Part 1: Between re-imagining and recognizing

Gisela Ruiseco: We are heirs of that moment in the history of modernity, where paid employment was crystallized as the “real work”. Other kinds of work, like care work, became invisibilized, and if paid, poorly paid. Work directly centered on the production for the well-being of the family and community (constituting “subsistence economies“) was devalued. Feminist scholars like S. Federici, have made a superb account of this process in our modern/colonial history, which in the long run made us lose sight that these types of devalued work constitute the bedrock of our economies.

Today many defend (as also taken up by the Degrowth movement) the importance of putting care and not capital accumulation again at the center of our economies. There is a call for a deep transformation in this sense. From our late modern point of view, this transformation may seem a strange idea, and perhaps very difficult to implement. But centering on care and guiding human efforts towards attaining sufficiency and wellbeing, has implicitly been the norm for humanity. In Global South societies, such arrangements may survive to some degree.

Question: Placing care at the center at the center of our economies would involve deep transformations, both of society and of our understandings, specifically here around “work”. Neha, how would you see this and how could we actually proceed with such a transformation?

Neha Saigal: What is work? It’s a deceptively simple question, and yet one that cuts to the very foundations of how we have organized society, our families, our sense of self, our relationships, our belonging.

For better or worse, work as most of us know it has been shaped by colonial capitalism, and more recently by what some are calling techno-feudalism: systems that define work by narrow parameters, oriented toward producing for an economy that grows for its own sake, with little regard for what that growth actually sustains or destroys.

My thinking on this has been sharpened recently by time spent in parts of Eastern India, where coal mining is the lifeblood of entire communities. Global and national energy transition discourses, however necessary, are threatening mine closures, or have already brought them about. In India, a significant share of the informal workforce comes from historically marginalised communities, compounding precarity with the disproportionate burden of hazardous and exploitative conditions in coal mining. And it is the people living inside that rupture who are sitting with the hardest questions: What will work mean for us? What will we do? Who will we be?

What has drawn my attention most, though, is the labour that was never counted to begin with. In these settings, the people most invisible in dominant narratives are women particularly from Dalit and Adivasi communities whose days are organised around caring for people, homes, farms, and land, much of which emerges as incidental yet essential labour within subsistence and ecologically dependent livelihoods.This work is foundational to the functioning of society and how consistently it is dismissed as something natural, something that certain bodies and simply do, rather than as work deserving recognition, value, or protection (see also a recent article in this magazine).

It is these conversations happening in places where the very meaning of mainstream work is being forced open that have fired my imagination.

We are living inside multiple, cascading crises each triggering the next, each falling hardest on those in the Global Majority. The genocide of Palestinians. Wars driven by the United States and Israel against countries like Iran and Venezuela. The relentless pursuit of minerals and oil by capital, replicating colonial agendas in ways the whole world can now watch in real time. These are not aberrations. They are the logic of the system, playing out across a global scale.

And yet, something else is also happening. A resistance is growing. Parts of the Global Majority are not only pushing back against the old order some are daring to imagine that this order was never inevitable, that sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination are not utopian fantasies but legitimate foundations for a different kind of world.

To understand why care sits at the heart of that reimagining, we need to understand what has been deliberately kept invisible.

The ecofeminist theorist Ariel Salleh developed the concept of meta-industrial labour to name exactly this: the caring, regenerative, productive, and reproductive work performed by women, peasants, and tribal peoples work that the dominant global economy has never adequately acknowledged, let alone valued. This labour does not merely supplement the capitalist economy. It subsidises and is the hidden ground on which everything else stands.

There is no denying that the system capitalist, feudalist, extractivist has been built on this unacknowledged foundation, and has benefited enormously from never having to pay its true cost.

So what would it mean to turn that on its head?

To centre care is not simply to add it to the ledger of recognised work. It is a far more radical move. It challenges capitalism, yes but also neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and the interlocking structures of gender and racial violence that keep certain bodies in service to others. Care, understood in this expansive sense, provides an essential social good. It underpins wellbeing and sustains standards of living by supplying the very conditions that allow people to participate in society at all.

The good news is that the communities I work with in the coal mining belt of Eastern India are asking these questions have never been without answers. There is no shortage of frameworks for organising societies, economies, and politics around care. Queer ecology troubles the boundaries between nature and culture, challenging the hierarchies that place certain bodies and certain lands in service to others. Ubuntu, I am because we are, grounds personhood in relationality rather than individual accumulation. Buen Vivir, rooted in Latin American indigenous thought, offers a vision of living well in balance with community and the natural world, rather than living more at its expense. Commoning points to the centuries-old practices through which communities have collectively governed land, water, and shared resources outside the logic of private ownership.

What these frameworks share is not just an intellectual position. They are, in large part, descriptions of how communities particularly marginalised communities in the Global South have actually been organising for a very long time. Long before scholars of degrowth and post-growth in the Global North began theorising alternatives to capitalism in academic language, these ways of living and relating were already present, already practised, already defended at great cost. The danger, then, is not that we lack ideas. It is that the ideas get laundered through institutions and disciplines until they are severed from the lived experiences and indigenous wisdom that gave them meaning in the first place.

So let us bring it back to the ground. Back to Eastern India. Back to the women. Dalit, Adivasi, marginalised who are standing at this frontier right now, not as subjects of study but as people who are already asking the hardest questions about what comes next.

For them, the transition away from extractive, fossil-fuel-driven economies is not an abstract policy debate. It is immediate, material, and existential. And what a genuine paradigm shift would require is not simply the substitution of one energy source for another, but a fundamental rethinking of what an economy is for. This means moving beyond conversations about care work important as those are, towards imagining full care economies and caring societies: structures that do not merely recognise invisible labour but restore dignity and sustenance to it.

It means dismantling the hierarchies that rank work by its proximity to capital, and replacing them with a systems understanding that what holds life together: caring for people, for land, for nature, for the wild is not peripheral to the economy but its most essential core. Everything is interconnected. To uplift care is to uplift the web.

In very practical terms, this looks like giving communities genuine choice over the kind of work they do and the kind of lives they build. It looks like respecting and resourcing the labour of women, queer persons, and elders. It looks like building economies of sustenance from the ground up not economies of endless growth that extract from the margins to accumulate at the centre.

(Will be continued...)

Egypt after Camp David

Modern Egypt, shaped by the 1952 revolution, was initially part of a broader national liberation project against British colonialism, with Palestine as a structural component of that project. The 1967 Six-Day War also known as Al-Naksa marked the decline of the Arab nationalist movement, a structural rupture in the legitimacy of liberation politics and the beginning of Arab regime dependency, while consolidating the strategic alliance between the United States and ‘Israel’, integrating the zionist entity as a militarily dominant regional power. The war resulted in the zionist entity occupying new significant territory, yet it gave birth to Palestinian resistance movements; the Fedayeen.

The decisive shift occurred with Camp David Accords, which led to the normalization of diplomatic relations between Egypt and the zionist entity in 1979. It redefined the function of the Egyptian state; Egypt was removed from the Arab resistance equation against Israeli occupation, and the regime was redirected from a national liberation project to a functional, dependent role within the Western imperial sphere. Following Camp David, the Egyptian army was strategically neutralized, and the logic of permanent “security coordination” with the zionist entity was entrenched, thereby making Egypt part of the blockade system imposed on Gaza. Thus, political confrontation with the occupation was replaced by the role of mediator, reinforcing occupation and siege rather than dismantling them.

Egypt’s transformation was not the result of weakness but of its reconstruction as a boundary state within the regional order: from a central state in a national liberation project to a functional entity guarding borders and controlling the southern front for the occupation.

Jordan as a Buffer State

The establishment of the Emirate of Transjordan occurred amid the collapse of the Ottoman state in 1920 and the redrawing of the Arab Levant under British and French colonial hegemony. At the Cairo Conference in 1921, Britain decided to establish a political entity in Transjordan under a British mandate. This would be governed indirectly, with sovereignty administered externally and authority exercised internally by local elites connected to the colonial centre.

Jordan did not emerge from a national liberation movement or an independent sovereignty project; it was formed from inception as a functional entity, a colonial decision intended to manage the political-geographical void surrounding Palestine. It served as a security buffer, providing strategic depth for the zionist entity and preventing the West Bank from becoming a military or popular resistance base. Simultaneously, it functioned as a separation zone, isolating Iraq and Syria on one side and Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula on the other, preventing the formation of a revolutionary sphere of unification. It also served as a strategic conduit for Western influence, securing transportation, energy lines, and military intervention routes.

After 1948, and especially after 1967, Jordan’s role included containing the Palestinian liberation movement within its borders to prevent the reopening of the liberation front from the East. Since Black September in 1970, the state’s function has been clear: prevent resistance within Jordan and turn Palestine into an external security file. The Wadi Araba normalization agreement cemented this role, making Jordan both a mediator and a buffer. Jordan functions as a control state, converting its security apparatus from national protection to tools for safeguarding the interests of the zionist occupation and the ruling bourgeoisie.

Gulf Protectorates

With the decline of the Ottoman state, Britain, through political and military agreements, imposed British hegemony over the region, a structure later inherited in part by the United States after World War II and reinforced through the regional role of the Zionist entity after its establishment. With the discovery of oil, these Gulf entities became a central node in the global system, forming rentier states with wealth concentrated in ruling families and comprador bourgeoisies tied to global markets.

Oil did not become a foundation for organized popular power, nor a tool for liberation; it was a mechanism integrating the Gulf more deeply into Western hegemony and maintaining their security dependencies to the West. This enabled the West, led by the Anglo-American alliance, to maintain lucrative arms sales to the oil-rich Gulf states, as well as political and military control over them. The zionist entity is viewed as a partner whose interests must be secured in this region.

After the Arab popular uprisings of 2011, the Gulf-Western alliance deepened its normalisation with the zionist entity, and the regimes redefined every resistance movement against it as a national security threat.

Saudi Arabia and Managed Chaos

The Saudi regime avoids direct confrontation or rupture of relations with the Israeli occupation or imperial powers. It treats the Palestinian cause as part of a broader negotiating policy tied to regional and international interests, not as a popular liberation cause. It balances regional interests while maintaining its position without direct confrontation with major powers. Simultaneously, Saudi Arabia has played a central role in “creative chaos” in the region, using political, media, and financial instruments to reshape balances in neighboring states such as Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, producing forms of externally manageable instability that serve a rentier regional system allied with the West, led by Washington, and with ‘Israel’ playing a central role.

Regionally, the Saudi regime has participated in containing any resistance axis, transforming the struggle from a liberation struggle against the Israeli occupation into intra-Arab disputes. Its official political discourse and media have redefined the enemy: instead of ‘Israel’ being the primary adversary, resistance movements are portrayed as “terrorist militias”. The regime thus acts not as a confrontational force but as a manager of chaos: exposing internal contradictions, redirecting the struggle, and demonizing every resistance movement, within a broader function of protecting a US-dominated regional order and Israeli security, while preventing any emancipatory dynamics that might threaten it.

Qatar as a Mediator under the US Umbrella

The Qatari regime provides humanitarian and political support, presenting itself as a provider of humanitarian assistance, while simultaneously mediating regional files. Its mediation operates strictly under American oversight and never exceeds the limits permitted by Washington. This occurs within a broader function: protecting ‘Israel’s’ security, the organic instrument of Western imperial interests. Any Qatari action, however humanitarian or political, is therefore governed by this function, managing the Palestinian struggle in a way that ensures “stability” in a structure reliant on US-Israeli military and political predominance.

UAE as a Model of Full Normalization

The UAE went far beyond limited diplomatic relations with the zionist entity, achieving full normalization through the Abraham Accords (2020), encompassing tourism, economic and technological cooperation, and opening joint channels for security and intelligence cooperation. In security terms, it partnered with the Israeli occupation forces in intelligence, military, and cyber surveillance, making it a direct ally in managing regional struggles, foremost among them Gaza. The UAE exemplifies how Arab regimes perform US-Israeli protective functions: managing balances, leveraging influence, and ensuring stability of the zionist entity at the expense of any Palestinian resistance project.

In conclusion, the idea of “purchasing security” that Gulf regimes believe they have secured is steadily unraveling. This assumption rests on a strategic illusion that reflects a shallow understanding of their position within the imperial order. Dependence on military agreements and normalization with the American-led imperial bloc has not produced genuine sovereign security; instead, it has deepened their structural incorporation into a broader system of external domination, where they function as dependent instruments within it.

The so-called imperialist, Zionist–American war against Iran has exposed the extent to which Arab states are already laid bare and fully embedded within the political, security, and strategic interests of Western imperial powers. These powers treat such states as subordinate functional structures and forward military platforms, deployed to safeguard the security of the Zionist entity and entrench American hegemony across the region. In this configuration, they are not independent actors but integral components of the Western imperial security system.

The Palestinian Authority as a Class-Control Apparatus

The Palestinian Authority emerged as a class intermediary with the Oslo capitulation Accords (1993), which did not constitute a peace project but a restructuring of Palestinian classes. Oslo dismantled the Palestinian national movement, turning the struggle into an “administrative dispute,” while creating a new class: a security-economic bureaucracy tied to donor-dependent governance and coordinated with the occupation, embedded in a rentier and aid-based economy, with interests aligned with the persistence of the occupation. The PLO leadership shifted from representing the people to managing “cantons,” producing class separation: leadership as a class, the population as controlled labor force.

Gaza: The Organic Threat to Dependent Arab Regimes

In this context, the practices of Arab regimes, as seen by the public are not matters of moral betrayal, political incapacity, or failure to fulfill a liberation role; rather, they represent strict adherence to the function for which these regimes were created. Arab regimes were not established as popular liberation projects or in response to collective national aspirations; they were functional entities serving specific objectives within a regional system dependent on the global imperial order.

They were not created to liberate land or protect peoples, but to safeguard elite interests, ensure continuity of governance systems and international imperial alliances, suppress internal dissent, and demonize any popular liberation movement. They were not established to liberate Palestine, but as colonial protectorates organically linked to the global imperial system, performing the function of protecting Imperial interests in the region, foremost among them ‘Israel’.

Hence, any hope for these regimes to intervene to save Gaza is illusory, and any expectation of a liberatory stance would only leave populations at the mercy of the machinery of annihilation. If this is the functional structure of dependent Arab regimes, a structure that is fully operational and capable of channelling genocidal action and redirecting it to serve its interests and imperial alliances, the central question emerges: why does Gaza represent an existential threat to this structure?

To be continued in Part III …

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مصر بعد كامب ديفيد

مصر الحديثة التي تشكّلت مع ثورة 1952 كانت مشروع تحرر وطني شامل في مواجهة الاستعمار البريطاني، وكانت فلسطين جزءاً بنيوياً من هذا المشروع. شكلت حرب الأيام الستة عام 1967، المعروفة أيضًا بالنكسة، نقطة تحول في تراجع حركة القوميبن العرب، وكسرًا بنيوياً للشرعية التحررية، وبدايةً لمسار تبعية الأنظمة العربية للقوى الخارجية، كما كرست التحالف الاستراتيجي بين الولايات المتحدة والكيان الصهيوني، وأسهمت فس إدماجه كقوة إقليمية مهيمنة عسكريًّا. أسفرت الحرب عن إحتلال الكيان الكيان الصهيوني على أراضٍ جديدة مهمة، لكنها أدت إلى ولادة حركات المقاومة الفلسطينية؛ الفدائيين.

جاء التحول الحاسم مع اتفاقية التطبيع كامب ديفيد عام 1979، التي أعادت تعريف وظيفة الدولة المصرية. فتمّ إخراج مصر من معادلة المقاومة العربية ضد الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، وإعادة توجيه النظام من مشروع تحرري قومي إلى دور وظيفي تابع داخل منظومة النفوذ الإمبريالي الغربي. في السياق الذي أعقب كامب ديفيد، جرى تحييد الجيش المصري استراتيجياً، وترسيخ منطق “التنسيق الأمني” الدائم مع الكيان الصهيوني، ما جعل مصر جزءاً من منظومة الحصار المفروض على غزة. وهكذا استُبدلت المواجهة السياسية مع الاحتلال بدور الوسيط، بما يرسّخ واقع الاحتلال والحصار بدلاً من تفكيكه.

هكذا لم تتحول مصر لأنها ضعفت، بل لأنه أُعيد بناؤها كـدولة حدود داخل النظام الإقليمي: من دولة مركزية في مشروع تحرر وطني إلى إلى كيان وظيفي يحرس الحدود ويضبط الجبهة الجنوبية للاحتلال.

الأردن كيان حاجز منذ التأسيس

تأسيس إمارة شرق الأردن جاء في سياق انهيار الدولة العثمانية عام 1920 وإعادة رسم خرائط المشرق العربي تحت الهيمنة الاستعمارية البريطانية والفرنسية. في هذا الإطار، في مؤتمر القاهرة عام 1921، قررت بريطانيا إنشاء كيان سياسي في شرق الأردن، على أن يكون خاضعاً للانتداب البريطاني بصيغة حكم غير مباشر، تُدار فيه السيادة من الخارج، وتُمارس السلطة داخليًا عبر نخب محلية مرتبطة بالمركز الاستعماري.

لم ينشأ الأردن من حركة تحرر وطني أو مشروع سيادي مستقل، بل تشكّل منذ تأسيسه ككيان وظيفي، بقرار استعماري هدفه إدارة الفراغ الجغرافي السياسي المحيط بفلسطين. أي كحاجز أمني يوفر عمقاً استراتيجياً لإسرائيل، ويمنع تحوّل الضفة الشرقية إلى قاعدة مقاومة عسكرية أو شعبية. وفي الوقت نفسه يقوم بدور منطقة عزل، فاصلاً بين العراق وسوريا من جهة، وفلسطين والجزيرة العربية من جهة أخرى، بما يمنع تَشكّل مجال وحدوي ثوري. كما يمثّل ممراً استراتيجياً للنفوذ الغربي يؤمّن خطوط المواصلات والطاقة والتدخل العسكري.

وبعد 1948 و1967 أضيف إلى ذلك دور احتواء الحركة الفلسطينية داخل حدوده، لضبطها ومنعها من إعادة فتح جبهة التحرير من الشرق. منذ أيلول الأسود 1970 حُسمت وظيفة الدولة الأردنية: منع المقاومة داخل الأردن وتحويل فلسطين إلى ملف أمني خارجي. كرّست اتفاقية التطبيع وادي عربة هذا الدور، ليغدو الأردن وسيطاً وحاجزاً. هكذا يؤدي الأردن وظيفته: دولة ضبط ويحوّل الأجهزة الأمنية الأردنية من حماية وطنية إلى أداة تحمي مصالح الاحتلال الصهيوني والبرجوازية الحاكمة.

محميات الخليج

مع تراجع الدولة العثمانية، شرعت بريطانيا منذ القرن التاسع عشر في إعادة تشكيل منطقة الخليج عبر تحويلها إلى منظومة من المحميات السياسية، مستندة إلى سلسلة من المعاهدات العسكرية والسياسية غير المتكافئة. وقد أرسى ذلك نمطًا من الهيمنة المباشرة التي أعادت الولايات المتحدة إنتاجها ووراثتها بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية.

في هذا الإطار، نشأت أنظمة الخليج الحديثة لا بوصفها تعبيرًا عن حركات تحرر وطني أو نتاج صراعات شعبية داخلية، بل ككيانات تشكّلت ضمن سياق استعماري مباشر، وارتبطت وظيفيًا بالنظام الإمبريالي الغربي. تمثلت وظيفتها الأساسية في تأمين تدفقات الطاقة وضمان سلامة الملاحة، ظناً منها أنها بذلك تشتري إستقرارها السياسي والأمني، ضمن معادلة أوسع تهدف إلى الحفاظ على استقرار النظام الرأسمالي الإمبريالي العالمي.

مع اكتشاف النفط، تحولت كيانات الخليج إلى مركز محوري في النظام العالمي، حيث نشأت دول ريعية تتركز فيها الثروة بيد العائلات الحاكمة وبرجوازيات كمبرادورية مرتبطة بالأسواق العالمية. ولم يصبح النفط أساسًا لبناء قوة شعبية منظمة، ولا أداة للتحرر، بل شكّل آلية لدمج الخليج بشكل أعمق ضمن الهيمنة الغربية، ولتكريس تبعيته الأمنية للغرب.

