Disrupting the Anthropocene

Abstract

Multiple interrelated global crises challenge political thinkers and activists to engage with temporality. Taking the diagnosis of already unfolding planetary environmental catastrophe seriously, climate activists and environmental scholars in the Global North have increasingly focused on experiences of irredeemable loss. These “postapocalyptic” discourses draw on Indigenous, decolonial, and feminist engagements with temporality to highlight the interconnections between different temporal scales, speeds, and rhythms in the Anthropocene. Moreover, the notion of the postapocalyptic present offers an analytical link between historical narratives about the development of extractive capitalism and social “lived” temporalities of mourning, care, and disruption. Feminist debates about the limits and possibilities of social (care-) strikes here provide important insights about the need to interrupt dominant temporal regimes defined by an incessant drive for heightened economic productivity. Disruptive and prefigurative political practices can in turn create room for experimentation with more sustainable and caring forms of societal organization in a diminished present.

Unified, linear, and progressive concepts of historical time are a defining feature of Western¹ modernity. In turn, modern theories of democracy are closely linked to the notion of an open malleable future. The idea of a future that can be formed by human action, however, has become complicated by the increasing awareness of the planetary dimensions of anthropogenic environmental destruction. The Anthropocene thesis (as a shorthand for the multiple aspects of anthropogenic interference with Earth's biosphere and biogeochemical cycles) reminds us of the complex interconnections of human and natural time-scales, rhythms, and speeds.

For modern conceptions of democracy this reorientation toward the temporalities of material processes is problematic because it reintroduces determinism. Not God's will or “the economy,” but natural limits are increasingly understood to curtail the scope of democratic politics’ creative possibilities. Even if drastic political interventions on a global scale would be imminent, it would still be too late to prevent futures where living conditions are severely diminished for some and become increasingly impossible for others. Moreover, Western societies’ past (economic and technological) relations to the environment have shaped not only the planet, but also political ideas, decisions, and systems (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017; Charbonnier 2021; Mitchell 2009). At the same time, however, grappling with climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss highlights the continued importance of broadening and deepening notions and practices of democracy and justice. While environmental destruction affects everyone to some extent, the unequal distribution of power and wealth on national and global scales also maps onto people's unevenly distributed vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophes. Likewise, the large-scale destruction of ecosystems and the mass death of individual organisms and whole species presses home the need to find better ways to define and represent the rights of non-human beings and entities in the political sphere. Taking the reality of already unfolding environmental catastrophes seriously, hence poses the question of how political thought and activism committed to the deepening and broadening of democracy and justice can meaningfully engage with an understanding of the present and future as already irrevocably impoverished in possibilities.

To approach this complex issue, I concentrate on the roles of historical and social time in environmental and feminist social movements. Discourses within these movements have made key contributions to contemporary political theory's ideas about the relationships between democracy, justice, and temporality. Instead of understanding a departure from “future-orientation” as necessarily demotivating or depoliticizing, I explore whether critiques of linear progressive notions of historical time enable a critical perspective on social “everyday” or “lived” temporalities, which are structured by (economic) demands for ever-increasing speed and efficiency. In particular, feminist discourses about care (work) pose the question of whether care-centered environmental and feminist activist practices can be fruitfully read as disruptions of dominant social time regimes.

The article proceeds in three steps. The first section explores narratives on the historical time-scale, which inform and motivate environmental political activism. The environmental movement in countries of the Global North is often singled out for departing from a progressive utopian framing of possible futures, prevalent in democratic mass movements of the twentieth century. Instead, environmentalist narratives have often evoked the threat of planetary annihilation. With the increasing conviction that humanity is missing its window to prevent catastrophic climate change, however, some environmental groups in countries of the Global North have shifted toward the position that we are living within an extended present of unfolding environmental collapse. This temporal shift has brought these groups closer to perspectives voiced by activists from countries of the Global South who have already experienced climate change as an immediate danger. The latter viewpoints also entail a broader temporal analysis of environmental deterioration, which draws attention to the long destructive history of colonialism and extractive capitalism. Decolonial, ecofeminist, and Indigenous engagements with historical time emphasize the plurality of perspectives on historical events, but also provide analytic frameworks that connect differentiated catastrophic events in the past, present, and future.

