The Great Unfettering

URL : https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-great-unfettering

Author : [[Kai Heron]]

Response to [[Mish-Mash Ecologism]].

From a first quick skim:

• agrees with need for widening of climate politics to appear to wider base (i.e. working class)
• seems less critical of degrowth
• finds issue with the US focus of Huber
• brings in anti-imperialism to the debate

What matters here is that, like all eco-modernists, Huber assumes capitalist industrialization is the pinnacle of technological advancement. Technology progresses, they suppose, in a linear fashion from inefficient and labour-intensive systems to efficient, energy-intensive, labour-saving ones. Hence, for Huber as for Phillips, the aim should be ‘to take over the machine, not turn it off!’

Instead of seeing capital’s abolition as the unfettering of productive forces, it is better to view it as freeing the world’s producers to choose from a richer and more diverse array of technologies and socio-ecological relations than capitalist industrialization can offer.

The question, then, is not about whether one is for or against technology – as if this were possible. It is about adopting appropriate technologies and collectively managing energy and food systems at relevant scales.