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The "marriage" of marxism and feminism has been like the marriage husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is Marxism. Recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the "larger" struggle against capital. To continue our simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce. The inequalities in this marriage, like most social phenomena, are no accident. Many marxists typically argue that feminism is at best less important than class conflict and at worst divisive of the working class. This political stance produces an analysis that absorbs feminism into the class struggle. Moreover, the analytic power of marxism with respect to capital has obscured its limitations with respect to sexism. We will argue here that while marxist analysis provides essential insight into the laws of historical development, and those of capital in particular, the categories of marxism are sex-blind. Only a specifically feminist analysis reveals the systemic character of relations between men and women. Yet feminist analysis by itself is inadequate because it has been blind to history and insufficiency materialist. Both Marxist analysis, particularly its historical and materialist method, and feminist analysis, especially the identification of patriarchy as a social and historical structure, must be drawn upon if we are to understand the development of western capitalist societies and the predicament of women within them. In this essay we suggest a new direction for marxist feminist analysis. I MARXISM AND THE WOMAN QUESTION The woman question has never been the "feminist question." The feminist question is directed at the causes of sexual inequality between women and men, of male dominance over women. Most marxist analyses of women's position take as their question the relationship of women to the economic system, rather than that of women to men, apparently assuming the latter will be explained in their discussion of the former. Marxist analysis of the woman question has taken three main forms. All see women's oppression .in our connection (or lack of it) to production, Defining women as part of the working class, these analyses consistently subsume women's relation to men under worker's relation to capital. First, early marxists, including Marx, Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin, saw capitalism drawing, all women into the wage labor force, and saw this process destroying the sexual division, of labor. Second, contemporary marxists have incorporated, women into an analysis of evervdav life in capitalism. In this view, all aspects of our lives are seen to reproduce the capitalist system and we are all workers in the system. And third,, marxist feminists have focused on housework and its relation to capital, some arguing that housework produces surplus value and that houseworkers work directly for capitalists. . . . While the approach of the early marxists ignored housework and stressed women's labor force participation, the two more recent approaches emphasize housework to such an extent they ignore women's current role in the labor market. Nevertheless, all three attempt to include women in the category working class and to understand women's oppression as another aspect of class oppression. In doing so all give short shrift to the object of feminist analysis, the relations between women and men. While our "problems" have been elegantly analyzed, they have been misunderstood. The focus of Marxist analysis has been class relations; the object of marxist analysis has been understanding the laws of motion of capitalist society. While we believe marxist methodology can be used to formulate feminist strategy, these marxist feminist approaches discussed above clearly do not do so; their marxism clearly dominates their feminism. Marxism enables us to understand many aspects of capitalist societies: the structure of production, the generation of a particular occupational structure, and the nature of the dominant ideology. Marx's theory of the development of capitalism is a theory of the development of "empty places." Marx predicted, for example, the growth of the proletariat and the demise of the petit bourgeoisie. More precisely and in more detail, Braverman among others has explained the creation of the "places" clerical worker and service worker in advanced capitalist societies.2 Just as capital creates these places indifferent to the individuals who fill them, the categories of marxist analysis, class, reserve army of labor, wage laborer, do not explain why particular people, fill particular places. They give no clues about why women are subordinate to men inside and outside the family and why it is not the other way around. Marxist categories, like capital itself, are sex-blind. The categories of Marxism cannot tell us who will fill the empty places. Marxist analysis of the woman question has suffered from this basic problem.

