Resisting state-sanctioned precarity: social reproduction and anti-austerity organizing in Berlin

ABSTRACT

This article explores the consequences of changes in social reproduction for anticapitalist social movements, specifically in the context of a neoliberalizing welfare state. I build on ethnographic fieldwork with the anticapitalist activist group Basta!, based in Berlin, which organizes unemployed people and precarious workers. I argue that the Agenda 2010 labor market reforms in Germany have created a crisis of care by threatening social reproduction, resulting in the emphasis on care practices in these activist groups. I position the work of the movement in the general social reproduction of an increasingly precarious society, highlighting the resilience that a focus on care practices can offer. However, I also discuss the potential risk of reinforcing the status quo through this strategy. Theoretically, the article contributes to a feminist elaboration of the political economy approach by examining how macrostructural developments shape everyday social practices that sustain movements. I note a macro bias and a production bias in the literature, which has resulted in gendered blind spots. Thus, the focus on social movements’ approach to the care crisis reveals ways of combining the political economy approach with those in the literature on gender and social movements. Overall, the article offers insights into the ways in which anticapitalist movements organize around reproduction in the context of neoliberal reforms and highlights the importance of care practices in sustaining resistance to precarity.

KEYWORDS:

• precarity
• anti-austerity movements
• social reproduction
• political economy
• labor market reforms

Introduction

More than a decade of anti-austerity protests has demonstrated the importance of a political economy approach to the study of social movements to understand the relationship between capitalist development and movement responses (Cox, 2014; della Porta, 2015). In this approach, social movements are analyzed in relation to socio-economic conditions and transformations, for example how austerity politics provoke and affect political protest. However, whereas this approach has been taken to study strategy and framing, as well as the spectacles of demonstrations and direct action, less attention has been paid to how macrostructural developments shape the everyday social practices that sustain movements. While the focus has been on the effects of changes in production and consumption on social movements, the responses of movements to developments in the social reproduction of societies is still underexplored (for some notable exceptions, see Casas-Cortés, 2009; Márquez, 2021; Santos, 2020). Thus, the political economy approach has had a macro bias as well as a production bias, which has resulted in gendered blind spots in the literature. In this regard, a focus on movements’ approach to the ‘crisis of care’ (Fraser, 2016) produced by neoliberal developments may contribute to a feminist critique and development of the political economy approach. Here, I explore the consequences of changes in social reproduction for anticapitalist social movements. More specifically, I seek to understand how anticapitalist movements organize around social reproduction in the context of a neoliberalizing welfare state. Thus, I examine the everyday practices of an anticapitalist activist group organizing unemployed people – Basta! – based in Berlin and formed in the wake of the introduction of a series of neoliberal labor market reforms in Germany, the so-called Agenda 2010 reforms. The article builds on ethnographic fieldwork from August through December 2018 with these groups.

The article is structured as follows. I begin by introducing the context of the article, namely the Agenda 2010 reforms and the activist group with which I conducted fieldwork, as well as my theoretical and methodological approach. I then move on to the empirical part of the article. I argue that the Agenda 2010 reforms have created a ‘crisis of care’ in the sense of threatening social reproduction, and that in response to this crisis, what I shall call care practices take a central role in the group. I argue that these respond to changes in social reproduction and that the emphasis on care can offer resilience in face of increasing precarity. On the other hand, this strategy risks bolstering the unemployment system as the activists make it more livable through providing what the state does not. I discuss this dilemma in the final section.

Agenda 2010

At the instigation of Agenda 2010, the German unemployment rate was 8.9% (Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut [Institute of Economic and Social Sciences], 2016). In response, Germany’s strict labor laws were liberalized, motivated by the demands of the market, making it easier to fire workers and to use temporary and fixed-term contracts (Brady & Biegert, 2017). The government impeded access to, and reduced, unemployment benefits through the so-called Hartz reforms. This included the creation of job centers where citizens go to meet state employees who check whether they meet the criteria for benefits (Kemmerling & Bruttel, 2006, p. 95). Earlier, workers paid into an insurance fund, which granted them 60% of their former income for up to 32 months, after which they received 53% for an unlimited period. Now, the unemployed can only receive the insurance-based benefit, renamed Arbeitslosengeld I (Unemployment money 1), for 12 months (Kemmerling & Bruttel, 2006). After 12 months, the unemployed are moved to Arbeitslosengeld II (Unemployment money 2). At the time of fieldwork, this benefit amounted to €424 plus health insurance and rent coverage for a single person. Introduced as the last cluster of the Hartz reforms, Hartz IV, this benefit is referred to as ‘Hartz IV’ in everyday language.

