permaculture

[Bob Howard <rmhoward@omninet.net.au>]

> > Reproduction, Economics and Permaculture

Bob Howard (c) 2002

It is a fact of current economic thinking that the role of reproduction is barely discussed yet production is in all it's forms endlessly dissected. Yet reproduction and production are two dimensions of the work involved in keep us alive and, yes, reproducing ourselves. In fact, production is contingent upon reproduction. The ultimate purpose of production is our reproduction and the ability to spend time making something assumes that our reproductive needs can be met in the mean time.

Reproductive work is quintessentially women's work. Consider - the oldest profession and the labour of labour. Male authors such as Bookchin and Engels downplay or ignore the female aspect of reproductive work. Yet the devaluing of reproductive work and the devaluing of women are patently one in the same. As Mary O'Brien pointed out - how can Engels discuss reproduction without mentioning biological reproduction once? (Engels wrote a famous essay on Woman and Work that talked about reproducing the (male) worker on a daily basis as the labour of reproduction.)

Mary O'Brien (The Politics of Reproduction) characterises reproductive work as different from productive work in three ways. (1) It is cyclical and not linear (2) it is time compulsory (3) it is necessarily socially as opposed to socially necessary.

Although she is talking primarily about the work of the household, the work of sex and the work of giving birth and child rearing, reproductive work also pervades the world as well as the home. The role of government in capitalist society is essentially one of taking on the reproductive tasks necessary for the society to function. This is because the market breaks down when it comes to reproductive tasks. In fact the growth of government in the last 200 years or so has been a response to the loss of the necessarily social activities that ensured that reproductive work is done.

If we look at the tasks of government we will see that they reflect the characteristics identified by Mary O'Brien. Hospitals, police, teachers are engaged in cyclical work that is time compulsory to a lesser or greater degree and that is necessarily social - in that there are social contracts regarding the priorities and communal responsibilities associated with this work.

As such, their work cannot be made more efficient by it being completed in less time. One policeman can cover only so much of a town/population, one nurse can only nurse so many patients and for both of them the task takes 24 hours a day. Increasing the number of patients or people rapidly leads to a collapse in effectiveness of nursing or policing or similar reproductive tasks. The best example of this is the well established criteria regarding class sizes for primary school children. Class sizes cannot be increased beyond 30 or 40 without ceasing to be functional. No amount of efficiency improvements can change this fact.

What is going on is that the necessarily social aspect of reproduction means that, in these examples, the work cannot be done except in a one on one situation. The teacher must have the time to work individually with each pupil because this one to one relationship is a necessary part of the work. A nurse for instance can't look after more than one patient at a time. Although there are often technological fixes at the margin they are generally more concerned with improving the distribution of reproductive workers (school of the air/internet, flying doctors, police radios etc.). These are, of course, not without consequence. See the discussion of Permaculture below.

The economic consequences of reproductive work (that is work characterised by the distinctions referred to above) cannot be separated from the role of women in society. A number of authors have drawn attention to the fact that the best way to control population growth in the third world is to improve the rights and education of women and to reduce the rates of infant and peri-natal mortality. Susan George is the most well known author to discuss this. She points out that the rationale for 10 children in Gambia is that only one will survive far enough into adulthood to care for the parents in their old age.

The economic consequences of limited expenditure directed at young children and mothers can have dramatic social consequences. Immunisation is one example. When Child Endowment was introduced into Australia in the late 1940's it was a payment of $2 (one pound) a quarter for the first child and 10/- ($1) for each subsequent. The fact that it was paid direct to mothers was attributed by the historian CD Rowley in 1968 to the stabilisation of (full blood) Aboriginal population in Australia which had previously been in decline or static.

Also a number of authors have pointed out that in many subsistence societies women are responsible for most of the work in the fields, household and so on. Women hold up more than half the sky... Not only is the care of the young an issue but also the care of the elderly, which even in the most feminist of western cultures is overwhelmingly done by women. So things like old age pensions can be guaranteed to have significant effects. The early provision of old age pensions in the growth of capitalist societies attests to this.

It's useful here to distinguish between reproductive work and maintenance work. The two share similarities but are not the same. The difference is that the focus of reproductive work is on a living organism whereas maintenance work is focused on non-living things.