At no point in Capital does Marx recognise that the reproduction of labour-power entails women’s unpaid domestic work – to prepare food, wash clothes, raise children, make love. On the contrary, he insists on portraying the waged worker as self-reproducing. Even when considering the needs that the workers must satisfy, he portrays them as self-sufficient commodity-buyers, listing among their necessities for life food, housing, clothing, but awkwardly omitting sex, whether they are obtained in a familial setup or purchased, suggesting an immaculate male workers’ life, with only women being morally tainted by industrial labour (Marx 1867, 275). The prostitute is thus negated as a worker, and relegated to an example of women’s degradation, being pictured as belonging to the lowest sediment of the surplus population, the lumpenproletariat that in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte he had described as “the refuse of all classes” (Marx 1852, 149). Even when referring to the generational reproduction of the workforce, Marx makes no mention of women’s contribution to it, and rules out the possibility of any autonomous decision-making on their part with regard to procreation, referring to it as the “natural increase of population” (Marx 1867, 788), commenting that “the capitalist may safely leave this to the workers’ drives for self-preservation and propagation” (Marx 1867, 718), suggesting that procreation is a natural phenomenon, which contradicts the previously cited comment that female factory workers’ neglect of their maternal duties practically amounted to infanticide. Marx also implies that capitalism does not depend on women’s procreative capacity for its self-expansion, given its constant creation of a “surplus population” through its technological revolutions. In reality, capital and the state have been so concerned with population movements that the advent of capitalism marked an extension of the prohibitions against all forms of birth control, in many cases in place even today, and an intensification of the penalties for women tampering with procreation. Marx also ignored that the most important commodities for the reproduction of labour-power in Europe, those that fuelled the Industrial Revolution – sugar, tea, tobacco, rum, cotton – were produced by slave labour, and that since at least the late 17th century an international division of labour, an international assembly line, had been created that cut the cost of producing the industrial work-force, connecting waged and enslaved workers, in ways prefiguring the present use of immigrant labour, serving to cut the cost of producing the industrial work-force. The plantation system was a key step in the formation of an international division of labour that integrated the work of the slaves into the (re)production of the European industrial workforce, while keeping enslaved and waged workers geographically and socially divided. But there is no analysis of slave labour in Capital’s discussion of the working day and the accumulation process, only passing references, although the International supported the boycott of cotton during the Civil War. Why this blindness? Certainly in the case of housework we can see a masculine bias that naturalises reproductive activity and makes it appear, in comparison with industrial labour, as an archaic form soon to be superseded by the progress of industrialisation. In addition, the working class family was all engaged in factory labour and little housework was done in the home. Another possible reason is that Marx was always thinking organisationally and did not see the social forces capable of transforming housework in a revolutionary direction.

Leonie Maria Tanczer, a postdoctoral researcher of cybersecurity, collective action, and gender studies, draws on the research of Jordan and Taylor to further study the “male-only” stereotype of hacktivism. In a 2015 article with a sample of five women and five men, Tanczer conducted a discourse analysis of hacktivist communities, believing that a gendered analysis was particularly necessary for a community focused on creating social and political change. Language reflects and perpetuates cultural stereotypes, so it was an appropriate venue to study the gender biases of hacktivists. Though Tanczer’s sample size is small, she is the first to venture into studying the direct link between gender and hacktivism. In interviews with her subjects, she recognized four patterns of discourse. Most prominently, she identified Male Oblivious Discourse among the men she surveyed, wherein they overlooked gender entirely. Not acknowledging sexism is in itself a form of sexism, and a male identity in the predominantly male hacktivist community affords the privilege of seeing gender as a non-issue. Female hackers push back on this attitude through Female Discourses of Resistance. This is either an Emphasis Discourse, where they actively emphasize their identities as women and hackers and combat the sexism in the community, or Negation Discourse, where women struggle with feelings of exclusion and with justifying a hacktivist identity. When confronted with their sexism or erasure of women, men retaliate with a Male Justification Discourse, where they try to defend themselves and explain away their Oblivious Discourse.41 A specific experience that Tanczer cites as Negation Discourse is particularly interesting in the context of my work. One woman who did not participate in the study explained to Tanczer that she identified as an activist and a hacker but not a hacktivist because her hacking work was not recognized as “real hacking” by other hackers: teaching everyone at occupy how to use wordpress, or teaching sewing classes at a makerspace in a poor neighbourhood…Skills that are categorized as ‘feminine’ are not thought of as real work in our society, so because of systemic social prejudices both within the hacker culture and society at large, by definition women are often not hacktivists.42 Comparing this with the experiences of the other women in her survey, Tanczer concludes that when faced with the struggle to reconcile their female and hacktivist identities, some will altogether drop the label hacktivist. Men, who dominate hacking communities, set definitions and decide what is considered hacktivism. Because of men’s built-in gender biases, these definitions often exclude work perceived as more feminine.43