These reforms restructured the economy so extensively that Bruff (2010) named them a ‘passive neoliberal revolution,’ by changing the norms concerning what was considered acceptable working and living conditions (p. 413) in line with the neoliberal idealization of individualized responsibility for well-being (Hall, 2011; Harvey, 2007). Neoliberal welfare reforms tend to affect women most severely as they tend to bear a disproportionate share of care responsibilities (Jenson et al., 2001). As showcased by Berghahn and Wersig (2005), this is also the case with the Agenda 2010 reforms. Several authors have argued that traditional labor unions appear unable to meet the challenges posed by an increasingly precarious labor market (Doellgast et al., 2018; Però, 2020). The state intervention of Agenda 2010 in the labor market constituted a break with Germany’s tradition of tripartite agreements, leading to a diminution of union power and support (Bruff, 2010). In addition, the liberalization of employment relations has resulted in an increase of workers in jobs without collective agreements (Nachtwey, 2018). Furthermore, unions have been criticized for being mainly occupied with protecting the rights of their ‘core’ members still working under strong collective agreements rather than working to expand these rights to others (Nachtwey, 2018; Simms et al., 2018). However, grassroots movements have proliferated in response to labor market developments. Both austerity measures and corresponding anti-austerity movements have led several scholars to call for a return of capitalism to social movement studies (Chouhy, 2020), as I show in the next section.

Theoretical framework

According to Zajak (2013), social movement studies have tended to focus on state – society relationships, disregarding questions of economics and how movements are shaped by, and shape, capitalist institutions. Similarly, della Porta (2017) argues that research on social movements should study how socioeconomic developments ‘affect novel organizational dynamics and central understanding of emerging forms of class politics’ (p. 455). She argues that discussions on capitalism have almost disappeared from social movement studies, which have consequently failed to analyze the sources of movement grievances. For instance, she criticizes the political opportunity approach for assuming that mobilization occurs when social movement actors rationally assess political opportunities as opening up. Rather, recent anti-austerity protests have in part been reactions to an increasingly closed political system. According to her, ‘the main challenge is to locate protests inside the linkages between the market and the state, capitalism and democracy’ (della Porta, 2015, p. 16). While this demonstrates important shortcomings in the social movement literature, the political economy focus itself arguably has blind spots. Although it has shown how movement strategies are impacted by developments in the capitalist system, less attention has been paid to how these developments manifest in the everyday micro activities of the movements. To illuminate these, we can turn to the literature on gender and social movements (Taylor, 1999). Taylor demonstrates how gender relations necessarily shape social movement activity both when the group is explicitly occupied with questions of gender, and when it is not. For instance, Taylor argues that women’s self-help groups tend to center their activism on emotional expressions and caring, which they insist constitute politics, but which are not always recognized by social movement scholars as such. Similarly, the focus of the political economy approach to production has led to questions of reproduction being overlooked. As this devaluation mirrors that in Marxist theory, criticized by Marxist feminists, it is productive to deploy a social reproduction theory (SRT) framework for a feminist critique of the political economy approach.

SRT builds on Marxist theory, but whereas most Marxist theory concentrates on the workplace, SRT is concerned with the processes that allow the worker to arrive at the workplace (Bhattacharya, 2017, p. 2). To be able to work, the worker needs food, a bed to sleep in, clean clothes and so forth. This daily support for workers, together with reproduction to create new workers, namely childbirth, is what is referred to as ‘social reproduction’ in SRT. The work going into this is called reproductive labor or care work¹ as opposed to productive labor, which refers to the wage labor performed in the workplace. Vogel (1983) highlights that in capitalist societies, women are tasked with the main responsibility for social reproduction. Productive labor has been seen as men’s domain, while reproductive labor has been considered ‘women’s work’ (Komlosy, 2018, p. 176). Federici (2012) argues that because reproductive labor is unpaid, it is devalued, naturalized, and thus not seen as ‘real’ (p. 15) work. Where Vogel (2013) and Federici (2020) are concerned with social reproduction primarily in the realm of the family, Bhattacharya (2017, p. 7) argues that social reproduction also takes place in the community, such as in the neighborhood and in society on a larger scale, such as education.