وقد أتاح ذلك للغرب، بقيادة التحالف الأنغلو-أمريكي، الحفاظ على صفقات سلاح مربحة مع دول الخليج الغنية بالنفط، إلى جانب فرض نفوذ سياسي وعسكري عليها. وفي هذا السياق، يُنظر إلى الكيان الصهيوني كشريك ينبغي تأمين مصالحه في المنطقة.

وبعد الانتفاضات الشعبية العربية عام 2011، تعمّق التحالف الخليجي-الغربي في مسار التطبيع مع الكيان الصهيوني، حيث أعادت الأنظمة تعريف كل أشكال المقاومة ضده باعتبارها تهديدًا للأمن القومي.

السعودية والفوضى

يتجنب النظام السعودي الدخول في مواجهة مباشرة أو قطع العلاقات مع الاحتلال الإسرائيلي أو القوى الإمبريالية، إذ يتعامل مع القضية الفلسطينية بوصفها جزءًا من سياسة تفاوضية أوسع مرتبطة بالمصالح الإقليمية والدولية، لا كقضية تحرر شعبي. وهو يوازن بين المصالح الإقليمية مع الحفاظ على موقعه دون الدخول في صدام مباشر مع القوى الكبرى.

في الوقت ذاته، لعبت السعودية دورًا محوريًا فيما يُعرف بـ”الفوضى الخلّاقة” في المنطقة، مستخدمة أدوات سياسية وإعلامية ومالية لإعادة تشكيل موازين القوى في دول مجاورة مثل اليمن وسوريا ولبنان ومصر، ما أفرز أنماطًا من عدم الاستقرار القابل للإدارة خارجيًا، تخدم نظامًا ريعيًا إقليميًا متحالفًا مع الغرب بقيادة واشنطن، ويحتل فيه الكيان الصهيوني موقعًا مركزيًا.

على الصعيد الإقليمي، شاركت السعودية في سياسة تطويق أي محور مقاوم وتحويل القضية من قضية تحرر من الإحتلال الإسرائيلي في المنطفة إلى صراعات داخلية بين العرب أنفسهم. كما أعاد خطابها السياسي الرسمي ووسائلها الإعلامية تعريف العدو؛ فبدلًا من اعتبار “إسرائيل” العدو الرئيسي، جرى تصوير حركات المقاومة على أنها “ميليشيات إرهابية”.

بهذا المعنى، لا يعمل النظام السعودي كقوة مواجهة، بل كقوة إدارة للفوضى: تفجير تناقضات داخلية، إعادة توجيه الصراعات، وشيطنة كل مشروع مقاوم، ضمن وظيفة عضوية تتمثل في حماية النظام الإقليمي القائم على الهيمنة الغربية الإمبريالية وضمان أمن أكيان الصهيوني، وبالتالي منع تشكّل أي دينامية تحررية تهدّد هذا النظام.

قطر وسيط تحت السقف الأمريكي

يقدم النظام القطري دعماً إنسانياً وسياسياً مقنّعاً، يمنحه من جهة صورة “المساعد الإنساني”، ومن جهة أخرى يؤدي دور الوسيط في الملفات الإقليمية. غير أن هذا الدور، لا يخرج عن الإطار العام المرسوم له، فهذه الوساطة تجري تحت سقف الإشراف الأمريكي، ولا تتجاوز حدود ما تسمح به واشنطن.

ويأتي ذلك ضمن وظيفة أوسع تتمثل في حماية أمن إسرائيل، الأداة العضوية للمصالح الامبريالية الغربية في المنطقة. لذلك يبقى أي تحرك قطري، سواء كان إنسانياً أو سياسياً، محكوماً بوظيفة تتحرك داخل معادلة إقليمية هدفها النهائي ليس كسر ميزان القوة لصالح الشعب الفلسطينيين وقضيته، بل إدارة الصراع بما يضمن استقرار البنية التي تقوم على تفوق الكيان الصهيوني وأمنه.

الإمارات كنموذج تطبيع كامل

اتخذت الإمارات مساراً يتجاوز بكثير حدود العلاقات “الدبلوماسية” المحدودة مع الكيان الصهيوني، إذ أقدمت على تطبيع كامل تجسّد رسمياً بتوقيع اتفاقية أبراهام (2020)، التي نصّت على إقامة علاقات شاملة مع الكيان، شملت التعاون الاقتصادي، السياحي، والتكنولوجي، إلى جانب فتح قنوات أمنية واستخباراتية مشتركة.

على المستوى الأمني، أقامت الإمارات شراكات مع الكيان في المجالات الاستخبارات، العسكرية، ومراقبة الفضاء الإلكتروني، ما جعلها حليفاً مباشراً له في إدارة الملفات الإقليمية وعلى رأسهم غزة.

وبهذا المعنى، تُعد الإمارات، نموذجاً واضحاً لكيفية توظيف الأنظمة العربية ضمن منظومة الحماية الأمريكية-الإسرائيلية، من خلال إدارة التوازنات الإقليمية، استثمار النفوذ، وضمان “إستقرار” الأنظمة الخليجية على حساب أي مشروع مقاوم فلسطيني.

ختامًا، تتهاوى مقولة “شراء الأمن” التي تعتقد أنظمة الخليج أنها أمِنتها، إذ تقوم هذه الفرضية على وهمٍ استراتيجي يعكس فهمًا سطحيًا لطبيعة موقع هذه الأنظمة داخل البنية الإمبريالية. فالتبعية للاتفاقيات العسكرية والتطبيع مع الحلف الإمبريالي الأمريكي لم تُنتج أمنًا سياديًا، بل عمّقت الاندماج البنيوي لهذه الأنظمة داخل منظومة الهيمنة الخارجية، كأدوات وظيفية وعضوية ضمنها.

لقد كشفت الحرب الإمبريالية الصهيو-أمريكية على إيران، أن الدول العربية مكشوفة ومُدمجة في قلب المصالح السياسية والامنية الاستراتيجية للقوى الامبريالية الغربية، التي تتعامل مع هذه الدول كبنى وظيفية وقواعد عسكرية، تُستخدم لضمان أمن الكيان الصهيوني وترسيخ النفوذ الأمريكي في المنطقة، ما يجعلها جزءًا من المنظومة الأمنية الغربية الإمبريالية.

السلطة الفلسطينية كجهاز ضبط طبقي

نشأت السلطة الفلسطينية كوسيط طبقي مع اتفاقيات أوسلو الاستسلامية (1993)، والتي لم تكن مشروع سلام بل إعادة هيكلة للطبقات الفلسطينية. فقد أدت أوسلو إلى تفكيك الحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية، وتحويل الصراع إلى “نزاع إداري”، مع خلق طبقة جديدة: بيروقراطية أمنية-اقتصادية مرتبطة بحكم يعتمد على المانحين ومنسّق مع الاحتلال، ومندمجة في اقتصاد ريعي قائم على المساعدات، تتوافق مصالحها مع استمرار الاحتلال.

انتقلت قيادة منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية من تمثيل الشعب إلى إدارة “كانتونات” مجزأة، ما أنتج انفصالًا طبقيًا: قيادة تتحول إلى طبقة بحد ذاتها، وسكان يُعاملون كقوة عمل مُراقَبة ومُدارة.

غزة: التهديد العضوي للأنظمة العربية التابعة

في هذا السياق، يتضح أن ما يشهده الرأي العام العربي اليوم من ممارسات هذه الأنظمة ليس خيانة أخلاقية ولا عجزًا سياسيًا، ولا إخفاقًا في أداء دور تحرري، بل هو التزام صارم بالدور الذي وُجدت هذه الأنظمة لتنفيذه منذ لحظة نشأتها. فهذه الأنظمة العربية لم تُنشأ بوصفها مشاريع تحرر شعبي، ولا كاستجابة لتطلعات وطنية جامعة، بل ككيانات وظيفية تخدم أهدافًا محددة ضمن نظام إقليمي تابع للنظام الإمبريالي العالمي.

إنها لم تُنشأ لتحرير الأرض أو حماية الشعوب، بل لحماية مصالح النخب الحاكمة، وضمان استمرارية أنظمة الحكم وتحالفاتها الإمبريالية الدولية، عبر قمع الداخل وشيطنة أي حركة شعبية تحررية. ولم تُنشأ لتحرير فلسطين، بل وُجدت كمحميات استعمارية مرتبطة عضويًا بالنظام الإمبريالي العالمي، تؤدي وظيفة حماية مصالحه في الإقليم، وعلى رأسها الكيان الصهيوني، عبر ضمان أمنه واستمرارية دوره، من خلال الحفاظ على بنيتها الوظيفية نفسها.

ومن هنا، فإن أي أمل في تدخل هذه الأنظمة لإنقاذ غزة هو وهم، وأي انتظار لموقف تحرري منها لا يعني سوى ترك الشعوب تحت رحمة آلة الإبادة.

وإذا كانت هذه هي البنية الوظيفية للأنظمة العربية التابعة، بنية مكتملة وظيفيًا تتحكم في مسار الفعل الإبادي وتعيد توجيهه بما يخدم مصالحها وتحالفاتها الإمبريالية، فإن السؤال الجوهري الذي يفرض نفسه هو: لماذا تشكل غزة تهديدًا وجوديًا لهذه البنية؟

يتبع في الجزء الثالث …

This is the first of six articles exploring the connections between chronic illness, degrowth, climate change, and capitalism:

1. Part I: An introduction to navigating chronic illness and current events

2. Part II: Navigating the workplace as a someone with a chronic illness

3. Part III: Questioning and relearning what it means to take care of the self

4. Part IV: Learning to find joy again

5. Part V: Chronic illness, capitalism, and climate change

6. Part VI: Lessons to help us weather any storm

Introduction: Then and Now

Four years ago, I’d just finished my third unofficial half marathon, and had my sights set on the next challenge: an official 26.2-mile race.

These days, I struggle to walk half a mile at anything faster than a snail’s pace.

No one wants to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic anymore. Many consider it a short, albeit painful, chapter of the last decade, overshadowed by other chapters filled with more horrifying events than one person can rationally be expected to bear. It’s a challenging subject to discuss because no one wants to hear it—and I don’t blame them. Everyone wants to move on, and many already have.

But I need to talk about it, because it changed my life. This has left me in the lonely position of navigating a new chronic illness—new to both me and the scientific world—while also coming to terms with a new sense of self, and continuing to exist in a world that seems to insist on fracturing itself in the most painful ways possible.

Four years ago, I had just finished my undergraduate degree, and was taking a year to figure out what I wanted to do with my career. My degrees were in Sociology and Environmental Studies, with concentrations in Public Health and Global Environmental Politics, all of which felt, to me, like inexplicably intertwined subjects—albeit ones that did not offer a clear career path. I had just finished learning about how many of the technological and medical innovations that have become second nature to Global North life intractably come with degradation of community, wildlife, and land health. That the Industrial Revolution coincided with the beginning of an exponential increase in greenhouse gas emissions was no coincidence—it was a genesis of our current predicaments. That environmental issues tied into racism—who lived near the landfills, the concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), the toxic waste sites—is not any kind of “bad luck,” but the illustrated contours of a system that was built to pummel some groups and support others. That the structure of our consumerist, ultra-individualist, capitalist system preys on us, willing us to buy into “health trends” and aesthetic lifestyles claiming to make us happier and healthier but are actually just smoke and mirrors, taking us away from our connections to each other and to nature while simultaneously destroying those very things—none of that is by chance, but by design. But I was only subliminally conscious of these connections at the time; the theoretical landscape had been thoroughly explored, but I lacked the personal experience that would transform theory into reality.

These days, my weeks are filled with doctor’s appointments, pulmonary rehabilitation classes, sleepy afternoons, cancelled plans, and disappointment. Half-marathons feel like a distant galaxy when I can barely muster up enough energy to cook myself a meal more complicated than avocado toast. My world has become smaller—not only because I spend more time at home, and so the physical boundaries of my days are characterized by the edges of my apartment and backyard, but also because my daily journal reflects a underwhelming lack of variety in activities: ate, slept, read, started a craft, slept more, watched TV, ate again, went to bed. Even friends who have the best intentions struggle to stay in touch—and I don’t blame them because no, nothing’s new, I’m still ill and sleeping all day, and the doctors haven’t found anything helpful—nothing interesting has happened in my life since we last talked.

The Chronic Illness, a New Lens on Life: Long COVID 101

I was suddenly faced with having to view my life in a completely new way. Activities that previously went unnoticed suddenly became mountainous challenges. Showering, cooking a meal, walking to the store—these all now required much more energy and planning than they did before. My daily routine, activities, social engagement, etc. all had to be filtered through a new algorithm—one that factored in a new unknown variable: this chronic illness thing that seems to rear its head at the oddest of times.

Long COVID is a tricky illness for many reasons. Most obviously, it’s relatively new, and so the scientific world has only had a few years to define and research it (and there isn’t even a universally agreed-upon definition yet, according to the Mayo Clinic). The list of potential symptoms is long and varied, and there is no laboratory test that can diagnose it. This makes the individual experience of trying to understand what’s happening to your body—why sleep doesn’t provide any respite, why my depression gets worse after exercise, not better—a confusing and lonely one. It means that employers, doctors, “accessibility” practitioners often don’t believe or cannot fathom the intensity of the illness, nor can they properly accommodate and address the sick person’s needs. It also meant I didn’t really know how to explain or talk about what was happening to me, which created further isolation and only intensified the negative mental health consequences.

There’s not a lot of information out there because, well, researchers are still figuring it out. According to a Harvard Gazette article, “Long COVID affects an estimated 15 million Americans, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, exercise intolerance, and cognitive decline for months or even years. Doctors and scientists don’t fully understand why some people develop long COVID while others don’t.” For many, symptoms overlap with other chronic illnesses such as postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, also called POTS, and myalgic encephalomyelitis-chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Notably, post-exertional malaise (PEM) is a hallmark symptom of both Long COVID and ME/CFS.

Fatigue may sound relatively harmless (after all, who hasn’t felt tired, especially these days). But chronic fatigue is very different from your normal run-of-the-mill tiredness. Imagine having to carry a weighted blanket around your shoulders all day, every day, without being able to put it down. That barely approaches what this kind of fatigue feels like. I’ve also heard it being described as the kind of tired you’d be after not sleeping for three days straight. It’s not just “being tired”—it’s soul-crushing, feel-it-in-your-bones exhaustion. Tasks that used to be so simple they were nearly thoughtless, like showering, now have to be scheduled for days with nothing else on the docket. Time slows down, because life slows down. The activities that you used to pack into one day now have to be spread out throughout the week, because you require time to sleep and rest in between each. The temporality of chronic illness is completely at odds with capitalist temporality—we can’t function on the same time scale, and the constant pressure to “keep up” with “normal” life only serves to isolate the chronically ill from everyone else.

Don’t be fooled by days you seemingly have more energy than usual, either. Early on, before I’d learned to be careful about my energy expenditure, I woke up one morning feeling like my old self. So, naturally, I thought I’d go for a run. Even on the run, I felt pretty okay! I was out of shape, sure, so it was harder than I would have liked, but I left the workout feeling optimistic, like maybe I’d overreacted with all this fatigue and Long COVID stuff. Cue post-exertional malaise (PEM), stage left. PEM is a brutal, vicious monster that excitedly waits in the shadows, ready to swoop in and destroy your good days. After that run, I slept for two days. Straight. It wasn’t until the fourth day that I felt somewhat like a human being again. And it wasn’t just fatigue—it was malaise too. My depressive symptoms got worse, and I fell into a dark, exhausted state that had me believing I would never be blessed by the sun-kissed lips of happiness or carefree energy again.

Devastation Abroad or at Home, Your Choice: Witnessing Destruction While Stuck on the Couch

I spent the first couple of months after my initial symptomatic episode (a story for another time) doing what many of my peers do in their free time, scrolling through the news and watching the world go up in flames. Except that I couldn’t get up and go to work to take my mind off of it—because I had quit my job (partly due to what I thought was burnout—but which turned out to be fatigue from Long COVID as well). I couldn’t go for a run to clear my head. Everything I saw, each piece of devastating news, plopped down right next to me on the couch and stubbornly insisted on remaining very, very visible. And because social media and algorithms and seemingly everything these days is designed to keep you scrolling, or at the very least, desperately vies for your attention, I couldn’t stop.

My phone, with the news, the videos, and the posts, was also my only portal into the rest of the world. It was my only escape from reckoning with my limited corporeal existence. Scrolling and watching news of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the blocking of aid to Gaza, the devolution of my country’s government into a overtly fascist regime, of the world having transgressed yet another planetary boundary: all of this offered a distraction from the reality of my life—the reality that I was ill, the fear I might be sick forever, that I might never be me again. The me that I knew—that I had spent a quarter of a century forming and learning to love—had been ripped away, unexpectedly, viciously, and without pretense. These were truths I wasn’t ready to face, and so I soothed myself with the details of soul-wrenching human rights crises instead. Not much actual soothing happened—shocking, I know.

Deep down, maybe I couldn’t stop scrolling through the devastation not because I thought it would actually soothe anything internally, but because the thought of turning inward and focusing on caring for myself felt too selfish to consider given the horrors that others were facing. My own problems paled in comparison, full stop. Maybe too, something in the helpless feeling of watching this world go down a path that horrifyingly felt like one of no return resonated with the helplessness I felt about my own life. I couldn’t do anything to stop the horrors outside my apartment, and I couldn’t do anything to get my old self back, either.

Not being able to distract myself with work I was passionate about—and not having the energy to pour into extra-curricular activities that might otherwise make up for the lack of a day job—turned out to be particularly harmful to my mental health. And I couldn’t spin the situation as a temporary setback. There was no consoling myself with the idea that I might soon be back at work, making the world a better place—because I had no idea when I would be back at work full-time, if ever. More on that in Part II...

• This article is part of our feature The Longer Read. Published periodically, The Longer Read explores important and timely topics in more depth than a typical Sufficiency & Wellbeing Magazine article.

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The debate over the cost of modern renewable energy technologies like wind turbines and solar PV ("renewables") is quite uncertain. One of the reasons that the debate over the cost of renewables is so uncertain is that there are a number of unresolved technical issues with renewable energy. The financial cost may not be the best indicator of the feasibility of renewables. A more relevant criterion may be “energy return on energy invested,” abbreviated EROEI (or sometimes, EROI). This standard doesn’t look at financial costs, but at energy costs.

EROEI of renewables

It takes energy to generate energy.

To drill an oil well, you need energy to manufacture the drilling equipment, trucks, and pipelines, in order to extract and transport the oil to market. What we need is an energy surplus: the energy return is greater than the energy invested. EROEI is usually expressed as a ratio, such as 10:1 or 25:1. It's still a relatively new concept. There is no standardized agreement as to how to calculate it. Different people include different things in the “energy invested” part of EROEI. To compare the widely divergent estimates, you need to look at them in some detail.

But conceptually, the idea is sound and gives us a way to understand possible problems with any energy source, whether renewables, fossil fuels, or nuclear power. In the Middle Ages in Europe, the energy surplus was small, much of it from agriculture, wood, and muscle power (human and animal). It enabled society to (usually) prevent the peasants from starving, and support a small number of kings, nobles, and clergy. Today, from fossil fuels, we have a huge surplus, enabling formal education for most people, a vast transportation network, modern medicine, and police. If the energy surplus is small, then the society will not be able to afford quite as much.

We can use EROEI to immediately exclude American corn ethanol as a viable energy solution. Without some dodgy accounting, the EROEI for corn ethanol is less than 1:1! Fossil fuels are used to grow all that corn. Corn ethanol is an energy sink, and is only enabled financially through huge government subsidies. (Hemp, however, appears somewhat better, in the region of 8:1.)

In 2013, Mason Inman estimated the EROEI of various energy sources in an article in Scientific American. Renewables aren’t too bad if we’re just talking about the energy (in the form of electricity) created; wind energy (at about 20:1) is actually better than the EROEI from conventional oil production (16:1). Solar panels come in at 6:1, hydroelectric power at 40:1, and Alberta Tar Sands oil and nuclear power at 5:1. However, others have said that the EROEI of solar panels may actually be improving, to about 10:1 or 15:1.

