Inviting Critical Political Economy to the Table
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COMMENTARY
Inviting Critical Political Economy to the Table Toby Miller 1,2 Received: 6 October 2020 / Accepted: 5 November 2020 / Published online: 19 November 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Keywords Critical political economy . Environment . Climate change . Culture
1 Introduction It is a pleasure and an honor to be asked to comment on the diverse and engaging essays produced for this special issue. As a Professor of Cultural Studies, I learned much from all of them, both when they touched on areas where I knew something already and when the material was bracingly new. Rather than review them serially, as one might be expected to do, I have selected themes that emerge from reading the issue: activism versus/as scholarship; climate change denial; corporate social responsibility; communications technologies, environmental imaginaries, “technomagic,” and consumer activism, while referring to the papers in this special issue as appropriate. I treat these themes through a lens that may be new to some readers—critical political economy. Unlike bourgeois/neoclassical economics, critical political economy is based on the priority of labor and the environment rather than supply and demand. Its goals are social justice and sustainability. My goal here is to show in short form how critical political economy might contribute to understanding the topics this special issue has raised, tracking the life of science, commodities, technologies, and activism—whom they benefit and how.
2 Activism, scholarship, false dichotomies, and climate change denial Since 2012, Richard Maxwell and I have co-authored a monthly column called “Greening the Media” for Psychology Today, a popular magazine based in the USA (https:// www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/greening-the-media). Along with various other interventions, it’s part of our attempt to forward public awareness of the state of knowledge about the This article is part of the Special Issue on “Everyday Climate Cultures: Understanding the cultural politics of climate change” edited by Goodman, Doyle and Farrell
* Toby Miller [email protected]; http://www.tobymiller.org
1
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana—Cuajimalpa, Mexico City, Mexico
2
Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
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Climatic Change (2020) 163:155–160
environment and expose the efforts of astroturf front organizations and corporate miscreants to mislead people about climate science. We get comments that variously describe us as socialists (true), Nazis (not so), and crazed leftists driving the nation’s children to ruin (?). When we report the state of science, we are frequently told by readers that this knowledge is false. So I have some sense of the stakes here, outlined so powerfully—and much more importantly—by Michael Mann (Mann and Toles 2016). And I am struck by the false dichotomy between science and advocacy that underpins distinctions drawn by reactionaries and radicals, academics and activists alike. As my colleagues and I have argued (e.g., Maxwell and Miller 2012, 2020, Miller 2018a, 2018b), almost
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