In the second section, I explore how historical and natural time-scales are interwoven with social time by turning to activist practices that take on the temporalities of environmental loss. I argue that rituals of environmental mourning challenge societal norms about which kinds of loss can be acknowledged. Acts of shared public mourning disrupt everyday life, creating a pause in which participants can find the time to engage with losses that otherwise often remain invisible or are deemed private. These practices acknowledge ethical relationships of care toward non-human beings and entities whose temporalities exceed accustomed human time-scales.

The last section turns to social strikes, such as the Fridays for Future school strike movement and feminist (care) strikes. I concentrate on the temporalities entailed in debates about the strategies, aims, and limits of recent feminist strike movements. With this focus, I hope to bring out the tensions involved within contemporary notions of the strike as exodus or refusal. These notions highlight the importance of prefigurative practices to “opt out” of contemporary time regimes structured by neoliberal governmentality. The organization of alternative relations of care (work), based on solidarity and communal democratic decision-making, is seen as both a condition for the very possibility of the strike and as one of its successful outcomes. These debates, however, also highlight the challenges and limits of establishing alternative networks of care as a social movement strategy, in particular where prefiguration has lost its connection to utopian horizons of (imminent) systemic change.

From Apocalyptic Progress to Postapocalyptic Temporalities: Environmental Movements and the Disruption of Dominant Historical Narratives

Social movements have tended to follow broader societal ideas about linear historical progress. Their guiding ideas and narratives are distinctly modern, Carl Cassegård and Håkan Thörn argue, in the sense that social movements adhere to the Enlightenment notion that humanity can alter the world according to its will, and hence that collective political action can bring about a better future (Cassegård and Thörn 2024: 49). Motivated by the threat of nuclear annihilation and descriptions of looming environmental collapse in early environmental literature, mainstream environmental movements in the Global North have departed from this broader trend in some respects. While retaining a linear and unified historical narrative, theirs has been one of decline. The need to prevent an apocalyptic future from coming to pass is seen as a unifying cause for all humanity, which has to come together to save Earth. This narrative framing has also been prevalent in the more mainstream part of the climate change movement. In particular in the Global North and in international governance spaces, humanity's collective moral responsibility for future generations has been frequently invoked. This apocalyptic narrative framing, however, has come under scrutiny by the 2010s, as critics have pointed out its failure to garner effective international action. The focus on a preventable future climate catastrophe, it is argued, has even contributed to depoliticizing the issue of climate change (see e.g., Swyngedouw 2010).

To understand this effect, one has to understand both the temporalities of contemporary institutional politics and the particular framing of these apocalyptic narratives. First, in blatant contradiction to the idea that modern democracy is inherently orientated toward a better future, it is often noted by political scientists that contemporary institutional politics (democratic or not) is badly equipped to deal with seemingly “far away” and hence “unreal” future scenarios, in particular if acting on them is perceived as (politically) costly in the present. This phenomenon can be ascribed, at least partly, to a general tendency to “discount” the future, which has long seeped from liberal economic thought into institutional politics (Doganova 2024). Second, the abstract idea of all of humanity as both perpetrator and (potential future) victim of environmental destruction, central to many apocalyptic climate change narratives, avoids a political analysis of the drivers of climate change. Finally, the apocalyptic narrative is often coupled to progressive narratives of techno-managerial solutions. This is even the case for the original earth systems science literature, which introduced the Anthropocene thesis to a broader audience. Here, grand cumulative descriptions of unfolding planetary environmental impacts do not dwell on the violence of the environmental crises they outline. Instead, the history of the Anthropocene is presented in the seemingly more neutral narrative framing of a technology-driven development of the human species into a geological force. Unaware of the planetary consequences of its novel—technologically mediated—powers, it is suggested, humanity has unwittingly interfered with crucial planetary systems. By undergoing a reflective scientific turn, however, humanity is now able to grasp the consequences of its juvenile growth spurt. It is therefore up to the global scientific elite to face the challenge of guiding “mankind toward global, sustainable, environmental management” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 18), which may involve “large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to ‘optimize’ climate” (Crutzen 2002: 23). While it is not too late to stop environmental destruction and climate change—or rather to reverse and direct what has already been set in motion—this, the apocalyptic/progressive historical narrative implies, is not an issue that requires systemic economic and political change (see e.g., Baskin 2019).

