← LSE: Public lectures and events
LSE: Public lectures and events
Mutually assured survival: feminist solidarities amidst planetary threats
01:21:53
Loading summary
Transcript113 lines
- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
- [00:16]
B
Good evening, everyone and a very warm welcome to both our in person and our online audience. I am Sharmila Parmanand, Assistant professor in Gender, Development and Globalization at the Department of Gender Studies here at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It is my pleasure to chair tonight's event, Mutually Assured Feminist Solidarities Amidst Planetary Threats. Generously hosted by the Ralph Miliband Program here at lse, this conversation is happening amidst existential planetary threats. From environmental emergencies and public health crises to grotesque inequalities and wars. This conversation is part of a series of interventions attached to an upcoming special issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics, co edited by Dr. Gloria Novovich and Professor Shirin Rai. So, before we begin, just a few housekeeping notes. Please put your mobile phones on silent to avoid disrupting the discussion. Please note that this event is being recorded and we hope to make a podcast of it available online.
- [01:35]
A
So let's go.
- [01:38]
B
We have three remarkable feminist scholars and thinkers with us tonight, and we're very lucky to have them here. The first, Dr. Lynn Osome is an Associate professor and Director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research at Makerere University and current President of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. Her work is in the fields of feminist political economy and feminist political theory, with research interests in gendered labor, land and agrarian questions, the Modern State, and the political economy of gendered Violence. Her books include Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya's Transitions to Democracy, States of Violence, and a forthcoming one entitled Democracy, Colonial Modernity, and the Gendered Subject of Violence. Professor Shirin Rai is a Distinguished Research professor of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences and author of Gender and the Political Economy of Development and Depletion, the Human costs of caring. Dr. Gloria Novovich is Lecturer in Public Policy in the School for Government at King's College, London. She holds a dual PhD in Political Science and International Development from the University of Guelph, Canada. Working at the intersections of feminist political economy, political ecology, and public policy, she analyzes global governance frameworks, particularly the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Transnational Coalitions for Planetary Justice. So the structure for tonight's event is as Dr. Novovic will begin by providing us with a background of this conversation and outline the agenda of the International FEMIST Journal of Politics special issue. She will then facilitate a discussion with Professor Rai and Dr. Osome. The transcript of this conversation will be published in the special issue. This dialogue will last around 30 to 40 minutes, followed by approximately 20 to 30 minutes of audience Q and A. So we will be taking questions from both the audience here in the hall and those joining us online. So over to you, Gloria.
- [04:05]
C
Thank you Sharmila, and thank you for all of the support, emotional, intellectual, practical in getting us all here. I also want to echo the sincere thanks to the Ralph Milband foundation and especially Professor Robin Archer and Melena Bastida Antich for doing what is extremely valuable at this time, which is pulling institutional resources to bring these types of discussions to together and holding space for both bigger, broader critical questions about where we are and what is to be done, but also to hold space to think about how we do it together and different ways in which that might be possible. A huge thanks is also to all of you really in the room. When Shirin and I first started talking even about the special issue and discussed discussions about feminist solidarity amidst the devastation of planetary crises, we always talked about how both important, critical, but also difficult it is to ensure these are collective discussions and invitations to engage. And so you all deciding to spend time with us on a Wednesday night, which I was saying earlier, is kind of a Friday night for Las Vegas performance in the London area, as far as events and lectures go, really does mean a lot. And it is about rethinking how we relate to one another and how we engage one another that we hope to frame this gathering. And so when we started talking about the special issue, the discussion was around creating what we call called an honest but also self critical and action oriented discussion about what is in fact possible in a world where a lot of our strategies and agendas seem already foreclosed. And it is about coming together and giving meaning to the world in which a lot of concepts are very rapidly losing meaning. So international law, justice, peace, ceasefire are becoming these abstract concepts that really risk holding so little. And so these types of discussions are our very small and modest attempts to hold ourselves and each other accountable, to ensuring that we give meaning and we insist on that meaning as we talk about our agendas and the feminist struggles in which they are engaged. And so ours is an invitation to defy devastation, to talk about world making feminist agendas while avoiding the past traps of identitarian exclusions, of liberal co optations of fear based betrayal, and as we are watching a live stream, genocide in Palestine, the abuse of human rights on virtually every continent on the planet. Planet. As we think about how hollow the pillars of our societal foundations really are, then the questions of coming together and thinking about solidarity and what that really means become ever more important and ever more daunting, which is why I kind of reiterate, thanks for all of you for joining us here in an attempt to make sure this discussion is as inclusive as possible. You all have received, I think, small pieces of paper so that even if you don't think of questions to throw away or interventions, you can leave a thought, a quote, albeit short, given how much space you have rent, anything that kind of comes to mind. And then as we're pulling together our thoughts from this discussion into a conversation piece that will be a part of the special issue, we will do our best to include those thoughts. So you'll have a chance to kind of leave those in the room tonight. And I would very warmly invite you to do so, whether anonymously or if you want to leave your name or any other information that we could work from. I'm infinitely grateful to two feminist scholars that I'm continuously inspired by and that really, really shape the way in which we think in the more radical, critical ways that allow us to ask the questions that we're often too afraid to ask. So I prepared what I thought was a set of those questions and expected pushback. To my great shock, received none. And Shirin yesterday said, these are big questions and it's about time we start answering them. So I don't think anyone in this room is arrogant to claim that we will fully answer them, but we thought it would be wise, urgent and important to invite ourselves and yourselves to start answering them. And so with that in mind, I might start with our first question and then see where we end up from there. So we've, both of you have really indebted feminist scholarship with your work and critical engagement around what is social reproduction. So the retrieving of conditions for creating, maintaining life, in the case of Shirin Rai, by inviting us to think about depletion under capitalism, and in the case of Lynn Somed, the foreclos of the modern state and the post colonial order, how do you conceptualize, for those of you who are still somewhere in the middle of reading your books and articles, how do you conceptualize social reproduction and its crises?