This scholarship contributes valuable insights into how patent law curtails the flow of scientific information. The values of openness are important; a culture of openness and sharing facilitates exciting scientific discoveries. An ethic of openness within patent law and the public domain also supports the free flow of scientific information to marginalized communities. In other words, values of openness facilitate access. Patent laws can be relaxed to make medicines open and freely accessible to the poor globally.52 Scholarship in this area though is limited. One shortcoming comes from the constraints of law itself, as jurisprudential concepts of the public domain stem from legal cases.53 A more alarming limitation, however, is its unwillingness to thoroughly recognize systems of power and inequality.

Scholarship in this area assumes a nonhierarchical public domain and culture of science where an ethos of sharing and openness extends to all. On the contrary, feminist science studies scholars have produced valuable work challenging science by examining gendered power relations embedded within science and scientific knowledge production. For instance, scientific practices of sharing and collaboration have not always been extended to or benefited women, particularly women of color and lesbian women.54 Female scientists have been denied access to the scientific professions.55 Science has violently exploited indigenous peoples, their knowledge, and their lands.56 And scientific method itself is grounded within masculine theories of objectivity and rationality.57 In other words, values of sharing and openness within science have not benefited everyone equally.

Adding to this extensive body of feminist literature, this paper interrogates crisis governance as discursively gendered, and the effects of this. A discursive approach is significant because it does not assume, as per liberal approaches, a foundational economic rationality to economic strategy, or, as per Marxism, the central truth of class struggle as universal. A discursive approach that centralises gender in understanding the reproduction of crisis governance discourses under- stands governance and its outcomes as a complex amalgamation of meaning and practice, founded by and reproduced through culturally produced and pervasively gendered ideas, assumptions and values about the world. A commitment to non- essentialism challenges, at fundamental and unsettling levels, some of the core categories of conventional forms of analysis. This contrasts with mainstream (international political economy) scholarship’s framing of human behaviour in terms of faceless, desocialised units of analysis and its reproduction of a model of society as a self-regulating machine explainable by scientific laws adapted from modern philosophy and Newtonian science. It also contrasts with critical scholar- ship’s preference for the Marxist view of economic relations as (pre)determined by the nature of class struggle. While some materialist (feminist) approaches articulate women’s disprivilege as a historical constant and something of a cultural given, discourse analysis of gendered governance, instead, understands privilege, discrimination and inequality as socially, and culturally, produced and variable across time and place, resisting the rooting of economic relations in class relations and showing a greater interest in the gendered cultural practices (including gendered recruitment and promotion practices, discriminatory forms of lending, gendered assessments of credit worthiness and so on) that enable the reproduction of gendered power in the global political economy. A discursive approach to gender and governance necessitates the analysis of norms and standards in the global political economy that many hold to be true, essential and universal, but a committed critique of which reveals as power-laden, regulatory and highly restrictive identity categories (Griffin, 2009: 1). Rather than positing the primacy of ‘the economic’, which swallows whole concepts such as culture, gender, race, production, consumption and representation, this paper looks to the cultural conditions of embodiments of capitalism, specifically neo- liberal global governance and the discourses of governance that neo-liberalism reproduces. To be sure, these discourses emanate from various and diverse actors, institutions, organisations and initiatives, including individual (state) governments and groupings of these (such as the G7 and G10); supra-national bureaucracies such as the European Union (EU); intergovernmental organisations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the UN; non-governmental organisations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF); and private financial governance initiatives (which are not available for public scrutiny) such as those instituted by the Bank for International Settlements and the International Organization of Securities Commissions. By asking us to confront in quite radical and imaginative ways how we know what we think we know and thus what we exclude from our analyses, a discursive research strategy is always strongly political.

