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The consequences of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic have been far-reaching, particularly among health care personnel (HCP) and within health care settings. HCP have been directly affected, sustaining occupationally acquired COVID-19 infections, and indirectly through a substantial alteration in health care delivery. With the advent of highly effective and safe SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, case rates and hospitalization rates are declining, and the promise of a return to some semblance of pre–COVID-19 health care is growing. Recently, several medical centers have announced a requirement for SARS-CoV-2 vaccination of all HCP (allowing for medical and religious exemptions), and the impending licensure of the mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccines (following the previous Emergency Use Authorization [EUA]) will move many other centers to consider a similar policy. A recent outbreak in a skilled nursing facility attributed to an unvaccinated HCP member clearly illustrates the risk unvaccinated HCP can pose to their patients and other HCP.1

The recognition of HCP vaccination as an essential component of patient and HCP safety programs emerged in the mid-2000s with a focus on influenza vaccination. Prior to the 2009-2010 influenza season, despite increased awareness of the importance of HCP influenza vaccination and large-scale, resource-intensive voluntary vaccination campaigns, vaccination rates remained very low. While HCP influenza vaccination was first recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in 1978, innovative, patient safety–focused programs at hospitals like Virginia Mason Medical Center paved the way for stronger expectations surrounding HCP vaccination.2 The success at these institutions, professional society endorsements of influenza vaccination as a condition of employment policies, and the addition of HCP influenza vaccination as a publicly reported quality measure were associated with increases in vaccination rates from around 45% to nearly 80%, with higher rates among acute care facilities, physicians, and nursing personnel.3 During the 2019-2020 season, the percentage of hospital-based HCP who reported working under an employer influenza vaccination requirement reached 72.1%.3 Very few HCP have had their employment terminated due to policy refusal, particularly considering the thousands encompassed by these policies.

