Two icebergs: Difference in feminist political economy

Introduction

This essay stems from our own scholarly trajectories through feminist political economic scholarship. We are environmental economic geographers who were trained in the tail end of post-structuralism’s heyday, intellectually raised in particular on a post-structural variety of feminist political economy (FPE). We have used this work not to study gender but to understand capitalism. In particular, our work investigates capitalism’s socio-ecological operations and effects, as well as conservation and environmentalist responses to environmental problems such as biodiversity loss, defaunation and extinction. For us, FPE provides a theory of capitalist social relations that helps us account for human and non-human energies, beings and materials often cast outside the economy and capitalism, as well as how these energies, beings and materials articulate with capitalism – all while recognising the great hold of the economic over the fate of the non-human world. Here, we refer to this approach to capitalism as one that recognises difference: difference in terms of a multiplicity of logics, subjects and structures; difference that, on the one hand, comprises capitalism and, on the other hand, comprises not only capitalism, but also social life more generally. In seeking out such an approach to difference and political economy, we are attracted to FPE approaches because they draw attention to a specific strand of difference: a gendered, non-commodified/unwaged reproductive realm that does not typically, officially, ‘count’ as constituting the economy. The household is the exemplar. We suggest non-human natures are also often cast as part of the same realm.

As we have explored FPE over the years, we have found a broader range of approaches than we were trained in or than is typically acknowledged. There is not ‘a feminist position’ within political economic scholarship generally or on difference in particular. In this essay, we highlight the divergent approaches of two different feminist political economists as a small step towards drawing attention to this broader range within FPE. The first theorist, JK Gibson-Graham, emphasises economic difference – a multiplicity of economic activities and logics – in order to develop strategies to change the economy and capitalism, to perform different worlds, to prompt innovation in non-capitalist alternatives. Gibson-Graham’s approach is embedded in the more post-structural variant of FPE that is familiar to most economic geographers and political ecologists, and is the variant we were raised on in graduate school. Gibson-Graham have long excelled at drawing attention to a world of social and economic practices – a world of difference – that both constitutes and exceeds capitalism. They have been among the more (even most) prominent feminists in political ecology and certainly in economic geography. In a recent bibliometric study of neoliberal natures literature, Gibson-Graham are found within the top 30 most-cited authors (see Bigger and Dempsey, 2018). Our own experience confirms this. When we have expressed our interest in thinking about capitalism as a multiplicity, often we are interpreted as wanting to make a Gibson-Graham-style argument (e.g. Buscher et al., 2015).

The other theorist, arguably less known to economic geographers and political ecologists, takes an alternative tack. Maria Mies is a eco-socialist feminist who also focuses on difference and the economy. However, Mies’s interest is in explaining how abstracted, hierarchical social difference – such as gender, constructed through patriarchy – shapes and is shaped by capitalism. Capitalism’s power is explained by Mies in part on the basis of its articulation with these other power-laden social structures: this is domination through difference. Mies’s work is thus consistent with a broader set of socialist/Marxist feminist scholars whose work is, we observe along with others such as Werner et al. (2017), resurgent or at least ascendant in geography and beyond. However, this work did not feature prominently in our graduate training (or really at all). Rather, we learned the critiques of this work as being too economistic and too functionalist (see the critique by Gibson-Graham (1996: 33–35) of socialist feminism and dual-systems theory as ‘capitalocentric’). This essay is, then, a rejoinder to our earlier selves, our training and the persistent association of FPE – in particular its approach to difference – with the work of Gibson-Graham.

