illustrates the digital record-keeping and spreadsheet logics that guide farmer decision-making, as well as the invisible infrastructures of pricing, efficiency, and abstraction predetermined by spreadsheets that may lead farmers to pursue growth and simplicity. Image shared by Midwest farmer participant, summer 2021.

Alternative food networks are common responses to acute economic crisis: Americans flocked to vegetable gardening during the first and second world wars (Lawson 2005), civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer organized America’s largest farm cooperative in response to the eviction of Black tenant farmers across the American South in the 1960s (White 2018), and Americans returned to urban gardens in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis (Flachs 2010; Poulsen et al. 2014). Shaken by shortages and price hikes at grocery stores, Americans rushed to buy vegetable seeds and garden supplies during the first waves of the pandemic, but they also supported an explosion of interest in local food through farmer’s markets, farm shares, and food deliveries.

To understand how local farmers responded to this sudden uptick in interest, we recruited farmers and farm managers as part of a larger, long-term project led by Dr. Ankita Raturi on data management and resilience in the local food system. Thanks to support from the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Covid-19 Rapid-Response program, we interviewed 12 local food coordinators and 29 Midwest farmers across rural, periurban, and urban environments to map the flows of information and food before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Growing Local Food

Farmers across the Midwest experienced the pandemic as a time of growth and expansion. “People were going to stores and they were out of meat, so it became this scramble: where can I get meat,” explained a rural Indiana beef farmer. “[It] opened their options a little bit more…We hear from some of our new customers that, ‘wow this is great!’ We didn’t know you were here this whole time and now we buy from you every other week.” Similarly, an urban herb and vegetable farmer laughed when we asked how his business coped with COVID-19. “Everything was booming through the roof…I don’t want to sound harsh, but the pandemic was good for farmers.” Growth is a desired goal here, outpacing the low-scale, high diversity local farms from before the pandemic. “This is the year of simplicity,” explained an urban farmer. “We don’t have 1,001 products; we specialize in 10-20.”  Local farmers turned to their data collection as demand grew and began asking where they could save time. “I really focus on how to reduce labor costs,” explained a periurban orchard manager. “Are there ways that I can automate in those areas or at least use tools or make a mechanical means to reduce labor and time spent?” Guthman (2004) called this creep toward agrocapitalist logic conventionalization, to note how alternative organic agriculture came to resemble industrial farming. Here, we observe that this is also as a growth trap and a data organization issue: conventionalization manifests as a combination of labor shortage, intensified demand, opportunism, and digital nudges implicit in data monitoring.

After initial hesitation over social distancing and public health, farmer’s markets and local food distributors across the country sprang back with new safety protocols and tools to arrange local food pickups.  Market managers also saw upticks in consumer interest in local food and especially in local meat. One such program became especially popular in Indiana and later across the Midwest as a tool to aggregate local food in regional cities and then deliver directly to consumers. The founder, himself a participating farmer, recalled:

[The stay-at-home order] hit and that Saturday we did as much volume that day as we would usually do in an entire week… Monday, we were freaking out. We did 400% volume that week and we thought: alright, let’s figure out how to just survive this week, we don’t have the shelf space or anything, but the vendors were there… We bought every black insulated tote east of the Mississippi that we could find.

Nine months into the pandemic, the program expanded from six to 32 cities, a sign of the enduring demand for local food deliveries that circumvent grocery store supply chains.  Critical scholars of science and technology have shown how the forms people use to organize information also dictate future planning (Ballestero 2019; Benjamin 2019). Produce demand grew alongside data management including spreadsheets, social media communications, and shifting inventory ledgers. Seeing these spreadsheets, many Midwest local farmers struggled to grow their production, ultimately paring back the diversity of food and services they offered.

Degrowing Local Food

Others looked over their data to find that their work, and the sociocultural values underpinning it, needed reexamining after March 2020. Degrowth, a political-economic theory of reorganizing production to achieve socio-ecological sustainability over the long term (Gerber 2020; D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015), provides a framework to evaluate the lasting impact of persistent local farming beyond the production or sale of agricultural commodities. By questioning externalized costs, capitalization, and yield growth in small farmer economies, degrowth asks how alternative rural development programs enable a range of possible futures on farms beyond continual expansion. Conversely, agriculture forces degrowth to face difficult questions around labor, productivity, and technological change – local food systems confront challenges in equitable labor and resource management in that they depend on difficult work and local ecological constraints. Scholars have looked to cases spanning Cuban agroecology (Boillat, Gerber, and Funes-Monzote 2012), Via Campesina (Roman-Alcalá 2017), and European allotment gardens (Vávra, Smutná, and Hruška 2021), questioning what an agricultural system might value apart from growth (Gerber 2020). Some Midwestern local food workers, having experienced the pressures of rapid growth, offer another perspective.

As employers cut hours for off-farm work, many farmers responded by intensifying their farm businesses – not merely to recoup lost wages but also to finally pursue more meaningful work. “As much as it was frustrating and difficult, and horrible, and terrifying, it has really given us time that we needed to put everything in perspective,” explained an automotive industry engineer whose plant closed during the initial COVID-19 shutdown. “We did definitely arrive at a place where people [realized] I have all of this extra time but I’m not feeling like I have something fulfilling to do,” agreed a rural Wisconsin farmer. “I think labor is often talked about in the ag circle as something to reduce down to nothing. And I think that we need to flip that completely on its head … I think that the sort of stuff we’re doing can be a healthful meaningful activity.” Similarly, a periurban orchard grower delved into his data not to specialize in top sellers but to understand how to turn buyers on to rare or unusual varieties.  “My wife is an educator, my father is an educator, my grandfather was. We just enjoy doing that sort of thing,” he explained. “We also need probably 7 or 8 varieties because a part of the educational aspect of this, which I dearly love, is helping people select the apple that they enjoy.”