- [10:40]
D
Thank you. Thank you, Gloria, and thank you for this invitation. So, I mean, my reflections are going to be from the vantage point of the global south of the third world, which is where I am situated and which is the vantage Point from which I can speak about because of very particular histories of integration into the global political economy. So I think of. I'd like to use the term social reproduction, the idea of social reproduction, which is usually used interchangeably with care work. But I think social reproduction, I think of it more conceptually as a set of structural relationships which render care visible. Right. How do we see care? We cannot see care without this kind of structural relationships. Right. And it renders care visible in social, political, and economic institutions as labor. Right. So care itself is very historical. It's always been with us. But how then are we at the point where we are thinking of it as labor? And I don't think you can think of care as labor without thinking of it structurally through social reproduction. Conceptually, that's one in terms of the crisis which we've been talking about. Thankfully for Covid, it became something that is kind of accepted now in policy, in the debates, although it is a much, much older debate. But the crisis is generated fundamentally when the social capacities that are necessary to provide care are depleted, to use Shirin's words, or are unsupported by the state, which is the condition in most of the third World in the global South. The state, historically, its capacity to support care and social reproduction has been very minimal under neoliberal governance. Of course, that capacity, you know what? Many of the goods and services that we need for social reproduction are commoditized, are priced out of reach of the majority, and therefore they are deepening gender inequalities, racial inequalities, class based inequalities, class based inequalities. Right. So we can think of inequality itself. Or let me put it differently. This question of social reproduction offers us a very central lens of understanding. Why are we so attracted? Why are we more drawn? Why are there more populations that are more drawn to their ethnic communities, to their racial communities, to their gender communities? There's a struggle in there. And what we are arguing as feminist economists or feminist political economists, is that you have to look at the basis of social reproduction, which has fundamentally been a social and political question, not so much an economic question as it is being elevated when the World bank and the UN organizations take it as a policy question. And I'm not saying they shouldn't. They have. By all means they should. But it has in many ways silenced the political and the social dimension of social reproduction. And so my own thinking has been around trying to pull back that discussion. Understand it structurally as this structure that renders care visible, but return it into the domain of social and political analysis proper.
- [15:05]
A
Thank you. This is very nice to build up from there. So in terms of how I've thought of social reproduction, it's maybe three things. One is of course, classic Marxist feminist position, which is it's a reproduction of labor, right, under capitalism. The second, I'll just be brief, it is the maintenance of that, where care becomes. So it's biological reproduction of labor. Then you have to care for that labor. So it's about maintenance of life. And the third, which I think we talk a little bit less about, which I would like, and I think Lyn.
- [15:50]
D
Was.
- [15:52]
A
Referring to that is the reproduction of the justification of the separation of private and the public. So the ideological reproduction, which justifies, legitimizes very often, but also challenges the way in which social reproduction is done. Who does it, how is it distributed, and why certain elements of care are seen to be more feminized than others. Right. So I think in my own work, so that's the first element. And the second element, which again Lynn and Gloria have talked about, is I became very interested in thinking about not just what social reproduction is and who does it, which is very important for a feminist economists, but also what are the costs of social reproduction.
- [16:59]
D
Right?
- [17:00]
A
So I think you can say that probably I got interested in that when I became a mother. And I really had to work hard to look after my babies, but also to see how society organizes. So I think Emma Dowling has made a distinction between valorization and valuation. Right? We valorize. And Lyn mentioned Covid. Can we forget it? And my colleague and friend Alessandra Mazadri has written fantastic three articles, I think, on Covid and social reproduction. What we found was, I was convinced. I know that many of my colleagues were convinced as feminists, this is our moment, when the importance of care in our society is so visible that no one can deny it.
- [18:01]
D
Right?
- [18:02]
A
Do you remember standing outside clapping for cares right? Now that is valorization, right? Just as motherhood is valorization. We get told that as a mother, you are reproducing the nation very often. The work of Nira Yuval Davis, for example. But also we are not producing anything really. So we are outside what is in economists terms is called the production boundary. That work is not visible, as Lyn was saying, that work needs to be dragged in. And that's a political act. That's not. It doesn't just happen, just like social reproduction doesn't just happen, right? It is organized, it is justified, it is done, and it has costs. And the cost that I thought about, together with my very dear friend Katherine Hoskins and Dania Thomas, is what we call depletion. So when you're outputting more than you are able to be supported in, so when your resources, the outflows of your resources are more than inflows of resources like health, access to health, to education, to shelter, obviously this is class sensitive, right? But it's also, and again, I think Lynn, myself, Alexandra, who's here somewhere in the. I can't see her. There you are. We are all part of now a collective trying to open up this debate to say social reproduction is done differently in different parts of the world. And therefore we need to understand that theorizing social reproduction also needs to be done differently. As Sue Ferguson has said, it's not just what you do, but where you do it that is important. And so, as we will see, there are issues of care, there are issues of land, there are issues of labor, which we'll talk about, but they are done differently and that has consequences for them.