But these EROEI estimates don’t always count the supporting infrastructure. Inman specifically excluded infrastructure dealing with the intermittency of renewables (see next section); therefore, the EROEI of the entire system—renewables plus infrastructure—is unclear. Two Spanish researchers estimated the EROEI of renewables as being relatively low — in the region of 2.9:1 for onshore wind, and 1.8:1 for solar PV. At these levels of EROEI, we might only be able to support a much more limited public infrastructure of medicine, transportation, and education. EROEI is a good conceptual tool, and gives us plenty of research projects, but it gives us more questions than answers. All of this further illustrates the uncertainty surrounding renewable energy.

Intermittency

What do you do when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine? The intermittency of solar and wind power is a key complicating factor in determining the EROEI of renewables.

There are various possibilities. To help guarantee that some source, somewhere, would always be operational, we could “overbuild” renewables; or we could use transmission lines to connect different areas with each other; or, you could store any surplus energy in some form. Batteries are one obvious, though quite expensive, choice. But storing surplus energy from renewables by creating hydrogen gas, and storing the hydrogen for use later, seems to be the favored choice for Jacobson and other renewables advocates.

No one knows yet how this will all work. Even supporters of renewables acknowledge that hydrogen “faces significant challenges,” and that hydrogen storage involves complexity and higher costs. Whatever we choose, incorporating that infrastructure into EROEI calculations will lower the EROEI of renewables somewhat. One bit of good news — right now, we already have a backup system for renewable energy! It’s the fossil fuel system. If it’s cloudy and windless, just switch over to fossil fuels. Of course, then we haven’t completely rid ourselves of fossil fuels.

Infrastructure changes

In addition, renewables will require numerous other infrastructure changes, because solar PV, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams produce electricity. But most of our energy does not come from electricity. Obviously, cars and trucks rely on gasoline or diesel, and many buildings utilize natural gas for heating. We’ll need to figure out how to perform these functions just on electric energy, which is trickier than it may seem.

Heavy industry (such as steel manufacture) often requires very high and steady temperatures which are difficult or impossible to provide only using electricity. Using renewable electricity to create hydrogen gas, and then burning the gas—suggested by Jacobson—seems relatively best, but could be quite expensive, increasing costs in our current market economy by 10% to 200%, depending on the heat supply, industrial sector, and specific application.

In some cases, electric substitutes work well. Electric heat pumps (to replace natural gas heating) are getting better and better. Transportation, however, could be quite difficult to run on electricity. Electric cars tend to be more expensive, have limited driving range, and currently don’t have as much infrastructure support as gasoline-powered cars. Competitive electric heavy-duty cargo trucks, which can weigh 40 times more than a car, may always be out of reach; the batteries would weigh too much. Currently, the initial cost of an electric truck is two to three times more than a standard diesel model, the cost is not expected to competitive in the near future, and they still require additional infrastructure (e. g. charging stations). Electrified rail is also possible, but still requires many infrastructure additions.

Materials issues

Large-scale production of lithium-ion batteries (for car batteries, or to back up renewables) may create lithium shortages. There have been widely-divergent estimates of just how much lithium is readily accessible— yet another example of how inexact our knowledge of critical resources is. Sodium-ion batteries are an alternative; there's 400 times as much sodium on the planet as lithium. But because sodium also weighs more than lithium, this won't help electric cars or trucks.

Modern renewables also often need rare earth metals or other scarce resources, which are also needed for much of our other modern technology (such as computers, refrigerators, TVs, and smart phones). Modern technology and renewable energy may be in direct conflict for the same diminishing supplies. Thomas Graedel, in 2012, was quoted as saying that to provide most of our energy through renewables would require expanding mining of rare-earth metals by hundreds of times.

Land use

Wind turbines have a substantial land “footprint”; they cannot be situated too close to each other, or they will interfere with the efficient use of other wind turbines. The supply of suitably windy sites is large, but not infinite. To supply all US energy from wind power would take over 500,000 square kilometers, an area larger than the state of California.

In between wind turbines, there is theoretically extra space which could be used for other purposes, like agriculture. But humans wouldn’t like it. The turbines are noisy, making what many call a “swishing” or “thumping” sound — distinctive not because of the volume of the noise, but its unusually low frequencies. Wildlife probably wouldn’t be very enthusiastic either; bats, at least, don’t like the noise. There will likely be a conflict between wind energy and any biodiversity solutions we might want to implement.

Conclusions

Our knowledge is inexact and research is continuing. None of these issues is necessarily fatal to the project of building out a massive renewable energy system to replace (or largely replace) fossil fuels. But the impact of each issue is cumulative, and each will lower the EROEI of the total system. Each of them requires thought, research, and discussion. With limited funding, there’s only so much researchers can do. The lack of discussion and research then becomes another problem we need to deal with.

None of this means that we shouldn’t build renewables anyway, or continue our use of fossil fuels! But we can’t just assume that with renewable energy, we can do everything we’re doing right now and it will all be wonderfully renewable. We need to be thinking in terms of decreasing—not ramping up—exploitation of the earth and exploitation of each other. We need to be thinking in terms of degrowth.

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According to one version of Mesoamerican tradition, a new sun is born approximately every 5000 years, most recently in December, 2012. By this teaching, transmitted to me by Indigenous elder Charlie Toledo (Towa), a new 5000-year age has already begun: an age of peace and joy. Given our present global convulsions, this idea may strain credulity. Wars, oppression, poverty, and biophysical collapse didn’t stop in 2012. But change takes time, and the times are changing. For the purposes of this article, it doesn’t matter if this sequence of ages is factual. Consider it an invitation to try a new perspective. When I look at the world from this long-range view, I find it entirely plausible that we are entering an unprecedented era of peace.

Toledo describes the previous age, the past 5000 years, as one of war and oppression. The past 5000 years also roughly coincides with the advent of the city as a unit of human organization. We’ve all heard truisms like humans are naturally destructive. Yet our species, Homo sapiens, has successfully inhabited a functioning biosphere for some 300,000 years. And while prehistoric humans may have had a significant role in shaping environments, severe impacts on the environment date back only about 3000 years. Humans are not naturally destructive; rather, under certain material conditions, we are predictably destructive.

I propose that the fundamental material condition that has led to large-scale destructiveness is urbanization within a context of real resource scarcity. But the material condition of real scarcity has changed. We are on the cusp of a post-scarcity social order in which material abundance can break cycles of destruction and usher in a lasting age of peace and sustainability—if we let it.

Human behavior is shaped by material conditions. For most of human history, we have lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, where the nomadic condition mitigated one group’s accumulation of power over others. Wealth could not be significantly hoarded because you had to carry everything with you. Damage to the environment was limited not only by Traditional Ecological Knowledge but by technological constraints: there were no plows, no steam engines, no automobiles to gouge the face of the Earth.

This began to change with the advent of settled agriculture. In a farming village, a degree of hoarding and, thus, wealth-based hierarchies became possible. Moreover, simply having fields and grain stores to defend made it inevitable that violent conflicts over resources would sometimes erupt. At the same time, farming provided such an attractive material buffer against food shortages that many populations adopted it.

The advent of the city intensified these factors. The first cities appeared about 7000 years ago, and by 5000 years ago, a number of cities with populations of tens of thousands were well established in Mesopotamia. Cities provided shelter from the elements, defense against invaders, and were necessarily accompanied by a large agricultural base and access to water. This significantly protected human populations from the vicissitudes of nature. Yet these same material conditions made violence and domination likely, though not, as Graeber and Wengrow note, universal.

“Precarity” is broadly defined as “the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse.” When people perceive precarity (for example, over food access), they will hoard to evade it. Until quite recently, perceived precarity was driven by real scarcity. Famines could be planned for but not fully avoided. Floods, droughts, plagues of locusts, and so on could devastate communities. Certainly, scarcity could be mitigated by redistributing wealth, even in an ancient city, but it could not be overcome. Real scarcity provided a motive for hoarding, and the stationary edifices of cities provided the means. Thus, hoarding wealth became a standard practice.

Wealth, in turn, is a proxy for power. If some hold significant power over others, the result will predictably be oppression. The rich dominate the poor, husbands their wives, adults their children, citizens foreigners, humans other animals, and so on. Finally, because cities themselves contain concentrated wealth and power, they are targets for military incursion by those who want that wealth and/or fear that power. Thus, violence became a major instrument by which power was both imposed and challenged.

The kingdom and nation state are further developments of this model, but the basic problem has remained. As I write this, cities are being bombed because the people doing the bombing are afraid of those societies or want their wealth or both. As I write this, wealthy hoarders continue to strip the poor of resources. No wonder people who live within these systems of oppression often feel they are inevitable.

But they are not. In the 19th and 20th centuries, we crossed into a fundamentally different type of material condition. The Industrial Revolution caused (and still causes) enormous misery and destruction, but it also launched a period of technological innovation that gave human beings a qualitatively new level of control over their local environments. New agricultural technologies proved Malthus’s fears of food scarcity wrong. New medical knowledge caused infant and maternal mortality rates to plummet. Electricity provided new and flexible protection from heat and cold. By the 1960s, the advent of fairly reliable contraception in the form of the pill not only significantly reduced reproductive oppression but also meant humans could, theoretically, manage population sizes to enable material “enoughness” for all people in perpetuity. Sixty years ago, we already had all the tools to create a truly post-scarcity world.

Cities are here to stay. But within their own borders, many urbanized countries today have low rates of violence. Though factors that affect well-being within a nation are complex, countries with low crime rates generally have relatively low poverty rates and score high in meeting their populations’ socioeconomic needs (Kallis et al., 2025, figure 5). This is not surprising. When humans experience comparatively low stress, we are predictably less aggressive (see Sapolsky, pp. 131-34), and escaping socioeconomic precarity, of course, reduces stress.

Under our current global economy, prosperous nations are sustained by exploitation of the Global South. But this exploitation occurs because global capitalism requires perpetual growth to keep from falling into recession, not because it is necessary to meet human needs (see Kallis, et al., 2025). Remove unnecessary financial speculation, planned obsolescence, bizarrely long supply chains (and commutes), and general rewarding of depredation, and these nations could still support their populations’ well-being (see Vogel, 2023, chapter 3.7). It is likely, therefore, that those populations would remain largely peaceful.

We are a post-scarcity urban civilization sputtering through the last gasps of the ideology of scarcity. We have the tools we need to enter a new era of lasting peace. Of course, climate collapse is on the cusp of imposing a new regime of real scarcity. The window is closing on our opportunity to make this ideological transition to post-scarcity without (even more) catastrophic loss of life. But this is not a reason for despair; it’s a reason for radical, optimistic action now. Many policy proposals suggest a path to post-scarcity social systems. Ways to get involved include the International Degrowth Network, local degrowth groups, democratic socialist political parties, and groups such as Braver Angels committed to honest civic communication across party lines. In the words of Arundhati Roy, “Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way.”

References:

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The psychology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Books.

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Current outrage

All the outrageous political events we have experienced lately, starting with Gaza and then continuing in breathtaking frequency and cruelty, are intimately related to coloniality. All involve absolute contempt for the livelihoods and lives of racialized people coming from what Trump has called “shithole countries.”

Coloniality expresses itself not only in an international setting but also inside the core countries. ICE’s criminal hunting of immigrants in the USA, with all non-whites being possible targets (and not only them) is the material realization, or rather logical consequence, of decades of basically all enriched nations demonizing immigration from the Global South. In Europe, ICE’s twin, Frontex, not only shares a similar development, technology and purpose, but is the EU’s fastest expanding agency. A European ICE is openly defended by far-right parties. It could be around the corner that scapegoat tactics lead to a similar devastation of society as in the USA: recently, the EU has toughened up asylum laws.

In part one we ended with an absurdity of unfreedom, i.e. absurd from the point of view of neoliberal logics: impermeable frontiers. The point was to make the contradictions of one of many neoliberal myths visible. However, the absurdity is only apparent. Actually, closed frontiers serve the winners of our present system very well: labeling people as “illegal” cheapens their labor to utmost extremes, so that the core countries can enjoy the cheap labor it extracts from the South at home. These exclusionary border policies compound to magnify the advantage those countries already enjoy by offshoring much of their production, arranging for sleek global supply chains (until recently at least).

Normalized abuse

Illegality in the Global North plays an important role in its welfare, it is part of what makes “the imperial way of living” possible. From cheap groceries to cheap labor for care work, we, the inhabitants of enriched countries, can’t really escape the benefits we enjoy thanks to a system that stays cheap because it colors outside the legal lines. We as consumers, and of course, capitalism in general, benefit, while paradoxically, relying on the existence of this illegality in order to be maintained as such.

The big question is: how does the system get away with these apparent contradictions? That is: how can we live comfortably in societies which so clearly and permanently disavow all modern values which constitute the pride of the “West” like human rights or the rule of law? Why is there only minimal public outrage?

Let us examine one particular sector, that of the invisibilized care necessities, dependent on cheapened immigrant labor force in the Global North, through one case involving an acquaintance. She, a South American woman, let us name her Margarita, arrived in Spain ‘without papers,’ looking for opportunities in life which she did not have back home, aiming to settle down. Through friends, she eventually found a job where they paid correctly, a minimum salary. That is, a minimum salary for normal working hours, but as it turned out, she was expected to work 10 to 12 hours a day, taking care of the household with kids, sometimes having to sleep overnight for a ridiculous extra amount of pay, or spending whole weeks of vacations with the family. It was a very clear example of an abusive labor arrangement, but she stayed. She slowly learned that it could actually be much worse. Her bosses were decent and nice people, they valued her work...

The crux of the matter is the following: the employer couple, a pair of medical doctors, were quite respectable people, in no way openly racist, brutal, nor followers of the far right. Just normal upper-middle class professionals, with the “freedom” to pursue their careers of choice, as their care necessities were conveniently taken care of. They could entrust their children and their house to Margarita because she was trustworthy.

Had they little conscience of abusing someone, perhaps? Could it seem a win-win scenario for them? How can one bring this abuse in consonance with “nice,” otherwise decent people?

Margarita was no fool. She actually found out that, according to Spanish law, she could file charges against them. But it was not worth the trouble. She did talk to her bosses, bringing solid arguments about what she was entitled to. And they answered: you are in no position to make those demands, you have no papers.

Borders and unfreedom

Immigration is a “problem” in the Global North, yes, for those leaving their homeland and putting themselves in abusive or life-threatening situations. It seems to be one plain fact of life that we have borders which are ‘naturally’ impenetrable from South to North. One interesting historical aspect: Our present spatial understanding and concept of borders actually emerges from the colonial encounter. As in many other aspects, plain realities of modernity were shaped, also, by coloniality1.

Borders seem real and solid, and the abuse we have been talking about is supported by the narrative that these people should not be here anyway: they are “illegal.” (Following far-right narratives, “they” are also suspected of being criminals, but we will leave this aside for now). In general, it is accepted that labor laws and human rights just don’t apply to some people, as it is taken for granted that these rights are linked to legality inside the borders.

The doctors above probably think well of themselves, settling their “western” identities on being part of a “civilized, advanced country” which functions within the order of law. Perhaps they even see themselves as helping out Margarita in a win-win scenario. Perhaps they even consider that she is probably used to worse circumstances in her “backward” country.

However it may be, they are acting from a profound power asymmetry given in this particular social relation which, as has been investigated, can express itself in verbal abuse, humiliation, threats, sexual harassment, and even physical assaults.

We can suspect that this has less to do with legality/illegality and more with racism/coloniality. Boaventura de Santos has named the developed “western” capacity to apply double standards to their most cherished societal values: he called this phenomenon «abyssal thinking», signaling the realm where those values are naturally not deemed valid and a field of brutal self-interest reigns. Only one side is free, borders are valid for only one side. The borders between Global South and North is a division in more than one sense...

The obscurity around the contradictions we perceive here maintains the functioning of a system whose only goal is to extract value. We are dealing here with cultural hegemony, the consent around the ideas of the ruling classes, as Gramsci developed, which gives solidity to our world, which even convinces us that there is no other way to live. The resulting “common senses” don’t endure any analysis, but that doesn’t gnaw on their solidity. They are part of our identity, of our ‘knowledge’ about who is “us” and who is “them.”

The “we” and the “them” or the construction of “race”

The South politician preaches to the poor white man
You got more than the blacks, don’t complain
You’re better than them
You been born with white skin, they explain
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain...

(Bob Dylan, “A pawn in their game”)

Dylan’s song is historically accurate. The first African people taken to the American colonies arrived as “indentured” servants, not differentiated from “white” ones, and actually gained freedom after a couple of years. “The first black and white Americans could develop strong bonds of sympathy and until the end of the seventeenth century they were all referred to as ‘servants’“ (Bennett, L., see also more about the construction of race).

In the late 17th century, these communities were broken: the “white” servants were singled out and given privileges, and contempt for the darker-skinned servants was actively promoted... A partitioning happening around “race” (W.E.B. Du Bois). Modern race concepts and the idea of whiteness crystallized in the 18th century, together with the developments of scientific human taxonomy 2.

Race was born as it was advantageous to divide those affected by early modern plundering. And the process has continued until today. For race plays a pivotal role in the more recent historic construction around “underdevelopment”. This imaginary permeates today the perception of the Other of “Western civilization” as she arrives as an immigrant. “They,” who are far behind “us,” only come to take advantage of what we have worked so hard for... (see a recent article of mine). Global dependencies and centuries-old siphoning of value from the South towards the North remains invisible, and the North’s consequent welfare seems completely brewed at home.

It could certainly be seen as strange that the idea of no-borders can be considered radical in a society having “freedom” as a supreme value.

But, as we have seen, it isn’t so strange if we take the real economic interests into account. Our attuned common senses as to who is “us” and who is “them” support and reflect the given order, as part of our modern/colonial imaginary.

Further, in a global setting, whiteness becomes a racialized “title to the universe” (W.E.B. Du Bois), mounding in the aggressive imperial expansion worldwide. A normalized international setting based on an apparent legality. That is, until recently. For this legal buffering seems to be losing significance today, at high speed. Coloniality’s increasingly denuded face: the unbelievable abuse inside the USA (and not only there) and the massive murdering of Global Southern peoples in the attacks waged on Iran and Lebanon, now towering on top of the Palestinian genocide, could make the “abyssal line” too visible for comfort. We can be witnessing hope amid the unbelievable destruction.

Outlook: the Cracks

Not long ago I visited the Basque country, and engaged in conversation with a taxi driver. He knew a lot about the unique language of his homeland, its territorial differentiation and history, and he was clearly proud of it. A question came up from our side: did he actually feel “Spanish”, besides feeling Basque? The answer was straightforward: he was a worker of the world. He loved his homeland, but he was a creature of our planet Earth.

My heart warmed... At this point I was expecting nationalist, excluding, divisive, simplistic views of who is entitled to what. But his “us” was clear.

Hegemony always has cracks, which can be widened--perhaps through the plummeting dignity of the supposed western humanistic superiority. Perhaps, the multiple crises may become so extreme that scapegoating immigrants will not be enough to maintain the status quo, bursting neoliberalism’s common senses, and forcing the system to change. And perhaps, at some point, many will see that “latinos,” or the equivalent, have much more in common with impoverished “white” citizens than the latter have with scaremongering politicians or with the owners of the world in their techno-feudal bubble, all of those who claim them for their superior race collective. An “us” made up of workers of the world (”the 99%”) could develop, like our basque cab driver expressed.

We have powerful images to resort to, like the ones of native US citizens revolting and defending the defenseless, in solidarity or also the recurring flotillas in different geographies. We also have leaders dancing out of the script like Prime Minister Sanchez in Spain introducing a massive legalization of migrants, recognizing that they keep the country going. At this very exceptional point in time, a question could be raised: why not solidarity, instead of hate?

Foto collage credits: Internet archive / Amnesty international

• This article is part of our feature The Longer Read. Published periodically, The Longer Read explores important and timely topics in more depth than a typical Sufficiency & Wellbeing Magazine article.

The war in Iran has done something brutally clarifying. It has forced the global economy to reveal the infrastructure of its own dependence. For decades, growth ideology has presented more production, throughput, energy use, trade, and speed as the ordinary metabolism of modern life. Then missiles fly, a choke-point tightens, insurers panic, ships stall, and suddenly the hidden architecture steps into view. The Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas flows, becomes a reminder that the everyday functioning of our growth-based society depends on a narrow, militarized corridor that can--at any moment--become a battlefield.