Conveniently, JK Gibson-Graham and Maria Mies each represent their position through an iceberg (see figures 1 and 2). In this commentary, we place the two icebergs side by side – but not to weigh one approach’s value against the other, and certainly not to advocate that economic geographers or political ecologists drop their copies of The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) and pick up Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Mies’s 1986 classic. We have a more modest goal of prompting an opening up of economic geography and political ecology to a wider array of feminist political economic approaches, especially to difference. We want to skirt the kind of ‘new theory’ problem in the academy, where a theoretical approach becomes prominent and the rest are pushed to the wayside (as was the case when we entered graduate school). In an initial draft of this essay, we repeated precisely this tendency, arguing Gibson-Graham do not have as much to offer the contemporary moment analytically, forgetting the context within which they were writing and also the crucial insights they bring to bear on our understanding of capitalism. In this final version, instead, we aim to distil some of the general differences between these two theorists’ ideas, as well as highlight where each might shine light within the empirical background of our own work: biodiversity loss, defaunation and extinction, exemplified by our research on caribou.

A note on this empirical background and our current research: academic journals, environmental organisations and the popular press reaffirm that we live on a planet becoming more depleted and less biodiverse at every turn. Yet, we have grown up alongside expanding attempts to do something about these things. Government representatives shake hands to create global environmental agreements, parliamentarians agree to new national environmental laws and policies, firms adopt voluntary codes of conduct, investors apply ‘environmental, social and governance’ screens. Environmental laws have increased 38-fold since 1972 (UNEP, 2019). Meanwhile, what has happened to trends in habitat loss, defaunation, carbon emissions and global warming? They have spiked during these same decades. The species we are currently studying – woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus) – reflects this tension: it receives the highest legal protections as a designated endangered species in Canada, but recent science suggests that the central and southern subspecies face extinction in our lifetimes. The core question of our research is: why? Given the prominence of caribou in the Canadian national imaginary (the species adorns the 25 cent coin, for example), given its importance to many Indigenous nations, given the growing environmental state bureaucracy – why do caribou face extinction?

Scientific, governmental, and international non-governmental studies find proximate explanations: habitat alteration, fragmentation and destruction due to industrial, extractive capitalist development – mines, roads, cutblocks, seismic and pipelines – that are spreading rapidly across caribou habitat (Johnson et al., 2015; Parlee et al., 2018). It is tempting too to blame lack of enforcement of the dozens of policy instruments meant to protect caribou. All of these explanations have merit and are part of the answer to the ‘why’ of caribou defaunation, but none of them gets at the ultimate cause. Here, we need to turn to critical scholarship. What does political economy tell us about extinction, defaunation and biodiversity loss? In what follows, we briefly review and ‘field test’ the ideas of Gibson-Graham and then Mies to see where they direct our attention within the caribou crisis as a stand-in for these wider ecological trends.

The first iceberg: a multiplicity of more-than-capitalist difference

The first iceberg visually represents a core claim of Gibson-Graham’s (1996) that will be familiar to readers: the economy is made up of much more than just the aspects that are typically recognised as economic, such as wage work or buying and selling goods – the ‘visible’ part of the iceberg. Economic activity – the production, exchange and distribution of values – occurs in all sorts of other everyday ways, through cooperatives, libraries, language and so on. According to Gibson-Graham, economists miss this diversity because they see the economy far too narrowly. So do critics of the economy. OPEN IN VIEWER

It is particularly a problem for Gibson-Graham when leftists repeatedly imply that the capitalist or economic sphere is dominant over a subsumed non-capitalist, non-economic sphere. The 90% of the economy below the waterline does constitute capitalist markets, Gibson-Graham admit, but those markets do not subsume, or absorb, all that is underwater. The underwater activities are actually existing alternatives to capitalism, and they are not weak or small. Economic difference – a variety of economic activities, some capitalist, some not – is all around us in our everyday lives, hidden in plain sight. This difference just needs to be noticed and understood to be powerful in its own right. The latter point is especially crucial for them, as they place much faith in how representations shape political possibility; they worry that awarding too much power to capitalism – and too little to non-capitalism – makes capitalism a foregone conclusion and forecloses the possibility of enacting inventive, anti-capitalist struggles. Gibson-Graham go as far as to suggest an understanding of capitalist hegemony as a ‘(dominant) discourse rather than a social articulation or structure’ Gibson-Graham, 1996: xi). Their project is centrally to counter prominent representations of capitalism as inherently dominating, expansive and monolithic; their primary intention is ‘to produce a discourse of economic difference as a contribution to a politics of innovation’ (Gibson-Graham, 1996: xii).

