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So, I think we need to ask what work does living well within planetary boundaries require? So we argue that it’s critical to think more broadly about green jobs, to think beyond you know, the kind of typical energy and infrastructure—important as those are, to also take into account work that’s oriented towards sustaining and improving life both human and non-human, and low-carbon waste. So, that in particular we think includes things like care work and education work, centering work that provides care for people, communities, and environment. To reference Sophie’s presentation, I think this is actually an important project of overcoming the family as the site of the only access to care and resources. We need access to care that doesn’t rely on getting married to access healthcare or having children who can take care of you when you’re old.

But as Sophie also points out care can also be brutal, including and especially for those who provide it. And so, care work is both the fastest-growing sector in the country, but also are among the worst-paid, least regulated, done overwhelmingly by women, particularly women of color and particularly by immigrant women. So, it’s hard work even if it sounds nice. It’s like we like care and it’s deeply exploited so you know, we need to improve that work, we need to protect people doing that work and organizing around that work as we’re thinking about building the no-carbon economy and adjusting a division of labor that gives women and people of color the worst-paid and lowest-status jobs.

These interviews reveal a collective understanding of the Feminist Green New Deal initiative and its applicability and potential contribution to not only policy discourses, but also overarching narratives of societal transformation. While many topical insights about the content of policy proposals could be extracted from these responses there are also three ontological themes that emerge. First, the feminist valuation of intersectional analysis – assumed by these activists as the tool de rigeur – corresponds to the ways in which knowledge in the Coalition is created, ordered, reified, and prioritised. Secondly, the collection of ideas points towards an overarching policy solution, reorienting the economy towards one centred on care and regeneration. Such a perspective reflects the trajectory of feminist thought, erected on decades of feminist economic analysis, that rejects the inimical framing of environmental problems being addressed through reductive, singular measures focused on treating the outputs of toxic processes instead of redesigning the processes. Lastly, the advocates demonstrate an undeterred investment in collective action, rooted in solidarity and rights, equal exchange, and mutual learning, as the most effective approach to movement building, indicating such an approach has emerged rightfully from the history of organising for justice.

Intersectional analysis as a key tool

These critiques provide a much-needed reminder that feminist aims can be thwarted when they are taken up within the spaces of global governance, as well as a useful counter-narrative to claims that the current approach to gender and development policy constitutes a victory for feminist alternatives when so clearly it is not. But the way that capitalism is presented in these critiques – as a priori determining all outcomes and bending all agendas to its will – makes it difficult to imagine development otherwise. The bulk of feminist criticism of current gender and development policy may therefore give too much power to the capitalist economy, even as these critics acknowledge the existence and value of a diversity of economic practices and motivations outside of it (Gibson-Graham 2006). But what if instead of seeing capitalism as an impenetrable system that determines the course of everything – including the messy business of gender and development – we could imagine these glimmers of economic difference in policy as ‘cracks’ of opportunity for challenging the capitalist neo-liberal order? John Holloway provides an opening to such reimagining in his book Crack Capitalism, which argues that social change can be fostered by the creation of ‘cracks’ and fissures in the supposed logic of capitalism that allow us to move beyond it to a more just world (Holloway 2010, p. 11). Holloway’s idea of cracking open the ‘world that presents itself as closed’ (Holloway 2010, p. 9) can be extended to the knowledge and practice of gender and development. The ‘business case’ approach, as presented by both its champions and its critics, views the world as a closed capitalist system to which all non-capitalist activities and motivations function only as resources for capitalism. An alternative reading could identify the glimmers of alternative economic and social practices that might emerge from the ‘cracks’ of economic diversity in gender and development – rather than presenting them in terms of a closure that gives capitalism a social cohesion and is difficult to break (Holloway 2010, p. 52). Of course not all resistances will create post-capitalist possibilities, and in fact invocations of ‘community’ and ‘care’ and ‘participation’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ and the like may very well be integrated into projects to sustain capitalism, as the critics suggest. But when development is seen as only doing the work of global capitalism, it is itself presented as a unified force rather than a multivocal site of contestation over political projects (Ferguson 2009). Thus we cannot know in advance the effect of these openings, as they occupy the contradictory space between resistance and integration that cannot be entirely co-opted or contained by the state and capitalist system (Holloway 2010; Dinerstein 2012). The question remains, then, as to how these glimmers and openings might allow for activities and motivations that are at odds with the ‘business case’ being pursued by development institutions. By refusing to define capitalism as a determining force, could we be open to imagining ways to take these openings and cultivate economic subjects-in-becoming who are guided by motivations of care, collectivity and ethical concern (Graham and Amariglio 2006)? Might we look to recent shifts in gender and development for spaces to foster projects that decentre neo-liberal subjectification in favour of emerging motivations of solidarity and care through which new conceptions of the self can be created (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxv), or what Holloway (2010) might identify as a ‘crack’ or interstitial moment of resistance? Knowing there are no guarantees, we might still consider letting go of totalising stories and adopting an approach that ‘tolerates “not knowing”’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxxi) and an orientation towards possibility.

In the radical context, the statement ‘politics is about power’ challenges not only a perspective that neglects this insight, but one that expressly rejects it. There is a major tendency in contemporary anarchism and anarchist-influenced radicalism that explicitly presents as ‘anti-power’ (Marshall, 2010: 679; Meltzer, 1993: 11), and anti-realist (Holloway, 2005: 18). This approach proposes disengagement and defection from the status quo with the implied expectation that capitalism and the state could wither away through lack of support and without confrontation.9 Realist anarchists oppose this view and argue that realistic efforts to ‘change the world’ unavoidably entail the acquisition and exercise of some forms of power (Mueller, 2003: 128); that the state and capitalism will not disappear without confrontation (Rai, 2015: 177); and that ignoring the current mechanisms of power in the hope that they will go away is not a realistic strategy for radical social change (Malatesta, 2014 [1922]a: 425).

For a realist anarchist the statement ‘conflict and disagreement are ineradicable’ similarly holds its greatest relevance as a corrective to a mainstream position in radical thought across its history including in the contemporary milieu. Orthodox Marxism, and many of its descendants, held to a long-term vision of a communist utopia where conflict had been reconciled and politics as such had been replaced by ‘the administration of things’ (Adamiak, 1970: 16). Many contemporary anarchists share a similar vision of a post-revolutionary utopia where conflict has been eradicated and where decision-making systems that allow for ongoing disagreement are replaced with those that accept only consensus (see Graeber, 2013: 210–231). Some, like the anti-power tendency discussed above, go beyond the expectation of a future without disagreement and presume the absence of conflict even in the realisation of their utopia. Here ‘everybody’ is made aware of the pressing need for radical social change either through rational argument, or by a sudden realisation or change of consciousness based on the recognition that ‘we are all one’ and have universal shared interests.10 So the realist anarchist perspective on the idea that ‘conflict and disagreement are ineradicable’ is not that conflict is universal and inescapable as with the conservative take, but that conflict cannot be completely eradicated, and that no future post-revolutionary society will be free from antagonisms (Edgley, 2000: 73). Nor does the radical interpretation imply that we must forgo radical aims for an uneasy acceptance of pluralism under a liberal democratic modus vivendi. The realist anarchist perspective, however, is not primarily directed at these conservative defences of dictatorship, or at liberal realist pessimism. Instead it is aimed at anarchists and other radicals who see the possibility of a conflict-free utopia, and propose confrontation-free strategies for its realisation that are based either on withdrawing from political struggle, or on successfully convincing all, through education and rational argument, that the proposed radical alternative is in their best interest. The realist anarchist interpretation means that direct and active struggle for positive change, and against oppression, are necessary; that they will continue to be in any future society; and that future visions and current strategies should reflect this (Edgley, 2000: 73; Gordon, 2007: 64–68).

