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Tracy, LA Times, “Pariah or partner? U.S. navigates complicated, contradictory relationship with Saudi Arabia” June 13, 2023 dmr

WASHINGTON — Visits to Saudi Arabia by high-profile U.S. officials are always problematic. The two countries have a love-hate relationship. Politicians and the public criticize the Saudi kingdom’s human rights record and repression of women; its unwillingness to increase oil production; its coziness with Russia, China and, now, even with erstwhile enemy Iran. But the U.S. and Saudi Arabia also need each other — for trade and for broader security arrangements in the Middle East, including conflicts in Yemen and Sudan, where they work together to broker cease-fires or deliver humanitarian aid to devastated populations. And the Biden administration is fervently coaxing Riyadh to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, following similar Trump-era breakthrough gestures by a small number of other gulf or Muslim nations. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken wrapped up a four-day visit to the Saudi cities of Jeddah and Riyadh last week, which included a midnight meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Salman, the de facto ruler of the nation, is a ruthless dictator, a bold reformer or both, depending on whom you ask. The 37-year-old prince is largely considered responsible for the brutal killing and dismemberment of U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. President Biden once called Salman a pariah and vowed to shun him, a pledge eventually reversed in a famous fist bump between the two last year. Executions of perceived enemies of the kingdom have surged under Salman’s rule, human rights activists say, and reports of arbitrary detention and torture of activists, including many women, persist — even as he lifted some anachronistic restrictions on women, such as allowing them to drive cars. Despite the litany of Saudi transgressions, the Biden administration is engaging with the kingdom as a way to demonstrate it still has influence in the Middle East — at a time many in the region note Washington has been absent in consequential events and decisions and as China and Russia flex their diplomatic and military muscle where the U.S. was once the unrivaled superpower. “I would say that my presence here over the last three days is one element to demonstrate that, no, we’re certainly not leaving. We’re here to stay,” Blinken told the Saudi-based Asharq News network Thursday when asked about the U.S. commitment to the region. “Day in, day out, we’re working with partners throughout the region … both to deal with many of the challenges that … are real and urgent and acute, but also — and this is so important — on an affirmative agenda for the future,” Blinken added. “We are a partner, and we’re here.” Blinken, in a separate news conference in Riyadh, said he “discussed” human rights in his meetings with Salman and other Saudi officials and “made clear that progress on human rights strengthens our relationship.” He said he raised “specific” cases, including those of several U.S. citizens who are imprisoned in the kingdom, but would not say whether he had secured guarantees of their freedom nor would he enter into any other details. Critics accuse the Biden administration of papering over Saudi abuses and fault it for not denouncing them more robustly, which in turn emboldens Salman. “The administration needs to abandon its behind-closed-doors approach to addressing human rights” in Saudi Arabia, said Tess McEnery, who served on Biden’s National Security Council until last year and now heads the nongovernmental Project on Middle East Democracy. “There need to be clear public costs to [Salman’s] repression. … For nearly a year [since the Biden visit], we’ve seen what a policy of appeasement looks like.” The Biden administration sanctioned some members of the Saudi security apparatus for the 2018 murder of Washington Post contributing columnist Khashoggi, but not Salman, whom U.S. intelligence officials believe probably ordered the killing. In Congress, lawmakers have revived legislation that could block arms sales to Saudi Arabia based on its human rights record, and two measures have been proposed that would punish governments for “transnational repression,” the illegal pursuit by a country outside its borders of dissidents or critics, as happened with Khashoggi. It is a tactic also frequently used by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose government has been accused of hunting down and poisoning opponents in England and elsewhere. While in Saudi Arabia last week, Blinken also came under criticism for praising what he called Saudi “progress” on its treatment of women, lauding the first female Saudi astronaut to go into space and meeting with eight handpicked Saudi women identified by the State Department as leaders. Blinken’s remarks came even as numerous Saudi women are being given decades-long prison sentences for what supporters say are minor offenses, such as failing to wear an abaya on social media or tweeting criticisms of the kingdom. Substantial progress for women “is only a narrative that the Saudi government is selling to the West,” Lina AlHathloul, a longtime Saudi activist fighting for women’s rights and free speech, said in an interview from Brussels, where she has sought refuge from her government. “It is only window dressing. … And the government sees a green light to double down on repression.” AlHathloul campaigned for years to free her sister Loujain, who was arrested in 2018 for driving. Loujain is out of prison now but banned from traveling or speaking publicly. Though women have been granted the right to drive and some access to elections, Saudi Arabia’s so-called guardianship rules remain in place, which restrict many activities such as travel or marriage for women without a male relative’s permission. Saudi officials insist that they have made significant progress in human rights, but will only advance on their own terms. “We are always open to having a dialogue with our friends, but we don’t respond to pressure,” Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan said at the Riyadh news conference with Blinken. “When we do anything, we do it in our own interests. And I don’t think that anybody believes that pressure is useful or helpful, and therefore that’s not something that we are going to even consider.” One reason the Biden administration seeks to keep its relationship with Saudi Arabia on a cordial keel is the role the oil-rich kingdom can play in integrating Israel into a region that has long refused to recognize Israel’s existence. The Trump administration brokered the Abraham Accords, under which the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain for the first time opened diplomatic and economic ties with Israel. As the powerhouse of the gulf, Saudi Arabia would be a prized addition to the declaration, but it is so far resisting. Saudi officials cite the continued failure to resolve the Palestinian quest for an independent state. Riyadh has also listed a series of high-stake demands, including U.S. help in developing nuclear power, but U.S. officials see that as an opening gambit. Meanwhile, the current Israeli government is the most right-wing in its history, with possibilities for progress on the Palestinian cause considered nonexistent. In Riyadh last week, Blinken said Saudi-Israeli normalization remained a “priority.” But the Saudi foreign minister countered that while desirable, the goal would remain remote “without finding a pathway to peace for the Palestinian people … a pathway towards a two-state solution, on finding a pathway towards giving the Palestinians dignity and justice.” It would also be a bad look for the Saudis to get closer to Israel at a time when deadly clashes and attacks are surging in Israel, the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and after several incursions by Israeli police into the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, said Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. Al Aqsa is the third-holiest site in Islam, located in an area also sacred to Jews. “The Saudis are not in a hurry to normalize,” he said, even as “the Biden administration has prioritized it higher on the list than [an independent state] for the Palestinians, which is now just a talking point.” Shira Efron, research director at the U.S.-based Israel Policy Forum, said that while Israel badly wants to enjoy the fruits of normalization, the pieces of the puzzle remain exceedingly complicated, with U.S. and Israel reluctant to accede to the Saudis’ most robust demands. “And if the U.S. and Saudi Arabia were able to agree on what the U.S. will give, would Congress approve?” she said, adding that room for negotiation is likely to shrink as the U.S. presidential election gets into full swing.