Fraser (2016) has argued that Western capitalist societies find themselves in a crisis of social reproduction or what she calls a ‘crisis of care,’ as a consequence of a fundamental contradiction in capitalism. Unwaged social reproductive activities, such as caregiving, are essential for capitalism to function: to reproduce workers as cheaply as possible. However, the inherent necessity in capitalism to accumulate and expand means that social reproduction is constantly destabilized, as illustrated by Fraser’s (2016) historical overview of the relationship between social reproduction and economic production. In the 19^th century regime of liberal competitive capitalism, social reproduction was entirely privatized and allocated to women in the private sphere. In the state-managed capitalism of the 20^th century, the state assumed some responsibility for social reproduction to ensure a productive workforce through investment in health care, schooling, childcare, and care for the elderly (Fraser, 2016, p. 109). A ‘family wage’ was introduced to allow consumption to increase; thus, the regime still assumed a single male breadwinner, as argued in feminist analyses of the welfare state (cf. Lewis, 1992). Although Fraser develops her argument in an Anglo-Saxon context, this also pertains to the German² labor market context, which has historically been characterized by a male breadwinner and a housewife or part-time working woman (Lietzmann & Frodermann, 2021). However, in the current era of financialized, neoliberal capitalism, real wages have stagnated, meaning that everyone must work more, thereby leaving less time for reproductive labor. Meanwhile, neoliberal policies and austerity measures have resulted in the withdrawal of state-funded care, individualizing the responsibility for care, while people simultaneously have less time to provide care. This results in a need to transfer care work onto others through privatized care services (Fraser, 2016, p. 114). In the German context, childcare has never been widely provided by the state, as Germany’s conservative welfare model has depended on one parent working part-time to care for children. However, the changing labor market leaves this as an option for increasingly few. While the state of Berlin has more developed childcare facilities than most other states in the country, they are still unable to meet the demand (Heilmann, 2021).

Fraser (2016) argues that the crisis is also one of broader social bonds, as it does not simply limit time for caring for family members but also generally, such as for friends, neighbors and co-workers. Similarly, Lorey (2015) argues that for precarious subjects, ‘it is not only work that is precarious and dispersed, but life itself’ (p. 9). Precarity results in loneliness and isolation, as workers lack a long-term connection to a workplace and other workers. Several studies have shown that being unemployed or precariously employed in Germany increases the risk of feeling lonely and isolated (Eyerund & Orth, 2019; Neu & Müller, 2020). Allison (2013) argues that precarization processes create what she calls a ‘desociality,’ (p. 15) undoing feelings of civic responsibility: people’s isolation in their unemployment or precarious working conditions means that no a priori sense of solidarity between them exists, posing a challenge for organizing.

Just as reproductive labor has been devalued in society at large, historically this has also been the case in social movements. These activities have rarely been seen as equally important to the frontline activities of movements: planning and conducting demonstrations, spectacular actions, media appearances, and the like. For example, hooks (1990) argues that in the history of Black liberation struggles, women’s way of resisting through care has been left out. Ipsen (2020) shows how in the 1970s socialist movement in Copenhagen, women’s issues were not taken seriously, and that women were expected to take responsibility for the same tasks as at home. Ferree and Roth (1998) argue in their analysis of the 1989 strike of daycare workers in Berlin that the male-dominated union’s devaluation of care work contributed to the failure to achieve the workers’ demands. These examples show how reproductive labor has been devalued in movements despite often being crucial to their general maintenance as well as the success of particular campaigns (cf. Baugh-Helton, 2021). However, recent scholarship has turned attention to the role of care work for social movement mobilization in contexts of crises (Santos, 2020). I build on this literature in understanding the work of the activists through the concept of care practices. Care practices encompass three aspects: 1) the maintenance of social relationships, 2) emotional work, and 3) practical and material support. In this way, the term builds on earlier work on gender and social movements that emphasizes the role of emotional expression in movements (Taylor, 1999) as well as responding to the neglect of reproductive labor. However, I use the concept of ‘care practices’ to draw attention to the place of these practices in relation to the social reproduction of the political economy, and how they respond to the care crisis. At the same time, the potential for activism centered around reproductive labor to challenge power structures has been questioned (Yuval-Davis, 2011). This will be critically explored in the final section of the paper.

