Technology as Capital: Challenging the Illusion of the Green Machine

ABSTRACT

Debates on technologies for harnessing renewable energies tend to generate a polarized arena in which critical voices are automatically denounced as defenders of fossil energy. This has created a difficult situation for activists and scholars voicing concerns about the comparatively low power density, low net energy, and environmental justice concerns of such technologies. In this paper, we highlight the contradictions and ambivalences underlying Promethean arguments for solar power, which are currently dividing the political left. Through a critical reading of three proponents of classical Marxism, we address the structural coherence and paradoxes of the discourses within which the faith in such “green” technology is mobilized. We illustrate how Promethean visions of solar power tend to suffer from a pervasive ontological separation of human ingenuity and global social metabolism. This raises important questions about the ambiguous and theoretically underdeveloped role of technology in historical materialism, and about how capital, once converted into the material form of technology, becomes exempt from political critique. Rather than accepting such an immaterial and ultimately depoliticized position on technology, we argue that Marxist scholarship should concede that Promethean approaches must be abandoned if we are to effectively address climate change and other challenges of the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Prometheanism
• solar power
• green technology
• energy transition
• machine fetishism

Introduction

Despite decades of unrealized technological promises, both neoliberal and ecosocialist responses to the Anthropocene rely on techno-utopian visions based on “green” technologies (Fremaux 2019; Hamilton 2016). Critical scholars have warned about the contradictory and often destructive conditions inherent to the realization of such visions (Dunlap 2021). Disagreements on green technology are particularly salient in questions concerning the transition away from fossil fuels toward advanced renewable energy technologies with the intention to sustain industrial levels of production (Capellán-Pérez, de Castro, and González 2019; Jacobson et al. 2017).¹

Recent critical scholarship on a transition to renewable energy sources has revealed unsustainable and unjust practices pertaining to mineral requirements and extraction (Mejia-Muñoz and Babidge 2023), land requirements (Capellán-Pérez, de Castro, and Arto 2017), net energy returns (King and van den Bergh 2018), carbon emissions (Wagner et al. 2022), biodiversity (Sonter et al. 2020), and labor conditions (Davidson 2023). An interdisciplinary body of literature focuses on understanding how the industrial development of advanced renewables is constituted by and constitutive of social relations of production (Huber and McCarthy 2017) with often problematic implications for social emancipation (Stock 2021), environmental justice (Avila 2018), ecological sustainability (Gellert and Ciccantell 2020), gender equality (Stock et al. 2023), as well as efforts to resist corporate power (Franquesa 2022) and decolonize the harnessing of energy (Zografos 2022). Other scholars are attempting to mitigate the consequences of this reality by appealing to technological progress or commodity chain reform as a means of solving the globally unsustainable and environmentally unjust relations implicated in renewable energy development (Riofrancos 2022).

While the physical and economic feasibility of a full transition to renewable energy is being contested by its proponents and detractors, we instead address the structural coherence and paradoxes of the larger discursive fields within which the faith in such a transition is mobilized. The purpose is to critique Promethean ontologies of technology that are inhibiting nuanced discussions on the role of advanced technology in achieving socially just and ecologically sustainable human-environmental relations. We focus on solar power as an example of an advanced renewable energy technology that is similar to other renewables (such as wind power and biofuels) in terms of its biophysical profile, pervasively characterized by low efficiencies (Smil 2015). While the critical literature on renewables has revealed important social and ecological dimensions of power at divergent sites of deployment, many still overlook the globally asymmetric exchange of resources necessary for such “green” technologies to be feasible.

Our first aim is to trace the ambiguous role of solar power within a landscape of intersecting discourses and identities in which technology itself is a contested category. The idea of solar power – the direct human harnessing of the sun’s energy – has gained a symbolic and discursive significance far beyond its practical implications (Roos 2023). As it is emblematic both of mainstream neoliberal climate change policy and modern proponents of classical Marxism, it raises crucial questions about the role of advanced technology in the worldview of late modernity. While scholarship on technology has attempted to go beyond the optimist-pessimist binary (Tiles and Obderdiek 2014), the continued influence of Prometheanism suggests that fundamental disagreements on technology remain unresolved and highly relevant for the increasingly felt contradictions of “green” technology.