We fear it is only a matter of time before we face a deadlier and more contagious pathogen, yet the threat of a deadly pandemic remains dangerously overlooked. Pandemics now occur with greater frequency, due to factors such as climate change, urbanization, and international travel. Other factors, such as a weak World Health Organization and potentially massive cuts to funding for U.S. scientific research and foreign aid, including funding for the United Nations, stand to deepen our vulnerability. We also face the specter of novel and mutated pathogens that could spread and kill faster than diseases we have seen before. With the advent of genome-editing technologies, bioterrorists could artificially engineer new plagues, a threat that Ashton Carter, the former U.S. secretary of defense, thinks could rival nuclear weapons in deadliness. The two of us have advised the president of Guinea on stopping Ebola. In addition, we have worked on ways to contain the spread of Zika and have informally advised U.S. and international organizations on the matter. Our experiences tell us that the world is unprepared for these threats. We urgently need to change this trajectory. We can start by learning four lessons from the gaps exposed by the Ebola and Zika pandemics. Faster Vaccine Development The most effective way to stop pandemics is with vaccines. However, with Ebola there was no vaccine, and only now, years later, has one proven effective. This has been the case with Zika, too. Though there has been rapid progress in developing and getting a vaccine to market, it is not fast enough, and Zika has already spread worldwide. Many other diseases do not have vaccines, and developing them takes too long when a pandemic is already under way. We need faster pipelines, such as the one that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is trying to create, to preemptively develop vaccines for diseases predicted to cause outbreaks in the near future. Poinkt-of-Care Diagnostics Even with such efforts, vaccines will not be ready for many diseases and would not even be an option for novel or artificially engineered pathogens. With no vaccine for Ebola, our next best strategy was to identify who was infected as quickly as possible and isolate them before they infected others. Because Ebola’s symptoms were identical to common illnesses like malaria, diagnosis required laboratory testing that could not be easily scaled. As a result, many patients were only tested after several days of being contagious and infecting others. Some were never tested at all, and about 40% of patients in Ebola treatment centers did not actually have Ebola. Many dangerous pathogens similarly require laboratory testing that is difficult to scale. Florida, for example, has not been able to expand testing for Zika, so pregnant women wait weeks to know if their babies might be affected. What’s needed are point-of-care diagnostics that, like pregnancy tests, can be used by frontline responders or patients themselves to detect infection right away, where they live. These tests already exist for many diseases, and the technology behind them is well-established. However, the process for their validation is slow and messy. Point-of-care diagnostics for Ebola, for example, were available but never used because of such bottlenecks. Greater Global Coordination We need stronger global coordination. The responsibility for controlling pandemics is fragmented, spread across too many players with no unifying authority. In Guinea we forged a response out of an amalgam of over 30 organizations, each of which had its own priorities. In Ebola’s aftermath, there have been calls for a mechanism for responding to pandemics similar to the advance planning and training that NATO has in place for its numerous members to respond to military threats in a quick, coordinated fashion. This is the right thinking, but we are far from seeing it happen. The errors that allowed Ebola to become a crisis replayed with Zika, and the WHO, which should anchor global action, continues to suffer from a lack of credibility. Stronger Local Health Systems International actors are essential but cannot parachute into countries and navigate local dynamics quickly enough to contain outbreaks. In Guinea it took months to establish the ground game needed to stop the pandemic, with Ebola continuing to spread in the meantime. We need to help developing countries establish health systems that can provide routine care and, when needed, coordinate with international responders to contain new outbreaks. Local health systems could be established for about half of the $3.6 billion ultimately spent on creating an Ebola response from scratch. Access to routine care is also essential for knowing when an outbreak is taking root and establishing trust. For months, Ebola spread before anyone knew it was happening, and then lingered because communities who had never had basic health care doubted the intentions of foreigners flooding into their villages. The turning point in the pandemic came when they began to trust what they were hearing about Ebola and understood what they needed to do to halt its spread: identify those exposed and safely bury the dead. With Ebola and Zika, we lacked these four things — vaccines, diagnostics, global coordination, and local health systems — which are still urgently needed. However, prevailing political headwinds in the United States, which has played a key role in combatting pandemics around the world, threaten to make things worse. The Trump administration is seeking drastic budget cuts in funding for foreign aid and scientific research. The U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development may lose over one-third of their budgets, including half of the funding the U.S. usually provides to the UN. The National Institutes of Health, which has been on the vanguard of vaccines and diagnostics research, may also face cuts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been at the forefront of responding to outbreaks, remains without a director, and, if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, would lose $891 million, 12% of its overall budget, provided to it for immunization programs, monitoring and responding to outbreaks, and other public health initiatives. Investing in our ability to prevent and contain pandemics through revitalized national and international institutions should be our shared goal. However, if U.S. agencies become less able to respond to pandemics, leading institutions from other nations, such as Institut Pasteur and the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in France, the Wellcome Trust and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs have done instrumental research and response work in previous pandemics), would need to step in to fill the void. There is no border wall against disease. Pandemics are an existential threat on par with climate change and nuclear conflict. We are at a critical crossroads, where we must either take the steps needed to prepare for this threat or become even more vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before we are hit by a deadlier, more contagious pandemic. Will we be ready?

In April, more than 1,000 vaccine experts gathered in Washington for the first time since the pandemic began. Over four days, scientists, doctors and drugmakers pored over cutting-edge research and tackled some of the most pressing questions in the world of vaccines.

Talk of Covid-19 vaccines was, of course, unavoidable. But high on the agenda at the World Vaccine Congress was a vaccine for another mysterious illness that could strike at any moment: Disease X.

The recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases have refocused attention on the threat posed by unvaccinated and undervaccinated individuals.1 Governments around the world have responded by strengthening laws and policies directed at increasing vaccination rates. The standard menu of options includes education and information initiatives, incentives, and mandates; these may be directed at the general public, health care organizations, or practitioners.