Degrowth scholarship has made powerful contributions to climate, justice, and wellbeing, but its de-escalatory implications remain comparatively underdeveloped. This matters because a growth-dependent world does not only generate ecological breakdown. It also generates the strategic pressures, choke-point dependencies, and militarized protections that make war more likely. What this conflict between the US/Israel and Iran--centering on the strait of Hormuz--shows is that degrowth also belongs to the politics of de-escalation. A world organized around permanent expansion creates permanent strategic pressure. The result is a system in which interruptions to energy flows are treated as existential threats rather than manageable disruptions. When so much social reproduction has been built on high levels of material and energy throughput, the defense of that throughput becomes a matter of state doctrine.

Growth-oriented societies create choke-point dependence because they require immense and continuous volumes of energy and materials to preserve the systemic integrity of the global political economy. The closure or effective blockade of a passage like Hormuz threatens fuel supply, freight, food prices, inflation, and the confidence structures of financialised economies. That is why states mobilize fleets, invoke “energy security,” pressure allies, court petro-states, and prepare for escalation. The system is engineered in such a way that de-escalation often appears, from within the ruling imagination, as a greater risk than confrontation.

For parties and movements that oppose war but remain committed to growth, the problem is deeper than foreign policy posture. So long as economies depend on expanding throughput, choke-points, extraction frontiers, and militarized trade protection remain built into normal functioning. A serious anti-war politics therefore requires more than protest against particular cases of aggression. It requires a program for reducing the material dependencies that repeatedly make aggression appear necessary.

Degrowth offers an alternative to that trap. It asks a more serious question than how to secure enough fuel to keep growth going. It asks how much throughput is actually necessary for a dignified and flourishing life, and how much is merely the metabolic demand of accumulation. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report gave demand-side mitigation a central place for the first time and concluded that demand-side changes could cut global greenhouse gas emissions in end-use sectors by 40 to 70 percent by 2050 while maintaining or improving wellbeing. In simple terms, it means the IPCC is no longer only asking how to power the same way of life more cleanly, but also whether we can build ways of living that need less energy to begin with. That means lower throughput is not synonymous with deprivation. It points toward a reorganization of housing, mobility, provisioning, and infrastructure around sufficiency rather than endless expansion.

A lower-throughput society requires less energy in total, and Research in Nature Communications found that inequality can dramatically increase the energy required to secure decent living standards for everyone, effectively doubling the energy requirement in some modeled conditions. In other words, elite excess is a major driver of total system demand. Jets, oversized homes, luxury data use, built-in obsolescence, wasteful freight, and prestige consumption all expand the strategic burden on energy systems and trade corridors. A politics of sufficiency and redistribution therefore reduces the geopolitical pressure generated by the consumption patterns of affluence.

That matters immensely in a world of fossil choke-points. Conventional energy security thinking has long been tied to military protection of flows, especially the protection of tanker routes and strategic passages. Once that framing takes hold, sanctions, proxy wars, and coercive diplomacy begin to appear as ordinary tools of economic management. Degrowth changes the terrain by weakening the compulsion behind that whole apparatus. Lower throughput (of all materials) means less dependence on distant extraction zones. Greater localization of provisioning means fewer catastrophic knock-on effects when trade routes get blocked. Investment in public transit, insulation, repair systems, and democratic energy reduces the tendency to treat shipping disruptions as civilizational emergencies.

As the Strait of Hormuz tightened, Gulf producers rushed to reroute exports through pipelines and alternative ports. Import-dependent states turned to emergency diversification. Strategic reserves were released. Analysts raised price forecasts. LNG buyers looked for non-Middle Eastern supply. Demonstrating that the system treats dependence as a logistical problem to be managed rather than a structural condition to be transformed.

The logic of degrowth offers a different strategic horizon. It loosens the background compulsion that drives escalation. Lower energy dependence, stronger public goods, and shorter supply chains reduce the likelihood that distant disruptions are translated into domestic existential crises.

Degrowth cannot, by itself, dissolve hegemonic projects rooted in supremacy, chosenness, civilizational entitlement, or sacred territorial destiny. A lower-throughput economy does not automatically undo settler myth, racial hierarchy, or expansionist identity. But degrowth still matters here, because it contests the deeper social logic that treats land, energy, labor, and life as substrates for endless appropriation. In that sense, degrowth is part of a wider struggle over desire, legitimacy, and the stories societies tell about what they are owed. In contexts shaped by settler colonialism and ethnonational expansion, degrowth only becomes fully de-escalatory when joined with decolonial struggle. Without that, material contraction could coexist perfectly well with fortified exclusion, sacrificial zones, and a politics of permanent siege.

There is also a moral unveiling here that should not be ignored. Wars around oil and gas are often discussed using the language of stability, deterrence, and national interest, which conveniently sanitizes what is really happening. High-throughput societies are held together by coercive access to distant labor, land, fuel, and sea lanes. Their normality rests on the successful management of violence elsewhere. Choke-point crises tear that veil. They reveal that what is called “prosperity” often depends on a global architecture of force. Degrowth makes that structure harder to hide because it asks whether any form of wellbeing worth defending should require this level of militarized extraction in the first place.

None of this implies that degrowth offers an immediate solution to the war in Iran. It does, however, help us identify the systemic conditions that make conflicts like this more explosive and more globally consequential than they would otherwise be. It tells us that the route to a less war-prone world runs through the metabolism of the economy itself. As long as states remain trapped in the need to secure ever-expanding flows of energy and materials, they will continue to militarize choke-points, externalize risk, and gamble with planetary stability. As that compulsion weakens, so does one of the deepest structural drivers of escalation.

The current US/Israel-Iran war highlights the need for degrowth. It does so by revealing the choke-points of growth-oriented society with almost theatrical cruelty. Hormuz is a window into the true design of the system. Degrowth becomes, in that light, a project of de-escalation. A way of reducing the material stakes that turn trade corridors into battle lines, of shrinking the strategic importance of fossil flows, and of building social ecologies that do not require the world to be continuously secured at gunpoint.

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In this article, I want to offer some hints and open a debate: how can we transition to a mosaic of just futures aligned with degrowth, without the current suffering I see around me?

1. Economic Security: Finding Work That Doesn’t Betray Us

The lack of reliable, safe, and well-paid work makes it very hard for committed people to focus emotionally on transformation. It makes any working model unsustainable — savings and family support will not last forever for most of us. Even when they do, many people want to feel rewarded and recognized for their work. Society should honor those who care about unfair trade, water pollution, affordable healthcare, and ending extractive practices.

The uncomfortable reality is that the most ideologically “pure” workspaces are those with the least connection to material reality. Research centers, think tanks, and alternative study centers do important work — but their connection to the materiality of productive and reproductive systems is close to nothing. And even where research and knowledge-building are genuinely needed, these spaces rarely create healthy feedback loops with hospitals, energy providers, housing projects, farmers, foresters, or water custodians.

Look at the industry depth in degrowth literature: it can explain the mechanics of the current system at a macro level, but offers little guidance on how to actually transform a particular activity — finance, housing — beyond some lab-like experiments. This will lead to enormous frustration for people working in degrowth research. More importantly, it makes degrowth-aligned jobs a total rarity.

So we must ask: what can we do outside those spaces while staying consistent with our values?

I think we need to name the work that is essential in the future we want — and exclude from our paid work anything that should not exist in it. There is no way to make chemical pesticides just, nor fast fashion, nor the military complex. There are industries and companies we simply will not step into: we refuse them in the medium term, including big tech.

But outside that space, many paid jobs can let us permeate our workplaces with collective values while making a living close to our ideals. Maintenance work (electricity, water, housing), low-carbon energy, organic farming, alternative software, public transportation, fair clothing, second-hand shops, community centers, cafes, arts, gardening, bikes, sports, ecotourism — these may still operate within a capitalist system, but they will be present in our collective futures. They offer decent pay today while giving us the essential skills to transform those industries further.

I am especially excited about the regeneration movement: people and organizations working full time to restore soils, water systems, forests, and communities — especially in the rural world. If you are reading this, you almost certainly have skills that are missing and desperately needed in rural areas, where housing is more affordable, community is a necessity, and there is a deep thirst for new projects and perspectives.

Every person’s and family’s context is different. My point is simply this: your work today does not have to be perfect. If it allows you to stop worrying about every bill and gives you space to express your values, creativity, and service to others, that is already a significant step.

Note that your potential to change your workplace depends a lot on its governance structure, economic health, and leadership — so read the room and be realistic about transformational potential. And always remember: you are much more than your job. If you find yourself somewhere with little room for change, try to reduce your paid hours so you can dedicate time to initiatives that truly reflect your values. This is what I did — to raise our child, to organize political groups, and to do important unpaid work for human rights and nature regeneration.

2. Community and Social Infrastructure: Getting Off the Screen

We spend enormous hours consuming news, articles, and podcasts — squeezing information into our scarce attention, mostly content that frightens and saddens us, and rarely gives us a sense of power. Social media is the ultimate expression of this. People spend around four hours a day on it, on top of mandatory screen time for work and admin.

This is not just ineffective political work whose returns diminish over time. It is precious time we could be spending building real social infrastructure in our communities.

We cannot say this enough: while alternative media and independent journalism are needed now more than ever, if we are to have any chance against oppressive forces, we must build compassionate, effective, joyful, and safe social spaces where we live. These spaces — of production, reproductive work, and genuine joy — should not be isolated utopias. They must engage in international and supra-local solidarity on a material level.

Let’s make solidarity not about narrative-building, but about actually ending oppression and artificial scarcity. Anything less is virtue signaling and feel-good politics — a true pandemic in our movements.

3. Collective Economic Power: Walk the Talk

If you are reading this, you are likely among the 10% wealthiest people on Earth. Around 60% of global GDP depends on what we buy, finance, and use. The call here is simple: walk the talk.

Be unionized. Support independent journalism. Buy regenerative and organic local food. Choose alternative software over big tech. Use insurance and banking tied to real, regenerative economic activity. And punish — vocally, but most powerfully with your money — those complicit with racist, genocidal, and ecocidal governments and practices.

There is no space in degrowth for Microsoft, Google, Nestlé, Total, Repsol, Zara, and their kind. Do not hide behind affordability or systemic arguments to justify complicity.

Boycotting, when organized, targeted, and consistent, drives systemic change: the successful international boycott of South African goods that spurred the larger Anti-Apartheid Movement, alternatives to industrial animal farming, the phase-out of palm oil and dangerous food pollutants, the Metaverse collapse, Starbucks. Corporations know very well that they depend on our legitimacy and complicity to keep operating. It would be naive to think that reduced demand alone makes these monsters disappear, since they own our governments, which will continue to use public money to keep them alive — see Volkswagen's pivot to arms financing to compensate for falling car demand. But when we walk the talk, our redirected money does flow to organizations that align with us, and they will be part of the world yet to be born.

In Closing

If you feel purposeless or struggle to align your values with paying your bills — I feel you. That is exactly why I wrote this.

First, let’s help each other find and have good jobs. Not perfect jobs — good ones.

Second, let’s break the addiction to social media and toxic news, and instead build the social infrastructure we are missing: nearby spaces for organizing, caring, celebrating, and defending ourselves.

Third, let’s support those who are opening cracks in a broken system. Regenerative, democratic work is everywhere if we look for and support it. Let’s make every daily act — eating, drinking, heating our homes, powering our grid, using water and furniture — a political act. Let’s trade quantity for quality, comfort for values, and withdraw our money and legitimacy from those feeding fascism, white supremacy, and ecocide.

Deep transformation is an ultra-marathon. It requires compromise and engagement at both the micro and macro level. Narratives that tell you nothing is possible until capitalism is dismantled, or that strip away your agency and demand perfection, belong in the compost bin.

It’s time to reclaim our voice and our agency — one job at a time, one dinner at a time, one hug at a time — until those acts become billions and make our dreams a material reality, not just words in a book.

With love and solidarity

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يتناول الجزء الثاني من السلسلة البنية التاريخية لنشأة هذه الأنظمة، مبيّناً الأسباب البنيوية التي تجعلها تؤدّي وظيفتها الحالية، ولماذا لا يمكنها، بحكم الوظيفة التي أُنشئت لأدائها، أن تكون جزءاً من أي مشروع تحرري.

أمّا الجزء الثالث، فيكشف الركائز الأساسية التي يقوم عليها النظام العربي التابع، ويُظهر لماذا تمثّل غزة، بنموذجها المقاوم، خطراً وجودياً على هذا النظام، ولماذا لا يرى في وجودها إلا تهديداً لا يمكن احتواؤه، لذلك وُجِب إبادتها.

أهدي هذه السلسلة إلى غزة وشهدائها،
وأخص بالذكر الشهيد الناطق باسم الأمة، حذيفة الكحلوت
وأعيد كلماته للتاريخ:

… فإنّ عدوّنا تمدّه أقوى القوى الظالمة في العالم بقوافلَ لا تتوقّف من السلاح والذخيرة، في حين تتفرّج أنظمةُ وقوى أمّتنا على أشقّائهم .. يُقتلون بعشرات الآلاف، ويجوعون .. يا قادة هذه الأمّة الإسلاميّة والعربيّة، ويا نُخبها وأحزابها الكبيرة، ويا علمائها… إنّ رقابكم مثقلةٌ بدماء عشرات الآلاف من الأبرياء الذين خُذِلوا بصمتكم، وإنّ هذا العدوّ المجرم النازي لم يكن ليرتكب هذه الإبادة على مسمعكم ومرآكم إلّا وقد أمِن العقوبة، وضمِن الصمت، واشترى الخذلان…!

ليس انحرافاً ولا إخفاقاً أخلاقياً، بل وظيفة سياسية بنيوية

أين هي الأنظمة العربية؟
ولماذا لا تتدخل لنجدة أهلنا في غزة؟

تساؤلات ظلّت تتردد على مسامع الرأي العام طوال الشهور الماضية، في ظل إبادة مستمرة خلّفت عشرات الآلاف من الشهداء ودمارًا هائلًا طال البشر والحجر. وفي المشهد المقابل، تتكشف ممارسات لا يمكن حصرها في مقال واحد، يتسم بعضها بقدرٍ كبير من الوقاحة السياسية والأخلاقية، ما يستدعي التوقف عندها بوصفها مؤشراً واضحاً على حجم النفاق بين الخطاب والواقع.

فما نشهده اليوم لا يمكن اعتباره انحرافاً سياسياً أو خللاً طارئاً في أداء هذه الأنظمة، بل هو سلوكٌ منهجي يوضّح الدور والوظيفة اللذين تؤديهما هذه الأنظمة في المشهد الإقليمي الجيوسياسي.

مشهدُ إدخالِ النظامِ المصريِّ جرافاتٍ عبرَ معبرِ رفح للبحثِ عن جثثِ جنودٍ إسرائيليين عقب إعلان “وقف إطلاق النار”، جاء في وقتٍ لا يزال فيه أكثر من عشرةِ آلافِ فلسطيني مفقودين تحت أنقاضِ منازلهم المدمّرة، بينما ظلّ المعبر مغلقًا أمام المساعدات الإنسانية والإغاثية. هذا المشهد ليس حيادًا، بل مشاركة مباشرة في حصار غزة، عبر تقديم أولوية أمن الاحتلال على حياة الضحايا الفلسطينيين.

يتكامل المشهد الميداني مع البعد الاقتصادي، فخلال الإبادة أقدم النظام المصري بقيادة عبد الفتاح السيسي على إبرام أكبر صفقة لشراء الغاز من دولة الاحتلال بقيمة تُقدَّر بنحو 35 مليار دولار، وهو رقم يقارب نصف قيمة الخسائر التي تكبّدها الكيان منذ بداية الحرب الأخيرة على غزّة، تأكيداً على التزام النظام المصري بالاستمرار في تعزيز التبعية الاقتصادية والسياسية.

الإبادة المستمرة لم تمنع النظام الأردني من مواصلة التنسيق الأمني والاستخباراتي مع الاحتلال، بما شمل اعتقال مقاومين وتفكيك خلايا داخل الأردن، ومنع أي محاولة لنقل السلاح أو تقديم دعم فعلي للمقاومة الفلسطينية، في وقتٍ كان فيه المطلوب الحد الأدنى من الإسناد، لا المزيد من القمع. القتل الممنهج للشعب الفلسطيني لم يمنعه من مواصلة الاتفاقيات التجارية و استيراد الغاز الطبيعي والمياه من الكيان. يُظهر ذلك كيف أنَّ الاعتماد على الموارد الطبيعية مُتجذِّر في مسار التطبيع مع الكيان الصهيوني.

النظامُ القطريّ يقدم نفسه وسيطاً في إبادة غزة، غير أنّ وساطتَه تقتصرُ على إدارةِ ”هدوءٍ نسبيٍّ“ تحت السقف الأمريكي الإسرائيلي دون ممارسةِ أيّ ضغطٍ سياسيٍّ حقيقيٍّ على الاحتلال لوقف الإبادة. حتى المساعداتُ الماليةُ، فتقدَّم بموافقة الأميركي والإسرائيلي، لا لتحريرِ غزة أو تمكينِ المقاومة، بل كأداةٍ لإستكمال الإبادة الناعمة.

خلال الإبادة، عمل النظام السعودي على تطويق المقاومة عبر شيطنتها ووصفها بـ”الإرهاب”، وعزلها دبلوماسيًا وتحميلها مسؤولية الحرب، ما أسهم في نزع التعاطف العربي وتحويل بوصلة الإدانة من الاحتلال إلى المقاومة. وبذلك جرى نزع الشرعية الأخلاقية والسياسية عنها، وتقدّمت دعوات “التهدئة” بما يخدم إنهاء المقاومة لا وقف المجازر. ويندرج هذا الموقف ضمن سياسة أوسع لتفكيك محور المقاومة، وتحويل الصراع من مواجهة مع الكيان الإسرائيلي إلى نزاعات داخلية عربية تحت كذبة “مكافحة الإرهاب”. هذا الخطاب ليس جديدًا، بل هو امتداد مباشر للدعاية الصهيونية التي روّجت لعقود، مستخدمًا الآن من قبل النظام السعودي كأداة رسمية لسحب الشرعية عن أي نبض مقاوم للهيمنة.

دخل النظام المغربي في صفقات تسليح تُقدَّر بمئات ملايين الدولارات مع شركات إسرائيلية كبرى، على رأسها “ألبيت سيستمز”، شملت أنظمة مدفعية متقدمة، ومنظومات دفاع جوي، وطائرات من دون طيار، إضافة إلى شراكات في مجال التصنيع العسكري. اللافت أن عددًا من هذه الصفقات جرى تنفيذُه أو توسيعُه بالتزامن مع الإبادة الجارية في غزة. جاءت هذه الصفقات العسكرية في إطار اتفاقيات التطبيع أبراهام 2020، التي جعلت المغرب إلى أحد أكبر عملاء الصناعات العسكرية الإسرائيلية.

في السياق ذاته، وفي إطار إتفاقيات أبراهام، طبّعت الإمارات علاقاتها مع الكيان الصهيوني على كلّ الأصعدة، لاسيّما الصعيد الأمني والتطبيع استمرّ خلال الإبادة. ربطت تقارير متداولة النظامَ الإماراتي بإنشاء، تسليح ودعم ميليشيات مسلحة كمجموعة “ياسر أبو شباب”، متعاملة مع قوات الاحتلال، نفّذت أعمالًا تخدمه، من قطع طرق المساعدات ونهبها وبيعها بأسعار مرتفعة، إلى تنفيذ اغتيالات بحق مدنيين ومقاومين، والعمل ضد فصائل المقاومة بالتنسيق مع الاحتلال.

في البحرين، وفي سياق ما بعد التطبيع ضمن الاتفاقات عينها، أصدرت المحكمة البحرينية قراراً بسجن المناضل إبراهيم شريف ستة أشهر، بعد توجيه تهم إليه “بإهانة إسرائيل” والتحريض على الضغط الشعبي على الأنظمة من أجل إيقاف حرب غزة ، في رسالة واضحة لكل صوت يحاول كسر جدار التطبيع الرسمي.

أما السلطة الفلسطينية، فحدّث ولا حرج؛ إذ واصلت “التنسيق الأمني“ مع الاحتلال، من اعتقال المقاومين وتفكيك الخلايا، إلى شيطنة المقاومة، في مسعى منهجي لمنع أي ردّ شعبي أو مسلّح على الإبادة في الضفة الغربية دعمًا لغزة.