Of course, we recognize that these gains are not in any way revolutionary. The strategy is focused on effecting change through “small wins” (MacKay, 2021). In our pessimistic moments, we each worried that our work on these Task Forces might be reproducing a “cruel optimism” (Berlant,2011) in which a desire for paid care activities to be more visible and valued institutionally would be futile while ironically adding to the service burden of largely women members on the committees. Yet we both also believe, and in fact have written about in other contexts, that there is a need to challenge overly pessimistic views of feminist engagement in institutions as always already coopted by neoliberalism (Altan-Olcay,2020; Bergeron,2017). In the contingent, contradictory and diverse economic spaces of the neoliberalizing academy there remain openings for feminist change to occur. Also, we know from other institu-tions' experiences that if such initiatives receive support at the highest level, the space is widened for the formerly hidden scripts to become part of larger institutional narratives about the value of caring labor activities to the success of the university, without formulating it as something we do in addition to our “real work” (Clark etal.,2020) which can only lead to its depletion. A final point here is that such change is worth pursuing given that a far worse form of “cruel optimism” can occur when existing gender equality policies promise a fair outcome but fail to deliver because they do not challenge current definitions, measurements, and valuations of academic labor (Lipton,2017). Thus, universities committed to gender equality would be well-served by undertaking such activities.

However, from a practical perspective the question is whether a complete disengagement from institutions of power is feasible (Miller and Razavi, 1998; True, 2003). Furthermore, the idea of a binary of co-optation inside institutions of governance and ideological purity on the outside assumes there is/was a pure and monolithic feminist knowledge and activism outside of institutional frameworks (Calkin, 2015; Eschle and Maiguashca, 2014; de Jong, 2016). This assumption makes it difficult to recognize the complex connections between the history of feminist mobilizations and national and international institutions: behind the ability of women’s movements to influence the structure and agenda of the UN system lies a history of intricate contestations, alliances and victories (Antrobus, 2004; Hannan, 2013; Rai, 2004). Furthermore, this depiction is also less likely to account for internal conflicts and divisions in social movements and civil society (Alvarez, 1999; Alvarez et al., 2003; Eschle and Maiguashca, 2014; Maiguashca, 2011).

In recent decades, social–political literature has reflected a shift in emphasis in the construction of social justice from aspects of redistribution, such as class, equality, and economic deprivation, to aspects of recognition, such as identity, culture, and ethnicity (Garrett, Citation2010; Thompson, Citation2006). Nonetheless, while critical political theory highlights the importance of integrating recognition with redistribution (Fraser, Citation1995, Citation2003), the contemporary practice of direct social work is usually focused more heavily on recognition (Boone et al., Citation2020; McLaughlin, Citation2014). Emphasizing recognition as the main locus of social justice makes social work practice primarily relational, i.e. focused on providing respect and visibility for marginalized people and allowing their voices to be heard (Gupta, Citation2017; Rossiter, Citation2014). Nonetheless, giving precedence to relational practices of recognition over material assistance may result in social workers’ dismissal of the material aspects of service users’ unjust situations (Krumer-Nevo, Citation2020). The examination of these practical aspects of integrating recognition with redistribution is underdeveloped and requires further attention (Garrett, Citation2010). This gap between theory and practice is particularly important in the context of managerialist reforms and their consequences for the deprofessionalization of social work (Schram, Citation2015). These reforms are based on neoliberal rationality, with its commitment to reducing public spending and government intervention in the market and in citizens’ lives, and therefore promote major retrenchments in public services and assume that service users are solely responsible for their lives (Klenk, Citation2018). This basic stance is usually manifested in the undermining of distributive structural practices that challenge fundamental social orders while making personal recognition practices that focus on the individual more acceptable (McKendrick & Webb, Citation2014). The weakening position of redistribution in social work theory of practice may increase the gap between service users’ needs and the way in which social services address them. In an attempt to contribute to critical social work theory of practice, this conceptual article offers a novel model of social work practice that integrates the aspects of recognition and redistribution. In addition, this model offers a conceptual approach to the promotion of critical practice that can enhance resistance to deprofessionalization processes (Strier & Breshtling, Citation2016). I begin by elaborating on the theoretical basis of recognition and redistribution. Redistribution and recognition in social work Critical political theory constructs recognition and redistribution as basic human needs, claiming that a just society is ethically committed to providing both (Fraser & Honneth, Citation2003). Social work’s critical theory of practice adopts this construction in its practical guidelines (Fook, Citation2016). Thus, in order to portray the current positioning of recognition and redistribution in social work theory of practice, this discussion begins by asking how recognition and redistribution translate into direct social work practice. Nancy Fraser (Citation2003) and Axel Honneth (Citation1995) debate the critical commitment of both recognition and redistribution, but I will highlight here their emphasis on equality in aspects of recognition. In the framework of their claim, inequality and social suffering are based on social status and interpreted as a lack of respect, visibility, and acceptance (Fraser, Citation2003; Thompson, Citation2006). Recognition is thus presented as an essential human need that provides people with a vital experience of belonging and self-value (Houston, Citation2016). A well-known debate between Fraser and Honneth (Citation2003) portrays two interpretations of recognition, as Honneth (Citation1995) highlights recognition at the micro psychosocial level, while Fraser (Citation2003) emphasizes the fundamental role of social institutions in allowing or denying recognition. Either way, recognition may inform social work theory of practice as the commitment to providing voice, visibility, and respect to service users and promoting critical awareness of exclusionary mechanisms (Houston, Citation2016). At the other end of this scale, the Marxist critique of capitalism classically advocates equality in the distribution of material resources, emphasizing its potential to oppress workers under the power of capital owners (Horkheimer, Citation1972). In this framework, the suffering of marginalized groups is understood first as the lack of basic material needs such as nutrition and housing, and second as informing inequality, exclusion, and abandonment by society (Ferguson, Citation2008; Lister, Citation2004). In social work theory of practice, the redistribution standpoint moves between the promotion of welfare-state-oriented policies such as transfer payments and material support (Ferguson, Citation2008) to a more structural practice that addresses material inequalities at the policy level (Weiss-Gal, Citation2016). Fraser distinguishes affirmative from transformative strategies employed to counter misrecognition and misdistribution: ‘Affirmative remedies for injustice … [are] aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them. Transformative remedies, in contrast … [are] aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes precisely by restructuring the underlying generative framework’ (Fraser, Citation1995, p. 82). This distinction relates to the concept of resistance in critical theory, which studies ways of challenging hegemonic rationalities (Strier & Breshtling, Citation2016). Thus, critical social work practice seeks feasible ways in which to promote recognition and redistribution, striving for transformative solutions, but at times managing with affirmative ones. To sum up this section, recognition and redistribution represent two aspects of human suffering and inequality and thus inform two streams of social work practice. Recognition mainly informs direct therapeutic practice that provides emotional support, while redistribution mainly informs structural practices such as the provision of material support (Garrett, Citation2010). However, this picture is too dichotomous and reveals a fundamental lacuna. First, service users’ reality is bound by interrelated needs concerning recognition and redistribution, so the formulation of social work theory of practice on only one side of this scale may hinder social workers’ ability to fully address service users’ diverse needs. Second, this picture is imbalanced, and social work theory of practice is, in fact, constructed for the most part according to the recognition stance, with most welfare agencies providing assistance at the personal or family levels. Thus, the focus on recognition highlights the provision of therapeutic emotional support, undermining the professional rationality of critical redistributive practices (Garrett, Citation2010; McLaughlin, Citation2014). Beyond being superficial and one-sided, this formulation of social work theory of practice may invalidate the material aspects of service users’ needs and hinder social workers’ conceptual ability to genuinely understand and assist service users. It is important to note the role of the managerialist context in strengthening the unintegrated formulation of recognition and redistribution (Schram & Silverman, Citation2012). First, some scholars claim that managerialist rationality does, in fact, promote recognition and redistribution, though in an affirmative manner that focuses on the micro provision of emotional and material support and thus overlooks or even strengthens exclusionary social structures (Schram, Citation2015). Yet, in the street-level formulation of social work theory of practice, the commitment to budgetary retrenchment and the stance that holds service users solely responsible for their lives translates easily into the undermining of the redistribution of material support and the favouring of relational recognition practices (Lavee & Strier, Citation2018). To address such biased interpretations of critical practice, this article offers a theoretical model that integrates recognition with redistribution.

