In my mind, I call myself a love scholar. A sage of lurve. I fantasise about setting up a research institute called the Centre for Love Studies. I invite amazing artists, organisers and intellectuals to collaborate on unleashing the revolutionary potential of love. We work with local schools to teach and bring in the wisdom of children.

Then I remember that my husband and I are barely scraping by, have virtually zero childcare and are in the midst of ripping up our life and hauling our family across the sea at the precisely the moment when the mother of all economic crises is about to hit.

I guess the Centre for Love Studies will have to wait. But at night, after our three-year-old finally goes down at 9.30pm if we’re lucky, I bust out my e-reader and get at least 30 minutes of sweet reading and thinking time. In that time, I’ve identified four ways of thinking about love as a political concept. Together, we can see them as forming a banging framework for collective liberation.

These are the four ways:

Love as an ethic
Love as a vision
Love as a political practice
Love as a powerful force for transformation

In this post, I want to briefly introduce each one.

Love as an ethic

‘What even is an ethic?’, you may ask, in our era of craven political myopism. I’ll admit, when I first started reading Black feminist scholar bell hooks passionately calling for an ethic of love, I didn’t really even understand what an ethic was, never mind a love ethic.

But slowly it all fell into place. An ethic is about having, you know, convictions and stuff. An ethic is an overarching belief system, or a moral or political compass, a kind of guiding star that can guide our opinions, attitudes and actions.

A love ethic is about having unapologetically beautiful, sumptuous convictions. An ethic of love sees all life as interconnected. It sees us as part of one big whole that has been shattered by violent systems like capitalism. It emphasises solidarity, care and interdependence.

A love ethic means refusing to let go of the basic values that we teach our children, like respect, caring and sharing. As we get older, we are told that these basic values are childish, naive, even dangerous. A love ethic gives us permission to tell those voices to go suck a duck and reject out of hand any politics or system that fundamentally treats some lives as mattering less than others and forces us to compromise our integrity at every turn.

The dearly departed theorist and further education teacher Mark Fisher coined the term ‘capitalist realism’ – meaning that we have it drilled into us that there is no alternative to this catastrophic system. A love ethic is what can help us stay strong, hold onto each other, and kick capitalist realism up the bum.

Love as a vision for a better world

If you want to overcome capitalist realism, you gotta have a vision. And I don’t mean a vision for a slightly less horrific version of capitalism than the one we have now. I mean a vision that is utterly splendid. If we’re going to have to junk the whole thing, which we patently are, we may as well replace it with something gorgeous.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr. had one of the most well-known visions of love: his ‘beloved community’. This was a horizon beyond white supremacy and imperialism in which all people could live together in peace, justice and freedom. Yes please. King’s beloved community still inspires many movements now, including disability justice, abolitionist feminism, and ’s Beloved Community gatherings in Seattle.

Love as a political practice

This is where the doing starts. Love practices are anything we do that aligns with our love ethic and helps bring about our love vision.

One example is campaigning and activism. For instance, the NoBody Is Disposable campaign in California fought against care rationing during the Covid pandemic. For me, the idea that ‘nobody is disposable’ is a love ethic. It says that we are all of integral worth; we are all sacred, luminous beings who deserve to be cared for and have our needs met. Fighting for that is a love practice.

Another example of a practice of love is community building. speaks about social change and movements as mycelium – the everyday work that is going on all the time that lays the ground for transformational change when the time comes (what Loach calls the ‘mushroom’). Every single step we make to building connection, care and interdependence with someone else, is forming part of that mycelium network.

Love as a force for transformation

‘Why insist on talking about love when you could use other words like care, justice or solidarity?’ I get this question a lot. Part of my answer is: because love is fucking fierce.

I like this quote about the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin from Valarie Kaur’s book about revolutionary love, See No Stranger: “Oxytocin decreases aggression in a mother’s body overall with one exception—in defense of her young. When babies are threatened, oxytocin actually increases aggression.” Yaaas.

I see love in this sense of a powerful force as being similar to what Black feminist scholar Audre Lorde called the ‘erotic’. This was another one where I didn’t know what she was on about at first. Especially when I re-read her essay in the bleary wake of having a small child. ‘Erotic? Huh? Wtf is that?’

But again, it all gradually clicked into place, and actually, having my daughter and the feelings that stirs inside me is what made it click into place. For Lorde, ‘erotic’ wasn’t just about sexy time, any more than the meaning of ‘love’ was confined to romance for bell hooks. When Lorde said ‘erotic’, she meant any deep creative force within us.

That’s what I mean by the fourth meaning of love. That love is ancient. It’s primal, it’s fierce and its creative as hell.

You don’t have to be a mother or a parent to experience that force. Whatever it might be that lifts us up – be it spiritual practice, communing with animals or plants, creating art, or being with our beloveds – that is our love force.

If we can harness it for the project of collective liberation – in the service of our love ethics and visions, to sustain and guide us in our love practices – then we have a fighting chance of overcoming capitalist realism and building something utterly fabulous.

Please leave a comment! What are your thoughts about this framework of love? What is your love ethic? How do you practice love? Your comments, likes and shares mean the world to me!

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‘Are highly sensitive people always introverts?’

‘When will the quadruple attack on food systems hit the UK?’

‘Why did Friends from College get cancelled?’

‘What is “period flu” and do I have it?’

‘How should I be prepping for when the food shortages come UK?’

‘How old are all the main characters in Running Point?’

‘What is the definition of famine?’

‘Does ashwagandha help with tiredness?’

‘Homemade fluffy glitter slime recipe to make with toddler’

‘How can I protect my family when the triple AI-bubble/shadow banking/macroeconomic crisis hits?’

‘Will there be another season of Ramy?’

‘How can I tell my kid that I don’t want to play with her without crushing her sense of self worth forever?’

‘How can I save my job when the economic crisis hits?’

‘I don’t actually have a job, I’m self employed. How can I stay afloat?’

‘Best anti-aging hacks.’

For your doom scrolling pleasure

Why are we facing a food crisis? Richard J Murphy. YouTube video.

The Iran War could burst the AI bubble. ’s Substack.

The seven steps to economic meltdown. Richard J Murphy. YouTube video.

A once in a lifetime crisis is coming. Steve Keen. YouTube video.

If Trump could ‘chicken out’ he would. ’s Substack.

Some glitter slime to soothe your nervous system

Beloveds, this was a bit of an experimental one, what did you think? What’s your ‘capitalism brain’ looking like these days? Your comments, likes and shares mean the world to me!

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The last post I made here was titled ‘Things might be getting a teeny bit sporadic around here’. That was two months ago. Sorry about that.

A big welcome to the new people who have subscribed since I’ve been AWOL. And to all my regular readers, it’s good to be back – I missed you guys!

Obviously it’s all capitalism’s fault. So, for my big comeback, here are five ways that our pesky socioeconomic system plagued my life and kept us apart.

1. Money.

We ain’t got none. Mostly because we’re not arms dealers, fossil fuel tycoons or commodity traders. Class system: one; Laura: nil.

2. Work.

My husband, Erik, and I have been busy scrabbling around trying to get some of that aforementioned dosh, shedding our time, energy and dignity along the way. Thanks, wage labour.

3. The nuclear family.

We took our three-year-old out of daycare (again), for reasons also to do with capitalism that I’ll get to below. For the past couple of months, we have had zero childcare. Zilch. This is quite an adventure when combined with problems 1 and 2.

We’ve tried to carve out a couple of slots each week where Essie does ‘home school’ activities by herself while we try and get some basic stuff done. This usually consists of me lovingly collecting an assortment of objects from around the house which she can use to make an elaborate artwork, then getting halfway through an email before she yells, ‘finished mama! Whats the next activity?’

As of last week, our friend and guardian angel Crystal has volunteered free childcare for the next few Friday mornings, which is a big reason why I’m able to write this post. Capitalism: 3; beloved community: 1. Take that, capitalism!

