The Politics of Capitalistic Imperialism Via Technology
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- Category: Politics: Moral Issues
- Date Submitted: 09/30/2011 06:28 AM
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The politics of capitalistic imperialism via technology
By Anandi Sharan September 30 2011
Powering machines with renewable energy is like advising one’s child to avoid going in the street for fear of getting shot at in a war. It is true that the child will be temporarily safer. But we have to stop the war.
Just because machines are powered with renewable energy does not mean they are not harmful. First of all, renewable energy technologies depend as much on mined resources of copper, iron, aluminium lithium ion etc as do fossil fuel machines.
Secondly, technology is a fetish associated with elite dependence, with elitism itself.
Neither markets nor the state have ensured that all people in this world have equal access to health, wealth and fertility. The struggle over the means of production – land – is going on everywhere. A part of the motivation for land struggle is also the struggle to preserve the dignity of the individual and the group against machines, to conserve a kind of own-body-knowledge that is available to everyone at the place where her or his body is.
Renewable energy is a sensible idea only as part of a strategy of overall, drastic, total, reduction – abandonment – of technology-fetishistic consumerism and a total social switch to the bliss of equality, fraternity and frugality. It will only come into its own after the on-going collapse of the present world is completed... out of its ashes..
Capitalist technology is homogenous, expensive, degrading, impossibly difficult to understand, difficult to maintain, difficult to acquire, difficult to dispose of, user unfriendly, culturally oppressive and based on institutionalising caste and class where only the European race or those with European education have access. Environmental conflict and deprivation is race, nationality and gender specific in that it affects non-white, non-male, groups very disproportionately. In this European (as a race term) -owned capitalist alienated...
By Anandi Sharan September 30 2011
Powering machines with renewable energy is like advising one’s child to avoid going in the street for fear of getting shot at in a war. It is true that the child will be temporarily safer. But we have to stop the war.
Just because machines are powered with renewable energy does not mean they are not harmful. First of all, renewable energy technologies depend as much on mined resources of copper, iron, aluminium lithium ion etc as do fossil fuel machines.
Secondly, technology is a fetish associated with elite dependence, with elitism itself.
Neither markets nor the state have ensured that all people in this world have equal access to health, wealth and fertility. The struggle over the means of production – land – is going on everywhere. A part of the motivation for land struggle is also the struggle to preserve the dignity of the individual and the group against machines, to conserve a kind of own-body-knowledge that is available to everyone at the place where her or his body is.
Renewable energy is a sensible idea only as part of a strategy of overall, drastic, total, reduction – abandonment – of technology-fetishistic consumerism and a total social switch to the bliss of equality, fraternity and frugality. It will only come into its own after the on-going collapse of the present world is completed... out of its ashes..
Capitalist technology is homogenous, expensive, degrading, impossibly difficult to understand, difficult to maintain, difficult to acquire, difficult to dispose of, user unfriendly, culturally oppressive and based on institutionalising caste and class where only the European race or those with European education have access. Environmental conflict and deprivation is race, nationality and gender specific in that it affects non-white, non-male, groups very disproportionately. In this European (as a race term) -owned capitalist alienated...