Basing an ethics on our capacity to identify with the suffering of others rather than, say, on a priori principles of human rights, carries some risks, the first of which is that the failings of identification are so endemic that such an ethics might end up being unacceptably erratic. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Butler’s contention that global power imbalances make it hard for Westerners to acknowledge the equal humanity of non-Westerners, I do not think that the matter is quite this simple, for if Americans have a hard time mourning the Iraqis and Afghans killed by the United States military, Iraqis and Afghans might also have a hard time mourning those who are far away from them, including each other. Butler suggests that we identify with the suffering of some people more than others because their names and faces are familiar to us in the sense of being culturally and ethnically similar to us, and undoubtedly this is true. But there are other ways that alliances based on familiarity are forged, ways that cut across cultural and ethnic differences. For instance, that my friend is black, my colleague is Chinese and my downstairs neighbour is Muslim does not change the fact that if this friend, colleague or neighbour is harmed or killed, I – a white atheist woman – will mourn more intensely than I would mourn another white atheist woman harmed or killed somewhere in Sweden. In other words, there seems to be an important link between familiarity (and thus our ability to mourn), on the one hand, and intimacy, proximity and shared history, on the other, that is not necessarily in any way based on similarity of culture or ethnicity. From this perspective, the ability to mourn the other may be too haphazard, too random a basis for ethics.

The second risk that accompanies an ethics based on our ability to identify with the suffering of others is that it can replace political action with paralysing grief. Grief can be privatising, and thus potentially depoliticising, because it tends to result in a retreat from the social world. This retreat may, in part at least, be a defence against our own vulnerability, for grief reminds us of the immensity of our dependence on others: the fact that we can be undone by the loss of others highlights the flimsiness of our fantasies of sovereignty. Indeed, besides acute bodily suffering, there are few things in life that ‘interrupt’ the coherence of our being more than the anguish we feel when we have lost someone who feels irreplaceable to us. If desire, intimacy and sexuality already challenge our aspirations of autonomy, grief often results – at least momentarily – in the utter dissolution of the self. As Butler correctly remarks, we ‘cannot invoke the Protestant ethic when it comes to loss’ (Precarious Life 21); we cannot decide how the task of grieving is to be performed or when it is going to come to an end. Rather, we are forced to ride waves of sadness that mock our attempts at self-mastery, that call us back to prior experiences of dispossession. Some of these experiences relate to losses we can name, but, ultimately, what grief touches is the unnameable core of melancholia that connects us to our constitutive inability to attain closure (to disavow our dependence on others). Butler describes such melancholia as a kind of timeless enigma that ‘hides’ in each loss we mourn, as an indelible trace of a primary vulnerability that we can no longer access directly but that our losses touch indirectly. In a more Lacanian vein, one could say that every loss reanimates the primary loss – the loss of das Ding (the primordial non-object of desire) – that constitutes the melancholy core of our being. That is, when we lose another person, we not only mourn that loss but we also mourn, with renewed energy, our own incompleteness, our own helplessness, even if we are not aware that this is what we are doing.

The legacy of the 2019–21 biennium is yet to be fully grasped and processed, and often the urgency of chasing the next affective imperative (be it fear, terror, concern, relief, or indignation dictated by the virus’s iterations) can distract from looking back at how rapidly this period has transformed the world in ways unacceptable before 2019. Superficially, corporate capital in the form of techno-giants, big pharma, and the surveillance industry has managed to do the unimaginable: extract, evade, and profiteer even more than before, enabled by governments and central banks—the same governments and central banks advocating for the resilience, self-reliance, and autonomy of welfare states, individuals, and real economies. All the while, in many countries, the mantra of “public health on the brink of collapse” echoed as the best and most insistent advertisement for private healthcare in decades.

As more inhabitants of the planet seemed to empathize with experiences of being immobilized, terrified, and collateralized, the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis generated the Abolitionist Summer, with unprecedented multiracial and internationalist resonances. This was the most affirmative legacy of the biennium, alongside the activation of mutual aid infrastructures and all the practices of reciprocal nurture that kept most alive.

The next question raised by Cox’s argument that critical theory must limit the range of choices to ‘alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world’ is how we assess feasibility, or on what basis we are to ‘reject improbable alternatives.’72 More specifically, referring back to the continuum of transitional justice possibilities (Table 1), the question is whether any of the outlined alternatives can rightly be rejected as ‘improbable’ or ‘infeasible.’ The short if unsatisfying answer is that much depends on the particularities of context, including the legal, political, economic and cultural dynamics with which a particular approach to transitional justice might be expected to engage (and of which it is a part). In assessing whether a thinner or thicker approach to transitional justice is possible or probable, and whether that approach is likely to have much of a chance of disrupting the postconflict status quo, one would need to look at a range of context-specific factors, including: the nature of existing elites and their resistance to change; whether there is a history of democracy and strong institutions; the level of economic development and the nature of the economy; the nature of the victims of conflict, their perpetrators and the abuses that were suffered; and the strength of victim and civil society networks.

Thus, for example, even if critical theorists are correct that the ‘constructed invisibility’ of the economic within paradigmatic transitional justice is a matter of deepseated neoliberal ideology,73 the question of whether and to what extent an embrace of economic justice is possible will still require careful analysis of these and other contextual factors. Such factors may in turn suggest the feasibility of a comparatively broad approach to economic justice involving fundamental questions of redistribution, or perhaps only a narrow approach to economic justice involving the selective prosecution of economic crimes of corruption and violations of economic and social rights that rise to the level of a war crime.74 For this reason, abstract debates about the value of paradigmatic transitional justice versus one of the other possibilities outlined in Table 1 are unlikely to advance the discussion at this stage. To move forward, the current critical theory debates need to do more to engage with the difficult tradeoffs, policy choices and contextual realities that would inevitably be associated with efforts to implement an alternative vision of transitional justice.

The next question raised by Cox’s argument that critical theory must limit the range of choices to ‘alternative orders which are feasible transformations of the existing world’ is how we assess feasibility, or on what basis we are to ‘reject improbable alternatives.’72 More specifically, referring back to the continuum of transitional justice possibilities (Table 1), the question is whether any of the outlined alternatives can rightly be rejected as ‘improbable’ or ‘infeasible.’ The short if unsatisfying answer is that much depends on the particularities of context, including the legal, political, economic and cultural dynamics with which a particular approach to transitional justice might be expected to engage (and of which it is a part). In assessing whether a thinner or thicker approach to transitional justice is possible or probable, and whether that approach is likely to have much of a chance of disrupting the postconflict status quo, one would need to look at a range of context-specific factors, including: the nature of existing elites and their resistance to change; whether there is a history of democracy and strong institutions; the level of economic development and the nature of the economy; the nature of the victims of conflict, their perpetrators and the abuses that were suffered; and the strength of victim and civil society networks.

Thus, for example, even if critical theorists are correct that the ‘constructed invisibility’ of the economic within paradigmatic transitional justice is a matter of deepseated neoliberal ideology,73 the question of whether and to what extent an embrace of economic justice is possible will still require careful analysis of these and other contextual factors. Such factors may in turn suggest the feasibility of a comparatively broad approach to economic justice involving fundamental questions of redistribution, or perhaps only a narrow approach to economic justice involving the selective prosecution of economic crimes of corruption and violations of economic and social rights that rise to the level of a war crime.74 For this reason, abstract debates about the value of paradigmatic transitional justice versus one of the other possibilities outlined in Table 1 are unlikely to advance the discussion at this stage. To move forward, the current critical theory debates need to do more to engage with the difficult tradeoffs, policy choices and contextual realities that would inevitably be associated with efforts to implement an alternative vision of transitional justice.

