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Fossil fuels built the modern world. There remains an appreciation for fossil fuels – or, at least, for the high energy consumption they provided – as a catalyst of mass liberal democracy. This is evident in ecomodernist calls for a good Anthropocene that would decouple the benefits of fossil fuels from the fuels themselves.17 After all, while industrialisation wreaks planetary destruction, its spread was coterminous with humanist victories like the abolition of slavery, increased literacy rates, gender equality and poverty reduction. Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that this cannot be a coincidence, and that ‘the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive’.18 However, in addition to the ecological harms caused by oil and coal, fossil fuels have also done serious political harm. Timothy Mitchell argues that fossil fuels have had contradictory effects in terms of assembling democracy.19 On the one hand, due to coal’s material traits, its extraction and supply were vulnerable to choke points that could be exploited by a growing labour resistance in the 19th century. In contrast, oil systems were less vulnerable to democratic hijacking. The global oil systems of the 20th century required a host of illiberal and violent measures on the part of Western states and oil companies in order to ensure oil scarcity and, in turn, a profit. In the case of oil, the West touted a democratic creed while simultaneously benefiting from and supporting authoritarian regimes and extremist movements in the Middle East and North Africa. Likewise, fossil fuel and mineral extraction were secured, both within the US and abroad, by racist regimes of differential pay and access to benefits that were aggressively anti-democratic on the part of corporations and the states that supported them.20 Carbon democracy thus arose in tandem with, and reliant upon, authoritarianism. Put more strongly, authoritarian politics have historically been part and parcel of the project of securing Western (fossil) rule. By fossil rule, I mean a logic of governing that is dependent upon intensive fossil fuel consumption in both material and, as I will explore below, psycho-political ways. Fossil rule is mobilised through ‘fossil capital’, Andreas Malm’s term to describe how modern capitalism was erected around a belief in ‘selfsustaining growth … welded to the combustion of fossil fuels’.21 Fossil capital requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of other people and things, and this necessitates authoritarian tactics in certain sites and moments, a phenomenon that has been exhaustively catalogued by postcolonial theorists and thinkers in the global South.22 As a result, authoritarianism, rather than a perversion of modernity, or a lurking risk of mass industrial society to be avoided, appears instead as the very marrow of a contemporary life predicated upon burning fossil fuels. We cannot take comfort that, over time, creativity will shed its destructive possibilities.23 The novelty and freedoms enabled by fossil-fuelled civilisation are entangled with horrific violence, such that to embark upon fossil-fuelled life is to spark off mass species extinction just as much as it is to make possible the internet or global social movements. Carbon democracy strives to conceal this underbelly of mass destruction from privileged publics, whether in subterranean pipelines, in zoning plans that place heavy industry alongside poor communities and people of colour, and in the very notion of throwing things away. Similarly, the authoritarian practices required by fossil capital in the global South were often geographically separated from liberal forms of governance in the West. This made it possible for many Westerners to remain ignorant of their complicity in fossil authoritarianism, and to continue to believe that fossil fuels and liberal democracy are natural and inevitable partners. The narrative of righteous fossil democracy is crucial not only to American identity writ large, but to its hegemonic white masculinities. However, as Aimé Césaire pointed out more than 60 years ago, the violence that Anglo-Europeans have practiced abroad returns with ‘a terrific boomerang effect’, and that despite efforts to turn [away] a blind eye or justify the violence, ‘colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize [them] him in the true sense of the word, to degrade [them] him, to awaken [them] him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism’.24 The American public understands Donald Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ mission as an homage to a mid-20th century fantasy of American life, when white men ruled their households uncontested, a formula that relied upon widespread full-time employment for white men with wages that could support housewives and children. In the words of reporter Zoe Chace, reflecting on the 2016 election, ‘for a lot of people, “Make America Great Again” was about “make men great again”’.’25 Trump’s motto is a kind of petro-nostalgia,26 in that the achievement of the mid-20th century patriarchal ideal in the US was predicated upon an ongoing supply of cheap fossil fuels. Cars, suburbs, and the nuclear family, oriented around white male workers, formed a triumvirate that yoked the desires of Americans not only to wage labour, but to the continued supply of cheap energy that made the dream possible. These privatised consumer perks, along with New Deal infrastructure and policies that supported them, were intended to inoculate the American public against the twin threats of communism and fascism, both of which lurked in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II.27 On the supply side, and especially prior to the 1970s’ oil crisis, the state helped to secure an artificial oil scarcity that ensured profits for oil companies.28 On the demand side, the state also helped to cultivate oil desires, such that fossil fuel consumption became necessary to achieving the American dream. Finally, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, the American way of life was centred around a version of white, patriarchal rule in which the achievement of hegemonic masculinity required intensive fossil fuel consumption and, for the working or middle-class, jobs within or reliant upon fossil fuel systems (jobs and wages that, like state welfare benefits, were unequally distributed by race, often with the conscious corporate intention of dividing labourers in order to prevent unrest).29 For many, extracting and burning fuel was a practice of white masculinity, and of American sovereignty, such that the explosive power of combustion could be crudely equated with virility. No wonder that access to cheap and plentiful gas and energy became the sine qua non for American well-being, and a right demanded both of the state and for the state. Even as Americans in the 21st century disagree about whether health care or food should be considered a right, there is a widespread, bipartisan assumption that Americans deserve cheap energy, and that the state has a duty to ensure it.30 In turn, any threat to energy supply appears simultaneously as a threat to the American dream and, in turn, the dominant position of the US in the world. Make America Great Again thus insists upon a ‘Leave it to Beaver’ innocence about fossil fuel burning – that there are no downsides to burning more oil and coal, or at least none for white Americans. Exit polls show that it was a campaign message that resonated not only with white men, but also with just over one-half of white women voters,31 some of whom may also find security in the status quo, and therefore resent threats to fossil fuel systems and/or hegemonic white masculinities. Through the rosy nostalgia afforded by petro-masculine identity, the affront of global warming or environmental regulations appear as insurgents on par with the dangers posed by feminists and queer movements seeking to leach energy and power from the state/traditional family. Petro-masculinity approaches masculinity as a socially constructed identity that emerges ‘within a gender order that defines masculinity in opposition to femininity, and in so doing, sustains a power relation between men and women as groups’.32 Masculinities are always multiple, and involve ongoing struggles over which version of masculine identity will become socially dominant, or hegemonic, to adopt R.W. Connell’s influential concept. Petro-masculinity draws upon aspects of a traditionally hegemonic masculinity, but at the same time, its appearance in the American far-right today is better understood as a kind of hypermasculinity, which is a more ‘reactionary stance. It arises when agents of hegemonic masculinity feel threatened or undermined, thereby needing to inflate, exaggerate, or otherwise distort their traditional masculinity’.33 Petro-masculinity is reactionary in part because it is not the only hegemonic masculine identity available in the late industrial US; it is perhaps not even the most dominant one in terms of the gendered experiences of energy or electricity systems.34 Ecomodernism, for example, has become a prominent environmental disposition with arguably masculinised dimensions, and is especially popular among elite men (think of Elon Musk).35 Instead of the ‘limits to growth’ mood of the 1970s, which proposed decreasing energy consumption, ecomodernists claimed that ‘there was no conflict between economic growth and environmental problems’ and that technological solutions, often private and market-based, would solve any difficulties,36 a belief that continues to reign in much of Western corporate culture. Not only was growth not a problem – it was the solution, the very foundation of the innovation and entrepreneurship required to fix things.37 According to Martin Hultman, ecomodernism arose alongside a shift in hegemonic masculinity in the West, which Hultman traces through the changing roles played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became a globally influential ecomodernist figure. Older, industrially-aligned masculinities, embodied by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his youthful days of machismo and pumping iron, were discarded for the hybrid masculinity of Governor Schwarzenegger of California, an ecomodernist champion of fuel cells and greenwashed Hummers. Ecomodernism contributed to a new style of masculinity ‘in which toughness, determination and hardness was mixed with appropriate moments of compassion and care’.38 However, like Sherilyn MacGregor, who critiques the masculinisation of climate security, Hultman insists that ecomodernism, and the Silicon Valley masculinities often aligned with it, are ‘asymmetric’ in how they organise these values. Care and compassion remain subordinate to techno-rationality, toughness, and economic growth.39 In contrast to ecomodernist masculinities, petro-masculinity disdains any veneer of hybridity or care, and it also has no truck with sunny, California technoscientism.40 Ecomodernist masculinity may seek to adapt itself to new energy technologies and cultures, but petro-masculinity, as a reactionary stance, aims to defend the endangered status quo, entrenching the petrocultures that have historically propped up Anglo-European fossil-burning men. And while petro-masculinity is built upon mid-20th century fantasies, there is nothing nostalgic about its orientation to fossil fuels. After all, the fabled past of innocent fossil fuel consumption is irretrievable. In the US post-war economy, fossil fuel systems functioned as the means to becoming a real man – if burning them entailed violence, this was constructed as an unfortunate side effect to be made invisible to privileged consumers. But fossil fuels have become a dead end, both for the planet and for the goal of middle-class jobs. In this context, burning fossil fuels can come to function as a knowingly violent experience, a reassertion of white masculine power on an unruly planet that is perceived to be increasingly in need of violent, authoritarian order.

Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery Immediately after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the introduction of measures to prevent the virus from spreading, many new hashtags began to appear online: #stopspreadingthecoronavirus #washyourhands #covercoughs andsneezes #stayathome #wearamask #becalmbesafe #besafe #keepingpeoplesafe #stayhealthy #keepadistance #socialdistancing #quarantinecare #protectothers #wereallinthistogether #takecareofyourself #takecareofothers #takecareoftheworld. Such hashtags show how policy measures and public health rules like self-isolating, physical distancing, wearing a mask or washing one’s hands, as advised by the World Health Organization and implemented by governments around the world, created new social realities, which were immediately reflected online. Rules translated into new behaviors and routines, as people had to change habits and adopt new ones. A number of hashtags speak of responsibility, mutuality, and of protecting others.There was also the claim to pandemic solidarity based on the understanding of all of us being in this together. It was well understood that a pandemic, with the Greek word pan meaning all and demos meaning people, involves all people on their shared planet and requires societies around the world to develop new collective social practices globally. States and their societies, which make up the planetary society, of course responded in highly differing ways to these measures in terms of politics, policy, economy, and stratifications within the societies living within the borders of nation states. While the World Health Organization communicated the physical distancing rules by means of appealing to a military ethos as they encouraged people to “be a hero and break the chain of Covid-19 transmission by practicing social distancing”, such militarization was conspicuously absent from the translation of the new rules into the digital language of hashtags which emerged in March and April of 2020.1 Metaphors of war, as they were mobilized in public political oratory, were not much used in these new pandemic hashtags. Quite the 110 Living with an Infected Planet contrary: in the online language, care was omnipresent. Care was being understood at the different and interrelated scales of the individual, the social, and the entire world: takecareofyourself, takecareofothers, and takecareoftheworld. Even in many of the personal e-mails along with other digital messages which I received from colleagues as well as from family members and friends who live in different parts of the world, such expressions of care and concern for each other’s safety and protection formed a new and central part of the communication during the first months of the pandemic. Practically overnight, this new practice had formed, and e-mails I received right after the global virus outbreak began with sentences like the following: ‘Hoping that you and your loved ones are safe’,or ended with ‘Stay safe and take best of care.’There seemed to have been a mutually understood reciprocity of the need for care and a real desire to know how others were living and surviving in the pandemic catastrophe. New practices for giving answers to such questions had to be found in order to share, but not to overshare; in order to appreciate the other’s concern, but not overburden them with one’s own worries, fears,and sadness. It was also necessary to practice new ways of expressing empathy and sorrow when learning that someone had caught the virus, had fallen seriously ill, was having a hard time recovering, had family members whom they could not visit in hospitals or nursing homes, or was grieving loved ones they had lost to the pandemic or during the pandemic. I began to understand how extensively expressions of emotional caring are still connected to physical presence and closeness to others, with facial expressions, gestures, and moments sharedin silence often taking the place of words. In e-mails and other digital exchanges with my friends, colleagues, and collaborators, there was also, maybe even paradoxically, an expression of hope for more care, precisely because of the rising awareness that the catastrophe of the global pandemic was Man-made. Massive urbanization and deforestation led to increased human exposure to new and deadly viruses. This specific responsibility for the pandemic catastrophe—and that catastrophe arises from the historical situation in which the capitalist economy has taken command of the planet as a resource—, for what political scientists Ulrich Brand and MarkusWissen call the “imperial mode of living”, gave rise, perhaps counter-intuitively and paradoxically, to the hope that care, for the planet and all its living and non-living beings, would finally be placed where it belongs: at the center of politics and economies.2 There was hope that the “new awareness that each of us belongs to the whole and depends on it” in Rebecca Solnit’s words would finally lead to the recognition of interconnectedness and interdependence as the ground for organizing responsibility and mutuality.3 Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 111 There was hope for change in real time, not abstractly, in and for the future, but in the here and now. There was feminist hope for recovery and what I have suggested seeing as a call for building a new “international global care order”.4 This chapter focuses on recovery, identified as a pandemic keyword and, in my interpretation, also a keymetaphor. Approaching the public imaginaries of care in pandemic times as they were articulated through keywords, my feminist cultural analysis places recovery adjacent to war and the frontline. War, frontline, and feminist recovery as new political terminology emerged in response to the pandemic lockdown conditions in March and April of 2020. While war and the frontline articulate the militarization and forcible conscription of care, the meaning of recovery is closely associated with processes of healing, mending, and getting better. Feminist recovery is a novel concept that was introduced in response to the pandemic catastrophe or, more precisely, in response to how hegemonic politics and economies led to a new regime of care dictated by militarized essentialism and care heroism. Feminist recovery was elevated to policy level in feminist recovery plans, which this chapter presents and analyzes. Refusing the hegemonic imperative of returning to normal, feminist recovery plans centered on the essentiality of care and on care justice.Normal would mean the continuation of massive urbanization and environmental destruction as well as deadly extraction, and exploitation. Normal would mean a continuation of inequalities defined by health, by housing and food insecurities, failing infrastructures, impoverishment and no access to basic provisions. Normal would mean continued care extractivism and exhaustion for large swaths of the global population.Therefore, feminist recovery plans defied the warring logic of back to normal.The policies for the feminist recovery plans were developed horizontally and transversally by policy makers, public administrators, and scholars and researchers together with feminist grassroots organizations, activists, and civil society groups. Feminist worry was a central method to my approach of war and frontline as political imaginaries in pandemic times. Feminist hope is key to my reading of feminist recovery plans, yet feminist hope is not separated from feminist worry. On the contrary, feminist hope makes space and time for shared worry in recovery, seeking to re-imagine the rights to care through a new international global care order. How, then, to collectively imagine rights to care in light of the interlinked pandemic and climate catastrophes? How, then, to begin to work for the imagination of care’s recovery from the necro-epistemic patriarchal violence that is based on epistemologies of separation, of policing, and regulating the boundaries of life and death. How to imagine healing so that planetary being can re- 112 Living with an Infected Planet cover from the ideological onslaught on ways of thinking and imagining that led to separating humans from one another by means of hierarchies that result from ableism, classism, casteism, sexism, or racism as well as speciesism, which separates humans from all other living and non-living beings by placing the former above the latter? The violence of the epistemology of separation has been diagnosed in many different traditions of feminist thought, in particular Afrodiasporic, indigenous, environmental, or materialist perspectives, as a regime of domination through the logic of binary oppositions. Binaries—even though always reductive, as they describe states of being to be fully understood in pairs of two—do not, per se, have to be oppositional, hierarchical, or necroepistemic, as in you can live and I cannot, or I can live and you cannot. Feminist theory, particularly from the 1970s onward, has analyzed the impact of binaries such as Man/Nature, Black/White, culture/nature, mind/body, productive/unproductive, active/passive, man/woman. These binaries have captured the imagination. They have informed Western and globalized ways of thinking that underlie economic, legal, or policy imaginaries. Binaries, separations, and boundaries are ideas, imaginaries, and realities. Imagination is needed to imagine otherwise, to re-learn how to think, feel and care beyond and outside of them. In this context, recovery, and in particular the novel notion of feminist recovery, provides inspiration and, at the same time, requires reflection on what it can, our could, mean when approached through a feminist cultural analytical perspective. Recovery is an interesting term. Recovery takes time. One can plan for recovery, but recovery cannot be planned. There is an element of unpredictability in recovery. Recovery requires patience, endurance, and care. Recovery is always tied to what one needs to recover from. At the level of language, the semantics of recovery are closely connected to disease, war, and economy. Recovery is the process after a disease, recovery is the process after economic collapse, and recovery is the process after war, genocide, and ecocide. Recovery, most broadly understood, is the process of getting better after a crisis.The medical view on crisis is useful to understanding this, with crisis meaning the turning point for better or for worse in an acute disease.The pandemic is a moment of global crisis, in which it is socially and politically decided whether this crisis presents a turning point for the worse or a turning point for the better in relation to the Man-made conditions, which have not only caused the pandemic to break out but also include insufficient preparedness for pandemics despite abundant warnings by scientists, epidemiologists, and public health policy makers.5 In the pandemic situation, recovery has to be understood at Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 113 the scales of the individual, the social, and the planetary, which are most intimately physically and materially interconnected. No-one can recover on their own. Recovery, when one is still weaker, when one is still more vulnerable and more fragile than usual, makes one even more dependent on structures of care and support and their dependable availability. All living and non-living beings depend upon others for their recovery. The infected planet needs the support and care of human beings for its recovery. Thinking of individuals as planetary beings constituted by the conditions of the planet is helpful to understanding what living with an infected planet means.The different scales of the individual or personal, the social, and the planetary areinterconnected,as they foreground needs for differentinfrastructures and supports, as they actually enable caring for one another’s interdependent recovery. Recovery is mediated across the personal, the social, and planetary through environmental, material, infrastructural, and technological conditions. Processes of physical, mental, and spiritual recovery are tied to the specific local environmental, material, infrastructural, and technological conditions, which makes clear that recoveryis very much about these conditions as well.One cannot recover independently from these conditions.Therefore, people need to work together so these conditions, which are themselves not well, can recover from the centuries-old onslaught of patriarchal colonial violence, extraction, and exploitation. The conditions for recovery need to be restored in order for recovery to actually become possible. Bodies, minds, spirits, environments, materials, technologies, and infrastructures have to be understood not as separate from one another in their processes of recovery, but as deeply interdependent. Feminist activism and theory have long proclaimed that the personal is political. One has to add many more dimensions to such a conception of the personal: the personal is social, the personal is environmental, the personal is material, the personal is infrastructural, the