4. Capitalist daycare.

Being walled into a nuclear family with no help might not be my idea of thriving, but daycare that is either privatised or forced to work to market logic isn’t exactly optimal either. Call me a brat, but an arrangement where strangers are paid minimum wage to work in conditions designed to minimise costs while providing the minimum standards needed to keep the kids alive, doesn’t quite sooth my maternal separation anxiety.

Our daughter, Essie, wasn’t impressed either. After three months of humouring us, she went on a one-girl strike. Several weeks ensued of us trying various configurations of coaxing, forcing, bargaining, and negotiating with the nursery to let us resettle her gently.

In the end, we decided we couldn’t handle the level of force we would have had to consistently use to get Essie to get dressed, leave the house, and make the 15-minute walk to the building. As Erik said, there may be times that you have no choice but to cause great distress to your child, but that probably shouldn’t be your active strategy.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not dissing caregivers who send their kids to daycare. We have tried to do it ourselves no less than three times (long story) so we’re clearly not set against it. Obviously, the majority of people have no option but to enter into some less-than-idyllic childcare arrangement, because of capitalist problems 1, 2 and 3. In the Netherlands, daycare is heavily subsidised, whereas beloved community care (eg informal childcare arrangements like the one with our friend Crystal) are not, so there is little choice in what we do.

All I’m saying is, if drama and distress seem baked into your parenting routine, don’t blame yourself; blame capitalism.

5. Borders.

We are currently in the process of trying to get a UK spouse visa for my Dutch husband so that we can relocate from the Netherlands to my hometown of London, to be closer to my parents and that whole beloved community vibe. This costs thousands in that aforementioned ‘money’ which we don’t have, as well as hours in that other precious commodity called ‘time’, in which, as you might have noticed, we are also sorely lacking. All for the privilege of doubling our cost of living to return to what Erik affectionately calls ‘the filthiest city in Europe.’

Essie calls this visa bureaucracy the ‘blah blah’ that we have to do to be able to get back to her ‘nanan’ and ‘dadu’ (my parents). She has a new favourite game called ‘borders’, which she makes me play while I’m supposed to be sending files to the immigration lawyer. It mainly consists of me suspiciously eyeing the rocks and cupcake wrappers that are her ‘passport’ and ‘visa’, tapping on my pretend computer and either granting or denying her entry based on my whim at the time.

As I’ve written elsewhere, borders are capitalism’s best friend, hoarding wealth and cheapening labour. All this headache and heartache to get Erik – a white Dutch dude – his papers. How much worse is it for 99% of others who, when all’s said and done, are just trying to move?

To conclude, I quote Essie and her very own swear word that she’s made up: baffit.

I hope I can stave off capitalism to be with you again soon, my friends. Realistically, it’s unlikely that I’ll return to once-a-week in the near future, but I’ll try my best. In the meantime, please leave a comment! How has capitalism been biting you in the bum lately? Your likes, shares and comments mean the world to me!

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No post today, I’m afraid, and possibly not next week either.

I’m slightly drowning so, while I’m still aiming to post with decent frequency, for the next little while, they might not be quite as regular as you’re used to.

In my absence, I offer you this blessing: each and every day, may you feel like you’re being cuddled by a giant raccoon in a hollow log.

Love,

Laura xx

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When I was growing up, my parents were very active in radical politics. My dad used to organise locally in Newham, East London. He was involved in building the Newham Defence campaign, which defended immigrant communities from violent far-right attacks.

His politics was also staunchly internationalist. In 1985, he was invited to the UN on behalf of the Pan African Congress, to workshop strategies for post-Apartheid South Africa. Here he is with Kwame Ture, otherwise known as the legendary Black Panther Stokely Carmichael.

My dad was in his forties at the time, around my age now, with young kids at home. I find this inspiring; it gives me hope that I can still do things out in the world even now that I’ve got my little daughter, Essie.

Of course, I’m aware that it was my mum that was home watching me and my big bro while my dad got to jet off to the Big Apple and do bragging-worthy stuff. Still, my dad was away for a week for this mission, and it’s the only time I remember him ever spending a night away from home.

I remember he brought me back a stuffed rabbit dressed as a pilot. A few years later, we went on a family trip to New York and he got to show us round the UN. My favourite memory: eating a hot lunch in the canteen. Always the best part of any institutional taskforce.

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My last couple of posts have been instalments in a longer argument about how capitalism structurally runs on ableism. This week, I want to continue that thread by exploring how the disability justice movement can lead us out of our fundamentally ableist socioeconomic system, into something lovely and gorgeous.

So this post is actually instalment three of a longer piece, though it stands alone if you haven’t read the previous instalments. If you’re curious, you can read those previous two instalments here and here.

This post is going to be about the way that care is rationed in our societies. It will argue that, no matter what our rulers continuously tell us about having to make ‘tough choices’ about who gets to live and die, we can, and indeed we have an ethical obligation to, refuse care rationing point blank.

In fact, refusing to accept care rationing — as the disability justice movement does — is the first step to moving on from capitalism into a world of love.

Go QALY yourself: on assigning monetary value to life

A few years ago, back during the heights of the Covid pandemic, I got into a heated discussion with an acquaintance about the QALY system. This is a framework used to asses how ‘cost effective’ any given healthcare treatment is for a given patient, based on factors like our age and underlying health conditions. Many national healthcare systems, including Britain’s NHS, use this standard to base decisions about who gets what health treatments and kinds of care — and who is denied them.

Yes, our lives are literally assigned monetary value and some lives literally are deemed less worthwhile than others.

My interlocutor, let’s call him ‘John’, was very informed about the QALY system and also had a strong ethical position. He argued that the method by which life and-death decisions are made by our healthcare providers every day should be brought out into the open and that there should be a public debate about how to allocate care in the most ethical way.

My instinctive stance was that we should not be assigning numeric values to human lives at all. And we should certainly not be judging that some lives are worth less than others and therefore less entitled to care — and therefore to life — based on age, disability, or, for that matter, any other criteria.

What to me was intuitively a fundamental ethical point, a red line about which I was not willing to compromise, was given short shrift by John. We might want there to be no rationing of care but that is not the reality in which we live. The reality is that care is a scarce resource; we are going to have to ration care so the best use of our energy is to develop a fairer way of doing it. That was his gist.

That conversation still niggles at me all these years later. I can’t say it was the first time that someone, progressives included, has told me that my ideas about basic respect for life and decency were ‘unrealistic’.

Start from the assumption that care rationing is unacceptable — and take it from there

It was only a few months later that I discovered the disability justice movement. I was holed up, nesting, pregnant and in a nine-month flare up of my ulcerative colitis. I was still isolating from the pandemic while others were letting loose. I got my hands on ’s books Care Work, and a bit later The Future is Disabled.

There were many things about reading those books at that time that were special. The same high sensitivity that makes me think ‘unrealistic’ things was what made those books resonate with me in a way that felt like wiggly vibrations were rising out of me, connecting me to humanity, to the universe, and to freedom. (Ok the pregnancy hormones might have had something to do with it.)

One of the special things was the way Piepzna-Samarasinha talked about the horrors of the care rationing that their community was experiencing in north America during the pandemic, and their struggles against it. They wrote:

like every disabled person I know, I spent the year terrified that everyone I loved — because my whole beloved community is disabled — were going to be murdered by a virus plus care rationing.

They also wrote about the NoBody Is Disposible Coalition in California, which fiercely campaigned against those being deemed low on the ‘quality of life’ triage list (disabled, fat and old people) being denied care — and led to many care rationing policies being withdrawn.