Case selection and methods

To understand the everyday practices of activist groups in the context of the Agenda 2010 reforms, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Basta! in Berlin from August through December 2018. Basta! was started as a direct reaction to the implementation of the reforms by a group of activists, with some members employed and others not, which was already active in anticapitalist organizing. The group saw a need not only to provide practical support to those affected by the reforms but also to politicize the reforms, as they considered them an important point for the anticapitalist struggle. Basta! activist Marie described the group as a kind of union for the unemployed: the activists organize unemployed people by providing free counseling on unemployment issues in addition to various actions and demonstrations. Most activists are unemployed, and it was emphasized that activists should have personal experience of the unemployment system to counsel others. The counseling was meant not only to help visitors navigate the unemployment bureaucracy but also to politicize their situation by making them aware of their rights and the injustice of the system. Whereas labor struggles have traditionally taken place through trade unions, Basta! is a grassroot activist groups. The group is part of the general anticapitalist leftist movement scene in Berlin (Creasap, 2012; Novy & Colomb, 2013; Sweetapple, 2018), operates within a nonhierarchical structure, and tries to reach all decisions through consensus.

Some activists were involuntarily unemployed, and some chose to be unemployed as a protest or to dedicate more time to activism. The activists trained as counselors by following more experienced activists and through workshops arranged by the group. At the time of the fieldwork, the group consisted of around 20 core activists, with equal proportions of men and women. However, I was assigned to a specific day a week to follow the counseling when most of the activists were men, which is reflected in this article. Counseling took place three times a week, and each counseling session lasted three hours. The number of visitors varied between 15 and 30, and the activists often needed to stay past the official closing time. Visitors were of all genders and age groups and from differing educational and ethnic backgrounds. However, those with the most complicated issues tended to be women with caring responsibilities.

I contacted the group via email, explaining my project and research interests, and we agreed that I could follow the activities of the group for a period of four months. I was actively in the field for three to four days a week and participated in activities where I could learn about the precarious living conditions for many workers and where I could observe the activist practices of the group. I participated in their plenary meetings, which enabled me to observe both the practical and theoretical discussions among the activists (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2010). I participated in counseling sessions, and joined the activists when they went with people to the job center and when they visited employers who refused to sign contracts or pay employees’ salaries. Most of the activists assumed that I was familiar with leftist traditions and felt solidarity with their cause. I built rapport through exchanges of activist experiences, political discussions, going to protests together, and the like. I conducted eight recorded semi-structured interviews with activists, as well as people I met at the groups’ counseling sessions. In these sessions, I took on a role akin to that of an apprentice, following an experienced counseling pair who made an extra effort to explain the intricacies of German unemployment bureaucracy to me. All names and identifying details have been altered or removed. I mainly draw on observations from the counseling and interviews with activists in my analytical sections, to which I now turn. First, I show how a crisis of care was encountered by activists in the counseling sessions. Then, I discuss how the groups respond to this crisis by organizing at the point of social reproduction rather than production and through focusing on care practices. I critically assess the dilemmas of this kind of organizing in the final section.

Crisis of care

In Basta!’s counseling sessions, the activists encountered the crisis of care through the stories recounted by visitors of their difficulties in finding employment and navigating the job center’s rules and regulations. In these stories, it was apparent that these problems were entangled in issues such as childcare and housing. At one counseling session, I met Sofia, an East Asian migrant who had lived in Berlin for several years. She needed help to ensure she had understood a letter from the job center correctly, but activist Max and I struck up a conversation with her on her general unemployment situation. She received Hartz IV and was attending a course offered by the job center to enable her to work in a kindergarten. Sofia had a daughter attending nursery school. However, Sofia’s home, the place of her course, and her daughter’s nursery school were in three different neighborhoods. Hence, Sofia spent a great deal of her day transporting herself and her daughter around the city. When I asked her why her daughter went to nursery school in that neighborhood instead of closer to her home, she explained that it had been difficult to even find a nursery school that had free places. This one was her only option. Max joined in, telling me that Berlin was experiencing a shortage of nursery schools because of the state deprioritizing the area (Vieth-Entus, 2018; Vieth-Entus & Vogt, 2017).