We can begin to center care work in the university. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha defines care work as rooted in “a place where disability justice and queer femme emotional labor intersect.” 21 Piepzna-Samarasinha’s notion of disability justice is informed by Sins Invalid’s (a disability justice performance project) ten principles: intersectionality, leadership of those most impacted, an anticapitalist politic, cross-movement solidarity, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, commitment to cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation.22 Emotional labor follows Arlie Hochschild’s work, but for Piepzna-Samarasinha it acknowledges the ways in which this labor falls disproportionately on certain racialized, gendered, and queered individuals.23 I am not here arguing for the institutionalization of care work or for care work to replace service—though arguably many of us already perform care work within our service work—but, instead, for a reckoning with how care work is forced upon certain bodies: femmes, particularly femmes of color, queer and trans folk, sick and disabled folks. Once we reckon with this, we can see how care work is unevenly distributed and, yet, still important. Care work arguably functions as the work that keeps the university running, and those of us most impacted by the violence of the university use care work to keep each other within the university. What becomes a priority then is making sure our care work centers those we want to outlive the university rather than working to maintain the university. For example, here are some of the ways I have seen care work show up in the graduate student experience: editing papers for each other; sending each other highlighted readings; speaking up in class when we know others cannot that day; talking through theoretical ideas; talking through dissertation ideas; talking through micro- and macro-aggressions; 412 J. HATRICK talking about our lives outside the university; providing housing for each other; feeding each other; providing childcare or petcare for each other; de-escalating overreactions from people in positions of power; lending each other money; giving each other money; taking each other to and from the airport, doctor’s appointments, and vet appointments; starting mutual aid systems; sharing institutional history; sharing knowledge about which faculty have histories of racism or misogyny—including which have bragged about sleeping with their students; bringing each other groceries; taking each other on hikes and to beaches; banning academic talk for a few hours; providing feedback on syllabi; organizing potlucks and parties; making each other tea and coffee; and simply reminding someone you have their back in this process. Piepzna-Samarasinha advocates for recognizing these things as work, as skilled labor, and we know that this work is gendered, racialized, classed, and queered.24 Again, I am not arguing for the institutionalization of these skills but for, rather, a recognition that this work is done, an acknowledgement that it is time consuming, and an awareness that this is the work that keeps people in the academy. That, while we are working within an inherently violent structure that, in turn, exists within multiple violent systems, for many of us to survive, we must be doing care work—and we are doing care work. We must be caring for each other, and we must acknowledge the way this work is not evenly distributed. The university relies on exploiting our desire to do this work; historically underrepresented students are retained by other historically underrepresented students doing unpaid labor. Thus, we must approach care work by asking what deserves our care?25 How do we do care work to benefit our communities without benefiting the university? We must not give care to a violent system such as the academy, but to those who will ultimately destroy the academy. Maneuvering resources A further intervention we can make is maneuvering resources from the university to communities the university enacts violence upon. Faculty and students often discuss feeling powerless within academia as it currently functions, but this is not entirely true. Certainly, we have different access to power and different access to resources, but some of us do have access to the resources of the institution, including space, money, and labor. In terms of space, we often have access to physical spaces on our campus— or owned by our campus—that can be rented for free, we can offer meeting spaces to community organizations, we can form gardening projects, we can even work to return the land owned by the university to Indigenous nations. In terms of money, some of our programs, departments, or universities are extremely well funded. This money can be used to pay students and community members, provide food at events, and a myriad of other options that focus on redistributing the university’s wealth (in small and large ways) to poor and working-class individuals. In terms of labor, we can think about supporting student labor towards activism and community support through offering credit or research projects. We can also think about the flexibility of our own labor and skills—how can we focus our own labor in ways that benefit communities rather than the university? While our access to these resources hugely vary across academia, some of us have some power of maneuvering and redistributing those resources of space, money, and labor. Maneuvering resources allows us, in many ways, to care for students and the communities our universities exploit. These are just a few starting points and, while some of us may not be able to make any of them happen right now given our current access to resources, they are resources we can work to maneuver in the future. The university is ableist. One of the ways this ableism materializes is in how expectations around productivity are defined in relation to able-bodied, white masculinity. This can be seen in the gendered, racialized, and ableist difference in tenure/tenure track versus adjunct positions and tenure success rates. As noted by Laura Pulido, within the social sciences and humanities faculty at USC between 1998 and 2012, “91.9 percent of white men received tenure, but only 55.1 percent of women and minorities received tenure.” 26 At UC Berkeley, only 24 (1.5 percent) of its 1,522 full-time faculty are disabled—and the estimate that 4 percent of all faculty members across all institutions have disabilities is not much better (as this is well below the 22 percent for the general population).27 Does this mean able-bodied white men are inherently better at academia? Or are women, people of color, and disabled people held to higher standards? Chakravartty et al’s #Communicationsowhite and the nuanced responses to the 2019 NCA distinguished scholar controversy certainly suggest the latter to be true.28 Indeed, if, as Marta Russell and Ravi Malhorta argue, we understand disability to be “a socially created category derived from labour relations, a product of the exploitative economic structure of capitalist society;” 29 then, we can also see how the raced, gendered, and able-bodied structures of academic productivity also work to produce disability. Disabled people, women, and people of color often spend an inordinate amount of time trying to arrange for adequate work environments; for example, Joseph Grigely notes that he spends more time “trying to arrange for adequate sign-language interpreting” than preparing for conference presentations.30 What are we doing to stop this? What are we doing to reimagine productivity to create a university as a space for women, people of color, and disabled people?31 Our work is equally as important. Our work as academics should prioritize the lived experiences of those we share space with (and those we do not). Piepzna-Samarasinha writes of “centering sustainability, slowness, and building for the long haul.” 32 In some ways, this feels antithetical to academia, particularly the undergraduate experience, which is structured around student turnover. There are other scholars arguing for the slowing down of the institution, but rarely are these understood as arguments rooted in disability, gender, or racial justice.33 This, of course, has become intensified under the rise of COVID-19 and universities’ (inadequate) responses, with disabled folk, communities of color, and women bearing the burden of the pandemic and its consequences. The consequences of this result in a generalizing of an issue as affecting everyone equally when, in fact, ablebodied and minded people, cis men, and white people are affected the least, often even benefiting from the expectations of productivity. We must understand that the issue of unsustainable productivity not only worsens conditions for communities of color, disabled folk, and women, but is produced by white supremacy, ableism, and a structure of cisheteropatriarchy.

The first theoretical contribution of the proposed re-theorization of scholarship on care ethics in organizations is to provide a framework for understanding why disavowing embodied vulnerability underpins care’s systematic and persistent undermining. Feminist psychoanalytic perspectives focus on embodied vulnerability and the existential threat to survival it poses by evoking dependency and neediness for political ends. They explain how neoliberalism embeds this disavowal by promoting the illusory idea of invulnerability. The framing that I propose highlights why affect is indispensable to discourses on the supremacy of the market logic in all walks of life and how individuals and societies embody neoliberal politics of care. The dominant neoliberal dogma, I argue, is predicated on the fantasy that endless consumption and success in the competition for ‘scarce resources’ can assuage our existential vulnerability and even our fear of death (Fotaki, 2006). As a result, capitalist culture affects how we deal with distress and suffering; it shapes how we relate to others; it determines how the unconscious functions (Vanheule, 2016). While market societies promote greed, indifference to the poor (Polanyi, 1944), and other undesirable characteristics (Hirschman, 1977), individuals appropriate dominant discourses that encourage ambivalence about care by linking it to weakness, neediness and potentially diminished survival.

These have significant implications for understanding the relative unimportance of care in organizations and society. Specifically, psychoanalytic insights into the disavowal of vulnerability provide an alternative understanding of how power relations contribute to the undervaluation of care and the reproduction of neoliberal ideology. Yet to date, there are no explanations linking the evasion of this reality with the actual politics of undermining care. This is despite the engagement with Judith Butler’s ideas on recognition in contemporary workplace dynamics and the relationship between vulnerability and resistance (M. Tyler, 2019), ethics (Varman et al., 2021), or precarity (Hultin et al., 2021). Organizational scholars have not taken up these ideas to theorize care, and the work of psychoanalytic feminists on the unconscious, affect and body, as discussed above, has not been applied to theorizing care in organizations and organizing. The article addresses these lacunae in the theorization of care in a specific way through psychoanalytical framing. The implication for the organizational scholarship is that feminist ethics of care cannot play a vital role in rethinking our business models and work organizations (Lawrence & Maitlis, 2012; Liedtka, 1996) without acknowledging conflicting feelings arising from our state of dependency surrounding care. This requires delving into the relationship between the business models neoliberalism propagates, how these are affectively appropriated and how they impact different bodies. Therefore, we cannot advocate changing relationships between various actors in organizations and beyond (e.g. stakeholders; see Burton & Dunn, 1996) by merely evoking collaboration and the need for care. To achieve this, it is crucial to explain the causes of the absence of caring in organizations. Theorizing care through a psychoanalytic lens can also explain how carelessness becomes normalized and embedded in subjects’ souls and inscribed on their bodies. Psychoanalytic feminist insights show the affective appropriation of dominant discourses and ideologies at the psychic level and their enactment through the body that can lead to evading vulnerability and repudiating care. At the same time, the proposed framework stresses the connection between people through intercorporeality, offering new vistas for enacting care. It originates in the embodied and affective experience with others, preceding and exceeding the rational schemes that seek to regulate it – similar to Pullen and Rhodes’ (2014, 2022) idea of intercorporeal generosity, inspired by Diprose (1998).