- [20:29]
C
Thank you. And talking about social reproduction and the idea of defying devastation, I'll take us sort of further into the examination of what it is exactly that we're defying just given often how. Just given how often we seem to go around the elephant that is global colonial capitalism. And so if we understand the crisis of social reproduction as systemic and the system as that of global capitalism, then the feminist agenda that seems to be emerging from that critique is fundamentally anti capitalist. And so then hearing from both of you as feminist political economists, how do you situate your own work on one side in this feminist discussion that isn't always necessarily or clearly anti capitalist on one side, and then on the other, the discussions around surviving capitalism on a burning planet that aren't necessarily feminist.
- [21:42]
D
This is an important question because I think it's a question that a lot of mainstream thinking around care and around social reproduction have conveniently evaded. Right? And what is being evaded is that is the historical conditions that set the parameters for how social reproduction proceeds in different parts of the world. Right? In different. In the third world, it's a different way. The capacity of the state has been much, much more diminished. And that's also historical. Right. That capacity of the state is a historical question. So what is evaded is both the historical and the contemporary conditions under which we are articulating the feminist agenda. These feminist questions and those conditions locate these questions fundamentally in an anti capitalist and anti imperialist tradition. There's no possibility to me outside of that, why do I say this one. You can consider the history, at least in the third world, of uneven development or an equal development, where there were many, many structural barriers that were imposed on countries of the periphery, right. That led to their very unequal integration into the global capitalist political economy. The thing we have to consider both historically at least, we can see it very clearly in the colonial state, but we can also see it now is the way in which gender ideology is being deployed in response to underdevelopment. It's there everywhere in the development discourse that we know, at least in the mainstream discourse. We see it nowadays, the terms circulating very much around the backlash, which is very particular ways in which the state is responding to gendered groups and labor and that kind of thing. And this kind of backlash, this kind of gendered response, sustains structural violence, right? What we see as violence is actually in very many layers. What Iraq and what we are responding to is actually conceals the sources of that violence against gendered political minorities. I'm talking very carefully about political minorities, even though we are on the majority. This question of underdevelopment also is being spoken about in ecological terms, right? We have environmentally what some of the scholarship is thinking of us environmentally unequal exchange, which is that the environment itself is now enmeshed in an equal exchange between the north and the South. So it is not just labor, it is not just goods, it is the environment itself. It's a. A major frontier. And a central problem here, of course, is the loss by poor people of control over their lives, over their labor, over their environment and over land. And in fact, in the earlier question, and I think it might come up later, my own thinking around thinking social reproduction and care in the Global south has been to really try to reassert the centrality of land and the peasantry, the link between land and the survival of the majority of people for whom the state especially what we are thinking of now as the surplus populations, there's a massive amount of people in the global south that are simply no longer relevant to capital, but still remain politically important to the state. And this is a good thing, and I'll talk a bit about it later. So these arguments, all of these arguments, whether you're thinking of an equal exchange environment, the environment and what they are necessarily framed around an anti imperialist politics, partly because these ecological crises are deepening capitalism's reproductive crisis. When we think about the reproductive crisis or the ecological crisis, we have to think about them together and their accompanying demands. Then, on agrarian reforms, we see in it's not Just jobs people are asking for. I once spoke in South Africa around land and you know what? Logically we should say in a country in a post apartheid state where nearly 80% of the land is not with the majority black population, that land redistribution should be a major political agenda. And somebody in the audience said to me that yes, of course the government put this out and only 1% of the black population have said that they would basically want land according to these surveys, right? But I say to them that you cannot think of land in a context where people do not have jobs, where the health care system is completely gutted, where the opportunities for education through to university are very, very minimal. Land has to be accompanied by something else. You know, the demand for land is always a demand for something much more. It's not just land, because we are also in a place where we can't think of land only in this productivist sense as the basis of industrialization, when our economies are actively de. Industrializing, right? So it becomes the last bastion of our struggle. It becomes something that we can say, we still have that. So all of these arguments, when we are thinking about this, we are thinking in an anti imperialist frame. And very importantly also is the political question that all of these pose to the state, which is the fulcrum around which the reorganization of the peripheries has proceeded historically. We cannot put the state aside. I don't wish it away. We have to face it, right? Because I think all of these assaults on the ecology, on land, on labor, they do not diminish the role of the state. They actually reassert it in these present times. And we have to deal fairly with the state, even as we think of a different form of the state. And this is, I think, primarily because the national question regains relevance. Right again, on land, and I'm using this as an example. But even ecology, this ecological question, the question of sovereignty, is fundamental to how we are fighting. It is sovereignty over our economies, over our currencies, over resources and this kind of thing. So we have to think about this national question. In short, this unequal integration of countries of the global south and the reproductive crisis it generates is fundamentally a problem of empire. When we take history seriously and these structures and what we are seeing, and we have to see those links, we don't have a. That's the question of solidarity. There's no way that we can evade these questions. And I don't think feminist critique and analysis can evade these questions.
