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__Without social struggles, the model of constructing counter-hegemony based on technological development is likely to become a project of imposing social transformation ‘from above’__. Intellectuals, technocrats and politicians come up with the ideas for realizing policies as they are supposed to know better in terms of how to effectively manage and mitigate the ecological and economic crisis. They will monopolize the power of decision-making about which technologies to use and how to use them. __Although scientific knowledge is undoubtedly indispensable, centralized and gigantic locking technologies, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to democratic control because they require top-down policies and management.__ Even the mitigation of the ecological crisis becomes a means of subordinating individuals to undemocratic and technocratic command from above. This is why Gorz warned that a project of Promethean modernism would end in the ‘negation of both politics and modernity’ (Gorz 2018: 48). This risk cannot be underestimated after the failure of the avant-garde socialist model in the 20th century.
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism
Kohei Saito
Political decision-making is, or at least should be, as much about expert knowledge as it is about the capacity to empathize with the perspectives of different groups of people – not simply because it is compassionate to do so, but because it leads to greater knowledge of social and economic realities that other people either can’t see or refuse to perceive.
The Unknowers
Linsey McGoey
Getting somebody to deny a belief for no reason is a first step toward making her incapable of having a self because she becomes incapable of weaving a coherent web of belief and desire. It makes her irrational, in a quite precise sense: She is unable to give a reason for her belief that fits together with her other beliefs. She becomes irrational not in the sense that she has lost contact with reality but in the sense that she can no longer rationalize - no longer justify herself to herself.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Richard Rorty
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