As with any sustainable commons, a care cooperative must go beyond social relation to a process of collaborative organization and governance (Dengler and Lang, 2022). Horizontal, shared governance distributes power evenly across the member base. A key component to cooperatives is that they are owned by those who participate in the cooperative, so participants get decision-making power and monetary benefit when possible. Cooperatives build equity for worker-owners, giving them voice and power through participation (Waters, 2020). Cooperatives can also act as a forum for redistributive justice: “Because worker-owned co-ops function differently from other businesses, they build equity and ownership for care workers, who have been historically marginalized in an extractive economy” (Waters, 2020, para. 8). This power structure differs from effective altruism, where the dynamic is often that of a privileged group giving money to a less privileged group for a specific, clearly identified purpose. Through shared governance, horizontal power, and self-determination, cooperatives concentrate power in the people, rather than in the hands of the wealthy.

This type of collective arrangement applied to care work could also address the devaluation and invisibility of care work. Rather than relying on the market or state to assign value, participants themselves would jointly decide which acts and services are most important and how to compensate workers – and workers who join the cooperative would also have a say in their own pay rate.

Capitalist Publicity and the Enclosure of Intimacy Neoliberalism is often differentiated from liberalism based on the degree to which it relies on logics of marketization, debt, and austerity to discipline populations into compliance with the structural interests of capitalism. In contrast to classical liberalism (which advocated for a distinction between the state and a naturalized domain of the market beyond the state’s knowledge) and Keynesianism (which attempted to reign in the excesses of the market via state economic intervention), neoliberalism attempts to cultivate a social order where “market exchange [becomes] a guide for all human action” (Dean 48), including the actions of the state itself. Under such a regime of power, critics of neoliberalism argue, the need for disciplinary institutions to align conduct with capitalism becomes RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 395 396 M. W. BOST AND J. S. HANAN less necessary. As a biopolitical regime of power that acts immanently on “the cooperative labor of vast networks of social production” (Greene 200), while deploying logics such as incentive rhetoric to “nudge” behavior toward particular outcomes (McDonald), neoliberalism produces desiring subjects that approach all life decisions in calculative, economic terms. Critics of neoliberalism not only emphasize its novel effects on the production of subjectivity but also its corrosive effects on public life. As a regime of power that defines all “motivations and goals, such as obtaining an education or cultivating a friendship, under the singular framework of maximizing one’s competitive advantage” (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 338), neoliberalism prevents forms of public good from emerging that can provide collective solutions to matters of common concern. Against a vision of multiple public spheres that adhere to different grammars of communication based on their positionality and structural relationship to power, neoliberalism seeks to produce a uniform version of publicity that takes the market as a horizon and assumes a vision of subjects as “atomistic individual[s] motivated by their own self-interest” (Asen, “Introduction” 173). Neoliberalism thus generates a crisis of democracy, “flattening” the networks of relationally embedded communication that would enable individuals to build a world outside of the norms of market reason (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 338). The critique of neoliberalism is powerful and certainly highlights a pervasive experience of social life in various regions of the contemporary world. Yet, as Nancy Fraser argues, “[n]eoliberalism . . . represent[s] the latest chapter of a longer story, which concerns the political vicissitudes of capitalism as such” (117). Without attending to the ways that capitalism itself is “inimical to democracy” (117), we not only lose the thread of the fundamental antagonisms that define capitalism across its various historical periods, but also risk overvaluing the unique centrality of market affects and biopolitical power to neoliberalism’s mode of operation. As “an institutionalized societal order that encompasses not only ‘the economy’ but also those activities, relations, and processes, defined as non-economic” (82), capitalism—across its historical periodization—relies on a biopolitical logic that takes as its aim the cannibalization of life. When critiquing neoliberalism’s destructive relationship to publicity, then, it is crucial to appreciate the foundational capitalist logics that bound the reproductive terrain of extraeconomic life that is subsequently made the object of neoliberal control. We argue that a productive path for exploring such foundational logics can be found in commons scholarship that emphasizes the historical enclosure of noncapitalist intimacies. While in rhetorical studies the concept of the common and its enclosure has been taken up primarily in contemporary digital contexts (Boyle; Chaput and Hanan; Greene; Hartelius), for much of the broader critical humanities scholarship that engages with the common, the exploitation of informational labor and knowledge production are understood as just one layer of a broader logic of capitalism that is continually parasitic on the reproductive relations of ecology, care, and communal life. In this section, we deploy intimacy as a vocabulary for understanding this larger enclosure process and the way it conditions the terrain of extraeconomic existence that is so central to neoliberal regimes of govern- ance. As a result, our analysis here helps to clarify the racialized and gendered logics that have produced capitalist norms of public engagement. In the context of modernity, the phrase “enclosure of the common” describes the process of capital accumulation that dispossessed common lands, ways of life, and the lived environments that provided subsistence and meaning for most people who did not own land (or who existed in parts of the world not structured by logics of private land ownership). In England, where the language of enclosure is most salient, the process stretches from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries and encompasses the annexation of “about a quarter of [England’s] cultivated acreage,” turning it from collectively farmed, grazed, and foraged space to private property that could be agriculturally developed (Linebaugh 144). Enclosure produced “barriers between people and land” (145), transforming practices of exchange with the wild into a series of boundaries that delineated what was human (and owned) and what was nonhuman stock to be harvested. These develop- ments produced the material conditions for liberal and neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity and publicity through a process that was “inseparable from terror and the destruction of independence and community” (142). The “distinct epistemolog[ies]” and customs that built intimacies between commoners and the nonhuman lifeforms that coexisted on common land, and allowed com- moners to govern the provision of fuel, tools, food and water, housing, and medicines, were wiped out (150–51). This destruction of collective existence drove commoners into cities and toward the atomized relations of labor and political subjectivity that characterize capitalism, while also producing a precarious “surplus population” (Marx 797) whose labor was excluded from systems of waged work and expropriated through violence and coercion. Far from being confined to England, the enclosure of the common also describes the practices of extraction and colonialism that destroyed Indigenous ways of life that engage land, water, plants, and animals in terms of “a system of reciprocal relations and obligations” (Coulthard 78). As Walter Mignolo argues, without the “massive appropriation of lands” occupied by Indigenous peoples and the enactment of slave economies in Africa and the Americas (477), the forms of affective circulation, privacy, and publicity that ground capitalist conceptions of intimacy would not be possible. As a practice that anchors the modern global division of labor as well as the contemporary use of debt, austerity, and structural adjustment programs to maintain this division (Federici, Re-Enchanting 13), enclosure produces a split between those peoples accorded “freedom” as rights-bearing subjects who can sell their labor, and those subjects who are “marked” for violent expropriation through racializing practices (Fraser 40). This split is central to capitalism and demonstrates that the very possibility for liberal and neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity requires racialized expropriation and the enclosure of common land inhabited by Indigenous and colonized peoples. Beyond being shaped by the aforementioned enclosures, liberal and neoliberal articulations of subjectivity and publicity are structured through a further set of governing practices that enclose the common within “the intimate sphere” of the patriarchal conjugal family (Habermas 48). Jürgen Habermas traces the emergence of modern publicity to a division between the family room or salon, where “bourgeois family heads and their wives were sociable,” and the privatized space of the rest of the house (45–46). The bourgeois home became “the scene of a psychological emancipation that corresponded to the political-economic” growth of capital (46), where “privatized individuals viewed themselves . . . as persons capable of entering into ‘purely human’ relations with one another” outside of the vagaries of market competition (48). Moreover, the naturalized space of the bourgeois family “guaranteed . . . the accumulation of capital” through legally recognized lines of inheritance and also played a crucial role in the reproduction of capital by reconciling “the independence of the property owner in the market” and the authoritarian “dependence of the wife and children on the male head of the family” (47). As a site for the emergence of publicity under capital, the bourgeois household naturalized gendered and unpaid reproductive labor in the home to enable the spaces of discussion often considered as part of the public sphere. While he acknowledges their oppressive nature, for Habermas the relations of intimacy that underwrite the bourgeois public sphere “were surely more than just ideology,” fostering capacities of “freedom, love, and cultivation of the person” that allowed it to normatively function as a domain of democratic judgment and rhetorical action (48). Situated within histories of enclosure of the common, however, these qualities appear against the backdrop of the dispossession of noncapitalist intimacies that produced capacities for interdependent relation with land and with other beings, as well as forms of love and affection outside of naturalized domesticity. As Silvia Federici argues, wherever it occurs, the enclosure of the common tends to coincide with the devaluation of feminized labor, the enclosure of women in the household, and with regimes of gendered violence that enforce normative boundaries of intimacy. The dispossession of the common entailed the destruction of forms of ecological intimacy like working the fields, cultivating herbs, and tending animals on the common that had afforded women agency even in patriarchal contexts like English feudalism. Such dispossession further deva- lued domesticated care labor (washing, spinning, cooking) that came to be considered unproductive in contrast to wage labor (Federici, Caliban 25). Forms of work that had been historically open to women became gendered (Federici mentions ale-brewing, work in textiles, baking, and smithing among other examples) and still other professions like midwifery became criminalized entirely (Federici, Caliban RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 397 398 M. W. BOST AND J. S. HANAN 31, 92). Moreover, as scholars of Indigenous sexualities have pointed out, the colonial enclosure of the common violently reduced a wide array of kinship relations to the “biologically reproductive mono- gamous white marriage and family,” securing the patriarchal relations Habermas traces against other, more mutually supportive forms of intimacy (Tallbear 147). In addition to their entanglement with enclosures of land and social reproduction, liberal and neoliberal articulations of subjectivity and publicity can be detected in the valorization of intimacies associated with communicative norms of deliberation, as well as the enclosure of political life within ideals of citizenship. This enclosure of political horizons is evidenced in normative theories influenced by Habermas and John Rawls, which manage collective antagon- ism by distinguishing open deliberation from the confrontational affects associated with radical social movements (Asen, “Neoliberalism” 335–36). It appears in a milder form in the distinction between dialogue and propaganda on which many theories of public deliberation rest, as well as in rhetorical theories of social change that see recognition by the state or inclusion in dominant publics as the horizon for political action (Chávez; Coulthard; Mack and Na’puti). Finally, it appears in a broader imaginary of citizenship that has achieved wide purchase in rhetorical studies. As Karma Chávez notes, even scholars invested in critiquing norms of citizenship through an activist lens often “talk about all modes of belonging through the language and logic of citizenship,” constraining possibilities of collective agency that work outside that language (13). Considering these horizons through the enclosure of the common makes clear that the figure of the rights-bearing, self-proprietary citizen-subject that is central to liberal and neoliberal articulations of intimacy emerges through affective enclosures that are deeply inter- twined with patriarchy and “conditions of settler dispossession, slavery, and indentureship” (Lowe 39; see also Mack and Na’puti). Norms of publicity that arise from these articulations work to manage the antagonisms constitutive of capitalism, cultivating atomized affects of “freedom” and “rational choice” that only exist in a context of ecological and reproductive expropriation. The patterns of dispossession that have structured dominant logics of publicity continue in the present historical moment. While digital communication technologies and socially mediated plat- forms have arguably fragmented publicity and rendered capitalism’s forms of social control more flexible, quantifiable, and less tied to stable identity positions (Boyle; Pfister and Yang), enclosures of intimacy persist throughout contemporary life. Contemporary moments of intimacy’s enclosure include the hyperexploitation of human sociality, along with capital’s increasing reliance on care and service work, and the widespread privatization of public infrastructures, natural resources, and spaces of social contact based on the notion that the market is the only horizon for collective existence. Such enclosures are also legible at the level of the contemporary household. While not as naturalized as in earlier forms of modernity, the household remains a key vehicle for reproducing capital, as neoliberal discourses of domestic fiscal responsibility and risk management often take the place of overt patriarchy, and as gentrification becomes a new strategy of enclosure that displaces populations along lines of race and class, making the security of home ownership increasingly out of reach for people without preexisting access to capital (Hanan). Moreover, the naturalization of intimacy described by Habermas persists in contemporary gendered inequalities related to wages and labor compensation, as well as “family values” rhetorics, which frame familial childrearing as key to the reproduction of nation and economy and frequently connect proper family management to economic wealth (Cooper). Contemporary publics scholarship in rhetorical studies has emphasized many of these shifting cultural practices and has also brought to light the continuity in oppression between liberal models of bourgeois publicity and late capitalist configurations of power (Asen, “Neoliberalism”; Pfister and Yang). Our project augments existing work in its emphasis on common intimacy as a site of enclosure that enables the production and reproduction of normative intimacies conducive to capitalist social relations. If it is the case that the enclosure of the common grounds both liberal and neoliberal articulations of publicity, then contemporary practices of publicity are needed that can repattern the way intimacy has been written into modernity by reclaiming the common as a horizon for worlding otherwise. In the next section, we explore pathways for enacting such a horizon by linking the concept of counterintimacies to commoning practices that take as their aim the contestation of capitalist forms of intimacy.

