Alan P. Rudy

On ANT and Relational Materialisms

Since the mid-1990s, and particularly since September 11, 2001, Bruno Latour has looked more towards politics, political ecology, and sociology. Perhaps agreeing too much with Horkheimer and Adorno that science has trumped philosophy within modernity, Latour has long seen technoscience as politics by other means. His primary position has been that technoscience undergirds politics (far more than politics grounds technoscience.) As Latour has looked more at social rather than natural science, he has sought to define societies as “associations”––stabilized relations between humans and non-humans––or actor-networks. At the same time, his approach to political ecology seeks to undermine the inordinate power of Science in environmental Politics. Both Science and Politics are referred to here in the reified singular, but Politics represents the objective competition of competing and discrete social interests.

Actor-Network Theory, Marxist Economics, and Marxist Political Ecology* The participants thank Barbara Laurence. The symposium came about because of her interest, prodding and persistence, all of which were much appreciated.

Science and technology studies have generated increasing interest within Marxist circles. In this symposium, we focus on Actor-Network Theory, a topic that has, at times, sparked misguided debate due to misunderstanding on both sides. On the whole, though, green Marxisms and ANT have maintained relative distance from each other. The articles in this symposium seek to narrow the gap. Whether considering Marx’s deep concerns with the natural sciences, metabolic socionatural relations, and ‘‘natural’’ obstacles to capital, Marx’s discussion of constant capital’s contribution to maintaining capital’s ‘‘monopoly of property [in] and access to the material means of production,’’ or Engels’ attempt at creating a single, social-natural ontology in the Dialectics of Nature , Marxism has a deep historical concern with relations between natures, sciences, technologies and societies. These traditions are, of course, intertwined with the history of critical science studies, which assessed the contradictions of the hegemony of technoscientific and industrial power over sociopolitical and aesthetic values; the enforced irrationality of alternatives to scientific and political technics; the relationship between declining environmental conditions, economic productivity and social quality of life; the ways the domination of nature served as a means of social domination; the character of

Ecosocialisms, Past, Present and Future: From the Metabolic Rift to a Reconstructive, Dynamic and Hybrid Ecosocialism

ABSTRACT John Bellamy Foster and his colleagues have recently argued that the project of ecosocialism should be understood in terms of a “prefigurative” and “first stage” of red-green thinkers whose insights have largely been transcended by their own work on the metabolic rift. Rift scholars have further argued that “second-stage” ecosocialists should push back against “idealist” deviations occurring amongst historical materialists concerned with the production of nature, socionatures and “hybridity,” as well as more or less all engagements with literatures on eco-technological transitions, industrial ecology and the like, which are implicated in supporting “green capitalism.” This paper critically evaluates these claims. In each case, it is argued, rift scholarship is narrowing the possibilities for interdisciplinary engagement and for thinking in dynamic and reconstructive terms about red-green futures. It is our sense that an ecosocialist vision of just transitions has to be conceptualized as a diverse, dynamic, iterative and always incomplete affair. Anthropocene ecosocialisms are inevitably going to involve co-producing, making and remaking hybrid social ecologies on an irreducibly restless, turbulent and warming planet. We argue that what follows from this is the necessity to both critique and recuperate the better insights of hybrid political ecology and ecological modernities.

Marx's Ecology and Rift Analysis

transport, and other branches of the economy, as noted by Martin O’Connor in an early contribution to CNS. The strength of his book will remain the author’s assertion that a “theory of ecology as a process of change involving contingency and coevolution is necessary [for us] not only to understand the world but to change it in conformity with the needs of human freedom and ecological sustainability” (254).

On the Ecofeminist Editorial: “Moving to an Embodied Materialism”

Generating a synthetic position that does justice to ecofeminism and ecosocialism necessitates working out the diversity of each perspective, establishing the ground that is to be plowed, and then cultivating a new form of collective position and politics. But I question that these conditions are at issue because sex/gender is the deepest social oppression. In fact, this strikes me as a transhistorical vision that goes against the historical grain that grounds the materialism at the foundation of socialism, feminism, socialist feminism and feminist ecosocialism or ecofeminist socialism.