ESSAY: 'Care Lessons for the Climate Endgame' by Mikkel Krause Frantzen
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Social reproduction
10 min read
The essay centrally argues that care work is fundamental to both biological and social reproduction, drawing on Marxist feminist theory. Understanding social reproduction theory provides essential context for the article's argument about care as political and economic labor.
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Lützerath
8 min read
The article features an image of the Lützerath occupation and eviction, a significant 2023 climate protest in Germany against coal mining expansion. This specific historical event exemplifies the climate activism the essay discusses.
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Ecofeminism
18 min read
The essay explicitly draws on 'the tradition of eco-feminism and Marxist feminism' to define care work. Understanding ecofeminism's intellectual history illuminates why the author connects care, capitalism, and environmental crisis.
Hello readers,
Welcome back to The BREAK–DOWN’s now weekly newsletter, where we bring you the best writing and discussion straight to your inbox.
This week, we have two brand new things for you to enjoy, you lucky lucky people. But before all of that, a reminder: you have just one day left to take advantage of our Four-Issues-For-The-Price-Of-Two-Limited-Time-Only-December-Sale (full title tbc). Subscribe to a print subscription before the end of Friday 12th December using this link and we will not only send you the next two print issues of The BREAK–DOWN, we will also send the first two issues completely free. Plus you’ll get the lovely warm feeling of helping us continue publishing the best climate writing both online and in print.
Now, to business: first up, our podcast, where this week editor-in-chief, Adrienne Buller, interviews the political scientist Alyssa Battistoni about her latest book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, which has just come out with Princeton University Press. Both the book and the discussion are superb—engaged and incredibly wide-ranging; one of our favourite books of the year.
On the podcast, Battistoni and Buller interrogate one of the great ideological pillars of capitalism: freedom. We hear endless talk of the freedom that capital apparently affords, whether via “free markets”, or the endless free choice of the consumer. For many on both the right and the liberal centre, capital and freedom are so intertwined as be to almost synonymous. Added to this, we can count the huge number of things that are, within market systems, “free” insofar as they are assigned no value, from the free gifts of nature to uncompensated environmental destruction and the unpaid labour that creates and sustains life. Marx, meanwhile, described workers under capitalism as “free in the double sense”: “free” to sell their labour power in the market, and “free” or divorced from the means of production: the land, machinery or materials to sustain themselves on their own. In other words: not particularly free at all.
What, then, does freedom really mean within a capitalist society?You can listen to the discussion wherever you usually get your podcasts. Or you can watch the full episode along with all our others on our YouTube channel.
If that isn’t enough for you, also new this week is an essay by the Danish ecosocialist writer,
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.