Piepzna-Samarasinha didn’t get into a discussion about how value should be assigned to lives and whether it’s possible to have a world that doesn’t ration care. Their community was (and it still is) facing a violent attack from the state that was and (still is) acting out the banal brutality of those cold calculations, and were too busy fighting for their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

Piepzna-Samarasinha didn’t have to get into that discussion. The underlying assumptions were starkly different. Underlying John’s argument, the assumption was: ‘there is always going to be some form of care rationing — therefore the best thing we can do is decide how to do it more fairly’. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s assumption was: ‘assigning value to lives is unacceptable — therefore we must fight it’.

And the latter is the assumption that we need to start with if we want to get out of this capitalist hellscape into something splendid.

In Health Communism, and make a similar argument. Struggles for genuinely universal healthcare contain truly revolutionary potential because they break down the very logic of capitalism, which is a logic of scarcity and of valuing some lives over others for the sake of endless profit for those at the top.

And, my beloveds, engaging in these struggles, drawing the red line and point-blank refusing to accept care rationing, is how we start building a new world of love.

To be continued…

In the next instalment, we’ll explore the political economic argument for care abundance, arguing that care does not have to be a scarce resource — via a discussion of the nature of money. Stay tuned!

Please leave a comment! Have you participated in struggles against care rationing? Are you someone that capitalism has deemed low on the quality of life list and therefore disposable? What does care abundance look like to you? Your comments, shares and likes mean the world to me!

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Dear beloveds,

It just occurred to me that it might be a bit late to do a ‘wrapping up 2025’ post since it’s three days into January, but hey ho. I present you with five of my posts that meant a lot to me. Hopefully they resonate with you too.

☝🏽This was the first time that I wrote about my birth story, and also articulated what kind of society would put love and care at the centre.

☝🏽I enjoyed getting my feelings out about gentle parenting, attachment theory, and the plain fact that our societies are fundamentally incompatible with raising emotionally healthy human beings.

☝🏽This is my argument in a nutshell about why capitalism is inherently patriarchal. It got by far the most likes of any of my pieces bar the guest post I did for the brilliant .

☝🏽This is my argument in a nutshell about the role that the nuclear family plays within capitalism, and why the nuclear family is as sucky as we all know it is.

☝🏽 It was therapeutic to write about the horrors of germ season, especially when you have a young kid, and analyse it within the big picture of capitalism.

Reflecting on my five choices, I’m struck by the extent to which the posts that pull most on my feelings are the ones to do with domestic life, putting the most everyday in touch with the big picture of capitalism. That’s what Loveconomics is all about, and I hope to do a lot more of it in 2026. I hope we’ll do it together.

For now, I’m wishing you a 2026 filled with the things that the powerful tell us are ‘unrealistic’ — peace, love and harmony.

Please leave a comment! Were there particular Loveconomics pieces that you liked or that made you decide to hit subscribe? Are there topics that you’d like me to write about this year? Your comments, likes and shares mean the world to me!

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To mark the close of the year, and my appreciation to you, my dear readers, I offer you the snow lady.

I made her with my burgeoning threenager, my daughter Esmeralda who, if you follow this publication, you will have heard a lot about. Paper plate crafts is one of our things.

Crafting with Essie has been a tiny but important lesson in letting go. I’ve been forced to confront and curtail my controlling impulses, my drive to try to force her to do things ‘properly’, to make things ‘how they’re supposed to be’.

It’s not always easy, but this is my reward for doing my best. This is the light and the truth that has revealed itself to me through my continued efforts: if I let my baby do her thing, she instinctively makes everything fabulous. She makes the world shine.

And so, dear reader, here is my season’s blessing for you: may you strive to let go and, in so doing, find sparkle (and googly eyes) wherever life takes you.

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This week, I want to write about how ableism functions within capitalism today.

The circular economy of waste

In the previous instalment, I wrote about how, under capitalism, we are valued according to how much profit we can generate for capitalists. If we are not sufficiently ‘productive’, we are worthless. We are surplus.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, in their book Health Communism,, explain how a worker/surplus binary is at the heart of capitalism. This binary is central to the entire system. It is only the fear that we will become ‘surplus’ that drives us into spending our days drudging away at work, creating the profits that get sucked up the chain to those at the top.

As Adler-Bolton and Vierkant observe, when we are surplus, we are disposable. We become capitalism’s waste product.

What happens to us when we are waste? How do those governing and administrating our capitalist institutions see fit to do dispose of us?

I can assure you, we’re not just taken to the dump and left to form a gigantic waste mountain, like non-metaphorical waste is. Our disabled bodies aren’t left to pollute the Earth, like forever chemicals and microplastics.

No, while capitalism can’t for the life of it seem to figure out how to create circular economies and stop poisoning the world, when it comes to disabled people, it knows very well how to process its waste efficiently.

Those leading and administrating capitalism put us through a rigorous — and highly fruitful — process of dehumanisation. Let me elaborate.

First, they smear us.

Our media and politicians tell the world that we’re welfare fraudsters. They tell us that we’re ‘overdiagnosing’*, that we’re lazy, dangerous, or that it’s all in our head.

These public smear campaigns apparently get a good return on investment. In the UK, over the past few years, there have been around 11,000 recorded disability hate crimes each year, spiking at times when anti-disability rhetoric from our politicians and media is high.

Globally, children with disabilities are almost four times more likely to experience violence than non-disabled children. Disabled people are some of the most likely to experience violence and discrimination in the world.

This outlay on anti-disabled sentiment might at first seem frivolous — what’s the pay off? But as we’ll see, the yields on hate and division are strong.

Then, they deny us what we need.

They cut off our social security while making it impossible for us to work without getting even sicker or dying. They deny us safe housing and accessible transportation. They ration our care and medication.

In her important book, Ramping Up Rights, Rachel Charlton-Dailey carefully documents the struggles that disability justice activists in the UK have always been fighting. She also collates a litany of heartbreaking statistics. Here’s one: The Trussell Trust estimated in 2023 that 69% of people accessing their food banks were disabled. 75% have at least one disabled person in their household.

These are the people who the government apparently thinks need to have their benefits cut. Well, we have to make savings, and what’s more fiscally responsible than cutting waste?

Then, they exploit us.

Always remember: a dehumanised person is an exploitable person. In the UK, 70% of disabled women get paid less than £15 an hour, versus 44% of non-disabled men. According to the International Labour Organisation, in lower income countries (ie countries on the wrong end of neocolonialism), the disability wage gap is 26%.

In the US, it is legal for businesses to pay disabled workers ‘subminimum wage’, on average $3.34 an hour.

Not only are our wages lower; our costs are higher. In the UK, Scope estimates that life is £1,067 more expensive per month for households with a disabled person. This is because of things like higher medical, energy and transportation costs.

This double whammy — lower pay plus higher costs — means that disabled people offer double the bang for our buck in profits for capitalists. Because one person’s low pay means someone else’s profit. Someone’s unaffordable cost means someone’s chi-ching. Maximal efficiency achieved.

Then, they extract from us.

Why leave it at exploitation? If we’re smart, lean and nimble, we can innovate further profitable uses for waste.

Worldwide, millions of disabled people are still institutionalised without their consent, including in the US, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, Nigeria and Russia.

In her 2017 book Beasts of Burden, Sunaura Taylor wrote that, in the US, nursing homes had become a $116 billion dollar industry. A room in a nursing home cost on average $87,000 per year.

Adler-Bolton and Vierkant explain that these nursing home setups are often dodgy public-private deals, with for-profit providers receiving billions in public funding. In almost every case, it would be far cheaper for the government to assist disabled people to stay in their own homes, including with home care workers paid a living wage.

Disabled people in these homes face notorious conditions, including physical and sexual violence as well as neglect of hygiene and psychological needs. Oh well, caring properly for people isn’t cheap, and we’ve got to cut costs.

Then, they kill us (or breed us out).

Ok, I guess this is where things start getting less circular. Once we have been entirely stripped for parts, once every penny of profit has been squeezed from us, it’s time for us waste to be eliminated.