From what has been said previously, we hold that various examples of transformative, commonized caring arrangements exist around the world, and that both feminist economics and degrowth scholarship can (and should!) learn from these experiences. We must, however, also be critically aware that caring commons provide conceptual space but by no means an automatism for a gender-just redistribution of unpaid care work. Let us consider the example of Buurtzorg, a Dutch nurse-led model of care that is money-mediated, but displays features of care as commons by withdrawing care from market logics and building on principles like time-sovereignty, autonomy, and trust. It shows that commonized care is not necessarily small in scale: In 2017, Buurtzorg covered 75 percent of the mobile care in the Netherlands, and the model is rapidly expanding to other countries (Narbeshuber2017). It also shows, however, that commonized care does not necessarily imply a just redistribution of care work among genders, as the vast majority of the employees are women. It is the very nature of commons and commoning that there are no blueprints or clear descriptions of how to avoid these pitfalls. Rather, the potential of transformative caring commons to dismantle patriarchy crucially depends on how organized and articulate feminist positions are within the respective processes of commoning (Forné, Micciarelli, and Fresnillo 2019).When Christine Bauhardt and Wendy Harcourt (2019: 1f) raise the question: “If care work and care-full relationships are central aspects of the post-growth society, in the realms of paid as well as unpaid care work, how could we revalue traditionally female activities and jobs?”, to us as decolonial feminist degrowth scholars, it is clear that the focus must lie on Elson’s (2017) “3rd R” and Knobloch’s (2013) “4th V,” namely a strategy of redistribution of care work among all members of society. Although a gender-equitable redistribution of unpaid care work has long been a core concern of the feminist movement, a substantial cultural intervention into the gendered division of labor has not taken place (Budlender 2010; Méda 2017). The redistribution of both paid and unpaid care work between genders crucially depends on a profound shift in the “language of valuation” (Martínez-Alier 2008) that dominates our societies, which today is the language of profit, individualism, and competitiveness. Degrowth as a thoroughly transformative paradigm contains the possibility of destabilizing the false dichotomies of capitalist modernity (for example, culture/nature, male/female, rational/emotional, productive/reproductive). This destabi-lization allows for the strengthening of other languages of valuation, which put the sustainability of life at their core – as they still exist in many community-based societies of the South, and revive in the creation of transformative commons all over the world (Gibson-Graham et al.2013). At the same time, degrowth activism and scholarship aims at transforming many of the basic institutions that have been made responsible for the persisting gendered division of labor. A degrowth work sharing proposal that translates to shorter hours spent in wage work each day for everybody (Méda 2017; Dengler and Strunk 2018) combined with decoupling of livelihood security from wage work, for example by means of an ecologically sustainable basic income that is partially paid out in complementary currencies to stimulate regional economies (Hornborg 2016), is one of many ideas of how to transform institutions and liberate time for a structural revaluation of caring activities and all other forms of socially vital work. Again, every single policy requires a critical perspective on class, gender, social origin, and other forms of domination and/or exclusion of the other, as only an inherently intersectional degrowth approach gives leeway for a gender-just redistribution of care. The required transformation will also have to attain modes of gendered subjectification. For example, in a growth paradigm, value is constantly equated with monetary value, social recognition is based on money and other status symbols, which are often connected with narratives of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 2005). Karla Elliott’s (2016) assessment of “caring masculinities” and Martin Hultman and Paul M. Pulé’s (2018) notion of “ecological masculinities” pave the way for discussions on how relationality and conviviality can shape subjectivities for all genders. This implies acknowledging that life itself in all its forms depends on multiple relations and interdependencies, and that the philosophical assumption of a free, autonomous individual, which is moved by the rationality of unbound self-interest is no more than a patriarchal, capitalist, andro-, and anthropocentric fiction.