The consequences exemplified by this story can be understood from an SRT perspective. Just as reproductive labor is devalued in capitalism on a larger scale, reproductive labor is not adequately accounted for in the unemployment system. Hartz IV recipients with children do receive a higher rate than childless recipients (Für Arbeit, 2019) but are still required to search for full-time employment, participate in courses, and so on, on the same level as everyone else. In a counseling session, I met Clara, a pregnant French woman with a small child. She had recently moved into a new shared apartment that had been difficult for her to find. As the job center pays the rent of Hartz IV recipients, the case worker must approve the recipient moving because the monthly rent cannot exceed €404, problematic in a city such as Berlin. In spite of its reputation as being a ‘poor but sexy’ city (Neate, 2014), rent has increased enormously over the past decade (France-Presse, 2019), which makes it difficult to find housing within the job center’s price range. For Clara, who had a small network in Berlin, it had proved very hard to find housing for her family. She finally convinced her case worker to let her move into a place with a higher rent than was allowed by showing her the rejections of her rental applications, while breaking down in tears.

For both Sofia and Clara, then, issues of social reproduction complicated their experiences of unemployment. Sofia was offered a course that would improve her chances of finding a job as a kindergarten teacher but needed someone to take care of her daughter while she attended the course. The severity of these issues is evident in the fact that Clara had to go as far as breaking down in front of her case worker to receive help.

These examples point to the ways in which precarization processes are related to Fraser’s (2016) conceptualization of the ‘crisis of care’ (p. 99). This was evident in the shortage of nursery schools. A changing labor market that allows few families to have a nonworking parent means that parents must rely on private care services. This contributes to a rise in social inequality, because far from everyone can pay for private care, as is apparent from my interlocutors. For instance, Sofia had trouble finding childcare for her daughter while she attended her course, which would allow her to take care of other people’s children. The crisis is also illustrated in the case of Nina, a white German woman in her early 60s. I met Nina at a counseling session at Basta!, where she came for advice after recently having started receiving Hartz IV. The school where she worked as an art teacher had severely cut back her working hours, meaning that her wage was no longer sufficient to sustain her livelihood. At the same time, her husband had been diagnosed with cancer. This meant that Nina simultaneously had to work part-time, take care of her husband, and search for full-time employment.

The way Basta! has approached the problems created by the crisis of care to place its activism at the point of reproduction and focus on care practices.

Organizing based on care practices

When I attended my first Basta! meeting, one topic was the preparation for its annual street party. Simon, who had taken it upon himself to introduce me to the group, asked if I wanted to join him in hanging posters for the party around the neighborhood. The posters, printed in various colors, declared ‘Solidarity in everyday life – solidarity with our neighbors.’ While placing the posters on street walls and asking local cafés and bars to display them, we chatted about politics. When I mentioned this was my first time in Wedding, Simon told me about the neighborhood and its increasing gentrification in recent years, mentioning a protest that had taken place when a building was sold to a capital investment fund. In Simon’s view, this form of protest is unsustainable, because ‘they only gather people around the protest and not in their everyday lives’ and that it had come ‘too late.’ In this case, the building had already been sold and there was no way of reversing that decision. Simon and several of my other interlocutors regarded isolated protests as ineffective in bringing about change because they failed to engage people with the systemic nature of the processes against which they are protesting. This argument resonates with Davis (2005, p. 85) criticism of contemporary social movements for privileging mobilization over organization. She argues that movements today focus on mobilizing for demonstrations for specific causes, rather than organizing over the longer term to build ‘communities in struggle’ (p. 86) that can challenge the system beyond single issues.

In interviews with Basta! activists, I asked what they saw as the strength of their way of organizing. The activist Tobias said that the way unions traditionally organize in the workplace is no longer as effective, as the standard employment relationship is eroding:

With the erosion of this in neoliberal politics and the impacts this has, I think that organizing in the workplace isn’t […] It’s still important, I don’t want to say it’s not important, but it doesn’t involve everyone that can be potentially reached for politics of this kind. Because many people are in precarious situations and cannot live off their wages or they don’t work at all and so I think that being politically active in this field of precarity or unemployment is important. If it’s really more important than organizing in the labor market or in the company, I don’t know. But it’s at least as important […] Being in the place where people live and offering a space that is connected to a certain neighborhood is important and maybe becomes more important with this development.