personal is technological, the personal is planetary. In short, the personal is never alone, the personal is never on its own. There is, therefore, the need to recover from the modern ideology that the personal can be thought of as standing alone, separate from all these other dimensions that constitute it and support it, and, in turn, make persons able to have what is called personal relations, that is relations with other living and non-living beings. Modernization and large-scale urbanization define these relations through infrastructures. Therefore, modern life has to be understood as infrastructuralized life. The modern infrastructural condition reshaped not only the relations among humans, but also the relations between humans and their planet with all its living and non-liv- 114 Living with an Infected Planet ing things. Modern human inhabitation of the planet is founded on systems of infrastructures that intimately connect bodies and environments. One may think, here, of modern sewage or ventilation systems as salient examples that bound infrastructure and bodies as they began to reshape nature into a Manmade environment. Expanding inhabitation means encroachment onto territories that were previously nowhere near humans. The Covid-19 pandemic was caused by zoonotic spillover, which occurs when pathogens are transmitted from wild animals to humans. Such virus spillover results from infrastructure stitching bodies and environments closer together. The modern infrastructural condition, which I understand through dimensions of social equity and notions of support in tension with harmful and violent effects on bodies and environments, is a crucial starting point for understanding what feminist recovery entails and for reimagining care. In historical terms, periods of recovery after wars are linked toinvestmentin reconstruction and rebuilding. Twentieth-century realities and imaginaries of post-crisis, after the 1929 Depression or of the post-war period afterWorldWar II, are firmly linked to investmentsin large-scale infrastructures. Understanding how deeply linked wars are to the research and development that result in new technologies, which in post-war life are immediately translated into everyday infrastructures that define bodies and environments, is important to understanding how war has materially, infrastructurally, and technologically extended into life in so-called peace. Technologies and infrastructures invented for preparedness for wars—or even during times of war—have fully penetrated the everyday life of all living and non-living beings on their shared planet in times of so-called peace. One may be put in mind, here, of DDT—called “the atomic bomb of the insect world”—or of the military origins of the internet: those go back to the work of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Defense Department in the 1940s, which was motivated by bringing “computing to the frontlines”.6 Military infrastructures and war weaponry migrated into so-called civilian use and have profoundly defined everyday life, as such infrastructures not only surround living and non-living beings, but pass through them and unfold their effects inside of them. In this sense, a feminist recovery from infrastructural effects and within infrastructures that bring technologies of war into everyday life would need to expand the understanding of care to go far beyond the establishment of care infrastructure, which is understood primarily as healthcare or social care infrastructure. Imagining such recovery as necessary is made possible by the term feminist recovery. (Re)building and (re)constructing infrastructures that care, as well as infrastructures of care more narrowly under- Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 115 stood, are both central to feminist recovery. Such rebuilding and reconstructing needs to include infrastructural awareness-raising and work on cultural imaginaries that enable people to actually envision care-full and peace-full infrastructures that would come into being through a coming together of bottom-up social movements and grassroots knowledgein collaboration with topdown state politics that enacts infrastructural responsibilities. Making infrastructural politics matter to the continuous labors of feminist recovery, and to public policy and publicimaginaries at once,will necessarily have toinclude the development of robust collective forms of “feminist infrastructural critique” in order to understand better how infrastructuralization, with its origins in war, is the main cause behind today’s conditions of living with infected planet.7 At the same time, critique as awareness of these conditions is crucial to a politics of hope for imagining and building new care-full infrastructures for planetary recovery. The notion of feminist recovery was introduced in feminist policy which was written during the first months of pandemic lockdown. I understand feminist recovery to be a response to the language of war present in public pandemic oratory and the organization of the global frontline of care. Feminist recovery plans for Covid-19 and beyond articulate a dual aim: equitable preparedness, and accountability to the harms caused by centuries of (infrastructural) patriarchal violence. I see the work of feminist recovery as preparedness, understood as accountability to the future, and as reparation, understood as accountability to the ongoingness of the past: a different present is imagined as possible through the coming together of preparedness and reparation.The violence and deadliness of inequality is caused by the lack of infrastructural supports. This led to broad swaths of the planetary society not being enabled to follow pandemic measures. The feminist response to the pandemic centered on this inequality. I find inspiration for critical hope in the term feminist recovery, the meaning of which this chapter explores through my close reading of the feminist recovery plans as, at the same time, the chapter seeks to expand the meaning of feminist recovery in relation to patriarchal history as a whole and to imaginaries of healing the infected planet. The concept of a specifically feminist recovery is useful for questioning the “epistemology of mastery” inherent in modern ideologies of policy and planning.8 Processes of recovery are, per se, unpredictable.What bodies and environments that have been critically infected need to really heal today is still largely unknown, and might even change in surprising and unforeseen ways along the process of recovery.Therefore, planning for feminist recovery needs to stay attuned to such long-term 116 Living with an Infected Planet processes of recovery, which, above all, require the responsiveness of care to changing needs of care. In order to imagine feminist recovery from within, and beyond, the pandemic catastrophe, I apply the following questions: What does the infected planet, beyond the acute disease of the current pandemic, need to recover from? What does the infected planet need in order to recover and heal? When will the planet have been enabled to recover? While there is, as we have seen in the previous chapters, an official politics of beginnings and endings when it comes to declaring wars or pandemics, one can never declare the end of recovery. One can never be really certain that recovery, or healing, are over or complete. One cannot declare the end of recovery. One cannot declare the end of healing. Quite the contrary: recovery is always durational, marked by ongoingness and unfinishedness. The temporality of recovery, like all processes concerned with healing and restoring, is complex, never linear, unpredictable, and, in a certain way, never ending. When recovering from a disease, one may feel better one day and worse again the next. Recovery can be slow and unpredictable. Recovery is, first and foremost, a process and, therefore, has to be understood in temporal terms.While not only plans for disaster preparedness, but for recovery preparedness and all the necessary support structures and infrastructures are most certainly needed, there needs to be, at the same time, a better understanding of the uncertainty and the unpredictability of recovery. Planning that remains open to such uncertainties can be most responsive to recovery needs as they emerge, and to adapting supports and infrastructures accordingly. Planning based on mastery would assume knowing for certain what recovery needs. Planning that followed the needs of recovery would remain responsive to the kinds of changes needed during processes of recovery. The impact and traces of previous trauma and diseases live on in bodies, societies, environments, and the planet as a whole. The historical inequality and the harms enacted on bodies and their environments by sexism, racism, and speciesism on a planetary scale is an expression of war: war against Black and Brown people, war against indigenous populations, war against nature, war against poor people, war against vulnerable populations, war against women. This logic of war extended, in pandemic times, to forcibly enlisting care. Feminist recovery does not only address the current pandemic situation, but the historical ongoingness of multiple and interlinked wars against women rooted in the violence of colonial-patriarchal ideology as warfare.The effects of this ideology continue to penetrate conditions of life and death. Silvia Federici diagnoses that “capitalist development begins with a war on women”.9 Fem- Chapter 3: Feminist Recovery 117 inist anthropologist Rita Segato argues that femicidal violence has to be understood as “femigenocide”.10 Colonial-patriarchal warfare takes many forms that interpenetrate and support each other, economic and intimate, militarized and legal. Domestic violence has been described as “invisible war” or as “shadow war”.11 In pandemic times, as yet another example of the close traffic between imaginaries of war and epidemiological imaginaries, the so-called shadow war of domestic violence was referred to as “shadow pandemic”.12 Taking the notion of feminist recovery to refer to recovery from pandemic conditions and the lasting aftermath of ideological and material patriarchal warfare on bodies, minds, and environments as well as to recovery from the historical violence of patriarchy, which has led to the production of gendered, sexualized, racialized, and classed vulnerable populations and the large-scale ruination of their habitats and environments, requires an understanding of recovery as a slow and lasting process, the end of which can neither be planned for nor easily predicted. Feminist recovery is about never giving in to the afterlife of patriarchal violence and never giving up on the possibility of recovering. Perhaps, a politics of hope for continued living with an infected planet begins with understanding that feminist recovery will necessarily have to be never-ending, that it is ongoing for, and in futures to come. Providing in this chapter an attentive reading of feminist recovery plans as they were developed in different parts of the world, along with the policy advice for caring economies as well as the imaginaries for broader social and cultural transformation, I want to bring into play one additional dimension of recovery. Recovery can also mean the possibility of regaining something that has been lost or taken away. I argue that placing this meaning of recovery in relation to patriarchy’s centuries-old ruination of care, which includes the loss of care’s centrality and the taking away of its fundamental importance, value, knowledge, and visibility, makes for both a much more complex and, at the same time, more insistent and hope-full reading of what feminist recovery would need to entail. Regaining care from patriarchal capitalism and making the essentiality of care a source of value and recognition will require hard work, a new and much richer and more nuanced language for care as knowledge, and new social and cultural imaginaries. The idea of modern Man as an autonomous and independent individual which underpins care under patriarchy led to the silencing of the interconnectedness and interdependencies of bodies, minds, and natures. Feminist recovery, therefore, will need to regain, relearn, and retrain a deep sense of interdependency, which was violently taken away by toxic patriarchal “epistemologies 118 Living with an Infected Planet of separation”.13 The political and economic silencing, and persistent structural devaluation of care included the erasure of care as knowledge in hegemonic understandings of what counts as knowledge, of what matters to knowledge and what does not.14 Such silencing and “epistemic ignorance” is not a-historical, but continually reproduced, as care theorist Riikka Prattes has recently diagnosed.15 Central to the feminist recovery of care will be continuous work on epistemic and economic imaginaries that overcome the lasting epistemic violence of separation and ignorance, which have led to political, intellectual, spiritual, and cultural silencing and economic devaluation and deprivation of those who perform caring labors.

