It is 2025 and while I share the joy of many who celebrate the newness and the hope of things to be different and better that comes with every new calendar year. I also share the emotion of those that feel and experience the new year as a continuity of the previous one. A simple technical reason to experience continuity is that the new year day as we know it in western popular culture is adopted from the Gregorian and Julian calendars which has its roots in the Roman Empire. But many cultures around the world till date despite the remnants of colonialism and neo colonialism choose to bring in the new year at different times of the year and seasons.
Personally, it feels more continuous rather than new, after I had some time to sit with my thoughts and take a hiatus from all things connected to productivity in the material world. Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza still continues to wipe out multigenerational families. The attacks which started in October 2023 have killed over 42,000 Palestinians and injured over 97,000 and many among those are children and these are figures till October 2024[1] and the situation continues to worsen as I type these words. While millions over social media and on ground continue to protest Israel’s horrific acts, lives and generations are continue to be lost.
Along with the genocide, another crisis that continues to affect people in disproportionate ways is the climate and ecological crisis, which is a wakeup call to the way in which we consume material and energy. A recent report by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) that 2024 is on track to be the hottest year with global mean air surface temperatures surpassing 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average.[2] The impact of this with increased instances of floods, droughts, forest fires, heat waves and its elevated risk to vulnerable populations is our continued reality.
We find ourselves in continuous cycles of crisis each year at the core of which is an exploitative economic system that has crossed multiple planetary boundaries. This economic expansion relies on unsustainable extraction of resources, structural oppression of certain communities especially those experiencing intersectional vulnerabilities and primarily located in the Global South.[3] The economic system benefits a few and there has been overwhelming evidence that more economic growth does not necessarily lead to better social outcomes as economic growth measured in gross domestic product (GDP) is simply aggregate production.
This economic system rooted in capitalism has successfully and institutionally separated the economic production from the social reproduction, creating gendered divisions and an artificial hierarchy. This separation between the economic production and social reproduction has resulted in oppression and violence against women and rising inequalities in capitalist societies. This has led to a crisis of care, as social reproduction has been structurally devalued and diminished by capitalist institutions and conveniently presumed that reproduction will infinitely provide for capital accumulation.
We need to solve for this crisis of care to break the continuous cycle of climate, ecological and political crisis among others. There is a need to recognize the interconnections between the market and reproductive economy and address the artificial gendered divisions this causes that result in oppression and violence. Nancy Fraser articulates this succinctly “The current, financialized form of capitalism is systematically consuming our capacities to sustain social bonds, like a tiger that eats its own tail.”
Recent experiences of working on the issue of climate change has made me think deeply about the interconnections of care and climate crisis and making it a focused intervention across our climate work. There are many strands to this thinking but the one I would like to focus on, is care being pivotal to create social bonds and enable social cooperation which could be transformational in mitigating, being resilient in the face of the climate crisis but also make institutions accountable for their actions. Taking inspiration from the works of Silvia Federici and the broader midnight notes collective[4] we could think of locating care within the perspective of commoning. This would mean imagining the commons as multiple social relations and practices that could be relationships, networks and struggles that is sustained and reproduced by collective labour that is cooperative and non-hierarchical. [5]These are spaces that are not mediated by the market and the State and have egalitarian forms of decision making with equitable access to resources. These non-commodified social relationships and practices can be visualized as commoning care which could be ground breaking in forging new pathways and strategies for collaborative climate action.
One of the experiences I had in December 2024 in a gathering of individuals and organisations mostly from the grassroots with different social identities working across gender and climate justice made me recognise the value of commoning care as a critical intervention. The regenerative experience supported many of us in thinking and co-designing new and bold ideas with ease to solve the continuing climate problems across our geographies and created a sense of community that we could share and learn from each other to catalyse change in our respective spheres of influence. It supported us to work with each other’s intersectional vulnerabilities across gender, caste, class and locations. The space and time to strengthen social bonds and relationships in an extractivist society is a political and radical act urgently needed to ensure the tiger doesn’t eat their own tail.
Neha Saigal Works on issues of intersectional feminist climate justice in India.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/
[2] https://wmo.int/media/news/2024-track-be-hottest-year-record-warming-temporarily-hits-15degc
[3] https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj.q2781
[4] https://degrowth.info/de/library/carework-as-commons-towards-a-feminist-degrowth-agenda-3#_ftn2
[5] https://degrowth.info/de/library/carework-as-commons-towards-a-feminist-degrowth-agenda-3#_ftn2
