Related Papers
Marx, Machinery and Motive Power: the Thermodynamics of Class Struggle
Tom Keefer
The environmental problems associated with the use of fossil fuels have been the subject of numerous studies, international conferences and well-meaning declarations, but there nonetheless seems to be little substantive analysis of what the root causes are of our ‘addiction to fossil fuels’ and why dominant interests are so unwilling to undertake the transition to a new energy regime. The failure to adequately grapple with this question stems from the fact that two of the most important schools of thought that hold important components of the analytical framework necessary for this undertaking -- ecological economics and Marxism -- miss crucial insights that the other brings to the debate. What is manifestly absent from most ecological economist thought is a critique of capitalism as a historically specific economic system which is not only based on ever-increasing expansion but is also compelled to substitute machinery and raw material for human labor in its quest for higher margins of profit, increased productivity and to undercut working-class self-organization and power. Moreover, in failing to recognize commodified, alienated and exploited labor as lying at the root of the capitalist system, the ecological movement has not, for the most part, been able to see the project of ecological diversity and sustainability as representing a class project based upon the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by an alternative economic and political order.
Machinery and Motive Power: Energy as a Substitute for and Enhancer of Human Labor
Tom Keefer
In this text I argue that the analysis that Marx developed in Capital provides one of the most important starting points for understanding capitalism’s addiction to fossil fuels and its existence as a global economic system responsible for today’s ecological crisis. Following Marx’s discussion of the role of machinery in the capital- ist production process, I suggest that, in its transition from an agrarian form to an industrial one, capital came to rely on machinery as an indispensable tool to break workers’ resistance, increase the productivity of the labor it commodified, and to ag- gressively spread the capitalist system across the world. Because modern machinery requires a cheap and reliable source of low entropy energy to keep its machines go- ing, and because there are, at present, no ready alternatives to the fossil fuel energy regime, the capitalist system has always been dependent on finding and producing increasing amounts of fossil fuel resources. During the industrial revolution, fossil fuels provided the means to overcome both workers’ resistance to dispossession and the very real natural limits of agrarian capitalism. Coal, oil, and natural gas became the lifeblood of the capitalist system—providing energies that, like labor power, must be kept coursing through the system lest fixed capital and processes of accumulation should come to a shuddering halt. This article appeared in the edited collection by Kolya Abramsky entitle "Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a Post-Petrol World." Published by AK Press, in 2010.
Victorian Review
The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work by Cara New Daggett
2019 •
Kameron Sanzo
Journal of Political Ecology
Review of Daggett, Cara New. 2019. The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work
2020 •
Gustav Cederlöf
Cara New Daggett's The Birth of Energy is a major contribution to the environmental humanities that speaks to the notion of "political ecology" in the most literal sense. /---/ Her central argument is that the knowledge of energy, captured in the laws of thermodynamics, came to reflect a moral code that was rooted in the Protestant ethics of its inventors. Celebrating work and condemning idleness, the moral imbued in thermodynamics served the interests of capital and empire. A progressive politics towards a low-carbon economy therefore requires us to challenge the worldview entrenched in the energy idea.
Energy and the Anthropocene
Elizabeth Chatterjee
Working paper prepared for a workshop on Rethinking Economic History in the Anthropocene, Boston College, Boston, March 24-25, 2017 This paper seeks to nudge our energy histories of the Anthropocene away from a narrow focus on early steam power, inherited from older histories of the Industrial Revolution’s origins. In so doing it challenges the influential 'Capitalocene' thesis, which blames fossil capitalism for the current crisis of environmental unsustainability, along two interconnected lines. First, it suggests that the interests of colonialism and the expansion of fossil capitalism did not always align. The spread of the fossil economy was far from a neat process of passive diffusion, but something more uneven, locally mediated, and belated. This pushes us to a greater focus on electricity, oil, and other technologies, and toward later time periods. Second, the analytic of fossil capitalism fits this later period only uneasily. Regimes of quite different political types (market and planned economies, democracies and authoritarian governments) converged on fossil developmentalism: energy-intensive modes of industrialization, a substantial role for the state, and the expansion of fossil-fuel consumption to mass publics. In this way a far broader—though far from universal—set of interests than the original fossil-capitalist steam-power producers became implicated in the fossil economy.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Energy in the Anthropocene: How the concept of energy shaped both our current crisis and its professed solution
2021 •
Anna Simon-Stickley
This essay traces how the concept of energy-defined as the ability to do work in physics-informed two similar fields of knowledge with very dissimilar results. One, the resource economy in the late 19th century, laid some important epistemic and ideological foundations for the destruction of the environment in the present. The other, ecology, introduced a new holistic view of nature, which laid the groundwork for the recent reconceptualization of ethics, epistemology, and hu- mankind's role on Earth culminating in the Anthropocene hypothesis—formulated in direct opposition to the capitalist, anthropocentric notions inherited from the 19th century. In both cases, it was the concept of energy that enabled thinking about the multifarious visualities, materialities, and temporal- ities of natural phenomena as united in a single causal sub- structure of energy exchanges. In resource economics, the energetic worldview imposed an anthropocentric useful/use- less divide on the environment—modeled, I argue, on the en- ergy/entropy distinction—and made it “logical” to think of minerals, plants, and human labor as analogous resources, justifiably equated and linked in the economic system. The same ability to equate and connect was fundamental to the discipline of ecology and its application to sociology in the 20th century, and, in more recent years, to philosophy and historiography. In stripping nature of all surface illusions, en- ergy proved enormously efficient for exposing the entangle- ment of large‐scale systems composed of animate and inanimate actors equally imbued with agency.
The Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism: “Laws of Motion”, Class Struggle and the Centrality of Fossil Fuels
Tom Keefer
In developing an analysis of the rise of industrial capitalism, my paper will build upon the theoretical approach established by a group of Marxist scholars and historians – Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood and George Comninel – to explain the genesis of capitalism in the English countryside. These thinkers have argued that the development of agrarian capitalism holds the key to understanding the evolution of industrial capitalism and its technological breakthrough. The first part of this paper will examine their work and elaborate a framework for understanding the rise of agrarian capitalism and its internal “laws of motion” which encouraged the “putting out” system and the industrial or factory form of capitalism. I will do this by reviewing Comninel and Wood's critique of the "commercialization model" of capitalism and by also outlining Brenner's contribution to the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I will conclude by looking at the debate between Robert Albritton and Mike Zmolek on agrarian capitalism and the rise of the “putting out system” and raise the problem of the limits of relative surplus value extraction within pre-industrial forms of capitalist production. The second part of this paper will make the argument that were it not for the geological accident of the vast coal deposits present in England, the Industrial Revolution could not have happened in that country, and that agrarian capitalism, bound by the thermodynamic limits of the flow of solar energy, would have fallen victim to its own internal contradictions – intractable class struggle and the "metabolic rift" that led to declining agricultural sustainability. I will argue that the great depression of the 1830s and 1840s represented a crisis point for agrarian capitalismwhich was only overcome by a transition to a new energy regime based on coal, one able to contain class struggles, open up new avenues for economic production and inaugurate a new era of industrial capitalism.
Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research Volume 31, 2018 - Issue 3, pp. 251-277
Another economy: towards a cultural dialectics between energy and society
Thomas Seguin
The looming oil crisis, pollution, and climate change have pushed governments, corporations, and individuals to think of new policies, new objects/products and new manners to market them – usually under the label of “green economy” (or the shifting towards a sustainable economy). The changes that are on the way as a result of the envisaged “green revolution” need a broad vision that couples the economy of energetic techniques with the related socio-cultural economy that is induced by, and at the same time reciprocally influences, the mere technical transformations. Based on previous analysis of theories of socio-technological change and putting at its center the concept of subjectivation in social sciences, this article proposes a theoretical understanding of cultural shifts and their relationship with changes in the practices of production, transfer and use of energy. First part presents a schema of subjectivation in triangulation, that links the biological level with the material culture and with the representational realm of normativities in our society. It will be developed through the example of electric vehicle as metaphor of the energetic transition. Through this understanding, second part deals with the modeling of the three items as a processual energetic system by using the concepts of surplus and expenditure. Within this frame, we show how disruptions in one of the poles of this model influences the others and bring about changes in the entire Anthropo-Social level. Third part proposes possible types of emerging subjectivities and advances the idea of extending the realm of consciousness to the energetic transfers and their potentiality. Keywords: renewable energy, sustainability, exergy, electric vehicle, sexuality, subjectivation, economic growth, circular economy
Antipode
THE NATURE OF PRODUCED NATURE: MATERIALITY AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION IN MARXISM
1995 •
Noel Castree
Revue Études Anglaises. Special Issue: “Being Fossil: Energy Humanities 2.0.” Ed. Pablo Mukherjee.
“Energo-poetics: Reading Energy in the Ages of Wood, Oil, and Wind.”
2021 •
Stacey Balkan
As a means of imagining a future delinked from conventional articulations of energopower, in this essay I examine three speculative-critical texts that critique fossil capitalism and which demonstrate the ways in which a simple shift in fuel may be insufficient to the task of building a just future. I first read Ursula LeGuin's 1974 novel The Word for World is Forest as a critique of the plantation logic immanent to her fictional "New Tahiti" before turning to Paolo Bacigalupi's 2010 Ship Breaker-set in the blasted landscapes of the southeastern US's petrochemical belt-in order to consider how the dystopian mode may be productive for thinking about energy cultures, but might ultimately trap the reader in an imaginative impasse. I then look to Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe's recent duograph on the wind economies of Mexico's isthmus of Tehuantepec, Wind and Power in the Anthropocene (2019), which poses questions about energopolitics, just futures, and the imbrications of energy, ontology, and power within systems of modern governance, and which I read as a form of speculative anthropology, or (per historian Dipesh Chakrabarty) "philosophical anthropology." The duograph posits the possibility of unsettling what both authors understand as the distorted logic of the Anthropocene age, while examining putative alternatives to petroculture that merely reinforce systemic forms of social and environmental injustice on a global scale. I read each text as a possible (although not always successful) means of imagining anew-that is, for opening new horizons for thinking about energy cultures.