The term mandate is somewhat misleading, because there are exceptions —always on medical grounds, frequently on religious grounds, and sometimes on philosophical grounds. Moreover, the thrust of mandates is not to forcibly require vaccination but to predicate eligibility for a service or benefit on adherence to the recommended immunization schedule of vaccination. In the United States, every state requires proof of immunization for entry into public schools, and some states also have similar requirements for entry into daycare facilities and private schools. These requirements can seem coercive to families who do not have other feasible schooling or child care options. However, the logic and acceptability of these requirements are rooted in the fact that the risks posed by clusters of nonimmunized children are heightened in these very settings.

In June 2017, the Ferguson Township Board of Supervisors passed a resolution recognizing the risk and threats of failing to draw down carbon emissions. As a local government in Pennsylvania, the third-largest greenhouse-gas emitter in the United States despite having a right to a clean environment guaranteed in its state constitution, we knew we had to act. Our resolution calls for carbon neutrality as soon as feasible but no later than 2050.

Passing the resolution provided the opportunity and, arguably, the imperative to integrate emissions impacts into all township decision-making. By setting such a goal at the local level, governments can figure out what solutions fit their community’s needs and work within their state’s legislative landscape. For Ferguson Township, this has meant 100 percent wind power, designing a LEED Gold public works building, working on zoning changes to incentivize green building, low-impact stormwater infrastructure, and working with local school kids, teachers and families to plant trees.

The understanding of how the monetary system works and the role of the state in its monetary system that Modern Money Theory provides is fundamental for the GND. MMT maintains that a sovereign government is not financially constrained. As the currency issuer in a credit-money system, it neither has nor does not have money. It simply issues currency (its IOUs) into existence when it spends. In the modern world that amounts to changing numbers in bank accounts, i.e., electronic entries which the government can neither run out of nor save for future spending. Government spending leads to credits to nongovernment sector bank accounts, while tax payments lead to debits. A deficit then implies a net credit to bank accounts (Wray 2015 [2012]; Wray 1998; Nersisyan and Wray 2016). While the statement that the government is not financially constrained is often misinterpreted as a claim that the government faces no constraints, MMT maintains that the availability of real resources should constrain spending, both private and public. Excessive spending creates problems not in terms of higher government deficits and debt (and the usual insolvency arguments), but in terms of inflation. The danger of inflation, however, stems not from the way the spending is financed, but because of potential pressure on resources.2 Similarly, the function of taxes is not to finance government spending, but to withdraw demand from the economy, creating space for government spending to move resources to the public sector without causing inflation. From this perspective, it is counterproductive for the government to withdraw more spending power than it wants to put back in—except in the case that the economy is already operating beyond full capacity. It would be equivalent to opening up real resource space by preventing the private sector from using real resources while refusing to use them itself. MMT maintains that the concept of “paying for” government spending in financial terms is meaningless. The government pays for all of its spending, including interest and principal on bonds, the same way—by crediting bank accounts. If there is any sense in which “paying for” spending makes sense it’s in terms of real resources; a nation always pays for things in terms of the real output it can produce or can net import from others. Below full employment government spending creates “free lunches” as it utilizes resources which would otherwise not be used. Only at full employment does a country face tradeoffs for real resource use. Although the implementation of the GND will increase government spending and total aggregate demand, this does not imply that taxes need to go up. Instead, taxes should be raised only if the additional spending creates inflationary pressures. In general, it makes no difference in terms of inflation whether the dollar spent to hire resources comes from the government or from the private sector. Thus a shift in spending from the private sector to the government required by the GND need not be inflationary. Those arguing for tax increases have not carefully assessed the inflation potential of the GND. The GND will bring online existing excess capacity, will shift resources from current uses, and will further increase capacity along the way. It is not a foregone conclusion that the net increase in the demand for resources will be beyond our capacities. If we tackle climate change as the moral equivalent of war, and if this really does take us to and beyond full employment of resources, we can adopt measures to counter inflation pressure, including tax increases. Knowing that that is the real danger, we can formulate a strategy to prevent it.

