with Matthew Huber (Syracuse University) in English
Part of the Socialization in Theory and Practice research project led by Rabea Berfelde and Jacob Blumenfeld, funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung.
Topic
One of Marx’s key arguments in Capital is that capital lays the material conditions for socialism through the socialization of production (harnessing the cooperative powers of the collective workers and the social powers of science and technology). But he probably did not foresee the capacity of capital to arrest this process by breaking apart heavily socialized production systems – that is, de-socialization. Electricity represents socialized production par excellence – a physical grid infrastructure requiring socialized investment and central planning by its very nature. In the early 20th century United States, electricity was partially socialized through ‘progressive era’ public utility law and policy. Yet, starting in the 1970s, this model was demolished in favor of competition and markets – increasingly fragmenting grid governance into a dispersed and overlapping set of byzantine institutions. Where does this leave socialist electricity politics today (particularly in relation to the climate crisis and the centrality of electricity decarbonization)? I suggest the first step must be re-socialization.
Matthew T. Huber
Matthew T. Huber is Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author of Climate Changes as Class War (Verso, 2022) and Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom and the Forces of Capital (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)