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We explore the role of moral, cognitive, and pragmatic legitimacy in reproducing the organization of two on‐demand labor platforms for couriers. Labor platforms are ideal cases to explore questions of legitimacy and institutional reproduction because they aspire towards automaticity. Since the 1970s, with the emergence of new production technologies and organizational forms, labor and work scholars have predicted a shift from the use of direct, coercive controls as a method to coordinate activity to more indirect, hegemonic, and normative methods of control. However, we find that in the case of the gig economy, platform firms are refuting the predictions of Post‐Fordist labor scholars, relying upon new forms of direct technological control as well as coercive, indirect market control, as opposed to shared norms and obligations, as methods for coordinating activity. We explore the implications of ‘post‐legitimate’ institutions, as well as the latent moral economy of gig workers as revealed through their critiques of the platform economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of scientists have illustrated how economic growth is an underlying driver of the climate crisis. This article examines how associated levels of excess work, production, and consumption repress human flourishing and drive global warming. Drawing from the work of Herbert Marcuse and André Gorz, we discuss the irrationality of a system of excess work, production, and consumption in terms of unnecessary human repression and environmental destruction. In the context of the climate crisis, this system becomes even more irrational as it threatens the habitability of Earth for humans. We examine work-time reduction and related sufficiency measures as a rational response to the climate crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2022, a scientific breakthrough in fusion energy resulted in widespread media attention with a focus on fusion as a key strategy to mitigate climate change. In this article, we draw from Herbert Marcuse's work on technological rationality to examine fusion technology in this context. We explore if fusion is seen as a way to master nature, if it protects current power relations, and if a focus on fusion might detract attention and resources from alternatives. Illustrating technological rationality, much attention is being given to the potential achievement of fusion energy, it is being championed by already powerful economic actors, and despite that it is unlikely to be ready in time to support necessary climate mitigation, it may be detracting support for more effective and just strategies that already exist. In this context, framing fusion as a solution to climate change represents what Marcuse calls 'one-dimensional thinking'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are at least five obstacles to the viability of ideology critique as a method of analysis in current conditions: (1) there is no ideology-free, God's-eye view through which the critical theorist can analyze other ideologies; (2) few people really believe in explicit ideological justifications for exploitation and domination today, a widespread skepticism that could annul the warrant for ideology critique; (3) conspiracy theories and identity politics have superseded more universalistic and structural forms of critique, which, due to their real and superficial similarities with ideology critique, represent troublesome competitors; (4) ecological degradation is undermining the possibility of the free future that ideology critique implicitly anticipates; and (5) due to the decline of radical labor movements and near-absolute control of consciousness by the culture industry, the audience for ideology critique is so small and distracted that thoughtful, written analyses of ideology may be pointless. Despite these obstacles, I defend ideology critique as a viable and beneficial method. Barrier (5) is the only obstacle that I think has the potential to deliver a death blow to ideology critique in the foreseeable future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this project synthesizes and advances critiques of the possibility of a sustainable capitalism by adopting an explicit 'negative' theory of ideology, understood as ideas that conceal contradictions through the reification and/or legitimation of the existing social order. Prominent climate change policy frameworks--the 'greening' of markets (market-corrective measures), technology (alternative energy, energy efficiency, and geoengineering), and growth (the green growth strategy)--are shown to conceal one or both of the two systemic socio-ecological contradictions inherent in the current social formation: (1) a contradiction between capital's growth-dependence and the latter's degrading impact on the climate (the 'capital-climate contradiction') and (2) a contradiction between the potential of using technological infrastructure that aids in emissions reductions and the institutionalized social relations that obstruct this technical potential (the 'technical potential-productive relations contradiction'). Attempts to reform the very techniques and institutions that brought about the climate crisis will remain ineffective and reproduce the social order that results in climate change. After proposing a way in which societies might move out of the ideological trappings of green markets, technology, and growth, two alternatives are proposed: economic degrowth coupled with Marcuse's conception of a 'new technology'. Keywords alternative energy, cap and trade, carbon market, degrowth, emissions trading, energy efficiency, geoengineering, green growth, ideology critique, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP21 2015 Paris Agreement, Introduction Stoner and Melathopoulos (2015) succinctly articulate an 'environment-society problematic' (p. 22), a paradox that confuses and worries many: 'environmental degradation increases amid the growth of environmental attention and concern'. [...]