With increasingly ubiquitous iPhones, internet, central air conditioning, flat-screen TVs, and indoor plumbing, few in the developed world would want to go back to life 100, 30, or even 10 years ago. Indeed, around the world, the last two centuries have brought vast improvements in material living standards; billions of people have been lifted from poverty, and life expectancy across income levels has broadly risen. Most of that progress came from capitalist economies.

Yet those economies are not without their problems. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the gap between the rich and poor has become intolerably large as business owners and highly educated workers in urban areas have become richer while workers’ wages in rural areas have stagnated. In most rich countries, more trade has brought a bigger, better variety of goods, but it has also displaced many jobs.

Consider: Without competition and threat of failure, companies won’t engage in game-changing innovation and the adoption of new technology. In his book The Innovation Decision in Soviet Industry, economist Joseph Berliner termed this market mechanism the “invisible foot” — a complement to Adam Smith’s invisible hand — and argued that its absence helps explain the lack of innovation in the Soviet Union. Berliner writes that “from the point of view of innovation, the evil of monopoly is that it enables producers to enjoy high rates of profit without having to undertake the exacting and risky activities associated with technological change.”

The word “risky” is key here because the innovation may turn out to be a bad one. And even if a new technology eventually boosts production, there may be an adjustment period where production is lower than otherwise as the technology is integrated. Science historian Loren Graham provides an example of this dynamic in his 2013 book, Lonely Ideas: Can Russia Compete? (and gives Berliner a shout-out):

The brain is a cooperative computing machine—large networks of neurons collectively piece together the solution to a single problem. Importantly, the cycle of thought proceeds one step at a time. The brain’s networks of neurons are highly interconnected, so there seems little scope for assigning different problems to different brain networks. If interconnected neurons are working on entirely different problems, then the signals they pass between them will be hopelessly at cross-purposes—and neither task will be completed successfully: Each neuron has no idea which of the signals it receives are relevant to the problem it is working on, and which are just irrelevant junk. If the brain solves problems through the cooperation computation of vast networks of individually sluggish neurons, then any specific network of neurons can work on just one solution to one problem at a time.

Even the introspection of geniuses is not to be taken at face value.

In an era in which psychiatry is dominated by neuroscience-based models, psychological constructs tend to be neglected and may be taken seriously only when they have neural correlates.37 Some psychoanalysts have sought to link their model with neurobiological research and to claim that newer methods of studying the brain can validate their theories.5,6

Mark Solms, a South African neuropsychologist, is the founder of “neuropsychoanalysis.” This new field, with its own society and its own journal, proposes to use neuroimaging to confirm analytic theories. Its key idea is that subjective experience and the unconscious mind can be observed through neuroimaging.5 It is known that brain processes can be seen on brain imaging even before they have entered consciousness.38 However, claims that neuroimaging validate Freud’s model of the unconscious can be based only on “cherry-picking” the literature. The observed correspondences are superficial and hardly support the complex edifice of psychoanalytic theory.

The presumption of a universal form of desire is an important starting point for the analyst of any patient who arrives on the couch in the psychoanalytic clinic. The psychoanalyst can only offer certain parameters, with all their limitations. The patient, if the analyst allows for an interrogation of their own forms of resistance, however, can speak back to any frame of desire that the analyst presumes or proposes. And the analyst—if Jacques Lacan’s thoughts on resistance are taken seriously (Lacan, 2007, p. 497; Rogers, 2016, pp. 183–187)—must listen, attend, learn, and adapt. But when the desires of subjects are extended into the political realm, when the wants and needs of every subject are presumed to articulate with a psychoanalytic notion of universal desire, then something is lost. That something might be called the desire of the other, or it might not be called desire at all.