(Debbie - “‘I’ve always felt these spaces were ours’: disability activism and austerity capitalism,” City 27:1-2, 2023)

Inclusive solidarities of care Springer’s emphasis on the capacity for direct actions to construct a prefigurative politics, based on the fellowship, reciprocity and equality enacted during them, is a point echoed by feminist scholars who argue that focusing on messy unpredictable sites of collaborative practices can illuminate possibilities for radical alternative futures (Kern and McLean 2017; Ruddick et al. 2018). This is demonstrated in the ways that DPAC organises its actions. Jeffries (2018) emphasised the importance of social reproductive processes, such as washing, cooking and caring, for enabling the 2011–13 urban protest encampments: but reproductive processes are necessary for even one-off street actions by disabled activists. Due to the range of physical impairments and multiple social barriers producing disability, DPAC needs to carefully plan strategies of mutual care in advance of its protests (Clifford 2020), from financial help for transport to physical assistance on site. The way that we organise a protest is always collectively and it’s very inclusive and accessible. So, we’ve almost got a microcosm of what future society could look like, because we have to be very interdependent and we work together. (Clifford) As such, DPAC are producing ‘micro-worlds of alternative urban relationships’ (Kern and McLean 2017, 418) by enacting ‘horizontal relationships and forms of organization that strive to reflect the future society being sought’ (Springer 2016, 287). These embodied practices are thus worthy of academic attention because they have the potential to constitute what is possible at scale, a potential that is captured by the description of these micro-practices as ‘worldmaking’ (Kern and McLean 2017) or ‘mondialization’ (Ruddick et al. 2018). DPAC’s model of collaborative care also helps shift the discourse of ‘dependency’, re-presenting it as a positive and progressive value. People with impairments are not excluded because of what they cannot do but instead the diverse skills amongst a solidarity group are recognised, supported and put to use for the common good, What’s great is we all bring different skill sets. Some are great with social media, some are great with direct action, some are great at talking to the media, some are great at lobbying MPs, some are great at doing research. It’s horses for courses, what you’re good at. (Peters) Significantly, DPAC centre their struggles on the reproduction of life, the right to reproduce the self and others, which feminists have argued is the ‘“point zero” of anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial struggle’ (Jeffries 2018, 580). Rather than emphasising the role of social reproduction in the exchange value of the capitalist relations of production, disabled activists centre its use value for the reproduction of the self and other (Vogel 2019). DPAC’s struggles for subsistence and survival therefore provide orientation for alternative visions of a post-capitalist society that privileges care over competition, collectivism over individualism and reproduction over production.

In this effort to imagine more emancipatory futures, two aspects seem especially relevant. The first relates to the increasingly urgent challenge of articulating social justice and environ- mental sustainability. Given the insufficiency for addressing the environmental crisis of today’s dominant strategy that is focused on “green growth” and aims at de-coupling economic growth from emissions through technological and efficiency improvements, it is necessary to adopt a more radical approach — a “social-ecological transformation” that is based on conceptions of social wellbeing that reject productivism, consumerism and economic growth (e.g. Asara et al., 2015; Brand et al., 2020; Chertkovskaya et al. 2019; D’Alisa et al., 2014; Fitzpatrick, 2004; Gough, 2017; Hirvilammi, 2020; Hickel, 2021; Hickel & Kallis, 2020; Koch, 2013; Koch & Buch-Hansen, 2021; Büchs & Koch, 2019; Latouche, 2010; Mastini et al., 2021; Parrique, 2021; Rosa & Henning 2018; Sommer & Welzer 2014; Soper, 2020; Velicu & Barca, 2020). This requires — among others — to overcome the predominance of the economic discourse on the future, of its vocabulary and its paradigm centred on goods (de Leonardis, 2011, p. XV). The second aspect is that of avoiding the technocratic trap of formulating welfare reform proposals and theorizing policy “solutions” to socio-economic and environmental “challenges” in a top-down and de-politicized way, building exclusively on “scientific evidence” and experts’ opinions. On the contrary, since neoliberalism involves the marginalization of democratic politics, a post-neoliberal social citizenship should put democratization at its core. In this context, the aim should be to build a “deliberative welfare,” which institutionalizes “discourse about well-being and the good life” (Fitzpatrick, 2002, p. 167). In this way social policy can fulfil its role, which is not only that of addressing social needs through the distribution of goods and the provision of services but also that of improving the “practice of citizenship” working as a “multiplier of democracy,” which nourishes a “public discourse on needs and rights,” i.e. a discussion on the kind of society we want to build (de Leonardis, 1999, pp. 33–34).

Care as a public good goes beyond care provided by citizens and for citizens (Tronto, 2013); it extends to the non-human world as well. For example, clean air and water are often cited as examples of public goods, yet this paper has shown that they are in some ways exploited. If the U.S. considered care a public good and extended that to the natural world, it would change the policy analysis of environmental problems. Corporations, companies, and even individuals would have to be held responsible for harming the environment, as a clean environment would be seen as a public need to be provided for everyone.

As discussed in the very introduction, care is a vast, all-encompassing action and not all forms of care could be considered a public good. In a conversation with Joan Tronto, she noted that care needs to be distinguished into three categories: needs, wants, and desires. For the mother of a newborn, a need may be to have the time and monetary support to care for her baby. A want may be a physical space more conducive to child-rearing than her current one-bedroom apartment. A desire may be a luxury bassinet to rock the child during naps. While all of these are types of care for herself and her child, only the need would fall under the category of a public good. Further, only care needs should be the collective responsibility of the government and the public at large.