Critiques of these unified and linear historical narratives have gained in visibility in the international climate movement after the disappointing outcome of the climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Many activists have become convinced that decisive international political intervention is not forthcoming. Moreover, the growing insight that the narrow window to prevent future catastrophic climate change will be missed has coincided with a stronger focus on the contemporary effects of already unfolding climate catastrophe. Activists based in more affluent countries and communities of the Global North have increasingly come to understand that the idea of a coming catastrophe was too centered on the perspectives of people living in relative privilege. This viewpoint has overlooked past and unfolding environmental destruction that directly affects poorer people, communities, and countries (Cassegård and Thörn 2018: 568).

In this turn toward notions of global climate justice, activists could build on existing environmental and Indigenous justice movements. Local environmental grassroots movements have long highlighted the unequal distribution of environmental risks and burdens structured by colonial continuities and the gendered and racialized distribution of wealth and exploitation, on local and global scales (Parsons et al. 2021; Schlosberg and Collins 2014). For many people, catastrophe is not only a future threat but also a way of describing the historical past. With reference to climate change, Kyle Whyte notes “the hardships many non-Indigenous people dread most of the climate crisis are ones that Indigenous peoples have endured already due to different forms of colonialism: ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration” (2018: 226). As writer Claire Coleman explains the postapocalyptic setting of her novel, Terra Nullius, “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people alive today are the descendants of people who survived an apocalypse. . . . We don't have to imagine an apocalypse, we survived one. We don't have to imagine a dystopia, we live in one—day after day” (Coleman 2017).

In their sociological research on climate activism in countries of the Global North, Cassegård and Thörn use the expression “postapocalyptic sensibility” to describe the reorientation of historical narratives (Cassegård and Thörn 2018). The notion of living in postapocalyptic times disrupts the dominant modern Western concept of historical time as unified and progressive. While it retains the “apocalyptic” framing of environmental deterioration as an accumulative global phenomenon which unfolds into an uncertain and diminished future, it rejects the unified historical narrative of humankind's past and present collective agency, folly, and potential salvation. By pluralizing histories and sites of planetary environmental catastrophe, postapocalyptic ideas redescribe apocalypse as a multiple, situated event. This stresses that, while apocalypse may already be here, it does not affect everybody in the same way. However, as environmental and climate justice movements have shown, starting from specific experiences of past and present loss and destruction can inform a shared political critique. The latter highlights the continuities of “imperial ways of living,” where affluent communities, primarily in the Global North, externalize the risks and burdens of capitalist production and (over-) consumption (Brand and Wissen 2017). Historically and in the present, extractive capitalism has depended on the existence of “sacrifice zones”, on “places that, to their extractors, somehow don't count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress’’ (Klein 2014: 169). In this context, ecofeminist and decolonial theorists have offered analytic frameworks that explain the historical interconnections between colonialism, capitalism, and the exploitation of “free” nature and “free” enslaved or overexploited labor, violently extracted from racialized and gendered “others” (see e.g., Federici 2004; Quijano 2000). In some analyses, capitalist exploitation is connected to a longer history of Western dualism, where nature is delegated to the status of an exploitable and neglectable “background condition,” excluded from the realm of political significance. In turn, the notion that some humans and some human activities are “closer” to nature has historically served to justify colonialism, slavery, and the subjugation and over-exploitation associated with the modern gendered and racialized division of labor (Plumwood 2003).

In summary, environmental, feminist, and decolonial philosophies of history tend to focus on the development of (colonial, imperial, extractive) capitalism, which reunites pluralized historical time within a broader critical framework. The apparent tension between postapocalyptic fragmentation and unifying analysis is expressed well in early critical theorists’ engagements with historical time. They remind us that any form of universal history is necessarily constructed and hence disavows the actual discontinuity, chaos, and complexity of history. While it might be cynical to retain any teleological notion of history in the face of its catastrophic fragmentation, however, historical unity can still be at least approximated in the negative—as a process of increasing domination (Herrschaft) over external and internal nature (Adorno 2020: 314). Nevertheless, the cost of any unifying historical theory can be a form of “forgetting,” where we no longer mourn the lived realities of those who have suffered catastrophic events (Benjamin 1969).