Rationality in Interaction This skew is particularly evident in the assumption of rationality." The rationality assumption implies that the knower/actor can separate himself/herself from the “other” in interactions with that other. Feminists have argued that knowledge is always perspectival and political; therefore, states and their leaders’ decisions about how to interact with others are not rational, but informed by their situational and political biases. In this view, the rationality assumption may be seen as at once itself a political bias and obscuring other political biases. As Naomi Scheman argues, perceived rational cost-benefit analysis about war-making and war-fighting should “always be seen as especially problematical when... constructed only by those in positions of privilege... [which provide] only distorted views about the world.”78 In this view, rational calculation is not an objective, attainable, and desirable end, but a partial representation of both interest and actors’ representation of those interests. In this way, through gender lenses, rationality has been seen as importantly incomplete, leaving out significant (if not the most significant) factors that go into decision-making.79 In addition to understanding the rationality assumption as partial (and therefore unrepresentative), feminist research has pointed out links between rationality and mascuIinism.8° As Karen Jones notes, advocates of rationality as a guide for interstate interactions“ assume: 1. Available... conceptions of rationality and reason represent genuinely human norms and ideals; 2. The list of norms and ideals contained within available conceptions of rationality and reason are sufficiently complete; and 3. The external normative functions assigned to reason and rationality are unproblematic.82 Looking through gender lenses shows problems with each of these assumptions. Feminists have argued that “the identity of the modern subject-in models of human nature, citizenship, the rational actor, the knowing subject, economic man, and political agency-is not gender-neutral but masculine (and typically European and heterosexua|).”83 This impacts not only how we see the rational subject, but how we predict and understand his decisions, at the state level as well as at the individual level. According to Margaret Atherton, the possibility of rationality has “been used in a disturbing fashion to mark a gender distinction. We have, for example, on the one hand, the man of reason, and, on the other, the woman of passion.”84 In rationality assumptions, traits associated with masculinity are normalized and traits associated with femininity are excluded. The impact is compounded because (masculinized) rationality and its (feminized) alternatives are not on equal playing fields. As a result, Karen Jones notes that “women’s assumed deficiency in rationality” has been used to exclude both women and knowledge associated with femininity from accepted views of the world.85 The alleged gender neutrality of rationality, then, “is often a covert form of privileging maleness”85 and omission of “what has traditionally counted as ‘feminine.’”87 Still, adding women and values associated with femininity to current concepts of rationality is unlikely to create a gender-neutral concept of rationality.88 This is because, epistemologically, the sovereign rational subject constructs artificial gendered boundaries between rationality and emotion, male and female, and knower and known.89 Among states, those boundaries are not benign. Instead, they breed competition and domination that inspire and foster war(s) and conflict(s).90 This competition frequently relies on contrasting the state’s own masculinity to the enemy’s (actual or perceived) femininity. This cycle of genderings is not a series of events but a social continuum. In these gendered relationships, as Zillah Eisenstein argues, “gender differentiation will be mobilized for war and peace,” especially moving forward into the age of an American empire focused on manliness.9‘ Feminists have long argued that competitions between hegemonic masculinities and subordinate masculinities play a role in causing war(s).92 Hidden beneath the assumed independence, rationality, and unity of state interaction leading to war are gendered interstate interactions that cause, constitute, and relate to war and wars. Feminist scholars have recognized the extent to which the preeminence of masculine values dominates (particularly conflictual) accounts of interstate interactions, wherein “rational” interactions often become “a self-reproducing discourse of fear, suspicion, anticipated violence, and violence” in which “force is used to checkmate force.”93 Interstate interactions leading to wars often show the gendered nature of war narratives, war logics, and war languages, which produce (and reproduce) gendered cycles of violence.