Our second aim is to better understand the ontological position underlying Promethean conceptions of technology. This includes an analysis of the assumptions that are reproduced chiefly by some proponents of modern technological progress, but which could be found also among some detractors focusing exclusively on sites of deployment (for a critique, see Roos 2023, 2024).

The first among these assumptions is “technological immaterialism,” through which technology is understood as primarily ideas, blueprints, or designs. This assumption is commonly reproduced in instrumental notions of technology and supposedly materialist perspectives, including critical theory and science and technology studies (Roos 2021). Such an assumption contributes to the problematic understanding of technological progress as separated from its wider environmental and social consequences and prerequisites. From an ecosocialist point of view, to oppose technological immaterialism is to acknowledge technologies as inexorably dependent on a social metabolism exchanging matter-energy with its environment (Hornborg 1998; Roos 2021).

Second, the assumption of “technological neutralism” implies that technology is nothing more than a means to an end (Ruuska and Heikkurinen 2021). That is to say, technologies are viewed as neither constitutive of nor constituted by social relations. John Dewey (2008, 354–355) exemplifies technological neutralism when he asserts that “there is no problem of why or how the plow fits, or applies to, the garden, or the watch-spring to time-keeping. They were made for those respective purposes; the question is how well they do their work, and how they can be reshaped to do it better.” Applied to the case of solar power, arguments based on technological neutralism assume that it is unimportant, irrelevant, or beside the point to understand how solar power necessitates or facilitates (global) social relations of power.

To oppose technological neutralism is to consider technological artifacts as socially and politically contingent. Langdon Winner (1980) has described the two basic ways that technological artifacts may be considered political. We may call these “weak” and “strong” politics respectively. On the one hand, technologies are linked with the political intentions of the owners or designers, or otherwise compatible with specific political relations (Winner 1980, 130). For instance, technologies such as solar PV technology, computers, or space rockets are political in the sense that they can be employed in different contexts (e.g. research, commerce, war, or capital accumulation). On the other hand, Winner identifies so-called “inherently political technologies” that “appear to require, or to be strongly compatible with, particular kinds of political relationships” (Winner 1980, 123).² In this understanding, solar PV technology, computers, or space rockets are political since they are inextricably contingent upon a social relation of power. This categorization allows us to understand that technologies may not simply be employed to further capitalist accumulation, but that they may be expressions of global, capitalist relations of production. This exemplifies a “strong” or “inherent” politics of technology. The proliferation of solar PV panels that followed the transfer of production processes from the U.S. and Europe to China illustrates the “strong” politics of such technologies (Bonds and Downey 2012; Roos 2022).

Further on, we show how the assumptions of “technological immaterialism,” “technological neutralism,” and the “weak” version of technological politics feature heavily among Marxist Prometheanists, and how these assumptions operate to discursively and ideologically sequester modern technologies such as solar power from global asymmetries in resource exchange, where technology deployment in core regions occurs at the expense of “green dispossession” and “green sacrificial zones” in peripheral regions of the world (Brock, Sovacool, and Hook 2021; Chen 2013). We argue that immaterial and neutral conceptions of technology are the discursive foundation for “machine fetishism,” whereby “productivity” is thought to exist independently from an asymmetric transfer of resources upheld through global terms of trade (Hornborg 1992).

We focus on positions on solar power – and technology more broadly – among three Marxist Prometheans as an “outlier” case for theorizing the roles of green technology and energy transition in Marxist scholarship (George and Bennet 2005). We interpret the three selected authors’ works as “outliers” in the sense that they take deviant and sometimes extreme positions on technological optimism and degrowth compared to other ecosocialists. The strength of the “outlier” case is that it can identify foundational assumptions that could yield inferences concerning a wider group. We believe that a critical analysis of Marxist Prometheanism may help to illuminate some of the contradictions and problematic assumptions vitiating ecosocialist scholarship on “green” technology and energy transition more broadly.

Our analysis focuses on arguments among three Marxist scholars commonly understood as heralds of leftist ecomodernism, namely David Schwartzman, Leigh Phillips, and Aaron Bastani (Dale 2019; Saito 2022; Trainer 2019). The selection of arguments has in part been determined by their public visibility and impact, in part by the frequently explicit contrasts between them. All the selected authors firmly oppose degrowth positions arguing for “convivial technologies” and a socially controlled reduction of matter-energy throughput attentive to a fair distribution of resources (Kerschner et al. 2018). While each of these scholars and their arguments have already received much attention and critique (Dale 2019; Featherstone 2020; Mueller 2020), few have attempted to unpack what we here identify as a shared ontology of technology that risks serving as an unwitting endorsement of capitalist relations of production. We problematize this puzzling inability of Marxist Prometheanism to apply the same critical analysis that is applied to the process of capital accumulation, to its most prominent material expression – technology.

