Power, Profit, and Prometheanism, Part I

Method, Ideology, and the Violence of the Civilizing Project

Bibliographic Data

ID12433607
AuthorsJ W Moore (0000-0002-7237-9895, Binghamton University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume28
Issue2
Pages415-426
Publication date2022-08-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of World-Systems Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1076-156X • E-ISSN: 1076-156X
PublisherUniversity Library System, University of Pittsburgh (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5195/jwsr.2022.1140
OpenAlexW4293242942
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited26

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

Business · Electrical engineering · Physics · Power (physics · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Engineering · Political Economy and Marxism · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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