Postapocalyptic sensibilities, however, do not only disrupt dominant notions of unified linear historical time. They also reorientate notions of the lived present. As James Berger expresses this point, if “the conclusive catastrophe has already occurred”, the “ceaseless activity of our time—the new with its procession of almost indistinguishable disasters—is only a complex form of stasis” (Berger quoted in Cassegård and Thörn 2018: 562). This conception of the present as marked by “polar inertia” (Virilio 2000) builds on historical analyses of how social time regimes have changed with industrialization and colonization. The establishment of modern societies, in this understanding, entailed an enforced move toward “clock-time.” This involves an understanding of time as even, linear, and divisible into measurable intervals. Ubiquitous use of clock-time, in turn, makes acceleration a key feature of modern (work) life. Tasks have to be performed within externally dictated time-slots rather than according to the interrelated rhythms or Eigenzeit (their intrinsic speed and duration) of performer and task. These time-slots can be shortened to increase productivity (Hassan 2009: 51–66). As Julie Ann White reminds us, Marx already famously argues that “capitalism ‘compresses’ both time and space in its desire for new efficiencies and endless markets. This conception of time structures both our economics and our politics. It makes time unaffordable . . . as it reduces time to its relation to productive output” (White 2020: 163). However, as critiques of neoliberal work and governance regimes point out, acceleration now undermines societal structures previously ordered by clock-time. The structure of the industrial working day is increasingly replaced by a regime of spatio-temporal simultaneity and flexibility. The ever-intensifying drive to perform tasks faster and more efficiently, coupled with the promise of flexibility, leads to the expansion of capitalizable work-time and the dissolution of its boundaries, leaving people perpetually “out of time.” “Neoliberalism's productive impulses and competitive efficiencies”, White writes, create “anxious, perpetually insecure and readily fearful” subjects, without the resources (temporal and otherwise) to resist and engage in democratic politics (2020: 173). By exhausting, overwhelming, and coopting people, then, the logic of neoliberal technology-driven acceleration actually plays a part in producing social and political inertia. Moreover, the “naturalization” of acceleration as a necessary and uncontrollable feature of markets, capital accumulation, and technological developments also enforces the idea that the “naturally” slow social processes of democratic deliberation would not be able to regulate or disrupt the former spheres.

A postapocalyptic sensibility allows for a critical perspective on dominant ideas about historical and social time. Yet, it can also foster a sense that we are trapped within a perpetual present of “capitalist realism.” Mark Fisher has coined this term to describe a cultural atmosphere where, in a turn of phrase he ascribes to Frederic Jameson, it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism (Fisher 2009: 16). In the next section, I therefore want to explore whether dwelling with experiences of loss, exhaustion, belatedness, and frustration can be understood not as depoliticizing but in terms of a reorientation of the temporal logics of political activism. Instead of a focus on possible futures, here the disruption of dominant imaginaries and social time regimes in the present becomes a central aim of democratic political practices. Such disruptions may provide openings for more expansive conceptions of how we can live together within a diminished present. After I engage with rituals of environmental mourning in the second section, I turn to feminist (care-) strikes in the third section. Engaging with discourses around the feminist strike movement, I explore further how concerns with vulnerability, precarity, and care can enable the formulation of a politics of solidarity that transverses seemingly disparate political concerns.

Dwelling with Environmental Loss: Mourning as Disruption of Social Temporalities I

Postapocalyptic sensibilities become visible in recent engagements with environmental loss.² Public rituals of mourning often blur the lines between artistic performances and activism. Examples include symbolic funerals for glaciers, such as for Pizol Glacier (in 2019), Okjokull Glacier (in 2019) and Clark Glacier (in 2020), or the yearly Remembrance Day for Lost Species, initiated by a group of artists based in the United Kingdom in 2011 (Buhl 2023: 73; ONCA n.d.). One rationale behind these events is to create images and narratives that broaden the general public's appreciation of already unfolding environmental crises. This aim addresses one of the core issues Andreas Hetzel (2024) identifies with biodiversity loss. He argues that people struggle to grasp the planetary dimension of this crisis because it is not fully tangible in everyday experience. This, he writes, is partly due to the abstraction of biodiversity itself. Biodiversity can never be grasped in its fullness because it is sensually available to us only in small segments. Moreover, people often remain unaware of the decline of species numbers and diversity around them. As Hetzel puts is, ignorance (Nichtwissen) about the extent of the crisis can be understood as a hallmark of biodiversity loss. It is estimated that up to three hundred species become extinct every day; however, most of these species have not been described by life scientists (IPBES 2019: xvi; see also Hetzel 2024: 65). Moreover, usually the less common, and thus less generally known, species disappear first from an ecosystem. Casual visitors to the local park or forest, therefore, might not notice diminishing species diversity. In addition, Hetzel draws attention to shifting baseline syndrome, where people are unable to register the creeping changes in their environment and have become slowly desensitized to a diminished world (2024: 66). Anders Carlson, director of the Oregon Glaciers Institute and one of the organizers of the funeral for Clark Glacier, expresses a similar concern. For him, part of the intention behind organizing the funeral was to bring the importance of glaciers into the awareness of local communities. He believes that people simply have not noticed the decline of Oregon's glaciers and have been uninformed about the ways climate change already affects local ecosystems, despite the glaciers’ key role in providing water for agriculture and consumption (Buhl 2023: 75–76). I would suggest, however, that—in particular with climate change—the issue is not primarily a lack of available information. What we see is rather a form of shared denial or willed forgetting, a societal ability to simultaneously know and not know. Rituals of remembrance may invoke a deeper affective understanding of facts that can be known and still not fully comprehended. By acknowledging the disappearance of landscape features, ecosystems, and species as losses that can be mourned, these rituals are meant to broaden and deepen ethical sensibility.³