In the following sections, we first provide a critique of Promethean arguments for solar power, such as it is espoused by ecomodernists. We show how such arguments are based on an ontology of technology which precludes an understanding of solar power as intertwined with globally asymmetric flows of embodied land and labor. We then demonstrate the influence of such Promethean myopia, or “machine fetishism,” among three Marxist scholars. We show how the failure to account for the biophysical prerequisites of solar power reveals an inclination to force social theory to fit ideological prescriptions. Through closer analysis of Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, we then identify the politically neutralizing and immaterialist ontology of technology which is at the root of Promethean arguments for solar power. Finally, we provide concluding remarks on the paradoxical challenge facing Marxist theory, namely, how to account for technology as capital.

A Critique of Promethean Arguments for Solar Power

The turn to fossil energy in nineteenth-century Britain gave rise to two interconnected and quintessentially modern conceptions that remain with us to this day. One is the notion that economic processes can be understood without any consideration of nature, the other is that engineering is a matter of harnessing natural forces and does not require any consideration of world society. In a nutshell, economics has nothing to do with nature while technology has nothing to do with society (cf. Mitcham 1994; Spash 2007). Both conceptions are continuously being challenged by critical perspectives (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1989; Foster 2000; Hornborg 2023; O’Connor 1988; Roos 2021), but their hegemony remains intact in mainstream economics and engineering science.

Visions of solar power reproduce an image of technology that can be traced to the appearance of the steam engine, that is, as simply an innovative means of harnessing energy, with no detrimental implications in terms of the social distribution of resources, i.e. as politically neutral (Landes 1969). Historical research shows that the expansion of steam technology in Britain was inextricably linked to the colonial appropriation of land and labor embodied in cotton (e.g. Beckert 2014; Berg and Hudson 2023) and therefore better understood as implicating “strong” politics. Modern analyses of global commodity flows similarly indicate that core areas of technological expansion rely on net imports of biophysical resources that do not concern mainstream economists (cf. Dorninger et al. 2021). The negative ecological repercussions of fossil energy use have long inspired visions of new technologies for harnessing renewable energy, but these visions for abandoning fossil energy risk being as constrained by illusions of technological neutralism as the conceptions that accompanied the turn to fossil energy more than two centuries ago. In requiring capital, any advanced technology automatically implicates asymmetric flows of embodied land and labor. This applies to solar power as it does to steam.

Judging from recent literature and public debate throughout the world, a global majority of people now share the consensus that the combustion of fossil fuels is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (e.g. Lynas et al. 2021). There is also extensive agreement that this impasse necessitates a transition to renewable energy technologies such as solar power. To advocate such a transition – as do, for instance, proposals for a so-called Green New Deal – is to assume that it is both economically and physically realistic (see Boyle et al. 2021). Over the past decade, several researchers have offered calculations suggesting that a global transition to renewable energy is indeed feasible (e.g. Delucchi and Jacobson 2011; Jacobson and Delucchi 2011).

Although advocacy for solar power at first glance may seem opposed to other interventions arguing instead for the expansion of nuclear power (e.g. Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015), both kinds of proposals subscribe to an approach to technologies that tend to limit their system boundaries to the extent of their physical infrastructure. In both cases, however, it is reasonable to argue for complete Life Cycle Assessments that include not only the globally extracted materials, energy, and labor that are embodied in the infrastructure, but also all the resources mobilized in the economic processes that generated the money capital that is invested in it (Prieto and Hall 2013). From this perspective, calculations of “power density” (Smil 2015) – that is, the amount of energy that can be extracted per square meter – should include not just the spatial extent of the technological infrastructure but the total, global ecological footprint of each square meter of infrastructure (Hornborg, Cederlöf, and Roos 2019). In focusing on the output of the machinery, while largely disregarding inputs of resources from its global context, mainstream understandings of solar power technologies tend to share the myopic outlook of ecomodernist proponents of nuclear power. Both visions reproduce the “machine fetishism” (Hornborg 1992; 2001) of the Industrial Revolution, in which the steam engine was conceptually sequestered from the plantations – the labor and land – that made it economically feasible. While often providing important insights into local dimensions of power, frameworks focusing on the transformative potential of solar power and wind power limited to sites of deployment systematically overlook the necessary inputs of resources from the global context (Stephens 2019).

