Economics

Several environmental advocacy organizations have emerged that use narrative persuasion techniques to change climate change opinions and overcome climate change inaction. Written from the perspective of parents and grandparents (particularly mothers), the narratives in these testimonials reproduce the socio-cultural values of readers to motivate environmental concern. This article identifies pernicious hegemonic themes in the testimonial stories that have been featured on the websites of environmental advocacy organizations and critically analyzes these narratives using feminist and queer theoretical frameworks. Two themes are highlighted for analysis: first, themes about the special knowledges, powers, emotions, and duties of motherhood; and second, themes about the importance of preserving the environment for children and their offspring in the future. The oppressive influence of these particular narratives has been argued at length in previous research. Efforts to mitigate climate change are important, but attempts to shape public opinion should not simultaneously reproduce harmful myths about women and motherhood.

An investigation of household sustainability production makes possible the evaluation of the trade-offs inherent in these pro-environmental activities. The results suggest that policies promoting household-level sustainability efforts may be misguided. Without accompanying radical transformations in infrastructures and institutions—including the household—these efforts will always fall short of what is needed to promote human flourishing and protect the environment from harm.

This paper examines potential property value impacts when a nuclear power plant closes and spent fuel remains on site. We confirm earlier research that fails to find an impact on property values of proximity to a nuclear power site. Another contribution of this paper is our finding that a one percentage point increase in property taxes is associated with a 4.31 percent decrease in the sale price of a home. These results provide evidence for a positive impact of operating nuclear facilities on surrounding communities in the form of reduced residential property taxes for a given level of public expenditures.

In redefining social reproduction to mean only the reproduction of labor-power, Social Reproduction Theory has deemphasized a central insight of Marxist-feminism—the necessary role that household production plays in the reproduction of capitalist society.  This article presents a model of production in capitalism in which households, capitalist firms, and the state rely on inputs from the other sectors in their production process to perpetuate their own existences and in turn that of capitalist society as a whole.  This model shows it is necessary to tie the household and household production to the dynamics of production and reproduction in capitalist society.  There is no social reproduction without “societal reproduction,” as all production and reproduction in capitalist society is shaped by accumulation.  Thus, promoting human and environmental well-being requires fundamentally changing the production processes that take place in households and elsewhere, not merely redistributing the costs and benefits of that production.

This paper builds on Marxist-feminist analyses of the links between the household, the economy, and the state through a discussion of recycling, pointing to the ways the unwaged work of household waste sorting contributes to capitalism’s crisis-prone dynamic of overaccumulation.  Household waste sorting is an instance of work transfer—a reorganization of labor and day-to-day life by the state and industry in which production is shifted from industry into households without compensation.  A periodization of “waste regimes” reveals how the state management of waste both mirrors and is implicated in accumulation regimes, their crises, and their resolutions.  The current recycling crisis demonstrates the contradictory nature and futility of recycling in capitalism, and the specific manner in which the work transfer involved in household waste sorting contributes to accumulation and crisis.

Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight over Women’s Work, by Jenny Brown, Oakland, PM Press, 2019, 225 pp., $19.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-62963-638-2

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against the Family, by Sophie Lewis, London, Verso, 2019, 240 pp., $22.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-786637-29-1

This paper describes the household waste management habits and practices of self-described sustainable households, focusing on the intentional actions the members of these households take to reduce environmental harm. Data from qualitative interviews about household waste management practices related to the disposal of trash, “packaging”, and recycling are analyzed using a Marxist-feminist model of household production. For the households in this study, packaging is a powerful reminder of their collusion with capital, eliciting powerful and unexpected negative reactions in interviews. At the same time, practices that involve allowing organic matter to decompose in the backyard, leaving urine unflushed, or placing human feces in the clothes washing machine or bathtub elicited few negative reactions, and recycling made people feel happy. Packaging and waste are necessary in capitalism because of the spatial division of labor and production, part of the constitutive contradiction between social needs and private production. I show how a division of labor and production that is necessary for accumulation manifests itself in an inherent antagonism towards human well-being in a discussion of the exhaustion, frustration, and conflict generated for highly ecologically-oriented parents who are just trying to do their best to live a sustainable life in capitalist society despite the limits to the efficacy of these efforts.

