at: cap
Permutation – do both
Not the competition their ev assumes – we don’t put blind faith in the market incentives – we contest the market-based and political choices – that’s why we’re a dystopia and not a utopia
Sci-fi is a link turn – future histories steeped in the fears of sci-fi let us peer through the cracks of neoliberalism to imagine unthinkable futures – critical dystopianism provides the glimmer of hope beyond the confines the political as we know it – that’s McCalmont
Criticism of oil politics is compatible with critiques of capitalism
Szeman 10
Imre Szeman, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies and Sociology at the University of Alberta, November 6th, 2010 "Oil and the Left: An interview with Imre Szeman" Andony Melathopoulos with Brian Worley, Platypus Review 29
AM: You have identified three political narratives that take oil to be their central object—namely strategic realism, techno-utopianism, and apocalyptic environmentalism—and criticized them for their inability to inform a politics that could overcome capitalism.3 How can this critique, and your desire for a Marxian approach to oil politics more generally, help to clarify limitations in the politics of the Left? Why should energy production be seen as anything other than an immediate effect of capitalism?
IS: Talking about oil does not mean moving away from a critique of capitalism, nor does it mean privileging a discussion of energy over the broader system in which it operates. But it does offer a new way into the problem of capitalism, and thus perhaps new political possibilities, while also raising the question of energy for Left critique. One can say energy production is nothing other than an effect of capitalism, which is to say that the latter precedes the former, comes into history fully formed, and so on. Isn’t capitalism as it presently exists, in the form we are living it, an effect of energy production as well?
We need new pedagogies to solve for capitalism – our [Giroux/Darder] evidence is a uniqueness argument for anti-capitalist and ecological resistance – it’s failing now – we must revitalize it
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