قبل 7 أكتوبر 2023، كانت الأنظمة العربية تتسابق، واحدة تلو الأخرى، نحو التطبيع مع الكيان الصهيوني. وتعد اتفاقيات أبراهام الدليل الأوضح على هذا الاتجاه. وكان الرهان الاستراتيجي الرئيسي لإسرائيل منصبًا على النظام السعودي. جاءت العملية العسكرية “طوفان الأقصى“، التي نفذتها المقاومة في غزة، كصرخة لإيقاف عمليات التطبيع. ومنذ ذلك الحين، تم تعليق إبرام اتفاقيات تطبيع جديدة، خاصة مع النظام السعودي.

ومع ذلك، فإن هذا لا يغيّر الواقع: تورط الأنظمة العربية في الإبادة المستمرة، واستمرار علاقاتها الاقتصادية والسياسية والعسكرية مع الكيان الصهيوني. ما يطرح سؤال حاسم: هل ما نشهده مجرد صدفة؟ عجز؟ خيانة؟ وما الذي يدفع الأنظمة العربية للانخراط في مثل هذه الممارسات؟ هل هي أعمال معزولة، أم نمط منهجي يخدم وظيفة محددة؟

إن الملاحظة العملية تكشف أن ممارسات هذه الأنظمة متكررة ومنتظمة، بما يُسقط عنها فرضية الصدفة. ولذا، فإن فهم هذا السلوك لا يكتمل بمجرد توصيفه أخلاقياً، بل يستدعي تفكيك جذوره البنيوية. فإذا كان الأمر أبعد من أن يكون عجزًا أو خيانة، فنحن إذن أمام وظيفة تأسيسية بنبوية، لا انحرافاً مفاجئاً عنها.

يتبع في الجزء الثاني …

The second part will examine the historical formation of these regimes, outlining the structural reasons that compel them to perform their current role and explaining why, by virtue of the function for which they were established, they cannot be part of any emancipatory project.

The third part will reveal the core pillars upon which the dependent Arab order rests, demonstrating why Gaza, through its model of resistance, represents an existential threat to this system.

I dedicate this series to Gaza and its martyrs,
and in particular to the martyr, spokesperson of the nation, Hudayfa Al Kahlout.
I recite his words to history:

“…Our enemy is supplied by the most powerful oppressive forces in the world with endless convoys of weapons and ammunition, while the regimes and powers of our nation watch as their brothers are killed by the tens of thousands and starved…

O leaders of this Islamic and Arab nation, O its elites, major parties, and scholars… your necks are burdened with the blood of tens of thousands of innocents who were betrayed by your silence. This criminal Nazi enemy would not have committed this genocide before your eyes and ears had it not felt secure from punishment, guaranteed your silence, and purchased your abandonment…!”

Neither Deviation nor Moral Failure, but Political and Foundational Function

Where are the Arab regimes?
Why do they not intervene to stop the genocide?

These questions have echoed across public opinion for months amid an ongoing genocide that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and inflicted massive destruction upon both people and infrastructure. In parallel, a range of practices has unfolded, too numerous to confine to a single article, some marked by striking political and moral shamelessness. These demand public and analytical scrutiny as they are clear indicators of the magnitude of hypocrisy between rhetoric and reality.

What we are witnessing today cannot be regarded as a political deviation or a temporary malfunction in the performance of the Arab regimes. Rather, it constitutes a systematic pattern of behavior that clarifies the function and role these regimes perform within the regional geopolitical order.

The Egyptian regime allowed bulldozers to enter through the Rafah crossing, with an expert team, under the pretext of searching for bodies of Israeli soldiers. This followed the announcement of a “ceasefire” while more than ten thousand Palestinians remained missing beneath the rubble of their destroyed homes. At the same time, the Egyptian regime kept the crossing closed to humanitarian aid. This was not neutrality; it was direct participation in the siege of Gaza by prioritizing the security of the Israeli occupying power over the lives of Palestinian victims.

The field dynamics are closely aligned with the economic dimension. During the genocide, the Egyptian regime under Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi concluded the largest gas purchase agreement with the occupying state, valued at approximately $35 billion; an amount nearly equivalent to half of the financial losses incurred by the Israeli entity since the beginning of the latest war on Gaza, thus reaffirming its commitment to deepening economic and political dependency.

The ongoing genocide did not prevent the Jordanian regime from continuing security and intelligence coordination with the occupation, including the arrest of resistance fighters and the dismantling of resistance cells in Jordan. At the same time preventing any attempt to transfer weapons or provide tangible support to the resistance in Palestine. The systematic killing of the Palestinian people did not halt the continuation of trade agreements or import of natural gas and water from the zionist entity. This shows how dependency on natural resources is embedded in normalisation with the entity.

The Qatari regime presents itself as a mediator in the Gaza genocide. Rather than confronting the occupation, its mediation is confined to policing a conditional “calm” within American-Israeli limits, deliberately avoiding political pressure and leverage necessary to halt the genocide. Even financial aid is delivered only with Israeli and American approval, not to liberate Gaza or empower the resistance, but as an instrument to facilitate the continuation of a “soft” form of annihilation.

During the genocide, the Saudi regime worked to contain the resistance by demonizing it and labeling it “terrorism”, diplomatically isolating it and attributing responsibility for the genocide to it. This contributed to eroding Arab sympathy and redirecting condemnation away from the occupation and toward the resistance. In this way, the moral and political legitimacy was stripped from the resistance, while calls for “de-escalation” advanced in a manner serving the elimination of resistance rather than the cessation of massacres.

This position falls within a broader policy framework of dismantling the resistance axis and transforming the struggle from a confrontation with the zionist entity into intra-Arab disputes under the pretext of “counterterrorism”. This discourse is not new; it is a direct extension of zionist propaganda promoted for decades, now deployed by the Saudi regime as an official instrument to withdraw legitimacy from any movement resisting hegemony.

The Moroccan regime entered into arms deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with major Israeli companies, foremost among them Elbit Systems. These included advanced artillery systems, air defense platforms, drones, and partnerships in military manufacturing. Notably, several of these deals were executed or expanded concurrently with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. These military agreements were concluded within the framework of the 2020 Abraham Normalization Accords, which have made Morocco one of the largest clients of Israeli military industries.

In the same context, and within the Abraham Accords framework, the United Arab Emirates normalized relations with the zionist entity across all levels, particularly in the security sphere, and normalization continued throughout the genocide. Circulating reports have linked the Emirati regime to the establishment, arming, and support of armed militias such as the “Yasser Abu Shabab” group, cooperating with occupation forces. These militias reportedly carried out actions serving the occupation, from blocking and looting aid and reselling it at inflated prices, to carrying out assassinations against civilians and resistance members, and operating against resistance factions in coordination with the occupation.

In Bahrain, in the aftermath of normalization under the same agreements, a Bahraini court sentenced activist Ibrahim Sharif to six months in prison on charges of “insulting Israel” and inciting public pressure on regimes to stop the war on Gaza. This sent an unmistakable message to any voice attempting to breach the wall of official normalization.

As for the Palestinian Authority, its “security coordination” with the occupation continued unabated, from arresting resistance members, dismantling cells in a systematic attempt to prevent any popular or armed response in the West Bank to support Gaza.

Before October 7, 2023, Arab regimes were racing, one after another, toward normalization with the zionist entity. The Abraham Accords stand as the clearest evidence of this trend. ‘Israel’s’ major strategic bet was on the Saudi regime. The military operation “Al-Aqsa Flood”, carried out by the resistance in Gaza, was a cry to halt the normalization process. The establishment of new normalization agreements, especially with the Saudi regime, has since been put on hold.

This, however, does not change the intertwined reality: the complicity of Arab regimes in the genocide and their ongoing economic, political, and military normalisation with the zionist entity. A decisive question emerges; is what we are witnessing mere coincidence? Incapacity? Betrayal? What drives Arab regimes to engage in such practices? Are these isolated actions, or a systematic pattern serving a specific function?

Empirical observation reveals that these practices are repeated and consistent, thus nullifying the hypothesis of coincidence. Understanding this conduct therefore cannot be confined to moral description; it requires deconstructing its structural roots. If the matter extends beyond incapacity or betrayal, then we are confronting a foundational function, not an unexpected deviation from it.

To be continued in Part II …

This document, started by the the editorial team of the Sufficiency & Wellbeing Magazine, outlines how we understand degrowth. For a topic as multidimensional as degrowth, we decided to format this “definition” as an open-ended list and keep it in a living document, in line with Timothée Parrique’s analysis of degrowth’s (lack of a single) definition. In the spirit of prosocial collaboration, which the degrowth movement values greatly, we welcome comments and additions to this document, which we will incorporate periodically into the existing list.

In summary, we view degrowth as an expansion of social justice to all members of society, alongside the promotion of human well-being within the limits of Earth, through a selective reduction of production and consumption to lighten ecological footprint, planned democratically in the spirit of socio-ecological justice. The following list provides more detail.

We understand degrowth as:

1. a social movement that aims to decolonize the global economy through by delinking Global North consumption from Global South production and neocolonial systems of extraction.

2. an anti-capitalist paradigm that calls for a global downscaling of production and consumption (prosumption), re-organization of economic activities to prioritize wellbeing, and redistribution of wealth

3. requiring a shift in worldview, from a dualist perspective that separates humans and nature, to one that embraces the value of all life

4. a vision of a future where humans live in harmony among all life, economic and political decisions are made democratically, and ...

5. a rejection of growthism

6. a rejection of institutions that use abusive and illegitimate debt, unequal exchange and finance to impose austerity on countries both at the core and the periphery

7. a rejection of ethno-supremacist organizations, projects or states

8. the recognition of social and environmental limits on economic systems, which needs to be assessed

9. the recognition that technology cannot overcome the physical and thermodynamic constraints of growth, and it cannot be the solution to all social challenges

10. A plural framework that acknowledges the impossibility of capitalism to satisfy human needs within planetary boundaries and with justice, as well as almost infinite ways of being.

11. leveraging Western scientific methods, post-scientific approaches, and ancestral knowledge in a non-hierarchical way, subject to scrutiny

12. recognizing the importance of expertise and knowledge, but not at the expense of democratic planning and human agency

13. evaluating all technology to be subject to convivial and regenerative principles

14. creating spaces of non-violent communication, and supporting the ongoing process of transformation, even with contradictions

15. recognizing and leveraging other areas of knowledge beyond beyond any particular discipline, including ecological economics, and Eurocentric contributions

16. accepting that it does not have all the answers and works towards difficult debates on resistance, industry, culture, migration, freedom, democracy, and war beyond the slogan

17. pointing to mainstream economics as a theology to justify violent implementation of capitalism worldwide

18. defending the unconditional and universal rights to basic services to all humans and defending the unconditional and universal rights to life of all living beings

19. having limits on the freedom of expression, and opposing ideas that put the rights of human collectives and/or nature at risk

20. being internationalist in its framework and strategies, while recognizing local sovereignty

21. understanding both the geopolitics of global eco-social systems but also socioeconomic class as essential frameworks to assess power relations. National averages do not explain it all.

22. acknowledging the disproportionate responsibility of certain national states, corporations and social elites in the pluricrisis, and not blaming humanity at large or entire populations equally

23. accepting that there are many paths that are legitimate and effective to achieve global justice, safety and emancipation for all, including non-humans

24. unconditionally opposing colonialism, apartheid, patriarchy, and racism

25. a paradigm that considers capitalism to be incompatible with human and nature rights, deeply undemocratic, imposes violence and should therefore be dismantled

26. recognizing the need to pursue personal and local transformations, but also recognizing the limits to localized strategies and the need to achieve global justice and the protections of human rights and the rights of nature

27. giving voice to the silenced ones, those whose ideas and livelihoods have for too long been attacked, erased or ridiculed

28. supporting the need for reparations and the dismantling of abusive debt and trade agreements to those countries subject to (neo)colonialism

29. refusing ideologies that portray humans as inherently egoistic, violent and problematic to planetary health

30. considering consider that while there are limits to population, the problem is in inequality, not absolute population at any close time horizon

31. pursuing more economic democracy, so people have a direct relationship to and responsibility for deciding how resources are used

32. recognizing the global exploitation of care work, which is mostly carried by racialised women, and a need for that work to be valued, distributed, and repurposed as such

33. pursuing societies that are regenerative and redistributive by design

34. understanding the urgent need to deal with the global under-provisioning of billions of people, reduce social metabolism in high income countries, and eliminate superfluous and harmful production, to change productive and reproductive systems to return balance to life-supporting systems and our own collective health

35. refusing the imposition of any religion to any population, or discrimination of any type based on religion, ethnicity or origin

36. considering human and nature rights to be beyond electoral processes, private property rights (if any) and in the interest of any collective

37. a policy toolkit that undoes the fundamental forces of capitalism (proportionality, hierarchies, and dispossession)

38. being the context that ought to guide the designing of moral principles for the new economy

39. offering the material boundaries for a compassionate spiritual philosophy without itself being a spiritual philosophy

40. accepting and requiring maximum limits on wealth, as advanced by limitarianism

Teo: Buenos días desde Chile. La verdad es que es una historia que podría ser muy larga, pero trataré de resumirla. Todo nace de mi amor por la naturaleza; fui scout desde niño y siempre estuve muy vinculado a la vida al aire libre y a los bosques. Sin embargo, mi carrera profesional inicial fue la arquitectura, una disciplina que, lamentablemente, en su formación académica suele desligarse del contacto directo con la tierra.

Siempre sentí que me faltaba algo, ese contacto real. La magia de la vida me llevó a cumplir un sueño que tenía desde pequeño: vivir y estar en comunidades indígenas en Latinoamérica. Gracias a la universidad pude viajar y habitar territorios en lugares como Paraguay, observando la naturaleza desde una perspectiva no utilitarista, sino mucho más armónica. Allí vi cómo estas comunidades modificaban su selva para integrar plantas productivas, pero manteniendo el equilibrio, sin actuar como un humano dominador.

Esa experiencia sembró en mí el interés por la ecología y la relación entre el humano y el medio ambiente. Posteriormente, al mudarme a Chile, conocí el concepto de los bosques comestibles y la permacultura. Me di cuenta de que mi formación en arquitectura me daba una perspectiva espacial y de diseño útil, pero necesitaba profundizar en botánica y ecología. Así que ha sido un camino muy autodidacta, de mucha experiencia práctica.

Alan: Es fascinante cómo la observación de las prácticas indígenas rompe con la idea de que el ser humano solo puede destruir. Para quienes no estén familiarizados con el término, ¿podrías explicarnos qué es exactamente un bosque comestible y en qué se diferencia de una huerta tradicional o de un bosque convencional?

Teo: La palabra clave aquí es “bosque”. Aunque en inglés se le llama Forest Garden (jardín bosque), el objetivo principal es imitar la estructura y funcionalidad de un bosque a través del diseño.

La diferencia fundamental con una huerta radica en la sucesión ecológica y los estratos. En una huerta solías pensar en ciclos cortos, pero aquí cambiamos la perspectiva temporal y espacial. Integramos especies anuales (como una acelga), con bianuales, especies de vida media (como una alcachofa de 5 años) y especies de larga vida (como una papaya de 15 años, un melocotón de 20 o un pino piñonero que puede vivir 500 años).

Además, trabajamos con estratos asociados al tamaño y estructura de las plantas. Buscamos una alta biodiversidad y multifuncionalidad. Utilizamos especies “multipropósito”: algunas nos dan alimento, otras alimentan a las aves o insectos (melíferas), otras producen aceites, fibras o madera, y otras sirven para fertilizar el sistema captando nitrógeno o generando biomasa. Visualmente, buscamos esa belleza del bosque, ese aparente desorden que en realidad es un caos perfecto.

Alan: Mencionas una complejidad mayor en cuanto a interacciones. ¿Dirías que el bosque comestible requiere un diseño mucho más complejo que una huerta, aunque luego el mantenimiento sea menor?

Teo: Sí, el nivel de complejidad es mayor porque manejas muchas más especies y sus interacciones en el tiempo. Requiere más conocimiento o asesoramiento. En una huerta, si plantas algo y sale mal, en tres meses corriges. Aquí, gestionas árboles que estarán años contigo. Tienes que pensar mucho en el clima y el suelo específico; un avellano se da bien en Alemania pero no funcionará en Sevilla por la falta de frío.

El diseño es vital para planificarse, pero no es estático. Es muy probable que al segundo año te des cuenta de errores o de especies que mueren, y tengas que replantear estrategias. Es un proceso dinámico, no una receta fija donde plantas y esperas la cosecha.

Alan: Hablemos de casos prácticos. Actualmente gestionas un proyecto familiar cerca de Sevilla. ¿Podrías describirnos el terreno y los desafíos que presenta ese clima?

Teo: Es un terreno familiar de unos 4,000 m² donde conviven nuestras casas con el bosque. Es un espacio multifuncional donde buscamos autosuficiencia, diversidad de frutas, generar biomasa y belleza, además de ser un espacio educativo donde imparto cursos.

El clima de Sevilla es un reto: mediterráneo continental. Tenemos inviernos fríos, pero lo más limitante es el calor extremo, con veranos de 40°C y sequía. El suelo es arcilloso, compactado y calcáreo. La estrategia principal para sobrevivir al verano es el manejo del suelo. Utilizamos “mulch” o cobertura, que puede ser viva (plantas cubre suelos como calabazas o menta) o muerta (paja, cartón, lana de oveja, chips de madera). Aplicamos capas gruesas, de 30 cm o más. Esto es vital para proteger la microbiología del suelo, mantener la humedad de las lluvias de primavera hasta julio y reducir la evaporación.

Alan: ¿Y cómo manejas la selección de especies con ese calor tan intenso?

Teo: Usamos plantas “nodriza” o de soporte. Son especies rústicas de crecimiento rápido que generan sombra para proteger a las más delicadas. Por ejemplo, en Sevilla no puedo poner un aguacate al sol directo porque se quema. Lo planto debajo de una adelfa; con el tiempo, iré podando la adelfa y el aguacate la sobrepasará, ocupando su estrato.

También hay que ser muy cuidadosos con los requerimientos de frío. Especies como cerezos, arándanos o avellanos no funcionan bien allí. En cambio, priorizamos especies subtropicales que aman el calor (guayabas, papayas) y, sobre todo, especies nativas mediterráneas rústicas como higueras, granados y perales, que garantizan la estructura y resistencia del sistema.

Alan: También mencionaste un proyecto en Chile con características muy diferentes.

Teo: Sí, ese fue mi primer bosque comestible, iniciado hace unos 5 o 6 años. Es un entorno más salvaje, mezclado con bosque nativo y con suelo más fértil. Lo interesante de ese caso es que, por circunstancias de la vida, lo “abandoné” durante dos años, dejando solo el riego automatizado. Al volver, pude ver la resiliencia del sistema. Algunas plantas murieron, pero otras prosperaron y se adaptaron sin intervención humana. Fue un experimento involuntario de selección natural y desapego.

Alan: Para la gente que se plantea iniciar un proyecto así, la gran duda suelen ser los recursos. En un terreno de esas dimensiones (4,000 m²), ¿de qué inversión de tiempo y dinero estamos hablando?

Teo: Es muy variable y escalable, pero para darte una referencia: en términos de dinero, el mantenimiento anual puede rondar entre 1,000 y 2,000 euros, reduciéndose con el tiempo. El mayor gasto es al inicio (plantas, sistema de riego, infraestructura).

En cuanto al tiempo, diría que una media de un día a la semana es suficiente. Hay picos de trabajo intenso durante la plantación en invierno, y valles de mera observación en verano. Lo bonito es que tú diseñas también tu nivel de mantenimiento. El humano actúa como un acelerador de la sucesión ecológica: si trabajas más (podas, abonas, riegas), el bosque evoluciona más rápido. Pero si no tienes tiempo y lo dejas estar, el sistema sigue funcionando a su ritmo, como pasó en Chile. La idea es que sea un hobby o una forma de vida, no una carga laboral extra.

Alan: ¿Y qué hay de la producción? Aunque lleve solo dos años el proyecto de Sevilla, ¿ya obtienen alimentos significativos?