The desire of the other is not easily seen in the wake of European Enlightenment that has engulfed the imagination of psychoanalytic and political theorists and practitioners alike. It is not easily seen, and it is not easily conversed with when epistemological work presumes a trajectory of desire and then applies it. In this application, there is little space for a radically other performance of politics as action or imagination to appear. The subject who is subsumed into this imagination—the subject Gayatri Spivak (1996)1 describes as “the Other of Europe”—has little opportunity to do more than “utter” under the weight of its imagined subjectivity. As Spivak (1999) says:

The editor is a Professor of Environmental Studies but the material edited consists of articles by scholars who have analysed every subject in the book according to the theories of Jacques Lacan a pre-eminent psychoanalyst whose controversial contributions appear to be inexplicably influential. There are twelve essays on subjects varying from capitalism to culture and from empowering women to architecture. All the authors have attempted to look at their themes from a Lacanian standpoint. For a lay reader who succeeds in reading all the contributions to this book, it would still be obscure as to what purpose the Lacanian psychoanalytic approach would serve particularly in policy formulation by governments or in corporate behaviour toward individuals and society.

The book is not easy to read; the language of psychology and philosophy has been used to describe even common ideas. In his introduction Kapoor has stated ‘this book is about the hole at the heart of the glObal; it deploys psycho analysis to expose the unconscious desires, excesses and antagonisms that accompany the world of economic flows, cultural circulation, and sociopolitical change . . . . . . .the point here is to uncover what Jacques Lacan calls the Real of the global – its rifts, gaps, exceptions and contradictions.’(p ix)

Those who challenge the efficiency explanation generally do so because they start from an opposite interpretation of capitalism’s nature. These authors tend to emphasize the elements of irrationality in the capitalist process and in the belief system of its actors that work in favor of its perpetuation. Capitalism is thought to be sustained by the self-estrangement it produces, by the repression (or stimulation) of desire, by irrational expectations, and more generally by its capacity to interact with the actors’ emotional sphere. Contributions to this interpretation come from currents of philosophy and social theory variously related to Critical Theory or poststructuralism. All of them share the idea that capitalism appropriates certain human needs and turns them to its advantage. Capitalism therefore persists either because of the power and seduction it exerts over people’s minds or because of the way it appeals to deep needs. We could call this broad perspective the “social unconscious thesis.”

Critical Theory combines Freud and Marx, not the later Marx but the earlier humanist Marx who had reflected, in the “Paris Manuscripts,” on the psychological mechanisms of alienation.45 Indeed, the concept of alienation is at the heart of Erich Fromm’s attempt to psychoanalyze twentieth-century capitalist society and his idea that capitalist subjects, estranged from themselves, lose all connection with their “true needs” and embrace the senseless logic of the machine that enslaves them.46 Another version, unquestionably indebted to Freud’s analysis of “uneasiness in civilization,” is that capitalism obtains conformity from its subjects through the repression of desire. They live surrounded by things but are unable to recognize their “true desires,” whose satisfaction alone would lead them to a meaningful life. This repression affects all the actors of the capitalist process indiscriminately, regardless of their role, and hence of their relationship with capital. This is an idea that, with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), marked the transition from the critique of capitalism as a critique of inequality to the critique of capitalism as a critique of repression, the kind of discourse that would inform the counterculture of the 1960s. This vision is irreparably linked to an era in which social conflict was reduced to a minimum. Since it was thought that the economic problems of capitalism had been solved, one could afford the luxury of moralizing about capitalist society. As such, it appears dated today. But beyond this, its main weakness as a theory of capitalist reproduction is that it does not explain what the causes of the success of alienation are or who are the agents of repression. Capitalism may be a diabolical machine, but it has no autonomous agency. This defect has not been remedied by recent work in the same vein, where the focus is shifted from the (natural) desires that capitalism represses to the (artificial) ones that it feeds—so the drive to consume and to accumulate is explained by the continuous and illusory quest for “a more complete satisfaction.”47 The most promising recent contribution to critical sociology’s understanding of capitalist reproduction comes from Jens Beckert’s concept of “fictional expectations.” Beckert claims that capitalism creates a regime of “secular enchantment,” which keeps actors enmeshed in its cogs thanks to the continuous, albeit unrealistic, expectations it fuels.48 Beckert certainly captures an important element. However, when he moves on to identifying the factors that keep this machine of illusions in motion, these turn out to be the institutional elements of competition and credit, which leaves open the problem of the material and cultural structures underpinning them, not to mention the question of the relationship between these structures.

In their influential analysis of Critical Management Studies (CMS), Fournier and Grey (2000) argue that CMS scholarship is driven by three basic principles: denaturalization, reflectivity and non-performativity. Denaturalization deconstructs the seemingly immutable ‘realities’ and ‘rationalities’ of managerialism while exposing the wealth of alternatives that reside in the shadows of organizational life. Reflectivity challenges the dominance of positivism in the methodologies of mainstream management research, revealing how all social scientific investigation is underpinned by political assumptions. Drawing on Lyotard’s (1984) notion of instrumental performativity, the principle of nonperformativity rejects the means-ends rationality that governs many organizational situations, especially under neoliberal capitalism characterized by a brazen cost-minimization/ profit-maximization logic (Fournier and Grey, 2000).

The principle of non-performativity has recently been questioned in a number of articles published in this journal and elsewhere. These authors suggest that by critically distancing themselves from the concrete activities of managers, researchers may miss opportunities to intervene and make a difference for the better. For example, in their influential article, Spicer et al. (2009: 538) argue that the principle of non-performativity needlessly isolates CMS from organizational practitioners. This in turn fosters a corrosive ‘cynicism and negativism’ whereby scholars ply grand critical theories that have little relevance to everyday organizational challenges. Others similarly maintain that the principle of non-performativity fails to offer ‘practical’ guidelines for managers (King and Learmonth, 2014); misses crucial opportunities to ‘collaborate’ with middle-managers and stubbornly objects to becoming ‘more relevant to practice’ (Wickert and Schaefer, 2014: 7); is elitist in how it ignores practitioner management texts in favour of ‘canonical perspectives’ associated with Marx, Foucault and the Frankfurt School (Hartmann, 2014: 619, also see Clegg et al., 2006).