The Job Guarantee has the features of a public option and the benefits of a price support scheme. As a public option, it guarantees universal but voluntary access to a basic public service employment opportunity to anyone who wants one. 1 It is similar to the way individuals are guaranteed a public defender if they choose not to hire a private one, or the way families are guaranteed a seat in a public school even if they opt to send their kids to a private school instead. Since the Job Guarantee provides a fixed base wage, it also serves as a price support policy, not only for workers in the program, but also for all workers in the economy. This is because it acts as an alternative to the most undesirable private sector jobs – those with poor pay, abuse, harassment, wage theft, dangerous workplaces, and other problems – thereby establishing the minimum required pay and working conditions for all employers to meet.

Price Supports, Buffer Stocks, and Living Wages

Climate action and economic prosperity are often put at odds. Shortly after the Green New Deal resolution was introduced to Congress by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Edward J. Markey, the narrative rapidly shifted away from discussing the details of the first proposed solution to climate change on the scale of the crisis, to discussing the economic feasibility of implementing such a plan.

In reality, the Green New Deal addresses both concerns—addressing the climate crisis will grow our economy in addition to preventing immense economic losses that would result from inaction.

The first aspect of the Green New Deal is the wholesale transformation that is necessary to produce a rapid and robust answer to global warming. This is the all-hands-on-deck industrial strategy that has been called the “moonshot of our time” and likened to “wartime mobilization.” This component requires all the technological know-how, skill, and expertise necessary to achieve the engineering feat of transforming the production system from fossil fuels to clean energy. It creates quality union jobs with prevailing wages to reverse the extraordinary hollowing-out of middle- income jobs in the labor market.

But industrial policy is not the same thing as full employment policy, though it may temporarily produce full employment during the mobilization phase of the green transformation. The second aspect of the Green New Deal thus ensures that, through a mixture of policy measures, this industrial strategy results in economic security for all. The Job Guarantee is one of those measures. It is the safety net that is especially needed by people who are most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change and most susceptible to mass layoffs in the transition process.

Matt Bruenig criticizes the idea for its lack of clarity.8 He claims that “the flowering of dozens of mutually incompatible proposals that all go under the name ‘job guarantee’ ” suggests that the proposal is more of a rhetorical move than a policy proposal.9 Bruenig is of course right to notice that there have been multiple policies floating around that go by the name of “job guarantee,” but this only indicates interest and affection for the slogan, not some weakness inherent in the motivating ideas. My own feeling is that the interpretation of any policy by the press, the public, and political leaders is more important than the myriad micropolicy mechanisms of any given white paper. A good demonstration of this is how the press has intentionally distorted the meaning of “Medicare for All.” They have done this against both the text of the bills themselves and the myriad and detailed explanations of the utility and cost-effectiveness of the proposal by policy experts. This is to say that distortions of any idea by its opponents remains an intractable political problem, not a policy one. It follows, then, that defining the phrase job guarantee is the business of political campaigners, leaders, and advocates—not policy writers alone. Nevertheless, a survey of contemporary proposals suggests that a job guarantee refers to a set of policies that, when combined, are meant to remedy both structural and cyclical unemployment through direct, state-led employment. Good proposals do this by combining massive public infrastructure projects—thus creating expanded permanent or semipermanent public sector employment—with a more flexible solution for cyclical downturns. In other words, a robust job guarantee combines the “employer of last resort” principle (where the state swells to absorb unemployed workers in periods of recession and contracts during periods of recovery and stability) with an old-fashioned public works program. Good proposals also set a wage floor that is well above the current minimum wage and stem the possibility of downward pressure on wages through prevailing-wage clauses and limitations on redundant jobs. Such a policy also requires the establishment of employment offices and complementary active labor market policies (to fit job-seekers to jobs).