Establishing new rituals of environmental mourning challenges the tight boundaries of what kind of losses can be acknowledged socially. Accepted objects of mourning are usually restricted to the family and the human—but also to accustomed scales of temporal and spatial proximity. In difference, rituals organized on the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, for example, include the commemoration of events which are temporally and spatially removed, such as the extinction of the Great Auk (extinct in 1844) in 2011 or of the Passenger Pigeon (extinct in 1914) in 2014. In addition, mourning the loss of species and glaciers entails an effort to grasp that their existence and disappearance both far exceed and intersect the time-spans of human experience. The latter is highlighted in the acknowledgment that individual non-human organisms, species, and landscapes can hold deep personal, cultural, and practical significance to people. Taking these connections seriously, the rituals provide room to share stories of personal environmental loss and to dwell with sorrow, exhaustion, and anger; emotions often considered inappropriate in contemporary societies. Finally, the Remembrance Day for Lost Species organizers want to establish links between personal affect, political analysis, and action. For them Remembrance Day for Lost Species

is a chance each year to explore the stories of species, cultures, ways of life and habitats driven extinct by unjust power structures and exploitation, past and ongoing. It emphasises that these extinctions are rooted in violent, racist and discriminatory economic and political practices. It provides an opportunity for people to renew commitments to all that remains, and supports the development of creative and practical tools of resistance. . . . Climate change and habitat loss due to extractive colonialism and capitalism are not only exacerbating human suffering and structural inequality but plainly leading to a sixth mass extinction event. Now is the time to create new rituals for remembering and mourning what has been lost, and for celebrating and making commitments to what remains (ONCA n.d.).

An immediate possible effect of these rituals lies in their use of established social customs of mourning as a sanctioned interruption of everyday routines. Taking time for shared mourning offers a brief respite from the demanding speed of contemporary social life. The personal experience of grief is often described as isolating (and hence apolitical) because, by dwelling with the past, the mourner is incapable of keeping up with social time (see e.g., Kelz 2020). Social rituals of mourning, however, are meant to permit a brief shared suspension of forward-looking social time. Together, mourners can dwell with the past, and this collective experience is intended to ease the return to the social flow of time. Such rituals thus also fulfill the social function of circumscribing the appropriate time, space, and form for grief. Nevertheless, by appropriating rituals of mourning, disruptions in contemporary regimes of ceaseless efficiency and productivity can be created. They can provide a needed pause, which may enable a temporal expansion where participants explore how social norms, expressed in dominant time regimes, restrict the time allotted to emotional care. Such interrogations can also provide a different perspective on the temporalities of political practices. Without denying urgency, then, collective rituals of environmental remembrance can offer a temporary respite needed to establish novel practices of care within the setting of political activism. This acknowledges that political activism often entails negative affect, including frustration and hopelessness. Developing practices of emotional care is increasingly seen by activists as essential for sustaining political engagement. This requires, however, a critical examination of notions and postures of the “heroic”—autonomous, resilient, able-bodied, optimistic, and forward-looking—political agent, which is still a prevalent figure in political thought and activism (Zieringer 2024). If we understand rituals of mourning as involving forms of care which require an extended dwelling with the past and present, this broadens care beyond notions of nurturing directed toward better futures. In this sense, theories and practices of care are not necessarily opposed to postapocalyptic sensitivities. Instead, care can describe attitudes, “inclinations,”⁴ or forms of engagement, where, within non-linear, plural, and “more-than-human” temporalities, relations of multi-species solidarity can be fostered on a damaged planet.

