In that sense, it is good news that feminist economics is developing and posing a radical critique of capitalism, since the economy is our metabolism; that is, our relationship with energy and matter. We cannot aspire to change society without changing this material base. However, as Amaia Pérez Orozco recognizes[2], feminist economics still lacks a clear political commitment and finds it difficult to translate its criticism into concrete economic measures that go beyond common policies to other sectors of the left.

From my point of view –which comes from systems dynamics and environmentalism rather than from feminism– one of the tools that can best help feminist economics articulate a coherent discourse is the pattern of collapse. The collapse is one of the basic patterns of growth and can be compared fairly closely with the behavior of the capitalist economy, since it reflects its tendency to expand and overexploit. Understanding this pattern is essential when it comes to defusing the collapsing drift that our society is taking and I believe that a large part of the measures that can be taken to deactivate this collapse pattern are, basically, ecofeminist measures. But, before talking about the relationship between ecofeminism and collapse, I would like to describe the collapse pattern itself.

Collapse patterns

The collapse pattern is based on the combination of three feedback loops that can be seen in the graph of Figure 1, where each arrow speaks of a cause-effect relationship between the variables it links. We speak of feedback loop when a closed chain of cause-effect relationships appears. This is popularly described as a whiting that bites its tail: a behavior that feeds itself.

In the collapse pattern, on the one hand, we have the exponential growth loop, which, in Figure 1, is represented by the blue arrows and is applied to the economy. The blue arrows go from the variable economic growth to the variable economic activity, which means that when there is more economic  growth, the economic activity is higher (as is logical); but there is also a blue arrow in the opposite direction, indicating that the greater the economic activity, the greater its growth.

This is the usual behavior of systems whose growth is a percentage of itself, as capitalist economies, since it is assumed that GDP (economic activity) must grow a per cent per year for the economy to function properly. But growing at 2% or 3% means that growth is greater every year because it is a percentage of an amount that is also greater every year.

This type of exponential growth is very unstable, because it continually accelerates and becomes explosive when time advances. The capitalist economy is especially prone to grow in this way due to some of its characteristics (credit with interest, dynamics of competition, etc.) but it is not the only system that grows in this way. The exponential growth is very common in nature, since it is the habitual behavior of the populations of living beings when they find abundant food.

However, nothing can grow infinitely in the real world because all activity needs energy and materials, and both are limited. In ecosystems, we speak of the concept of carrying capacity (called in Figure 1, Capacity of the nourishing base), which we can define as the amount of food an ecosystem can provide in a sustainable manner. If, for example, we have a herd of herbivores in a pasture, the carrying capacity would be the kilograms of grass that grow each week. If the herbivores need a smaller amount, the population will get fed and tend to grow; but, if they require a larger amount, a deficit appears that slows down the growth of the population.

This limitation creates a feedback loop that, in Figure 1, is represented in green and is called stabilization loop, because it causes economic growth to slow down when the deficit begins to be important. The combination of these two feedback loops gives rise to a pattern of S-shaped stabilization. When the population (or economic activity) is small, resources are plentiful and the population can grow very rapidly, but, as it approaches the limits, the stabilizing link slows the growth down and the population tends to a sustainable value.

However, there are systems in which the green stabilization loop does not act fast enough to achieve this smooth evolution to balance. This is due to the fact that there are delays in the relation between shortage and economic growth limitation: the system is reluctant to decrease due to inertia, blockages or delays in information. In this case, a third loop may appear: the Degradation of the nourishing base loop that we have marked in red.

Growth might continue beyond the carrying capacity, but this can only be done by deteriorating the resources that are the nourishing base. Following the example of the herd of herbivores, they could eat more grass than it grows every week, but only at the expense of eating the whole plant. For a few weeks, the population could continue to grow above the carrying capacity, but on the basis of degrading the pasture and making it no longer productive. This is the behavior we describe colloquially with the expression kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Overexploitation might also create a third feedback loop (the red loop in Figure 1) because it decreases the capacity of the nourishing base and, when  this happens, the shortage gets even greater and this leads to an even greater overexploitation. This third feedback loop pushes the population (or economic activity) to collapse.

The result of the combination of these three dynamics is the collapse pattern that can be seen in black in Figure 1: a rapid initial growth that reaches a maximum and falls very quickly.

Conquest vs. care

The dynamics of growth, overexploitation and collapse have accompanied human beings since the beginning of their history, since, in general, they are the ones that govern the behavior of living beings. Some human societies have been able to reach equilibrium with their environment by limiting their growth; but western culture – especially since the fifteenth century– chose another option to escape from limits: conquest.

The colonial expansion allowed European societies to grow beyond the carrying capacity of their territory, and the use of fossil fuels made possible an even greater growth. This has allowed us to live five centuries of continuous exponential growth and has made us think that this is the normal behavior. But all growth has a limit and, although many people still believe that our expansion can continue with the help of new technologies, more and more scientific studies tell us the opposite [3][4][5][6]. But the more obvious evidence that shows we have reached the limits is in the signs of overexploitation that, for years, have been detected in the main natural [7]resources: collapsed fisheries, forests, water and degraded lands, pollution and climate change, decline of fossil fuels that is not compensated by investment in renewable technologies, etc.

Given the evidence of limits, society and politicians should enforce degrowth policies that would activate the green loop of stabilization. This idea of ​​voluntary degrowth, in one way or another, has been the main message of political ecologists in recent decades, but these measures are never implemented. The, so called, “sustainable development” became a slogan empty of meaning and our consumption and impact on the planets is growing out of control. Capitalism is reluctant to degrow, guided by its inertia and its enormously powerful interests that pursue continuous economic growth.

The absence of action of the stabilization loop might cause the activation of the pernicious red loop of the Degradation of the nourishing base. Nowadays, this is not the main loop observed in global society, but if the degradation of the environment continues, it will appear soon.  It is, therefore, vital that, at this moment, environmentalism adds a very important message with a strong emphasis: we have to deactivate the degradation loop. This message adds a different nuance to the degrowth message, and I think the word that best describes it is the ecofeminist notion of care, applied, in a broad sense, to the care of everything that reproduces life on the Planet.

We can perfectly call policies of care all those that deactivate the relationship between deficit and overexploitation (what in figure 1 has been indicated with the violet arrow). The attitude of care is what inspires the traditional policies of environmental protection and leads us to manage well the territory, the soils, the forests; it is the attitude that protects the reproduction of everything that feeds us. But, at this moment, we should not limit ourselves to environmental protection policies and we should start to devise more ambitious goals that change the sign of the arrow between deficit and overexploitation. We must start talking about regeneration policies, which not only prevent the nourishing base from degrading, but make it grow. In this sense, there are already very interesting experiments in the fields of regenerative agriculture and permaculture that show that these policies are possible and achieve remarkable successes[8].

On the other hand, the notion of care applied to people is especially important at this time. There are two things that activate the red loop of degradation: ignorance and desperation. Ignorance is very dangerous, although, at the moment, it is more virtual than real –because the problem is well known, but there are many people who choose not to see it. Desperation is more worrying, because it develops in people who, despite knowing the environmental damage their actions are doing, are not able to change because they are on the edge of their physical or mental capacities, unable to choose anything other than survival.

