ABSTRACT

"The paper suggests that the appropriate ‘agents of history’ in an era of globalisation and ecological crisis are ‘meta-industrial’ workers. This hitherto nameless class carries out hands-on reproductive labours at the interface of ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’ using ‘holding skills’, a grounded epistemology and ethic consonant with genuine democracy and local sustainability. Pointing to the unexamined neo-liberal assumptions of many environmental philosophers, the author suggests that only an ‘embodied materialist’ epistemology and ethic can do justice to class, race, gender, and species diversity."

Discussion

Ariel Salleh:

"In Ecofeminism as Politics (1997) I introduce the term ‘meta-industrial’ to designate a hitherto unrecognised class whose labours and value orientation in relation to ‘nature’ leave them at the margins the tele–pharmo–nuclear complex. Strictly speaking, meta-industrial groupings such as women domestic workers, subsistence farmers, and indigenous peoples, are both inside and outside of the dominant hegemony. They are inside in as much as they are essential ‘resources’ but as political ‘subjects’ they are largely outside. At an existential level, this structural contradiction is a source of insight and political motivation (viz. my chapter 11—‘agents of complexity’). The term ‘meta-industrial’ thus has both positive (immanent) and normative (transcendent) senses." (http://arielsalleh.info/theory/eco-socialism/d-and-n/d-and-n-article.pdf)

Meta-Industrial Class and Why We Need It

ABSTRACT

Discussion

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