Economic inequality is understood as the concentration of wealth and income, reflecting how global production distributes among the population, where the concentration level is highly dependent on the historical context and must be understood as a worldwide phenomenon (Milanovic 2016, 2020). Leading economists agree that a highly unequal distribution of the surplus does not simply occur by the invisible hand of the market; it is supported and reinforced by specific action in the economic, political and social spheres (Stiglitz 2012; Piketty 2014, 2020; Milanovic 2016, 2020). In recent decades, there has been a constant broadening of economic inequality; despite financial crises or the COVID-19 pandemic, billionaires continue to rise and accumulate wealth; between 1995 and 2022, the top 1 per cent captured almost 20 times more global wealth than the bottom 50 per cent of the population (Oxfam 2022 p 7). These differences are closely tied to the so-called neoliberal economic policies implemented in the past four decades (Marchina 2016). While liberalisation of capital flows, free trade agreements and the delocalisation of production have facilitated growth, technology upgrading, and higher productivity, they have also fostered the consistent expansion of economic inequality gaps (Stiglitz 2012; Milanovic 2016, 2020; Oxfam 2018; Lockwood 2021). In addition, the reduction of state intervention in the economy has turned public policy priorities towards macroeconomic stability and budget balancing. This matter has reduced social services and the scope of social security networks, particularly in the Global South, limiting the redistributing role of the State (Bakker 2003). From a Marxist perspective, inequality is an intrinsic result of capitalism and one of its main contradictions: the aim to compensate for the loss of profit margin to maintain the endless pursuit of capital accumulation through the depletion of its conditions of possibility (Arrighi 1978, 1994; Marx 1993; Moore 2011, 2017; Harvey 2014; Fraser 2017). In this case, neoliberal policies were implemented as an exit strategy from the 1970s and 1980s longue durée crisis (Arrighi 1978, 1994; Harvey 2007; Brenner 2009). While they have managed to sustain capital accumulation and increase its concentration, they have shown limited capabilities of formal employment absorption, reduced the standard of living, and increased the pressure on households to solve daily subsistence (Benería and Floro 2005; Salvia 2015). Under neoliberalism, an increasing number of people are being excluded from decent and well-paying labour opportunities, which then resolve to informal practices for income and become highly dependent on non-paid domestic and care work to sustain subsistence (Salvia 2015). These outcomes speak of an uneven distribution of responsibilities that revolve around relationships to sustain daily and generational human life maintenance. When the labour market does not provide opportunities and the state has retreated from providing meaningful social services and security networks, who and where are living conditions sustained? While mainstream economics and critical political economy tend to disavow this question, Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) aims to shed light on these dynamics, which are essential to understand how our economy works (Bhattacharya 2017). Social reproduction is understood as the activities, attitudes, behaviours, responsibilities, and relationships involved in the maintenance of daily and generational life (Brenner and Laslett cited in Bhattacharya 2017 p 6). When economic inequality broadens, every day and generational maintenance of people become even more reliant on households, where unpaid domestic and care work expands to compensate for what income and social services do not cover (Elson and Catagay 2000; Benería and Floro 2005; Martínez 2008; Salvia 2015). SRT and feminist economics have made critical contributions to understanding the key role of gendered social reproduction dynamics for the economic system and how these are affected by crises and policy change. Regardless, an element that needs further research, particularly in the current context, is how social reproduction serves as a strategy to increase externalities that drive economic inequality (Marchina 2021). From the foregoing, this paper intends to question how social reproduction relates to the constant rise of economic inequality from a critical political economy and SRT perspective. This paper sets both frameworks and feminist economics into dialogue, aiming to take a closer look into how social reproduction represents a whole realm for capital accumulation by proposing an expansion of Marx’s formula of capital. Rising economic inequality, its conditions of possibility From a critical political economy interpretation, economic inequality can be understood as the appropriation rate and concentration of the surplus generated through production, trade, and investment (Marx 1993, 2011). While Marx states that the distribution of wealth is expressly dependent on the established relationships between capital and labour that yield x or y productivity levels, it vaguely recognises how social reproduction dynamics sustain profit margins by providing unpaid inputs to the economy (Vogel 2013). These concepts disavow a crucial element in the increase or reduction of surplus appropriation: the degree of externalisation of our economy depends on the costs of labour, raw materials, and lower-value intermediate goods (Moore 2011, 2017). Taking the latter into account deepens our understanding of the factors that raise profit rates and sustain income levels. To dive into this conversation, it is necessary to discuss the capital accumulation process, why it rises or falls, and how it adapts to historical changes. The Expansion of Capital Accumulation When attempting to define capitalism from a critical political economy framework, the literature allocates the endless pursuit of capital accumulation as its constitutive driving force; where multiple mechanisms that allow for adaptation in times of crises ensure the constant expansion of capital (see, for example, Arrighi 1978, 1994; Wallerstein 1979; Marx 1993; Polanyi 2007; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018). While private property, free markets, and contractual labour forms are usually defined as the primary institutions that support the valorisation of capital (Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), history has shown that capitalism has gone above and beyond them to increase surplus extraction. Geographical expansion, the expropriation of natural resources, slavery, indentures, and unpaid and underpaid/non-contractual employment forms have allowed higher rates of value extraction (see Wallerstein 1979; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992; Quijano 2000; Moore 2011, 2017). This approach does not intend to deny the role of private property, free markets, and wage labour in value extraction processes, but to emphasise their obscured relationships with a broader range of spheres that transfer value to capital accumulation. Within those relationships, gender hierarchies and racism have been recognised as providing symbolic justification for noncontractual labour forms and the unrecognised inputs of unpaid domestic care work (Quijano 2000; Segato 2007; Fraser 2018; Hall 2019). From a decolonial perspective, labour segmentation is seen as the result of colonisation and hegemonic domination that have justified the inferiority of the Global South and coloured populations throughout history (Segato 2007; Quijano 2014;Hall 2019). Under neoliberalism, this can be seen in the following phenomena that shape the increasing asymmetries between today’s capital/ labour relations: 1. The deindustrialisation of the Global North with the expelling of workers towards precarised labour opportunities in the region (Harvey 2014). 2. The rise of highly specialised workers in the Global North tending to receive income levels that allow them to become capital owners and collect multiple forms of rent (Milanovic 2020). 3. A quick industrialisation of the Global South that sustains international outsourcing of raw materials and intermediate goods, relying on cheap labour supply, especially for the stages of low-value-added production chains (Milberg 2004). 4. The proliferation of technology upgrading in the Global South, from lower to higher value-added processes, increasing the layoff of lower-level workers (Tejani 2012). Randolph Persaud (2003) identifies in the mentioned phenomena a global labour supply regime that has its roots in the colonial, enclave, and rentier world system. All of the above show a global dynamic that results directly in a distribution of wealth and income that is highly unequal and dependent on racial, gender, and geographical asymmetries. Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) locate racism and gender hierarchies as co-constitutive of capitalism, serving as the background conditions of possibility to the foreground mechanisms of surplus extraction: private property, waged labour, and free markets. Nancy Fraser (2018) further explains that for value extraction through the exploitation of “free labour” to take place in the foreground, processes of expropriation of non-free labour must take place in the background.2 This concept is similar to David Harvey’s (2007) accumulation by dispossession, which he conceptualises as the continuous proliferation of primitive accumulation practices, such as multiple forms of labour control, natural resource extraction, and enclosures.