Climate change is bleak – coastal sea level rise, millions of climate refugees and whole sections of the planet too hot for human life. Thus, for good reason, ecosocialist politics often emphasizes a “dystopian” vision of a future if capitalism is not replaced. The main mode of critique is laying out what the science is telling us about current ecological collapse and the projected worsening of planetary conditions (not just climate but mass extinction, nitrogen dead zones etc.). However, part of socialist strategy is also about convincing the mass of workers that a better future is possible. Ecosocialist politics usually projects a dystopian future we must avoid, rather than an emancipatory future worth fighting for. Recently my local socialist reading group happened to be reading Friedrich Engels’s classic Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. For Engels, a “scientific” socialism must be grounded in an analysis of what kind of socialist society is possible given historical and material conditions. Engels emphasized utopian socialists imagine an ideal society “invented out of one’s brain”, but failed to articulate how socialism could be realistically built out of the present. I make a similar claim in this essay. The dystopian vision of the future among much of the green left prevents it from explaining how socialism can be built out of the material conditions that confront us. Ecosocialists often make impressive use of natural science to project a dystopian future, but this is not the “science” Engels called for (his “science” is better described as historical materialism). Our dystopian future is seen as a product of industrial civilization. For many ecosocialists or left green thinkers, the science is so dire the only option is a wholesale rejection of industrialism This, I would argue, leads to some fanciful (even utopian) ideas of what comes next. Degrowth theorists imagine a “decentralized” future society, “where resources were managed by bio-region—a participatory, low-tech, low-consumption economy, where everyone has to do some farming…” Richard Smith argues for a socialist program of “managed deindustrialization” without fully explaining what that would actually mean. Last year in the New Left Review, Troy Vettese argued for austerity (or what he called “egalitarian eco-austerity”): the program includes energy rationing, compulsory veganism and turning over half the planet to wild nature (a proposal he takes from reactionary sociobiologist, E.O. Wilson). Much of this thought recoils at any hint of industrial technology (or what they pejoratively call a “techno-fix”) or “eco-modernism.” There is a core contradiction here: Marx, Engels, and all the classical socialists saw industrialization as providing a historically new material capacity for abundance that could abolish poverty and offer freedom from work. As Engels himself made clear: ….[I]t is precisely this industrial revolution which has raised the productive power of human labour to such a high level that – for the first time in the history of humanity – the possibility exists…to produce not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also to leave each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture – science, art, human relations is not only preserved, but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society…. Simply put, industrial capitalism makes emancipation and freedom possible for all of society. This vision of freedom through social control over industrial abundance is key to mobilizing the masses to the socialist fight. Yet, most ecosocialists agree it is this very system of industrialization that has taken the planet to the brink. This has led to a wedge between the “fully automated luxury communists” on one side and the degrowth-oriented ecosocialists on the other with very little in between. The core question: is a politics of rejecting industrialism realistic given material conditions? Is it scientific in Engels’s sense? I will argue that this anti-industrial vision of ecosocialism is “unscientific”: its vision of the future is based in a romantic rejection of the material conditions that confront us. Clearly, ecosocialism will need to grapple with an ecologically sound vision of emancipation, but a scientific approach will show how the history of industrialization offers us only a limited set of possible (positive) futures. Here I argue that an emancipatory future can only be built out of industrial systems– not against them. As Leigh Phillips puts it, “Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!” In order to understand this from a “scientific” (and ecological) perspective, we need to consider the historically specific relations between industrialization and what Marx called “the realm of freedom.” Socialism, Machinery, and the Realm of Freedom My core thesis is that Engels’s view of scientific socialism is simply a realistic view of what is materially possible given historical conditions. In ecological terms, capitalism is fundamentally new because of the mass alienation of the bulk of the population from the natural conditions of their existence – the land. For the first time the vast majority is violently torn from the direct dependence on the land and forced to rely upon commodity relations to survive (usually but not exclusively via wage labor). Capital exploits this landless proletariat to accumulate capital and surplus value. One of capital’s main levers of accumulation is a relentless tendency to invest in machines that improve labor productivity. Industrial capitalism thus vastly expands society’s productive capacities in ways that surpasses previous biological and spatial limits to growth. Marx believed the way capitalism develops automation and machinery could massively reduce the labor needed for basic social reproduction – what he called the “realm of necessity.” If machinery were under socialized control (and not for private profit), he argued all of society could enjoy an extended “realm of freedom” – that is, free time not shaped by the urgency to meet society’s basic needs. Although George Orwell suggested the lack of manual labor could create, “a paradise of little fat men,” free time need not mean idleness and could include a variety of personal and collective activities (including artisanal production or gardening if one enjoys it). In his famous quote on the “realm of freedom” Marx mentions the realm of necessity should include “the least expenditure of energy” so that the realm of freedom can include “development of human energy [as an] an end in itself.” The focus on energy is key here – and one that is all too often ignored by both dystopian ecosocialists and fully automated communists alike. By focusing on energy and labor, we get a clearer picture of the historical conditions industrialization produced – and the possible futures we might build out of it. The Ecology of Industrialization: Energy, Labor, and Land The climate crisis emerges out of our relation to energy: specifically the use of fossil fuels to power machines and industrial processes. As Michael Löwy makes clear, ecosocialism, “first of all…requires a revolution in the energy system.” Yet, we do not reflect enough on the energy system that came before industrialization. In pre-industrial energy systems, nearly all “work” was accomplished by human and animal muscle power – a huge proportion devoted to agriculture. Thus, social power required control over human and animal bodies (i.e. slavery). This also meant the vast majority of society was condemned to brutal agrarian labor. Aziz Rana explains how early white settler colonialism was marked by, ”a basic divide between free and unfree work…The nature of agricultural life meant…there would have to be others who participated in forms of labor long perceived to be degraded.” In this context, political power and freedom meant exclusion from this work; slavery was seen as “either a necessary evil or a legitimate social practice.” How did