Working groups
Working group 1: Ecology and Nature
Chair: Suvi Salmenniemi
Bridging degrowth and ecological Marxism through reproductive labour (Toni Ruuska, University of Helsinki)
In this presentation, degrowth is connected to ecological Marxism through the concept and practices of reproductive labour. To sustain their social relations and metabolism with the more-than-human world, humans must actively balance their interactions with their communities, habitats and environments. As is argued by ecofeminist scholarship, in subsistence cultures and beyond, humans co-produce the necessities of life with(in) nature through reproductive labour, and via these practices also produce the seeds of freedom. Thus, reproductive labor is argued to be a foundational practice for the symbiosis of anti-capitalist degrowth and post-productivist ecological Marxism. By depicting a post-productivist turn in eco-Marxist scholarship and coupling it with degrowth theory and ecofeminist critique of labour, this presentation portrays how the seeds of emancipation could be found in reproductive labour embedded and manifesting in local economies and agrarian communities.
Addressing the Epistemic Ambiguities of ‘Human Needs’ in Social Reproduction Theory (Rebecca Lund & Helene Aarseth, University of Oslo)
This paper brings together and develops the eco-Marxist concept of human ‘metabolism with nature’ and a psychoanalytically inspired materialist-feminist conception of social reproduction as ‘mediation’. We do so to address the epistemological ambiguity or conflict underpinning the notion of ‘human needs’ at the heart of social reproduction theory. The need to nurture the capacity for ‘mediation’ is, we argue, at the root of the human condition: something that can be more or less nourished, stifled, or perverted both in specific relations of care and wider societal structures (Aarseth & Lund forthcoming). We apply the eco-Marxist notion of the ‘metabolic rift’ (Foster, 1999) – referring to capitalist extractions that prevent external nature from self-replenishing – to account for a parallel extraction from inner nature through the continued diminishment of ‘investments’ in social reproduction (Fraser, 2016). This enables us, firstly, to develop an enhanced conception of what kind of work or activity is required to reproduce human life, namely, mediational capacities. And secondly, it provides us with a clearer understanding of the impairments caused by its absence. These impairments comprise the social pathologies we are witnessing today – political polarisation, projective disgust, cultures of uncare (Weintrobe, 2021), epidemic levels of stress, depression and anxiety. We are interested in pointing to both the way capitalism undermines humanity’s capacity to sustain itself and to the life-powers at the root of the human condition that, in turn, if allowed space to flourish, will entail and call for other ways of organising society.
Elements of a Decolonial Marxian Ecofeminist Theory of Wasting (Anna-Maria Murtola, University of Turku)
While capitalism is often presented as a system of great efficiency, it is predicated on an immense amount of wasting. Wasting is integral to the accumulation of capital from the daily grind of wage labour and social reproduction through to the systematic laying to waste of lands, bodies and lives in specific locations in order to feed the insatiable appetites of the privileged of the earth. Wasting has been multiplied beyond imagination, as can be seen from the mountains of physical waste now engulfing the earth. But it is equally present in much less recognised forms, most importantly perhaps in the context of the accelerating global crises of social reproduction. This paper seeks to crystallise elements of a decolonial Marxian ecofeminist theory of wasting, which is comprised of three central points: First, wasting is structural to capital accumulation both with respect to more obvious forms of wasting and forms not currently recognised as such. Second, wasting is relational in the sense that the lives of the privileged are today made possible by the wasting of bodies and lives of others. Third, wasting is differential, and histories of class, race, gender and other differences frame the structural relations of wasting. This presentation thus seeks to highlight what a decolonial ecofeminist encounter with Marxism can show about current, often obscured, practices of wasting and the social relations involved.
Rosa Luxemburg: A communist being influenced by Marxism and matriarchal societies (Gunnel Christine Hinrichsen)
Working group 2: Politics and Resistance
Chair: Sami Torssonen
Palestinian Resistance and the European Left: Marxist Feminist Perspectives (Hansalbin Sältenberg, University of Helsinki)
Since October 7, 2023, and throughout Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, we have seen the surge of a global solidarity movement with Palestine, arguably the largest solidarity movement since the Vietnam War. Despite the success of this anti-war, anti-colonial, and ant-imperialist mobilisation, the question of Palestinian Resistance still poses some political and theoretical problems for the broad European left. To some degree, this has to do with the question of armed resistance, but to a larger degree the role of political Islam. In this paper I explore a number of texts written during the past years, pinpointing tensions in the European left’s relation to Palestinian resistance. Rooted in a tradition of anticolonial social theory, and in dialogue with Marxist feminists, I try to analyse the various subject positions taken in these ongoing debates. While it is not my intention to come to a conclusion on how the European left “should” relate to Palestinian resistance, the paper aims at understanding where these leftist subject positions are coming from and what political consequences they may have.