Although Tobias considers that organizing in the workplace remains important, he argues that organizing there exclusively is no longer sufficient. Basta! tries to create a ‘community of struggle,’ to use Davis’s term, by concentrating its activities in a specific neighborhood, which can be seen as organizing at the point of social reproduction (Bhattacharya, 2017, p. 7). Organizing in the community then responds to how precarious employment relates to other social reproduction issues, such as the above mentioned cases of Nina, Sofia, and Clara. Organizing in the sphere of social reproduction is not a new phenomenon. Basta!’s emphasis on neighborhood community organizing builds on the long tradition of anticapitalist activism in Berlin. Haunss and Leach (2009) show how the rise of the Berlin autonomist leftist movement has been contingent on the development of a movement scene tied to specific neighborhoods in which the maintenance of the community is seen as equally important as more direct political gains. This context is also what makes Basta!’s work possible: the counseling takes place in a space offered by an autonomous housing project and the group relies on the scene for spreading information about its activities.

I understand the work of the activists through the aforementioned concept of care practices, meaning both the practical and material support provided by activists, the social relationships they foster, and the emotional work of activists. In Basta!’s case, this meant that in addition to using the counseling sessions to give practical advice, it was important to the activists that the counseling session had a communal feeling that could be experienced as a contrast to the impersonal treatment people encountered at the job center. When I asked Nina to describe her first visit to the job center, she said that she had gone there ‘with a great knot in my throat and in my stomach.’ She described the atmosphere as ‘strange’ and unpleasant:

You feel so bad when you’re there. It’s so impersonal. They call you a client, but a client is someone who can go somewhere else. I can’t.

In contrast to these sentiments, the activists strive to make the counseling sessions feel homey and relaxed. Coffee is always brewed, snacks are provided, and despite the large number of visitors to the sessions, activists make sure to take their time on each individual case. The activists inquire into issues the visitor does not raise herself and those not directly related to unemployment. A non-EU migrant was asked whether everything was alright with her residence permit, which led to her showing us photos of racist material she had received in the mail. When she told us that she had reported it to the police, who had rejected it by saying that it did not constitute racism, Max – who was counseling her – sent the photos to a local antiracist group who would try to identify the sender.

Creasap argues that in anticapitalist leftist scenes, it is ‘the relationships and solidarity’ produced by rituals and practices rather than cultural markers that create a sense of belonging among the participants (Creasap, 2012, p. 187). Similarly, Flesher Fominaya (2010) argues that emotional and affective ties between activists are central to building a collective identity that can help people feel like part of the group even when times are tough. In this way, the community created by Basta! can be thought of as a space that seeks to counter the isolation and individualization of living with precarity. For example, the activists repeatedly insist that no one should go alone to appointments at the job center. When visitors say that they are going to a meeting at the job center, the activists pull out a folder with contact information on people who have signed up to accompany others to appointments. They call until they find someone available for the meeting. The activists also ask for all visitors’ contact information and note their names and ‘skills’ to contact them and ask for help with the group’s activities. By doing this, the activists try to establish a connection to visitors that extends beyond the counseling session and includes them in the community around Basta!. By asking the visitors about the skills that they feel they possess but that would not be regarded as such by the job center, the activists attempt to challenge the job center’s assumptions about valuable skills and thus to politicize the counseling by empowering and mobilizing visitors.

This ambition is also reflected in the counseling itself. When a visitor is being counseled, they begin by telling the activists about their issue. The activists ask clarifying questions about the visitor’s situation and what they wish to achieve in the situation. They then present different solutions available to the visitor in the current situation. It is one of the principles of Basta! that it presents different solutions to visitors, who can then choose the option they prefer. If the activists are in doubt about how to advise on a certain issue, they consult each other as well as the legal books stored in the community space. Moreover, the counseling takes place in an open room where those waiting their turn for counseling can listen in and chime in with their own experiences of similar situations. Basta! also arranges community kitchens, film screenings, parties, and talks in which visitors are invited to participate or to organize. Several times, when participating in these events, I met people I had encountered in earlier counseling sessions. Together, these care practices respond to the isolation and individualization of precarization, creating an alternative to the impersonal, production-oriented unemployment system.

In contrast to the view of care as a natural ability, the activists in Basta! treat care as a skill to be learned like any other. ‘It’s important to learn how to talk about the seemingly banal everyday things,’ Marie said, and continued to explain that this was a hard lesson to learn but that:

Basta! is a school for all of us; that is, a self-organized school. We’re learning from one another and with one another. If we weren’t interested in us, who would be?

