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Table of Contents

10. Meming Prometheus

‘To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.’

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

The new far right has yet to mature into anything displaying the organised and armed force of historical fascism. However, this only buys the left breathing room. Out of the business of history-making for so long, we must swiftly revise our classical visions and strategic preconceptions. We must formulate a version of plenty, of abundance, that does not brazenly override ecological limitations.

The left is particularly sensitive to anything smacking of Malthusian arguments about ‘overpopulation’: given the historic resonance of such arguments with racism and eugenicism, this is not surprising. Thus, for example, the understandable and widespread criticisms levelled at Donna Haraway for her recent urgent insistence on reducing population to around two billion as part of left strategy, which Sophie Lewis in a sympathetic, almost anguished critique, calls ‘primitivism-tinged, misanthropic populationism’.

Such justified criticism, however, can elide with less persuasive contrarianism on the axis of productivism. This underlies the wide-ranging arguments on the left over issues of economic ‘degrowth’, its necessity or otherwise. The so-called ‘ecomodernist’ position, advocating climate intervention by radical redistribution plus technofix, has recently been (notoriously, for many) exemplified in the _Jacobin_ issue, _Earth, Wind and Fire_, and in Leigh Phillips’s _Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts_, with its provocatarian, Marxist-épatering chapter titles such as ‘There Is No “Metabolic Rift” ’ and ‘In Defense of Stuff’.

Unlike many ecosocialists, _Salvage_ is not, in principle, opposed to Promethean aspiration and speculation – the opposite, in fact. Quite apart from the literally epochshaking nature of the revolutionary social change we espouse, we dissent from the view of those many socialists for whom any talk of geoengineering, for example, is anti-socialist – ‘science-fiction fantasy bankrolled by the ruling class’, as Keith Brunner puts it. Contrary, with comradely respect, to John Bellamy Foster, we do not see it as self-evidently ecologically questionable that ‘smart parking meters, robo-bees, and new potentialities for geoengineering’ are ‘perfectly compatible with “socialist ecology” ’. The hermeneutics of ecomodernist suspicion are not without traction: dystopias can be politically polyvalent, but misanthropic, even symptomatically sadistic, collapse-porn is certainly a culturally prevalent current thereof. And, too, it is undoubtedly the case that some left opponents of ecomodernism indulge in the kind of ‘green moralising’ of which Peter Frase complains.

But such moralising is a political failure, not definitional to a left ecology. And there are, moreover, major problems and lacunae in left ecomodernism. It is predicated on a faith position that ‘we can’ overcome ecological problems, on the basis of the most tendentious scientific and/or sociological extrapolation, if any – as when Phillips blithely insists that ‘you can actually have infinite growth on a finite world’. It validates that particular narrow conception of the polysemic word ‘growth’ – ‘growth’, for Phillips, ‘is freedom’ – without anything approaching adequate interrogation of the history and ideology of the concept, as extensively outlined by Gareth Dale, for whom ‘[t]he growth paradigm … is a form of fetishistic consciousness’ that ‘functions as commodity fetishism at one remove’. This strain of eco-modernism performs a relentless elision of analysis with a kind of cruel-optimistic hectoring: when Connor Kilpatrick criticises ‘a politics of fearmongering’, or Phillips ‘catastrophism’, they ignore the possibility that ecological fear, far from being mongered, is entirely appropriate, if not too little and too late, that catastrophe is indeed almost here. Let alone the crucial point that after decades of exhausting boosterism, left and right, that such earned fear can be politically inspiring – that, as Gerard Passannante puts it, ‘as we face the frightening effects of climate change, catastrophising may be something we can’t do without’.

The most robust and inadequately fearful ecomodernist extropianism, the Elon Muskrattery of the left, feels predicated on a category error: it has mistaken a kind of ludic meme culture around the aesthetics of post-scarcity and ‘Luxury Communism’ for a research programme, or even, at its worst, for a conclusion. This is not to denigrate the memes. Provocations and utopianism are play, relief, and can be goads to thought and action and _Sehnsucht_. They are valuable – if vanishingly rarely worth much as blueprints. But it does not take much for provocation to become swagger to become mannerism, and thence a new kind of rote thinking.

The instant one starts to get into granular details about possible ecological limits, problems arise – as, indeed, often does anger. But limits haunt ecomodernist writing too. Phillips cheerfully cites various studies suggesting – depending on various ecological and technological variables – that the world could potentially support more people than are alive today by factors of twelve and more – 96 billion, 150 billion, 282 billion, 100 quintillion people. Crucial, though, is not only that the desirability of those various possibilities is questionable (the last involving a cramped planet of cannibals): what is also key is that even for a writer so committed to limitlessness, there _are_ conceptual upper limits.

