Johannes Fehrle (HU Berlin) and Anna Saave (University of Freiburg) will give a talk on democratic economic planning against the anthropocene crisis at the conference “Marx in the Anthropocene: Capital, Nature, Ecology, Environment” the will take place from March 11-14 2025 in Venice, Italy. Their talk will examine eco-Marxist and eco-feminist approaches to planning.
Abstract:
Technology (Foster and Clarke 2020) and labor (Barca 2019) serve as crucial mediators in the metabolism between human communities and the natural environment. Under capitalism, however, labor and technology mediate society-nature-metabolisms along dominant imaginaries and structures (Pineault 2022) such as fossil capital (Malm 2016), the modern/colonial gender system (Lugones 2007), and ecological modernization (Kern 2019) with outcomes that are both unsustainable and unjust. Moreover, as eco-Marxists and eco-feminists have convincingly shown, capitalism is unable to transform in a way that meets the demands of the socio-ecological transformations necessary to grant a ‘good life’ to the majority of humans (and non-humans). This would include e.g. slowing down anthropogenic climate change and the ‘anthropocene’ extinction, decolonization, or a transformation of patriarchal or racial oppression, to name only a few challenges.
In response to the polycrises of the present, the notion of planning has recently seen a revival among radical thinkers (for an overview see Heyer 2024). They argue that a capitalist market system will never be able to truly take into account social and ecological costs and that it is therefore time to think again about a planned economy. To learn from historical mistakes, most thinkers have adapted a model of democratic planning. Building on insights from eco-Marxism, and (Marxist) ecofeminism we explore some of these models and see which insights need to be taken into account from feminist and ecological Marxism when imagining a post-capitalist non-market democratically planned economy.
For more information on the conference see: https://www.marxintheanthropocene.com/