Did you think eugenics was a thing of the past? Wrong. Many countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Belgium, still have rules to prevent disabled people from crossing their borders.

In both the US and UK, up to half of all those who die in police custody have a disability (disproportionately Black and brown disabled people).

In at least 12 European countries, including Denmark, Portugal and Latvia, the forced sterilisation of disabled women is legal. In Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic, it is legal to forcibly sterilise minors.

In the UK, austerity cuts have killed tens of thousands of disabled human beings. The UN has found that the UK has committed ‘grave and systematic’ violations of disabled people’s rights.

Covid has shown exactly what those running our institutions think of disabled people. The UK imposed Do Not Resuscitate orders on disabled patients during the pandemic without their knowledge or consent.

In 2022, it was found that three quarters of the people who had died of the Omicron variant in the US were disabled. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control, described this fact as ‘really encouraging news’.

After all, what could be a more effective way of eradicating waste?

The hyper-productivity of waste

Together, these steps make up disabled people’s comprehensive process of dehumanisation. While I’ve presented them as taking place in a certain order, actually all these stages are happening together, all the time. They all feed into each other, like a beautiful arrangement of virtuous circles.

For example, we’re easier to exploit when the world thinks we’re welfare cheats, but its also easier to convince people that we’re welfare cheats when we’re immiserated and suitably abject.

(A similar process springs to mind when I think about the dehumanisation of asylum seekers and the fact that, at least in my town, you can always spot an asylum facility by how inhumane and unlivable the building looks.)

The ultimate irony is that, even though they tell us that disabled people are worthless, we’re actually supremely productive for capitalists. They can make valuable savings by denying us the things we need; they can slash our wages, charge us through the roof for basic necessities, and then make bank from warehousing us.

Under capitalism, subjugation is never for its own sake. Some politician always ends up with more power and some rich fella always ends up with more profit out of it, every time. That’s how the entire system works.

Ultimately, under capitalism, both sides of the worker/surplus binary are rubbish and we all end up as waste. Time for a magnificent new system that values us all.

To be continued…

In the next instalment, we’ll see how disability justice can lead us out of this disaster into a world where care is abundant, community is nourished, and we all get what we need to be able to thrive.

*Shout out to who noted the cries of ‘overdiagnosis’ coming from politicians and the media in a comment on my previous instalment.

Please leave a comment! Did I miss a step in our circular economy? What’s your experience with being waste? What have you learned from disability justice or how has your community fought back or hacked the system? Your comments, likes and shares mean the world to me!

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Enrolment for Capitalism vs. Love has opened! 🎉

• This is an online, 8-week course beginning February 3rd.

• Workload is not too heavy; it’s designed to fit around life.

• Enrolment closes December 20th! Participants are limited to 25 as we want to keep the space intimate and create genuine community.

Capitalism is the overarching, global economic system at the root of all the turmoil we are seeing in the world today. Yet it somehow remains hidden.

Capitalism vs. Love aims to change all that.

We are going to unpack, in a super accessible way, exactly what capitalism is, how it works and its deep structures and inner logic.

We’re going to apply this analytical framework to our own personal lives — how does capitalism shape our identities, bodies and relationships?

And we’re going to explore what love-centric economic systems would look like — systems designed to help us thrive 💖

The course is for the new School of Radical Imagination, founded by the brilliant Palestinian social impact coach and economist Besan Abu-Joudeh. I can literally feel the electricity around the school crackling as we prepare for launch.

This is the first, inaugural cohort of Capitalism vs. Love and of the entire school — we get to build this thing together!

Learn more and enroll here.

Finding you guys here on Substack and finding my community at the School of Radical Imagination have coincided and it’s felt like this beautiful magic is happening that we can bring into the world together.

Please share with anyone who you feel might be interested. This course is for anyone who feels that things are profoundly wrong in the world, that there’s more to life than this, and who wants to gain clarity and make a difference while finding community.

I can’t wait to begin this journey together ❤️

My noggin again. This is my second ever face-to-camera video. Constructive (gentle!) feedback is welcome :)

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I’ve written before about how capitalism is inherently racist and sexist. Today, I want to do the same for ableism. These systems of oppression aren’t incidental to our global economic system. On the contrary, they are hotwired into capitalism and form its basic logic and structure.

I’m dividing this piece into two instalments. This post will focus on the history and internal logic of capitalism. The next instalment will look at how ableism works today and how disability justice can get us out of this circus and into something fabulous.

The roots: capitalism was built on ableism

We take for granted that we have to work to earn money to buy the things we need to stay alive. But wage labour only became pervasive during the era of capitalism, which began around 500 years ago.

Sure, there were artisans and other kinds of workers who worked for money, but wage labour wasn’t the dominant way of organising the economy. Under European Feudalism, for example, peasants worked the land for their lords and for themselves and their families. There were also communal tracts of land, so, even though Feudalism was a harsh and dehumanising class system, people were at least able to feed themselves directly from the land.

The transition to capitalism wasn’t exactly a peaceful process. On the contrary, it was a bloody onslaught and theft of global proportions. It was good old fashioned class war, perpetrated by a newly forming ruling alliance composed of the Church, the state, the old nobility and the emerging bourgeoisie. Its victims were everyone not part of the ruling alliance.

The world over, people were forced off their lands and deprived of the means of providing for themselves and their beloveds. Their land was stolen and so was their labour. They were forced onto plantations, into mines, factories, or the homes of the rich as domestic servants. They were forced to work for wages or to work for no wages at all, as in the case of the millions of enslaved people who built the new world of capitalism.

This process wasn’t, let’s say ‘respectful of people’s bodily integrity’. The global transition to capitalism itself created millions upon millions of disabled and chronically ill people.

Disfiguring the body through branding was what turned a person into a slave, a piece of property to be owned for their masters’ profit. Indigenous Americans were infected en masse with diseases such as smallpox. Enslaved workers on sugar plantations were regularly dismembered, burned, and maimed during the course of their hazardous work. In Europe, the new urban working classes worked and lived in conditions so unsanitary that in some cases they only had about a 50:50 chance of keeping their kids alive.

(Btw if you’re thinking that this is all nothing more than the barbarity of some bygone era, just wait till the next instalment.)

Did this new system that enriched its rulers by maiming and sickening people then reward those people’s sacrifice? Did it tenderly nurse them and make sure they had everything their transformed bodies needed? No, my friends. Quite the reverse. It labeled sick and disabled people as inferior, even deviant. The capitalist ruling class subjected them to a systematic campaign of dehumanisation.

As capitalism proceeded, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, disabled people were increasingly locked up in asylums, often subjected to cruel medical experiments. The fake race science of eugenics targeted disabled people for literal extinction. Countries including the US forbade disabled people from crossing their borders. Across Europe, Africa and the Americas, hundreds of thousands of disabled people were sterilised against their will.

If we look at the history, we see that ableism was baked into capitalism from the get go.

The structure: ableism is integral to the logic of capitalism

This is a devastating history that, on the surface, might defy comprehension. How can humans behave so inhumanely to one another? What evil compelled our ancestors to do this to each other?

But if we look at the inner structure and logic of capitalism as a system, it makes a gnarly kind of sense.

The history of capitalism is one of the new ruling alliance grabbing as much land and labour as they possibly could. Why? To make a profit out of it. What was the point of this profit? To use to make more profit for themselves. And what was the point of that new profit? To use to make even more profit for themselves. That’s it. That’s the whole point of capitalism.

Everyone else, deprived of the means of sustaining their own community, became the working class – having to work for the ruling class (who have now mutated into billionaires and almost-trillionaires) to get money to buy the things they need to stay alive.

Under this system, the worth of a human being is reduced to how much profit they can make for capitalists. We are valued by how productive we are for capital. and , in their book Health Communism, describe a binary logic of worker/surplus. If you are not a sufficiently functioning worker, you are ‘surplus’. Surplus to capitalism’s requirements. And if you are surplus, you become waste.