In group dynamics, confusingly, the term "maintenance work" is used to describe reproductive work if one accepts the reasonable proposition that a group of living beings is a living thing. Certainly the tasks of group maintenance accord with the characteristics of reproductive work as described above. Group dynamics divides the tasks of groups into "maintenance oriented" and "goal oriented". Successful groups ensure the both kinds of work are valued. It is telling that group dynamics, in its description of the performance of groups, also functionally serves the purpose of providing tools for conflict resolution in groups. The "necessarily social" aspect of group maintenance.

Amongst other things that reproductive work involves is the provision of air, food, water and shelter. These are the fundamental reproductive goods necessary for the reproduction of living things. And our societies are the reproductive capital that ensures that their supply is met. The failure of societies to ensure food or water supplies is usually fatal for the society.

Reproductive goods cannot be stockpiled for more than a season, their prices often need to be fixed and their supply largely rests upon the weather (they are time compulsory) and social contracts.

Which brings us to Agriculture and Permaculture.

J.K. Galbraith once pointed out that agriculture was the least susceptible part of the economic system to the concentration of capital. Farms could not be concentrated in one building but are spread all round the country side and farmers of necessity self exploit and also develop a love/knowledge of the land that has economic consequences that cannot be met by farm managers or casual employees.

The concentration of capital in farming is, of course, on the distribution side of things. Galbraith's point about farmer's knowledge love of the land and willingness to self-exploit if they own the land points to the unacknowledged reproductive work that is involved in sustaining the land and to the fact that this work cannot be accounted for in dollar terms. (See below).

Every farmer can identify the reproductive nature of their work. The 24 hour day, the rush of seeding time and cropping time. Protecting young against predation etc. etc.

This reproductive agenda is also what stops much land care sustainability work in its footsteps. You need 10,000 people on two days in autumn (say) to plant enough trees to make a difference. Multiplying out this labour and converting it into dollars tends to put politicians off their breakfast. Yet the critical thing to realise is that it would only take two days.

Similarly and more topically in Australia, doing fuel reduction burns is all right in theory but if you spend time on a local council or volunteer bush fire group you will know that the problem is that the window of opportunity, (time of the year), is small and you need  (at least) half a dozen people at each burn. Can't be done.

Germaine Greer pointed out recently that, during the Mughal Empire prior to the British Colonisation of India, farmers owned their land at the behest of the Emperor - the deal was that they provided two days worth of labour a year to the Emperor. This ensured that the Emperor could maintain the rivers, roads and general sustainability of his land (which it ultimately was).  It worked for 600 odd years. The British took over and substituted a $ tax for the two days a year and the whole system of land maintenance collapsed within 10 years.

This brings home the point that dollars and time are not interchangeable in reproductive economics. This also points the way to a whole series of practical measures that can be taken to create a sustainable economy.

Reinstituting programs that are cyclical and that have as their focus the working together of large numbers of people on specific days or at specific times of their lives can be a useful focus for reinstitionalizing reproductive work as part of society.

In Buddhist Thailand, every boy at the age of 13 or 14 spends 2 years on average in a monastery. It is not a modernist thing and Buddhist monks are as prone to sexual abuse as any Boston priest. But it teaches non-violence and it underpins South East Asia's oldest social order and strongest democracy

There are a variety of ways in which reproductive work operates in cultures around the world. It is important to realise that this is work that gets done even if it's not paid for, acknowledged, never done etc...But reproductive work must be done.

Many of Permaculture's key ideas are focused around dealing with minimising or designing for reproductive work.

The use of zones specifying frequency of use is a way of minimising reproductive work.

The Permaculture dictum 'every thing must have four uses' points the way to how we can assess the efficiency of reproductive work. Work that is cyclical and time compulsory and necessarily social cannot be done by fewer people but it can be done so that more than one purpose is served. Plants can be grown in guilds.

Similarly, nursing homes can double as creches. 'Community service'/monasteries for youngsters can double as ways of mobilizing large workforces and also marking a transition from child to adult. The also provide a means of supporting the needy in a society that has no state based welfare system.