the shift to industrialization change these dynamics? Industrialization largely meant the replacement of muscle power with automatic machinery. This started with the production of textiles, but quickly spread to the mass production of everything from housing to books formerly made by human hands and brains (today algorithms can replace human decision-making). In the 20th Century, a narrow spectrum of the working class gained access to automated machines in the realm of social reproduction (e.g., dishwashers, electric devices, etc). The level of reliance on energy and machinery has gotten to the point where, according to historian Bob Johnson, per capita energy consumption in the U.S. is the equivalent to, “about eighty-nine human bodies working for us day and night.” In the early industrial era slavery was not displaced by machinery, but rather supplemented it. As Marx wrote: “Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry.” Yet, we often do not consider the role of fossil fuels in “freeing” some of society from muscle-based labor on the level of society as a whole. As mechanization spread throughout all forms of production, the social necessity of slavery slowly dissipated (even as it still persists today). In this context, social power emerged less from control over human bodies (slaves) and more from control of machines, factories and other “means of production.” Capitalists who owned such machines made massive investments in fixed capital, which made their labor requirements more flexible. As Andreas Malm illustrates, fossil fuel – specifically coal-fired steam power – suited capital’s need to control energy, machines and exploitable labor power in the service of accumulation. Unlike rural water, steam was mobile and could be concentrated in urban industrial districts where “where labor is easily procured.” The other critical material aspect of pre-industrial energy relations is land. All pre-industrial energy came from the land – food for muscles, fiber for clothing, and forest for fuel. In this territorially extensive system, those who controlled land had immense social power – the church, crown, and aristocracy. Suddenly the energy requirements of production shifted from large swathes of land to small “holes” with access to the subterranean bounties of fossil fuel. Capitalism can be seen as a historical process of shifting power from those who controlled land (the landlord class) to capitalists who controlled energy, machines, and, of course, money (the bourgeoisie). Like labor, we do not reflect on the enormous material transformations this transition made possible in terms of land-use. Fossil fuels expanded society’s access to heat energy for not only domestic heating, but also heat process industries like brickmaking, steel, glass and beer. Prior to the widespread use of coal, E.A. Wrigley estimates iron smelting was spatially extensive: “10,000 tons of iron involved the felling of 100,000 acres of woodland.” Rolf Sieferle estimates that by the 1820s, British coal use would have required the entire territory of the United Kingdom to produce the equivalent amount of wood energy. The urban built environment of steel, concrete and brick requires relatively little land for its fuel needs. It is hard to imagine a future built environment based purely on organic land-based energy and materials. None of this would be possible without dramatic transformations of agriculture which freed up labor for other kinds of work. It was the steel plow and eventually the tractor that dramatically lessened the labor requirements on farms. Today, virtually every “input” into industrialized agriculture is one that saves labor. Tractors plow and plant and chemicals do the “work” of weeding, killing bugs, and fertilizing the soil. In the U.S., the story is dramatic: in 1790 90% of the population worked on farms (including slaves). In 1910, it was down to 35%. Today it is less than 1.5%. As Connor Kilpatrick and Adaner Usmani put it, “In the West at least, the agrarian question has been answered — by capitalism. “ Even the global south has also seen massive “depeasantization”, although an estimated 1.5 billion still practice smallholder agriculture around the world. Industrialization has totally remade the world from a biologically restricted land and muscle based economy into an automated mass energy society of abundance. Socialists have always argued this makes possible a wider “freedom” from work, but neglect the energy basis of these relationships. Many ecological critiques argue these machines are inherently stained with capitalist logics. Since the capitalist use of machinery has not lightened the toil of workers, we must abandon the idea they will ever do so. Consider a Corner House report on “Energy, Work, and Finance”: ”Every time a ‘labour-saving’ energy advance has been introduced in the workplace, the result has generally been new kinds of toil.” As I have argued above, industrialization actually has led to less labor in agriculture. However, the authors are generally right that under capitalism industrial abundance has not led to ample leisure for the majority. Nevertheless, this is a class not technological problem. It is rooted in capital’s private appropriation of the wealth and profit from automatic machinery – not in the machinery itself. The key “scientific” question for ecosocialists must be: how can we build an emancipatory and ecological society out of industrial forms of production that now structure the material lives of billions of people? Some ecosocialists hint we should return to more labor-intensive agricultural society. Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams suggest an ecological agriculture “…may mean smaller farms with more people working on them,” but they admit machines must developed to lessen the time needed for working on farms. Jasper Bernes’s provocative essay, “The Belly of the Revolution,” lays out a future vision of communism where developed world agriculture is more “effort intensive,” and “nearly everyone would have some hand in growing the food they eat.” More egregious is the explicit promotion of labor-intensive farming. One of the most prominent critics of industrial agriculture, Tony Weis, claims, “Agricultural systems must be vastly more labour-intensive and biodiverse…There is no substitute for skillful and dense human labour, decentralized agricultural knowledge and careful, passionate stewardship.” Naomi Klein explains the benefits of sustainable agriculture: “Another bonus: this type of farming is much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture, which means that farming can once again be a substantial source of employment.” Let’s get real, or “scientific.” At least in the U.S., where 1.5% people work on farms (globally it is around 30%), we are not going to win the masses of workers with a socialist program based on what Leigh Phillips calls “drudgery for all.” Capitalism has produced the first society where the vast majority need not work in agriculture. A reversal of this is not politically possible or desirable. We cannot make ecosocialism about massive urban outmigration where millions must go do hard labor on farms (that sounds reminiscent of a Stalinist collectivization based on coerced labor). Despite the popularity of urban gardens and small-scale agriculture, we cannot wax nostalgic about “passionate” agricultural labor. Because agricultural labor is often insufferable, societies reliably find ways to coerce others on behalf of elites. While we certainly want to support peasant movements seeking to maintain their livelihoods and resist dispossession, we cannot act as if smallholder agriculture is any material basis for a society beyond capitalism. Yet, one article argues that something called “peasant food webs” have the capacity to “feed the world.” Peasant communities, already struggling with debt and manifold threats to their livelihood must now feed a world that is more than 50% urban? Who will force them to?

