Barbara
Can you tell me how this collaboration started?
Amy
We started working together in 2012. We'd known each other a while, and we were both very interested in the Working Class Movement Library in Salford in Manchester. We did a residency there and we were fascinated with this fantastic collection about labor history, compiled by the co-founders, the British Communist Party. We were interested in what left politics was, and how was it was still relevant to what was happening, at the time, not much longer since the 2008 crash. Austerity was a major government policy. We asked ourselves, how can we think about this in in a relevant way, and not in a nostalgic way? We started a reading group about money and economics using some of the books from this library.
Ruth
We wanted to look at economics in a moment when politicians were really using economics as political justification for things where people couldn't argue with it. So, we thought, let's unpick this. Let's try and understand it. Is it a science? Or do we have a claim on it? In this way, we try to think about these bigger ideas: how national and global policy connect to our personal and individual lives.
Barbara
What do you want to achieve?
Amy
There is an element of demystify difficult subjects or language or areas of life related to economics. Why do we need to have austerity? What does austerity actually mean?
Ruth
We are The Alternative School of Economics and is a manifesto in itself. We're not the alternative. We're not the School of alternative economics. We are trying to learn about alternative ways of learning together. It is about self education and creating agency for ourselves, and whether self education can be a collective practice.
Barbara
Do you mean that the methodology also alters the outcome of the study or are you referring to the way that people understand your practice?
Ruth
For us, there are different kinds of knowledges but are all equal. It is really important to the way that we approach things. We might speak to an academic in a project, but we're also going to speak to somebody who has lived experience. That is one of the ways to level out and try not to be hierarchical.
Amy
We work collaboratively together and obviously, we have quite intense discussions about a project. Maybe that implicit tension in the project is how other people get involved. Sometimes it is harder to reconcile depending on the structure or the project that we're involved in. For example, with the podcast that we made on feminist economics, there was the podcast, but it was also about working with local people who were already working collectively.
Ruth
We're aware of politics of socially engaged practice, in terms of what we're inviting people in to do, and always wanting to make sure there's reciprocity. You know, being clear: this is what this is, this is what we want, this is what we're offering, and this is what we want from you. I suppose that's also about recognising our kind of power as artists or what cultural capital we're getting from it. There need to be awareness.
Barbara
In the context of the collaboration, what could be the potential role?
Amy
We have had different experiences with different organisations and institutions. And I mean, a really positive one was when we did the podcast, and that was an art organisation called Gasworks[1]. The project was a sort commission but it was actually framed as a residency. Even before we started working, they were evaluating the project, asking questions like, “How can we connect with communities locally?” That's why they named it Participatory Artist Residency Connecting Communities. They were also involving participants from previous projects in the evaluation, like another artists collaboration called Future of the Left. This meant that we were supported. And that's what an institution can do: to support complexity.
Barbara
You guys just started working together after Great Recession and, of course, there was then an urgency of talking about economic issues. Do you think these topics are now relevant in a a world post-quarantines? Is there some references worthwhile looking into?
Ruth
I still feel like economics is being used to justify decisions in the UK. They're going to stop restrictions are going to end next week. And that's about opening up the economy. But, has the economy stopped during this time? Or is it to do with particular economies of hospitality or finance? And, I mean, it was very interesting working on True Currency during the pandemic, and the way we made an extra episode about what was happening. We went back and interviewed some of the people that we'd spoken to earlier in the podcast, about how it was affecting them. These conversations about care suddenly became headline, became part of a national conversation. If children aren't in school, who's looking after them? Why are care workers, the lowest paid workers, the least valued workers suddenly considered heroes?
Amy
There was a kind of personal urgency in that from ourselves, as women, mothers, and feminists. And we did learn a huge amount, I think, from doing it. Just a really simple thing: feminist economics is not just about women, but the whole economy can be thought different. And then, very quickly, you're realising the link between feminism and social justice, and the importance of interdependence and how that relates to environment, and its urgencies because this extractive economic model. Right from the beginning of our project, we started a feminist economics reading group, which then went online when the pandemic started. And that was really interesting. We started that just because it would make us read things since we just don't have very much time. One of the things we read was the care manifesto by the Care Collective[2]. And that was a really brilliant book to think across care, from the state, to politics, to economy, to family, and communities.
Barbara
There is also a collateral effect, which is how we re-conceptualise value. Value is always a factor of exchange, and it's always money, but if you take away it from capital relations, then you have almost a very complex, empty word. We're not used to think about money without value and viceversa. It's so difficult to find vocabularies, or a taxonomy that could encompass these alternative forms of value, because the value is always co-opted by capitalist value.
Ruth
When we talked to Lisa Baraitser[3], she said something like: we need to rethink value. Not to rethink what we value, but rethink value itself. Her work on time is a really good example of that. The capitalist, compartmentalization of time, valuing of time, monetizing of time compared to the time of parenting, mothering. A weird amorphous version of time: the time of care. That is not an answer, but an example. That kind of time doesn't fit into the capitalist conception of time.
Amy
Lisa Baraitser also talks about how things are generated through care and time and how whatever is generated is different. It has an ongoing nature, instead of a capitalists endpoint.
Ruth
Through repetition. It makes me think of the washing and how, the baskets are always full again. Something as mundane as that. That's not producing anything, but it is maintenance, and it is caring too.
Barbara
I was also thinking about a type of time that is productive, as in the Marxist labor time: man-hours relation to money. But then is that time you talked about, the care time. That is repetitive, and almost impossible to measure, but it's also quality time. On blockchain everything is about time and the accounting of that time. Do you think that the quality of the care would be lost if it would be accounted? Could blockchain, in your opinion, sustain a community economy?
Amy
It's almost like the technology is trying to force humans to be nice to each other, or trying to make communism work without a dictator. It is trying to control human relations, but there is already a direct relationship between the social relationships of the community and the rules within the blockchain mechanism. Those two things are already completely intertwined.
Ruth
it's like an elaborate version of the babysitting circle. But it takes out that direct exchange as well, doesn't it? Couldn’t it be creating hierarchies?
Ruth
Can blockchain be visual?
Barbara
Yeah, but not for humans.
Ruth
I was thinking of the JK Gibson Graham’s iceberg to think about the economy that is below the waterline. That's something that was introduced to us by Katherine Bohm. Ailee Rutherford talks about it as well, from People's Bank of Govern Hill. Having a tool of visualizing is really powerful. Kate Raworth, in her book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist[4] talks about how we need to get rid of this kind of plumbing system idea around the economy, because it's inaccurate. Her idea of the donut represents interdependency of human and environmental need.
Amy
I'm sure you, you know, with Ailee Rutherford, she's done quite a bit of work on blockchain. I know that she's been doing these blockchain knitting circle things. Yeah. Which in a way is a kind of visualization, she is working with people who probably would not know anything about blockchain technology. she's definitely had the experience of trying to make it that technology more more accessible, and, so that you can understand how you can use it.
Ruth 45:02
This is a problem with a lot of technology, which isn't designed to be understood.
[1] https://www.gasworks.org.uk/
[2] https://www.versobooks.com/books/3706-care-manifesto
[3] Baraitser, Lisa (2017) Enduring time. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781350008137.
[4] https://www.kateraworth.com/