I was recently amused by a train of thought on Twitter excoriating Henry David Thoreau for his experiment in self-sufficient living. True, he was on the land of his wealthy neighbor, his mother did his laundry (and brought him old-timey donuts to eat), but it was rugged, dammit. Okay, it was something akin to a 10 year old living in a tree-house in the backyard with mom sending up sandwiches in one of those nifty rope and bucket contraptions, but this was a white man doing something and writing about it so of course it’s monumental and imbued with all sorts of significance. This to me, is a perfect analogy for America and its early beginnings. Never mind the back-breaking labor provided by the women, the horrendous slave trade and lethal work that made the infrastructure possible–the convenient clearing (genocide) of the already here peoples through illness and murder……. the narrative is that it was magically produced by powdered wig donning men who weren’t just all about a self-serving course correction. This fallacy has permeated the psyche of most Americans, and doesn’t allow for adequate self-reflection or improvement, and I would say is a path to eventual extinction if a new narrative and belief system isn’t adopted.

Nature gives us ample metaphor to realize the interconnectedness of our lives. I can never look at an Aspen grove and not consider the exquisite synergy of the system.  All tethered together in an interlocking root system—what affects one tree, manifests in the whole. The 80,000 year old Pando grove in Utah has managed this interplay.  For perspective, the last Neanderthals in Europe seem to have been around about 40,000 years ago. Working together has its benefits. We’ve managed to do incredible harm in only about 300 years. We could be gone rapidly and take Pando with us at this rate.

As a scientist, I have watched in terror as warnings from those who study our world’s land-based and ocean ecosystems have grown increasingly dire.

Yet the world seems to blithely go on its way in a fossil fuel-drunken haze. The Baha’i teachings address the scientific warnings this way:

For Marx (2011) the hidden abode of capital accumulation lies in the value added by labour when transforming commodities (C) into a new commodity (C’) which, when sold in the market, sees surplus value appropriated by the employer. Furthermore, Marx (2011) divides C into Fixed Capital (Kf), which includes infrastructure, technology and machinery and Circulating Capital (Kc) that subdivides into Constant Capital – raw materials and intermediate goods – and Variable Capital that refers to labour. This differentiation helps to explain where capital has more flexibility to reduce or increase production costs. While infrastructure and technology are usually expensive investments with limited surplus value margins, as they depreciate reasonably quickly; Circulating capital refers to the inputs that require daily repositioning. Intermediate goods and raw materials are constant, but labour is variable because the need for it fluctuates with productivity levels and technological changes (Marx 1993). Therefore, cost reductions usually aim at acquiring cheaper raw materials, intermediate goods, and labour (Arrighi 1978, 1994; Moore 2011). This shifting is seen especially in times of crisis when capital aims to compensate for the loss of profit margins, as discussed earlier. In particular, under neoliberalism4 the need to cheapen labour is dictated by geographical, racial, and gender global hierarchies in two main ways: (1) sustaining a standard of living through an increased load of unpaid social reproduction work, (2) providing a segmented labour force that is underpaid depending on race, geographical location, and gender. The above further increases and externalises the actual costs of social reproduction globally. Oxfam estimates that the monetary value of unpaid care work globally for women aged 15 and over is at least USD 10.8 trillion annually (Oxfam 2020 p 8). How much would profit rates reduce if even a fraction of these inputs were paid through wages to consume in private markets or redistributed through taxation for public social security networks? Moreover, this paper argues that circulating capital is the central realm that capital moves towards to increase surplus margins, mainly achieved by externalising the costs of social reproduction in a segmented manner between geographical regions and people (Marchina 2021). After considering the preceding, Marx’s formula of capital can expand as follows: M – C (Kf, Kc (IG, L (C, USR(h*Wd)))) – P – M’ – D’ (2) C: Fixed Capital (Kf) plus Circulating Capital (Kc) Kc: Intermediate Goods (IG) plus Labour (L) L: Commodities (C) plus Unpaid Social Reproduction Work (USR) USR: Hours of Labour (h) * medium wage (Wd) When looking closer into circulating capital, we can expand our shared understanding of the valorisation of capital to include unpaid social reproduction work in its relation to the surplus, calculated by using Picchio’s (2005) proposed formula: number of hours dedicated to unpaid care and domestic work (h) by a median wage (Wd). Regardless, it is worth mentioning that translating the complex processes that sustain life into an x amount of exchange value that fluctuates in the market inaccurately represents the cost of labour (Harvey 2014). In addition, a lingering tension prevails between the natural price of labour (not including unpaid inputs) and its market price established by supply and demand forces, collective bargaining, and other historical processes (Picchio 1992). Moreover, the proposed expanded formula does not explicitly account for tax rates, labour regulations, and public social services, which provide the normative bases for establishing profit margins (see Figure 2). These further obscure the role of social reproduction and the degree of externalisation economic growth relies on to sustain profit margins. In addition to labour, another significant aspect of circulating capital is the daily repositioning of raw materials and intermediate goods (Moore 2011, 2017). Colonisation, imperialism, and current global production dynamics discussed previously have historically endorsed the unpaid extraction of natural resources from the Global South and multiple forms of labour segmentation that permit lower wages, guaranteeing higher surplus rates. Surplus enlarges in intimate relation with the deductions made under circulating capital, sustained mainly by social reproduction practices that are intimately gendered and racialised, presenting social reproduction dynamics as an elemental domain for capitalist expansion. This assertion cannot be analysed in national terms but as an unequal global dynamic, where state regulations, social services, labour segmentation and the mobility of goods, services, and capital are central to determining the rate of externalisation through social reproduction (Bakker and Gil 2003). The complexity of these processes poses essential limits to their measurement; nonetheless, a conceptual approach allows us to deepen our understanding of capitalistic expansion. Economic Issues, Vol. 28, Part 1, 2023 - 25 - Conclusions In a world where the top decile of the population holds anywhere between 55- 75 per cent of total wealth, depending on the country (Piketty 2020 p 671), this paper presents a framework to analyse how social reproduction is intimately tied to increasing externalities that sustain the endless pursuit of capital accumulation. While critical political economy tends to focus on the relationships between capital and labour, a dialogue with SRT offers an expanded understanding that includes the conditions of possibility for a capital/labour relationship of exploitation to emerge. Decoloniality and Fraser’s approach to ongoing expropriation processes in the background of exploited labour showcases capital’s tendency to externalise its actual reproduction costs through global segmentation and the political subjectivation of race and gender. Through this lens, a closer analysis of the relationships between production and reproduction as they relate to surplus extraction further reveals the dual ties between the intensification of unpaid social reproduction caused by increasing economic inequalities, with the conditions of possibility for higher surplus extraction. The expanded formula of the valorisation of capital proposed Figure 2: The expanded process of the valorisation of capital Source: Marchina S (2021) Reproducción social, nodo del ensanchamiento de la desigualdad económica, Tijuana, México: UABC. ST Marchina - 26 - in this paper offers an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms involved in adapting capital to the loss of profit margins by externalising its costs towards the social reproduction realm. However, the scope of this paper is limited, as the complexity of these processes includes multiple axes of analysis. For instance, global care chains that support social reproduction through unpaid and underpaid inputs, in connection to migration flows that offer cheap labour to the Global North, are crucial elements to consider in the study of the externalisation of the actual costs of capitalist expansion. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of the present discussion is to offer a deeper understanding of these processes that leads to an exploration of solutions to redistribute social reproduction as a powerful strategy to reduce economic inequality.