This worker/surplus binary is not incidental to capitalism; it is necessary. If we were whole, if we were treated as if we mattered no matter what our bodies were like, if we knew that our needs would be met come what may, do you think we would work in Amazon warehouses to get harassed all day by algorithms? Would we work in poultry farms where we have to wear diapers because we don’t have time for bathroom breaks? Would we let our children work in hazardous mines for $1.50 a day for minerals for other people’s kids’ smart watches?

Would we even choose to do the ‘good’ jobs, sucking out our prime hours, day in, day out, on pointless and mind numbing tasks instead of being with our loved ones and doing things that bring us energy, inspiration and joy? I think not.

No. Under capitalism, unless you are part of the ruling class, the only thing worse than being a worker is not being a worker. Is being waste.

To be continued…

In the next instalment, we’ll look at how ableism functions within capitalism today, and how disability justice can set us free.

Leave a comment! What are your experiences with the worker/surplus binary? What would you do with your time if you could cut out all pointless tasks? What do you think of the instalments/to be continued format (it’s a new one for me and feels a bit odd!). Your likes, shares and comments mean the world to me!

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The Coshever sisters at my mum’s aunt Cissie’s wedding in 1968. Cissie is in the middle; my granny, Rebecca, is on the right; and Esther is on the left.

Cissie was in her fifties when this was taken. She married late because, as the oldest sister, she had the responsibility for caring for her father as he aged. She never had children of her own.

My mum says that she is very proud of Cissie. Besides being a loving and caring person, she was one of the few women in the London clothing industry of the sixties who became a cutter, a very skilled job. She even cut men’s suits, which was very much a man’s job at that time.

When my mum was growing up, her aunts both lived in the same street very close to where she and her parents lived. They even shared a house at one point. Some of my mum’s happiest childhood memories are of being with the three women together.

A few years ago, my mum wrote a beautiful social history of the immigrant working class community of Fitzrovia, London, where my granny grew up. It was a labour of love for my mum, written after her mother passed away as a way of being in communion with her.

One of my proudest memories is helping to convince my mum that she had permission to write a social history, even though she had no formal training in that discipline.

Watching my mum write this book made me understand how I want to write: with tender patience and infinite love xx

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In my last post, I wrote about the role of trauma in autoimmune disease and chronic illness, putting the spotlight on the bit that usually gets left out: the social contexts that create the conditions for trauma in the first place. That’s right, we’re talking about capitalism.

This week I want to do the same thing for the role of environmental destruction, including things like microplastics, forever chemicals, and ultra-processed foods.

Capitalism is programmed to kill our magnificent planet Earth. Given that homo sapiens are part of nature (a fact that should be so obvious it doesn’t need pointing out but we tragically have a system in which it does), it’s hardly surprising that this isn’t exactly salubrious for us humons (yes that is a Star Trek reference).

A panoply of poison

Sometimes my husband and I joke about how our generation, growing up in the 1980s and 90s, were probably the most screwed of all generations when it comes to childhood diet. Our parents would innocently pack Capri-Sun in our lunch boxes, and give us things sweetened with weird artificial sweeteners. Those poor fools thought that margarine was the healthy alternative to butter.

We gloat about how much hipper we are now to diet. We boast that our nearly-three-year-old gets hardly any refined sugar and we give her kimchi on the regular. She’s going to be so much healthier than us.

Then the sinking feeling starts. The dark curtain begins to descend. My smug denial is malfunctioning.

We can have all the knowledge and practice all the caution in the world; she’s still going to be infinitely more poisoned than we were.

We should love our planet like we love our babies. Because it is our natural world, our ‘Mother Earth’, that nourishes our children and ourselves.

Correction: we should have a socioeconomic system that enables us to love our planet like we love our babies. Because, as will become clear, this is about the design of an entire system and not about our individual choices as consumers.

Instead of being tenderly loved, our glittering orb is being poisoned. Forever chemicals contaminate our drinking water, food and air. Nearly all of us have these chemicals in our blood, including newborn babies. The clue’s in the name, guys, this stuff isn’t going away.

Microplastics are accumulating in our lungs, blood and brains. The air we breathe is polluted from fossil fuels and industrial agriculture. Did I mention the fact that Newham, the working class immigrant borough of East London where I grew up, has some of the worst air pollution in the whole of the UK?

Forever chemicals, microplastics and air pollution all have established links with ulcerative colitis, the autoimmune disease that capitalism has gifted me. They are also associated with cancer, lung disease, heart disease, neurotoxicity, infertility, and, here it comes, premature death.

These toxins impair intestinal barrier function and disrupt the gut microbiome, triggering abnormal immune responses. They also cause oxidative stress and chronic inflammation. They can even damage our DNA and alter our epigenetics, reprogramming our cells.

We are not being poisoned by accident. Each of the industries responsible for making us permanently sick have been revealed to have known about the deadly effects of their businesses and actively covered them up. The 2019 film Dark Waters, starring Mark Ruffalo, dramatises this for the Teflon manufacturer DuPont, which contaminated a US town with forever chemicals shown to cause cancer and congenital diseases.

Essie was two and a half when she learned about the sad turtle, the little icon on household cleaning products and baby wipes that tells you that this product kills our fellow luminous beings and contaminates our world. Those turtles aren’t the only ones that are drooping.

Forget margarine, think about the bread

Oh btw, it turns out that I was completely wrong about my generation being the most screwed when it comes to junk food. Since the 1980s and 90s, ultra-processed food has exploded. The reason I feel that our food choices with Essie are healthier is that ultra-processed food has become so ambient that I don’t even realise when I’m giving it to her.

Just think about the mass produced bread we buy at the supermarket. Even the ‘good’, wholemeal variety can contain ingredients that can cause autoimmune diseases as well as cancer, diabetes and damage brain health. Yep, bread.

And, just as the chemicals dumped into our environment end up sickening us humans, the ultra-processed foods dumped in us also destroy our environment. Ultra-processed foods have high carbon footprints and are associated with deforestation and biodiversity loss.

As with plastics and chemicals, it’s not as if the food manufacturers are innocently pumping out food that gives us serious diseases by accident. They are deliberately making this stuff as addictive as possible. They have labs full of scientists who spend all day every day doing experiments to find out how to get our kids most hooked on this stuff that is going to kill them. Then, they have massive marketing departments doing research to find out to get our kids to wear us down to the point where we let them eat it.

In high income countries, including the US, UK and Canada, ultra-processed foods make up around half or more of our calorie intake. In lower income countries, the consumption of these foods is steadily rising.

Remember, then, that we are talking about the ‘lucky’ ones here. We are supposed to think that we are ‘advanced’ or ‘developed’ because we get to eat food that has been so mutilated that it makes us chronically ill.

Under capitalism, we are ‘privileged’ if we are not the hundreds of millions of humans who are going hungry and even starving to literal death while there is more than enough food to feed everyone. We are at the top of the heap if fossil fuel companies have not poisoned our water, soil and air to the point where life expectancy is around 40 years of age, as they have in the Niger Delta.

It’s capitalism doing what it’s designed to do

We are not to blame for the fact that we or our kids are ingesting poison. No matter how much caution we practice, there are immensely bigger forces dictating what goes into our bodies. The idea that we get to choose any of this is insulting. I don’t remember voting in a referendum on the question: ‘would you like to mangle your guts forever in exchange for this non-stick pan?’

We can, and definitely should, point the finger at the individual companies and entire industries that conspire to keep making us sick for the sake of their bottom lines. But even then, these shareholders and executives are just doing what they are incentivised to do. The problem lies in the very wiring of the capitalist global economic system itself.

The driving force and sole purpose of this system is to accumulate more and more and more profit for those at the top. Everything else is less important than that. Does that sound like a recipe for healthy outcomes to you? In a system where profit is number one, if our health or that of our children might get in the way of profit-making, which one is going to get kicked out the window?