It was instructive for us to go back to dog-eared copies of Gibson-Graham’s work, poured over in introductory graduate seminars. They remind us of the ‘not-necessarily-capitalist breadth of the economic’ (see Mann, 2012: 67). The economy is multiple. Capitalism is not monolithic; it is contingent and localised. Globalisation does not involve the subsumption of all non-capitalist (localised) forms to a sprawling capitalism. There are heterogeneous not always capitalist economies pulsing everywhere if we would only see them.

Taking a lead from Gibson-Graham, for example, we might turn our eyes to the multi-species relations of care that are emerging to promote caribou life in British Columbia. On First Nations, Crown and private lands in British Columbia, there are now two maternal caribou pens: the Klinse-Za caribou maternity pen is run by the West Moberly First Nations and Saulteau First Nation on Treaty 8 territory, and the Revelstoke pen is run by the Revelstoke Reading Caribou in the Wild organisation. Both penning projects involve capturing pregnant caribou cows in the spring and moving them into fenced and guarded pens where they – and then their calves – are protected from wolves and other predators. Later in the summer, when the calves are at least a couple months old, they and their mothers are released back into the wild. During observation at a caribou conference, we listened to a talk and documentary where members of the West Moberly and Saulteau nations describe ‘guardians’ patrolling the Klinse-Za pen, and community members hand-picking lichen to fill large bags to feed penned caribou (We Are Bringing Them Back, 2018). Such relations of care are economic in the sense that they are about reproducing daily, collective life – entwined lives of caribou and people. And while there are market elements involved in the maternal pens – the wildlife tracking technologies produced and marketed by capitalist firms, for example – the economic relations of care enacted in the pens exceed capitalism in many ways. The metabolic exchanges and material interventions are not designed to create or accumulate capital. The end goal is to work towards multi-species abundance in order to recover caribou not only to the point of survival, but to the point where First Nations can resume hunting. As West Moberly First Nations Chief Roland Wilson explains, ‘Caribou were always an animal that if we ever needed something, we could go to them and they would help … Now the caribou are in a struggle, and they need us. We have to at least try’ (in Rosner, 2018).

The above example directs our attention, as we think Gibson-Graham would encourage, to the more-than-human, more-than-capitalist but still economic relations of care and reproduction that are emerging around caribou to promote caribou life. But the specific nature of Gibson-Graham’s project – to pay attention to alternatives to capitalism right under our noses – also means they are less helpful as an explanatory lens for material crises – less helpful for explaining, for example, the puzzle of caribou extinction – and biodiversity loss more generally. Even though Gibson-Graham avoid economic overdetermination, they consciously award little dominance to capitalism over the non-commodified realm. While Gibson-Graham acknowledge ‘non-capitalism’s’ entanglement with capitalism, their analysis often implies that this non-capitalist ‘outside’ is radical, oppositional to or at least other than capitalism, not itself constructed and woven into – even supportive of – hegemonic capitalist formations (see Sanyal, 2007, on this point, summarised nicely by Gidwani and Wainwright, 2014).

Importantly, Gibson-Graham’s theoretical and political bent reflects who they were speaking to and in what context: a moment in leftist geography and social science preoccupied with explaining increasingly globalised political–economic relationships and ‘flexible’ labour arrangements. The End of Capitalism is an exemplar of the debates of the time, effectively bringing the insights of post-structural queer and feminist theorists and activism to the overwhelming white and male political economy tradition (Gibson-Graham name Michael Aglietta, David Harvey, Ernest Mandel and Immanuel Wallerstein). Propelling the book forward is an effort to expand the range of politics that can be considered Marxist. It moves away from a ‘politics of preparation or postponement’, ‘waiting for the revolution’, to a politics of the everyday. As a result, Gibson-Graham provide a welcome reminder to be attentive to the collective performative energy of explanations and representations of capitalism.