- [31:10]
A
As always, you're giving me so many different ideas to Bounce off. Lyn, I wanted to start by. You mentioned backlash. And that's where I will start. The fragility of our quote unquote progress has been very evident in these last few years. This morning, as I was going to the Finchley Road tube station, which is the closest to my house, I saw a graffiti. And it was quite small, so I couldn't read it first. I just saw the word socialism and I thought, oh, that's nice. And it was in pink, so I thought even nicer. And I looked closely and I was appalled. What the graffiti said was true evil always self identifies as socialism. That's a long graffiti, so hopefully nobody will read it. But the point was, this is the first time I have seen a explicitly anti socialist graffiti in this way in London. Right? I mean, I wasn't here. I've just arrived in London actually. So you might say, well, we have seen it. If you have, please raise your hand. But I think it's part of that. What we saw about the flags, what we know about the rise of racism, what we know about attacking sort of, you know, all the gender progress that we have made, it's a real thing. And it really materialized for me that actually we are living it. And I think that does relate to Lynn's point about it's not just anti capitalist, but it is anti colonial. It has to be. And let's try and connect that back with not land in this case, but with migration. So let me give you two instances of migration and how it connects with social reproduction and how then it connects with Gloria's question. The first is when Covid hit and you all saw those images of, I don't know, it was all over BBC. Indian workers in Delhi being thrown out of their jobs and being told go home. No state provisions or back to the state. No support for their transportation, lot of aggression against them or where were they going? They were going back to their villages. They walked hundreds of miles. In some cases, they were going back to their villages, to their home. And who keeps the home fires burning? It is the woman and the kids and the grandparents who this man is supposed to be supporting, sending money back. But actually in this context of crisis, it was both a crisis, a pandemic, a health crisis, therefore it was a huge economic crisis. And second, thirdly, it was a crisis of social reproduction. Because when they get there, what happens? Right, so that's one. The second, I think is we all, well, we are quite familiar with, which is the long care chain. Countries in the global north are getting old Countries in the Global south are young. And what we are generating now are not only old histories of nannies from the natives, but long histories of migration to look after those people who have, for different familial reasons, not the labor to do so. Now those two for me are connected because the Global north, global south we keep talking about, but there are many Global Souths in the Global north and Global Norths in the Global south because of wealth. And so we definitely need the anti capitalist as, even though we try and understand the long histories of colonialism as present in our everyday. And that brings me to, I think what I'll say is my final point on how do we understand the situation, which is another sort of. I'm just writing something with my wonderful colleague Juanita Elias on crisis. And the point for me is that crisis is not an event. Crisis is part of our everyday, you know, when we cannot make ends meet, when economic pressures intensify, depletion, when people are migrating under conditions of violence. Those are everyday experiences. So you cannot disassociate crises of the everyday from crises of capitalism. And unless, and again, going back to politicizing this issue, unless we want to treat it as an event. Look at 2008. Things happened then, we had austerity and now we are fine. And now, you know, the economy is doddering along, but maybe it'll recover in the uk, but look at China and look at India and they are just doing fine, thank you very much.
- [37:12]
D
Right.
- [37:14]
A
Crisis politically in Gaza. I just don't even understand. I cannot visualize how social reproduction is happening in Gaza just now. And yet the steadfastness of everyday life is making people return to Gaza even as the ceasefire was declared. So for me, the question about anti capitalism is also connected with reversing depletion, reversing depletion not individually, by buying in labor of others and creating care gaps for them, but collectively and holding the state to account, as you were saying, to provide that social infrastructure for care. So anti capitalism, in whatever form, it's not going to be overturned is. I think that's my focus. Because if we don't, then we have authoritarianism, then we have racism. What we are experiencing now is a failure of globalization of a particular kind of. Is state sovereignty the answer to that? I'm not sure.
- [38:42]
D
Right.
- [38:43]
A
But definitely state accountability has to be there. Thank you.
- [38:49]
D
Yeah, thank you.
- [38:51]
C
And we've had sort of questions and a bit of discussions in terms of what it means to think about these planetary crises. And so all of you have mentioned the environmental breakdown and then the breakdown of relations between the state and the peoples. The breakdown of relationships within our social structures and ways in which that paradoxically leads us back to solidarity because it exposes the unifying apparatus behind it. And so, in keeping in this promise or premise of this event of thinking beyond those foreclosures, what then can we say about feminist possibilities? How do we deal with this multiplicity and complexity of our crisis in ways that lead towards action and not devastation? And how do we do that in a way that's sustainable, that's kind of this anti fragile strategy, but in a world where we're told that we need quick, easy, simple solutions if we want the majority of us to be involved. So how do we move forward? I guess, despite everything?