There is a gap between concern about environmental degradation such as climate change and effective action taken against the forces that drive degradation. This paper argues that real helplessness, a social condition producing powerless, stupefied, and repressed actors, is a fortified barrier between climate concern and effective climate action. Political‐economic analysis has theoretical and methodological implications for environmental social science and helps explain a current conundrum in critical sociology: Why are alternatives to a system that drives climate change and other catastrophic risks still seen as unrealistic? We suffer from a political‐economic system impervious to transformation before we suffer from a lack of alternative ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists and world leaders increasingly call for bold climate action. Yet proposals remain far from the transformative systemic changes required. While many remain in denial that system change is necessary, others who call for system change fail to articulate what that change would entail. It is critical that the climate movement identifies and promotes specific strategies for change. Identifying synergistic proposals associated with ecosocialism and degrowth, we describe a set of policies, programs, and strategies that have the potential to justly minimize warming and that could become key demands of climate movement organizations attempting to influence governments in the Global North. While there are stigmas associated with ecosocialism and degrowth, the described strategies can be promoted without using these terms. Articulating specific strategies for system change is necessary to challenge the powerful actors and interests that continue to maintain the status quo and our current climate trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social-theoretical assumptions and assesses the potential effectiveness of holding carbon-intensive corporations legally accountable for climate change harms. We argue that the structure of private corporations operating in a growth-dependent capitalist social formation is the problem, not concrete companies. Ignoring social structure has practical consequences. Assuming favourable court outcomes in the future – a questionable assumption considering remaining procedural obstacles and the status quo-preserving tendencies of law –, bringing claims against corporations for civil wrongs will remain ineffective as a mitigation strategy because many carbon-intensive corporations can absorb substantial lawsuit-related costs and, even if legal costs push fossil fuel companies out of business, their competitors will step in to extract open reserves. Changing the law, rather than pursuing individual offenders, will necessarily need to provide more systemic recourse to environmental degradation. We recommend a potentially more effective mitigation strategy for which lawyers concerned about climate change could lend knowledge, resources, and time: fossil fuel nationalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the economic growth imperative not only drives climate change and created the conditions for the development and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic but is also the context for climate change inaction and ineffective responses to the pandemic. Focusing on the United States, the paper identifies pretenses for collective inaction on COVID-19 that are similar in content to familiar justifications for delay in climate action: (1) denialism, (2) individualism, and (3) techno-optimism. These justifications must be identified as strategies to maintain the status-quo and benefit the wealthy few while allowing avoidable human suffering and loss. Adequately addressing climate change and future pandemics requires overcoming these false narratives and transitioning to social conditions that are resilient, healthy, and sustainable – specifically conditions where social and ecological well-being are prioritized over economic growth for the sake of profit maximization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project clarifies the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification through analytical descriptions of reificatory modes of experience in social context. The experience of social constructions as fixed and unchangeable ("subjective reification") is manifest in four interrelated experiential modes: (1) doxa, taking the social world for granted; (2) identification, experiencing abstractions as realer than particular objects; (3) enframing, the experience of means (technology and economic production) as ends and ends (humanity and life) as means; and (4) detachment, experience after suspending genuine emotional engagement. Each experiential mode is rooted in historically contingent yet objective social conditions ("objective reification") and, thus, has a degree of validity – hence the power of reification, in comparison to legitimation, in social reproduction. Methodologically, the difficult path remains theorizing society as a totality without losing sight of its human formation with due attention to the everyday actors who reproduce and, every so often, challenge this totality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the concepts of metabolism and metabolic rift as a framework, this paper examines carbon geoengineering technologies as a solution to climate change and explores if it is possible to mend an ecological metabolic rift without fundamental changes in the social metabolic order. Carbon geoengineering technologies have become a key component of scenarios to limit the extent of global warming and are being discussed as a means to sequester carbon and, therefore, mend the carbon cycle. However, most applications of carbon geoengineering thus far do not result in net negative emissions. Strategies to make operations profitable result in neutral or positive, rather than negative, emissions. While these strategies have the potential to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations, the current social order constrains their use and effectiveness. Instead of being applied as part of the solution to climate change, carbon geoengineering is being strategically promoted by the fossil fuel industry