"You trivialize us and trivialize the bird that is not in our hands. Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation. "Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. "Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. Turning as though there for the taking. They stop at an inn. The driver and his mate go in with the lamp leaving them humming in the dark. The horse's void steams into the snow beneath its hooves and its hiss and melt are the envy of the freezing slaves. "The inn door opens: a girl and a boy step away from its light. They climb into the wagon bed. The boy will have a gun in three years, but now he carries a lamp and a jug of warm cider. They pass it from mouth to mouth. The girl offers bread, pieces of meat and something more: a glance into the eyes of the one she serves. One helping for each man, two for each woman. And a look. They look back. The next stop will be their last. But not this one. This one is warmed." It's quiet again when the children finish speaking, until the woman breaks into the silence. "Finally", she says, "I trust you now. I trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together."

My thesis is that blackness, dysfluency,[1] and music are forces that open time. Opening brings possibilities: temporal refusal, temporal escape, temporal dissent. But because thesis also refers to a downbeat in music, my thesis must move, must metamorphose, like music. Sound is vibration, a wavering band of energy, endless restlessness. For us to perceive it, the sound waves emitting from the source must make our eardrums vibrate. Du Bois begins each chapter in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) with lyrics and a few bars of musical notation from spirituals. With this gesture he makes the page vibrate. He contraposes the vibratory nature of music with the essentially lapidary nature of writing. As the cover flap to a collection of José Arreola’s works reads: “La escritura fue originalmente cincelada en piedra. Mediante la mano es una incisión del espíritu [Writing was originally chiseled into stone. A spiritual incision moving through the hand]” (1995). So the beat goes on and new theses arise with each laying down of foot to ground (for thesis also refers to the stressed syllable of a foot in verse). Harriet Jacobs reminds us that black loops in black music (including but not limited to rap and house) are always black loop(hole)s of retreat;[2] that black music, like black escape, is a never-ending activity and never an achievement. And when the black stutterer loops a syllable (m-m-m-m-m-m-mother), this too is a black loop, black music, black activity. My thesis is that if (fluent) speech has been used to police the border between humans and non/subhumans, then black dysfluency enfleshes (to borrow a term from Ashon Crawley) the paradox of black humanity.[3] Are black people humans? The jury’s still out on that. And who’s on the jury? Further: if speech is a property of the living, black dysfluency enfleshes the paradox of black life itself. Do black lives matter? If so, why does the phrase need to be “repeated and recited incessantly?”[4] We live within the veil, and the veil is ever waving. How can we think about blackness and dysfluency together?[5] We can begin here: About this time my master came down the field. I became very bold and answered him when he called me. He asked me very roughly how I came to plow up the corn, and where the horse and plow were, and why I had got along so slowly. I told him that I had been talking with God Almighty, and it was God who had plowed up the corn. He looked at me very strangely, and suddenly I fell for shouting, and I shouted and began to preach. The words seemed to flow from my lips. When I had finished I had a deep feeling of satisfaction and no longer dreaded the whipping I knew I would get. My master looked at me and seemed to tremble. He told me to catch the horse and come on with him to the barn. I went to get the horse, stumbling down the corn rows. Here again I became weak and began to be afraid for the whipping. After I had gone some distance down the rows, I became dazed and again fell to the ground. In a vision I saw a great mound and, beside it or at the base of it, stood the angel Gabriel. And a voice said to me, ‘Behold your sins as a great mountain. But they shall be rolled away. Go in peace, fearing no man, for lo! I have cut loose your stammering tongue and unstopped your deaf ears. A witness shalt thou be, and thou shalt speak to multitudes, and they shall hear. My word has gone forth, and it is power. Be strong, and lo! I am with you even until the world shall end. Amen.’[6] Or we can begin here: Bernie Mac’s stuttering nephew is waiting at the bus stop. The bus pulls up, the driver opens the door, and the boy tries to ask a question. Impersonating his nephew, Mac closes his eyes, nods while shaking the microphone, and says “uh” four times. After sixteen seconds he returns to his “normal” voice and says, “Bus driver closed the door and drove the fuck off.” Next day same thing happens. “Bus driver closed the door and drove the fuck off. He ain’t got time for this shit here.”[7] “I’m gonna begin by borrowing a thought from Glissant: when we regard each other, we should tremble.”[8] This is how Teju Cole once introduced Fred Moten at a reading in honor of T.S. Eliot, who wrote: “For most of us, there is only the unattended / Moment, the moment in and out of time. / The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, / The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning / Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.”[9] Or we can begin with my mother Pauline. I inherited my stutter from her. She was born in Higgin’s Land, St. Ann, Jamaica. Her father Charles, aged one hundred at time of writing,[10] is head pastor of a storefront in Canarsie, Brooklyn. My master looked at me and seemed to tremble. My thesis is that blackness, dysfluency, and music are shaped by forms of subjection enacted in the sphere of time—what I call temporal subjection. But because these three forces open and shape time, they create alternative temporalities that can help us heal from the wounds of that subjection. Healing, too, is an activity, not an achievement. Temporal subjection enacted against black people occurs in many spheres. Brittney Cooper examines several in her work: black women’s reproductive health; legal and extralegal murders of black people; racially skewed correlations between zip code and life expectancy; and the conceptualization of history itself.[11] Here I’ll focus on the plantation, and two scenes of temporal subjection discussed by Mark M. Smith in Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South. The first comes through the testimony of a former slave “named”[12] William Byrd, interviewed in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration: Master, he had great iron piece hanging just out side his door and he hit that every morning at 3:30. The negroes they come tumbling out of their beds. If they didn’t master he come round in about thirty minutes with that cat-o-nine tails and begins to let negro have that and when he got through they knew what that bell was the next morning.[13] Slavery’s ontological brutality knotted together time, sound, and violence. According to Smith, because masters wanted to inculcate time obedience in their slaves but didn’t want to give their slaves watches (“time-owning slaves would, after all, readily become like free, time-negotiating northern workers”), they generally kept clocks and watches for themselves.[14] They communicated clock time using bells, horns, and other sounds. And if the sound wasn’t obeyed, the whip intervened. When Byrd says ”they knew what that bell was the next morning,” he’s pointing to the ways that knowing the time, for slaves, was often shadowed by knowing the sound of that time (bell, horn) and knowing the consequences of not obeying that sound. The whip was an extension of the clock.