- [40:20]
D
Yeah, I mean, there's no. It's not an easy question. I don't think there's a direct way of. I also don't like talking about fraternity. I think we are all feeling our way through. But first is to say that we can't save a planet about which we are not actively conscious. We have to be very intensely conscious of the planet. I was saying to Gloria that I raised a dog who was very dear to me, who I lost last year. But he. I think animals in general caring for someone else, care makes us intensely aware of something other than ourselves. You know, animals. Being with this little guy gave me an intense awareness of a non human world. Right. Of care that extends beyond us as human beings. So if we can, at least at a very basic level, accept the idea that we can't save a planet of which we are not actively conscious, the next question becomes what is the source of that consciousness? Right? Where does it come from? Or what are the sources of that consciousness? And this is a historical question. This is not a question that can be answered. Generally there is no consciousness that will unite us all as a single consciousness. So if it is historical, we understand that there will be multiple elements of it. You know, for instance, the reassertion again of a peasant question in agrarian context flows from our analysis in those contexts of the continued relevance for land of land and nature as a basis of social reproduction. That analysis does not necessarily stand in advanced capitalist countries that have had a modicum of a responsive social state. So the sources of our consciousness are different based on these historical conditions. The other point relating to the question of planetary consciousness, I think is that, and I keep saying this, I'm a student of politics, but I think that this political question has to be seen again and again. I Think it is a fundamentally, you know, the link between the survival of the planet and our own survival is political in a very simple, basic sense. And because, you know, social reproduction itself, as we know it takes place whether people are employed or not. It just takes place. It has to take place. Care has to happen, right? This survival to let live, where the state kind of comes in. We saw it during COVID Even the most neoliberal of states did something because they need to manufacture this legitimacy to continue to govern. There's no state that can possibly govern when you have millions of your people dying of starvation. It becomes one step away from being divorced. So just as critical. So there is that because of that dimension that people have to be kept alive. But I think it gives us a political window, an opening which goes back to the point I made earlier, that it's not just an economic question, right? This consciousness of ours is moved into the realm of social and political spheres that govern livelihoods and struggles of working people everywhere. And I think that this is one of the things that heterodox economics and feminist political economy has been able to do very well. Because we are necessarily speaking from the margins of history. We have to think about the margins. You know, whatever margin. I think even you have to think about it. You know what Nancy Fraser talks of this non economic background conditions, but in the margins, especially in relation to this colonial question that you're thinking about, is the realm where all manner of difference has been pushed to and is being reproduced. When you are talking about how do we reproduce the social conditions for reproduction, difference has been pushed to those realms and is being actively reproduced in those realms. It is from the margins where we foremost go to identify with our race, with our ethnic community, with our gender communities, with our class. It is at those margins. And it is not irrational. It is not irrational. The kind of right wing rhetoric that we are seeing now has something very rational to it when you think about what is happening with the state. And part of it I think is a manifestation of the abandonment of the state, right? So to identify with my ethnic community is to identify with, to say at least I'm guaranteed some kind of safety in a state like mine where you know, where your person enters the government and you're assured of some jobs. To identify with your ethnic community is very rationally the possibility of mobility in some kind of way. So this is happening. It is a recognition, a profound recognition of not just a failure, but of the abandonment of the state. And so to access the group is to access some kind of recognition and some kind of access to resources. But this is also the domain of decolonization. We're in that period where we are all talking about decolonization. None of us is sure what exactly it is, but we have a sense that we have to deal with these questions of difference if we are to think about solidarity. I don't think we can wish difference away. And I think that difference on its own is very benign. But if you put it firmly in the structural relations of the kind of economic abandonment and the abandonment of the state, then it becomes something that we have to deal with completely. We have to overcome ourselves in a certain way. And so this decolonial question rises, comes up the question of democracy itself, and democratization becomes how does it manage these differences? We can't have any doubt around the consensus that exists between the ruling classes. You know, you have to understand.
- [48:45]
A
That.
- [48:46]
D
These fragmentation that we are seeing that is being pushed into the margins and in the peripheries is a fundamental condition for the survival of the ruling consensus. And so we have to deal with it in this way.
- [49:04]
A
I'll be brief. I think the first thing I want to say is that one thing that feminist political economists have done really strongly, and you can see that in our conversation today is challenging a siloed approach to change, right? So we change here, the land, and then we change their sort of, you know, education, and then we change their astrophysics, and then we kind of just keep going in our own little parallel worlds which never coincide. And what we are trying to say to you is think about maternal health, think about droughts, think about extremely high temperatures, think about land and labor, and you have a cocktail of devastation that you cannot. You cannot resolve by just taking one out of those and focusing on that. So that's what I also meant about crisis, right? Crisis is everyday endemic. The second thing I think I want to say here very briefly is that scale matters, right? Again, something that we are trying to do, which is to connect the micro with the meso, the state and the macro. So think about local village councils insisting upon provision of clean water and mobile health vans coming to the villages, holding the state accountable for not addressing the deep social inequalities that leave some communities on the margin and some not, whether it's on the basis of caste or class or religion. Just now in India, big, big factor, how the vectors of class and caste are actually intensifying depletion and intensifying challenges to us holding the state accountable there and then at the international level. I mean, we've seen for a long time now, the IFIs are just not international. Financial institutions seem to have just withered away. Really. I mean, how in the 90s, how important was the WTO as, you know, as organization that actually put fear into even the richest of countries, but definitely the poorest countries. So you can't think about today's connected world resolving issues. And in fact, I remember when we started teaching and learning about globalization in the 90s, the first example that was given was that of the environment, environmental crisis and the ozone layer hole cannot be resolved because, look, it's above Canada, but all the nasty people who are creating that are in the global south burning their fires and or in industrial North. So in a way, I think the question of scale then becomes really important for our analysis, but also in the context of social reproduction and our understanding of alternatives that we can pose. I think I'll stop.
- [52:27]
D
Okay.
- [52:27]
C
All right, so the ozone layer is a good example because it's the one example we have of the international community.
- [52:36]
D
Actually working together to repair it.
- [52:39]
C
So maybe it's a good moment, too.
- [52:41]
B
We have very few of those. Thank you very much to the three of our speakers. And now we open the floor for questions from our audience. We are taking questions, so please remember we are taking questions from people in the hall and also online. Maybe we can take two questions at a time. Are you okay with that? All right. And then when you ask a question, we need to make sure you have access to the mic so everyone can hear it. And we are also asking you to please introduce yourself very briefly and also try to keep the question as brief as possible so we can get as many questions from the crowd. All right, can we please.
- [53:26]
C
From the back?
- [53:27]
B
Yes. Thank you.
- [53:28]
D
Hi. I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like why.
- [53:42]
A
Do people believe in conspiracy theories?