There are a lot of worthy campaigns out there trying to regulate these companies and rein in the worst of the harm they cause. This all well and good, and hopefully might do some damage control. But can we just pause for a moment on this fact: we live in a system that is literally programmed to kill us.

Are we just supposed to be cool with this and try to get killed a little slower than would otherwise be the case? Or would a better solution be, oh I don’t know, to have a system that isn’t designed to kill us?

Here’s the good news: if we’re going to have to junk the whole thing anyway, which we clearly are, that means we get the opportunity to build something that isn’t just better but is completely and utterly fabulous.

Yes, my friends, we get to build a gorgeous new system based not on endless profit but on love.

Please leave a comment! How do you deal with the knowledge that we are being poisoned? What would a love-centric system look like to you? Comments, likes and shares mean the world to me!

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I was diagnosed with the autoimmune disease ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), in 2017. Since then, my journey has gone something like this:

Stage 1: The beginning — veering wildly between cheerful denial and tearful panic.

Stage 2: The Covid pandemic — learning what ableism looks like first hand.

Stage 3: Getting pregnant — a nine-month flare up.

Stage 4: Now — veering (less wildly) between thinking I can do anything if I did the nine-month-pregnant-flare-up and ambient anxiety about what I’ll do when societal and environmental collapse reaches my family and how I’ll live without access to my medication.

There are so many things to say about the relationship between capitalism and disability, but I want to start at what I see as the beginning: the ways that this economic system makes us sick in the first place. I’m going to write a separate post on how capitalism poisons the natural world and what this does to our health. Here I’m going to focus on trauma.

This is not to say that all chronic illness or disability is caused by trauma or that, if you have experienced psychological trauma, you are fated to develop an autoimmune or other chronic disease. It’s also not to say that capitalism is responsible for every trauma we go through.

But the fact is that capitalism causes a lot of harm to our squidgy selves (our ‘bodyminds’ as some people say to try to overcome the silly idea that our minds and bodies are two separate entities), and that’s an important place to start when thinking about disability and illness within the big picture of our socioeconomic system.

Childhood trauma

It’s now well established that IBD, along with many other chronic and autoimmune diseases, is linked with ‘adverse childhood experiences’ — including abuse, neglect, experiencing racism, financial distress, the loss of a parent or parental conflict.

This kind of childhood trauma can alter the function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which manages our stress responses and can trigger chronic inflammation. Chronic stress in childhood can also dysregulate our gut microbiomes and our hormones. and Raj Patel have written about these pathways in their important book, Inflamed.

The primary places where this trauma happens is within families. Within the family unit’s private walls, we play out the traumas that happened to us on our own kids, passing chronic stress and relationship dysfunction down the generations. Far from helping, the state institutions that are supposed to support us are just as likely to harass and surveil us and further our distress. As I’ve written elsewhere, under capitalism, the family is a walking trauma factory.

Even when we long to break the cycle, we are usually too crushed by the burden of work and dealing with our kids’ immediate needs to put in the full time job of processing our own trauma and relearning how to parent. As put it in a comment on one of my previous posts, the capitalist grind keeps us perpetually in survival mode.

And even when we are doing our level best to practice things like ‘unconditional love’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘attunement’, this becomes increasingly untenable once our children reach school age or come more into contact with the ‘real world’, with its relentless emphasis on competition, rankings and measuring up.

Looking back, I can now see my parents’ inner conflict when faced with their sensitive little orchid of a daughter, about how far they should honour that sensitivity and the countervailing urge to drive it out of me, because it made them feel uncomfortable, and because they had been taught that hammering on a ‘thick skin’ was the only way to survive in the real world.

To be fair, they weren’t exactly wrong. Quite aside from the everyday judgements and nudges that chip away at children’s’ sense of innate self worth, there were some scarier monsters lurking. My brother still remembers skinheads swarming Plaistow station and the surrounding east London streets every time a West Ham football match was on (fascists on the streets sound at all familiar today?). When I was a babe in arms, my parents would field death threats for their anti-racist activism. Instead of helping, the police tapped their phone.

When I got sent to secondary school in far-away Essex, I was one of about five non-white kids in the whole year. My walk to and from what was casually called the ‘p**i’ shop was regularly accompanied by the dulcet tones of kids chanting ‘there ain’t no Black in the union jack’. As I’ve written many times elsewhere, racism is not incidental to capitalism but integral to it — racial exploitation and dispossession is what capitalists’ profits are made of.

The message I received was that showing the smallest vulnerability — showing my real self — was an unforgivable weakness to be scrupulously avoided.

Following a well-worn script, many years of heavy smoking, drinking and avoidance ensued (probably not great for the ole microbiome) that I only really started coming to terms with after my ulcerative colitis diagnosis.

This is what kids have to contend with in our societies — and my childhood was by no means extreme. There was also oodles of love and relative financial security. In fact, relatively speaking, I’d say I was one of the ‘lucky’ ones. Let’s just pause and let that sink in for a moment.

Intergenerational trauma

Try as they might, my parents passed their own traumas down to me. Two messages that my delicate little organism imbibed as a child, no doubt unintentionally on my parents’ side: 1. ‘don’t ever think that it won’t happen to you’, and 2. ‘they’ll never accept you’. Thanks, mum and dad.

Little wonder when you take a quick look at my family tree. On one side, my dad, coming to Britain in the era of Enoch Powell from the empire’s former ‘jewel in the crown’, the son of independence fighters. On the other, the working class daughter of eastern European Jews and a Polish fighter in the Second World War. Alright mum and dad, me and my inflamed gut forgive you.

Intergenerational trauma can even write itself on our epigenetics and genetics. Take telomeres, parts of our cells that play a role in the aging process. Trauma shortens those guys and even the telomeres of our descendants, leading to increased risk of chronic illness.

Research has recently come out around the intergenerational impacts on the health of south Asians of the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed three million humans. Through epigenetic alterations, descendants of those who faced starvation may be more susceptible to diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The Bengal famine was not due to crop failures or lack of moisture in the soil. It was the result of deliberate policy on the part of the British under Winston Churchill, who stockpiled food for British and European soldiers while their colonial subjects starved to death.

My dad was two years old at the time, toddling around the verandas of his family home in the Bengali town of Bankura. He didn’t go hungry, and I don’t think my colitis is related to this deliberate disaster, but millions have had their health cut up by the colonial violence whose stolen profits fueled capitalist development and continue to do so today.

Something similar can be said of antisemitism. When I was being diagnosed, my gastroenterologist displayed what I considered a distasteful level of excitement when he discovered I’m part Ashkenashi Jew — as that’s a group with increased risk of developing IBD. Scientists are exploring possible links to epigenetic factors caused by the horror of the Holocaust — being perpetrated at the same time as the Bengal famine.

While capitalism didn’t invent antisemitism, the Holocaust was a thoroughly capitalist genocide, with its bureaucratic rationality, meticulous division of labour and its taxonomic categorisation of different species that was also applied to humans. The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman has written about the Holocaust in the context of capitalist modernity.

Can we possibly fail to make the link to current intentional starvation and genocide, in Palestine and now Sudan? For those ‘lucky’ enough to survive, what will be the effects on the health of our descendants, for generations to come?

How to heal

It was when I was in stage one of my life with IBD — the denial-panic cycle — that I first started reading up about the role of trauma in chronic illness. Back then, I thought that, if only I could do enough therapy, if only I could reach a high enough plane of spiritual enlightenment, I might be able to cure myself. Maybe I could be the miracle being who never had another flare up?

I don’t believe that now. Maybe that’s not even what I would want. I hate my illness a lot of the time, but I wouldn’t want to lose the person its helped me become. I’m the product of everything I’ve experienced in my life, and even what my ancestors experienced before me, and that should be enough for me to matter, and for us all to matter.