Where Phillips is clearly right is that the question of what this number is has no meaning absent a wide range of other variables and aspirations. We can go further. It is precisely due to the Promethean scale of the project to utterly reconfigure of the world and _thus the humans who will remake it_ that we can know neither their capabilities nor their drives and desiderata in advance. This is not an evasion but rigour.

The obvious problem with Haraway’s proposal is that she proposes a drop in population, one dramatic enough to provoke alarm: an underlying problem is that she proposes a specific number at all, because she – anyone – can only do so with a pre-revolutionary consciousness, stained by the muck of history. Not only do we not claim that speculation about a post-capitalist future is _verboten_, we hold it to be necessary. But we must be clear about the categoric nature of those ruminations, the veil between us and prediction. _Eco_socialists, we take the existence of limits seriously; _ecosocialists_, we take seriously the fact that we cannot yet know them. Indeed, it is an urgent task to usher in a society in which we might. No more than we can write the cookbooks of the future can we plan its population limits. To think otherwise is unseemly prefiguration – the bad Prometheanism of the quotidian. Which, too, afflicts the ecomodernist – who is, on the axis of the human soul, not Promethean enough.

The repeated evocations of left ‘austerity’ in the bestiary of the ecomodernists is rhetorically effective in the rubble of the neoliberal project of that name. Against which are deployed defences of the _having of stuff_ that are pitifully uncurious about the possibility of the emancipated human of the future wanting anything other than yet more stuff. ‘What exactly is wrong with gaming consoles, OhMiBod dildos that plug into an iPhone, or Hello Kitty Fortieth Anniversary plastic toys in Happy Meals anyway?’ asks Phillips. To which the radical answer should not be histrionic anticonsumerist moralism, but the counter-question ‘What exactly is right about them?’ Indeed, what exactly is right about there _being_ anything right about them at all? What is right or inevitable about object-oriented cathexis? Is its relationship to commodity fetishism of so little interest to the radical?

As with population limits, so with trinkets: we cannot ultimately know what the tchotchkes of a liberated people will be, nor how many they will have, nor if they will have any at all. But that aporia does not preclude critique of such hankering or scepticism about its immortality, and the acknowledgement that we cannot be certain goes for the ecomodernists no less than for those they chastise. ‘Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure?’ Phillips insists. As if what la-las bring us pleasure is immutable, apolitical, unconflicted. As if, under capitalism, those things and our pleasure itself cannot be sources of despair.

Production is not productivism. Intervening in and acting on nature is not ruining it, nor humanity. There is not, in Lenin’s urgent aspiration for nationwide electrification, any necessary and intrinsic subordination of radical ecological politics to narrowly defined productivism. Nor even is there – quite – in Trotsky’s sternly ecstatic utopian dreams of geological reconfiguration – terramorphing – at the close of _Literature and Revolution_, his assertions that the literal movement of mountains will, after capitalism, ‘be done on an immeasurably larger scale [than hitherto], according to a general industrial and artistic plan’, that ‘man’, in the end, ‘will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste’. But it would be disingenuous to deny a strong tendential logic towards it therein, and it is hardly a surprise that it was used as epigraph for _Earth, Wind, and Fire_, nor that Trotsky’s own record of support for projects such as, for example, the construction of the Dnieper Dam, was characterised by unedifying attacks on critics, like the Bolshevik engineer Peter Palchinsky, of the ecological and social effects of its ill-conceived gigantism: Trotsky’s 1928 smear about ‘the collusion of the Shakhty specialists [Palchinsky’s circle] with capitalists’ saw him side with Stalin against the accused in the first major show trial in Russia.

Victor Serge, famously, argued against the facile equation of Bolshevism and Stalinism not on the grounds that the former did not contain a germ of the latter, but that it ‘also contained many other germs, a mass of other germs’. So, too, for what Foster calls ‘reckless productivism’.

Literal ‘conservation’ – a dream of stasis – is not in and of itself necessarily a good. And indeed, there must be, for any dream of the future, of emancipation, a place for truly epochal and transformative aspirations. But if this is Prometheanism, Prometheus here must be, not bound by, perhaps, but _sublated_ with a rigorous humility. Otherwise it will be at best a kitsch performance, at worst dangerous.