- [53:44]
D
Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [53:55]
A
Hi, I'm Lydia. I'm a master's student in sociology. I wondered if you could say something about the role of digital technologies in the commodification of care work, particularly with the gig economy and digital platforms, particularly given how the gendered and racialized dimension to the labor involved in the production of technology often goes overlooked and neglected. And also with talking about planetary threats, the environmental impacts of the development of technology, particularly AI, I think is Crucial to consider. Thank you.
- [54:32]
B
Thank you. We had a question here in front, actually.
- [54:36]
D
Hello, my name's Ian and I work in people's houses.
- [54:41]
A
Lately I've been working for some remarkable, very elderly French nuns.
- [54:47]
D
So question is, can we.
- [54:50]
A
Would it be useful to ask the communities of particularly nuns throughout the world what they think about some of these questions.
- [55:01]
D
And also, sorry about this, but.
- [55:06]
A
Would it be possible to develop some sort of hypothecated economic system so that we can, for instance, provide for care workers?
- [55:18]
D
So hypothecated housing for care workers. Okay, would you like to answer this?
- [55:26]
C
Should we take another or should we take another issue?
- [55:29]
B
I think we might have space for one more question, actually. So we have a hand up over there as well.
- [55:37]
A
Hi, my name is Emma.
- [55:38]
C
I'm an undergrad in politics and philosophy.
- [55:41]
D
I had a question kind of regarding the Gen Z divide because it's obviously the Gen Z gender divide, kind of.
- [55:50]
C
Seeing it's our generation and we're also going to be the ones probably dealing the most with many of the planetary.
- [55:56]
D
Threats we've discussed today. I was just kind of wondering what.
- [55:59]
C
Your insights are in terms of like.
- [56:01]
D
How we could overbridge this divide that's creating now between young men and women.
- [56:06]
C
To deal with these planetary threats together.
- [56:09]
D
And over bridge them together.
- [56:11]
B
Okay.
- [56:13]
D
Good morning.
- [56:16]
A
You're asking about digital issues to a person who's a Luddite. So I have no sense really of how to answer that. But it is extremely important in terms of labor issues that you raise, especially care issues. But I've done some work where we talked about, well, we first mapped the investment in AI and in digital care mechanisms as part of trying to understand how social reproduction is being done in the uk and what we discovered was that it's a extremely profitable industry to invest in just now. Secondly, that nobody's particularly asking those who are cared for through these mechanisms how they feel about it. Thirdly, those who are doing that labor with assistance of digital technology are not particularly happy to be shunted from one to another with 15 minute sort of, you know, slots. So for socially productive labor, I think digital technology, I could be really flippant here and say that's what they said about vacuum cleaners, right? That it will liberate women's time. But it was going to be women's time right now. If it is feminized labor that we are talking about, digital technology can help make it less or more intensive. But I'm not so sure about the redistributive aspect of digital technology. In terms of care work, which brings me. I mean, I think we should be asking, not just nuns, we should be asking different communities about how they have experienced care and what would they like. My understanding is that's why I said that individual strategies for filling up care gaps, which is to pay for somebody to come and clean your house, pay for somebody to come and look after your parents, pay for. It works for some, it will definitely not work for others. What alternatives might there be? There could be a collective approach to this. I believe there are sort of housing arrangements where people live by themselves till they can with support from others. That could be one. But where I feel your major point is, which I thought is fantastic, is nobody talks to people about how they feel about the care they are getting. So are you getting care? Fine, let's get on to the next job. So I think that's really, really important. The Gen Z and hypothecated. I wish I could just say yes. I mean, but where we are right now is that we. The history of austerity, at least in this country, has just left that whole sector reeling. I think after Covid in particular. But just generally since 2008, it's just been downwards. So I think you are absolutely right. We need that. Gen Z again. You're raising this wonderful. You know, these questions, which. I'm not Gen Z and neither are my children. I don't know how this works, but I've heard that there's a lot. Maybe Lyn Yu can say something about it. I don't know whether you can or not because I've heard that there's a huge amount of debate going on on South Africa on Gen Z issues, that people think that young people think that they are being made responsible for development of South Africa because they are young and you know, they are no longer tainted by the apartheid experience. I have no idea. But the fact remains that the Gen Z generation is confronted with the crises that we were talking about. Environmental crisis, crises of social reproduction, the economic crisis, and no collective strategy. So instead of having an intergenerational war, I'm trying to now work on intergenerational justice. So hopefully that'll teach me a little.
- [61:10]
D
Thank you. I'll just say a bit on this very briefly. You know, this Gen Z, this generation that we are dealing with is in a sense, it's confronted by the same crisis, but it's a generation that has to approach it from a very, very different place. This is a generation, many of whom are not thinking of family in any traditional way. And I'm not talking about even the heteronormative family. I'm just talking about the tradition, the possibility of a life with somebody and kids who you will see growing up because of this destruction that we are seeing and the violence that we are seeing en masse every day. Right. It's a generation that might have worked, but I'm probably going to be cut off from any possibility of a pension. It's a generation that is not going to be able to have to buy, leave alone, even mortgage, just the possibility of the good life in general, which is what I'm trying to. But yet they do not get to turn their backs or run away from this social reproductive crisis. They have to deal with it. They have to face it without being nihilist. They have to. And I don't know, actually, I think it's just. And it's not to be too openly cynical. I mean, I think that this is part of the continuity and the solidarities and the struggles that we might continue on the. Both the digital technologies and your question. I think we have to seriously ask. To me, care is always a critique. We have to approach it as critique. It's not a positive social reproduction, especially under capitalism, it is a critique. And so we have to. Even if we do solve the disintegration through digital technologies, there are all these developments happening and the possibility of provisions from the state. We remain with the suspicion that the exploitation continues. We might not see it directly and which direction it's going, but we remain with the profound suspicion, and we have to retain it, that it is because of that question you asked about the anti capitalist and anti imperial that its nature. Right. So there are spaces, but it should not placate us in terms of the struggle. There's a possibility of responding to these questions, but we have to retain our eyes on the historical structure that necessitates it in the first place that makes social reproduction such a crisis ridden process on a daily basis, as Shirin was saying.