The essence of such “machine fetishism” is particularly conspicuous in the Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). Its recipe for sustainability is to technologically intensify human activities – such as farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement – in the belief that this will “spare nature.” It dismisses the notion of limits to growth as “functionally irrelevant” and suggests that humans using “next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion” (23) will have access to “unlimited energy.” Urbanization and industrial agriculture are to be celebrated as the “decoupling” of humanity from nature (as if modern urban consumers did not have substantial ecological footprints beyond the city limits). If technological progress and current trends continue, the manifesto suggests, human impact on the environment may “peak and decline this century” (14).

Such an understanding of technological progress as a cornucopia is often referred to as “Promethean.” It is easy to identify in nineteenth-century discourse on the Industrial Revolution, including classical Marxist texts (Benton 1989). The inclination to conceptually insulate the technical from the social – as in the Marxist distinction between “productive forces” and “relations of production” – produces a fetishized view of technology as magically generative of wealth, rather than a socionatural mechanism for redistributing human time and resources by displacing work and environmental loads. Building machines for harnessing nature’s forces requires social mechanisms for appropriating resources, whether through slavery or the world market. The world market prices of cotton textiles, raw cotton, iron, coal, and slaves were thus requisite to the expansion of steam technology in late eighteenth-century Britain (Hornborg 2006). To conceptually excise technology from its global social context is misleading whether we want to account for the expansion of steam technology in eighteenth-century Britain or for the feasibility of solar power 250 years later.

Several energy researchers have hesitated about the feasibility of a large-scale transition to renewable energy technologies. Some have argued that the problem is their low power density – that is, the amount of energy that can be harnessed per unit of land – compared to fossil fuels (MacKay 2013; Smil 2015). Others have focused on their comparatively low net energy or EROI – that is, Energy Return on Energy Invested (Hall and Klitgaard 2011; Prieto and Hall 2013). Both these limitations highlight the importance of redefining “efficiency” in terms of inputs and outputs of natural resources (land and energy, respectively) rather than monetary cost/benefit analysis. In the ongoing debates between proponents and detractors of solar power and other “green” technologies such as electric cars, many participants have explicitly rejected the approach of mainstream ecomodernism and economics in favor of a focus on asymmetric biophysical resource flows and the displacement of environmental impacts to poorer sectors of the world-system (Bonds and Downey 2012). To the extent that a shift to renewable energy is feasible in some areas, this argument goes, it will occur at the expense of other areas with lower wages and less rigorous environmental legislation. Paradoxically, such a shift of perspective toward the material aspects of energy technologies may help us understand the extent to which such technologies crucially also have a social aspect, as it would not make sense to rely on physically inefficient technologies if world market prices did not make it rational to do so.

Approaches to Solar Power among Three Promethean Marxist

Although some prominent Marxist theorists such as John Bellamy Foster (2000) have made great efforts to show that Marx’s worldview was not as Promethean as many environmentalists and ecosocialists have argued, several Marxists have asserted that an endorsement of modern technological progress is quite aligned with Marx’s own convictions (Löwy 2002; Rahim 2020). This conflict of perspectives raises important questions about technology's role in Marxist theory, particularly about the Marxist claim to offer a “materialist” understanding of society.

Exemplifying such ecomodernist Marxism, David Schwartzman (2008) has asserted that solar power is a necessary condition for the Marxian vision of communism, which includes a progressive dematerialization of technology through the expansion of information technology and a concentration of urban settlement that would leave more space for nature. His technological optimism is particularly evident in his prediction that humanity will eventually “expand outward in our solar system and even further into the galaxy” (Schwartzman 2008, 52–53).