Our gorgeous post-capitalist society centred on love won’t be one where we all fit a body type labeled ‘able bodied’. That kind of eugenicist thinking is part of the system that is causing all this trauma in the first place.

True healing means creating a world in which all our wild, beautiful bodies are honoured and have our needs met, whatever they are, as a matter of course.

Leave a comment! How are you navigating disability and chronic illness in this world that isn’t designed for us? How do you see your health in relation to capitalism?

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I want to devote this post to telling you about a major new thing in my life — something I need your help with.

From February, I’ll be teaching a new online course with the School of Radical Imagination called Capitalism vs. Love!

In this 8-week course, we’re going to grab capitalism by its roots. We’ll break down what this system really is and how it shapes our personal lives, including:

– Our relationships
– Our health
— Our identities
– Our sense of self-worth

And we’ll explore what a love-centered economy could look like.

This is an invitation to reimagine economics not as a discipline of scarcity and competition, but one that nurtures care, community and solidarity.

Its everything that this Loveconomics publication is about and that YOU have been a part of building.

We are having an open house this coming Monday:

Open House: 3 November 5pm CET/ 4pm GMT/ 11am EDT/ 8am PDT/ on Zoom
Sign up here.

Course Dates: 3 February – 24 March 2026. 8 weeks in total.
Limited to 25 participants

This course has arisen out of everything we’ve been doing here together, and I could not be more grateful to you. You are the people who I would want to be with in this learning community most in the world.

If you would like to learn more, join the open house or sign up, do so here.

Here’s where I need your help

To make Capitalism vs. Love viable — and to make the entire School of Radical Imagination viable — we need to find the people who this course was made for, who are going to be part of this new adventure with us.

Please can you take 2 minutes to think of one person who might be interested in this course – someone who wants to deepen their knowledge about the global economic system that shapes all our lives or is questioning how we can build transformation centered on love – and share the course with them?

NB: This is a super accessible course – zero background in economics is needed!

(This is my very first one of these face-to-camera videos. What do you think? Please be honest — but in an extremely gentle way!)

About the School of Radical Imagination

When someone called Besan Abu-Joudeh reached out to invite me to teach an inaugural course at the new school she was founding, my first thought was: ‘this is going to be some ropy AI thing that basically wants to suck my labour for free’.

Then I started digging around and discovered that Besan is a brilliant Palestinian social impact coach and economist. Then I looked into the other instructors teaching inaugural courses and realised that every one of them brought something unexpected and profound.

When we all finally met online, I couldn’t believe that I had found such a gorgeous community of teaching and learning.

The School of Radical Imagination is for those who crave learning in community but don’t want to go into debt or participate in institutions that are complicit in harm or stuck in outdated ideas.

Instead, you get the opportunity to enroll in courses with the same academic rigour, without having to commit to a full programme with associated fees. And the courses are geared to liberation, awakening our creative power, and building deep community within the class.

Classes are intimate, with enrollment limited to 25 learners per course. Scholarships are available.

I’d love to see you at our online open house event.

And could you help me by taking that 2 minutes to think of one person who might be interested in the course and share it with them?

If you can’t make the open house, the recording will be up on the website afterwards. And feel free to DM me on Substack with any further questions.

I’d also love to hear from you in the comments – if you’re interested in taking the course, what would you most want to get out of it? If you are sharing with someone you know, what made that person come into your mind?

With infinite thanks and love,

Dr. Laura Basu
Faculty, School of Radical Imagination 💗

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If you follow this publication, you’ll know that we’ve been struggling epically with childcare for our toddler. Well, it looks like she’s now slowly getting settled into daycare (please oh lord, please), but — guess what? — we’ve now all been hit with some hideous virus! Quelle surprise.

Ok, I’m not going to blame capitalism for the common cold. But, stay with me, what my sister-in-law dubbed the ‘great winter germathon’ can tell us a lot about capitalist societies.

I identify more as an xennial than a full-blown millennial, but I’m going to hit you with a listicle anyway. Here goes.

1. Capitalism makes you sick

Capitalism makes us sick in so many ways that aren’t specifically about germ season. Just think about how fossil fuel companies, chasing endless profits, have poisoned the Niger Delta in Nigeria to the point where life expectancy is around 40 years of age (see my interview with for more on this travesty).

When it comes to common contagious diseases, capitalism’s profit motive is also deeply implicated in the Covid pandemic. Mass deforestation and rampant globalisation — spurred by capitalists’ jonesing for profit — were recognised drivers of this mass global catastrophe, whose ongoing casualties are quietly being shoved under the carpet by our political class.

One lesson I’ll never forget about the Covid pandemic: how capitalist institutions that in various ways serve as container devices for humans — prisons, care homes, refugee detention centres and, yes schools and daycares — became hotbeds of contagion and sickness.

No, I’m not saying that my daughter’s nursery is the same as a prison. Its a reasonably humane-seeming place and the carers are lovely. But there is something to say about how these institutions that, bear in mind, weren’t made with our thriving as priority number one, confine people together in ways that aren’t necessarily beneficial for our health.

And that is especially so when privatisation and ‘efficiency measures’ — also for the purposes of savings and profits — squeeze more and more bodies into tighter and tighter spaces. Lesson number one: the needs of capitalism and the needs of our squidgy selves are lethally non-aligned.

2. Capitalism doesn’t care if you’re sick

You would think that the people in charge of this economic system — people like bosses and politicians — would want us to have at least a modicum of health so that we can continue to be good little workers and create their profits for them.

But here’s the second thing we can learn about capitalism: it contains a fundamental contradiction between the short term and the long term. Because capitalists are competing with each other, they need to win, now now now. This means that they are willing to sacrifice long term financial health, both of the system as a whole and even for their individual business, for the sake of short-term gains.

That’s why capitalism resembles a chaotic giant baby id with a hammer, barging around randomly, smashing everything that comes in its way. Capitalists are incentivised to put the blinkers on and only think about the here-and-now, and we’ll deal with the repercussions when we come to it (by doing everything we can to make sure that someone else has to clean up the mess).

That’s why there has been this eerie silence around the devastating long-term effects of Covid that have blasted millions of people’s lives and health. As long as we’re finding short-term hacks to rake in the profits, fine, and anyway AI is making these pitiful little worker humans redundant so it’s all good (and we’ll deal with the question of who is going to buy our products when all the humans are broken and penniless when we have to).

Instead of taking measures to preserve the workforce, our leaders decide that a neat solution is to demonise disabled people, punish us for being sick, and drive us to keep working even when we’re sick and will make everyone else sick.

My husband, Erik, and I are both self employed, which means we have more flexibility to prioritise our recovery, but also means we don’t get sick pay. Even if we did, I’m sure we would feel the pressure to go back to work before we’re fully recovered, just like everybody we know does.

And so, we feel compelled to send our little Essie back to daycare before she’s ready so that we can get back to work; send her back into the germ den where she can pick up another bug on top of the current bug, bring it home to us, and keep up the time-honoured winter germathon cycle of doom. Thanks, capitalism.

3. The nuclear family sucks (more) when you’re sick

There’s another reason why we felt compelled to send Essie back to daycare before she was ready — a reason that dare not speak its name.

We needed her gone. We needed time away from her, we needed her out of the house. So that we could give ourselves a fighting chance to recover from our own lurgies. And so that we could stop ourselves melting into a raging sea of bile and cabin-feverish lava.

When I confessed this reason to Erik, he said, ‘well yeah, but I wouldn’t say it out loud’.

We’ve tried daycare twice before, both times unsuccessfully. The first time, Essie was around 9 months old. We had to take her out after a few months because she just kept getting sick. And I’m not talking perma-snotty-nose sick. I’m talking red-limp-whimpering-pneumonia-and-antibiotics sick.

