Marx, Machinery and Motive Power: the Thermodynamics of Class Struggle
38 Pages
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.
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