The 'progressive' forces in this age of climate change and environmental degradation aim at making the (difficult) transition to a sustainable human way of life based on a sustainable, so-called 'circular', recycling economy. In the West, our relatively comfortable, even affluent, life style is to be sustained, supported by an efficiently productive economy that regulates and reduces its rate of exploitation of the Earth's natural resources. Sustainability suggests that the standard of living 'we' in the West have attained historically can be sustained and life can go on pretty much undisturbed, perhaps with some trade-offs. This is an important message for democratic electorates worried about holding on to their material standard of living and also for maintaining the status quo of our present world set-up.
It seems reasonable: the Earth's natural resources are finite (message from the Club of Rome in 1972), so 'our' exploitation and use of these natural resources must be brought within the finite bounds of what the Earth can sustain into the future, and these finite resources, it is claimed, ought to be fairly distributed. In particular, the emission of climate-changing greenhouse gases produced by energy generation must be brought under control through alternative, non-fossil-fuel technologies that can be developed and deployed at scale on an economically sustainable basis. 'Economically sustainable' translates here as profit-generating because, as everyone knows, a loss-making company or industry must inevitably disappear in the long run. On that front, sustainable energy generation seems to be a physical problem to be solved by techno-science within the parameters of economic efficiency, i.e. of profitability. The prospects of a 'green economy' are asserted to offer a win-win situation.
The criterion of profitability, in turn, is applicable specifically to our global capitalist economy which, in turn, requires huge amounts of energy in the physical sense to keep the capitalist production and circulation processes moving. Due to the nature of a capitalist economy, the huge amounts of physical energy required to keep the global economy ticking over nicely are ever-increasing. Why this is so is not a question of physics and techno-science, but of the nature of a capitalist economy itself, i.e. its essence, i.e. of what it is at core; and this essence is nothing physical, but, in a well-defined sense, meta-physical, i.e. beyond the realm of what all the physical techno-sciences deal with or even know about. For the physical sciences, energy is the physical movement of all kinds generated by a power, potential or force being realized. Such forces and the energy they generate, i.e. the movement they effect, are at the core of the physical sciences all the way from quantum mechanics, general relativity, chemistry, molecular biology, biology through to even today's neuroscience.
But the circular movement of capital in its myriad circuits (an entirely different kind of circular economy that has been with us for centuries) in itself is not a physical movement. Rather this circular movement is the accumulative movement of thingified value, about which not only the physical sciences, but also the social sciences, including even economics, know nothing. Thingified value, namely, is a meta-physical or, better, an ontological idea, that 'hides' from us, i.e. it remains invisible to our thinking as long as we do not think ontologically in order to bring the phenomenon of thingified value to light in adequate concepts. Any concept worth its salt is not merely one pertaining to the modern (positivist, empiricist) sciences, but to philosophical phenomenology. To characterize the principle of global movement of the world in its essential core as the accumulative, circular movement of total global thingified value must remain controversial. For today's scientifically based thinking and its innocuous mainstream philosophy, the very idea of thingified value must remain scandalous, ridiculous, invisible, for to conceive it, the ontological difference must be open for our thinking mind. But today it is not, and any attempt to reopen it is systematically repressed by the institutions of learning. Therefore we cannot properly decipher, interpret the world's movement and, above all, its infinite, destructive principle of movement. Insofar, today's struggle and striving for a 'sustainable, circular' economy in the energy-efficient sense remains misguided; it underestimates the depth of our dilemma.
If the never-ending accumulation of thingified value, or, in other words, its limitless valorization as the invisible Medium of economic sociation, is the principle of global movement — a kind of movement sui generis that cannot be mastered via efficient causality —, it is easily seen that this principle of movement is not a physical one that could be approached by considering the 'sustainable' generation of renewable energy. Rather, it is the limitless valorization of the Medium that demands the unbounded generation of physical energy, renewable or not, for the sake of sustaining its valorization endlessly. To be sure, the principle of movement of the Medium of globalized thingified value, its valorizing requires as its material human labour power and the Earth.
For, the valorization of thingified value is a formal movement in which thingified value circulates through its various forms, i.e. its 'sights', 'looks' or 'forms of appearance of its essence'. The term 'form' must be understood here in the non-trivial ontological sense of a Platonic idea: as the 'sight' or 'look' of the being of a being (or more deeply: its mode of essencing*). The 'sights' or 'looks' of thingified value (such as goods, services, wages, productive capital, loan capital, interest, landed property, ground-rent, net profit, dividends, etc.) and their interlinking in a circular movement remain uninterpretable, invisible as such for as long as the essence itself remains hidden. The forms of appearance on the surface encompass what we see and understand as various kinds of private property, which functions as the perfect cover-up for the Medium. As a formal movement, the valorization of thingified value is not only limitless, but also indifferent to its content, its material, which it exploits. Any and every possibility of profit-generation will do, no matter how harmful, destructive and hostile it is to humans and the Earth, e.g. wages paid to humans detract from maximum possible valorization. In its indifference, the limitless valorization is also senseless. As players in the gainful game, earning income and spending it as consumers, we are all entangled in this senseless, endless, augmentative movement that as such remains hidden as long as we do not think ontologically.
In view of its essential limitlessness, indifference, destructiveness and senselessness, how is this principle of global movement — the valorization of the Medium — to be squared with the striving for sustainability for the sake of the so-called 'survival' of future generations of the human species? This 'for-the-sake-of' already misconceives by presupposing and postulating unquestioningly what we are — a species of animal — rather than insistently asking who we are. Hence it is entirely and tragically misleading in a futile direction. We must first learn to conceive clearly the principle of global movement as the endless accumulation of the Medium of thingified value for us to assess the depth of our predicament as its character-mask bearers. Our continuing wilful blindness to the Medium, that both dissociates and associates, prevents us from seeing who we are become: competitive players in the gainful game enjoying individualized personal freedom in the pursuit of income. The most ruthless players, the capitalist corporations, are unknowingly the most loyal devotees to the principle of the Medium's endless valorization, and insofar just as much subject to the ambiguity of competitive freedom, on the one hand, and subjugation to the Medium's valorization, on the other. Blaming certain players in the gainful game for our dire predicament amounts to remaining on the surface, oblivious to the Medium's relentless valorization below.
Further reading: Social Ontology of Whoness.
An Invisible Global Social Value.
On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo.
Tale of the Qua: A Philosophical Comedy.
Song: Extinction.
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