The weakness of most proposals for payment of a basic income is that they envisage funding through general taxation based on rolling up current welfare payments. This raises the problem of the level of payment. Spreading the available money universally may mean that those in most need might see a drop in income. Those unable to access other forms of income may still require means-tested benefits. Also, it would not challenge the difference in status between the public and commercial economies and unpaid care work. A basic income would still be seen as dependent on the ‘wealth creating’ sector, requiring high levels of taxation if a level of income was to be provided that created real choice. The politics of a basic income also needs to be kept in mind. An early proponent was the right-wing economist Milton Friedman (1962). He proposed a negative income tax that would be implemented in place of all direct welfare payments and services. The aim was to solve the demand problem for capitalism. There would always be money in circulation, but it would leave people at the mercy of the market relying only on charity to relieve need. While neoliberalism has not reached this extreme, it has undermined the legitimacy of the welfare state.

My claim, here, is that Srnicek and Williams’s Inventing the Future errs in the way it poses the problem of unemployment under neoliberalism and that this confused formulation generates a desire for UBI that is not only politically wrongheaded, but also contradicts the book’s professed goal of systemic transformation. The UBI may provide relief from some contemporary ills. But I suggest that it cannot bear the weight of the total transformation Srnicek and Williams are after.

At the heart of Srnicek and Williams’s analytical misstep, I argue, lies an unreflected  and . According to this Liberal imaginary, money appears as a finite thing-cum-process, which belongs to the volatile domain of private capital and finance. Upon the basis of this conventional image of money, Srnicek and Williams then presume Liberalism’s other great myth: that unemployment is a direct result of market vagaries and increased automation. To be fair, most critical theorists indebted to Marxist political-economy subordinate the money relation to a totality they term “capitalism” and, from here, envision unemployment as a necessary effect of this totality’s unruly transformations. The difference is that Srnicek and Williams seek a fresh and transformative solution to this seemingly intractable problem; to them, the Universal Basic Income is just what the doctor ordered. Leaving collapsing labor markets behind, while looking forward to a , these authors surmise that UBI is the best solution on offer.

In the age of wonkery and data, the policy discussion above is where the analysis often ends. But in the long term, it is politics that determines whether a program will survive or work as intended. If one takes a tripartite view of society, with a public, private, and civil sector, then a BI could further shrink one of the most important elements of civil society—labor unions. After all, a BI is an individualistic policy: by raising each individual’s own personal bargaining power, it diminishes the need for collective bargaining and social solidarity. When individuals have a stronger exit option, they are less likely to voice collective opposition towards an organization or institution than to simply leave it. This is why unions have expressed concerns that a livable BI will render them superfluous. By further weakening this core civil society institution, the BI removes yet another of Burke’s little platoons that play an active role in intermediating between society and an ever-centralizing bureaucracy and advocate on behalf of the community beyond the ballot box.

This is why highly unionized countries, such as Belgium, fought against proposals for a BI. Belgium operates under the “Ghent system,” in which unions receive the revenue for subsidized unemployment insurance programs and operate voluntarily. An independent BI would weaken unions at the expense of an even stronger federal government. Since at least a portion of the American welfare system is funded by social contributions and not general taxation, a movement towards a generalized BI could be perceived as a massive expansion of welfare.

When an idea stirs the popular imagination, pundits and politicians find it hard to resist.

Never mind if there is no evidence to support it. Never mind if closer scrutiny suggests putting it into practice will be counterproductive or plain impossible.

At the same time, it may well be asked — did the Social Security Act [slow], set back or kill off the development of an old age movement, one that would have moved off with considerable — and growing strength — to new and more radical nostrums?

Yet Social Security was also a weak and hesitant piece of legislation in many ways:

This conceptualization breaks with the neoliberal understanding of freedom, potentially valorising the non-economic uses of positive freedom and the republican (political-democratic) dimension of freedom. However, in order to use the capability approach as a normative framework for a post-neoliberal eco-social politics, it is necessary to overcome some of its limitations. Indeed, one of the most important critiques of the capability approach is, for the purpose of this paper, Hartley Dean’s argument that the capability approach neglects the exploitative nature of capitalism, especially with respect to the relationship between work and freedom. As Dean (2009, p. 272) puts it: “although wage labour is preferable to slave labour, a contract for labour cannot be wholly free entered so long as one party depends upon the sale of her labour power in order to obtain the means of subsistence.” On this basis, a post-neoliberal interpretation of the capability approach needs to problematize the relationship between employment and capability-freedom. Emancipation and empowerment should thus not be conceived of as inclusion in the (labour) market: the goal is to enhance “human richness,” reframing development as the expansion of potentialities for human flourishing in its multidimensionality both within and beyond work (Giovanola, 2005, 2009b). This requires emphasizing both “freedom from work” and “freedom at work” (Laruffa, 2020; Bueno, 2021).

One important reason for interpreting capability narrowly as the capacity to participate in the economy through employment lies in the fact that this interpretation allows to reframe social policy as an “investment.” Hence, while at the individual level the employment-focused paradigm is justified in terms of empowerment, at the collective level it is legitimized through its contribution to economic growth. Social policies promoting individuals’ participation in the economy are thus praised for being able to reconcile social and economic goals (Hemerijck Citation2013, 134) whereas, not surprisingly, the emphasis on unpaid care work and political participation is much less strong: these activities have no or very little economic return. Yet, from a capability perspective, justifying social policy in terms of economic growth appears difficult. Indeed, one of the central normative concern of capability theorists has been precisely that of challenging the appropriateness of economic growth as a measure of social wellbeing, arguing that it treats a means—and not even a very good means (Crocker Citation1992, 585)—as if it was an end in itself (e.g. Sen Citation1999). This is not to say that economic progress is unimportant. However, there is no automatic link between economic growth and social wellbeing. For example, higher economic growth does not necessarily imply a better healthcare or education system and indeed national rankings based on the Human Development Index are not the same as those based on GDP (Nussbaum Citation2011, 48).