The attitude of care is vital at this time. Only a society that cares for people and diminishes poverty will be able to prevent desperation from leading us to degrade the resources that sustain our own lives. It is also vital, on the other hand, that we know how to take care of ourselves and satisfy our needs with technologies that have very low environmental impact and, also, take care of the Earth. Only by protecting nature will we be able to sustain human life; only by taking care of human life will we be able to stop the degradation of nature.

Ecological economics and feminist economics: the issue of reproduction

The concept of nourishing base has been applied in the previous paragraphs to the ecosystems that provide us with resources or services (forests, fisheries, soils) but it can also be extended to many other things that sustain human life, including technology. In this sense, the issue of the reproduction is the key that unites feminist economics and ecological economics and can create the necessary dialogue between these two disciplines (as Yayo Herrero points out[9]).

Just as feminist economics speaks of the importance of the reproduction of human life, ecological economics speaks of the reproduction of stocks and fund-service resources[10]. Stocks and fund-service resources are those that regenerate themselves (because they come from biological systems) and their reproduction allows human beings to obtain renewable resources and energy. Much of what I have called nourishing base are basically stocks and fund-service resources. The good health of these resources implies that their reproduction will be successful and they will be a sustainable source of inputs for the human economy.

Both feminist and ecological economics are based on the idea that we need to take care of life and its reproduction. On the contrary, the capitalist economy does not pay attention to the reproduction of life, assumes that natural and human resources are infinite and will always be available. While capitalist economy does not even see that the base that sustains itself is physical, biological and limited, the ecological and feminist economy recognize the value of all the activities of care that allow this fragile base to remain alive and healthy.

A similar concept can be extended to technology and its use, for example, of materials. The recycling of many of the minerals that are essential to current technologies is negligible nowadays. The minerals are extracted from mines and, once used, they are thrown into landfills, where they are dispersed and it is practically impossible to recover them. Our technology is based on a throw-away culture: extracting from mines and dispersing in landfills and, when a mine runs out, the companies looks for another new mine or try to replace one resource with another. But this replacement has a limit, since the new mines found are worse than previous ones and replacing some minerals by others implies losing performance and efficiency.

The minerals valuable to technology should be considered part of the nourishing base that must be taken care of. They should be recycled at rates close to 100%, so that they are available for human technology for centuries. Our nourishing base, therefore, can be considered made up of many things that make our life possible and whose reproduction must be protected: ecosystems, people, technologies, minerals, families, societies, etc.

Turning the economy yin

The concepts of nourishing base and exponential growth loop have an important similarity with the Chinese concepts of yin/yang, also the loops present in the collapse pattern can be interpreted in terms of the yin/yang equilibrium of the Chinese philosophy.

What I have called the nourishing base is very similar to what Taoist philosophy would call the yin part of the society: all that nourishes, all that sustains, the apparently passive part of society but the one that possesses the force on which any action is based . The activities of care have an eminently yin character: silent, humble, often ignored, often feminized, enormously important. On the other hand, the yang concept is associated in Taoism with the expansion and is similar to the exponential growth feedback loop of Figure 1 and to the conquering tendency of the capitalist economy.

In both Taoism and System Dynamics, the notion of dynamic equilibrium is fundamental. This is a very interesting contribution to Western culture, which tends to be tempted to think in the old terms of good/bad Manichaeism, too simplistic to understand systems. Neither the yin nor the yang aspect of a society are desirable or undesirable by themselves, it is equilibrium that is desirable. When the excess of yang leads a society to expand above what its yin can sustain, the political action should try to turn society more yin, that is, prioritize nutritive actions over expansive ones.

The capitalist economy tends to enhance the yang expansive aspect at any cost. In the Spanish economic crisis of 2008, for example, from both liberal and social democratic positions, the emphasis was on reviving growth, adding more yang to an already expansive economy. Few people stopped to think if the problem was in the yin base of the economy, that was exhausted and could no longer sustain more growth.

A very interesting yin policy would have been, for example, to save energy through plans such as those proposed for energy-saving housing reform or public transportation[11]. This would have helped to mitigate unemployment and balance the trade deficit without the need to increase the export effort. Instead, the government decided to promote large public works: a policy without the slightest yin ingredient, since it consumed even more energy and not even saved the base of the construction sector but its elite.

The policies implemented by the government to overcome the crisis have focused on protecting the banks and large companies instead protecting the families and the employees: this is a very yang policy that deteriorates the basis to save the elite. Ten years away, we can affirm that the Spanish social and ecological base is still more exhausted than before the crisis, which indicates that, what they call recovery, was only a continuation of economic growth based on social overexploitation.

Another interesting aspect of the yin / yang notions is their relative or adjective nature, since there is no clear boundary between them: something is yin or yang in relation to what it is compared with. This is interesting when applied to ecofeminism and what we consider the nutritive base to protect, since the most yin aspects of society are not necessarily occupied by women (especially of developed countries).

A European urban middle-class woman who takes care of her children, for example, is doing a yin work of care, but a peasant woman who performs the same tasks would be even more yin than the urban woman, because she lives in a more forgotten and more basic sector. And it would still be more yin the work of a man from an impoverished country who extracts the minerals necessary for the electronics used by both women; and it is even more yin the invisible contribution of the crops, the cattle and the fertile land on which the feeding of all of  them is based.

This adjective character can help us when deciding what are the priorities when it comes to protecting the nourishing base of our society. If what we need is to feed the yin aspect of society, the priority should be to protect the most yin, the most basic, the things that have a more nutritious character, which, normally, will be the most silent and the most forgotten. The first priority should be the stocks and fund-resources of energy, ecosystems, minerals and soils on which people and their activities are based and from there all human activities beginning with the most humble.

 The economy of care

Western society has lived for many centuries within an expansive culture that did not need to take care of the regeneration of its nourishing base, since it always found the possibility of conquering new territories and exploiting new resources. This attitude has been possible and very profitable (at least for some individuals) while resources were abundant. For that reason, the conquering and expansive attitude, associated with the political right parties, has been associated to images of prosperity, well-being, wealth and progress. It is the attitude that we have associated with the economically sensible, with what makes the companies to have a positive balance.

On the other hand, the discourse of the left parties has been based on rights: the rights to decent work, equality or a healthy environment. These rights were something to protect even though, economically, they were seen as a hindrance, a worsening of the accounting balance, a loss of economic efficiency that had to be assumed to protect our well-being, often more spiritual than material. With this mentality, it is not strange that, in the face of the crisis, the first thing to do is to end labor rights and further exploit ecosystems, to protect the economy, which is the most urgent.

But this discourse is based on a big mistake: to associate the expansive and exploitative attitude with good economic management, without taking into account that, when the limits of growth appear, exploitation becomes over-exploitation and this is a disastrous economic strategy, even from the purely economic, selfish and material point of view.

When limits are reached, expansion is the attitude that most quickly leads to collapse. And the collapse is the worst scenario of poverty, involution and degradation, that is to say: the opposite of those ideals of progress, well-being and wealth that the right brandishes as a standard. While it is true that, in the short term, an over-exploitative policy can increase the wealth of an increasingly smaller minority at the expense of the impoverishment of majorities, this process soon finds its limits. Inequality accelerates the degradation of the social base and intensifies the collapse pattern that ends in a resounding fall for all.

