Post-Capitalist Ecomodernism

Discussion

Christoph Sorg:

"Postcapitalist imaginations of the post-capitalocene range from eco-modernist techno-optimism to degrowth and eco-socialism, with a plurality of stances in between. Socialist eco-modernists tend to assume that humans notoriously struggle to imagine exponential developments (e.g. Bastani, 2019: 40ff; Rifkin, 2014: 79ff), as virologists recently found when trying to warn the public of exponential growth of infections during the Covid-19 pandemic. They thus argue that we tend to underestimate the potential of technological innovation—just like sophisticated speech recognition (e.g. Reddy, 2004) and self-driving cars (e.g. Levy and Murnane, 2004: 24ff) seemed like absurd science fiction in the early 2000s. From the postcapitalist eco-modernist perspective this creative human potential needs to be liberated from such capitalist institutions to harvest it for the struggle to avoid climate disaster. Postcapitalist degrowthers and eco-socialists, however, depart from the observation that technological innovation (under capitalism) tends to increase output instead of producing the same amount with less resources (e.g. Hickel and Kallis, 2020). They thus call for sufficiency-based economics, at least in classes and regions of the world that claim a disproportionate share of our global carbon budget and finite resources. While these positions are in principle compatible, distinct assumptions about the potential of technology tend to entail drastically different imaginaries about what a sustainable and decarbonized postcapitalism could look like.

Postcapitalist eco-modernists envision a world of abundance built upon the foundation of low-carbon energy sources such as solar, hydro, and wind, with some disagreement existing over the role of nuclear (e.g. Jacobin, 2020). In such a world, the increasing demand for lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare-earth elements, and other material would eventually be covered via asteroid mining (Bastani, 2019, 117ff). Accelerating computing power, AI, and free information would successively reduce the overall amount of work (Rifkin, 2014; Srnicek and Williams, 2015), while synthetic meat and cellular agriculture fill our plates with cruelty-free, low-carbon food (Bastani, 2019). In addition to renewable energy sources and the end of industrial meat production, zero-emission flights and high-speed trains fix another high-carbon sector of our current economy.

The postcapitalist-modernist project is to prevent capitalism of getting in the way of such a futurist utopia. Srnicek and Williams (2015) suggest an acceleration of technological progress via full automation, universal basic income, reduced working hours and a cultural shift away from the work ethic, thus making sure companies have every incentive to automate and that the remaining work is spread evenly among workers (p. 107ff). Phillips and Rozworski (2019) suggest a socialist anthropocene that democratically plans the earth system to deal with climate change (p. 240ff). Such planning would need to put decarbonization and technologies to help a transition toward a low-carbon or even negative-carbon economy on the top of its list of priorities (Phillips, 2015). Without such democratic planning fossil capital and irrational markets left to their own devices would precipitate a climate catastrophe. Aaron Bastani (2019) elaborates a more concrete transformative program, which features socialized finance on the local, national, and international scale as key institutions to fund and direct a transition into postcapitalism (p. 217ff). In addition to worker-managed businesses and universal basic services, such directed finance could facilitate an energy democracy based on decarbonization.

Concretely, national energy investment banks are supposed to fund local energy cooperatives, carbon-neutral/-negative buildings and smart energy systems to reduce unnecessary energy consumption. To account for global inequality and the Global North’s climate debt, an ‘International Bank for Energy Prosperity’ capitalized by taxes on Northern CO2 emission would fund energy transition in the Global South."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08969205221081058)