Image by Jana Shnipelson.
In The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment, human ecologist Alf Hornborg argues that “the essence of human technology” — at least in a capitalist society — “is the use of time and space to save time and/or space for some social category. Technology or capital thus amounts to a way of redistributing temporal and spatial resources” (land and labor) in a way that serves the interests of capital, which Hornborg defines as “a recursive (positive feedback) relationship between some kind of technological infrastructure and some kind of symbolic capacity to make claims on other people’s resources.”
There is no shortage of ruling-class attempts to mystify the nature of technology in capitalist society, and these mystifications have bled into almost every social and institutional realm. A 2014 report on unpaid care work by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) serves as a paradigmatic example. Among other things, the report recommends “investment in time-saving technology and infrastructure” as a way to address gendered economic inequality.
The suggestion that technology and infrastructure of various kinds are inherently time-saving is one of the most common forms of ideological misdirection. It’s a suggestion that obscures the unequal net flows of energy and materials that make this ostensible “time-saving” feature possible in the first place, imputing to technology an inherent use value, and concealing the appropriated use values elsewhere in the capitalist world system.
An OpenAI chatbot, Whirlpool washing machine, Tesla electric car, or Keurig single-serve coffee-maker might save some people time, but only by sucking up the labor time of everyone who works in the washing machine factory or content moderation office, and by creating a metabolic rift between the short-term temporal cycles of capital accumulation and the long-term temporal cycles of water recirculation and energy absorption by the Earth system.
The OECD report’s perspective also obscures the unavoidable fact that capitalism creates new needs far more quickly than it satisfies them, which leads to phenomena like the planned obsolescence of modern technology. As first-wave eco-socialist André Gorz writes in “Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation,” “it is only because capital needs consumers for its products that production also serves human needs . . . [But] they are needs and desires which have been produced to satisfy capital’s need for profitability.” Rampant consumerism is “thus the product of capital’s own requirement to create the largest possible turnover of goods. The quest for maximum efficiency in the exploitation of capital therefore requires maximum inefficiency in the coverage of needs: maximum waste.” Excessive waste and pollution are thus features of a capitalist society, not bugs.
Indeed, drawing on the ecological economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Hornborg elsewhere describes how “not only energy but materials, too, suffer irreversible dissipation in economic processes, and that the concept of entropy applied to such processes should be understood in terms of the generation of increasing energetic and material ‘disorder’ [i.e., waste and pollution] as a by-product of the local creation of cultural and technological ‘order’ or structure [i.e., commodities and machines].”
Any activity that allegedly “saves” time, space, matter, or energy in one sector of the world-economy must, according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, be enabled by higher rates of extraction, exploitation, and matter-energy dissipation in other sectors. Nothing we do is “thermodynamically free,” as the media historian John Durham Peters emphasizes: any attempt to order and organize matter and energy “runs uphill against the tendency of everything to degrade.”
Or, as the socialist philosopher Nancy Fraser succinctly puts it in “Climates of Capital”: “northern post-materialism rests on southern materialism.” One of the implications is that the depressed wages associated with neoliberal globalization mean longer hours for workers, “prompting a desperate scramble to transfer carework to others,” as Fraser writes in “Contradictions of Capital and Care.” These “others” are often poor, non-white women who “must transfer their own familial and community responsibilities to other, still poorer caregivers, who must in turn do the same.” Instead of “filling the care gap,” Fraser writes, “the net effect is to displace it — from richer to poorer families, from the Global North to the Global South.”
There is a tight interdependence between productive and reproductive labor, and, by extension, between capital and reproductive labor. Greater exploitation of paid workers presupposes greater expropriation of unpaid reproductive workers (and of the environmental conditions which, in turn, sustain them). The latter enables the former, with the Global South (an economic designation, not a geographic one) disproportionately bearing the burden of both unpaid reproductive labor and ecological “loss and damage.”
Reproductive labor should here be understood as the creation and maintenance of the economic and ecological conditions necessary for human and nonhuman communities alike to survive and thrive. From this perspective, technological development must be put in the service of habitability, equality, genuine sustainability, and human development, not limitless economic expansion. As Friedrich Engels explains in one of his prefaces to The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State:
According to the materialistic conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance, the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life . . . On the one side, the production of the means of existence, of articles of food and clothing, dwellings, and of the tools necessary for that production; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.
Hence the wisdom of Stefania Barca’s desire to define “the working class” as inclusive of both productive and reproductive labor (paid or unpaid), as well as Michael Denning’s insistence that “proletarian” is “not a synonym for ‘wage laborer’ but for dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market. You don’t need a job to be a proletarian.”
Definitions of class, after all, affect how class war is waged, and how class consciousness is formed. In a passage that calls to mind Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s treatment of language and meaning as sites of class struggle (if far from the only sites), Fraser notes how, “in periods of crisis, social actors struggle over the boundaries delimiting ‘economy’ from ‘society,’ ‘production’ from ‘reproduction,’ and ‘work’ from ‘family’, and sometimes succeed in redrawing them.” Class struggle, then, is not only an objective economic struggle between classes. It is also an ideological struggle over the meanings and boundaries of the “class” concept itself (and its relation to race, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, etc.).
The labor theory of value implies that formally employed productive workers under capitalism are positioned in a way that endows them with a potent, class-specific form of collective power and leverage (the strike, for example, or the factory occupation). A similar conclusion can, I think, be drawn about the world’s unpaid and informally employed class of reproductive workers and peasants (the small-scale farmers and care workers of the world). While the former will often be moved to defend its material interests by struggling over working conditions (the capital-labor relation), the latter will often be moved to defend its material interests by struggling over living conditions (the capital-nature relation).
In practice, of course, these two struggles are inseparable. As the ecological Marxist John Bellamy Foster writes, “If humanity is to survive and prosper in the Anthropocene Epoch, it will be through the development of an environmental proletariat engaging simultaneously with the domains of production/social reproduction and the environment, bringing together the exploited and marginalized populations within every realm.” In Capital, Volume 1, Marx himself encouraged organization and “co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects” of capital accumulation on the lives of every layer of the proletariat.
A capitalist society, with its recurring environmental “crises of underproduction” (created by using up natural resources much faster than they can be replenished), itself facilitates the development of an ecological, working-class consciousness. As Oscar Olivera, a trade unionist and prominent participant in the Cochabamba Water War of 2009 and 2010, recalled in an interview a decade later: “The struggle for water gave me a much broader vision of union struggle. It no longer involves just economic ends, but rather a struggle for life and a much broader framework.” And, as Foster elsewhere observes:
Everywhere, the class struggle of production is converging with class-based environmental justice struggles over food, air, water, and the conditions of social and ecological reproduction. The global resistance of Indigenous communities, together with peasant subsistence producers, to increasing land grabs associated with the accelerating capitalization [i.e., financialization and monopolization] of nature is one of the most important developments of our time.
Struggles over the resources necessary to satisfy universal, material human needs — including safe, reliable access to de-commodified food, water, air, energy, housing, health care, and education — won’t, by themselves, magically fix every other social problem. Such struggles do, however, have the potential to maximize the efficacy of every other social struggle. Struggles over living conditions are, ultimately, struggles to defend the necessary conditions of struggle itself.
And bottom-up class struggle, in particular, will be ineffectual without a critical understanding of the nature of the tools and technologies that the underclasses are intent on inventing, repurposing, or sabotaging. “It is not enough for workers to gripe about the boss,” as Thomas R. Bates writes. “They must make themselves better than the boss, not only in their moral conduct, but also in their technical know-how.”