- [64:38]
B
All right, thank you very much. So we can do another round of questions. I see. All right, let's do 1, 2, 3.
- [64:49]
A
Okay.
- [64:51]
C
Hello.
- [64:52]
D
Thank you so much. Franz Biep.
- [64:53]
A
I'm Okata.
- [64:54]
D
I've recently graduated with sociology.
- [64:57]
B
Sorry, we can't hear you. Could you speak up a bit more?
- [65:00]
A
Yeah, sorry. Hi, I'm Okata.
- [65:02]
D
Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming to speak.
- [65:06]
A
I was just a bit of a broader question. I was just wondering, you know, you've touched on anti imperialism and anti capitalism. I was wondering if you could potentially draw a bit more explicitly if you think it's relevant on the role of.
- [65:21]
D
Abolitionism potentially in mutually assured survival.
- [65:25]
A
Because as you were speaking about depletion.
- [65:29]
C
I was kind of thinking that in.
- [65:31]
A
A way activism can be seen as.
- [65:34]
D
A form of depletion in the way.
- [65:37]
A
We invest resources into our protests or even research and don't really get much back. And when we do get something back, it can often be state violence and.
- [65:49]
D
The force of the police.
- [65:51]
A
And so that was just an interesting point that came up when I, when you were talking about that. And so I was wondering whether you have anything to say about abolitionism and how we can kind of remain resilient in the face of state power as we try to move forward with our feminism.
- [66:07]
D
Yeah.
- [66:08]
A
Hi, my name is Yuan, I'm from.
- [66:10]
D
SOAS University, Department of Development Studies. My question is, once you mentioned about.
- [66:17]
A
You know, this kind of survival threatening is mutual.
- [66:19]
D
So I want to ask can feminist the ethnics of care and vulnerability and.
- [66:24]
A
This humanitarian embassy offers an alternative politics for our planetary survival? And if it can, so in the policy application, can feminist ethnics of care.
- [66:38]
D
Sorry, ethics of care resist the masculinized.
- [66:41]
A
Logics of control and the extractions that dominate the climate and security policy which is also the dominant forces in modern global capitalism?
- [66:51]
D
And if it is possible. So if equality, if ecological feminism can offer us a solution, Is planetary feminism.
- [67:00]
A
Possible without reproducing global hierarchies of race, class and colonial history?
- [67:06]
D
Do you want me to.
- [67:08]
B
Are you able to just repeat the last part of your question for us? Thank you very much.
- [67:14]
A
No problem.
- [67:15]
D
I mean if this kind of, I.
- [67:17]
A
Mean like ecological feminism, maybe the ecological feminism can offer us and perspective one way solving this kind of planetary solution. And once you mention the solution, can this solution actually be possibly without reproducing.
- [67:35]
D
Global hierarchies of Greece, class and colonial history? Or I mean like could it, you know, just preventing from repeating, like ignore.
- [67:46]
A
The rights from the marginalized people.
- [67:49]
C
Hi, thank you so much for your time. I'm Daniela, I'm a student of Development.
- [67:54]
B
Studies here at LSE and I was thinking that sometimes policies, care policies can advance in a way that seems contrasting with societies. Specifically referring to for example when parental leave is advancing but men don't use it. And specifically there a lot of feminist organizations, for example in my country in.
- [68:19]
D
Costa Rica have been focusing on using data evidence based approaches, but they don't.
- [68:29]
C
Seem to be working. Newer generations seem to be actually going.
- [68:34]
A
Back to more conservative approaches.
- [68:37]
D
Like for example, I Know, there's a.
- [68:39]
A
Paper of the trad wife trend right.
- [68:43]
B
Now, Kings.
- [68:46]
A
What to do, what to.
- [68:48]
D
Do if not evidence and data driven.
- [68:52]
A
Approach is sort of like an existential question.
- [68:56]
C
And just before we move on, we should highlight if anybody has online questions. We're not currently able to see them, but we are working on that.
- [69:05]
A
Okay. I think they were really excellent questions, all the three questions. Abolitionism. I'm so glad you raised that. Because if you're thinking about solidarity, we need to think about sustainable solidarities, Right. Otherwise, burnout is the inevitable depletion, burnout, whatever you want to call it. How do you do that? So one element, and I think my colleague Sumi Madhok and I wrote a paper ages ago when we said that actually we never think about risk to activism. And we should, as feminists, we should because that's also a form of building a scaffolding around solidarity that is as equitable as we can, as supportive as we can, but which also allows us to carry on working. Bernice Reagan, for example, said once, like, you know, making change happen is darn hard and you have to do it every day. Like sort of, I was saying with social reproduction, it never stops. So if you stop, then you have these backslidings very quickly. Which does connect with your point that evidence is not always persuasive. Of course it is at times. And that is my current thinking, which is in terms of not so much ethics of care, but just research ethics that I employ as a researcher. And we are all complicit in this university, in all universities in that regard, that we want grants, we want to build our evidence base, we want to persuade policymakers, we do research, we like doing it. And yet who's looking at that research? Where is that making a difference? Both at the individual level that you talk about, parental leave. Absolutely. But also at the policy level, if we think about feminist economics, Marilyn Waring's book, if Women Count, it came out in 1988. Since then, feminist economists have had huge research agenda, have developed hugely complex methodologies for doing that work, and yet here we are.