This situation complicates progressive notions of dual power. In Murray Bookchin’s definition, dual power is “a strategy for creating precisely those libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies that would oppose and replace the State. It intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist, and one must sooner or later displace the other.” Here, then, the state is the power to be opposed and ultimately replaced; however, the second step has proven a rather big hurdle—and at the moment, under the right-wing onslaught, it is often a matter of defending the state’s institutions even while building up popular, assemblist power.

Dual power is often discussed with reference to Rojava or Chiapas, the Zone à Défendre near Nantes in France, and various temporary autonomous zones that emerge from urban confrontations. Emancipatory “liberated zones” carved out of the territory of the globalist empire are attempts to build up bases within the heartlands of empire. In the wake of May ’68, movements such as the Dutch Kabouters and the German Spontis attempted to create counterpower from below by creating forms of self-organization and self-government. Their spectacular and mediatized exploits—the Kabouters’ declaration of Amsterdam as an “Orange Free State,” as in “free from the House of Orange,” or the Spontis’ squatting and urban warfare in Frankfurt—proved predictably short-lived under the conditions of actually existing capitalism, but for decades autonomists have been creating pockets and zones of opacity. Such desertions, however, should not be fetishized and identified with counterpower as such. They have their necessary counterpoint in activist uses of the infrastructure of the state and of the legal forms that structure relations in the decomposing states of capitalism.

The degrowth program is highly problematic because of its failure to analyze the qualitative aspects of economic growth and its emphasis on the local economy without recognizing the urgency to address global anthropogenic change from a transnational political perspective. In particular, a major challenge humanity now faces is to rapidly implement a prevention program to avoid catastrophic climate change. Demilitarization, solarization, and the creation of agroecologies are critical if we are to have any chance of success. This demands struggle on all spatial scales, from the neighborhood to the globe. While degrowth proponent Mauro Bonaiuti (Citation2012; this issue) provides an interesting discussion of the social limits of economic growth driven by capital reproduction, I find the paper's degrowth argument shallow and frankly incapable of providing a viable political agenda for confronting the converging economic and ecological crises of real existing fossil fuel nuclear capitalism in the face of the growing threat of catastrophic climate change (“C3”). Specifically, it fails to come to terms with qualitative versus quantitative aspects of economic growth and the critical difference between using the current energy supplies and a solarized infrastructure. The concept of economic growth should be deconstructed, with in-depth consideration of its qualitative versus quantitative aspects, particularly its differential ecological and health impacts. Growth of what are we speaking? Weapons of mass destruction, unnecessary commodities, SUVs versus bicycles, culture, information, pollution, pornography, or simply more hot air? What growth is sustainable in the context of biodiversity preservation and human health, and which is not? Bonaiuti fails to confront these questions and instead lumps all growth into a homogenous outcome of the physical and political economy. Most of Bonaiuti's paper is occupied with an examination of the social limits of economic growth. However, it fails to account for the highly contradictory character of corporate-driven globalization. For example, now for the first time in history, a majority of humanity lives in urban areas. Population density in the global South has grown alongside great inequalities (Davis Citation2006). On the other hand, a vast new terrain of class struggle has emerged centered on the potentials of green urbanism in the context of the growing threat of C3 (Davis Citation2010). Davis’ argument for a green (and red) approach to urban reconstruction is very welcome. Even now cities like New York are much more energy efficient than suburbia. And in China, now the greatest carbon emitter on the planet (not per capita, of course), almost half its population is urban (46 percent), with urbanization rapidly increasing. Davis points out that very significant reductions in carbon emissions could potentially occur with aggressive energy conversion in buildings and transportation centered in and around urban areas. So the urban question as a nexus of class struggle is now also a climate security challenge. This huge challenge is also a huge opportunity to create that other world that is possible—a green and red utopia—especially in metropolitan areas. Undoubtedly, this is a vision that will attract many more adherents than the “end of growth, we must all sacrifice” mantra of so many neo-Malthusian greens. Clean air and clean water, meaningful employment, and more free creative time for all on this planet should be the transnational red and green program. One more example of degrowth's limited vision should suffice: economic growth created globalized information technology with its immense potential for a transnational movement, a development made possible by this revolution in communication.

