Power, Profit, and Prometheanism, Part I

Abstract

No civilization has been more Promethean than capitalism in its aspirations. Named after the Greek Titan who gave fire to humankind, Prometheanism is understood as a kind of environmental-but not (necessarily) environmentalist-strategy for the domination and management of something usually called Nature. Unfortunately, the discussion often stops there. But if Prometheanism is domination, How does it turn a profit? This is an elementary, yet frequently, unasked question of a civilization that dispenses with everything ill-suited to the law of value. The uncontroversial statement that capitalism is a system of profit-maximizing class power hasn't translated to a dialectical synthesis of power and profit in the web of life. There are surely many reasons for this. One of them is the systematic acceptance on the left of Nature as a value-free concept. And yet, historically, bourgeois naturalism has been the ideological lynchpin of successive Civilizing Projects and Malthusian moments. To ignore this is to disarm struggles for climate justice and planetary socialism.

Reframing Relationships Between Humans and the Earth: The "Anthropocene", a New Ideology to Justify the Status Quo?

“…But the evils attributed to the "Anthropocene" cannot be the responsibility of all humanity; the main culprits, who have the political and economic power to shape the forms of production and consumption and define lifestyles, must be distinguished from the majority of the population, whose power to change things cannot be compared with those. The Anthropocene argument is called "a conceptual and historical mess, a neo-Malthusian view of population, a fanciful historical interpretation" (Moore, J.W., 2022). It is not just about a word, but a misleading way of understanding things, affecting communication, advocacy, public policies, research and teaching programs (Pilon, A. F., 2023).…”