Teo: Sí, es sorprendente. Integramos mucha huerta dentro del bosque aprovechando el sol de los primeros años. Tenemos calabazas para todo el año, pimientos, tomates cherry, y frutas como limones y naranjas. La clave es concatenar variedades: plantamos distintos tipos de naranjos para que produzcan de forma escalonada, teniendo fruta desde diciembre hasta abril, por ejemplo.

En un horizonte de 5 años, esperamos ser autosuficientes en fruta. En bosques más maduros, como el de mi mentor en Chile (10 años), el desafío cambia: ya no es cultivar, sino gestionar la abundancia. Tienes tantos excedentes (nueces, melocotones) que entras en dinámicas de conservación, deshidratación y soberanía alimentaria real.

Alan: Para cerrar, Teo, ¿qué consejo le darías a alguien que quiere empezar pero tiene miedo de no saber suficiente o de equivocarse?

Teo: Les diría que pierdan el miedo a plantar. La muerte es parte del proceso; si una planta muere, su biomasa alimenta al suelo y aprendes de ello. No hay recetas perfectas, cada lugar es único.

Una recomendación clave es la observación: mira qué plantaban los ancianos del lugar, qué especies nativas prosperan en tu zona. Esa es tu base segura. Y luego, planta muy denso. A las plantas les gusta estar juntas, cooperan entre ellas (efecto nodriza) más de lo que compiten.

Finalmente, hay que entender esto como un acto de trascendencia. Quizás plantamos árboles cuya sombra o frutos no disfrutaremos en su plenitud, pero estamos dejando un regalo. Nosotros comemos hoy manzanas que alguien plantó hace décadas; es nuestro turno de dejar ese legado para las generaciones futuras.

Alan: Un mensaje inspirador para terminar. Muchísimas gracias, Teo.

Teo: Gracias a ti, un abrazo.

La entrevista completa puede verse en el siguiente enlace:

English translation below

Teo, the Andalusian architect of food forests

Alan: Good afternoon, Teo. Thank you very much for taking the time to explain your work to us. To begin, we would like to learn about your life story. How did you move from your initial background to becoming so deeply interested in ecosystem restoration and edible forests?

Teo: Greetings from Chile. The truth is that it’s a story that could be very long, but I’ll try to summarize it. It all stems from my love for nature; I was a scout as a child and was always closely connected to outdoor life and forests. However, my initial professional career was architecture, a discipline that, unfortunately, in its academic training often disconnects from direct contact with the land.

I always felt something was missing — that real contact. Life’s magic led me to fulfill a childhood dream: living in and being part of Indigenous communities in Latin America. Thanks to university, I was able to travel and inhabit territories in places like Paraguay, observing nature from a non-utilitarian, much more harmonious perspective. There I saw how these communities modified their forest to integrate productive plants while maintaining balance, without acting as dominating humans.

That experience planted in me an interest in ecology and the relationship between humans and the environment. Later, when I moved to Chile, I discovered the concept of edible forests and permaculture. I realized that my architectural training gave me a useful spatial and design perspective, but I needed to deepen my knowledge of botany and ecology. So it has been a largely self-taught path, full of practical experience.

Alan: It is fascinating how observing Indigenous practices breaks with the idea that humans can only destroy. For those unfamiliar with the term, could you explain what exactly an edible forest is and how it differs from a traditional garden or a conventional forest?

Teo: The key word here is ‘forest.’ Although in English it is called a Forest Garden, the main objective is to imitate the structure and functionality of a forest through design.

The fundamental difference from a vegetable garden lies in ecological succession and strata. In a garden, you usually think in short cycles, but here we change the temporal and spatial perspective. We integrate annual species (such as chard), biennials, medium-life species (such as a 5-year artichoke), and long-lived species (such as a 15-year papaya, a 20-year peach tree, or a stone pine that can live 500 years).

In addition, we work with strata associated with plant size and structure. We seek high biodiversity and multifunctionality. We use multipurpose species: some provide food, others feed birds or insects (nectar plants), others produce oils, fibers or timber, and others fertilize the system by capturing nitrogen or generating biomass. Visually, we seek that forest beauty — that apparent disorder which is actually a perfect chaos.

Alan: You mention greater complexity in terms of interactions. Would you say that an edible forest requires a much more complex design than a garden, even if maintenance later is lower?

Teo: Yes, the level of complexity is greater because you manage many more species and their interactions over time. It requires more knowledge or guidance. In a garden, if something fails, you correct it in three months. Here you manage trees that will be with you for years. You must carefully consider climate and soil; a hazelnut tree thrives in Germany but will not work in Seville due to lack of cold hours.

Design is vital for planning, but it is not static. By the second year you will likely notice mistakes or species that die, and you will need to rethink strategies. It is a dynamic process, not a fixed recipe where you plant and wait for harvest.

Alan: Let’s talk about practical cases. You currently manage a family project near Seville. Could you describe the land and the challenges of that climate?

Teo: It is a family plot of about 4,000 m² where our homes coexist with the forest. It is a multifunctional space where we seek self-sufficiency, fruit diversity, biomass generation, beauty, and an educational space where I teach courses.

Seville’s climate is challenging: continental Mediterranean. Winters are cold, but the most limiting factor is extreme heat, with summers reaching 40°C and drought. The soil is clayey, compacted, and calcareous. The main survival strategy for summer is soil management. We use mulch or ground cover, either living (groundcover plants such as pumpkins or mint) or dead (straw, cardboard, sheep wool, wood chips). We apply thick layers of 30 cm or more. This is vital to protect soil microbiology, retain spring rain moisture until July, and reduce evaporation.

Alan: How do you manage species selection with such intense heat?

Teo: We use nurse or support plants. These are hardy, fast-growing species that create shade to protect more delicate plants. For example, in Seville I cannot plant an avocado in direct sun because it burns. I plant it under an oleander; over time I prune the oleander and the avocado surpasses it, occupying its own stratum.

We must also be careful with chill-hour requirements. Species such as cherries, blueberries, or hazelnuts do not work well there. Instead, we prioritize subtropical species that love heat (guavas, papayas) and especially hardy native Mediterranean species such as figs, pomegranates, and pear trees, which ensure structure and resilience.

Alan: You also mentioned a project in Chile with very different characteristics.

Teo: Yes, that was my first edible forest, started 5 or 6 years ago. It is a wilder environment, mixed with native forest and more fertile soil. Interestingly, due to life circumstances, I ‘abandoned’ it for two years, leaving only automated irrigation. When I returned, I saw the system’s resilience. Some plants died, but others thrived and adapted without human intervention. It was an unintentional experiment in natural selection and detachment.

Alan: For those considering starting such a project, resources are often the main concern. On land of this size (4,000 m²), what kind of time and financial investment are we talking about?

Teo: It is very variable and scalable, but as a reference: annual maintenance may range between €1,000 and €2,000, decreasing over time. The biggest cost is at the beginning (plants, irrigation system, infrastructure).

In terms of time, I would say an average of one day per week is sufficient. There are peaks of intense work during winter planting and quieter periods of observation in summer. The beautiful part is that you also design your level of maintenance. Humans act as accelerators of ecological succession: if you work more (prune, fertilize, irrigate), the forest evolves faster. But if you lack time and leave it alone, the system continues functioning at its own pace, as happened in Chile.The idea is that it becomes a hobby or a way of life, not an extra workload.

Alan: What about production? Although the Seville project is only two years old, are you already obtaining significant food?

Teo: Yes, it is surprising. We integrate many vegetables within the forest, taking advantage of the sun in the early years. We have pumpkins for the entire year, peppers, cherry tomatoes, and fruits such as lemons and oranges. The key is to chain varieties: we plant different types of orange trees so they produce in stages, having fruit from December to April, for example.

In a five-year horizon, we expect to be self-sufficient in fruit. In more mature forests, like my mentor’s in Chile (10 years old), the challenge changes: it is no longer about cultivation but managing abundance. You have so many surpluses (nuts, peaches) that you enter into preservation, dehydration, and real food sovereignty dynamics.

Alan: To close, Teo, what advice would you give to someone who wants to start but fears not knowing enough or making mistakes?

Teo: I would tell them to lose the fear of planting. Death is part of the process; if a plant dies, its biomass feeds the soil and you learn from it. There are no perfect recipes — every place is unique.

A key recommendation is observation: look at what elders planted in your area, which native species thrive there. That is your safe foundation. And then plant densely. Plants like to be together; they cooperate (nurse effect) more than they compete.

Finally, understand this as an act of transcendence. Perhaps we plant trees whose shade or fruits we will not fully enjoy, but we are leaving a gift. Today we eat apples planted decades ago by someone else; now it is our turn to leave that legacy for future generations.

Alan: An inspiring message to end with. Thank you very much, Teo.

Teo: Thank you, a big hug.

The full interview can be seen at the following link:

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Vlad Bunea: You wrote the book, Anthropause. The Beauty of Degrowth, for which I have been waiting a long time! A book that shows how degrowth is, in fact, a very positive vision for a post-capitalist economy. What prompted you to write the book?

Stan Cox: I have been writing against growthism for twenty years or so, and in recent years have been cheering the degrowth movement from the sidelines. One day, my editor, Greg Ruggiero, suggested that I consider writing a book under the one-word title ‘Anthropause’—a term coined by ecologists to refer to the reduction in environmental damage and the flourishing of the natural world that occurred when restrictions on human activity were imposed in the early months of the COVID19 pandemic.

After reading some of the papers that had been published about the anthropause, I decided that it could serve as a good opening parable for a book on degrowth. Not to advocate [for] pandemic-style lockdowns, of course, but to engage in a thought experiment in which the United States (or any other rich, over-consuming country or region) puts strict, declining caps on the quantities of extracted resources, focuses resource use on equitable satisfaction of basic human needs, and refrains from resource use for profit and growth. I then would consider some of the evils, harms, dangers, frustrations, and annoyances—some small and mundane, others catastrophic—that such a society would necessarily leave behind in the trash can of history.

VB: A recent survey showed that degrowth, once properly explained and understood, is quite popular. Can we say that degrowth has won the battle of narratives?

SC: Those survey results were striking. When people were asked whether they favored degrowth without being given a description of what degrowth would mean in practice, about three-fourths said no way would they want degrowth. Not surprising; we’ve been told all our lives that endless growth is essential to civilization’s survival. But when, instead, the features and practices of a degrowth society were described to them without using the word “degrowth”, about three fourths said, yes, they would like to see us move toward such a society.

Many have worried that the degrowth label is an obstacle to acceptance of the concept. But degrowth scholars and advocates have always maintained that the term is intentionally provocative, to help strip away growth’s shiny aura. And I think the label has become a clear asset in recent years, as the devastation caused by growth and the violent competition over resources has become more starkly obvious.

The movement has also gained ground by making it clearer that degrowth is for affluent countries and populations, not for societies that do not have sufficient resources to meet basic human needs. In fact, one of the big ways in which our rich countries can help resource-poor countries is to end our own plunder of the Earth and exploitation of human beings.

It seems even the experts—often the hardest nuts to crack—are being won over. Another survey, this one of almost 800 climate-policy researchers, found that 73 percent favor degrowth or no-growth over green growth.

VB: Your book gives many examples of how life can be lived with a genuine sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, without such a high environmental impact. Can you give us some of these examples?

SC: I like to introduce these lists of examples with a statement of what the book is not arguing. I’m not saying that the way to prevent ecological and civilizational collapse is to work our way through individual problematic features of our society, one by one, and fix them. It’s the precise converse: When societies deeply cut resource use and overall ecological impact, while focusing on sufficiency and justice for all, they will naturally have to stop causing such problems, and we’ll realize myriad benefits.

In the book, I start with some seemingly minor harms and irritations that would be jettisoned on our way to a future with lower resource extraction and use and that will greatly improve wellbeing. With less industrial energy available, for example, we’ll produce far less noise pollution (for which I use the leaf blower as a poster child) and light pollution (for which I use the blotting out of the night sky and human and ecological health problems that have been caused by the huge increase in outdoor lighting over the past decade and a half).

We can also say goodbye to one of the most widely despised features of the capitalist economy: commercial advertising. With the economy aimed at producing necessary goods and services, there will be little need for an industry whose purpose is to convince people that they need or want stuff they would not otherwise buy. Another burden lifted, along with its harmful psychological and social effects, would be the overabundance of material goods that plagues American households, in particular.

Reduced fossil fuel supplies will also mean fewer vehicles on the road. As during the anthropause, such a reduction in traffic will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But in many ways, it will also improve quality of life (and could even preserve the lives) of people who walk from place to place in and around US cities. Pedestrian deaths on our roadways have leaped by more than 70 percent in the past 15 years, as deaths of people struck by increasingly tall, heavy pickups and SUVs climbed a whopping 140 percent. As if that’s not bad enough, in a 16-month period during 2020-21, US drivers intentionally rammed their vehicles into groups of protesters 139 times.

With private vehicles largely replaced by extensive transit networks and bike and foot traffic, we also won’t have to contend with road-raging drivers in armored pickup trucks the size of World War II tanks. Urban and suburban dwellers won’t face the health dangers of air and noise pollution from heavy vehicle traffic. With less need for parking lots and multi-lane roadways, much of the pavement now blanketing our cities can give way to green space, reducing the summertime urban heat island effect.

VB: In a degrowth-like economy, as you have pointed out, we could work for as little as 21 hours per week and have the rest of time to ourselves. How would work be defined in a degrowth-like economy, and how would it relate to the notion of care?

SC: It appears that cutting the work week by half is among the most popular degrowth ideas! And the degrowth vision goes much further, calling for a complete overhaul of paid employment, workplaces, and working time, both paid and unpaid. Simply by not producing superfluous, harmful, unjust, or ecocidal goods and services, a society can deeply reduce the total number of hours worked. Adapting to that, it is said, would be best achieved through worker-owned cooperatives. And universal basic income and services will be needed to ensure sufficiency and fairness.

Reduced time spent in paid employment will leave people more time for doing things themselves for which they now have to pay someone—childcare being the prime example. There will be more time for household self-provisioning and joining in community efforts of all kinds.

Just as much of what is now paid work may become unpaid, some currently unpaid work may become paid, to redress the unfair distribution of paid and unpaid work time. More equitable allocation both between the sexes and among racial and ethnic groups will be especially important.

Such shifts will probably be most dramatic when it comes to care work, much of which involves taking care of family, friends, or the home and is unpaid. Care work outside the home, in childcare, elder care, education, health, social services, and other areas, is often badly underpaid. Degrowth visions always stress the need for an overhaul in the way care work is allocated and compensated.

VB: Would you say that degrowth is ideological in nature, similar to socialism?

SC: Degrowth is absolutely inherently anti-capitalist, because a capitalist economy can’t survive without growth. Most degrowth advocates foresee radically egalitarian societies with governance through small-d democratic processes and workers’ control of production. With that, we are into uncharted territory. No self-identified socialist or communist states of this or the previous century have eschewed growth, much less worked to reverse it. (Rightly so in most cases, because they started out needing to deal with extensive poverty in their country). Instead, most have prioritized increasing production.

I agree with Kohei Saito, the author of the Japanese bestseller Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (available in English translation), who argues that the society we’re envisioning here would most accurately be termed “degrowth communism”. Indeed, degrowth could finally provide a way to achieve the kind of small-c communism originally envisioned by Marx and Engels, in which everyone’s equal and produces what they can and gets what they need. Degrowth communism would even do their vision one better by creating a society that can be sustained long into the future without ruining the ecosphere that sustains us.

VB: Thank you, Stan.

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Mainstream understanding of ‘work’ and value

What we imagine as work has profound implications for environmental resources because every activity is energy-intensive; and on social justice, particularly in terms of which activities are deemed socially (in)valuable and whose bodies, often gendered and racialised bodies, perform those activities. Under contemporary capitalism, value is primarily assigned to work that drives economic growth, while socially necessary forms of care, community, and familial labor are devalued, and the system’s hidden social and environmental costs remain unaccounted for and invisibilized. Even if societies succeed in downscaling economic systems away from growth-oriented capitalist objectives, a post-capitalist future does not automatically ensure that sufficiency-oriented work is shared equally among genders, racialised groups, and oppressed peoples across global scales. This is why gender and intersectionality (gender interlocks with other sources of oppression like race, caste, and class) are a crucial lens through which to interrogate the unequal distribution of labour, and for supporting post-capitalist and sufficiency-based activities.

A short documentary representation of this article can be found here:

In this article, I examine the rift between productive work, understood as economic production, and reproductive work, understood as socially necessary care work that regenerates life, in the context of agrarian economies in the Global South living under post-colonial situations. Here, I draw on findings from my doctoral fieldwork, conducted in 2022, in the rural regions of eastern India, specifically in West Bengal and Odisha. My research explored how rural cultivators are adapting to climate-aggravated water scarcity and droughts, and how gender and intersectionality shape adaptation labour. Adopting a narrative approach, the article highlights the voices of rural women, especially from Puruliya district, a drought-prone region in West Bengal, and other villages in western Odisha. These voices are followed by an analysis of the concept of work that is not only critical of capitalist framings of production boundaries but also takes a feminist and decolonial turn. The feminist turn centres rural women’s perspectives as embodied, because environmental experiences and sufferings are located in bodies, and situated in histories of colonial violence and ongoing imperialistic subjugation that benefit the global elite class. The decolonial perspective brings historically marginalised and post-colonial knowledges to the forefront, as well as epistemologies or knowledges that remain largely invisible within mainstream and Eurocentric critiques of capitalism, and imaginations of post-capitalist futures.

Reconceptualising ‘work’ through rural women’s lived experiences

In rural Odisha and West Bengal, the gender gap in labour was stark and openly acknowledged by men and women. Most women farmers reported performing 70-80% (field diary) of farm-related tasks, including sowing, weeding, harvesting, processing, and storing crops, while also bearing a disproportionate share of household responsibilities. During a focus group discussion with Dalit farmers across genders in Puruliya, the following conversation took place:

Dalit women: Women farmers have more workload.

Dalit men: Men are responsible for ploughing and broadcasting the seeds. After that, women do most of the farm work.

Dalit women: What do the men do? They only plough and disperse the seeds. That’s it. Women do everything. We leave at 6 in the morning and return at 6 in the evening. Men work for half the day, and women work till the evening. This is the case in the months of May, June, and July. We work for 12 hours.

- Notes from a focus group discussion with the Dalit community, traditional instrument makers, Puruliya, West Bengal, 8^th March, 2022

These conversations demonstrate that both rural women and men are aware of women’s excess workload compared to that of men. Importantly, women conceptualise work in ways that extend beyond the conventional income production boundary. This perspective became more clear in my conversation with another participant from a different household in the same village in Puruliya:

Just like husbands perform work, women also perform work. If men work outside, women work inside the home. We wake up at 5 a.m. and pray to God to protect our home. Then we do the Maruli ritual, during which we sprinkle pure water throughout the house. After that, we clean the house and the utensils. Around 7 a.m., we wash our faces and have tea, and at 9 a.m. we eat muri, flaked rice, with something for breakfast. Then we feed our children, drop them at school, and finally take a bath ourselves and have lunch at 12 p.m. These are the kinds of work we do (laughs). In the evening, we make rotis for the men. We do not like rotis; we like rice more (laughs). In the village, we enjoy rice more. For lunch, we eat rice, dal, vegetables, pickles, and one fried item such as potato fry or fish fry. On some days, we also cook fish curry or meat curry. For dinner, we eat the same food. We buy vegetables from the bazaar and the local haat (community-based market). Women do most of the cooking, but if guests come from outside, our husbands sometimes help us.

- Excerpts from a conversation with a Dalit woman from the Natua or traditional dancers community, Puruliya, West Bengal, 8^th March, 2022

In this narrative, the participant redefines ‘work’ outside the capitalist and patriarchal framing of the economy, which categorises activities beyond agricultural production or those lacking exchange value as ‘non-work.’ For rural women, every activity geared toward the reproduction of everyday subsistence life constitutes work. Subsistence here implies not bare survival, but women’s collective “autonomy and agency and economic self-sufficiency” as well as a means of “resisting the global capitalist economy and its patriarchal, colonial control over women, means of production, and the land.” Labouring for water is then embedded within a bundle of everyday care activities that reproduce rural households and sustain traditional and subsistence ways of living. This labour serves multiple purposes, including rituals, cleaning, bathing children, cooking, and drinking, and is primarily managed by women on a daily basis. During periods of water scarcity, water is reused for cattle and kitchen gardens, the adaptation labour largely borne by women owing to their gender role as caregivers by default. While some tasks are shared among family members, women overwhelmingly bear these responsibilities.