The personified Fancy is in direct conversation with Imagination, and it seems to be the fancy of the speaker. The speaker seems to fall under the sway of some kind of love object, and is fettered by this attachment. Though the ominous force of Winter tries to hold the speaker's Fancy back, Imagination helps the speaker to imagine spring, and the flowering of love and possibility. Indeed, the "subject-passions" are ruled by Imagination, and Imagination has the power to create anything in this poem. But Winter, which symbolizes reality, must eventually materialize, and though the speaker's Fancy may try to break free of the shackles placed on her by love, as the sun rises, and Aurora rises with it, the speaker must turn away from the sun rise, from the mountain, and rejoin Winter.

So, even though Imagination allows hearts and minds to wander, eventually reality must set in, and reality cannot let us—the reader or the speaker—live wholly in the imagination.

Sharp rises in global food prices in 2007/08 jolted global political leaders out of any complacency they might have had regarding the future of food and agriculture. Street demonstrations and food riots broke out in more than 40 countries across the world, provoking unrest and violence in several places.

The L’Aquila Food Security Initiative, launched by the G-8 and the G-20 in 2009, brought new funding and energy to the task of quelling the “perfect storm” of food insecurity set off by spiking global food and fuel prices, financial and commodity market turmoil, the competition of biofuel production, and adverse weather in key agricultural regions. The L’Aquila Food Security Initiative successfully reversed a decades-long decline in international support for agricultural development.

However, current research does not yet indicate a clear link between climate change, food insecurity and conflict, except perhaps where rapidly deteriorating water availability cuts across existing tensions and weak institutions. But a series of interlinked problems – changing global patterns of consumption of energy and scarce resources, increasing demands for food imports (which draw on land, water, and energy inputs) can create pressure on fragile situations.

Food security – and food prices – are a highly political issue, being a very immediate and visible source of popular welfare or popular uncertainty. But their link to conflict (and the wider links between climate change and conflict) is indirect rather than direct.