Promoting existential competitive compulsion: A Marxist reading of future Finnish higher education policy (Mikko Poutanen, Tampere University)
International competitive pressures exert increasing influence in the formation of higher education policy. Under global competition between knowledge economies national higher education policy is called upon to support the competitiveness of the national economy. Competitive frameworks strongly influence future visions outlined in policy documents and define available policy imaginaries. The economic-competitive policy imaginary is supported by transnational agents, such as the OECD and – in the European context – the EU. The increased emphasis on economic priorities in higher education can be referred to as academic capitalism, we call for a deeper analysis of the pathology of competitive compulsion in policy. Given the taken-for-granted nature of the economic-competitive policy imaginary, its underpinnings are rarely critically debated – this includes (receding) Nordic welfare states like Finland. This article proposes revisiting the Marxist conception of competition as a defining social relation – a compulsion, following Mau (2023) – under capitalism. While Marx did not extensively theorize the mechanics of competition, he did argue competition formed an underlying logic – the compelling laws of competition – that hold capitalist imaginaries and become realized in action. Our analysis suggests that these compelling laws of competition are reproduced in the future-oriented policy-documents of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. We argue that the Ministry could be characterized as a state capitalist actor, which seeks to leverage higher education for national economic competitive success and warns of the consequences of failing to do so.
Embodied gestures for life: Care, reparative resistance, and prefigurative economies in climate activism (Henna-Elise Ventovirta, Tampere University)
The climate crisis is not only an ecological emergency but a site of intersecting social and economic breakdowns. Climate justice activism responds through practices that are not merely discursive but deeply embodied—somatic, emotional, and relational. This paper brings Eva von Redecker’s call for a “revolution for life” into dialogue with J.K. Gibson-Graham’s critique of capitalocentrism, grounded in my concept of relational embodiment. Von Redecker frames capitalism as life-destructive, requiring gestures of care and commoning as seeds of transformation, while Gibson-Graham invites us to recognise and cultivate diverse economic practices beyond the capitalist imaginary. Drawing on ethnographic and embodied research within climate justice movements and protest camps in Europe, I examine caring infrastructures, embodiment workshops, and mutual support networks as embodied gestures that enact reparative and prefigurative economies. These practices interrupt fossil fuel capitalism, re-centre social reproduction, and open spaces for more-than-capitalist futures. By foregrounding relational embodiment, this paper expands feminist-Marxist theorisation of political economy, showing how embodied and emotional labour sustains movements and generates pluriversal horizons. It argues for understanding resistance and reparation not only as structural but as deeply embodied, relational, and prefigurative—gestures towards worlds where many worlds fit.
Radical self-care and the lived contradictions of gender in capitalism (Suvi Salmenniemi, University of Turku & Taina Meriluoto, University of Helsinki)
This paper examines representations of and discussions on radical self-care on Instagram. Based on critical visual analyses of 310 images and their captions and comments posted with the hashtag #radicalselfcare, we analyse how radical self-care is understood and visually portrayed, what constitutes ‘radical’ in the representations of self-care, and how politics, selfhood and social relations are constructed in this context. We identify two forms of radical self-care: self-care as a form of and prerequisite for political activism, drawing from the Black feminist tradition of self-care as political warfare in an oppressive society, and radical self-care as an individualized and neoliberal feminist practice aimed at self-optimisation in the competitive structures of capitalism. While the former construes radical self-care as a collective practice aimed at resisting intersectional dynamics of social oppression through building and sustaining political communities, the latter tends to pathologise relationality and legitimize withdrawal from social relations. This detached form of radical self-care positions self-making as the solution for an unnamed but intensely felt problem, prioritizing individual wellbeing as a necessary component of survival in the contemporary condition. We argue that these two forms of radical self-care exemplify lived contradictions of gender in capitalism and ways of responding to them. We conclude by suggesting that radical self-care can shed light on the ways in which gendered contradictions of capitalism play out and are grappled with. It also brings to light a sense of powerlessness and futurelessness, and a perplexity about ways of pursuing effective political change.
Working group 3: Labour
Chair: Evelina Johansson Wilén
’You live with a woman, but you’re always away’’: Constrained intimacies among mobile Estonian construction workers (Matias Muuronen, University of Helsinki)
This article examines how Estonian men employed in circular and mobile construction work interpret expectations of provision, presence and partnership, and how these interpretations shape decisions around delaying, abandoning or rejecting family formation. Focusing on men who have not yet – or may never – become parents, including those who prefer staying single, the study conceptualizes circular mobility as a temporal regime that destabilizes the predictable presence associated with responsible masculinity. Men articulate tensions between earning a reliable income, being emotionally or physically available and preserving the autonomy that mobile work affords. These dynamics produce divergent orientations toward intimacy: chronic deferment of family life for some, and intentional non‑family futures for others. The article argues that temporal instability within mobile construction labour structures men’s imagined life courses, shaping both the possibility and desirability of forming families.