Schwartzman’s refusal to recognize the kinds of natural constraints on growth emphasized within ecological economics and the degrowth movement is duplicated and elaborated by Leigh Phillips (2015) in his provocatively titled book Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts. Phillips shows that the political Left has historically sided with industry, technology, and modernity rather than with anti-consumerism and ecologically motivated restraint. His explicit goal is to revive pro-industrial and pro-growth sentiments within the Left. He devotes most of his book to an agitated critique of contemporary “anti-modernist” and “green” voices. Using similar arguments, he also disapproves of classical critics of modernity such as the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), Lewis Mumford, and E.F. Schumacher. Although many of these writers identify with the Left, Phillips’ pervasive agenda is to highlight an “anti-modernist ideological overlap between contemporary green back-to-the-land ideology and volkisch agrarian mystique, resulting from common romanticist origins that were deeply antipathetic toward the Enlightenment” (243). Through guilt by association, Phillips insinuates that the above-mentioned writers have been tainted by recurrent “patterns of green xenophobia” and risk succumbing to “the lifeboat politics of limits to growth” (ibid.). In Phillips’ account, green anti-modernism thus tends to shade into brown. Although he repeatedly affirms that this is not what he means, the overall message appears to be that to oppose growth puts you in the company of fascists. The underlying implication is that the endorsement of growth is morally superior to its antithesis.

Phillips (2015) concedes that calls for more “immaterial” kinds of growth are a fantasy: “While we can steadily dematerialize production via technological innovation, and though knowledge itself is certainly immaterial, knowledge will always be linked to the material, both in its origins and its products” (38). However, he sympathizes with the ecomodernists of the Breakthrough Institute when they “argue that it is precisely through economic growth that humanity will be able to afford and develop the new technologies and infrastructure” for solving problems like climate change and biodiversity loss (67). Like the ecomodernists, he favors nuclear power (197–199) over renewable energy technologies, which would produce considerable environmental damage, “whether from the steel production required for pylons, concrete for the bases and fiberglass … for the blades, or the heavy metal pollution from solar panel manufacture” (182). He is also concerned about the comparatively low EROI of photovoltaic solar power (194). Rather than advocate green anti-modernism, Phillips suggests that we must “accelerate our modernity” (186). “To deliver on the promise of social justice,” he asserts, “we need a high-energy planet, not modesty, humility and simple living” (190). Finally, like Schwartzman, he endorses space exploration to ensure “the survival of our species beyond the life of our sun” (258). This will permit humanity to “spread throughout the galaxy so as to assure the continued existence of the species in the life-vitiating event of a local supernova” (261).

The conundrum posed by “green” technology is clearly highlighted by the voluminous debate around the documentary Planet of the Humans, produced by Michael Moore and Ozzie Zehner and directed by Jeff Gibbs. The film argues that ostensibly “sustainable” technologies such as wind and solar power rely on the same kinds of unsustainable practices that characterize the conventional fossil energy regime. Phillips (2020) responds by classifying the argument as right-wing, anti-progressive, and “anti-working class.” The debate illustrates the role of technological transition as an existentially charged faith in salvation from the contradictions of industrial capitalism. Rather than conceding that the high-energy lifestyles promoted by modern civilization may be inextricably based on fossil energy (Love and Isenhour 2016), Promethean Marxists like Phillips reject such critical observations as morally and ideologically suspect. Admitting that the intermittency of renewable energy sources will require a firm backup, he advocates an expansion of nuclear power. He asserts that countries like France, Sweden, and Norway “have already completely or largely decarbonized their electricity grids” – as if the technological infrastructures for delivering nuclear and hydroelectric power did not require massive amounts of fossil energy (Diaz-Maurin and Giampietro 2013). Such “decarbonization”, he asserts, “could secure a future for both the planet and the political left.” This sentence illustrates how the discussion about technological systems tends to be framed in terms of morally and politically charged prescriptions rather than empirically grounded theoretical reasoning. Although as much as 90% of world energy use currently derives from fossil sources (Voosen 2018), it is politically incorrect to conclude that global decarbonization is incompatible with modern civilization. If such a stance were to be expressed by a climate denialist funded by the fossil industry lobby, the denunciation as “anti-progressive” might indeed be appropriate, but neither we nor Planet of the Humans deny the disastrous reality of fossil-fuelled climate change. “At its worst,” says Phillips, “Planet of the Humans even attacks industrial civilization and technology itself.” It is revealing to find a Marxist considering this kind of subversion so repulsive. Phillips’s Promethean misunderstanding of technology is nowhere more clearly exposed than in his narrative of human history as continuous efforts “to solve problems via new technologies and then [to use] class struggle to force elites to share the benefits of those technologies with everyone.” This is definitely not how we understand the history of technology since the birth of the steam engine. But Prometheanism, even in its Marxist variant, hitches the cart before the horse by tailoring social theory to fit ideological prescription, rather than letting advocacy be informed by critical social theory.