Others explicitly saw their agricultural work as a path toward social justice. “I know that my price points are not all that low because I have a high input cost. But… it costs a lot of money to heal this planet,” a rural Minnesota farmer explained. She plans to continue this healing process by donating her farm to Indigenous or Black female farmers when she retires as a form of reparation for centuries of systemic racism in American agriculture.  “It’s really hard I think to figure out how to do reparation on a system level. But on a one-sie, two-sie level I can make that happen.” For an urban hydroponic farmer, growing vegetables in a shipping container was an explicit response to the generational marginalizing of Black farmers that stems from “not having access to land. I don’t have access to seven acres of land to try to grow lettuce. So, pivot and do something different…If you don’t have fertile land that plants like, and that you can grow plants in, and that has that nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium that plants need, you’re just wasting your time. And most people that look like me don’t have access to that kind of land that’s suitable for plant growth.” Amid questionable, data-driven indoor agriculture expansions over the last decade, this farmer highlighted the role that indoor agriculture can have in bringing equity to local food production.

Building and Degrowing in the Post-Corona Rural Economy

Anthropological insights should always tie to lived experiences of particular times and places, not universalist theories bent to match interesting case studies. No farmers discussed wanted to produce less. However, a degrowth perspective on agricultural sustainability is not inherently against all increases, but rather against a particular model of short term extraction (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015; Gerber 2020) that imagines rural economies as short term assets to be leveraged and then liquidated in the mode of financial capitalism. When the Midwestern local food economy experienced rapid growth, some took it as a sign to intensify production and compromise on biodiversity and employment – but many were cautious to pursue goals of diversification and meaningful work, eschewing growth that came at the expense of solidarity and ecological commons.

Smallholder theory building from A.V. Chayanov (1966) and Robert Netting (1993) offers a general model wherein farmers often want to expand their sales, group memberships, savings, and production, because it helps them to escape difficult work, subsidize risks, and build a promising future in their own terms. Historically, crises of political economy have opened doors for temporary exercise of radical politics as seen during the resurgence of US urban gardens through war and financial crises and the organization of Black farmer cooperatives in response to civil rights activism and white agrarian closure in the US South. As they grew into internationally regulated brands, organic and Fair-Trade initiatives succumbed to conventionalization as they adopted productivist logics and ultimately aimed to increase yields, profits, and consumption. Clearly, some of the farmers above are taking this opportunity to expand into new markets. Yet others seek not an expansion of sales or production so much as an expansion in labor, skill, education, or equity. As a moment to challenge agri-food hegemony, the pandemic allows these farmers to pursue these goals above sheer growth. Such work is sorely needed to reorient food systems toward the kinds of collective solidarity and local investment necessary to provide a future in which US farmers and their farms can diversify away from extractive monoculture farming underwritten by the violence of cheapened labor. The efforts that farmers and farm supporters make now to manage renewed interest in local food economies is having serious repercussions for rural, urban, and peri-urban farm economies moving forward. Equal attention should be paid to how these changes ultimately reflect what kind of lives people want to live on the farm.

Andrew Flachs researches food and agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom seeds, and our own microbiomes.  An associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University, his work among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM cotton fields. Andrew’s research has been supported by public and private institutions including the Department of Education, the National Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Volkswagen Foundation, while his writing on agricultural development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National Geographic magazine. Andrew’s work has been recognized by numerous international awards, including most recently the Political Ecology Society’s Eric Wolf Prize and the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Book Prize Committee.

Ankita Raturi is an assistant professor at Purdue University, where she runs the Agricultural Informatics Lab, focused on human computer interaction, information architecture, and software engineering, for increased resilience in food and agricultural systems. Ankita’s current work includes: the development of modular, open source, decision support tools (e.g., for cover cropping); information modeling for the development of agricultural ontologies and data services(e.g., for plant data); design methods for agricultural technologies (e.g., for soil health management technologies); and design for diversified farming systems (e.g., for community food resilience).

Juliet Norton is an Informatics Research Scholar in the Department of Agricultural & Biological Engineering at Purdue University working with Ag Informatics Lab. She is a co-project manager for the NECCC Cover Crop Species Selector Tool and Seeding Rate Calculator, MCCC Seeding Rate Calculator, SCCC Species Selector Tool, and Informatics for Community Food Resilience projects. She works remotely from her home in Martinez, CA. http://aginformaticslab.org/index.php/2020/04/15/juliet-norton/ 

Valerie Miller is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the anthropology department at Purdue University. She holds an MA in applied experimental psychology. Now studying as abiocultural anthropologist, she researches alloparenting, postpartum experiences, maternal cognition, and mental health in the United States and the Commonwealth of Dominica. Valerie is trained in several ethnographic and psychological methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, and integrates these approaches while researching human matrescence, cognition, and lifeways of Caribbean women. She is passionate about highlighting maternal perspectives within biocultural research projects as well as the centering of children’s voices and insights in ethnographic studies. Her writing has been published in peer-reviewed journals as well as public-facing online spaces including Teaching Anthropology and Ethnography.com.

Haley Thomas is an undergraduate at Purdue University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering. She is working with Agricultural Informatics Lab to study farmers’ data management and software for local foods. Her other academic interests include ecological restoration and natural resource management. http://aginformaticslab.org/index.php/2021/07/15/haley-thomas/  

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Cite as: Flachs, Andrew, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas. 2022. ”Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies.” FocaalBlog, 23 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/23/andrew-flachs-ankita-raturi-juliet-norton-valerie-miller-and-haley-thomas-building-back-bigger-or-degrowing-local-food-us-alternative-food-networks-and-post-corona-agrarian-economies