Refiguring Intersectional Solidarity and Refusal: Social Strikes as Disruption of Social Temporalities II

“The strike puts us in a situation of struggle. It does not forget the importance of mourning, but it removes us from the ‘state’ of mourning.”

(Gago 2020: 12)

To explore further how political networks of solidarity can be formed based on “postapocalyptic” analyses outlined in the first section, I turn to activists’ and academic reflections about recent feminist strike movements in Europe and Latin America. With this shift in emphasis, I do not want to diminish the global significance of the climate school strike movement.⁵ However, while this might seem like an abrupt departure from the focus on environmental catastrophe in the previous sections, these feminist discourses have long explored issues I understand as being at the heart of the notion of a postapocalyptic present. Moreover, I believe that debates about the conditions of possibility and limits of social strikes, which have long been central to feminist strike movements, speak well to some of the issues Fridays for Future activists have recently faced. In addition, I hope that the overlap in concerns of these movements is apparent, in particular as Fridays for Future has increasingly turned to notions of climate justice to formulate intersectional political critiques (König 2022: 232).

In particular in their recent iterations in Latin America, feminist strike movements have drawn attention to connections between gendered violence and issues of social and environmental justice. As Verónika Gago argues, as a transversal movement, Latin American feminist strikes have addressed gendered and racialized over-exploitation of productive and reproductive labor together with gendered violence and the violence involved in environmental destruction, for example, in communities affected by the use of toxins in industrial agriculture (Gago 2020). These issues are connected to each other as instances of heightened precarity, structured by capitalist governmentality. While I maintain that rituals of mourning, like those described above, are important parts of political practice, they are nevertheless often understood as a pivoting away from political activism's key strategies and aims. The relationship between public mourning and politization, however, has recently become especially visible in the “Ni una menos” protests, which played a prominent role in recent feminist strike movements. These protests publicly commemorate femicides to highlight that these murders are being depoliticized when they are framed as isolated “private tragedies.” The demand that not one more life should be lost to gendered and racialized violence is directed toward the immediate need for drastic societal change (Ni Una Menos n.d.). While, as Gago points out, this entails a shift in temporalities—from a static “state” of mourning, which I understand as a dwelling with the past, to one of forward-looking struggle—I would still maintain that feminist movements have seldom appealed to unified utopian visions of the future as a central organizing narrative. Instead, they aim to make life less precarious and more livable within an extended and complex present, which is understood via engagements with entangled historical genealogies of different forms of oppression. Focusing on feminist strike movements in this section, I also want to further explore the possibilities of care (-time) as central to the interruption of dominant social temporalities of extractive capitalism. Therefore, I follow theoretical engagements that understand social strikes in terms of refusal or exodus. This framing aims to exceed a political logic of “division of labor,” where social movements are ascribed the function of formulating civil society demands, which then can be taken up and fulfilled by the government. Moreover, the notion of refusal also exceeds the very temporal restriction of the strike as a specific date.

Strikes have been key political instruments for workers to exert their collective bargaining power against their employers. Historically, general strikes have also been a central tool for workers to assert collective political power.⁶ On the occasion of a general strike in Spain in 2002, the feminist collective Precarias a la deriva asked, however, whether the general strike can still be regarded as a key political practice, given that many people are not represented by organized labor unions and face greater hurdles for participating in strike action because they work under precarious conditions. The collective focused on care work, which is often done in the isolation of private homes or delegated to people without secure citizenship status or employment contracts. Moreover, interrupting care work can be difficult when care receivers depend on it for their survival. Finally, waged care workers often have less bargaining power than people employed in other sectors, given the devaluation of their work in capitalist economic systems (Precarias a la deriva 2014: 117–118). Despite these difficulties, Precarias a la deriva and other groups that have organized feminist (care) strikes remain attached to the potential of the strike as a key form of political organization (see e.g., AG Feministischer Streik Kassel 2023).

