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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'. [...]