In a world with four more degrees of temperature, the only human society that can be imagined are groups of Tuaregs trying to survive hell, where little benefit could be found by investment funds. In a Spain swallowed by the Sahara, neither hunting nor macro farms would achieve a positive economic balance, no matter how much they try to maximize automation or destroy natural parks. A world of degraded ecosystems and shattered societies is a world of very low energy return, where the harvest is meager and unstable and work is painful. And a low energy return means, inevitably, a low economic return, that is: very bad business. Given the limits of growth the exploitative attitude is not only morally reprehensible, it is also a very stupid attitude.

Economy of care or collapse

Only economic policies based on care and regeneration can be sensible in a limited world, since they are the only ones capable of keeping society away from collapsing and achieving a positive energy and economic balance. The left parties must be able to understand this new position in which we find ourselves at the beginning of the 21^st century and make use of all the arguments that the collapse pattern gives us to launch a message much more powerful than the current one. The policies of the right are absolutely collapsing, they are based on ideas from the past and lead us to a world located at the antipodes of the ideal of progress that they sell us.

It is time to stop associating prosperity, good economic management and well-being to attitudes that destroy the ecological and human base that feeds us. Only the attitude of care and regeneration of life is able to lead us to the horizons, always desirable, of abundance, prosperity and progress.

We need to feminize the economy because, as Alicia Puleo says[12] “The characteristics of the warrior and the hunter (hardness, emotional withdrawal …) are today a dangerous heritage.” In the 21^st  century, with a planet exploited on all four sides, we no longer have wide plateaus or vast empires to conquer and it is time to tell the new conquerors that are emerging from the far right to do the favor of staying at home and do not destroy with the hooves of their horses the few resources that we have left.

Feminism has come to stay because its message is reaching both the head and the heart of a society tired of patriarchy, wars, exploitation and destruction. That is why it is important that the feminist message evolves, as it is already doing, and does not restrict itself to the equality of rights between men and women; because that equality, in many areas, is already being achieved. It does not make a big difference for both parents share the tasks of caring for their children if the topsoil that feed them is degrading, if chemical contamination fills the body of newborns and the life of the whole family moves in a precarious pattern that makes reproduction difficult.

Let’s hope that feminist economics continues to extend its analysis far beyond the domestic sphere and is able to develop theoretical tools that allow building an economy that really puts life at the center. If something characterizes this century that begins is the deterioration of life on the planet, both human and non-human. Restoring the base that sustains and nourishes our life is essential and this can only be achieved if the idea of care becomes the central theme of that discipline that is at the base of political power and so importantly determines our lives: the economy.

[1] This lemma is becoming common in the discourse of some Spanish ecofeminsts, but does not seem to have a translation in English speaking countries https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/?p=16371

[2] Amaia Pérez Orozco. Espacios económicos de subversión feminista. Economía Feminista, desafíos, propuestas, alianzas. Ed. Cristina Carrasco Bengoa y Carmen Díaz Corral. Entrepueblos 2017.

[3] I. Capellán-Pérez, M. Mediavilla, C. de Castro, Ó. Carpintero, L.J. Miguel, Fossil fuel depletion and socio-economic scenarios: An integrated approach, Energy. 77 (2014) 641–666. doi:10.1016/j.energy.2014.09.063.

[4] C.J. Campbell, J. Laherrère, The end of cheap oil, Sci. Am. 278 (1998) pp. 60–65.

[5] C. de Castro, M. Mediavilla, L.J. Miguel, F. Frechoso, Global solar electric potential: A review of their technical and sustainable limits, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 28 (2013) 824–835. doi:10.1016/j.rser.2013.08.040.

[6] Assessing vulnerabilities and limits in the transition to renewable energies: Land requirements under 100% solar energy scenarios IñigoCapellán-Pérez, Carlos de  Castro, Iñaki Arto. Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 77 (2017) 760–782.  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032117304720

[7] In 2017 year there was a second Scientist Warning to Humankind  signed by more than 15000 scientists.   William J. Ripple Christopher Wolf Thomas M. Newsome Mauro Galetti Mohammed Alamgir Eileen Crist Mahmoud I. Mahmoud William F. Laurance 15,364 scientist signatories from 184 countries World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 12, 1 December 2017, Pages 1026–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229

[8] https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/

[9] Yayo Herrero. Economía ecológica y economía feminista: un diálogo necesario. Economía Feminista, desafíos, propuestas, alianzas.. Ed. Cristina Carrasco Bengoa y Carmen Díaz Corral. Entrepueblos 2017.

[10] La economía en evolución: Invento y configuración de la economía en los siglos XVIII y XIX y sus consecuencias actuales. José Manuel Naredo. Manuscrits : revista d’història moderna, N. 22 (2004) p. 83-117. https://ddd.uab.cat/record/4786

[11] http://www.ilo.org/integration/greenjobs/lang–en/index.htm, http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/—webdev/documents/publication/wcms_098489.pdf

[12] Alicia H. Puleo. La Utopía Ecofeminista. La utopía, motor de la Historia.. Juan José Tamayo, dir., ed. Fundación Ramón Areces, 2017.

Margarita Mediavilla is a PhD in Physical Sciences from the University  of Valladolid (Spain) and associate professor of Systems Engineering and Automation in the School of Industrial Engineering. Her lines of research focus on energy and sustainability using system dynamics as the methodological tool. She belongs to the Research Group in Energy, Economy and Systems Dynamics of the University of Valladolid,  which is a multidisciplinary team of engineers, physicists, economists  and social scientists that works on the study of global energy  perspectives resulting from peak oil and other natural limits and  combines academic research with social divulgation. She is a member of Ecologistas en Acción, the main confederation of  environmental associations of Spain, and is a very active discloser of  the problems of the limits to growth, participating in all kinds of  publications and conferences in the Spanish area. Her personal blog (in  Spanish) is Habas Contadas.

Header image: Pedro Ribeiro Simões, Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Republished from Resilience.org

The post Ecofeminism to Escape Collapse appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This interview was completed in early 2016 as part of the research for Joyful Militancy. We (carla and Nick) sent Marina Sitrin a ‘preamble’ outlining some of the ideas behind the book, and then included a couple questions based on Sitrin’s other writings (especially Horizontalidad — published in English as Horizontalism — and Everyday Revolutions). As time went on in the researching, interviewing and writing of the book our ideas and articulations shifted and for that, we are deeply indebted to all our interviewees who offered new insights and shed light on areas that needed reworking.

Interview:

carla & Nick (c&N): Based on what we’ve told you about the book project, can you tell us what resonates and what doesn’t?

Marina Sitrin (MS): I am so excited for this project. It all resonates deeply with things I have been thinking, witnessing, fearing and dreaming. The role of joy, in particular in the way you describe it, is often absent – though not entirely – from our conversations and constructions in the northern part of the Americas and Europe. I do see joyful militancy as closely tied with emotion, on the individual and collective level, and will get to that with some of the later questions. It is both a fairly large and abstract concept, and at the same time a very simple direct and emotive one.

How do we feel when we participate in a movement or group? What are our relationships to others in the group? Does it feel open? Caring? Social? Is there trust? Why do we come back to assemblies and actions? Are people open to one another?

c&N: We have been told that “joyful militancy” or “militancia alegre” is a more common notion in Latin America.  Do you know anything about the genealogies or origins of “militancia alegre” in Latin America?

MS: I don’t know of any specific genealogy, but there are for sure many examples of the practice and language of care, trust, love and affect throughout the history of movements in Latin America. I see joyful militancy as both a practice and an articulation – ideally both together. As a practice it does not always come with an articulation of the experience, and then there are those groups and movements that have the explicit language of care and love, but do not always practice it. My first exposure to it as a concept together with a practice was in Argentina in the post 2001 popular rebellion and all the social creation that transpired.