Underlying Permaculture is an ecological awareness of the cycles of nature, water, nutrients etc.  Good design looks to catalyse the energetics of these cycles. Solar design principles implicitly acknowledge the cycles of the day and the year.

Time is money, is the capitalist dictum and as a way of evaluating social necessity or more precisely exchange value this is perfectly true. Please understand I am not denying the reality of productive work. But the difference between reproductive work and productive work can be given a mathematical reality by contrasting arithmetic to modulo 12 (say for months of the year) and arithmetic that is infinitely countable. The capitalist paradox of the infinitely growing economy is explained by recognizing that productive work is less than half the sky...

Yet money also has reproductive aspects associated with its flow and acceptance. Money is really information and as such it must be reproduced in an agreed upon way at different locations. This depends entirely upon social contracts and expectations and upon the existence of maintenance functions (clearing houses) that must function on a cyclical basis to ensure the integrity of the supply. It is the collapse of these necessarily social functions that leads to the collapse of currencies.

More fundamentally, information itself is something that is reproductive. "Facts" are necessarily social agreed upon statements about the world. One can get Hegelian about knowledge very easily and nothing I've said negates Marx's dictum that economics determines religion and that knowledge has a material reality. Marx's great failure was that he was a man in patriarchal society and reproduction was seen to be secondary to production. The political consequence of this is played out today in union support of logging and other unsustainable activities.

It's important to realise that I'm not suggesting that reproductive work is good and productive work is bad. What I am suggesting is that the two kinds of work need to be accounted for to ensure against economic collapse.

It means that we need to assess both the time component and the money component of projects separately. We need to assess the time component in terms of the cyclical work that needs to be done. Much of this cyclical work is being done by Nature in the form of free seasonal goods. Seeing reproductive work as distinct from productive work is IMHO more fundamental than seeing it as a case of accounting for 'externalities'.

There is no doubt that the idea of progress and the modernist agenda has had far-reaching positive affects upon human society. But the erosion of a sense of time as a cycle has triggered an epidemic of addiction throughout the western world. Addiction can be viewed as a fetishization of time - a pathological response to this loss. The collapse of the modernist agendas against the reality of a finite world should not mean that we retreat to some religious fundamentalism where there is no progress only the past. Although this is the Islamic (and Christian) fundamentalist agenda

The challenge is to acknowledge the importance of reproduction and to value the reproductive goods alongside the productive ones. IMHO there is no difficulty in accounting for or developing rational economic policy that deals with reproductive work and reproductive goods. The economic solutions may not involve accounting for money however as much as they involve accounting for time.

The solutions are also non-economic in that they depend upon necessarily social agreements. They depend upon ensure that the maintenance tasks such as democratic elections, conflict resolution, ensuring that all voices are heard and ensuring that people have a good time, are carried out. Good politicians recognise the value of circuses. Better politicians recognize the value of circuses that involve the whole of the community. The successful strategies of the anti globalization movement in mobilizing large groups of people demonstrate the value of reproductive work.

Lastly, I've said little about the time compulsory nature of reproductive work although it is implicit in much of the above. Someone once said that any country is only a square meal away from a revolution. The collapse of societies such as those that have happened in Eastern Europe is attributed to the Marxist nature of their regimes. Notwithstanding the problematic equation of Marx's writings with the practical realities of Communism. The collapse of collective farming models was due to then failure of the regime to acknowledge the reproductive work and industry of the land owner. That this is a failure of both communism and capitalism is not acknowledged at our peril.

The industrialisation of agriculture has proceeded apace notwithstanding Galbraith's observation's regarding it's resistance to capital intensification. The driving force has been the unsustainable use of oil and elemental fertilizers(NPK). The consequence, global warming. The inevitable collapse of the resulting agribusiness system will not be long in coming.

Fertilizers, do not protect soil against drought or flood. We are currently on the verge of running out of global food surpluses. The world has been getting rapidly warmer in the last 5 years. The imminent (by which I mean next year) price rises in basic commodities should start to sharpen a few minds. If the next five years warm as rapidly as the last five years have. A month will start to seem like a very long time in politics.
 

(c) 2002 Bob Howard