“Eco-Socialism Without Guarantees”

Dr M. MCFly (independent scholar)

Abstract:

We’re toast. That has been clear for quite some time. Who gets to count as “we” is of course of for debate, and how the toast-i-ness came to be “a thing” (as the young people used to say) is another question. But rather than admit that, we keep pretending there’s a new Saviour gonna go all Deus Ex Machina on our sorry doomed asses. Now that we’ve given up on the working classes, the peasants, da yoof and technology, somehow “climate change” is gonna short-circuit the circuits of extractivism and exploitation.

Keywords: Anthropocene, extractivism, more-than-human and whatever other buzzwords are faddish right now.

Introduction

We’re toast (and continues in this vein, padding out the abstract for a bit. Grand Societal Challenges blah blah. Urgency of climate action. Theories of transformation (throw in some MLP?)

This article proceeds as follows… (grab first sentences of next sections)

Methodology

I quote mined some books that have been sitting unread on my shelves for yonks. Neither engaged with nor critiqued their assumptions. Raid google books too. Quick recap of the 19th to early 21st centuries. Bish bosh.

Findings/Discussion

None of the historical actors has met expectations – they all fluffed their lines, got booed off stage, or bombed off it. The Modern Prince turned out to be a frog even after being kissed. Turns out “we” are toast who knew, eh? So it goes

Turns out the organised working class got crushed or bought off,

The peasants are too far from the metropole, and can be exterminated, their movements crushed, the populace diverted into various forms of pie in the sky, a comprador elite installed and kept in power. Meanwhile, it was worse when we turned to the kids on the left and got let down again by some poor excuse for protest, as the song goes.

The school strikes etc have – who coulda guessed it – turned out to be spasms of “why can’t we have the nice things?”, as anyone with two neurons to rub together would have known.

But you don’t get grants, publications, citations for saying “we’re toast” so instead academics keep inventing words for post-industrial disease (that’s another song reference, since we’re all in dire straits). And meanwhile, as a “public intellectual” you don’t get book contracts or speaking gigs for saying “we’re toast”, so they keep inventing new ways of saying “the cat should wear a bell” while never bothering to investigate while all the previous mouse meetings went nowhere.
Conclusion

We’re toast, and the soi-disant pissant academic “radicals” have helped not a jot. So it goes.

References.

Yeah, throw in some Haraway, Gramsci, Karl, Foster, do some citational erasure of scholars of colour while passing their work of as your own, make sure you cite the editorial board of the journal you’re submitting to, because chances are they are doing the desk review and possibly the actual peer review.