In Argentina, when people found themselves without even the basic means for survival, they turned to one another. They did this without political parties, intermediaries or any sort of hierarchy. People explained this moment in history as a rupture, a break with past ways of organizing, but also a break in their finding one another – looking to one another. The effects of the dictatorship maintained a hold on many aspects of daily life, including fear of the other and a culture of turning one’s back in silence. HIJOS, the children of the disappeared, had been organizing for a few years in this silence, with internal forms that focused more on social relationships than an “end”. Their argument is that, at least in part, it was people in society who allowed the dictatorship to take place, with what they call a social silence. They organize in neighborhoods, speaking to people, face to face, and trying to recreate community. Their internal forms of organizing are also focused on social relationships, and in particular horizontal and affective forms. They speak of love as a relationship necessary in their group’s internal relationships as well as the sort of movement that has to be built. HIJOS in many ways was a precursor to the forms of organizing a few years later with the neighborhood assemblies, unemployed movements and recuperated workplaces, among tons of other collectives and networks that emerged.

I would love to share quote after quote of people in the movements in Argentina. I was honestly a bit surprised at how much people spoke of love and care as necessary to create the sort of world they desire. But now, in retrospect, the fact that the forms of organizing are all about social relationships—paying attention to power, making sure people are heard and can speak, prioritizing voices often excluded and ignored, organizing events with food, drinks, music and other tools that make them more social—were crucial and often just necessary for survival. Care is at the heart of the new forms of organizing. Horizontalism as a relationship is all about a shifting relational form between individuals and a group – paying attention to both – now. It is not a means to an end, but the means are a part of the end, and the end keeps changing.

Another example from Latin America, and one that is more of a practice and less something talked about as a tenet around which they organize, is the Zapatista communities. Their forms of organizing are based in assemblies striving for all people to participate equally and in creating structures of care, from health care to food and education, and then also creating processes for alternative adjudication—all of this is deeply affective, even if they do not shout to the world that they are joyous and grounded in affect. The joy is seen in these affective practices as well as in the celebratory nature of many of day to day experiences.

I see the concepts of joyful militancy, affective politics and a care/love-based organizing as also directly tied to prefigurative politics, and that has a long history and roots in Latin America. By prefigurative I mean as much as possible creating the desired future alternatives in the present.  This is an idea and practice that has roots all over the world, from the IWW in the US to the writings of W.E.B DuBois, and the practices of anarchists and autonomous activists in Latin America. It has become more popular and widespread, both in theory and practice, in the last twenty years with the rise of more autonomous and horizontal organizing, particularly in Latin America, but also with the Global Justice Movement and Occupy and movements of the Squares.

Going back to Latin America, while the more contemporary movements organize with affective politics as one of the hearts, consciously and intentionally, there is a long history of this sentiment as a part of organizing, including say the FORA in Argentina (the largest Anarchist federation in the world) which was a part of organizing Patagonia Rebelde, a free region in the south of Argentina in the early 1900s. While it was brutally repressed, the movement organized to create a free society then and there, rather than demanding or building towards a future society. This included all sorts of different social relationships which entailed care, trust and love as their foundation. This is a history that many contemporary movement participants have ideas about, but few have read about it in great detail. It is one of those funny things where historical memory is somehow imbued in current practice, even without a direct intentionality.

I also wonder about liberation theology and the role of love and care in Latin American movements today. Similar to the role of the memory of anarchism in Argentina, in some parts of Latin America, the liberation theologists actively supported revolutionary movements and for sure brought in the importance of love and care in the present – not just the future. Of course the Catholic church as a whole, like the communist parties, were all about the future and not the present.

c&N: You have described the work you do as a form of militancy.  Can you say what you mean by this concept?  What is militancy about, and what does it do?

MS: I also describe myself as a militant. I say this in part to counter the concept of activist, especially as it is understood in parts of Latin America, which is as oriented to NGOs – more ‘professional and paid’. In Spanish una militante is often someone who was a part of something, such as a movement or group, though not something like Greenpeace. It describes a more direct action sort of politics. And, in English, as it sounds, it has a force or action orientation – not militaristic, that is not what I mean – but determined and maybe hard left. I am not sure exactly how best to translate it alone; I use it as an alternative to identifying as an activist and to indicate direct involvement and revolutionary politics.

As for the work I do, I tend to think of it as militant research, and by this I mean a form of research and investigation that is together with people in movement, so again, militant meaning a sort of direct participation and action. I try as best as I can to not only use interview-based work, but to be involved in those things I write about and to engage back and forth with movement participants (if I am not active in that movement all the time) so as to check and make sure I am reflecting what people are doing/thinking. Sometimes this leads to a lot more work or investigation, as happened in Argentina when I was close to finishing the book Horizontalidad: Voces de Poder Popular en Argentina.^[i] I thought it was just about finished and circulated it with a number of movement participants. I got great feedback, and a few women from two different unemployed movements gently told me, compañera, you cannot publish this, it does not include the direct struggles of the Mapuche or Guarani, not in their own words. So, I took another many months, built relationships with a few indigenous communities in the far north, was fortunate to be joined by one of these two women when I went, and then was able to finish the book.

All together then, this sort of work can become a form of militancy as it can help connect people from different groups and movements who might not otherwise meet one another. For example, having developed relationships with more autonomous movements in Greece, and collaborating with a network of assemblies who translated Horiozntalidad into Greek, we found that not only were the voices in the book useful, but there was an opportunity to create direct relationships. So twice I helped initiate visits of Argentines to Greece. The second such visit was a worker from a recuperated workplace who met with workers in Vio.Me in Thessaloniki, and after the visit and exchange of ideas the Greek workers decided absolutely to recuperate their workplace. They say that without the direct exchange of ideas they might not have done it. The sharing of movement contacts and relationships across movements, countries and continents is for me a part of being a militant who does militant research.

c&N: What’s been your experience of sad militancy^[ii]–meanness, shame, fear, guilt, and ideological purism–in movement spaces?

1.     What sustains sad militancy?
2.     What provokes or inspires it?  What makes it spread?

MS: I have put off this question for second to last. And now am again taking a break, since as important as it is, it is such an ugly and sad part of our movements I am going to wait a moment before writing about it. I will answer it however, since it is also what has destroyed so many groups and movements – so utterly important.

Sad militancy can come from many places. First, and important to identify is when it comes from external forces, people who are paid to disrupt movements and do so in all sorts of ways from disrupting democratic processes and assemblies, to those who spread gossip and create divisions amongst people in the movement. This has been seen in so many movements historically and there is a great deal to learn from these experiences, particularly the disruption of the Black Panthers – and here I am thinking of some of the lesser known and insidious tactics such as “poison pen letters”.

I would like to end it there, but sad militancy is not just something that people from the outside are paid to do – and in fact, they are able to be paid to do it because we are so susceptible to it. On a basic level, the space a group or movement creates from the beginning is key – the tone and openness, or not, makes a big difference if one wants to focus on new relationships with one another. Along these same lines, ideological rigidity and hierarchies in ideas, formal and informal, create a closed and eventually nasty space for those not ascribing to the ideology or a part of the clique. People do not stay in movements that organize in this way, or if they do it is with a sort of obedience that is not transformative for society and instead creates versions of the same power and hierarchy – with people not being actors or agents of change, not to mention that dignity cannot grow or flourish.

