Whatever the hell that is.

Toward cyborg socialism – People’s World

[T]he failure of the American left to engage more substantially on environmental issues at home has real consequences for the expansion of neoliberalism worldwide.

The history of environmentalism is littered with Malthusianism, ecological determinism, biological essentialism, and neocolonial conservationism. Left skepticism of – or perhaps more accurately, indifference to – engagement with ecological politics is certainly understandable. But we’re not talking about preserving an idealized concept of pristine, untouched nature – we’re talking about the world we choose to make, and the world we’ll have to live in.

Green dominates the environmental landscape, from the light greenwash of “sustainable lifestyles” to the dark green of deep ecologists. But environmentalism is also black lung disease in coal-mining towns and toxic brownfields in urban neighborhoods, the iridescent sheen of an oil spill and the translucent white of melting polar ice caps.

And so I cringe a bit at the term ecosocialism – it’s too earth-toned. What we need is a cyborg socialism that points not to the primacy of ecology, but to the integration of natural and social, organic and industrial, ecological and technological; that recognizes human transformations of the natural world without simply asserting domination over it.