- [71:46]
D
Right?
- [71:47]
A
And in terms of what Udan, you said about, we do need to avoid liberal traps, but I think in a way, I don't want to call it simply liberal traps. I feel very much that we need to think about the way in which feminist struggles are about a bundle of things. And today I cannot, even as a good socialist, despite what that graffiti artist said today to me, I cannot say that tomorrow capitalism will go. So what do I do Instead. So you have to think about policy. You have to think about, as Lyn has been saying over and over again, the state. We have to engage with it and we have to fight against it. So I think we need to have a more complex for which then sustainable solidarities. What I've tried to call in my own work is reflexive solidarity, which is self critical, which is pluralistic. Not pluralizing or not pluralism, but pluralistic, which takes seriously our histories as well as our locations. Without that, I think changes is more difficult.
- [73:21]
D
This question of abolition, I think is one that I'm reflecting on. I don't use it very much as a concept, but when we think about the way in which difference is mobilized to organize labor in general and reproductive labor, and the fact that that process of organization is accompanied by violence, right? It's coercive. It's always coercive under the, you know, historically, if we think of slavery and colonialism, but even under the contemporary conditions of capitalism, it is coercive, it's violent. The massive disposition that it takes to move the person who was talking about digital technologies to move labor, reproductive labor, in certain ways, to certain realms is not a voluntary process, right? So in a way, at the core of our work, our thinking around possibilities, there needs to be. We need to retain the idea of justice, but also the idea of liberation. The articulation of liberation, again is a historical question, but liberation cannot be articulated on an individual basis. We were talking about this earlier and I was saying to Gloria, the thing we articulate as individuals is freedom, right? No interfering with my freedom to do this. Liberation is always connective. And so different collectives around the world have to think about this question and we have to retain it at the core of how we are thinking about reorganization of care and reorganization of social reproduction. If you're thinking about nones, we can think about them very collectively, right? Not in the way they. And so in a sense we are always, as I was saying earlier, if we approach social reproduction under capitalism as critique, then abolition itself becomes one of the possibilities that we see that we have to hold there. Especially when we put it next to this liberation question on the care policies. It's an important question, but sometimes I wonder whether the locations from which we are thinking policy make all the difference. I don't want to put it aside, but look at the revolution in Sudan 2019, which was really the economy of care at that was organized around women, tea selling women who are basically looking after the. You know, the sit ins were organized around them Right. They did not depart from what they were doing daily. They are there, they sell to anyway on a daily basis. But this became a fulcrum where people could go and it took on a different significance. This is labor, this is gendered labor. This is reproductive labor. This is labor that we see every day. But it was rendered visible suddenly. We were all writing about these sittings and these women selling tea, right? That somehow it takes these events, it's not a they are in crisis every day, but it takes this event to reify this thing, put it in a place of not just policy, but politics, Right? Because I think good policy has to retain a human subject at its core. Otherwise it is just policy that is not going to change anything. So we can think of those revolutions, we can think in the present day about Gaza. We don't know you are wondering, Shirin, how is it happening? But we know it's happening. We know it's happening. We know someone has had to reproduce the people in Palestine throughout this period. It's part of the resistance, right? We know it is happening. And so I think that what if the policy machinery, what if we approach policy in a different way from what I was saying in the earlier point I was making that we have to think of this question from its margins, from its political. The voices of its political minorities which exist everywhere, not just in the peripheries in the global, even in the global north, there are political minorities, those who are trying to speak out and who are being repressed everywhere in the universities, in the places of work, but also those who are rendered visible doing their everyday roles. But because of these events and crisis coming to our political consciousness and visibility and we can. I want a policy on care that speaks to these tea cellars who the state has harassed routinely, right through these public order laws. They've always been harassed in Sudan, but they were the fulcrum of the revolution. I want someone to give me policy from them and think of that. And I want someone to give me policy from the vantage point of those gendered laborers who have held Gaza together in this period.
- [80:12]
B
So thank you very much. We have a minute left, so I'm going to have to institute some discipline here, unfortunately. I do want to acknowledge that we got some questions online, but we are out of time. I'm really sorry, but maybe this is why we should have more events like this. Right. So we are at the end of this particular event and I'd really like to thank our wonderful speakers for such a rich and thought provoking, provoking discussion thank you to everyone in person and online for being a part of this conversation. This event is the first in the Autumn series of the Ralph Miliband Program, so we hope you'll join us again for upcoming events. So the next two are the first one Is the US Still a Democracy? Authoritarian Populism in the Trump era, on Monday, November 17th with Professor Brian Klatton and the second one, why I Am An Insights into British Anarchist Thought and Politics, on Tuesday, December 2 with Dr. Sophie Scott Brown. So thank you once again and I wish you all a good evening.
- [81:30]
A
Thank you for listening. You can subscribe to the LSE Events Podcast on your favorite podcast app and help other listeners discover us by leaving a review. Visit LSE AC UK Events to find out what's on next. We hope you join us at another LSE event soon.