in ways that serve to reproduce and maintain the current social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article expands upon the notion of ideology as a material phenomenon, usually in the form of institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices. It draws on Herbert Marcuse and related thinkers to conceptualize technological solutions to environmental problems as materialized ideological responses to social-ecological contradictions, which, by concealing these contradictions, reproduce existing social conditions. This article outlines a method of technology assessment as ideology critique that draws attention to: (1) the social determinants of the given technology; (2) whether the technology conceals or masks social-ecological contradictions; (3) whether the technology reproduces existing social conditions; and (4) whether the technology may be used for more rational or emancipatory ends in different social conditions. The examples of solar geoengineering and agricultural biotechnology are examined and it is found that, in each case, these technological solutions conceal social-ecological contradictions and support the current economic system and those benefiting from it, while precluding other alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Frankfurt School formulated a negative dialectics that keeps open the possibility for alternative social futures by explaining and diagnosing the non-existence of 'real possibilities' to actualize a better world. Ernst Bloch's category of 'mere possibility' makes a 'warmer' negative dialectics viable, a form that faces a grim reality head on yet loosens the prohibition against identifying pathways toward alternative social futures latent in social conditions, possibilities with the potentiality (the objective-external dimension of possibility), but lack the capacity (the subjective-internal dimension of possibility), to become actual. This allows negative dialectics to engage in relatively programmatic 'prospect-exploration' when tackling dire issues like climate change, even if the proposed solutions are deficient. Identifying merely possible climate change solutions skirts three problematic tendencies in prescriptive assessments of climate politics: (1) promoting the continuation of ineffective mitigation strategies (e.g., carbon markets), (2) calling for a revolution without a revolutionary subject, and (3) fatalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, a wave of climate change activism emerged in response to calls from scientists for urgent, unprecedented, and far-reaching changes to address the climate crisis. Three social movements, Extinction Rebellion, Fridays for Future, and the Sunrise Movement, have received the most attention and continue to grow. Synthesizing and integrating Erik Olin Wright's theories of social transformation, the authors apply Wright's work to analyze these movements and identify barriers and opportunities moving forward. While significant forces of social reproduction continue to shape politics and constrain climate action, unintended social consequences combined with new social movements are ripening conditions for transformation. The authors identify non-reformist reforms, a forceful form of symbiotic transformation pushed forward by social movements, as the most likely strategy to address the climate crisis and catalyze broader emancipatory transformation. While climate movements face significant opposition, they continue to grow and create a stronger trajectory for deep social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how nonhuman animals, along with land and labor, represent fictitious commodities as described by Karl Polanyi. Animals in agriculture are examined as an extreme example of animal commodification whose use resembles the exploitation of land and labor. Conceptual frameworks developed from Marxist theory, including the subsumption of nature, the second contradiction of capitalism, and alienation, are applied to illustrate how the negative impacts to animals, the environment, and public health associated with animal agriculture are caused by attempts to overcome the incomplete commodification of animals. This article illustrates how social theory can be extended to apply to animals, especially animals who are deeply embedded in human society. The inclusion of animals in social analyses also serves to strengthen our overall understanding of exploitation and oppression under capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have societies failed to effectively respond to climate change? We address the question of climate change inaction by (1) examining how an unambiguously ominous report about climate change (IPCC 2018) was made palatable by news media and (2) explaining why climate change is typically unthematized in everyday life. Drawing on Adorno and Schutz, we develop a political‐economic theory of relevance. The imperative to accumulate capital is not only a social‐structural reality but also shapes why particular facts are regarded as relevant in experience (topical relevance) as well as how relevant material is interpreted (interpretative relevance) and acted toward (motivational relevance). Applying this framework, we (1) argue that media popularizations of the IPCC's dire Global Warming of 1.5°C (2018) are constituted by relevance systems conditioned by a capitalist social context and (2) strengthen Ollinaho's (2016) Schutzian explanation for climate change inaction by examining how productive relations and the culture industry perpetuate climate change irrelevance in everyday life. Schutz's framework helps conceptualize the intricacies of ideology and, when revised with Adorno's sociology, shines new light on an old question: the relations between social conditions and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectacular reassurance strategies, drawing from Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, refer to tactics that mitigate environmental concern and action while simultaneously maintaining or accelerating the social-structural causes of environmental harm. Three such strategies are identified here, each