In conclusion, providing people with jobs may be an inadequate measure of social advancement as are increase of GDP or income (Koggel Citation2003, 168), especially if the goal of maximizing the participation in the labour market is motivated by the increase of economic output rather than by a real concern for people’s quality of life. In particular, merely increasing citizens’ workforce participation may be insufficient and misleading if the goal is the expansion of their political agency. Indeed, inclusion in the labour market obscures more radical forms of empowerment aimed at achieving broader social and political changes, especially within the economy and the workplace—which in the employment-focused paradigm remain largely de-politicized.

In feminist economics, the overarching goal of recognizing unpaid care work as a socially vital and necessary basis for the functioning of our societies was often connected to the strategy of shifting unpaid care work to the paid care sector, either by outsourcing it to the market (for example, with respect to eldercare) or, much more frequently, by calling for public provisioning (for example, of childcare). The feminist economic policy position on care is doubtlessly more nuanced and multi-layered than a mere transformation of all care work to paid care work, and the 3R (recognize, reduce, redistribute) strategy shows that the shifting and the redistributing strategy are complementary rather than mutually exclusive (Himmelweit 2007; Elson 2017). However, we still consider the strategy of shifting as problematic when reasoning about feminist degrowth visions. To underpin this argument, we need to do some conceptual groundwork. Ecofeminists and feminist ecological economists have been at the forefront of discussing the (feminized) social and ecological reproduction, that is, what Maren Jochimsen and Ulrike Knobloch (1997) call the “maintenance economy,” Maria Mies (2007) refers to as the underwater part of the “iceberg model of the global economy,” and we will henceforward call the “economy of socio-ecological provisioning” – as the devalued (in the case of unpaid care work) and destroyed (in the case of ecosystem functions) other. By drawing on different articles published in the 1997 Ecological Economics special issue on Women, Ecology, and Economics, Corinna Dengler and Birte Strunk (2018) conceptualized a boundary between the monetized economy (that is, what is counted in GDP) and the economy of socio-ecological provisioning (that is, the unaccounted caring activities and ecological processes). This boundary is a manifestation of a deep “structure of separation” (Biesecker and Hofmeister2010)in economics. Dengler and Strunk confirm agreement among feminist economists that, as a prerequisite for gender justice, “the boundary between the monetized and the maintaining, the productive and the reproductive, the valuable and the valueless, the counted and the unaccounted, and the visible and the invisible needs to be overcome” (2018: 163f).

Figure 1 Strategy of shifting formerly unpaid parts of the economy of socio-ecological provisioning to the monetized economy. Source: Authors’ own depiction drawing on Dengler and Strunk (2018).

In this article, I argue that we need to re-envision our organizations and society in line with a holistic notion of care by focusing on embodied vulnerability as an inherent part of our human condition and as a political category. This view aligns with the Care Collective’s notion of radical care (Chatzidakis et al., 2020), advancing a ‘universal care’ model as ‘the ideal of a society in which care is placed front and centre on every scale of life’ (The Care Collective,1 2020, p. 19). Now, more than ever, I will argue, we need to infuse all aspects of our political and social lives with care. If we are to draw a single lesson from the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that we cannot survive without the care we provide to one another as individuals and without collective care efforts as a society. We require care to maintain our lives and well-being; we need it to recover from diseases and when facing the dangers of illness or death. The recent response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates the importance of caring for the survival of fleeing victims. The massive numbers of refugee arrivals attest to the significance of grassroots, volunteer-led care initiatives to receive them (Fotaki, 2021a). These developments signal the need for a political, economic, and ethical repositioning of the value of care in society and caring professions (Folbre, 2015; Sandel, 2012; The Care Collective, 2020).

However, a shift toward radical care, as proposed by the Care Collective (2020), requires a comprehensive approach to afford a deeper understanding of why we simultaneously need yet often undervalue care. We need to consider why the value of care in private life is generally accepted when its importance and role in the public sphere are subject to heated debates and controversies (Fotaki et al., 2020, chapter 1). The article seeks to interrogate this ambivalence by bringing psychoanalytic feminists’ ideas into conversation with political and activist conceptions of care. Psychoanalysis, for instance, stresses our conflicting feelings about being dependent on others, which leads to an apparent contradiction: while care is socially valued because we cannot survive without it, this need makes us feel dependent, vulnerable, and weak – and we tend to avoid these states, seeing them as undesirable because weakness and dependency are associated with a threat to survival. Neoliberal ideology accommodates and magnifies these existential fears by rejecting collective care arrangements such as the welfare state. On a larger scale, this neoliberal capture permeating our societies, may explain why we evade the need for care individually and socially assign it as low-status work while exhorting its high moral value. The article argues for politicizing care because by drawing attention to the interests that are served by its relegation to the private sphere, the neoliberal logic underpinning this view is disrupted (Fotaki, 2017).

While rethinking academic labor obviously involves work on multiple fronts, one clear need is a transformation in our shared understanding of what is acknowledged, measured, and documented as important work. We believe that FPE is useful for such a reframing because it conceptualizes care labor as a structural necessity and refuses the totalizing representations of capitalism that devalue such work. In this section, we borrow from these theoretical frameworks to outline two strategies for making visible and measuring the diverse components of academic labor. The first idea we borrow from FPE is to classify the currently invisibilized and/or devalued forms of work we have been discussing thus far are under a broad umbrella of care labor. Feminist political economy scholars define this as work that is structured around service to others and/or involving caring motivations (Folbre & Nelson,2000; Nakano Glenn,2010). For a few decades now, FPE scholarship has focused on making visible and/or revaluing the enormous amount of caring labor, the majority of it done by women, that is essential to human flourishing in the economy. For instance, FPE scholars have challenged the inadequate metrics used to measure economic productivity for excluding or devaluing this work, from national income statistics to job performance measures (Folbre,2006; Waring,1988). They have also highlighted how caring labor fits into the diversity of values, motivations and economic forms that exist within workplaces themselves. As FPE scholars have shown, caring labor is essential to the functioning of organizations and economic systems – even those that define efficiency and productivity around masculinist ideals of individualism and detachment (Gibson-Graham,2006; Nelson,2010; Steinberg & Figart,1999). Reframing these aspects of academic work as care labor is an important move because it allows us to recognize it as proper work, requiring effort and resources that are not in infinite supply. However simply recognizing it as work is not enough. Paid caring labor is recognized in the economy, but often devalued because it is viewed as an extension of unpaid caring labor and something to which women are “naturally” suited, rather than legitimately skilled work (Folbre & Nelson,2000). Attention to intersectional politics is important, as class, race, and migration status structure the valuation of care work as well. Caring labor is not just gendered but also racialized (Nakano Glenn,2010). In higher education, women of color face higher expectations to under-take support and service work than White women, and men of color taken on more than White men (Miller & Roksa,2017). Thus a truly gender and race-equitable approach would require a change in the flawed metrics of productivity in higher education, reinstating the importance of teaching, mentoring and student support work, under-lining the contribution this labor makes to the university and economy as a whole. Yet another issue to tackle is the widespread representation of the political economy of academia itself as an entirely neoliberal and capitalist sphere, in which there is no diversity or alternatives. Feminist political economy scholars have transformed thinking about the economy at large by showing it is made up of more than the activities of rational, self-interested individuals in markets, drawing attention to essential contributions of unpaid household and subsistence labor as well as a diversity of motivations and processes. We can apply these insights to university settings. University administrators will often claim their hands are tied by the “realities of the market” when they employ discourses of competition and market discipline to justify policy changes, adopt corporate models of “effi-ciency” to evaluate academic labor, reframe students as “customers” and education strictly in terms of human capital development for the workplace and so forth. Interestingly, the critical literature on academic labor often reproduces this same discourse in their representations of capitalism as a totalizing force in higher education, where managerial techniques, performance rubrics, rankings, and curricular reform all line up under a regime of “total administration” to serve neoliberal agendas (e.g., McCann etal.,2020). Essentially, these representations, albeit from different power and ideological positions, all reproduce the idea that the logic of neoliberal capitalism now drives higher education such that there is no alternative. But, as FPE scholar J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996) argues, this representation of the economy and/or individual organization as subsumed to the neoliberal order, even when employed in service of social justice projects, can para-doxically contribute to neoliberal capitalism's continued dominance. When applied to the university, such representa-tions help constitute the neoliberal ideal of the entrepreneurial, individualistic, self-managing subject and neoliberal measures of productivity and worth as the standard against which all motivations and contributions will be, for better or worse, assessed. This makes it harder to recognize or fight to support the diversity of economic practices and motivations that constitute the university and help it to achieve its goals. It also lends credence to individualist expla-nations that end up blaming academics who do perform undervalued care work for their own “imprudent choices” while failing to address underlying structural inequalities. What Gibson-Graham calls for, echoing a long history of FPE scholarship, is a transformation of our understand-ing of the economy by acknowledging the diversity of non-capitalist practices that exist in the sometimes unruly and incoherent spaces of our economic system, including universities. This is a strategy of reading for difference rather than dominance. Reading for difference allows us to foreground the diversity of economic activities that contribute to the well-being of the university, and to see ways that these may not “line up” with dominant readings of economic life as determined by capitalist logics. We recognize that this is a difficult thing to do in some of the alienating contexts in which some academics find themselves. But in our experience, there is a great value in acknowledging that projects of neoliberalism, including those related to higher education, are not totalizing, and that motivations and activities outside of the neoliberal frame that are more in line with our values exist (Roelvink,2016). Change becomes more of an open-ended question rather than a given, allowing more space for imagining and enacting economic possibility.