A way the activists learn this is through a monthly meeting called Mediation. Once a month, Basta!’s weekly plenary was substituted by such meetings, in which participants discussed ongoing or past conflicts with the help of two outsiders. This was a way for the activists to discuss and resolve personal conflicts within the group. The activists described the Mediation meetings as tedious and time-consuming, but necessary: ‘it’s… important that we talk about these problems and don’t just be silent about it,’ as Tobias put it. In this way, maintaining the personal relationships between the activists was recognized as important to the group and its activities. In an interview, Simon described the close ties between the activists as one of the strengths of the group:

[When] you get into the group […] you also get involved in the daily life of the people that are in the group. I think we have this, that this group is a part of our daily life, so we also get to know each other. […] We’re doing a lot of stuff together in this group. And I think this gives us the strength that we know each other and support each other and it’s more [of a] mutual help situation that we create inside the group: if a person has a problem, then the person can say it at the plenum [Basta!’s biweekly meeting] and then find a solution for this […] Other groups joke that when they invite Basta!, a bunch of people come. It’s not that one person comes and makes a presentation […], there are like all these, four, five, six, or seven people coming and sitting in the audience. I really like this, that we sometimes act like a mob.

Simon saw the way activists in Basta! become invested in each other’s lives as positive aspect of the group and the one that he appreciated most. For instance, members go with each other to job center appointments, or help each other craft letters to obstinate landlords. However, this emphasis on care practices is not completely unproblematic, as I show in the final section of this article.

Dilemmas of organizing

As I have shown, in many ways Basta! provides what the welfare system fails to do, both in terms of practical advice and the type of care and support for social reproduction that is not taken into account in the unemployment system. However, this creates certain dilemmas for the activists. First, they expressed concerns about their focus on the job center and their emphasis on the counseling, worrying that in providing the care that is absent from the unemployment system, Basta! continues to provide the reproductive labor that capitalism needs. In this way, the group faces a ‘strategic dilemma’ (Jasper, 2006): whether to make the unemployment system more bearable for the people most affected by it and do the job the state fails to do, but at the risk of making the system more viable in doing so. Ferree (2012) describes a similar dilemma faced by the West German feminist movement in the 1970s and 80s. Setting up shelters for women victims of male violence builds on principles of autonomy and self-determination, so-called Frauenhäuser. These were initially meant to challenge the state’s inaction in this area. However, the initial success of the shelters led to an increasing need for the movement to receive state funding, leading some feminists to criticize the shelters as serving as a ‘fig leaf’ for the state that in turn allowed it to transfer responsibility for men’s violence onto the feminist movement (Kavemann, 2004 in Ferree, 2012, p. 109). These dilemmas only become more pronounced with the neoliberal rollback of the welfare state. Yuval-Davis (2011) argues that adopting care as a mobilization strategy risks ‘oil[ing]… the smooth working of globalized neo-liberalism, which depends on local and global chains of care’ (p. 191). Johansson Wilén (2019) describes how, in a situation of increased precarity, some feminists have reclaimed vulnerability as a political position. This however, risks becoming a strategy of survival rather than resistance. Although vulnerability can serve as a point of departure for political power through the creation of a ‘relational community’ (p. 250, my translation), these must extend the boundaries of the group to constitute actual resistance to the neoliberal politics.

Second, and relatedly, activists faced a dilemma regarding their focus on the unemployment system. This was brought up in an interview with Simon, who identified a risk of losing a general critique of the capitalist system seen by the activists as its producer:

It’s somehow a danger to always focus on the job center […] I think it would be super easy for them to just change small stuff that we [have been] demanding for years and years and years, because it doesn’t matter so much if they stress people more or less […] We have to push it forward and connect it with fights over prison and fights in the care industry and connect it with any labor strikes that are going on, because I think it’s necessary for us as a group to have a broader view on capitalism at least and also on other oppressi[ve] systems – the whole system.

Basta! tried to counter these dilemmas by politicizing its counseling. After Marie and I took part in a demonstration with another activist group, which was also concerned about the effects of Agenda 2010, she criticized the group for deploying a discourse of victimhood:

I find this symbolism terrible. Framing people as merely victims and not as agents […] They are reproducing the discourse of the state and the media that poor people are so small and weak that they are unable to be politically active – that poor people can’t have a seat at the table. We are told that we have no power to act.