Selling the Town in Difficult Times: Branding of Varkaus since the 1980s (Vihtori Suominen, University of Helsinki)
My dissertation examines how Varkaus, a former Finnish company town, has navigated structural changes since the 1980s. Drawing on David Harvey’s concept of urban entrepreneurialism, it explores how global economic competition reshaped local governance, emphasizing competitiveness and public-private partnerships. This strategic shift positioned municipalities as agents of attractiveness for mobile capital, making branding central to urban policy.
I examine how branding operates within a gendered, globalised capitalist economy where cities compete through narratives aimed at attracting the creative class, high-tech industries, and high-value services—domains often coded as masculine. Varkaus, stigmatized as “Finland’s Detroit” after forest industry decline, illustrates how industrial towns cope with narratives of loss and abandonment. Yet its trajectory resists simple categorization as deindustrialized or post-industrial: town has successfully pursued a diversified industrial strategy, securing investments in the 2010s and 2020s.
Until Finland’s early 1990s depression, industrial towns paid less attention to negative perceptions, relying on strong job prospects and a shared working-class identity. As unemployment rose and town’s stigma intensified, local actors adopted branding strategies to counter decline. In my presentation, I examine how these branding strategies and urban entrepreneurialism reproduce gendered hierarchies by privileging male-coded industries as the source of locality’s viability.
Sexual Labour as a Form of Intimate Labour: An Integrative Literature Review of Sex Work in Organisation and Management Studies (Kristiina Vesanen, University of Helsinki)
Although several scholars suggest sex work should be characterised as a form of work and economic activity that generates income, it has received relatively little attention in organisation and management studies. The aim of this integrative literature review is to make a synthesis of the existing literature on sex work within the field of organisation and management studies. The point of departure for reviewing the literature on sex work was to critically engage in a dialogue with the existing body of knowledge by asking: “What has been explored thus far, and with what objectives?” On a theoretical level, the aim is to bring care ethics into dialogue with critical feminist analyses of labour under capitalism.
Working group 4: Social reproduction, gender and embodiment
Chair: Suvi Salmenniemi
Nursing during the Russian Civil War: Regendering of the Profession (Olga Simonova, University of Turku)
The Red nurses were a unique phenomenon that emerged during the Russian Civil War (1918–1922). They represented a new type of women who participated in the war both as medical workers and as fighters. The evolution of attitudes toward the nursing profession was significant. If until the mid-19th century it was considered shameful for women and girls to be nurses in hospitals, to see and touch the naked male body, then by the early 20th century nursing had been institutionalized as an auxiliary role in the army. In Marxist ideology, the Red nurses were regarded as equal to soldiers. The ideological framing of Red nursing took place in the speeches of Alexandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand, and other Marxist feminists. The phenomenon was based not on the feminine/masculine dichotomy, but on the expansion of feminine identity, in which the traditional women’s virtues (consoler, caregiver, inspirer) were supplemented by “masculine” valor and belligerence. In Kollontai’s view, while the sexual relationships were important for the First World War nurses, for the new nurses non-sexuality became fundamental: adversity in the face of death brings soldiers together regardless of gender. Another argument in favor of overcoming gender markers and erasing the boundaries between men and women was their equal position in the army. Marxists proposed a vision of the Red nurse as an ideological ally and comrade of the soldier. For many women who took part in the Civil War, extended femininity became the norm. Kollontai saw participation in military action as a liberation for women, giving them the opportunity to achieve full subjectivity and equality with men. The formation of the new Soviet person was based on the rejection of gender and sexual differences.