To the extent that Gibson-Graham at times stand in for a feminist economic critique in economic geography and beyond, in this commentary, we push for an expanded conception of FPE and what it can do – particularly recalling another the work and iceberg of an underused feminist political economist, Maria Mies.

The second iceberg: domination through difference

Mies is a social feminist who works on development and feminist solidarity. She is a less familiar figure than Gibson-Graham in economic geography and political ecology. She is nowhere in the top-cited authors in neoliberal natures scholarship, with only seven citations in the data set collected by Bigger and Dempsey (2018); 1082 authors are cited more times than her. And in a recent review of economic geography, Rosenman et al. (2019) find a pittance of keywords highlighting feminist perspectives, but even fewer identifying social reproduction – which is an imperfect stand-in for socialist feminist perspectives like Mies’s but is the closest signal to such perspectives among the top keywords.

In Mies’s iceberg, like Gibson-Graham’s, the visible tip represents the formal economy, where capitalist value emerges from exploited waged labourers and the circulation of monetised goods and assets in markets, and the underwater represents economic activity that is not conventionally counted as economic. But the icebergs diverge when it comes to the relationship between the above and below water parts of the iceberg. Mies’s underwater points to a world of exploitations on which markets, commodity production and profit-making depend – exploitation of subsistence work, household work (largely carried out by women), the work of the colonies and, at the very base, the work of nature. Mies highlights both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ colonies. Internal colonies comprise the household and housewife; following Selma James and Franz Fanon, ‘the household is a colony, dominated by the metropolis, capital and state’ (Mies, 1986: 32). External colonies are formal and, in some cases, former colonised territories and people, whose labour power and raw materials are extracted at the lowest possible price, and which were/are used as markets for the realisation of capital – following Rosa Luxemburg (Mies, 1986: 201). These bodies, places and materials of the submerged, invisible iceberg supply cheap or unwaged labour and cheap or free inputs and energies that are productive; capitalism depends on this deeply undervalued work. As Mies (1986: 200) writes, ‘the exploitation of colonies, as well as that of women and other non-wage workers, is absolutely crucial to the capitalist accumulation process’ and ‘without the ongoing subsistence production of non-wage labourers (mainly women), wage labour would not be “productive”’ (Mies, 1986: 48). OPEN IN VIEWER

More specifically, Mies understands capitalist production as comprising what she calls the ‘superexploitation’ of non-waged or devalued labour (by women, colonies, peasants, nature), upon which ‘wage labour exploitation then is possible’. Superexploitation is Mies’s (1986) term for how capitalists appropriate ‘the general production of life, or subsistence production’. That is, superexploitation is not based on the appropriation of the ‘time and labour over and above the “necessary” labour time’ (i.e. surplus labour), but of ‘the time and labour necessary for people’s own survival or subsistence production’ (Mies, 1986: 48). This appropriation is referred to as “superexploitation” because unlike wage exploitation, it is not even compensated by a wage. Superexplotiation is held in place by a broader array of social relations (not just formally capitalist ones, such as class), including ‘force and coercion’ (Mies, 1986: 48). In particular, Mies and many others (Federici, 2004; Fraser, 2013) point to the role of patriarchy in delivering gendered hierarchies of roles and worth that are functional for capitalism. And as many feminists do, Mies denaturalises the placing of certain types of bodies under the waterline. Arguing against the idea that women ‘naturally’ perform social reproductive work, Mies (like many other feminists) shows how women’s ‘otherness’ and devaluation are constituted through multiple sites and processes – law, religion, science and so on.

This is a point that has been made by generations of post-colonial and critical race scholars too – scholars who have long emphasised how capitalism depends on ‘others’ constructed as different and worth less (see Gidwani, 2008; Lowe, 2015; Pulido, 2017; Sanyal, 2007; Tsing, 2009). For these scholars, capitalism relies on violently enforced, abstracted difference to devalue those it exploits or whose energies it appropriates – women, racialized people, colonised and enslaved people. These hierarchies and devaluations are useful for capital accumulation, even as they cannot be reduced to their function under capitalism (e.g. patriarchy also serves men, and racism whites).