The food price spikes in the late 2000s caught the world’s attention, particularly when sharp increases in food and fuel prices in 2008 coincided with street demonstrations and riots in many countries. For 2008 and the two preceding years, researchers identified a significant number of countries (totaling 54) with protests during what was called the global food crisis (Benson et al. 2008). Violent protests occurred in 21 countries, and nonviolent protests occurred in 44 countries. Both types of protest took place in 11 countries. In a separate analysis, developing countries with low government effectiveness experienced more food price protests between 2007 and 2008 than countries with high government effectiveness (World Bank 201la). Although the incidence of violent protests was much higher in countries with less capable governance, many factors could be causing or contributing to these protests, such as government response tactics, rather than the initial food price spike.

Data on food riots and food prices have tracked together in recent years. Agricultural commodity prices started strengthening in international markets in 2006. In the latter half of 2007, as prices continued to rise, two or fewer food price riots per month were recorded (based on World Food Programme data, as reported in Brinkman and Hendrix 2011). As prices peaked and remained high during mid-2008, the number of riots increased dramatically, with a cumulative total of 84 by August 2008. Subsequently, both prices and the monthly number of protests declined.

Toby Ord: Carl Sagan suggested it could potentially lead to our extinction, but the current people working on this, while they are very concerned about it, don’t suggest that it could lead to human extinction. That’s not really a scenario that they find very likely. And so even though I think that there is substantial risk of nuclear war over the next century, either an accidental nuclear war being triggered soon or perhaps a new Cold War, leading to a new nuclear war, I would put the chance that humanity’s potential is destroyed through nuclear war at about one in 1000 over the next 100 years, which is about where I’d put it for climate change as well.

There is debate as to whether climate change could really cause human extinction or a permanent collapse of civilization. I think the answer is that we don’t know. Similar with nuclear war, but they’re both such large changes to the world, these kind of unprecedentedly rapid and severe changes that it’s hard to be more than 99% confident that if that happens that we’d make it through and so this is difficult to eliminate risk that remains there.

Major effects of climate change include reduced agricultural yields, sea level rises, water scarcity, increased tropical diseases, ocean acidification and the collapse of the Gulf Stream. While extremely important when assessing the overall risks of climate change, none of these threaten extinction or irrevocable collapse. Crops are very sensitive to reductions in temperature (due to frosts), but less sensitive to increases. By all appearances we would still have food to support civilization.85 Even if sea levels rose hundreds of meters (over centuries), most of the Earth’s land area would remain. Similarly, while some areas might conceivably become uninhabitable due to water scarcity, other areas will have increased rainfall. More areas may become susceptible to tropical diseases, but we need only look to the tropics to see civilization flourish despite this. The main effect of a collapse of the system of Atlantic Ocean currents that includes the Gulf Stream is a 2°C cooling of Europe—something that poses no permanent threat to global civilization. From an existential risk perspective, a more serious concern is that the high temperatures (and the rapidity of their change) might cause a large loss of biodiversity and subsequent ecosystem collapse. While the pathway is not entirely clear, a large enough collapse of ecosystems across the globe could perhaps threaten human extinction. The idea that climate change could cause widespread extinctions has some good theoretical support.86 Yet the evidence is mixed. For when we look at many of the past cases of extremely high global temperatures or extremely rapid warming we don’t see a corresponding loss of biodiversity.87 So the most important known effect of climate change from the perspective of direct existential risk is probably the most obvious: heat stress. We need an environment cooler than our body temperature to be able to rid ourselves of waste heat and stay alive. More precisely, we need to be able to lose heat by sweating, which depends on the humidity as well as the temperature. A landmark paper by Steven Sherwood and Matthew Huber showed that with sufficient warming there would be parts of the world whose temperature and humidity combine to exceed the level where humans could survive without air conditioning.88 With 12°C of warming, a very large land area—where more than half of all people currently live and where much of our food is grown—would exceed this level at some point during a typical year. Sherwood and Huber suggest that such areas would be uninhabitable. This may not quite be true (particularly if air conditioning is possible during the hottest months), but their habitability is at least in question. However, substantial regions would also remain below this threshold. Even with an extreme 20°C of warming there would be many coastal areas (and some elevated regions) that would have no days above the temperature/humidity threshold.89 So there would remain large areas in which humanity and civilization could continue. A world with 20°C of warming would be an unparalleled human and environmental tragedy, forcing mass migration and perhaps starvation too. This is reason enough to do our utmost to prevent anything like that from ever happening. However, our present task is identifying existential risks to humanity and it is hard to see how any realistic level of heat stress could pose such a risk. So the runaway and moist greenhouse effects remain the only known mechanisms through which climate change could directly cause our extinction or irrevocable collapse.