My early organizing experiences were fortunately with anti-racist and later Central American Solidarity movements, with people who had been a part of the civil rights and later anti-nuclear movements, so they had a focus—at least in part—on social relationships and democracy. Later however, when I decided I needed to be a part of a revolutionary group that was organizing against capitalism as a whole, well, I found myself in a few different centrist socialists groups which were really soul deadening. It was all about ideology and guilt. One could never do enough, and could never know enough or quote enough of whomever was the revolutionary of the day (James Cannon, Tony Cliff, etc.). It was also politically all about the end and not the day-to-day. This even included women: one would think after the radical feminist movement these groups would get that relationships have to change now, but no, it was all about the future free society we all had to work for – accepting relationships as they are pretty much. I later came around some anarchist groups, thinking that they would be more open and focused on the day-to-day, as that is what I had read from the theory, but found the rigidity around identity too harsh and since I was not squatting or dressing a certain way I was kept at arm’s length – which was fine since I felt too rejected to try very hard.

Enough of these icky groups. I think the big question for today is how do we organize in ways that try to prevent sad militancy from creeping into our practice. Articulation of a joyful movement is important, and not as easy as one might think since there is so much resistance to the idea of feelings, which is also to say, relationships. Many in Argentina reflected on this, especially men in the unemployed movements and workplaces who would joke that they would approach people on the street and ask if they wanted to join a “love movement” and get punched. But it was a real question of machismo they were addressing. I do not mean just men here either, though it is the joke. Social relationships are increasingly given lip service, but we often do not work on them in our movements in a way that makes them dynamic enough to really create an affective space. Relationships here means not only how we treat one another individually, but things like our democratic practices as a whole and how and if we adjudicate or resolve conflicts that arise. So first, talking about it and stating clearing that it is important. But then, some movements do this and still sad militancy sneaks in, or jumps in, depending … it often concerns democratic practices and questions of flexibility—it is crucial to be able to change our practices as well as our ideas. That does not mean to be without clear ideas that are collective, but to avoid the ideological traps that can happen. Autonomous and anti-authoritarian movements are hardly exempt from this. In Occupy we sometimes found people arguing they were more horizontal than others, or more autonomous … this creates a closed and defensive space.

One way to try and keep our movements and groups more open is to be more open ourselves. To call things out when we see them. Not in a hostile way, but in the sense of identifying it and talking about it collectively, in special assemblies or in the moment. This is tricky as it can come off as hostile and people can easily get defensive – we live in a society where we are all so very fragile that calling someone out almost always leads to defensiveness … so figuring out ahead of time how we will deal with these issues as they come up and sticking to it. I am thinking now of how Occupy Farms in Albany California, learning from some of the difficult and sometimes nasty things that emerged in Occupy, organized based on a few common agreements and to participate all had to agree. Things that included participation – not as a ‘work ethic’ sort of thing, but that if one was going to be a part of a collective farm, one had to be a part of a working group that did things (without creating ableist hierarchies, of course).

This avoided people coming to just hang out and speaking in assemblies from a position of ideas alone without practice. In Argentina, when people were disruptive in assemblies, it was called out (this was learned first by having assemblies destroyed by disruption). People are told to stop, and if it does not work they are asked to leave. It is more complicated than that, but that is the essence for some assemblies. In the 15M they had a group of people that was always roving during assemblies to try and support those people who were disrupting, believing they needed support, and not to be silenced.

c&N: What’s been your experience of joyful militancy?

1.     What inspires/encourages/sustains it?
2.     How do you try to embody it?

MS: My first experiences with joyful militancy, without having a name for it at the time, were very specific and location-based. I went to Seattle in 1999 to participate in the protests. Later in the day, when the repression picked up, I found myself alone and scared for a moment – only a moment however as an experienced anarchist from San Diego helped me quickly join their affinity group. Not only did I come without an affinity group, but what I knew of them was from reading Murray Bookchin on the Spanish Revolution. It was all a wonderful idea, like assembly based decision making and councils, but I had no direct experience with them. I had been a part of a few different hierarchical socialist groups and left all of then in part due to the hierarchy and centrism, but also what for sure can be called sad militancy. I had witnessed mass assemblies and direct democracy, including in Tepotzlan Mexico where people had taken over the town in the later 1990s, but still had had no direct participation – I did not know what it felt like to be a part of it. Not until Seattle.

So, this wonderful person, whose name I have since forgotten, brought me into a small group and together we blocked an alley where delegates were trying to pass, and supported one another in the massive tear gas attacks by the police, as well as negotiated road blocks of burning dumpsters and projectiles launched to protect people from the police. It was quite scary, but I did not feel fear as much as energy. I was now with a small group of people who were taking care of each other, checking in with one another all the time and taking breaks to do so.  And then that evening there was a spokescouncil and I felt that “aha” moment where it all made sense. The ideas I had read about with direct democracy and people caring for one another was all around me, even amidst the tear gas and injured people – perhaps even because of it – which brought up the stakes and made the care and trust all the more important. It was a short lived experience, but has marked me forever.

As for longer, deeply grounded movements based in affective politics and joyful militancy, that for sure would be Argentina post 2001. While emerging from necessity, from a rupture in society that was both crisis and a newfound finding of one another on the streets, it continued in many of the movements, taking deep root and becoming the place from which people organized and mobilized. What sustained it in many places was concrete projects around which people were organizing, from running workplaces to maintaining popular kitchens or media groups, together with open discussion of what it was/is. Collective reflection cannot be underestimated, and by this I do not mean only having assemblies to discuss what we are doing or will do next – and not either reflecting on what we have done. But reflecting on the meanings behind what we are doing and why. Taking time to explore ideas and our feelings related to them. There were constant discussions and assemblies in all of the movements, from the recuperated workplaces during lunch and breaks to weekly gatherings within the unemployed movements and parts of the agenda of the neighborhood assemblies. There were also assemblies comprised of people from the different movements to discuss things together, like autonomy, autogestion and affective politics, and this was done in a way that reflected the politics of the movements, with openness and care, in the discussions and infrastructure – meaning there was food and breaks with music and murgas, helping to facilitate the celebratory and emotive elements involved in all of it.

As for my personal attempts to try and embody a politics of affect and joyful militancy, I don’t know. On a very basic level, but one that really does mean a lot, and at the risk of being dismissed as unserious, I try and be open, smile, and really listen and ask questions with others in the movements. Welcoming people, asking about their lives and being friendly is a bigger deal than most people realize. Feeling welcome into a space that is new, feeling like people care about who you are and not just what action you are participating in is huge. On a more general level, I try and create space for others to speak and be heard, and in a way that is meaningful. This often means things like helping to make sure there is facilitation that allows and develops listening, as well as creating a warm climate and atmosphere around discussions, assemblies and other spaces. I like to think I try and reach out to younger and sometimes lesser experienced participants so as to help them feel heard and involved. This is almost always with younger women. In Occupy in New York, I shifted early on to focusing on the legal group since we did not have much of one when it began. A space or movement without legal support, especially in an action that is not legal in certain respects, is not serious, and for sure does not have affect and care at its core. We must protect all people in their/our bodies; this means legally and in the streets with affinity groups. Within the legal group of Occupy we quickly discovered that we not only needed to create legal support for the hundreds arrested, but also to create spaces of mediation for the conflicts coming up in the Plaza. I was a part of a legal subgroup, together with Safer Spaces, that was trying to set up a mechanism not only for mediation but also the adjudication of conflict. Without ways of resolving conflict within our movements we cannot say we take care, trust and affect seriously.

c&N: Because we think joy and sadness are always moving and shifting into new configurations, we are really curious about how these shifts take place.  Have you seen spaces, conversations, or practices shift from joyful militancy into sad militancy, or vice-versa?  What leads to these shifts?