One way that feminist economists have intervened in economics is by challenging the ostensible division of productive and reproductive labor, the latter referring to the provision of services required to create and sustain a person’s functioning, both physically and mentally, oftentimes called “caring” labor (Himmelweit, Reference Himmelweit2007; Himmelweit, Santos, Sevilla, & Sofer, Reference Himmelweit, Santos, Sevilla and Sofer2013). For instance, many have produced work critiquing the exclusion of emotional and household labor from economic accounts of value (Waring, Reference Waring1988) like gross domestic product (Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum2000, Reference Nussbaum2003). Marcal (Reference Marcal2017) reminds us that Adam Smith, from whom economics inherits the famed parable of the butcher and baker, expressing how self-interest connects man with his bread, lived with his mother for much of his life and rarely cooked his own dinner, yet relegated such investments into social reproduction to the margins of economic life. It is perhaps illustrative that the parable of Robinson Crusoe is used in some economics textbooks to demonstrate how self-sufficient, rational agents allocate time to maximize well-being. Grapard (Reference Grapard1995) argues that the story of a white, male colonizer living alone is hardly representative of economic life and, furthermore, reveals the extent to which neoclassical theory is based on the erasure of social reproduction.Footnote 5 These and other feminist critiques charge that the self-supporting, rational caricature of economic life might “be typical of the perceived experiences of adult white male middle-class economists” (Barker, Reference Barker, Peterson and Lewis1999: 573; Strassmann, Reference Strassmann, Ferber and Nelson1993) but it is foreign to everyone else. From the epistemic perspective in which gendered norms around social reproduction are considered central for understanding economics, feminist economists have advanced the field’s understanding of a variety of topics, including sex discrimination in labor markets. In neoclassical economic theory, discrimination exists when differences in remuneration between sexes cannot be captured by variables like education or job experience; thus, discrimination is analytically treated as a “residual, stemming from the tastes of employers,” and as a “puzzle,” because it is seen as an inefficiency (Elson, Reference Elson1999: 611) that market forces tend to eliminate over time (Becker, Reference Becker1957). In contrast, from a feminist economic starting point, we might theorize labor markets—and the sex discrimination observed in them—not merely as expressions of individual preference or belief but as reflecting gendered social institutions in which economics is embedded, including the gendered expectations around caring labor. Following from this premise, some feminist economists suggest that “discrimination against women in the labor market may persist even though it is not economically efficient, in the sense of maximizing profits and output, because it is an effective way of empowering men socially and politically” (Elson, Reference Elson1999: 619–20) and, indeed, economically. Feminist economists extend critiques and contributions beyond those I cite here, including challenging androcentric bias in econometrics, measuring unpaid work as well as paid work in informal economies, and advancing the understanding of occupational segregation. While some feminist economists depart from neoclassical theory altogether, others work within the neoclassical tradition, publishing research that incorporates feminist insights to innovate and advance neoclassical theory and methodology (Barker, Reference Barker, Peterson and Lewis1999). What I wish to emphasize is the epistemic stance found in several of these streams of research, in which feminist scholars have interrogated and critiqued how social categories like gender, race, and class influence economic theory and research, rather than assuming that they play no role at all. Here, I highlight one technique they have used to study labor markets: foregrounding the social position of the knower. Deploying methodologies that may include but also go beyond the neoclassical, including qualitative studies in the traditions of organizational ethnography and economic sociology, many feminist economists seek to engage directly with the experiences of those influenced by labor markets, with particular attention paid to those occupying marginalized social positions. As a result, they are able to offer novel analytic insights into the gendered nature of labor markets. Such scholars hold that instead of seeing labor as exogenous, we should consider how labor markets impact people in ways that are relational, gendered, and fundamentally social (Ramamurthy, Reference Ramamurthy2003) and how gender norms around caring labor can influence formal labor markets (Ferguson & Gupta, Reference Ferguson and Gupta2002). By recasting labor as a site of study marked by social gender norms and power hierarchy, not natural laws, feminist economic epistemology helps us understand how social position matters for producing knowledge about business. In the section that follows, I illustrate how.

Capitalism, and especially the capitalist economy, may be hegemonic, but it is not monolithic and incontestable. In order to develop new concepts, new understandings of resistance to social injustices we must move outside the frame of the master’s house of capitalism and capitalist ethics especially in higher education. It is time to recognise that care is a fundamental value within education and that students themselves prioritise care and public service values; they see their education as helping them to realise these goals. It is time for higher education to move out of the ‘master’s house’ of neoliberal capitalism, and all that it entails, when education is built on such a narrow instrumentalist view of society.

Taking affective equality seriously is not only about how staff and student carers are facilitated and encouraged in higher education, but also about how curricula in higher education are made care- and social justice-focused, in both human and environmental terms. It is time for the ethics of care, equality and social justice to replace the ethics of capitalism in the academy. As Tronto (2017: 28) has observed, people are self-preoccupied, and they act as self-interested rational economic actors (homo economicus), but they do not always act from this motivation; people are also caring, homines curans (caring people). The will to care and show concern for others is as real a psycho-socio-political phenomenon as competitive self-interest. However, care for others needs to be nurtured through education and social practice if it is to survive as a cultural phenomenon.

By approaching the toxicity created by the greedy, neoliberal university amidst the pandemic (Ashcraft, 2017; Smyth, 2017) as a relational issue, we have engaged in shedding light on the entanglements that bind us together with all of our differences and all the filth we usually keep in the shadows (Pagan, 2020). Inspired by feminist critical management scholars' intellectual activism to nurture resistance by writing differently (Ahonen et al., 2020; Contu, 2020; Gilmore et al., 2019) about these toxicities and associated neoliberal politics, we developed an ethic of care sensitive to all kinds of actors and sorts of needs. This includes caring for the flipsides and shameful affects, rendering them non-individual and thus less frightening or risky to share, thereby also turning those precarious truths into potentially liveable, laughable and perhaps somehow also loveable features inherent to academic life these days.

In discussing this further, the vignettes indeed elucidate how toxicity charges us with ugly feelings such as worthlessness, guilt and shame. While guilt relates to our actions, or lack thereof when experiencing toxic passivity, shame relates to us as people; makes us doubt our worth (Sand, 2021). As such, we can sense and embody shame without being able to formulate from where precisely it comes (ibid.). We may simply experience a “foggy sensation of being ‘off’ or out of place, combined with an anxiety of being exposed” (our translation; Sand, 2021, p. 15). Shame can be paralyzing and pacify us. Moreover, the sense of shame easily produces shame about the shame, because we associate shame with weakness, and we are afraid that weakness will lead to our exclusion by others.