of which advances a critique of image-based, consumerist-oriented, and ineffective environmental politics. First, spectacular justifications for environmental harm are legitimations of environmental degradation based on values that paradoxically presuppose a livable environment. Second, spectacular environmental communication is the use of 'green' images and symbols that mitigate environmental concern and action. Third, spectacular environmental reform refers to policy or lifestyle changes that fail to alter the underlying systemic causes of the environmental crisis. Debord's prescriptive environmental politics are explicated and his conceptual framework is brought into conversation with overlapping theories and concepts influential in contemporary environmental political analysis: social practice theory, green governmentality, hegemony, and post-ecologist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geoengineering would mask and reproduce capital's contradictory needs to self-expand, on the one hand, and maintain a stable climate system, on the other. The Plan B frame, which presents geoengineering as a back-up plan to address climate change in case there is a failure to sufficiently reduce emissions (Plan A), is one means to depict this condition to the public and is a product of, and appeals to, a prevalent 'technological rationality'. Despite its misleading simplicity, logical flaws, and irrational rationality, the Plan B frame is a relatively valid representation of geoengineering in current political-economic conditions. Although the Plan B frame will gain traction because Plan A is too expensive in the short term and does not serve powerful interests, there are alternative social futures in which technology could be used to address climate change in ways that preserve the environment and reduce social risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists commonly hypothesise that experiencing the impacts of climate change will lead actors, including farmers, to desire to address climate change. It is increasingly clear that farmers can detect the regional biophysical expressions and impacts of climate change. However, this has not led farmers to desire to take action on climate change. This begs the question: how then are farmers interpreting these experiences? We argue that political‐economic context, the structural conditions of capitalist production, contributes to how farmers perceive and understand the impacts of climate change. We draw from our novel political economy of relevance theoretical framework and apply this framework to a sample of over 100 qualitative interviews with Iowa and Indiana row‐crop farmers. We focus on their experiences with heavy rain events, a key impact of climate change in the Midwest. Our findings suggest that farmers become aware of, interpret and respond to heavy rain events within the context of capitalist production. This leads most farmers to see heavy rain events as barriers to achieving capitalist goals, rather than as signals of the reconsider climate scepticism or the need to mitigate contributions to climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Work time reduction (WTR), or reductions in the total amount of time spent in paid work, and economic democracy, or shifting the control of firms from capitalists to workers, are discussed as strategies to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increase well-being. Along with numerous social benefits, reduced working hours are associated with reductions in GHG emissions, energy use, and ecological footprints. Economic democracy not only increases individual and group autonomy, but also creates conditions conducive to lower energy and material throughput. A successful implementation of WTR and/or economic democracy presupposes a renewed labor movement. One tactic to help revive the labor movement is highlighting its capacity to help fight climate change. Pairing WTR and economic democracy may help overcome the false antithesis between the interests of workers and the environment. There is a genuine "win-win" scenario for people and the climate via shorter working hours in democratically controlled workplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the commodification of nature. In addition, they increase risks to society and the domination of economic elites. While carbon markets further subject social and ecological relations to market mechanisms, we examine degrowth as a possible response to climate change that prioritises social and environmental goals over economic growth. While degrowth continues to be dismissed as impractical or impossible, a growing number of scholars, scientists and activists argue it is the only way to address global climate change. In contrast to carbon markets, we argue degrowth could represent a genuine Polanyian counter-movement in response to climate change. In addition, degrowth could help all those disenfranchised by market fundamentalism by addressing the triple crises related to the commodification of land, labour and money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goals of this project are twofold: (1) to show how research on, and normative-theoretical justifications for, public participation in environmental decision-making can inform discussions about how to improve global environmental governance (GEG) and (2) to present a series of questions that follow any attempt to scale up results from research on local, regional, and national public participation to meet global environmental challenges. It seeks to clarify what the ‘problem of scale’ means for democratizing GEG by classifying, and proposing partial answers to, multiple problems of scale: (1) The social barriers question: What political-economic barriers stand in the way? (2) The institutional formation question: What institutions need (re)forming? (3) The ‘who’ question: Who should participate and how should they be selected? (4) The procedural question: How and when should the global public participate? (5) The evaluative question: What are the criteria for process and outcome evaluation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]