Forgetting the Body? Rethinking Affective Labour through a Historical Materialist Lens (Johan Örestig Kling, Umeå University)
Feminist theory has long intersected with Marxism in debates on the alienating effects of affective labour. This concept refers to gendered forms of work that involve producing, managing, and shaping emotions in others. Typically understood as immaterial labour, affective labour contributes to the creation of social relations, community, and subjectivity through care, empathy, and interpersonal engagement. Arlie Russell Hochschild famously argued that such labour alienates workers not only from the products of their work but also from their own selves. When subjected to the law of value, capacities such as smiling, comforting, and nurturing become instrumentalized, shaping personality in ways that demand critical attention. This paper examines how key feminist and Marxist contributions to this debate theorize the body as biological, cultural, and social. A central aim of these approaches is to resist essentialism and biological determinism. I argue, however, that this effort often underestimates the embodied dimension of affective labour, framing it primarily as cognitive or symbolic. Emotions are not disembodied; they are experienced and expressed through physiological processes. Ignoring this material dimension reflects what David McNally calls “forgetting the body,” leaving the interplay between biological, cultural, and social aspects undertheorized. In the final section, I apply McNally’s conception of the body as “historical” to the debate on affective labour. This perspective acknowledges the body’s relatively fixed biological constitution while emphasizing its role as a site of dynamic social processes that generate open-ended systems of meaning. Such an approach, I argue, deepens our understanding of the alienating effects of affective labour and challenges static views of the body, enabling a more comprehensive account of what it means, and does not mean, to recognize the human body as a living, biological entity.
Ecofeminist Political Economy and conceptualisations of labour: Critiques and Alternatives to Green Transition Programs (Eeva Houtbeckers, University of Eastern Finland)
The ecological crisis shapes the capacity of species to survive in their habitats and of human societies to thrive within planetary boundaries (Steffen et al. 2015; Raworth 2017). Margaret Atwood (2015) describes these interconnected processes as “everything change,” influencing material and existential conditions and challenging taken-for-granted practices. In response, governmental authorities, intergovernmental actors, think tanks, civil society organisations, and social movements have produced both mainstream and alternative policy frameworks. Scholars have critically analysed these proposals to highlight diverse conceptualisations and strategies, as well as the normative assumptions underlying visions of desirable socio-ecological transformations (Massa, 2009; Davidson, 2014; Taipale & Houtbeckers, 2021).
In Finnish politics and the European Union, the green transition discourse centres on achieving carbon neutrality by 2035 in Finland and by 2050 in Europe. Yet beneath its promising surface persist dualistic and hierarchical assumptions about humanity, gender, nature, development, wealth, and power—long identified by ecofeminist political economy scholars. These assumptions have historically enabled the exploitation of subordinate actors (Plumwood, 1993; Oksala, 2018; Barca, 2020). Ecofeminist political economy analysis further reveals how the patriarchal and capitalist system generates social, embodied, and ecological debt while depending on the unpaid labour of human and more-than-human actors and ecosystems (Salleh, 2009). Moreover, mainstream green transition programs do not challenge the growth paradigm but instead assume that growth ensures human and environmental wellbeing (Cohn & Duncanson, 2023). Ecofeminist thinkers, by contrast, critique capitalism as systematically eroding the conditions of life globally (Barca, 2020; Gregoratti & Raphael, 2019; Mellor, 2017; see also Fraser, 2024).
This study examines ecofeminist critiques of green transition programs and the alternatives they propose. To avoid reproducing the dualistic and hierarchical assumptions identified by ecofeminist scholars in both mainstream and alternative green transition programs, this study consolidates existing critiques, offers tools for analysing green transition policies, and advances ecofeminist economic and political literacy. The focus is on the conceptualisation of labour, given its centrality in ecofeminist political economy.
Reproduction Under Constraint: Pronatalism, Refusal, and the Loss of Ethical Space (Evelina Johansson Wilén, Örebro University)
This presentation examines the renewed politicization of reproduction in the context of declining fertility rates, welfare-state retrenchment, and growing economic insecurity. Across advanced capitalist societies, falling birth rates are increasingly framed as a threat to labor supply, welfare sustainability, and national futures, prompting pronatalist interventions that seek to steer reproductive behavior. These policies often coincide with restrictions on reproductive rights and with the refamilialization of care, shifting responsibility for childrearing and dependency back onto private households and reinforcing gendered and classed inequalities.
At the same time, reproduction has become a site of critique from family abolitionist and antinatalist perspectives, which reject both conservative and feminist family politics by treating the nuclear family – or reproduction itself – as structurally oppressive or ethically suspect. While politically opposed, these positions share a tendency to reduce reproduction to an instrumental or moralized problem, framing parenthood and childlessness alike in terms of duty, harm, or guilt.
I argue that this moralization reflects a deeper political failure. Under conditions of economic precarity and weakened collective provision, reproduction is no approached as a question of how we wish to live with others, but as a calculation shaped by risk, survival, and abstract imperatives. The ethical dimensions of reproduction – desire, responsibility, care, and commitment – are displaced rather than resolved. The presentation concludes by arguing that reproduction can only become an ethical decision when social conditions make ethical deliberation possible. Rather than prescribing reproductive outcomes, a non-instrumental politics of reproduction would aim to rebuild the collective infrastructures of care that allow people to meaningfully choose whether or not to take the existential leap of parenthood.