It is hardly contentious that all modern science is materialist, including even psychology, that seems compelled to prove its scientific credentials by referring and reducing to neuronal processes. The social sciences, too, investigate the positive 'reality' of materially anchored, social practices and structures. But what is matter? Is it what can be perceived by the bodily senses and measured by various techniques and apparatuses to provide data for analysis? Is it what extended, physical beings are made of?
Already with the ancient Greeks, science (ἐπιστήμη _epistaemae_) focused on physical beings with size (μέγεθος _megethos_), extension (ἔκτασις _ektasis_) and mass (ὄνκος _onkos_). Their word for matter is ὕλη (_hulae_), which in its everyday usage covers all sorts of wood: a forest of trees, timber for building, firewood fuel. For the Greeks, the paradigmatic kind of matter is tree, from which the philosophical concept of matter is abstracted, or 'pulled off'.
Modern physics and chemistry would seem to have come a long way from this primitive Greek conception of matter, but is this truly the case? Modern physics has broken down matter into sub-atomic entities including protons, neutrons, electrons, and even stranger entities such as quarks and gluons holding them together like glue, and light itself, composed of streams of massless quantum entities called photons (from Greek φῶς, _phos_ for 'light'). Light is the purest form of energy, consisting of massless photons travelling at maximum physical speed c, the speed of light, thus representing the purest form of transformation of matter into movement, as expressed in Einstein's famous equation E=m.c^2.
In the present globalized world, energy is of vital importance not just physically by powering the movement of all sorts of technological things in production processes, but prior to that, and even more so, in powering such technological things for the sake of keeping valorization of the Medium going, i.e. the endless circular movement of thingified value going through its various value-form transformations to generate surplus-value. The hidden global imperative is that thingified value endlessly augment.
Although the valorization movement of thingified value is purely formal and infinite, it also requires the physical movements of production and circulation, including the activity of human labour, for its endless augmentation. Only by virtue of valorization of the Medium being endless does it have also an endless need for physical energy to drive all the necessary physical movements, enhanced by various technologies for the sake of cost-cutting productivity increases that, in turn, enhance the generation of surplus value.
These technologies have long since liberated themselves from a reliance on matter in the Greek sense, i.e. on wood. Technological devices and buildings are no longer made merely of wood, and energy is no longer provided by burning firewood. We moderns flatter ourselves that we have long since surpassed what a Greek carpenter can do with timber or a Greek blacksmith can achieve with a hammer, anvil and a charcoal fire. We have moved on to more sophisticated fuels as energy sources such as coal, oil and natural gas. All these so-called fossil fuels, however, derive from decomposed trees extracted from the Earth's crust. Trees decompose over geological æons into solid coal, liquid oil and gaseous natural gas, and all three fossil fuels can be burnt to generate electric current that is today the preferred power source for any physical movement, especially as required by valorization of the Medium.
It is even the case that liquid trees, i.e. mineral oil, is the material employed to make myriad kinds of plastics that are ubiquitous in today's world. Without the discovery of polymers, many modern technologies would be impossible, and our lives as players in the gainful game would not be so convenient, environmental pollution by plastics be damned.
The depletion of the Earth's huge deposits of fossil fuels by digging them up or otherwise extracting them, then burning them, has led inevitably, over frighteningly few centuries, to devastation of the Earth for the sake of endless valorization. Climate change, with devastating ramifications, including geopolitically, is upon us. Political efforts are being undertaken to accomplish the momentous shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources for the sake of sustainability. But who is seriously asking: sustainability of what?
Further reading: Laws of movement & Energy.
'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.
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