When my mum heard about the pneumonia, she packed her bags, jumped on a plane in London and was in Nijmegen to save us within 18 hours. She left behind my dad, who had recently had hip replacement surgery and who let her go without hesitation, even though he needed her too.

But the pneumonia was just one of the acute illnesses that season, and my mum couldn’t be there the whole time. I counted at least 12 really nasty bugs, and Erik and I were getting them too. One time we all got Norovirus. Thank God that there were around 10 hours separating the worst of my symptoms and the worst of Erik’s, otherwise we literally wouldn’t have been physically capable of caring for our baby.

And yes we do have people in Nijmegen who we can call on in a real emergency. But you have to have quite a high level of closeness with someone before you can ask them to catch the vomiting bug for you.

Item number three in our listicle: we all know that two people is not enough to raise a child. We are pushed into this arrangement for capitalism’s convenience. And the same nuclear family format that makes the family unit so pitifully small also makes it very difficult to reach that level of closeness with those outside its walls who might be able to lend a hand.

4. Your self esteem takes a beating when you’re sick. Why? It begins with C.

When you’re sick, it makes sense that you’re going to feel low and sad anyway. But if you could just be snuggled in a warm bath of love and acceptance until you recovered, that would probably minimise the emotional fallout.

Instead, we spend our sick time in cold anxiety that we’re not bringing home the bacon, or that our managers will think we’re skiving, or about how big the pile-up of work will be when we get back.

On top of the anxiety, our self-esteem takes a beating too. As Erik observed during his latest bout, being sick doesn’t help your sense of self worth if your validation is based on a) making money and b) more broadly, being ‘productive’ and ‘achieving’ things.

Our fourth lesson: capitalism creates a gaping void where our sense of innate self worth is supposed to be, which we usually try to fill by ticking an endless series of boxes. When we’re sick, the quick dopamine hits of notching up small achievements dry up and we’re left with frustration, self doubt and low-grade fear.

5. Disability justice can help us heal

I started learning about disability justice after I got diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2017. It was a lifeline. The work of and, more recently, and , has helped me join the dots between ableism, racism, heteropatriarchy and capitalism. It’s shown me that we can celebrate our wild sick and disabled bodies. And it’s taught me that disabled people have been leading the care revolution all along.

Germ season comes for us all. So do chronic illness and disability, eventually. If we know what’s good for us, instead of trying to forget and move on as soon as possible after the latest bug, we’ll let it guide us to disability justice.

Our listicle’s fifth and wisest lesson: the common cold can teach us a lot about capitalism. And, if we let it, it can also teach us what kinds of societies will actually nurture us — and how we can get us there.

Leave a comment! How do you deal with the germathon? How do you navigate your chronic illness or disability within a system that wasn’t designed for us?

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I’ve added an extract of the interview below, for those of you who prefer to read text rather than watch videos (I’m one of these people myself, so if you’re one too, I understand!).

Full disclosure: I found this conversation inspiring as hell and learned some very practical things about what we can all do to help strengthen our communities and find hope and connection in the midst of the shit spiral the world is in.

Loveconomics is the name of this Substack publication and also of a book project I’m working on. It joins the personal with the political, explores how capitalism affects our everyday lives, bodies, and relationships, and thinks through how to build a new system that puts love where it belongs: at its heart.

Each of my guests speaks with me about these topics from their own unique perspective. Previous installments have featured the amazing Grace Blakeley, Gary Young, and Rachel Shabi, and upcoming is Nergiz.

I’ve been publishing one interview every two weeks, with a reflection piece from myself in between. I hope you enjoy!

Extract from the interview

Laura: I think for me, the key thing is to understand that capitalism, which is this global system that has taken over every part of the world, is fundamentally hierarchical. And that’s where profit comes from.

And so because of that, capitalism is inimical to love on this really sort of deep, fundamental level. It’s inimical to what is really important to everybody, which is being cared for, caring for each other, feeling safe, feeling secure, feeling like we belong and being able to do that on a thriving and healthy planet.

And at the heart of this system of hierarchy is the hierarchy between humans and the rest of nature. It was making this division and saying humans are somehow different, somehow superior to every other species and every other part of nature and it’s our role to dominate nature for our purposes.

And then it was about carving up who really gets to be human and that’s where all those other hierarchies, like racism, come in.

And so overcoming that means overcoming the whole thing, all of the hierarchies, including this hierarchy between humans and the rest of nature.

Mikaela: Yeah, I mean, 100%. And I do think love is so central to this.

I spent the two years before this year almost constantly giving keynotes or doing book talks, and it exhausted me, even though I’m sure it was very useful in many ways and there were lots of times that I did enjoy it.

But I’d always ask the audience to close their eyes and imagine the person they love the most in the world and how that person makes them feel and how do they feel when they think about that person. And then I ask them to hold on to that feeling about how much they love this person.

And then I’d ask them to try, as hard as it might be, as I talk in this presentation about maybe people who look differently than us or live further away from us or have an experience that is very different from you or whatever else like that, to try and multiply that feeling by how many times these people are that I’m talking about or try and replicate it again for this person’s story that I’m talking about because I think that, if we can feel this love that is real and is within us for our siblings across the world that we have been taught to not love and taught to dehumanize —

not that it’s a conscious feeling perhaps but maybe even in the way that we choose to get things into our lives, like if we’re not honoring the person who made my clothes in that moment, that is a way that we’ve been kind of manipulated to believe that that person is less human than us, less worthy of respect and love and dignity.

And so instead I really try and encourage people to reject that and instead choose to not see a stranger and try and realize that every single person across the world is someone’s everything and someone’s person that they would think about in that moment — it always gets me a bit emotional.

But I think if we can do that, that will help counteract the powers of capitalism, the powers of neoliberalism in particular, that ask us to see ourselves just as individuals that are not connected to each other and that we’re all just in competition with each other. We don’t need to think about everyone else. We just need to focus on ourselves.

And so, I do think that love is central and important to tackling that and getting to something else.

Laura: That was beautiful. And there’s a quote from James Baldwin that I keep going on about, which is, ‘the children are always ours, every single one of them all over the globe.’

And that, I think, is what we should be holding on to, that should be our starting point, and any time we’re faced with a policy decision or any sort of political debate or societal issue that we’re not sure where we stand on, start there, with someone else’s person they love most in the world is just important as my person who I love most in the world.

And then where does that take us? Let that take us to its logical conclusion. And if we do that, we get somewhere pretty revolutionary, pretty radical, pretty fast.

And I think that’s our natural instinct. I’ve got a two-year-old, and I see it, it’s her instinct to see things like that. And those are the values that we try to teach our children — within this context that is continually showing us the opposite.

But if we were to just follow that and not let ourselves be convinced that that’s somehow childish or unrealistic or whatever, where would we get to? We’d get to somewhere totally transformed.

Mikaela: Yeah. I think there’s so much that we can learn from young people, which is why I wrote a kids book as well. It’s called Climate is Just the Start, and it came out this year.

And part of that came from, what I think is seen as naivety in young people is actually this truth that should be honoured. In Islam they talk about how the people closest to truth are those who are the closest to life having begun and the closest to life having ended. And how I think that we can dismiss both groups so much.

People talk as if old people don’t care about things and I’m like — who do you think was fighting for all of this stuff before — also who is getting arrested more than anyone else in defense of groups like Palestine Action?

Elderly people are the people I think in our society who see how the world should function the best. And children in many ways just are not ground down by what we’ve been told is only possible.

And so that’s why I wrote a kid’s book for middle grade so that those kids can hopefully hold on to those feelings and realise that they don’t have to dismiss or ignore them and actually they’re so important and powerful and they can be transformative.

Watch the video for more!…

Previous installments of the Loveconomics series

Leave a comment! What do you think is the best way to make change in the world?

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Just a note to say that, although I tried — God knows I tried — I wasn’t able to get a post together for today. I’ll be back next week - promise!

Laura xx

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