MS: I have seen movements go from joyful to sad, though it is usually soon before they break up as that specific form of movement. From my experience, this has often been when there is very specific activity on behalf of one or a few people who are extremely disruptive and their disruptions are not dealt with. Our culture of silence or even being polite and not wanting to say things out loud, at least not collectively is a real problem. It allows one or a few people to dominate groups of hundreds and event thousands as was the case with Occupy. This was not the only thing that happened with Occupy, but was among them. In Argentina I saw it happen with left political parties intentionally destroying horizontal assemblies (something that is much harder to do today since they have learned hard lessons and changed their practices). I also saw it with the role of money in movements: from the unemployed movements having to be “managers” of state money and deciding who gets it or not as the government never gave enough, to NGO money in movements creating divisions and finally, to what was for sure government intervention by way of paid disruptors who—when all the other forms of disruption did not work—used direct violence, burning homes and shooting at participants until the land-based movement dispersed. This however raises bigger questions about defense of movements, perhaps for another book.

c&N: In your book, Everyday Revolutions,^[iii] you continually return to the rejection of ideology and how important this has been for movements to create communities based in love and trust. It sounds like in Argentina, what is being rejected is the traditional ideology of Marxism that tends towards vanguardism, hierarchy, and so on. Is there something about all ideology that gets in the way of love and trust across differences?

MS: After the 2001 economic collapse people in Argentina came together from all sorts of backgrounds, as well as networked across all sorts of social classes and identity based groups. The unemployed with the formerly identified urban middle class, the Guarani and Mapuche with media collectives and children of the disappeared (HIJOS) and workers recuperating their workplaces with all of the above. People organized in their locations and came together out of necessity. They forced out four governments in the first months of the rebellion with sheer popular power – people in the streets banging pots and pans (cacerolando). No one called people together, not unions or political parties, they did not have formal leaderships, banners or posters, or even united slogans in the beginning. They came together banging pots and pans and created the song – Que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo (They all must go, not even one shall remain). And it worked. They forced out presidents, heads of the judiciary, economy and other ministries. There was a rejection of what was – of political parties and forms of hierarchy (power over) that people saw as responsible for the economic crisis and mass privatization which in part destroyed the economy.

Again and again people who I spoke with while living there and those I’ve visited over the years insisted that they did not want to replicate the forms of organization that they saw as responsible … not only responsible for the crisis, but also all those groups and forms of organizing that were also seen as unable to respond sufficiently to these groups – so forms on the right and left. All political parties. So, yes, what you suggest with a rejection of Marxism as an ideology is true, but it was also true for anything that seemed to harken a pre-formed ideology or set of ideas. People wanted to create things anew – social relationships and forms of organizing. And this is where we get to some of the ideas in your next question. There were and continue to be consistent forms and ways of thinking about organizing and while it was in no way an ideology – there is an amazing consistency in the ways people across class and identity spoke and speak about these forms: new – rejecting the old – and creating something new in similar ways. I believe this is tied to what is being rejected, but will get to that next.

c&N: You continually point to the concepts of horizontalism, affective politics, autogestion, and autonomy as concepts that are widely shared among movements in Argentina. It’s clear that they’ve been central to constructing and sustaining movements, and warding off ideology and co-optation. You quote a number of movement participants who seem to refuse any concrete definition of the movements they’re part of, and you call these concepts “living words.” It seems clear that you and the voices you highlight are refusing rigid definitions of these terms–autonomy, horizontalism, love, and trust–so that they can be part of an ongoing discussion, and that this is different from an ideology. Can you say more about these differences? What is the difference between an ideological concept and a living word?

MS: First, the idea of a living word comes not from me, but people in the movements. I repeat it a lot since I love the way it captures what people are doing and striving towards, but it is for sure a concept that is also living and dynamic, from within the movements in Argentina. What is rejected is ideology, as I understand people in the movements, by this they mean any predetermined set of ideas or concepts that then are applied to life – to concrete situations. I don’t know that all ideology is rejected as an analysis for what is wrong in society – so elements of Marxism to explain capitalism … it is possible, but what is rejected is a set of ideas that will then “free” people or make for new social relationships. The focus of the movements is how people organize and relate now – in the day to day – and from there construct the future. This already implies a dynamic as the everyday changes, and thus the future, as related to the everyday, must change. The same is true for the ideas around which much of the organizing takes place.

Take for example Horizontalidad – a word that did not exist before in Spanish, or if it did it might have been used a few years prior by HIJOS, the children of the disappeared in Argentina… Horizontalidad was and is described as a relationship, a way of coming together without power over the other, as a way of having conversations and relating more generally. It is always described as a changing relationship since as people relate to one another they change and the group changes, thus the concept of the tools used also must change, thus the living part of the word. It is ever-changing and dynamic as it is used in life by people… It is not a description of a relationship either – not direct or participatory democracy, nor consensus – it is a relationship itself that might or might not use these other tools.

Similarly, autonomy and autogestion. Autonomy was used, together with horizontalidad and autogestion to articulate the focus of the movements being on and with one another – not looking ‘up’ but horizontally. Seeing power as something created together, and also as a live thing, not something to take or be given. Autonomy has been used to distinguish both movements and groups, as well as individuals. Deciding for ourselves or oneself. Not having a party or politician dictate what to do or how… autonomy is a practice and dynamic – not an ideology and theory – and the danger of calling it a theory is that it can become less “alive” less of a practice. In a number of movements, when offered ‘gifts’ and subsides from the state, they continued to call themselves autonomous while simultaneously organizing based on the agenda of the state, and eventually the splits within the movements became too big. But that is another story, and entails sad militancy: with the stagnation of autonomy, the trust and care within the movements also unraveled.

One of the things that I believe has helped keep autonomy and horizontalidad as living words is the practices connected with them. It is not abstract. To be autonomous and horizontal is related to concrete practice. So what is that practice? Those movements that self organize, from the recuperated workplaces (of which there are over 350) to the self organized unemployed movements (a handful still) and media networks and alternative outlets (of which there are around 60) have all continued, even with challenges, and they all argue that part of their ability to face the challenges posed by the state has been their level of self-organization or autogestion. They also intertwine this practice of autogestion with a practice of autonomy and every changing relationships of horizontalidad.

This brings us to affective politics: a politics based in affect, trust, care and love, as people in the movements describe it. This is something I describe more earlier, but it cannot be left out of any question related to the dynamics of the movements and how they are rejecting ideology and instead are creating ever-changing dynamic relationships.

c&N: We have the sense that the situation in North America is a lot different Argentina and other places in Latin America. One of the most striking differences, from our perspective, is that the dense networks of love, care, and trust do not seem to exist in the same ways among the Left in North America, especially among European-descended settlers. What’s your impression of these differences, and what are the implications for movements in North America?