The combination of the employer of last resort model with a public works program is important if a job guarantee is going to both succeed politically and be effective once implemented. The major political weakness of CETA was the liability introduced by so-called make-work jobs, which came to be seen as a symbol of liberal government profligacy. But when we combine countercyclical job creation with a major public works program, the political implications could be positive. The program could demonstrate that jobs generated by the government are not just meant to absorb surplus labor but also perform an independent function valuable to the whole society—like building infrastructure, telecommunications, and public transit. If implemented, the ramifications of a program like this would be massive. Without exaggeration, a job guarantee of the type described here would partially socialize the labor market. And there is still no surer way to move us closer to the achievement of a social right to employment.

The first aspect of the Green New Deal is the wholesale transformation that is necessary to produce a rapid and robust answer to global warming. This is the all-hands-on-deck industrial strategy that has been called the “moonshot of our time” and likened to “wartime mobilization.” This component requires all the technological know-how, skill, and expertise necessary to achieve the engineering feat of transforming the production system from fossil fuels to clean energy. It creates quality union jobs with prevailing wages to reverse the extraordinary hollowing-out of middle- income jobs in the labor market.

But industrial policy is not the same thing as full employment policy, though it may temporarily produce full employment during the mobilization phase of the green transformation. The second aspect of the Green New Deal thus ensures that, through a mixture of policy measures, this industrial strategy results in economic security for all. The Job Guarantee is one of those measures. It is the safety net that is especially needed by people who are most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change and most susceptible to mass layoffs in the transition process.

1. Liberal wars are fought over the modalities of life itself. Liberalism is undoubtedly a complex historical phenomenon, but if there is one defining singularity to its war-making efforts, then it is the underlying biopolitical imperative, which justifies its actions in relation to the protection and advancement of modes of existence. Liberals continuously draw reference to life to justify military force.3 War, if there is to be one, must be for the protection and improvement of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favor. More recently, for instance, it has underwritten the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation that is seen to offer a more humane and locally sensitive response.4 If liberal peace can therefore be said to imply something more than the mere absence of war, so it is the case that liberal war is immeasurably more complex than the simple presence of military hostilities. With war appearing integral to the logic of peace insofar as it conditions the very possibility of liberal rule, humanity’s most meaningful expression actually appears through the battles fought in its name. It would be incorrect, however, to think that this logic represents a recent departure.5 Life has always been the principal object for liberal political strategies. Hence, while the liberal way of rule is by definition biopolitical, as it revolves around the problems posed by species life, so it is the case that liberal ways of war are inherently biopolitical, as they, too, are waged over the same productive properties that life is said to possess. The reason contemporary forms of conflict are therefore seen to be emergent, complex, nonlinear, and adaptive is not incidental. Mirroring the new social morphology of life, the changing nature of conflict is preceded by the changing ontological account of species being that appears exponentially more powerful precisely because it is said to display post-Newtonian qualities.

2. Liberal wars operate within a global imaginary of threat. Ever since Immanuel Kant imagined the autonomous individual at peace with the wider political surroundings, the liberal subject has always been inserted into a more expansive terrain of productive cohabitation that is potentially free of conflict. While this logic has been manifest through local systems of liberal power throughout its history, during the 1990s a global imaginary of threat appeared that directly correlated liberal forms of governance with less planetary endangerment. This ability to collapse the local into the global resulted in an unrivaled moment of liberal expansionism.6 Such expansion did not, however, result from some self-professed planetary commitment to embrace liberal ideals. Liberal interventionism proceeded instead on the basis that localized emergency and crises demanded response. Modes of incorporation were therefore justified on the grounds that although populations still exist beyond the liberal pale, for their own betterment they should be included. This brings us to the martial face of liberal power. While liberalism is directly fueled by the universal belief in the righteousness of its mission, since there is no universally self-evident allegiance to the project, war is necessarily universalized in its pursuit of peace: “However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims.”7