The everyday labour of rural women can be summarised as performing rituals like Maruli, a predawn practice that involves fetching water, sprinkling it inside the home for blessings, followed by mixing water with gobar (cow-dung) to clean and disinfect the household. Their day then unfolds in continuous and time-consuming processes of reproductive labour: preparing meals, fetching water, cleaning, and caring for children, husbands, and family members. For poorer women, the burden is greater, because in addition to finishing their own household chores, they also work as wage labourers on others’ farms or as domestic helpers in richer households. The day concludes with final rounds of cooking, serving, and cleaning. When I asked about their workload, most women expressed that they are so occupied throughout the day that their bodies feel exhausted, barely finding time to rest. Climatic disasters threaten subsistence ways of living, pushing women especially toward conditions of severe exhaustion and bare survival.

Reimagining work beyond growth

As evident in the narratives, gendered inequality in labour persists because the capitalist economy rewards outputs and production, thereby dismissing process-based activities such as cooking, cleaning, caregiving, maintaining water security, and conserving nature as ‘non-work.’ As a result, care and emotional labour end up being absorbed within patriarchal gender roles, naturalised as women’s responsibilities, rendered unpaid, and systematically devalued.

The feminist social reproduction theory challenges the dominant framing that values production over reproduction by asserting that the labour required to reproduce families, people, nature, and communities is as essential to the economy as producing goods and services, yet remains invisibilised, unrecognised, and unpaid. The theory’s central aim is to place all forms of labour that create and sustain society at the core of economic analysis.

To decolonise work, then, is to recognise how historically marginalised women dismantle the mansplained boundaries of what constitutes labour. Their voices challenge capitalist and patriarchal market economies that privilege profit and GDP growth over care. Decolonising work requires valuing all forms of labour that sustain the daily well-being of people and the planet, and redistributing this labour equitably across gender, caste, class, and race to reduce the disproportionate burden placed on marginalised women. It also calls for expanding our understanding of the economy itself, recognising that what has long been dismissed as ‘non-work’ under capitalist-patriarchal norms is, in fact, foundational to all labours valued as productive work. Rural women’s understanding of work covers income generation, social reproduction, and the labour necessary for human survival.

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What would be the financial cost to build a renewable energy infrastructure to replace our current use of fossil fuels entirely (“100% renewable energy”)—or at least to eliminate net positive CO2 emissions (“net zero”)?

There are countless issues to discuss when it comes to climate change in the context of degrowth. But replacing fossil fuels with renewables is the “dominant aspirational pathway” for the climate-aware activists. So let’s start there. How much would such a “Green New Deal” cost?

Experts are really far apart on what such a world-wide renewable infrastructure would cost. I will cite three:

1. Mark Jacobson and his colleagues believe that getting to 100% renewable energy will be relatively easy— a mere $62 trillion, which, prorated over 30 years, would represent an annual cost of about 2% of the world’s GDP.

2. McKinsey & Company estimated the cost for “net zero” carbon emissions to be “about $275 trillion, or $9.2 trillion per year on average [for 30 years], an annual increase of as much as $3.5 trillion from today.” This comes to roughly 9% of world GDP.

3. Energy scientist Vaclav Smil says that the goals we’ve set for ourselves to reduce carbon emissions are “delusional.” He critiques McKinsey & Company’s estimate as “almost certainly highly conservative,” and suggests a figure of 20-25% of the GDP of the “high-income” countries.

We may be able to make “degrowth adjustments” to all of these estimates. In a degrowth scenario, we might not need as much energy — we might dispense with luxuries for the super-rich, or with AI data centers, for example. But the technology, presumably, would be the same, so figuring the costs for making the current output renewable is a good place to start. Once we have an idea as to what’s possible, then we can figure out how much we need.

Jacobson, et al. (2022)

Jacobson et al.’s conclusions have been embedded in various papers since 2009, and were first solidified into a proposal for “100% clean and renewable” energy in 2015. This is the only cost estimate that can easily be easily translated into a practical political demand. The 2019 resolution in the US Congress for a “Green New Deal” exemplifies this general line of thought. It even allows the possibility of continued “economic growth.” Many American non-scientist climate leaders (e. g., Bill McKibben, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) tend to rely on this line of thought. But this approach has attracted considerable criticism in some scientific circles, for example:

1. In 2011, James Hansen said that, “suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels . . . is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

2. In 2017, a group of Australian scientists said that “efforts to date [e.g., Jacobson et al.] seem to have substantially underestimated the challenge.”

3. In 2017, Christopher Clack et al. raised a number of issues, concluding that Jacobson et al.’s approach “used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.”

4. In 2021, Megan Seibert and William Rees argued that “Not only is the GND [Green New Deal] technically flawed, but it fails to situate climate disruption within the broader context of ecological overshoot.”

There have been numerous barbed exchanges between the supporters of Jacobson et al. and these critics, including a lawsuit claiming defamation against Christopher Clack (later dropped). These exchanges are difficult to follow, and the only sure conclusion here is that these people aren’t speaking to each other.

The McKinsey report (2022)

The McKinsey report gives a substantially higher estimate than Jacobson: $275 trillion (~7.5% of world GDP). The costs would be front-loaded: about 9% of GDP at the start, but declining somewhat later.

But they ominously warn that even their higher estimate fails to account for a number of things (Box E1, p. 3):

1. The availability of key materials used in current renewable technology, such as neodymium and lithium.

2. The cost of accommodating the social impacts. (E.g., if we stop burning coal, won’t there be a lot of unemployed coal miners?)

3. The merits of various decarbonization strategies. (What about nuclear power? What about massive reforestation?)

4. Who is going to pay for all this?

Vaclav Smil (2024)

Vaclav Smil, in turn, critiques even McKinsey & Company’s estimate as “almost certainly highly conservative,” citing these factors (p. 25, 26):

1. Not all countries will want (or be able) to pay. The McKinsey report already made this point, but Smil uses this to pin a cost increase onto those countries who are most responsible. Basically, the high-income countries of the world — the leading CO2 emitters — will likely bear almost the entire burden of this transition (as well they should!). We need to assume that the cost will be more like 15% or 20% of the GDP of the global north (the “affluent economies” or “the high-income countries” in Smil’s terminology).

2. Cost overruns are likely. Over 90% of large projects (those over $1 billion) run over budget, with the typical overrun being about 60% (How Big Things Get Done, p. 192). And this project is already estimated to cost trillions of dollars, for decades! Realistically, argues Smil, we need to tack on another 60%, reaching 20 to 25% of the GDP of the global north.

Political aspects of these estimates

We are left with three wildly different estimates of the costs, and no assurance that any of them is accurate. What’s our strategy here? If we low-ball the cost, people will feel betrayed if (or when) the costs turn out to be much higher. The public may then decide that they can’t trust “scientists” and accept some climate destruction rather than taking action.

We do not need to assume any dishonesty here in these estimates. Obviously, the lower the cost of the transition, the easier it is to “sell” climate action to legislators, business leaders, and the public. The impacts of unconscious bias on science testing has been well-known since the 19th century. That’s why “double-blind” experiments (neither the test subjects nor the experimenters know precisely what’s being tested) are now standard scientific procedure.

A massive 30-year project is unlikely to be repeatable. If we had aggressively started addressing climate change in 1988, after James Hansen warned Congress in unequivocal terms that climate change was real, we might have had the opportunity for a false start or two. Decades later, we no longer have that option.

Questions to be asked

Most of the climate-aware (including even some degrowth advocates) seem to buy into some version of Jacobson’s defense of a relatively optimistic Green New Deal policy. But there is a strong and well-informed minority, including many scientists, who question this. We need to look further. That means (at least) asking these further questions, which I will explore in future articles:

1. Technical issues with renewables. Financial cost may not be the best indicator of the feasibility of renewables. What about technical issues such as energy cost, intermittency, materials requirements, and land use?

2. The scientific context of the renewables debate. Why can’t scientists agree on the technical and costs aspects? While there is a scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real, there is no agreement on what to do about it.

3. Other climate problems. What about climate issues other than CO2 emissions, such as methane and land use?

4. Other environmental issues. Climate is only one of numerous environmental problems. What about other non-climate issues, like soil erosion, groundwater depletion, or biodiversity collapse?

5. What are we now going to about climate? (Hint: it will have something to do with degrowth.)

All of these questions require thought and research; each subsequent article in this series will focus on one of these areas in turn.

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English translation further down

Alan: Buenas tardes, Charline. Gracias por tu tiempo. Me gustaría empezar por tu recorrido personal. Estudiaste Derecho y Ciencias Políticas, una trayectoria muy intelectual. ¿Cómo llegaste a dedicarte a tiempo completo a la agricultura?

Charline: Es cierto que estudié Derecho y Ciencias Políticas, pero lo hice un poco por inercia, sintiéndome algo perdida. Sin embargo, siempre tuve una conexión latente gracias a mi madre, que valoraba mucho la alimentación de calidad, y a mi abuelo, que cultivaba su huerto. Cuando terminé mis estudios y me pregunté qué quería hacer realmente, la intuición me llevó de vuelta a esa importancia de la alimentación.

Como no tenía formación técnica, empecé poco a poco. Hice una memoria sobre agricultura ecológica y eso me permitió conocer a agricultores en Lyon. Me impactó su humildad y su disposición a enseñar a alguien que no sabía nada; esa conexión humana fue decisiva. Posteriormente, trabajé en el instituto de investigación INRAE, en Francia, en un equipo dedicado a recuperar variedades locales de bancos de germoplasma para volver a cultivarlas. Allí entendí cuánto hemos perdido desde la posguerra con la llegada de la agricultura productivista: sabor, nutrientes y biodiversidad. Ver que el oficio de campesina está desapareciendo, a pesar de ser imprescindible para comer, me hizo sentir que debía dedicar mi energía a esto.

Alan: Tu experiencia actual es un híbrido interesante: vives en Pontevedra pero trabajas la tierra, rompiendo el mito de que hay que irse a lugares remotos para cultivar. Cuéntanos, ¿en qué consiste tu trabajo para la asociación Boa Vida?

Charline: Boa Vida es una asociación de inclusión social vinculada al movimiento Emaus, cuyo objetivo es erradicar la pobreza y acoger a personas migrantes. Mi labor allí es gestionar lo que llamamos una huerta social o comunitaria.

Nos reunimos varias veces por semana. La sesión siempre empieza con un “círculo de bienvenida” para ver cómo estamos y calentar el cuerpo. Luego repartimos tareas: mantenimiento, desbroce, siembra o cosecha. No buscamos una producción industrial, sino formar en principios de agroecología: rotación de cultivos, acolchado del suelo y uso responsable del agua, como el sistema de recuperación de lluvia que estamos instalando. Lo más bonito es que la huerta es una herramienta para crear comunidad; no soy una monitora que impone soluciones, sino que aprendemos y resolvemos problemas entre todas.

Alan: En tu artículo enfatizas el valor social. ¿Qué impacto has observado en las personas que forman parte de este programa, muchas de las cuales llegan en situaciones vulnerables?

Charline: El impacto es muy visible. Para muchas personas que no trabajan, la huerta les ofrece una rutina y una estructura semanal. Valoran enormemente la conexión con la naturaleza y el estar al aire libre, algo que a veces se pierde en situaciones de precariedad. Pero lo más crucial es la comunidad: muchas llegan solas al territorio y aquí encuentran un grupo que las sostiene.

Además, existe una pequeña beca económica que, aunque modesta, ayuda a fomentar el compromiso y la continuidad. También funciona como formación práctica; por ejemplo, aprender a usar la desbrozadora les abre puertas laborales en el mantenimiento de fincas.

Alan: Mencionabas retos sobre la continuidad, tanto de los participantes como del acceso a la tierra. ¿Cómo crees que podría garantizarse mejor la estabilidad de proyectos como este?

Charline: El acceso a la tierra es un gran obstáculo. Nosotros trabajamos en una finca cedida por un particular, pero cada año tenemos que renegociar, lo cual genera incertidumbre. Si construimos un invernadero, no sabemos si al año siguiente tendremos que desmontarlo. Creo que para la agricultura son necesarios contratos de cesión de mínimo 10 o 15 años.

En Francia existe un modelo inspirador llamado Terre de Liens, una fundación que compra tierras gracias a donaciones y las cede a agricultores con proyectos serios, evitando que tengan que endeudarse de por vida para acceder al suelo. En Galicia existe el Banco de Terras, que es una iniciativa interesante para conectar propietarios con personas que quieren cultivar, y creo que es una vía que debemos explorar más para democratizar el acceso al campo sin necesidad de tener un gran capital.

Alan: Además de tu labor en la huerta, formas parte del Sindicato Labrego Galego. ¿Por qué es importante para ti sindicalizarte y qué aporta un sindicato en este sector?

Charline: La profesión campesina es extremadamente precaria y solitaria. Si estás aislada, es muy difícil sobrevivir a las condiciones económicas y de vida tan duras del campo. Organizarse es imprescindible para tener voz y defender nuestros derechos.

Mi sindicato pertenece a la Vía Campesina, un movimiento internacional. Esto nos permite no solo luchar por mejoras locales, sino defender un modelo de agricultura frente a proyectos extractivistas y capitalistas globales. Sin una organización detrás, la pequeña agricultura agroecológica sería invisible en las negociaciones políticas.

Alan: Tu sindicato tiene una clara vocación feminista y ecologista. ¿Cómo se diferencia esto en el día a día respecto a un modelo sindical más patriarcal o productivista?

Charline: La diferencia es fundamental. Nosotros defendemos la agroecología y la pequeña escala, mientras que los sindicatos mayoritarios suelen alinearse con el modelo industrial que impera en Europa.

Pero el rasgo distintivo más potente es la Secretaría de la Mujer. Históricamente, las mujeres en el campo han sido invisibles; trabajaban igual o más que los hombres, pero no tenían la titularidad de las tierras ni derechos reconocidos. Eran vistas como “ayudantes”. El sindicato ha luchado mucho, por ejemplo, por la Titularidad Compartida, para que las mujeres sean dueñas de sus proyectos y tengan derechos administrativos y económicos. El enfoque feminista es vital porque las mujeres son quienes sostienen la alimentación y el territorio, pero a menudo están ausentes de los espacios de poder y decisión.

Alan: Un ejemplo actual de estas luchas es la oposición al acuerdo de Mercosur. ¿Cuál es vuestra postura?

Charline: Nos oponemos porque pone en peligro directo a la pequeña agricultura. Ese acuerdo permitiría la entrada de productos cultivados con normativas laborales y sanitarias mucho más laxas (uso de pesticidas prohibidos aquí, mano de obra barata), lo que tiraría los precios por los suelos.

No podemos competir contra eso, y el resultado será el cierre de más granjas locales que sí cuidan el medio ambiente y la salud. Mientras otros ven una oportunidad comercial para exportar coches o industria, nosotros vemos una amenaza para la soberanía alimentaria y la supervivencia del tejido rural.

Alan: Para ir cerrando, ¿qué mensaje darías a la gente urbana y al ecologismo para que sean verdaderos aliados del campo y rompan esa desconexión?

Charline: Debemos romper la dualidad consumidor-productor. La responsabilidad de una alimentación sana y sostenible no puede recaer solo en los hombros de quien produce, que ya carga con la burocracia, el clima y los precios bajos.

A la gente de ciudad le diría: acercaos. Id a los mercados locales, conoced a quien produce vuestra comida. No se trata solo de una transacción económica. Ofreced ayuda puntual; a veces un agricultor necesita manos para cerrar una finca o plantar, y esos intercambios crean vínculos reales y rompen la soledad del campo. Modelos como los grupos de consumo o la agricultura sostenida por la comunidad, donde los consumidores se comprometen con el productor, son vitales. Nos afecta a todas: si comemos mal, enfermamos todas. Tenemos que entender que apoyar a la agroecología es defender nuestra propia salud y futuro.

Alan: Muchas gracias, Carlota, por tu claridad y por tu trabajo.

Link a la entrevista completa en video.

Link al proyecto de huerta inclusiva.

Link al sindicato labrego galego.

Sowing community and rights in rural areas

English Translation

Alan: Good afternoon, Charline. Thank you for your time. I would like to begin with your personal journey. You studied Law and Political Science, a very intellectual path. How did you end up dedicating yourself full-time to agriculture?

Charline: It’s true that I studied Law and Political Science, but I did so somewhat out of inertia, feeling a bit lost. However, I always had a latent connection to agriculture thanks to my mother, who valued high-quality food, and my grandfather, who cultivated vegetables. When I finished my studies and asked myself what I really wanted to do, my intuition led me back to food production.

Since I had no technical training, I started little by little. I wrote a thesis on organic agriculture, which allowed me to meet farmers in Lyon. I was deeply struck by their humility and their willingness to teach someone who knew nothing; that human connection was decisive. Later, I worked at the INRAE research institute in France, on a team dedicated to recovering local varieties from germplasm banks in order to cultivate them again. There, I understood how much we have lost since the postwar period with the arrival of productivist agriculture: flavor, nutrients, and biodiversity. Seeing that the peasant profession is disappearing, despite being essential for feeding us, made me feel that I had to dedicate my energy to this.

Alan: Your current experience is an interesting hybrid: you live in Pontevedra but work the land, breaking the myth that one has to move to remote places to farm. Tell us, what does your work for the Boa Vida association consist of?

Charline: Boa Vida is a social inclusion association linked to the Emmaus movement, whose objective is to eradicate poverty and welcome migrant people. My role there is to manage what we call a social or community garden.

We meet several times a week. Each session always begins with a “welcome circle” to check in with how we are feeling and warm up our bodies. Then we divide tasks: maintenance, clearing brush, sowing, or harvesting. We are not seeking industrial production, but rather training in agroecological principles: crop rotation, soil mulching, and responsible water use, such as the rainwater harvesting system we are installing. The most beautiful part is that the garden is a tool to build community; I am not an instructor imposing solutions — we learn and solve problems together.

Alan: In your article you emphasize social value. What impact have you observed on the people who are part of this program, many of whom arrive in vulnerable situations?

Charline: The impact is very visible. For many people who are not working, the garden offers a routine and weekly structure. They deeply value the connection with nature and being outdoors, something that is often lost in situations of precarity. But what is most crucial is the community: many arrive alone in the region, and here they find a group that supports them.

There is also a small financial stipend which, although modest, helps foster commitment and continuity. It also functions as practical training; for example, learning how to use a brush cutter opens up job opportunities in land maintenance.

Alan: You mentioned challenges regarding continuity, both for participants and access to land. How do you think the stability of projects like this could be better guaranteed?

Charline: Access to land is a major obstacle. We work on land lent by a private individual, but every year we have to renegotiate, which creates uncertainty. If we build a greenhouse, we don’t know whether the following year we will have to dismantle it. I believe that agriculture requires land-use agreements of at least 10 or 15 years.

In France there is an inspiring model called Terre de Liens, a foundation that buys land thanks to donations and leases it to farmers with serious projects, preventing them from having to go into lifelong debt just to access land. In Galicia there is the Banco de Terras, which is an interesting initiative to connect landowners with people who want to cultivate, and I believe it is a path we need to explore further to democratize access to farmland without requiring large capital.

Alan: In addition to your work in the garden, you are part of the Sindicato Labrego Galego. Why is it important for you to be unionized, and what does a union contribute in this sector?

Charline: The peasant profession is extremely precarious and lonely. If you are isolated, it is very difficult to survive the harsh economic and living conditions of the countryside. Organizing is essential to have a voice and defend our rights.

My union belongs to La Vía Campesina, an international movement. This allows us not only to fight for local improvements, but also to defend a model of agriculture against global extractivist and capitalist projects. Without an organization behind us, small-scale agroecological farming would be invisible in political negotiations.

Alan: Your union has a clear feminist and environmental vocation. How does this differ in daily practice compared to a more patriarchal or productivist union model?

Charline: The difference is fundamental. We defend agroecology and small-scale farming, while the majority unions tend to align with the industrial model that dominates Europe.