For Marie, it was important to view those in precarious situations not just as victims of their circumstances but as possible co-fighters, as she phrased it, possessing knowledge and political agency; hence the emphasis on counseling as a collective effort involving the counseled themselves, to build an enduring community of struggle. However, this was not always reflected in the wishes of those being counseled. Tobias and I counseled a woman in her early 30s who grew frustrated with Tobias’s unwillingness to provide a single answer, bursting into tears and exclaiming that ‘I have been to three different consultation places, but none of you are able to help me.’ In this case, it was clear that the visitor was not interested in Basta!’s political work but merely wanted help to navigate her tricky unemployment situation. In an interview, Marie admitted that in the counseling, the political dimension of their work was sometimes lost on the visitors:

Most of the visitors know this [the politics of the group], but there are also people who don’t. These are often the ones in highly precarious situations who are under a lot of pressure and just need to ensure that they receive their benefits because they need to pay their rent or their public transport ticket or they need to eat.

As such, the ideal of politicized counseling with mobilization potential was not always realized. While this emphasis thus went some way toward addressing the aforementioned dilemmas, it also created new dilemmas in itself.

Conclusion

I have argued that the German Agenda 2010 reforms have resulted in a ‘crisis of care,’ in the sense that they leave less time for reproductive labor and isolate precarious subjects. This complicates the possibilities for organizing among unemployed and precariously employed workers. Whereas unions have failed to respond adequately to the socioeconomic situation brought about by the reforms, grassroots activist groups have started organizing in response to the unemployment system. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork one such group, I have argued that they respond to the crisis of care caused by the current situation in two primary ways.

First, they organize in the local community, the neighborhood, rather than the workplace. I have referred to this as organizing at the point of social reproduction rather than the point of production. As I have argued, this is not a new phenomenon; however, as fewer people are tied to a specific workplace, organizing in the immediate community becomes even more important. However, this dispersal necessitates a simultaneous strengthened effort to connect ongoing struggles. Second, the groups center a large part of their activities around what I have called care practices; that is, the maintenance of social relationships, emotional work, and the practical and material support the group offers. These practices constitute the reproductive labor that goes into the daily maintenance of the movement, reproducing the movement as well as its wider community. Together, they offer an alternative to the individualization accompanying precarity. In showing how they do this I have situated the care practices of the movement in relation to the political economic context in which the movement operates. I have argued that this way of organizing also presents a dilemma to the activists, who worry that they are merely making the system more livable rather than challenging it. To avoid this, these caring practices must be politicized and used to build an enduring ‘community in struggle’ from which state-sanctioned precarity can be challenged.

In summary, through deploying a social reproduction theoretical framework (Federici, 2012; Fraser, 2016) this study highlights the necessity of focusing on the sphere of reproduction as well as production when studying the consequences of changes in the political economy on movements. In this way, it builds on earlier work on gender and social movements by examining the role of movement practices gendered as feminine in these processes, insisting on their profoundly political nature (Taylor, 1999). In this way, the study relates to more recent scholarship on the role of care in European anti-austerity movements. For example, scholars have demonstrated the role of care practices in the 15-M square protests and the anti-eviction movement PAH during the Spanish financial crisis (Agenjo-Calderón et al., 2023; Santos, 2020; see also Flesher Fominaya, 2020). Diz et al. (2023) have showed how this ethos of care was again mobilized by the Mutual Aid Groups in Spain during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study contributes to this literature by combining the political economy approach with a Marxist-feminist theoretical perspective to understand socio-economic developments and social movement care practices as integrated within the same framework. It demonstrates how movements deploy care practices not only in times of crisis but also in periods of relative stability. More studies are needed to show how this plays out in anti-austerity movements in contexts undergoing similar developments and how these seek to overcome similar dilemmas to those presented here. While this article has mainly focused on the gendered aspects, future research should pay further attention to the role of racialized effects of welfare state reforms in these movements.

Disclaimer on ethics approval

The data for this article was collected as part of the research for my master thesis at the Department of Anthropology, the University of Copenhagen from August-December 2018 under the supervision of Nico Miskow Friborg. At the time, the department did not require approval from an ethical review board for research carried out by master students, only approval from the supervisor.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lotte Schack

Lotte Schack is a PhD student in sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science at the University of Gothenburg. Her current research explores visions of a fossil free and just future within the Swedish climate movement.

Notes

1. The terms ‘reproductive labor’ and ‘care work’ are used interchangeably in this article.

2. At least in West Germany. In East Germany, labor market participation was generally more gender equal than in the West (Rosenfeld et al., 2004).