The digital commons build upon these functions of the innovation commons and extend them through commons- based arrangements. The creation of commons and relations around them articulate a value system that transcends our understanding of innovation altogether. Operating in a value system inherently at odds with their practices, digital commons innovations are primarily expressed as limits posed to the expansion of capital (De Angelis, 2007). Legal hacks such as copyleft or civil disobedience practices, like peer- to-peer sharing bypassing intellectual property rules, create spheres of de-commodification to reclaim freedom expressed through the commons. In this sense, digital commons institutional practices are similar in their underlying logic to struggles in non-digital settings, such as occupations of land or urban spaces, while digital commons often contribute to these struggles (Kioupkiolis, 2021). These limits to capital are aligned with the post-growth/degrowth notion of limits as necessary condition for genuine human freedom (Kallis, 2019). They challenge the understanding of innovation as the continuous introduction of novelty in markets to drive growth with one related to social-emancipation and prosperity within planetary boundaries (Pansera and Fressoli, 2021). Coriat (2015) uses the term “commons-based innovation” to describe the recurring cycles of open input, self-organization, and shared output evinced in digital commons projects. These characteristics are found in a broad spectrum of digital commons innovations expanding on many levels: from digital tools, knowledge, and information, to design and physical artifacts, to integrated technological systems. In FOSS cases, such as GNU/Linux, Apache, Mozilla Firefox and WordPress, self-organized communities share code and co-create software tools openly shared under commons-based licenses. Likewise, open hardware projects, like RepRap (Jones et al., 2011) and open design technologies like WikiHouse (Priavolou and Niaros, 2019) share technical designs and manufacturing guides that people can utilize locally in community- operated places, such as Fab Labs and Makerspaces. Finally, cases such as the Farm Hack and L’Atelier Paysan (Giotitsas, 2019) demonstrate how communities of farmers, engineers, researchers, and enthusiasts operate open technological systems around small-scale farming tools and the related services and commercial operations. Digital commoning and commons-based innovation offer a dynamic framework of how value practices that are contested to capitalist ones articulate a broader social whole in the digital economy. We analyze the characteristics and causal relations of this process of articulation by the digital commons to identify elements of value that may rationalize and guide real economic phenomena towards a commons- based orderly configuration within and beyond the digital economy. Exemplary digital commons cases feature a series of process, organizational, and institutional innovations that materialize these elements, and make them visible as they define commons-based orderly configurations in the emerging digital economy. With capitalism gradually crystalizing its institutions that define the conditions for accumulation and profitability in this emerging field, the digital commons become the epicenter of new forms of enclosures. Commons-based innovation demonstrates how alternative value practices can unfold within the capitalist value system that is fundamentally at odds with them. This dynamic framework of value informs our exploration of elements of value as a commons.

Now, for Stiegler, the question of technics is a Greek question because the relation between the human and the technical is explicitly posed by the Greeks, and any thinking on technology necessarily works within this Greek framework.5 Whatever one makes of this thesis technologically speaking, the question of the modern and contemporary autonomy of the economic from the social whole is nevertheless not Greek. With the end of the Cold War, with increasing trans-border activity of capital, goods, and, to a much lesser extent, labor, capital comes to determine the terms in which the allocation of scarce resources is made. Capital becomes, that is, general, and there is for the foreseeable future no alternative to it.6 All human beings live within the system of capital, whatever the particular node they live on, or conjunction they make with it. This system is highly unstable and dissymmetrical with immense imbalances in equality, natural resource distribution, financial assets, and terms of trade. With no alternative to capital, a revolutionary politics is no longer tenable. The ethical question driving political innovation has, consequently, to be worked out in terms of universally coordinated, but locally determined equilibriums between growth, sustainability, and equity. Given economic interdependence and the necessity of large transfers of technology and wealth from the developed world to the developing world in the context of climate change, effective financial regulation, economic coordination, and staggered development present the right strategies to tame the excesses of neoliberal global capitalism. Whether these strategies are feasible or not is at present an open question given recent government failure to regulate risk-taking and the evident dilemma, for developing countries, between the need for curtailed energy use, on the one hand, and industrialization and exit from poverty, on the other.

Now, whatever our answers to these large questions, the political question today—‘who are we?’—can only be appraised if the political economy of a globalized world becomes the direct object of critical attention. Only by foregrounding this object and its dilemmas will one have any chance of critical purchase on the political challenges ahead. In this context, Stiegler's foregrounding of technology to promote a new critique of political economy is decisive in purpose and tone, important in detail, but misplaced in general intent. Stiegler is right to stress again the pertinence of the economy for critical thought after “the supposed economism of Marxism” (2009: 29). His technologically trained focus on the alienated consumer is important within the cognitive dimension of contemporary capitalism and debt-led growth. But, if he is concerned to show, as a philosopher, the general lines of a re-invented critical political economy, his object and attention need to be much larger than his “Greek” framework affords. Since there is no systemic alternative to capitalism at this moment in history, the question of political economy is one of whether effective regulation of capitalism is possible or not for the world as a whole.