A third Marxist keenly committed to Prometheanism is Aaron Bastani (2019), who also reminds us that Marx lyrically celebrated the progress of technology under capitalism.³ Bastani predicts that renewable energy technologies – particularly solar – will “spell an end to energy scarcity altogether” (38). What we know for certain, he asserts, is that “solar is more than capable of meeting the world’s expanding energy needs” (48). In Bastani’s vision of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” new technologies will make access to energy and resources limitless and free while replacing human work. He reaches this conclusion based on the premises that (1) technological progress is essentially immaterial – “amounting to nothing more than an upgraded re-arrangement of previous information” (63) – and that (2) in modern capitalism information is the basis of value but paradoxically becoming less scarce and thus cheaper and cheaper (49). Bastani envisages how particularly poorer countries near the equator in Africa, Central America, and Asia will benefit from clean and inexpensive solar energy, as “nature’s gifts become an economic blessing” (108). Like Schwartzman and Phillips, he also envisages limitless returns to space exploration, as resource scarcity will be permanently abolished through the mining of asteroids (117–137).

These three Marxist writers should represent a conundrum to ecosocialists who wish to reconcile Marxist theory and ecological sensibility. Although their Promethean recipes for human progress in the twenty-first century are frequently bizarre, it is difficult to deny that they are generally compatible with the approach to technology in classical Marxism. The fact that many modern Marxists would reject their suggestions raises the question of what this disagreement ultimately signifies: simply put, either our three Prometheans have completely misunderstood Marx, or the phenomenon of technology has been seriously misunderstood in Marxist theory. The debate clearly indicates that, at the very least, the concept of “technology” or “productive forces” occupies an ambiguous and theoretically underdeveloped role in historical materialism. In the next section, to further substantiate this claim, we take a closer look at Aaron Bastani’s (2019) approach to technology.

The Ontology of Technology in Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism

To unveil the underlying ontology of technology in Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, it is important to note that the book’s premise is rooted in an understanding of historical transitions as exclusively progressive (31–39). Bastani’s understanding of history can thus be clearly categorized as part of what economic historian Stefania Barca (2011) calls the “modern economic growth” narrative. This narrative is both teleological and immaterial in that it systematically ignores the adverse socio-ecological consequences of past historical transitions in its progressive interpretation of history. While Bastani repeatedly reminds the reader that progress is a political choice (9–12), the central premise of the book is that modern societies should embrace exponential technological progress. This normative position is symptomatic of a particular ontology of technology that refuses to take into account the material conditions under which such technological progress is made possible.

At the heart of Bastani’s vision lies the notion that technologies, or machines, are neutral products of the human mind (or engineering science) to be applied to fulfill certain ends. Bastani contends, for instance, that “[t]here is no necessary reason why [advanced technologies] should liberate us, or maintain our planet’s ecosystems, any more than they should lead to ever-widening income inequality and widespread collapse” (242). As described above, technological neutralism is a conception of technology captured in the cliché “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” From this perspective, technological artifacts themselves are not the issue, as it is how – or to what end – technologies are deployed that matters. In other words, technologies are ontologically sequestered from the contexts in which they arise and which they reproduce (Roos 2021). This ontology of technology underscores the famous opening to Marx’s chapter 15 in Capital where, in response to John Stuart Mill, Marx contends that the role of machinery under capitalism is not to save labor, but that it may be employed for such a purpose under other social forms.⁴ In Bastani, this approach is omnipresent, as is evident from the fact that the global material prerequisites of the technological developments on which his vision depends are systematically ignored.

Both Bastani and Marx in Capital vol. 1 (notably in chapter 15) deal with how machines are employed by capitalists to maximize profits. In this sense, the machine is understood within the context of capital accumulation. However, neither Marx nor Bastani acknowledges technologies as physical artifacts that are dependent on inputs of specific quantities of non-renewable materials per unit of mass produced, and therefore contingent on global capitalist relations of production (Bunker 2007; Gutowski et al. 2009). For Bastani, technological development signifies something else entirely. “[A]s technology develops,” he writes, “the value increasingly arises from the instructions for materials [i.e. immaterial information] as opposed to the materials themselves” (Bastani 2019, 63). This argument appears to be based on the hypothesis that the more advanced a technology is the less socio-ecological impact it is associated with – a hypothesis that has been abundantly refuted (Gutowski et al. 2009).