There is no scientific basis to suggest that climate breakdown will “annihilate intelligent life” (by which I assume the report authors mean human extinction) by 2050.

However, climate breakdown does pose a grave threat to civilization as we know it, and the potential for mass suffering on a scale perhaps never before encountered by humankind. This should be enough reason for action without any need for exaggeration or misrepresentation!

Practices sold as promoting “soil health” are even murkier. Cover cropping and reduced- or no-till farming—the poster children of soil carbon sequestration—can increase the amount of carbon held in agricultural soils rather than released into the atmosphere. They also increase soil organic matter, helping to keep both soil and crops healthy. But they often do so at the expense of yields and at high cost for farmers. When these practices do decrease yields, their adoption can lead to land-use change elsewhere. Further, while these practices can increase soil carbon levels alongside soil health co-benefits, the permanence of that newly sequestered soil carbon—how long it remains in the soil before it returns to the atmosphere—is uncertain. Whether these “soil health” practices can be called “climate-smart” is yet to be seen.

Pasture management solutions present similar tradeoffs. The cause célèbre of so-called “regenerative” ranching, practices like rotational grazing and multi-paddock systems can increase carbon sequestration in animal agricultural soils. But they also come with massive reductions in efficiency compared to feedlot and other confined feeding systems. And once again, reduced efficiency means increased emissions intensity of agricultural products and indirect land-use change elsewhere.

Herein lies the fundamental problem with IRA agricultural funding. As it stands, “climate-smart” agriculture is a misnomer. Some practices under that label can reduce emissions, but many, if not most, are more likely to have little to no impact on emissions. In the worst scenarios, where “climate-smart” practices decrease yields, they can even increase global agricultural emissions through indirect land-use change, in exchange for short-term local benefits. We simply do not have the technologies, practices, or techniques to fundamentally reduce the emissions from American agriculture, at least not yet.

With Congress finally starting to make progress on reauthorizing the long delayed Farm Bill, a showdown over funding for so-called “Climate-Smart Agriculture” is brewing. Environmentalists are set on protecting Inflation Reduction Act funding for USDA conservation programs that would incentivize things like the use of cover crops and regenerative farming practices. Republicans want to shift the funding into the Farm Bill and broaden eligibility to include traditional conservation program activities.

Representative Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA), who is chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, recently proposed taking the money back and instead putting it into the next Farm Bill as additional funding for conventional agricultural producers. A recent report from Senate Republicans made the same case: extend the “climate-smart” agricultural funding to all conservation activities, effectively diluting the funding into broad support for agricultural producers.

A five-year farm bill was supposed to have been approved last year, but was held up in the House over disagreements on food stamps, conservation, crop insurance and funding. House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., announced recently that he will find a way to push a farm bill out before Memorial Day in order to get President Biden to sign a new farm bill by the end of the year.

Don’t bet the farm on it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE After a handful of moderate Democrats shot down the minimum wage hike, some progressive journalists blamed Biden for not fighting tooth and nail – I mean, really, really trying – to get it in the bill. This belief that a president's legislative shortcomings are the product of a lack of will is what some media critics call the Green Lantern theory of the presidency. The Green Lantern Corps., for those unfamiliar with the DC Comics canon, are a class of superheroes who can conjure supernatural weapons using sheer willpower. As in that Ryan Reynolds movie from 2011.

[CLIP]