Exploring the possibility of strike under these complex conditions makes hierarchies of work visible and gives value to precarious, informal, domestic, and migrant work, Gago (2020) argues. With reference to climate school strikes, we might add that social strikes direct attention to the “private” and intergenerational reproduction of capitalist labor relations. Schools prepare students to become part of the workforce. They are not only meant to convey needed knowledge for the labor-market, however. Schools also discipline students to fulfill the temporal demands of capitalist labor. They teach how to be “productive” with one's time, including the expectation that students show up for an externally determined time-span and learn to organize their time according to set expectations (König 2022: 223–224; White 2020: 171). This analysis of climate school strikes as social strikes based on a broad definition of work as “encompassing all activities—waged and unwaged, productive and reproductive—that are subordinated to . . . the accumulation of capital,” however, is only in rare instances explicitly formulated by climate strike activists (König 2022: 223). One example is a statement by two organizers of the 2019 climate strike from Australia who write that “[a]s a strategy, the social strike reflects the fact that capital depends on our leisure time, our domestic activity, and our social spaces, not only to circulate goods and services, but also to create relationships suitable for capitalism to continue to exist” (quoted in König 2022: 223–224).

Feminist strikes, however, do not exclusively aim to raise the visibility of precarious and “hidden” reproductive labor. Engaging with the concept of strike and the experience of organizing and being on strike are also seen as themselves valuable political practices. Precarias a la deriva stress the importance of understanding instances of strike within the context of broader histories of workers’ self-organization, which, they explain, reaches back as long as the history of alienated labor, including slave labor and unpaid reproductive labor (Precarias a la deriva 2014: 111–113, 117–118). Engagements with the history of strikes in terms that exceed the history of organized waged labor, then, provide a way of pluralizing historical perspectives on political subjectivity and agency. The strike itself, moreover, is experienced as the disruption of social time regimes. For Precarias a la deriva, the point of the care strike is not simply to interrupt work, as a conventional strike would do, but also to establish more caring ways of organizing care work. Instead of “just” demanding more time and resources for care, the care strike is an occasion for extended experimentation with new practices and patterns of care. Caring activities are put at the center of building new social connections with others and with the environment. Here, the notion of care-time, as for example discussed by White, comes into play. Focusing on the sector of waged care work, White emphasizes the problematic nature of integrating care professions into capitalist labor systems, which require ever-increasing productivity and efficiency. This, she argues, puts mounting pressures on care workers and lowers the quality of care. In her understanding, the activity of care is not compatible with neoliberal time regimes. Good care demands not only that care givers have enough time available for specific tasks but also that they have the flexibility to just be with care receivers, to listen and observe and be open to the different temporalities they inhabit. As White writes,

“[g]ood” care workers are “generous” with their time and attention in ways that are driven by situational needs. . . . When we describe this kind of care as “generous” we are actually capturing work that is not just “more” but recognizing that it is qualitatively different. It is excessive in the sense that it cannot be contained by or measured within the categories of productive time and value through which our economic order is sustained. (White 2020: 161–162)

Good care, then, is “dyssynchronous with the dominant temporal regimes” as “[c]aring attention is exactly the space of attending rather than producing, of being rather than doing” (White 2020: 166–167).

Being attuned to the intersections of different speeds and temporal scales is not only important when one takes care of other human beings. It is also central for broadening an attitude of care to non-human animals, plants, and ecosystems, as for example María Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) points out. The role of temporalities is stressed in literature on sustainable agriculture or ecological gardening, which highlight the need to recognize and honor the different time frames various plants, animal populations, and ecosystems need to recover from human interventions. Understanding the effects of intersecting temporalities is also key to the development of nature-based climate change solutions, which entail a careful engagement with processes of ecosystem carbon-sequestration and biodiversity dynamics. Sustainability and climate change mitigation strategies therefore often require adjusting human time regimes to the complex and multiple temporalities of natural non-human entities.

Their emphasis on establishing new temporalities of care highlights a shared understanding that the feminist strike is not meant as just a temporary interruption in the form of an isolated protest. The question whether short and clearly temporally circumscribed strikes can be effective in the long-term has also been brought up in critical engagements with the school climate strike movement. Some critics have argued that school strikes have lost their (limited) effectiveness because they did not ultimately disrupt the reproduction of a (of largely middle-class) workforce. Neither did the school strike format effectively target and interrupt actual processes of fossil fuel extraction (König 2022: 225). In arguing for a temporally more expansive understanding of strike, feminist strike movements highlight the importance of developing alternative prefigurative structures for providing care, based on notions of radical democracy and solidarity, within contemporary societies. Such alternative networks of care are established by groups that are motivated by the needs of people in precarious living and working conditions (and maybe also the needs of some animals, and plants, e.g., in projects that create community gardens or community-supported organic agriculture).