MS: Hmmm … I think a lot of this has to do with identity, class, experience and options in life. People who lack options, such as the unemployed workers in Argentina or the population facing a total economic collapse, have seemed to come together in very similar ways; both movements rejected hierarchy, power-over, and ideology while at the same time creating new ways of being together, self-organizing grounded in horizontal relationships and affect. As the movements continued over time it does seem like those that have self-organized out of necessity have lasted longer and continued with the same dynamic forms of organizing based in new social relationships.

Saying all this, I am now thinking about a conversation I recently had with two young people, one Mexican and one US, who had both been living in Oaxaca for years, collaborating with the Universidad de la Tierra and Gustavo Esteva in particular. They are now in another part of Mexico struggling to organize a social center, a small editorial (printing books and booklets) and a few other projects, all based in horizontal, autonomous and affective relationships. They are facing internal challenges for sure, and that is some of what we spoke about, but they continue and are quite motivated and really lovely, passionate, smart young organizers. They would be examples of people from the left, working with others on the left, to create these sorts of space – and while they need to self organize to survive, it is not to the same degree as say the unemployed in Argentina. They could get other jobs, even if with difficulty … so maybe I am contradicting myself, or maybe the first response to organize with autogestion, autonomy and horizontalidad, developing and grounding in affect, is something that is first a response, but can also be something intentional, if one is very very careful with each step and moves slowly. And, if we could all spend years with Gustavo Esteva, learning and sharing, well, that would be a wonderful gift.

So, after being so wordy here, the conclusion is that while joyful militancy is easier to maintain in places where organizing is based in necessity and the rejection of ideology and pre-formed ways of organizing take root much faster, it is not impossible or even improbable in other spaces where people have less urgency and necessity in their survival questions and options … what it does require in these ‘left’ spaces is a lot of attention to maintaining relationships as flexible and ever-changing. Learning from our companeros in the global south.

c&N: Where do you see love, trust, horizontalism, and autonomy being generated and sustained in North America? Or, do you see other, alternative common notions that animate North American movements?

MS: While I do for sure see autonomy, horizontalism, affect, trust and love animating US and Canadian movements, it is not what occurs to me first for these regions. Too often, at least in the US, there is a sort of territoriality of left ideas and sadly ideologies, even in the more autonomous spaces, so rather than flexible and caring ideas guiding our actions and relationships we cling to ideas and notions such as autonomy as a rigid dogma – “I am more autonomous than you” using forms of comparison with actions and even life choices. It has even occurred more recently with horizontalism, so rather than seeing it as an ever-changing relationship that must change as people change and a group changes, it is used as a particular definition of a form of consensus decision-making. We saw this in particular around the Occupy plazas. I have no idea where this came from since it has nothing to do with the way Argentines use it, but instead people argued for horizontalism to mean absolute consensus, not the striving for consensus, but that all must discuss and agree with the exception of one. (Something impossible in groups of people who do not know one another and particularly large groups as we had in New York, with over a thousand or two thousand people in assemblies at times.) What this points to is the rigidity that people—even those who have not been organized in movement or groups before—tend towards, which is a sort of hierarchy of ideas instead of flexible open relationships … maybe we have not broken from the traditional forms of change on the left as many others have. Or maybe when we become more flexible, those who have preconceived ideas of how change should happen jump in so fast and occupy the space that it seems like that is the majority opinion when it is not. I could explore this more, but would rather begin to think about those spaces where people have organized in these more dynamic and open ways.

Historically, there are tons of examples from the history of the US as well as around the world – we just have to look for them and listen well. For example, SNCC was grounded in participatory and direct democracy, with attempts at creating leadership and horizontal relationships, as well as beloved community overall. The radical feminist movement is fairly well known for working on more affective and care-based ties, focusing on sharing personal stories and creating atmospheres of openness within the movement. Following chronologically is the Anti Nuclear movement in the 1970s and 80s that in many areas was based in direct democracy and affinity groups, making sure to take care of each person bodily as well as with emotional support. I could go into many more examples, though that perhaps is for another project.

c&N: A common perception we’ve been grappling with is that joyful militancy is naïve—a failure to appreciate how bad things are (if you’re not sad/angry/cynical, you’re not paying attention) – how do you react to this?

MS: That is total nonsense. And I do not call many opinions nonsense, really, almost none. But from my experience, those people from whom I have learned about joyful militancy and affective politics are people in unemployed movements, people living in situations such as shanty towns, with nothing to live on and no real future prospects. Or, workers facing a life of unemployment taking over their factories. Or women in the Southern Non Violent Coordinating Committee in the south of the US. Here of course I did not participate, but have spoken to people who were involved in the movement and I read a great deal, and the concept of Beloved Community was key to what they were trying to construct. Inspired in part I believe by this form of organizing is now Black Lives Matter, who are best known for their interruptions in business as usual; less known is that the organizers try and ground their organizing explicitly in the politics of care and love. Black Lives Matter as a hashtag created by co-founder Patrisse Cullors was made famous almost instantaneously, though lesser known is the simultaneous “love letter” that was written by Alicia Garza, the other of the three women co-founders. Written to “Black folks” it speaks of the importance of loving oneself as well as organizing based in love. And recently, in interviews I have done and read with people who are spending lots of time in Rojava, from Janet Biehl to Kurdish women militant researchers, they all speak of the joy, happiness, laughter and smiles that fill the spaces of self-defense and creation that are the autonomous Cantons of Rojava. Women there speak of the importance of this care, joy and laughter. If they do not appreciate how “bad” things are, then, well, shit, no one does.

I do not write this to dismiss the question, it is an important one, and one I get all the time. Affect is not seen as serious. Both due to what people think is something “soft” or not looking to the bad, but also I think it is a deeply gendered and race-based argument. The people I know who are or did ground their organizing explicitly in affect, joy and beloved community are on the margins of society – they are women in groups and networks all over the world, the unemployed and queer movements in Argentina, SNCC in the US and currently the coordinators of Black Lives Matter, women in Rojava … I could go on and on, but the reality is the opposite of the argument being put forward. I do not want to place ideological or identity boxes on those posing these questions, but from my experience they do not come from similar backgrounds as the movements and networks I just mentioned. And last, forget academia. The idea that affective politics or love based organizing is seen as serious in social movement theory is just, well, not happening. I have been asked so many times, “what is that?” and then told to remove it from articles (which I refuse). Emotion yes, and negative emotion, for sure, but love and affect, no, it is seen as not serious. Who dominates the academic world? Some real similarities with those on the left also making the critique. But, I don’t want to spiral into who is to blame for not taking it seriously; it is not particularly useful. Most important is to do what you both are doing, which is bringing this form of organizing more into the public discourse as an option for organizing.

___________________________________________

^[i] The English translation of this book, edited by Marina Sitrin, was published as Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland: AK Press, 2006

^[ii] Earlier in our process of researching and writing the book, we were using the concept of ‘sad militancy’ to describe the ways that radicalism can be intertwined with shame, fear, guilt and ideological purism. We later changed ‘sad militancy’ to ‘rigid radicalism’ in the book, in order to avoid confusion with the emotion of sadness.

^[iii] Marina Sitrin. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. London: Zed Books, 2012.