Commoning and the Cultivation of Counterintimacies While the concept of counterintimacy has yet to be fully theorized within rhetorical studies, publics scholarship in the critical humanities has productively discussed the term in the context of queer worldmaking. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue that queer life and politics have produced improvisational counterintimacies that contest the heteronormative forms of relation built into the family, sociality and sex, the economy, and the nation-state (202–03). Emerging through everyday practices, such as “gossip, dance clubs, softball leagues, and the phone-sex ads” that were a primary “commercial support for print-mediated left culture” when Berlant and Warner were writing, counter- intimacies generate forms of life that are typified by their own logics of affective circulation and that “are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activ- ity” (203). Within rhetorical studies, scholars have discussed counterintimacy in the context of man-on-man public kissing, noting that public performances of queer intimacy “function as a bodily challenge to a culture of heteronormativity” and an expression of nonheteronormative bodily pleasures, while making legible the disciplinary mechanisms that strive to erase or domesticate such pleasures (Sloop and Morris 19). While not directly employing the term counterintimacy, recent rhetorical scholarship on psychoanalysis has also highlighted the importance of “spaces of truth-telling and intimacy . . . to cultivating community,” calling for a turn to communities of psychoanalytic practice that cultivate vulnerability and shared self-knowledge and address the affective impact of systemic oppression (Hallsby 57). Although they lack the institutional support afforded dominant forms of intimacy, one common thread linking these accounts is the view that the senses of felt closeness and proximity we have termed intimacy carry the potential to produce new forms of affective investment that can contest oppressive patterns of relation. Counterintimacies are a powerful frame for understanding a variety of counterpublic attempts to create ways of living that resist different forms of oppression. In this essay, we focus on how commoning practices can be a resource for generating counterintimacies opposed to capitalism. We have argued that capital relies on a process of enclosure that cannibalizes its ecological, reproductive and political outsides, in the process replacing intimacy-in-common with the naturalized intimacies of market publicity. In contrast, commoning challenges capital’s enclosures by “shap[ing] the web of affects” that constitutes collective life toward contesting these boundaries (De Angelis 125), enabling individuals to unlearn the forms of intimacy and publicity that capital has naturalized. Commoning describes “the ongoing praxis and (re)production of social relations” (98) aimed at fostering commu- nal sharing, horizontal governance, and patterns of reproductive labor that do not rely on capitalist expropriation and ecological destruction (104). Beyond creating collective modes of governance for physical or informational common wealth, if successful, commoning cultivates affects conducive to “the . . . motivation to continue, to enter further into commoning relations” (235). Thus, whether it manifests in everyday forms of counterintimacy or in more organized social movement strategy, we argue for commoning as a coalitional form of counterintimate relation that seeks to build worlds that are explicitly opposed to capitalism. At the most immediate level, the counterintimacies generated by commoning practices can be seen in spaces of stranger-relation that facilitate the multiplicity of connections theorized by critical publics scholars. In one example, speaking about a card tournament held as a fundraiser for a variety of collective projects near his home in Italy (a volunteer ambulance service, a theater festival, and a community association dedicated to local governance), Massimo de Angelis detects commoning in the interplay of rhetorical action circulating through the room. Commoning arises in the RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 399 400 M. W. BOST AND J. S. HANAN conversations between strangers meeting for the first time and sharing food, the verbal and bodily cues exchanged as the tournament progresses, and the donated cheese and prosciutto offered as prizes in the tournament that connect participants to the cooperatives that produced them (76). This space embodies commoning in its collective orientation (money and goods are oriented away from the market and toward communal projects) and its cultivation of interdependence between bodies in the space through conviviality and investment in a collective project. De Angelis points out that the space is a meeting place for a wide variety of subjectivities and rhythms of life, from farmers and factory workers to students and teachers, who (if the evening goes well) become oriented toward the collective projects that are the object of the fundraiser (77). While De Angelis’s example is not overtly political, it shares basic patterns of communication with other invitational spaces, from peoples’ assemblies to communal, DIY concert spaces (Verbuč) to public art constructed as part of social movement coalition-building (Bruce and Homan). Such spaces “subvert . . . capitalist economic exchange” by “embracing communally (publicly) oriented reciprocal economic relations” (Verbuč 291); they can also prime bodies to be receptive to more oppositional forms of anticapitalist affect. The kinds of stranger intimacy De Angelis describes take a more politicized form in the contexts of care activism and mutual aid work. In the context of decolonial and Black liberation struggles, community service programs offered by groups like the Black Panthers and Young Lords created spaces of counterintimacy by distributing free breakfasts in their communities, creating free health- care clinics, and facilitating theatrical and musical events and political education, “creating spaces where [community members] could meet basic needs and build a shared analysis about the conditions they were facing” (Spade 9; see also Wanzer-Serrano 154). Feminist consciousness-raising frame- works, similarly, facilitated the “articulation of individual experiences” of intimate household labor, reproductive injustice, and the gendered inequities attendant on marriage in order to forge a shared political consciousness (Dubriwny). In anticapitalist contexts, this led directly to movements like Wages for Housework, which sought to organize housewives, sex workers, and underpaid domestic laborers as workers, demanding compensation as well as an end to the capitalist social relations that led to domestic spaces becoming sites of expropriated labor (Dalla Costa and James). While examples abound (from the rise in mutual aid activism in the early days of COVID-19 to the care networks established by early AIDS activists), these moments demonstrate the ways that the sharing of food, conversation, and care draw attention to the contradictions in capital’s ordering of reality, building intimacies of trust and love as well as ambivalence and anger to encourage anticapitalist forms of counterpublicity. Counterintimacies oriented toward commoning are also legible in traditions of community and labor organizing. Placing an emphasis on community organizing highlights the ways that more visible forms of protest and activism (from marches, strikes, and occupations to letter-writing campaigns and lobbying efforts) rely on commoning labor that is often invisible and that hinges on the production of counterintimacy. Organizing is “the messy work of bringing people together, from different back- grounds and experiences, to change the conditions they are living in” (Garza 57). Organizing works through door-to-door conversations, public meetings, and the sharing of experiences in a way that facilitates workers and communities identifying problems and building power to effect potential solutions. As proponents of “whole-worker” organizing in labor contexts argue, growing successful social movements requires moving beyond a specific point of political or economic contest to engage community members in terms of household and (chosen or biological) kinship relations, their neighbors and social circles, and their hobbies and other life activities. Whole-worker organizing models encompass the full breadth of lived experiences as potential sites of social change, and places where conversations about a better world might be fostered. They identify sites where commoning labor can occur (e.g., cooking food for strikers) to bolster more visible forms of activism (McAlevey 58–70). These models of organizing are useful to frame as a form of counterintimacy because they aim at creating affective investments in social change by producing a felt sense of solidarity, proximity, and desire for collective empowerment. Such organizing is a form of commoning because to build power from the lived experiences of workers highlights capital’s oppressive effects while destabilizing a monolithic vision of workers as white, male, or articulated to a particular kind of labor. In bringing together heterogeneous bodies in order to scramble capitalism’s enclosures and create solidary resistance, commoning practices exemplify what Fraser calls “boundary struggles”: a term for the ways that the “distinctive ontologies of social practice” associated with capitalism’s extraeconomic supports can be organized antagonistically to contest the division of “economy from polity, produc- tion from reproduction, human from nonhuman nature” (20–21). Framed through commoning practices that cultivate counterintimacies, the common appears (similarly to its use in Marxian feminist analyses of struggles over reproductive labor) as a useful heuristic for building anticapitalist coalitions that contest multiple forms of social inequality simultaneously (Federici, Re-Enchanting The World 96), as well as for recognizing the “shared natural [and] social wealth . . . systems of knowledge [and] capacities for care” that will be destroyed unless struggle is waged in common (93). In Deborah Gould’s terms, considering different boundary struggles through the analytic of the common can be a way of constructing a shared “political horizon,” or a sense of what is “politically (im)possible, (un) desirable, (un)necessary,” that aims at anticapitalist solidarities at increasingly global scales (443). From this vantage, the political horizon of the common would appear not as a panacea that must merely be affirmed (or a dimension of existence that is held in abeyance from political practice), but as the shared feelings and embodied relations that emerge from living, working, and struggling together against capitalism’s continual enclosure of extraeconomic life. Seen in the context of enclosures and boundary struggles, counterintimacies and commoning provide a vocabulary for theorizing the “preparatory and affective labor” that goes into social move- ment coalitions as itself a structural challenge to capital (Bruce and Homan 242). The vocabulary we have developed in this essay thus expands calls to heed the ways that coalition works through “process, not product alone” (241; see also Chávez). Moreover, considering the common as political horizon suggests anticapitalist activism as an especially important site of resistance to contemporary oppres- sion and advances commoning as a language for those who “seek to resist hegemonic dominance in its multiple forms” through anticapitalist coalition (Chávez 27; Siegfried). When conceptualized as the production of counterintimacies, commoning allows scholars working in critical idioms that center publics as well as commons to consider how plural practices of publicity cohere into resistant counterpublicity, and also how counterpublic practices can be structurally positioned to resist capitalism’s enclosures.