Leveraged Futurity: Markets and Militants in the Transition

ABSTRACT

This article provides an overview of a market-led energy transition, before enquiring into what this new terrain of struggle implies for militants. Market institutions such as central banks and private money markets dominate how transition is framed. A market-led transition requires leveraging vast amounts of capital, which in turn requires a monetary environment in which private capital dominates production. This remakes sites of political conflict: over asset values, over the state, and the profitability of energy forms. I focus on one aspect in particular: conflict over economic representations of the future. I call this ‘leveraged futurity’, analysing it in corporate narrations of energy transition as well as science fiction. This concept shows how transition constitutes a ground of struggle that has its origins in the relation between energy and value congealed in the factory, but extends far beyond it, into the time of fiscal and investment politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Transitions
• militancy
• energy
• leverage
• markets

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to two anonymous reviewers, as well as Daniel Eltringham and Fred Carter, for excellent feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. An asset is a claim on future company profits in forms such as dividends or credit, which means that assets are appealing to investors to the extent that they provide expectations of profit. This might be because of rising productivity and output rates, an expansion in demand, disorganised workers who are heavily exploited, or some combination of these. All discussions of competing asset values ultimately refer back to an economic reality of profits derived from workers, that is, they express capitalist social relations of exploitation and market competition.

2. Interestingly, the ‘sun rises every day’ is the first example that Gerard Genette (1980) gives for the narrative category of ‘frequency’, noting that ‘the “repetition” [of an event] is in fact a mental construction, which eliminates from each occurrence everything belonging to it that is peculiar to itself, in order to preserve only what it shares with all the others of the same class, which is an abstraction’ (113). The abstraction that takes place in Lightsource’s description conceals the particular intensity of sunshine, which matters for how much energy a solar panel captures in a given day.

3. Whether or not the carbon coin would be a successful currency is beside the point. The objections are obvious: abstract wealth at the expense of material wealth is the opposite of socialist visions of abundance; premising financial value on competitive sequestration through human labour-power would likely proletarianise those doing it; commodity production, and so social reproduction in capitalism, is premised on fossil fuel energy, which means that without alternative means of producing life, carbon coins would drive up energy prices and increase poverty, producing political backlash, and so on. I am more interested in how plotting carbon coins is meant to highlight the way financial governance could be targeted by militant action.

4. Inflation is not an inert economic fact, but a representation assembled through socio-technical measurement, such as the consumer price index, assembled into a tool of financial governance. It is a mediated distributional struggle over the share of money divided between labour (in the form of wage-claims) and capitalists (in the form of profits). This makes inflation so important in an era of low growth, because productivity and output increases cannot be used to overcome this distributional conflict at a societal level. Because service sectors are labour intensive, and hard to automate, firms are likely to pass on increased labour costs, in the form of wages, to consumer goods, thus contributing to inflation. If one of the effects of the downturn was the structural shift to low-paid service work, keeping that work low-paid is a structural necessity for central bank institutions when governing the monetary environment, and an indicator of the relative weakness of labour in making claims on the distribution of wealth. Thus, central banks raise interest rates to increase unemployment, destroying demand for goods and loosening the labour market.

If central bankers think rising wages pose a consistent inflationary threat, then keeping the price of labour low is central to market stability. Instead of targeted price controls of key commodities, there are interest rate hikes to drive unemployment up and spending down, as seen by the recent Bank of England response to the Ukraine War, which has deployed this typical playbook to curtail demand, rather than, say, putting price controls on key inputs like grain, oil, and gas through regulation or nationalisation. This decision reflects political commitments to defend profits (Barker 2021). It is worth noting that labour militancy comes up against this state-finance structure that uses monetary policy to regulate demand and ensure that a reserve army of labour keeps labour costs in check.

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Harry Pitt Scott

Harry Pitt Scott is an Early Career Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick, where he is working on a project about speculation and energy transitions.