The difficulty of following these critiques from American Legal Realists and these other heterodox authors to any normative conclusion, however, seems two-fold. On the one hand, to think outside of consumption seems in some ways to border on a theological aspiration, to be ushered into the responsibility of remaking society according to some almost other-worldly dimensions: an economic order that conceives progress beyond growth, a socio-political structure that allows for systemic change without reducing the possibilities of human freedom, the normative agenda to substantiate egalitarian relationships, a global order that preserves the victories of industrial capitalism while simultaneously transcending its costs (ecological, human, etc.). On the other hand, critiques of consumption-led governance seem both anachronistic and violent. They are anachronistic because they either too readily rely on the possibilities of the Enlightenment assumption that there is a clear set of ‘truths’ that once disseminated to the population will enact meaningful change (e.g., if particular industries or products are demonstrated to be unsustainable to the environment, populations will demand alternatives) or they overly invest in the possibility of some benevolent, universalizing spirit that is capable of trumping the politico-economic exigencies of personal well-being (e.g., individuals are naturally willing to collectively do the right thing for the greatest amount of people even at personal cost in a consistent manner). They are violent because in calling for systemic change, such reversals would almost undoubtedly entail significant and most likely intensely hostile opposition from entrenched actors who benefit from the current economic legal arrangements. A liberal mode of economic management (e.g., consumerism) is itself undoubtedly more coercive and violent than its advocates tend to admit (e.g., it is part of the very problems it claims to address), but where the fundamental point of disagreement arises is over the question whether the current trajectory is occasioning a level of lost opportunity costs that warrant the effort and violence most likely necessary to enact an alternative mode of political life. Furthermore, if we accept the proposition of the necessity of coercive change, it still begs the question to what extent its proponents within intellectual circles are really willing to fully participate and accept the potential costs of radical struggle – they may, to put it vulgarly, simply have too much comfort to lose. To what extent, in short, are current left-oriented calls within academia and policy circles merely reflecting the more general postmodern crisis of identity versus the partisan militant residing at any revolutionary core? In giving normative bite to any alternative model, as the American Legal Realist Robert Hale pointed out, it seems undoubtedly the case that any future system would only find new constraints and forms of violence to sustain its cohesiveness.

[T]he systems advocated by professed upholders of laissez-faire are in reality permeated with coercive restrictions of individual freedom, and with restrictions, moreover, out of conformity with any formula of “equal opportunity” or of “preserving the equal rights of others.” Some sort of coercive restriction of individuals, it is believed, is absolutely unavoidable, and cannot be made to conform to any Spenserian formula.161

Advocacy for “socialism,” which the Socialist Party USA defines as a “social and economic order in which workers and consumers control production,” has made a comeback in American politics in recent years. Public figures such as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sing its praises. But the truth is that socialism deeply undermines people’s ability (and motivation) to improve their own living conditions. The misery socialism has caused for millions of people refutes its promises—horrifically.

Socialism, advocates claim, will bring prosperity and better living conditions for everyone, a claim also made for communism, in which the government controls the means of production and the distribution of the results. British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that socialism is “calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.” As have its advocates throughout history, the now-defunct Socialist Labor Party of America depicted socialism as utopian, writing: “Under socialism our farmlands would yield an abundance without great toil; the factories, mines and mills would be the safest, the most modern, the most efficient possible and productive beyond our wildest dreams—and without laborious work.” The website doesn’t specify how such magic would occur.

STORR: I did. I was very lucky. I’m benefiting from the inequalities in a lot of ways. Certainly in a market society, though, some people will have more and others will have less. It turns out, though, that when you look at the evidence, inequality is way worse in nonmarket societies than it is in market societies, and for a lot of reasons. One, it’s much better to be poor in a market society than in a nonmarket society. The poorest in market societies are better off than the poorest in nonmarket societies.

In fact, the poorest in some market societies—like, say, the U.S.—are much better than the richest in some nonmarket societies. You can name a number of nonmarket, less-developed countries. Even if inequality in the U.S. is as bad as they say, it’s not the social problem that people seem to think it is because it’s better to be poor here than it is to be poor anywhere else. That’s one reason.

In this paper we have found strong empirical evidence supporting the Okishio Theorem using data for the US non-financial economy, though its empirical robustness at more general level is left for future research. To conclude this paper, let us return to a fundamental question: What is Okishio’s Theorem really about? Or put differently: How could a profitable technical change not raise the equilibrium rate of profit given the real wage rate is fixed? To us, the Okishio Theorem is nothing more than a formal confirmation of the economic intuition that if the cost of production is reduced, the economic efficiency of the system will be raised. This rise in economic efficiency, in the new equilibrium, is either expressed in rising profitability (if the real wage rate is fixed), or in rising real wage rate (if the rate of profit is fixed), or in both. The actual distribution of the fruits from the technical change fundamentally depends on class struggle, rather than any ex ante principles.

[Table Omitted]

High-efficiency solar cells produced from earth-abundant materials are an exception and have the potential to provide many tens of terawatts on a few percent of the Earth’s surface. Present-day solar technologies will require substantial innovation to meet this standard and the development of cheap energy storage technologies that are capable of dealing with highly variable energy generation at large scales.

Nuclear fission today represents the only present-day zero-carbon technology with the demonstrated ability to meet most, if not all, of the energy demands of a modern economy. However, a variety of social, economic, and institutional challenges make deployment of present-day nuclear technologies at scales necessary to achieve significant climate mitigation unlikely. A new generation of nuclear technologies that are safer and cheaper will likely be necessary for nuclear energy to meet its full potential as a critical climate mitigation technology.

Everywhere I look these days there’s greenwashing. Not necessarily actual greenwashing. I’m talking about the word itself.

It’s everywhere, from media missives to activist accusations to regulatory remedies on both sides of the Atlantic. There are academic papers, investor research reports, conference sessions and no small number of online rants in which the G-word is tossed around with abandon.