First, as a critique of capitalist political economy, degrowth cannot but consider waged work as “the standpoint from which capitalism's mysteries can be uncovered and its logics laid bare" (Weeks 2011, 6). In most countries around the world, waged work is the main way for people to get access to food, clothing, and shelter, as well as healthcare and retirement. Neoliberal ideologies of the "end of work" notwithstanding, people cannot but aspire to be included in the work society. This, however, is not the result of individual choices, but a governmental dispositif that is instrumental to capitalist political economy. As Kathi Weeks writes, “Enforcing work, as the other side of defending property rights, is particular preoccupation of the postwelfare, neoliberal state" (ibid., 7). In a more recent assessment of labour politics worldwide, Verity Burgmann has noted how "the trajectory of capitalist development is to draw more and more people into waged work" (Burgmann 2016, 6). Since the 1980s, this long-term trend has been accompanied by a decisive move towards lowering labour's share of income and labour standards, in order to fuel increased global competition—a process known as "race to the bottom" (Newell 2012). Increasing working hours, precariousness, and casualization of jobs; decreasing wages and occupational safety; recurrence of old and new forms of unpaid and slave labour; and the deregulation of labour markets and the legitimation of anti-union politics as necessary to global competitiveness are all ways in which globalized capitalism is intensifying the exploitation of labour on the world scale. It is worth noting that, at the same time, the global rate of waged work has been increasing-not diminishing—as more and more people have been deprived of access to a means of subsistence via both dispossession and the degradation of natural resources (Federici 2012) and have become proletarians.

In short, the growth society is the same as the work society. A political economy of degrowth thus needs, primarily, to expose, denaturalize, and politicize the social organization of work as a key mechanism of capitalist political economy (see also Koch, this volume).

And now one of the oldest journals on the socialist left, the Monthly Review — its first issue in 1949 included “Why Socialism?” by Albert Einstein — has fully embraced degrowth. It’s latest issue is entitled “Planned Degrowth: Ecosocialism and Sustainable Human Development” and features many of the most prominent degrowth proponents, such as Jason Hickel and Matthias Schmelzer. The issue also includes a long introduction by the long-standing ecological Marxist John Bellamy Foster. As usual for a Foster essay, there is much thought provoking and worth agreeing with in it. But ultimately, like much of the degrowth movement, it needlessly shackles its vision of a socialist future to a program of aggregate reduction.

Ecosocialism, Human Needs, and Planning

In sum, both lifestyle and its offshoot, livelihood environmentalism, have emerged in the very period in which the environmental crisis has only worsened and private capital’s capacity to harm the environment has vastly expanded. Their political strategies are ineffective. We now turn to diagnose this ineffectiveness in more explicit historical and class terms.

Part 2. “Overshoot”: The Class Basis of Environmentalism

Larger surpluses of labour are, on the one hand, beneficial to capitalist interests. They serve as a disciplinary tool against the working class (particularly when filtered through racism, nationalism and sexism) and as a reserve to call upon in times of growth. They reduce wages, sow competition among workers and shackle the ambitions of the proletariat. These are among the reasons behind a gradual drive to incorporate the world’s population into a global labour force, fostered by imperialism and globalisation.117 On the other hand, capital requires a particular type of surplus population: cheap, docile and pliable.118 Without these characteristics, this excess of humanity becomes a problem for capital. Not content to lie down and accept its disposability, it makes itself heard through riots, mass migration, criminality, and all sorts of actions that disrupt the existing order. Capitalism therefore has simultaneously to produce a disciplined surplus and deploy violence and coercion against those who resist.