Against the backdrop of deindustrialization and the rise of the service economy, small artisan businesses have been promoted as a liberatory alternative to large-scale enterprise and mass production in the wake of the 2007 global financial crisis. We analyze advice manuals for aspiring artisan entrepreneurs by adapting Boltanski and Chiapello's (2005) framework and analysis of management textbooks to investigate books for would-be artisan business owners. These texts are "manuals of moral instruction" (58) that offer the reader the promise of a more fulfilling and ethical life through self-employment. We reveal that the artisan economy promoted by these advice manuals represents a further evolution in capitalism's co-optation of the artistic critique via the oppositional strata of punk and indie youth subcultures-and their style.

Social Reproduction Theory, as advanced by scholars such as Bhattacharya (2017) and Ferguson (2019) is at its core a theory of the revolutionary capacity of "unproductive" workers such as teachers, nurses, and social workers who are disproportionately women and disproportionately employed by the state. However, Social Reproduction Theory overlooks the contradictory and antagonistic role of the state in the lives of people, as the reproduction of labor-power in capitalism proceeds via antagonism and state repression. The task of teachers, nurses, and social workers is the production of not just any life but that of a docile, exploitable worker.

Over the past five decades, Marxist-feminist theorizing has been hampered by confusions over the multiple meanings of “reproduction” (Barrett [1980] 2014, 19-29).  Overcoming the haziness with which these concepts are too often treated is especially urgent given the current popularity of Social Reproduction Theory, a recent offshoot of Marxist-feminism. The potential for misunderstanding is exacerbated by the existence of an additional use of the term “Social Reproduction” outside of Marxist scholarship—in a Bourdieu-influenced subfield in education scholarship. I will argue that precision in the application of political economic categories related to reproduction is not merely desirable for precision’s sake—these categories lose their critical explanatory power when applied carelessly. The reproduction of capitalist society as a whole—that is, social reproduction— can’t be examined without an understanding of the contribution of the reproduction of labour-power and the reproduction of capital to social reproduction. Indeed, the concepts of labour-power and the reproduction of capital from Marx’s critique of political economy are meaningless if divorced from their explicit roles in the perpetuation of capitalist society as a whole, and from their recursive relationship to each other in the reproduction of capitalist social relations of production.  In this chapter, I will define these concepts drawing on Marx and Marxist-feminism, use these definitions to demonstrate the relationships between these concepts, show how these concepts have been misapplied in some strains of recent Marxist-feminist research.  Finally, I will discuss the consequences of the incorrect application of these concepts.

These are comments on David McNally’s 2024 David Gordon Memorial Lecture. In this response, I point to the immanent critique present in Professor McNally’s remarks. I then show the potential usefulness of immanent critique for an engagement with neoclassical economics, and I consider the consequences for Marxist economics of characterizing the critique of political economy as a critical theory of economic categories.

Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.

This paper examines the dynamic interactions between forest biomass, atmospheric carbon, and land use change. Using a dynamic system model, these three factors are modeled as state equations while the policy maker decides the optimal timber harvesting and deforestation quantities. As forests are suggested as potential climate change mitigation tools to reach net negative emissions due to their function as carbon sinks, examinations into this dynamic relationship is of increasing importance. This investigative line can shed light on how to sustainably manage forests in the context of climate change, as well as indicate forests' role in atmospheric carbon dioxide removal, and there are multiple opportunities for extension of its application.

Solar photovoltaic systems are prohibitively expensive in terms of installation costs. Power from them is also available intermittently-only when energy from the sun is available. On the other hand, PV systems are free of the ever-rising costs of input fuel. They also incur much less operation and maintenance costs and are supposed to have a longer lifetime than, for example, a fossil fuel power plant. Thus using solar-PV power looks uneconomical in the short term, but may be profitable in the long term. It is, therefore, interesting to identify the factors that can make investment in solar PV power generation acceptable.