Images by Pete Railand at Justseeds

Lead image of Marina Sitrin from an interview with M Cem Menguc, “Horizontalism: This, But Not This (1001 Plateaus, # 1)”

Reposted from Joyful Militancy

The post Care is at the heart: an interview with Marina Sitrin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Contextual Citation

The call for a Reparation Ecology by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel:

“Weighing the injustices of centuries of exploitation can resacralize human relations within the web of life. Redistributing care, land and work so that everyone has a chance to contribute to the improvement of their lives and to that of the ecology around them can undo the violence of abstraction that capitalism makes us perform every day. We term this vision “reparation ecology” and offer it as a way to see history as well as the future, a practice and a commitment to equality and reimagined relations for humans in the web of life.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

Description

1. From the publisher:

“Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these things cheap, modern commerce has transformed, governed, and devastated Earth. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today’s planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other rebellions and uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate that throughout history, crises have always prompted fresh strategies to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism. At a time of crisis in all seven cheap things, innovative and systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding—and reclaiming—the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.” (https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520293137)

2. From the intro by the authors, Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel:

“In our new book … we show how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. Every word in that sentence is difficult. Cheap is the opposite of a bargain — cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life that includes humans. “Things” become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print. Most centrally, humans and nature don’t exist as giant seventeenth-century billiard balls crashing into each other. The pulse of life-making is messy, contentious and mutually sustaining. Our book introduces a way to think about the complex relationships between humans and the web of life that helps make sense of the world we’re in and suggests what it might become.

As a teaser, let’s return to those chicken bones in the geological record, a capitalist trace of the relation between humans and the world’s most common bird, Gallus gallus domesticus. The chickens we eat today are very different from those consumed a century ago. Today’s birds are the result of intensive post-World War II efforts drawing on genetic material sourced freely from Asian jungles, which humans decided to recombine to produce the most profitable fowl. That bird can barely walk, reaches maturity in weeks, has an oversize breast, and is reared and slaughtered in geologically significant quantities (more than 60 billion birds a year). Think of this relationship as a sign of Cheap Nature.

Already the most popular meat in the United States, chicken is projected to be the planet’s most popular flesh for human consumption by 2020. That will require a great deal of labor. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work.

In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care.

The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That’s a strategy of Cheap Food.

Chickens themselves are relatively minor contributors to climate change — they have only one stomach each and don’t burp out methane like cows do — but they’re bred in large lots that use a great deal of fuel to keep warm. This is the biggest contributor to the US poultry industry’s carbon footprint. You can’t have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy.

There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown — mainly in China, Brazil and the United States — to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money.

Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of human life — such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color and immigrants — have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element — the rule of Cheap Lives.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

Excerpt

(from the introduction)

How climate change spurred the end of feudalism

Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel: “Civilizations don’t collapse because humans reproduce too fast and starve, as Robert Malthus warned in his Essay on the Principles of Population. Since 1970, the number of malnourished people has remained above 800 million, yet few talk of the end of civilization. Instead, great historical transitions occur because “business as usual” no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing. So it was with feudal Europe. The Black Death was not simply a demographic catastrophe. It also tilted the balance of forces in European society.

Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power. The aristocracy wanted a relatively high peasant population, to maintain its bargaining position: many peasants competing for land was better than many lords competing for peasants. But feudalism was a system born of an earlier climate. Historians call this the Medieval Warm Period — it was so balmy that vineyards reached Norway. That changed at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Climate may not be destiny, but if there is a historical lesson from climate history, it’s that ruling classes don’t survive climate transitions. Feudalism’s class-enforced monocultures crumbled in the face of the Little Ice Age: famine and disease quickly followed.

As a result, with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn’t just transmit disease — they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasant revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized — they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism’s logic of power, production and nature.

The Black Death precipitated an unbearable strain on a system already stretched to the breaking point. Europe after the plague was a place of unrelenting class war, from the Baltics to Iberia, London to Florence. Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism’s rulers could not tolerate. If Europe’s crowns, banks and aristocracies could not suffer such demands, neither could they restore the status quo ante, despite their best efforts. Repressive legislation to keep labor cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague’s first onslaught (1349–51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.

The labor effects of climate change were abundantly clear to Europe’s aristocrats, who exhausted themselves trying to keep business very much as usual. They failed almost entirely. Nowhere in western or central Europe was serfdom reestablished. Wages and living standards for peasants and urban workers improved substantially, enough to compensate for a decline in the overall size of the economy. Although this was a boon for most people, Europe’s 1 percent found their share of the economic surplus contracting. The old order was broken and could not be fixed.

Capitalism emerged from this broken state of affairs. Ruling classes tried not just to restore the surplus but to expand it. That was easier said than done, however. East Asia was wealthier, so although its rulers also experienced socio-ecological tribulations, they found ways to accommodate upheaval, deforestation and resource shortages in their own tributary terms. One solution that reinvented humans’ relation to the web of life was stumbled upon by the Iberian aristocracy — in Portugal and Castile above all. By the end of the fifteenth century, these kingdoms and their societies had made war through the Reconquista, the centuries-long conflict with Muslim powers on the peninsula, and were so deeply dependent on Italian financiers to fund their military campaigns that Portugal and Castile had in turn been remade by war and debt.

The mix of war debt and the promise of wealth through conquest spurred the earliest invasions of the Atlantic. The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers. The modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at this frontier. What followed was an epochal transition: one that reinvented the surplus around a cocktail of banking, slaving, and killing.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

On the perspective of World-Ecology

Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel: “Our view of capitalism is part of a perspective that we call world-ecology. World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life. Rather than begin with the separation of humans from the web of life, we ask questions about how humans — and human arrangements of power and violence, work and inequality — fit within nature. Capitalism is not just part of an ecology but is an ecology — a set of relationships integrating power, capital and nature. So when we write — and hyphenate — world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of “world-systems” to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation.

To say world-ecology is not, therefore, to invoke the “ecology of the world” but to suggest an analysis that shows how relations of power, production and reproduction work through the web of life. The idea of world-ecology allows us to see how the modern world’s violent and exploitative relationships are rooted in five centuries of capitalism and also how these unequal arrangements — even those that appear timeless and necessary today — are contingent and in the midst of unprecedented crisis. World-ecology, then, offers something more than a different view of capitalism, nature and possible futures. It offers a way of seeing how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history.

This opens space for us to reconsider how the ways that we have been schooled to think of change — ecological, economic, and all the rest — are themselves implicated in today’s crises. That space is crucial if we are to understand the relationship between naming and acting on the world. Movements for social justice have long insisted on “naming the system” because the relationships among thought, language and emancipation are intimate and fundamental to power. World-ecology allows us to see how concepts we take for granted — like Nature and Society — are problems not just because they obscure actual life and history but because they emerged out of the violence of colonial and capitalist practice.

Modern concepts of Nature and Society were born in Europe in the sixteenth century. These master concepts were not only formed in close relation to the dispossession of peasants in the colonies and in Europe but also themselves used as instruments of dispossession and genocide. The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history — one that includes the early-modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples and Africans from humanity — is testimony to modernity’s extraordinary capacity to make us forget.

World-ecology therefore commits not only to rethinking but to remembering. Too often we attribute capitalism’s devastation of life and environments to economic rapaciousness alone, when much of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics. Contrary to neoliberal claptrap, businesses and markets are ineffective at doing most of what makes capitalism run. Cultures, states and scientific complexes must work to keep humans obedient to norms of gender, race and class. New resource geographies need to be mapped and secured, mounting debts repaid, coin defended. World-ecology offers a way to recognize this, to remember — and see anew — the lives and labors of humans and other natures in the web of life.” (https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/)

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