Before we turn to caribou, we also need to place Mies’s work in a broader intellectual and political context. Gibson-Graham’s work in the 1990s was attempting to intervene in critical scholarship they suggested reduced all difference to its function under capitalism. But Mies, writing in the 1980s, was attempting to intervene in critical scholarship that had long denied the function that social difference – along lines of gender and race, primarily – performs in capitalism. Barbara Ellen Smith’s (2016: 2086) commentary in a series on difference and economic geography attests to the ‘repeated, apparently unquestioned conceptualisations of gender as one of several “non-capitalist axes of social differentiation”.’ As Smith explains, even today there is a persistent relegation of gender and race to non-capitalist forms of social difference – where class is the one mode of difference produced under capitalism. Now, no socialist feminists whose work we have seen would suggest that patriarchy did not exist before capitalism or could not exist outside of capitalism. But in the 1970s and 1980s – as still today, to some extent – these socialist feminists’ attention was instead trained on convincing critical scholars that gender and race are not incidental to capitalism, not something that occurs only outside of capitalism, but instead ‘assume a capitalist form and are vital to the operations of capitalism today’ (Smith, 2016: 2086). This helps us explain why Mies’s work may sometimes appear as functionalist or economically deterministic. We suggest that this is because she was writing at a time when it made more sense to focus on patriarchy’s usefulness to capitalism than to focus on how patriarchy exceeds or precedes capitalism (although Mies does acknowledge this; see Mies,1998 (1986), ch. 2).

Back to caribou: where are they and their ecologies in Mies’s iceberg, in this super-exploitative intersectional structure? Caribou’s own means of reproduction, like undisturbed standing forests of trees and lichen, start underwater – unpriced. Some are moved ‘above water’ as they are harvested and become fictitious commodities – for example, trees/timber. But caribou and the majority of the materials and relations on which they depend (land, food, a degree of protection from predation) are underwater, non-commodified and unwaged – including networked practices such as the slow composting of carbon to produce oil, or the grasses and waters that absorb toxic run-off from mining. Markets in minerals and oil appropriate these practices. In the process of directly harvesting marketized goods (trees, gold, oil) or appropriating non-marketized entities and energies (waste absorption, composting), ecologies are transformed – ecologies that form caribou’s means of reproduction. In other words, caribou are part of the relations of ‘the general production of life, or subsistence production’ that is superexploited by formal markets. The conditions of caribou’s subsistence activities are robbed from them, appropriated by development for markets in gold, oil, timber and so on. Mies urges us to understand how value is produced and surplus is distributed according to well-worn, deeply grooved paths forged in part through devaluation and exploitation of non-humans. Accordingly, our current research project aims to answer how caribou are devalued – a devaluation that involves capitalist and state processes, but not only these processes.

The caribou situation, or biodiversity loss, defaunation and extinction more broadly, cannot be understood through capitalism alone. To understand why and how capitalism so ‘successfully’ transforms natures in directions with such dire consequences for non-human – and many human – lives, we must consider more than capitalism’s accumulative logic. There are a wide set of logics, institutions and processes that are currently operating in alignment to keep caribou ‘superexploited’ (in the Miesian sense of the term). These include colonial, anthropocentric and racial logics that devalue caribou and the Indigenous communities whose ways of living are entwined with the species. The institutions at play include, at minimum, resource firms, the state, the legal system and science – institutions that often but not always line up in the service of capital. We must also include processes such as resource permitting, legal proceedings and environmental assessment – none of which can be understood as operating purely in service of capitalism (or an accumulative logic) but are also not outside of accumulation.

