Joint Genealogy of Sustainability and Digitization

Discussion

Nick Dyer-Whiteford:

"It seems to me that, in order to articulate objective and subjective conditions for the becoming-ecological of working-class struggles, two moves are needed. First, a comprehensive understanding of the labor-ecology nexus and its political development. Second, a wager about which mobilizations can better define a terrain for convergences between environmental/climate justice instances and workers’ demands.

1. The reason why I often insist that the history of working-class environmentalism is key to organizing current conflicts is that conventional wisdom assumes that labor and nature are to be considered in oppositional terms: either one, or the other. This position—which is today politically true (as many instances of industrial collective bargaining sadly remind us, on a regular basis)—is historically false (or, at the very least, partial). As various contributions in the emerging field of environmental labor studies have shown, the ecological crisis became policized in the 1960s/70s through workers’ struggles, not in spite of them. In the moment in which class struggle questioned not only the level of exploitation, but its kernel, an alliance between human production of use values and non-human production of use values became conceivable. The substitution of this perspective with the aut-aut one—either labor or nature —is due to the political defeat of the working class, which is encapsulated in the rise of neoliberalism and its environmental façade, namely the green economy. What is often overlooked, in this shift from ecology as a crisis of capital to ecology as a crisis for capital, is the process of relegating organized labor to the background. The actors of the green economy are smart, innovative entrepreneurs and smart, careful consumers; dirty working hands — and their unions — are nothing more than obstacles in the way of an ecological transition ‘from above’.

From this perspective, a research project I’m undertaking with Maura Benegiamo and younger comrades such as (to name but a few) Giulia Arrighetti, Giorgio Pirina and Federico Scirchio aims at investigating the ‘joint’ genealogy of sustainability and digitization. It is indeed plausible to put forward the hypothesis that these two are, so to speak, 'twin' responses to the same problem, that of the excessive rigidity of the wage-earning society (to use Robert Castel’s well-known formula). Here I think our path overlaps quite nicely with Nick’s. Moreover, it may be useful to recall an essential trait of such a society, which degrowth scholar and historian Mathias Schmelzer refers to as the growth paradigm, that is, a specific set of discourses, theories, and statistical standards that converge in asserting and justifying the idea that economic growth as conventionally defined is a necessary means of achieving social goals, such as full employment, and substantive equality. Through the dynamism of a powerful virtuous circle (...> employment > wages > welfare > access to mass consumption > employment...) it was possible

“to turn difficult political conflicts over distribution into technical, nonpolitical management questions of how to collectively increase GDP. By thus transforming class and other social antagonisms into apparent win–win situations, it provided what could be called an “imaginary resolution of real contradictions” [Eagleton] and played a key role in producing the stable postwar consensus around embedded liberalism: It helped integrate labor and the political Left, rendered rearmament feasible without a decline in living standards, it helped stabilize the Bretton Woods system, and in the context of global inequalities it offered the (post)colonial countries in the global South a possible route out of poverty towards what came be defined as ‘progress’” (Schmelzer 2015).

It is against this backdrop that Fordism shows itself as an entropic device: the inextricable nexus between capital accumulation and the reduction of inequality (largely limited to the global North) can only work if the costs of a constant increase in the volume of production are offloaded onto the biosphere (and, more generally, onto the subjects of social reproduction—which, in addition to the natural environment, include domestic labor, mostly performed by women, and servile labor, mostly performed in the colonies).

The crisis of this entropic device illuminates the issue of the proximity between sustainability and digitization: indeed, both respond to an excess of ‘rigidity’, imposed on the one hand by workers' mobilizations (particularly those against industrial noxiousness) and social mobilizations (especially the feminist revolution), and on the other hand represented by the upsurge of international competition in a period marked by profound geopolitical transformations. Here, then, is where the nexus between infinite growth and the reduction of socio-economic inequalities (with the sphere of reproduction bearing the costs) gives way to a new conceptual pair, that between infinite growth and environmental protection—via sustainable innovation, green and technological (with social equality bearing the costs, since the subject of the new nexus is the most forward-looking entrepreneurship, selected 'meritocratically' by the market—understood as a formal model of social relations).

The main point to be made here is that, after at least 20-30 years of implementation, this innovative way of articulating capitalist development and ecological preservation has proved ineffective. Its promise was to decouple economic (positive) growth and environmental (negative) impacts; its outcome is a scarcely profitable proliferation of financial eco-assets and an outstanding boost of CO2-equivalent emissions."

(https://projectpppr.org/populisms/degrowth-communism-part-ii)

More information

• Jameson, Frederic (2016) “An American Utopia.” In Jameson, Fredric, ed. Zizek, Slavoj. An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army. London: Verso. 1-96.