But the most powerful distinguishing feature is the Women’s Secretariat. Historically, women in the countryside have been invisible; they worked as much or more than men, but did not hold land titles or recognized rights. They were seen as “helpers.” The union has fought hard, for example, for Shared Ownership (Titularidad Compartida), so that women are co-owners of their projects and have administrative and economic rights. The feminist approach is vital because women sustain food production and the territory, yet are often absent from spaces of power and decision-making.

Alan: A current example of these struggles is opposition to the Mercosur agreement. What is your position?

Charline: We oppose [the agreement] because it directly endangers small-scale farming. That agreement would allow the entry of products grown under much looser labor and sanitary regulations (use of pesticides banned here, cheap labor), which would drive prices down dramatically.

We cannot compete against that, and the result would be the closure of more local farms that do care for the environment and public health. While others see a commercial opportunity to export cars or industrial goods, we see a threat to food sovereignty and the survival of rural communities.

Alan: To conclude, what message would you give to urban people and to environmental movements so that they can become true allies of rural areas and break this disconnection?

Charline: We must break the consumer-producer divide. The responsibility for healthy and sustainable food cannot rest solely on the shoulders of producers, who already carry the burden of bureaucracy, climate pressures, and low prices.

To people in cities, I would say: come closer. Go to local markets, get to know the people who produce your food. It is not just an economic transaction. Offer occasional help; sometimes a farmer needs extra hands to fence a field or plant crops, and these exchanges create real bonds and break the loneliness of rural life. Models such as consumer groups or community-supported agriculture, where consumers commit to producers, are vital. It affects all of us: if we eat poorly, we all get sick. We must understand that supporting agroecology means defending our own health and future.

Alan: Thank you very much, Carlota, for your clarity and for your work.

Link to the full video interview.

Link to the inclusive garden project.

Link to the Sindicato Labrego Galego.

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The “free world” is heading towards authoritarianism. Perhaps not so surprising, since it was never quite free and this so-called ‘world’ was always rather exclusive, to put it mildly.

The term originated during World War II to differentiate the allies from the fascist states. Later, during the Cold War, it was widely used to refer to the countries aligned with the USA. Could it be rather outdated today? Recently, Madrid’s mayor I.D. Ayuso announced that she would award the International Medal of the Community of Madrid to the United States for being the “leading beacon of the free world”. This happens in a historical moment when that ‘free world’ is trampling on freedoms, assassinating with impunity in different geographies, among them inside the U.S. itself!

Ayuso’s award can, of course, make your blood boil.

Actually, we are dealing with very stubborn imaginaries making up our deep seated idea of ‘the West’ as the place where ‘freedom’ has been attained. A high-value word (Mirandum), it is an integral part of modernity’s identities. It is also a highly complex concept whose actual meaning depends on which aspects get highlighted (and which obscured) in a given context.

Today, curiously, the mainstream discussion is more concerned with pointing out the dangers of potentially restricting ‘freedom‘, than with freedom itself. Thus, it indicates freedom for entrepreneurs from regulations and the government. Global freedom would then refer to the corporations that should not be restricted from extending their tentacles all over the globe, a freedom to be defended with wars, if necessary, as we see today.

We could add here, further, that bleak utopia of the ‘freedom’ to consume. A call, or rather instigation, that has become a curse for the planet and for the life it carries (and more concretely for humans, engaged in chasing a carrot that never brings ‘enoughness‘).

‘Freedom’: a thinned-out concept

Those of us socialized in ‘the west’ are actually much less free than we may think1. I would like to share a few scenes from the dawn of modernity which allow us to peek behind the veil.

Scene 1

In the 18th century, as machines were first introduced in the working process, they were met with multiple riots in different geographies throughout Europe; the best known machine wrecking movement is that of the ‘Luddites’. The terrible working conditions were reason enough to riot, yet one interesting point has perhaps remained in the background. For previous generations, the production of goods had been quite autonomous, people organized themselves as to how much, and when, they worked: “Basically they shaped their work around their lives, rather than their lives around their work”.

The industrial revolution dramatically turned their world, and ours, upside down. And our relationship to ‘work’ shapes us to such a degree that even imagining otherwise is very difficult. But history can help:

Workers had a large amount of control over their own labour. They produced only enough to keep themselves comfortable and if the fancy took them they might not work for days. Even after the enclosures took away large amounts of common land they subsisted for a great percentage on what they grew in their gardens.

Today, our unfreedom with respect to this overarching aspect of our lives is taken completely for granted2.

Scene 2

One delicious excursion: Graeber and Wengrow, in their book The Dawn of Everything, take us on a journey to recover some interesting historical episodes. At one point, they describe how the Europeans were first seen by Native Americans: as completely unfree. Making fun of them was a common occurrence. Among the Wendats (in today’s Quebec), hierarchies were understood differently as in Europe: a ‘captain’ “could give all the orders he or she liked, but no one was under any particular obligation to follow them”. And further, as Father Lallemant wrote in 1648:

...the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people ... They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.

This understanding of freedom, which includes a necessary ability to talk through any issue that needed to be decided, also has an interesting consequence with respect to inequality. The latter existed (although ‘possessions’ meant something different than for us), but their concept of freedom provided a soft prevention of these to harden into power-over relations.

Further, these societies took care to ensure that people would be ‘free’ of deprivation. This is a premise of freedom which finds, not surprisingly, little consideration in the ‘Free World’. As we saw further up, it was only in the dawn of modernity when people lost all access to their own means of production (see the Marxian concept of “primitive accumulation”, also S. Federici’s work). Our societies created artificial scarcity, i.e. scarcity in the midst of abundance, generating complete dependency, both in the colonies and in the centre of the fledgling Empires.

These examples can make us realize what potential we humans have beyond our present modern imaginaries. Our possibilities of being and relating to others, of building other kinds of societies, are bountiful, as Graeber and Wengrow develop in their highly recommendable book.

Modernity-coloniality

Let us stay briefly in the 17th and 18th centuries with the so-visible-yet-curiously-invisible fact that the ideas of the Enlightenment and the resulting Declaration of Human and Civil Rights did not include everyone by far. As Latin American decolonial authors, among others, have discussed, these historical developments happened at exactly the same time and were authored broadly by the same peoples who were trading with human beings (see Kant’s defence of slavery, for example).

We know this roughly and, from our ‘top of history’ point of view, we may think: Oh well, they were ‘still’ racists, feminism had not yet emerged, modernity was just developing...

However, we fall today into the same contradictions, and this is not a coincidence:

Scene 3

Let us turn to the bloody frontiers of the enriched world, to those imaginary lines which, for some, determine life or death. These are largely the same lines that were drawn during colonial times. Today we take this monument to unfreedom for granted.

Frontiers are permeable in one direction, impermeable in the other. Today, they signal the impossibility for people --many of them victims of global (environmental) injustices-- to move to where there is demand for what they offer: their labour. It is ridiculous and tragic at the same time: The sacrosanct law of the market where free floating demand and supply form a wonderful equilibrium which will bring the good to all is shattered when insisting on closing up borders. If we follow neoliberalism to its fullest, there should be no borders at all! As there are no borders for finance.

Today, as during the Enlightenment, whatever rights are declared as ‘universally valid’ have a very clear threshold below which the law of impositions and brutal interest reigns without shame...

The modern ‘we’ may actually be constituted by rather unfree peoples waving the flag of freedom. Yet within our structural unfreedom, some are more unfree than others: an intrinsic colonial aspect of modernity.

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Photo 1 : The New Statesman / Photo 2: Painting: L.R. Batchelor, In Wikipedia

Ketan Joshi is a freelance analyst / writer, based in Oslo, Norway. He works with a range of climate and energy groups to advocate for, analyse and report on major issues in this space. He is currently writing about fossil fuel extraction, data centre growth and greenwashing / climate delay.

Vlad Bunea: Some people continue to deny the reality of the climate crisis. From those who recognize the facts there are some that believe we can innovate our way out of the crisis with carbon capture, nuclear power, and basically electrify everything. Others have pointed out the impossibility of harvesting all minerals to build a new energy system while maintaining the same levels of energy consumption. Others have pointed out that sufficiency should determine how we look at energy production and consumption. First, what do you think is wrong with nuclear power, including the new, less harmful reactors with thorium, and other “green” technologies? And second, should we think about energy solutions by starting with a solid foundation of principles around the idea of sufficiency, then move to developing the appropriate technologies?

Ketan Joshi: Nuclear power is inherently faulty as a climate solution due to a mix of technological, social and financial factors. The time it takes to build requires long-term commitments and clear planning from governments - in the UAE or China, nukes end up being built, but in the UK for instance, they blow out and are delayed by decades. They tend to be advocated for by politicians and parties skeptical or in denial of climate change, and that hasn’t changed for a long time, so [it is] a self-defeating climate solution. It is also expensive: again, not on its own a ‘bad’ thing but which governments are willing to spend the money required? Not as many as you might think.....

VB: Do climate conferences, such as the COPs, have any effect in changing government policy or changing people’s minds?

KJ: Yes! Undeniably they do. The declarations, agreements, plans and targets have some non-zero effect, and the widespread media coverage has a material impact on public awareness of the issue. It’s one of the remaining venues for majority-world countries to have a voice, in particular. In my opinion, that’s not the right question: I want to know, what are the loopholes? What are the gaps? Consider the spectacle of debates about “Article 6”, the Paris Agreement’s offsetting rules, that occurs every year, despite the concept of offsetting having been debunked decades ago. Why is that sucking up time, money and oxygen from other areas? It’s ripe for reform. Same with Paris Agreement targets etc.

VB: There are a lot of reports (1, 2, 3, 4) that tell us how bad the climate crisis is. If we were to use a metaphor it appears they are describing the water while we are drowning in it. They do not take a stance against the extra-scientific causes for these terrifying realities even though this would be perfectly well aligned with the scientific method. This is letting us believe that science itself is captive in the do-not-talk-about-capitalism narrative. Should the scientific community, including the future Seventh Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, take an open position and call out the root causes for the crisis, namely capitalism itself?

KJ: Honestly, I’m not sure scientists would be best placed for that? I think IPCC AR7 should put way more effort into prioritising and elevating social scientists, political theorists and other fields of academia. I am particularly interested in the IPCC getting a grip on greenwashing and corporate dynamics as this is so poorly considered.

VB: Where do you stand in the never-ending yet necessary debate of change must happen in our communities first versus we must take state power and force fast change from the top-down?

KJ: It’s both :)

VB: Some commentators such as Nate Hagens consider that energy is the one thing that powers our global economy. However, from a causal perspective this may be misplaced because without human action no barrel of oil will jump out of the ground on its own and do productive work. Which means, the primary causal factors in driving the global economy are the action of humans. Energy is certainly a strong catalyst but to consider energy as a primary causal force is a metaphor and not a material reality. Would you say that solving the energy crisis, from fossil fuels to inequality in consumption, requires a redesign of the fundamental principles of our economy?

KJ: It’s interesting to ask and think what this looks like in practice. Who gets to do the design? What can I do today and tomorrow and next month? I’ve never designed an economy before! I’m not sure I’m even allowed to! Not to sound too incrementalist but while I agree that solving the crisis requires fundamental principle redesign, I also like to focus most of my time on stuff that chips away at the foundations of the old, bad ideas. In my view, I think this is a useful contribution to the broader project of finding a better systemic structure for society, something far more beneficial and less oppressive than the existing system.

VB: Since the publication of your book Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future in 2020, we have seen many corporations dropping their commitments to investments in the green transition. This may be interpreted [to mean] that even capitalists themselves no longer believe that salvation can come from technology. At the same time, the degrowth camp has a solid case against green growth that has not been disproven yet. In this context, are there any new mind-blowing facts from the field of energy and technology that may convince citizens and politicians to embrace an ethic of sufficiency?

KJ: I definitely see the uncontrolled growth of data centres as a major demonstration of the active, immediate and serious risks of the growth mindset.

VB: Thank you Ketan.

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This transcript has been edited for length.

Iris Basile is a 32-year-old transwoman who grew up in North Plains, Oregon, USA. Because of her experiences with abuse and addiction growing up in a rural town, her goal is to become a therapist and help small/rural communities. She is currently a second-year student at Portland State University pursuing a Bachelor’s in Social Work with a minor in Spanish.

Iris was my student in the Human/Nature class at Portland State University. I was struck by the depth and grace of her insight into the human psyche and her commitment to building bridges between progressives and conservatives. This interview arose from my desire to share her insights with the degrowth community.

Arwen Spicer: You grew up in rural Oregon, which predominantly identifies as socially conservative. Can you talk about your lived experience as a progressive in a more conservative community?

Iris Basile: I haven’t lived in my hometown for quite some time now, but I was working there again last year, and I feel like a lot of people in communities like these have more of a “live and let live” kind of style where, if you’re not prompting these conversations, generally there’s no friction. And even in conversations I would have with people where we very clearly had differing beliefs, a lot of the times it would stay... “friendly” is not the right word but “amiable.” There are times where you bite your tongue a little bit because you pick your battles. But overall, I wouldn’t say it was really that rough.

And when I was younger, I wasn’t this socially progressive. You can’t even tell a lot of times until you get more exposure to the rest of the world, and then you realize, “Oh, this place is more socially conservative.” But for the most part it’s pretty friendly and respectful. It’s more the politics rather than the person that causes the harm, like policies and things.

AS: Could you say more about what you mean by “the politics rather than the person that causes harm”?

IB: Yeah. A lot of times, if you need help, they will provide help. It’s just one of those things where, weirdly enough, while they might provide you with help, the conservative platform generally hurts, and there’s a bit of a disconnect between the way those [policies] hurt people versus seeing or helping somebody right in front of you.

There’s a joke by a comedian, Gianmarco Soresi. He’s walking along with a conservative person and there’s a transwoman in heels who’s walking ahead of them, and one of the heels breaks and she falls into oncoming traffic, and the conservative person leaps into action, grabs her, gets her out of the street, and gives like some diatribe about, “This is why people shouldn’t do this.” And the comedian goes, “If it were just me there, I would have gone, ‘Oh no, she’s dead!’” Which I think speaks to [how] rural communities have this strong ethos of helping. In person, that’s really what comes through. Then, it’s the back end where it’s the effects of these policies that are the bad thing. And then people just don’t like changing the policies they vote for. It’s confusing. It’s funny.

AS: It would be nice to bridge that disconnect in some way.

IB: Well, I honestly think exposure is how to do it. A lot of people, when it’s right in front of them, then they know and they see [harm that occurs to marginalized people]. And it’s just hard because, by definition, rural [areas] are more isolated. There’s less opportunities and chances [for exposure], especially for sustained and consistent exposure to different people’s beliefs, lifestyles, etc.

AS: Maybe that’s a good segue into our next question. You’re planning to pursue work as a therapist...

IB: My goal is to become a community psychologist or therapist for rural areas. I want to do individual counseling or couples, and groups, but I really would also like to work on community counseling, like building or organizing communities with a therapeutic mindset, trying to help communities with that type of healing. Because I believe that a lot of the current political tension stems from these places getting isolated and left alone. I wouldn’t so much say “left behind,” because some of them made more deliberate choices, but kind of left to their own devices. I think part of what has made it difficult for more social progressivism to get in is that these places get left alone. A lot of people grow up and leave. Very few people stick around.

And these places are also an excellent breeding ground for traumas and abuse. Then, you can get these long-term, generational issues, where you’ll have untreated mental health or other stresses, and these can lead to more mental health problems or addictions. So when life moved really quickly in the last fifty years, it was this jump with so much change: technological, social, financial, Bitcoin, all these things. Then, it doesn’t help that large agri-businesses have decimated local or smaller farming, which a lot of rural communities [traditionally] relied on. Then, things like mining and logging and those industries have also really died. So these places have dealt with [rapid social change] while simultaneously getting economically depressed.

In Behave [by Robert Sapolsky], it talks about how when you’re under stress, you become more conservative. Even people who are more socially progressive, when you put them under stressful conditions, they will make more conservative decisions. And when you’re under stress, one of the easiest ways to relieve stress is to punch down. Because things like racism and bigotry are easy ways to self-elevate to relieve stress in a world that increasingly makes it difficult to express anger at the appropriate mechanisms causing a lot of these problems. So with these communities, I want to try to change the method of stress relief.

[We need] to get people more connected to the places where they live and the people that live with them. Rural people barely go to the doctor, let alone going to mental health [providers]. So [I want] to find ways to help improve mental health without using traditional mental health settings, to give people more toolkits. Most people who are in bad places or are potentially doing bad things don’t like [their situation] either and want to change, but it’s really, really hard. [Without help with their problems], there’s no point for them to make some of these more socially progressive changes. Why would they? The system isn’t good, but it gives them somewhere to release their anger, which is better than nothing.

AS: It’s interesting that you’re talking about a therapeutic model on the community level. For me, that overlaps a lot with the degrowth community, where there’s an emphasis on local autonomy but focused not on the level of the family and the homestead but the community.

IB: Well, I think, as a species, we evolved for, what, like between 100 or 150 people in a community where people have these deep entwined social connections.[1] I think people want to get back to that. Co-ops and stuff like that will probably continue to be more and more popular, especially when the other side of the coin is these massive conglomerates. The only way to keep yourself out of almost being a serf is to lean on the community around you and work to provide yourselves with what you can and then interact with the wider world for other things. That’s not to say isolationism is good, but a better balance [is possible] between what we have now and just solely taking care of your own.

AS: That reminds me of the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin in some of her utopian writing: people often live in small communities but have larger networks where they connect interculturally.

IB: It’s basically like systems of representation which we kind of already have. I think part of it, too, is keeping people civically engaged and educated, because some of [our social systems are] very labyrinthine. But an important thing is just getting people to connect within their local contexts.

AS: Earlier, you noted that rural communities are a place where experiences of trauma can be likely. Can you say why it might be more likely in rural places?

IB: It’s a more specific type of trauma, like [physical] injuries. A lot of these places have more farming, livestock, mining, logging, etc. These are all professions that come with higher risk, and you can get injuries. You’ve got stress. Then, it can create an environment where it’s easy for people to lash out or get hurt and then perpetuate it or fall into addictions, like alcohol, in particular. Alcohol is just insane in rural communities. Opiates are a huge problem too, but alcohol’s been there, and I think alcohol will be there after opiates leave. Plus, the privacy [i.e. social remoteness] creates an environment where it’s easy for things to perpetuate.

AS: Is there anything else you’d like left-leaning people to understand about the type of conservative community that you’ve lived and worked in?

IB: Just that they’re people… I think it’s easy for people to go along [with conservative movements] without fully being on board. The amount of people I knew while working at the bar in town who would stand up for me or defend me but then vote Trump! There was one lady, in particular. One of the employees at the bar was a black lesbian and then there was me. And this lady loved us both, you know what I mean? She befriended us, talked, and hung out all the time. She still voted for Trump, because there’s just enough of a disconnect there. Eventually, she kind of came around and felt bad, and there’s a bit of “It’s a little late now,” but at the same time, a lot of people, they’ve got all this other shit to care about. There’s this propaganda from all sides, but the heavy fire hose points a little further to the right than the left. It’s all of these things. It takes time and space for people to get out of these things, especially in a way that’s not jarring or traumatic.

It’s cliché, but there are far more similarities than differences at the end of the day. A lot of times, if you just give time and space, people can surprise you. That’s not to say that anybody owes giving out olive branches or attempting to bridge divides, because… I’ve described it to people kind of like reaching out to a stray dog. Sometimes you might get bit in the process of doing this sort of rehabilitation, and nobody is obligated to do that. But if it’s something that you’re interested in, it’s worth it sometimes to just give people space to unwind through some of their stuff. They’re people. They deserve kindness. You deserve kindness. Make sure you don’t let people disrespect you. And at the end of the day, the politics don’t necessarily make the person.

AS: Was there anything else that you wanted to share that we haven’t touched on?

IB: Honestly, the only thing I would like to share is my caveat that I am a student. This is all based on personal experiences, and I am still working some of this out. I don’t want to come off as a person with a paintbrush just making these absolute statements or anything like that.

AS: Sure. Your experiences are valuable, and thanks for all the thought that you have put into this.

IB: Thank you.

Footnotes:

[1] Ehrlich (2024) argues for a comfortable group size of under 150, while Dunbar and Sosis (2018) find evidence for group stability at roughly 50, 150, or 500 individuals.

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