In Marx’s analysis in Capital, the material prerequisites of the machine are not dealt with in detail since his main objective is to show how machines are used in the capitalist mode of production. The analysis starts with already existing machines without a deeper analysis of their social, geographical, or geological prerequisites. It does not include an adequate account of how the machines employed by the British bourgeoisie during the Industrial Revolution were made possible by the historically developed world division of labor (i.e. colonialism). Although Marx’s analyses are largely devoted to comprehending the societal prerequisites and consequences of mechanization, neither in Capital⁵ nor in Grundrisse do we find an understanding of industrial technologies as modes of globally appropriating and redistributing embodied labor time and other biophysical resources.⁶

While Marx’s Prometheanism has long been debated (see Benton 1989; Burkett 1999; Löwy 2002), Marx’s inclination to consider the productive potential of machines as originating within the machines themselves appears incontrovertible (see Marx [1867] 1990, 494, 502; Marx[1939] 1993, 818–819). However, Marx also acknowledged (albeit in passing) how the development of “the technical foundation of large-scale industry” necessitated a strict division of labor in British manufacture (Marx [1867] 1990, 503–504). The difference between these two points made by Marx hinges on whether we should understand technological productivity as an innate property generated by the machines themselves or as a relational property generated by specific socio-ecological relations. Bastani’s focus on the technological artifacts in themselves, in precluding a relational understanding of productive capacity, fails to realize how such artifacts are embodiments of the specific global political circumstances on which their productive potential relies.

The resulting ambiguity is captured when Bastani (quoting Kranzberg) writes, “‘[t]echnology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral’” (237). This view resembles Feenberg’s (1991, 14) take on technology as “not a thing in the ordinary sense of the term, but an ‘ambivalent’ process of development suspended between different possibilities.” By such an account, technology is ontologically relative, and its actualized form depends on who controls the design. The ontological immateriality underlying such a view becomes apparent once we realize how technology is thereby assumed to exist before its social and material expression. The resulting technological neutralism – or “weak” politics at best – is strongly related to the Promethean Marxist understanding of technology as primarily employed to maximize profits under the capitalist mode of production, but as liberated to serve other purposes under communism.

Promethean Marxist visions based on a “weak” political understanding of technology tend to come into conflict with the “strong” understanding. Phillips reveals important aspects of the former view of technology when he explains that “[t]he long-standing promise of socialism was not that we’d have the same stuff as under capitalism but shared out equally; rather it was that through equality, we could release the forces of production from the fetters placed upon them by capitalism” (255). This quote illustrates how the “forces of production” (i.e. “technologies”) are conceptually sequestered from the “relations of production.” The essence of the technology referred to consists of immaterial ideas, rather than something belonging to the material world. This explains why Promethean Marxists proclaim that we must “permit ourselves to dream a little” (Phillips 2015, 258) and reclaim our “collective imagination” currently in crisis (Bastani 2019, 31). In contrast, a materialist and “strong” political understanding of technology would take into consideration under what socio-ecological relations a particular technology is currently actualized to examine and assess these relations as necessary aspects of that technology.

In Bastani’s vision, global energy production will be doubled in the coming decades. This will be done by massively scaling up the production of solar PV technology and lithium batteries for electricity generation and storage. Bastani, like Phillips (2015, 38), acknowledges that such a project would require unreasonable volumes of materials from the Earth’s crust. However, as we have seen, rather than seriously fathoming these limitations, as Phillips does, Bastani sidelines them altogether by suggesting that the necessary materials could be extracted from extraterrestrial bodies such as asteroids (2019, 38–39). Bastani then proceeds to completely ignore the substantial material prerequisites of space travel itself. The remarkable consequence is that he manages to construe the creation and operation of solar technology as entirely independent of the social and ecological metabolism of the world economy. Leaping from one techno-fix to another, Bastani evades rigorous consideration of the material constraints facing proposals to double the world’s energy use and shift away from fossil fuels through the massive installation of solar power.