One of the principal ways to manage the unruly surplus has been to champion the social democratic ideal of full employment, whereby every physically capable (male) worker has a job. In support of this ideal, economic policies aim to reincorporate the surplus into capitalism as disciplined and waged workers, secured by a hegemonic consensus between the representatives of labour and capital. The apogee of this approach was the postwar period, when working-class struggle and conservative concern with social order positioned full employment as a necessary economic goal.119 In this brief ‘golden age’ of capitalism, unemployment was kept to a minimum, and capital had to seek out pre-capitalist populations around the world in order to expand and accumulate.120 For the most part, job growth was achieved through healthy economic growth that increased the demand for labour.121 Historically, growth of the national economy has often been important in warding off the effects of technological unemployment – either by increasing the output of existing industries or by inventing new industries to employ the displaced workers. For instance, during the latter half of the 1800s, the rise in capital goods output created jobs that offset the surplus population newly released from the agricultural sector.122 In the prewar and postwar eras, growth in manufacturing jobs was sustained by the rise of mass consumerism and surges in government military spending.123 Today, we can see similar attempts at creating new markets through accumulation by dispossession – turning public or common goods into privatised (and monetised) commodities. If increases in labour demand are to be successful, however, they require the right supply of labour – which means an increasingly high-skilled workforce. Education has been the primary way to achieve this, with, for example, secondary education having its origins in efforts to produce more skilled workers. The demand to educate workers for jobs held wide support during the high unemployment period of the Great Depression,124 and early neoliberals went so far as to argue that education was necessary only to adapt human beings to the constant changes in the economy.125 Today, the growth areas of the labour market tend to be in high-skilled, non-routine and cognitive jobs.126 This means any attempt at full employment increasingly requires new skills from workers – a demand that helps explain the aggressive efforts to reduce higher education to glorified job training.127 The overall societal aim becomes the production of competitive subjects undergoing constant self-improvement in an endless effort to be deemed ‘employable’.128 The demands that workers be constantly retraining and that policies support healthy economic growth are necessary components to the drive for full employment.129

Work is often understood and experienced as a field of individual agency and as a sign of and a path to self-reliance. The Protestant work ethic family support. Waged work thus became seen as the sine qua non of self reliance. By this account, the ‘‘free’’ labor market provides the institutional setting—‘‘a very Eden of the innate rights of man’’—in which individuals can seize control of their own fate; individuals meet in this realm as buyers and sellers of a commodity, labor power, and ‘‘contract as free persons, who are equal before the law’’ (Marx 1976, 280). Of course, the progress of industrialization posed many challenges to the claim that waged work was best characterized as a state of independence rather than dependence. And yet, as Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon argue, it was in this period that waged labor became increasingly synonymous with independence. Whereas individual—or, more precisely household—independence had been a status that only property ownership could confer, over the course of the in dustrial period it became increasingly identified with wage-earning. Indeed, whereas working-class activists had previously decried waged labor as a form of ‘‘wage slavery,’’ they now claimed ‘‘a new form of manly independence within it’’ (Fraser xx1 Gxxordon 1994, 315–16). x

As Weber points out, the work ethic—and this remains consistent over the course of its historical transformations—is an individualizing discourse. The individual’s economic of a collective becomes the duty of every individual; thus, refracted through the lens of Puritan ethics, ‘‘St. Paul’s ‘He who will not work shall not eat,’ ’’ once understood to be relevant to the community as a whole, now ‘‘holds unconditionally for everyone’’ (1958, 159). That is, moral responsibility now lies with the individual rather than the community, and rich and poor alike ‘‘shall not eat without working’’ (159–60). This becomes even more applicable over the course of the industrial era, once waged work becomes normative; and it is especially true in the postindustrial period as the breadwinner norm becomes increasingly universal, an expectation not just of household heads but of every adult citizen. With fewer instances of ‘‘legitimate’’ economic or political dependence, ‘‘whatever dependency remains, therefore, can be interpreted as the fault of individuals’’ (Fraser and Gordon 1994, 325). Independence becomes less a matter of the types of relationships one finds oneself subject to and more a quality of one’s character (332). ‘‘Postindustrial dependency’’ thus becomes at once increasingly illegitimate and ‘‘increasingly individualized’’ (325).