Over the last decades, the alignment of these institutions towards superexploitation has been extremely robust. In British Columbia, the provincial government suppressed a scientific report documenting extensive regulator contravention of its own caribou protection laws – a sure sign of the fox guarding the henhouse (poorly, as one might predict; Parfitt, 2018). Caribou have been listed as threatened and endangered under Canada’s Species At Risk Act since 2003, but in the years since, federal and provincial governments have dragged their feet on producing required caribou recovery plans while moving at lightning speed to approve the industrial, extractive developments driving caribou loss. In West Moberly First Nations and Saulteau First Nations territory – where the Kilnse-Za caribou maternal pen is and where Dane-zaa elder Mary Apsassin describes two thirds of the territory as ‘broken’ for wildlife and the communities who depend on them (in Penn, 2013) – the last 20 years are an endless stream of logging, mining and oil and gas developments (see Lee and Hanneman, 2012).

But while the current state of caribou affirms this alignment, such an alignment is not easy or guaranteed. Scientists whistle-blow and leak reports – which is how we all came to know about the suppressed science. The state does not always line up on the side of capital – in response to scientific assessments, the Canadian federal government recently declared an ‘imminent threat’ to mountain caribou recovery, essentially ordering the British Columbia government to take immediate action to protect mountain caribou habitat or else lose jurisdiction, and a moratorium on new developments has been enacted. Extractive capitalist firms must constantly negotiate with these other logics that do not always or necessarily operate in the service of capital. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers – the main industry lobby group in the country – is seeking new solutions to save caribou habitat, and major firms are involved in creation of a large protected area in Northern Alberta. Legitimacy seeking, yes, but also a sign that rapacious exploitation is becoming less tenable (perhaps). Court cases are fought by indigenous nations to protect caribou from development. Sometimes they are won (on the side of caribou), as in the case of the West Moberly First Nation who successfully quashed a British Columbia government decision to allow coal exploration by arguing that the project and the cumulative effect of nearby developments would negatively impact their treaty-protected right to hunt caribou. And sometimes court cases are lost, as when the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that slowing the pace of development in the Blueberry River territory would result in too great an economic impact (despite the Supreme Court Justice noting the irreparable damage done to the territory by the almost 20,000 oil and gas wells, developments the Blueberry River First Nation said compromised its right to hunt caribou and other animals; Brend, 2017).

All this to say, in recent years, the superexploitation of caribou is not easily secured; it is contested terrain.

Conclusion: difference in FPE

Both of these icebergs matter – we do not want either to melt away. Gibson-Graham’s iceberg reminds us of the incompleteness of domination, of what escapes, exceeds and grows in the interstices of capitalist and non-capitalist spaces and practices. They spark imaginations of generations of researchers and activists to see and accelerate alternatives, urging us not to perpetuate representations of capitalism that feed into its strength. But one cannot be so captured by the alternatives, the cracks and fissures as though domination is not also often breeding within and beyond those spaces. Difference and so-called non-capitalist spaces can be indispensable to capital accumulation and are so often produced and deployed through violence and exploitation – a key point of much FPE, demonstrated through Mies’s iceberg.

Mies and Gibson-Graham both offer incisive and politically productive insights into extinction, defaunation and biodiversity loss. Gibson-Graham urge us to seek out, learn from and promote more-than-capitalist, more-than-human practices of care that promote the flourishing of human and non-human collectives. Mies, on the other hand, provides explanatory tools to help us understand how we got here and to see the ‘underground connections’, to use her words, between multiple root drivers within environmental crises.

Ultimately, the brilliance and necessity of feminist political economic approaches stem from the demand that we hold onto both icebergs at the same time: to understand how difference and diversity are crucial to ‘how we get out of this place’ as much as to ‘how we got into and remain within this place’, to understand when and how multiple structures form a durable, superexploitative structure and also to keep an eye trained on when and how the nature of that superexploitation is tenuous and antagonistic. Going beyond generating ideas for intervention to participating in political opportunities is also where FPE flourishes, with its long-standing tradition of praxis – certainly something that unites Mies and Gibson-Graham.