While utopian visions can certainly be justified, they must be grounded in real material conditions and understood in relation to the socio-ecological realities of today. The resort to space travel, which recurs in Schwartzman’s, Phillips’, and Bastani’s Marxist utopias, is not coincidental. To circumambulate the increasingly obvious distributive and ecological constraints of technological utopianism, the fantasies of Promethean Marxists are compelled to leave planet Earth. We instead propose a social and ecological politics aiming to care for the Earth we inhabit: one that is prepared to radically transform the money that today serves as the cultural vehicle of machine fetishism and unsustainable relations of production, and one that engages in the exercise of “realistic envisioning” to identify the means needed for a subversive transformation of fossil metabolism (Roos 2023, 171–192). Such politics would be aligned with the broader program of “degrowth communism,” which offers a much-needed synthesis of socialist and ecological perspectives (Saito 2022).

Conclusion

In this paper, we have tried to show how modern visions of technological futures tend to suffer from a pervasive ontological separation of human ingenuity and global social metabolism. It is widely assumed that problems of global unsustainability can be alleviated through technological solutions that are conceptually excised from the world economy that has made such technologies physically feasible – in restricted areas of the world – to begin with. It is taken for granted, for instance, that fossil energy will be replaced by renewable energy sources, while the material affluence and mobility of modernity that fossil fuels have historically made possible (for people in the Global North) shall be retained and even universalized. Such assumptions hinge on interpretations of technological progress as essentially immaterial and politically neutral, and based on engineering knowledge, while the material asymmetries of the requisite global resource flows are ignored.

This failure to theorize the social asymmetries embodied in modern technology is particularly problematic in the context of Marxist analyses, whose most foundational justifications pertain precisely to questions of social justice. In both classical Marxist texts and those of modern adherents of Marxist theory, the distinction between “productive forces” (as “Nature’s free gift to capital”) and “relations of production” mirrors the mainstream separation of the material and the social, in which the former is to be understood as mere revelation of nature. The paradox confronting Marxist theory is how “capital”, once converted into the material form of technology, becomes exempt from political critique. As we face climate change and other challenges of the Anthropocene, we shall have to concede that the existence of modern technology always implicates issues of globally skewed distribution, and thus cannot be politically neutral. In other words, technology is capital.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the two anonymous reviewers who critically scrutinized the paper manuscript and provided us with invaluable feedback. Any remaining mistakes or flaws are entirely our own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Andreas Roos gratefully acknowledges the project “Harnessing the heat below our feet: Promises, pitfalls and spatialization of geothermal energy as a decarbonization strategy” funded by FORMAS (Swedish Research Council, Project no: 2020-00825). The funding source had no involvement in the conduct of the research or the preparation of the article.

Notes

1 The arguments of this article pertain exclusively to advanced technologies, such as mass-manufactured solar photovoltaic modules, dependent on globally manufactured components based on the extraction of non-renewable materials and fossil fuels.

2 In Winner’s analysis, this distinction is made in part to demonstrate how nuclear power is an example of an “inherently political” technology.

3 Gareth Dale (2019) has provided a critical review of the wider argument in Bastani’s book. Other critical takes include Mueller (2020) and Featherstone (2020). Here we complement these critical appraisals by examining how Bastani’s recipe for progress is based on a more widely shared immaterial and politically neutral ontology of technology.

4 Our reading of Marx's treatment of machinery is necessarily incomplete, as a fuller treatment of this topic would require a separate article. For further reading on this matter, see e.g., MacKenzie 1984; Wendling 2009; Hornborg 2023.

5 A digital search for the word “machine” or “machinery” in Capital vol. 1, yields 978 hits, but nowhere is the machine discussed as an instrument for exchanging quantities of embodied British labor and land for increasingly greater quantities of embodied labor and land from its colonial periphery (cf. Hornborg 2006). While Marx is abundantly aware that labor and machinery are transposable in the sense that labor both produces and is displaced by machinery, he does not address the extent to which the very existence of machinery is contingent on global exchange relations, i.e. global market prices reflecting relative costs of labor in different geographical areas (Hornborg 2019, 96–97).

6 As Walter Johnson has observed, Marx evaded the question of slavery by incongruously discussing commodity fetishism through a detailed consideration of a bolt of linen, rather than cotton, thus staying clear of the fact that each bolt of cotton “had been put in the ground, tended, picked, bagged, baled, and shipped by an American slave” (Johnson 2004, 301, 304).