Creating and maintaining networks of solidarity that allow people to take part in acts of refusal, then, can ultimately not be understood as aiming for reforms to the capitalist organization of production, labor, and care, but at its destabilization (AG Feministischer Streik Kassel 2023: 73)—a notion that Isabell Lorey expresses with her conception of exodus. For her, the conditions of possibility for exodus are, at least in part, effects of precarization and neoliberal time regimes. The flexibilization of societal patterns and temporal regimes, “harbours the potential of refusal” and becomes the possibility for the emergence of “something unforeseen, contingent, and also in this sense precarious,” a “re-composition of work and life, of a sociality that is not in this way, not immediately, not so quickly, perhaps even not at all, capitalizable” (Lorey 2015: 103). Importantly, for Lorey, exodus has to be simultaneously external and internal, in the sense that it entails “the rejection of capitalizable self-government and the turn to self-conduct that tests new modes of living in disobedience” (2015: 102). Exodus, then, in my understanding, is not so much a spatial leave-taking but a reorientation of temporalities.

Engagements with ideas and practices of feminist strikes, however, also stress the difficulties and tensions involved in proposals for strike as exodus or refusal. That discussions of alternative practices of care often remain vague might be at least partially due to the difficulties inherent in attempts to establish lasting structures and communities of solidarity and care under conditions of heightened precarity and dominant social time regimes. Such alternative forms of organization often rest on self-organized groups, motivated by political ideals and personal connections. However, such groups are at times inadequately equipped to provide care that is reliable and long-term or requires heightened resources and know-how. This means that not everybody has the same opportunities to “opt out” of oppressive or inadequate existing structures, just as they do not have the same opportunities to benefit from established political, social, and economic structures.⁷ Therefore, feminist strikes often simultaneously aim to create alternative prefigurative structures of care and campaign for institutional changes and support. Environmental and climate activists face a similar conundrum. Given the urgency of the biodiversity and climate crises, activist practices which aim to establish more sustainable relations with Earth appear too slow, and not inclusive or far reaching enough, to add up to sweeping systemic change “from below.” Small-scale sustainable agriculture projects, urban gardening or other nature-based solutions cannot prevent large-scale destruction caused by extractive economies. Hence, such prefigurative projects cannot alone “solve” the postapocalyptic lock-in of recalcitrant and (in many countries of the Global North) increasingly authoritarian political institutions, unwilling to tackle systemic issues. An important short-term aim, where both movements increasingly come together, nevertheless has to be to provide, as much as possible, more equitable possibilities for “opting out” and care for those humans and non-humans whose lives are endangered because they are not adequately cared about in contemporary societies.

Conclusion

The diagnosis of living in a postapocalyptic present is connected to analyses that explore the interconnections between climate change, extractive capitalism, and contemporary governmental institutions. “Postapocalyptic sensibilities” can thus be read as analytic disruptions of still dominant historical narratives of unity and progress. These critiques of historical time are connected to critical engagements with contemporary dominant social time regimes. Decolonial and feminist perspectives provide an understanding of the interconnections between concepts of nature as “free” resource, historical forms of racialized and gendered oppression, the social distribution of precarity, and the current organization of labor and care. Drawing such connections has enabled feminist and environmental movements to develop broadened and deepened notions and practices of justice and democracy, which allow for the formation of transversal networks of solidarity. At the same time, however, these analyses emphasize how difficult it is to alter engrained economic and political structures, which have quite literally formed our built and natural environments, social categories, and lived temporalities. The insight that current political and economic elites are unwilling to engage in far-reaching reforms, however, has left social movements with an ambivalent stance toward existing democratic institutions. In their frustration with the ineffectiveness of governments’ responses to climate change, paired with analyses that highlight the historical interconnections between fossil fuel extraction and contemporary institutions, some “postapocalyptic” climate activists in the Global North have turned away from a strategy of addressing demands to political and economic elites altogether. Instead, they focus on creating small-scale alternative ways of living (Cassegård and Thörn 2018: 570–571). This brings them closer to a long tradition in feminist activism, which has “kept its distance” from the state, as it understood the state as central part of a patriarchal system (Pateman 1988; Sauer 2015). Rather than aiming at the prefiguration of an imminent move toward a utopian future, however, these structures are often understood in terms of enhancing the survivability and livability of a postapocalyptic present. Further exploring the tensions and challenges of these approaches can be a way of increasing connections between environmental and feminist movements and highlighting their links with other social movements that focus on violence and survival, such as anti-racism movements and movements for migrants’ rights.