In this system, what individual businesses experience as the competitive pressure for profit is a result of a system-wide drive to always increase productivity, regardless of the bounds of the market—the key dynamic of capitalist production. From the standpoint of the owners of capital, this effectively reduces all the diverse forms of labor to the same measure: comparable, compressible expenditures of time. Yet by imposing this reduction on labor and constantly pushing to produce more in less time, capital sears coercion, violence, stupefaction, and hostility, the raw materials of class conflict, into the core of money itself. The blind pursuit of money by banks and businesses is only the flip side of this systemic, relentless drive for higher productivity and the social antagonisms it engenders.43

As a universal equivalent, then, money becomes an abstract, normative measure of time, the way the system evaluates, regulates, and disciplines everything from the different kinds of work people do, to the time society allots to different productive activities, to the temporal pressures of everyday life. As such, "money" names an alienated form of power: something created through relationships between human beings that takes on an impersonal, independent existence from its creators and in turn dominates them.44 To everyday perception, as well as in the theoretical elaborations of everyday perception that make up economics, money appears to represent different things, like market relationships, material goods and services, or state authority. Actually the reverse is the case: these things now represent money as an autonomous power, which invests them all with its holy aura.

The EGD (EC, 2019a: 2) is explicit that it is ‘a new growth strategy that aims to transform the EU into a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy where there are no net emissions of greenhouse gases in 2050 and where economic growth is decoupled from resource use’. Everyone, more or less, can agree with ‘a fair and prosperous society’, while the sleight of hands are performed by proclaiming ‘modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy where there are no net emissions’. Degrowth intellectuals have done well to destroy the myth of ‘decoupling’ (Hickel, 2020; Kallis et al., 2020; Requena-i-Mora & Brockington, 2021), which makes attentiveness to the problem of low-carbon infrastructures and their economy all the more important.

The necropolitical features of the economy are hidden by normality (Mbembé, 2003), technocratic language and ideological entrenchment (Gills & Morgan, 2020). The energy economy offers a framework of management, propulsive purpose and, most of all, establishes its violence implicitly within the planning, extraction, construction and operation of infrastructural systems. The EGD extends this necropolitical economy, which the following subsections demonstrate. The EGD, mimicking Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7, relies on the Clean Energy for All Europeans (EC, 2019b) to reveal its energy policy and strategy. The EC (2019b:4) reveals their energy policy logic, saying they will also ensure a more stable EU energy market in the future, by making the electricity market in the EU better suited to variable and intermittent renewable energies. With the new rules, electricity can be traded closer to real time, when weather forecasts are more accurate and renewable plants are able to better predict their production. The new regulations also strengthen price signals and increase cross-border trade to ensure that electricity can always flow to where it is most needed. When we need a lot of electricity in the peak of the day of a cold winter, we must make sure that the clean and cheap electricity from the wind farms of the North of Europe or from the solar farms of the South of Europe can arrive where it is most needed. This is not only good for the environment, it is also good for consumers' pockets, reducing the need for constructing new back-up power plants in each country that would be used only a few hours a year and would eventually be paid by electricity consumers.

The left must therefore develop a sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas and ideology, and in the sphere of material infrastructures. The objective of such a strategy, in a very broad sense, is to navigate the present technical, economic, social, political and productive hegemony towards a new point of equilibrium beyond the imposition of wage labour. This will require long-term and experimental praxis on multiple fronts. A hegemonic project therefore implies and responds to society as a complex emergent order, the result of diverse interacting practices.22 Some combinations of social practices will lead to instability, but others will tend towards more stable (if not literally static) outcomes. In this context, hegemonic politics is the work that goes into retaining or navigating towards a new point of relative stability across a variety of societal subsystems, from the national-level politics of the state, to the economic domain, from the battle of ideas and ideologies to different regimes of technology. The order which emerges as a result of the interactions of these different domains is hegemony, which works to constrain certain kinds of action and enable others. In the rest of this chapter, we examine three possible channels through which to undertake this struggle: pluralising economics, creating utopian narratives and repurposing technology. These certainly do not exhaust the points of possible attack, but they do identify potentially productive areas to focus resources on.

REMEMBERING THE FUTURE