Labor, energy, and ecosocialist futures

In the debate between modernist and degrowth versions of ecosocialism, Paul Robbins’s (2019) cautious support for what he calls socialist modernism revolves around his claim that “the Earth economy … is trending towards higher levels of energy and lower levels of human labor” (p. 1). Is it inevitable that energy is abundant and workers are scarce? Is this situation good? In this short intervention, I suggest that the forces that make energy abundant and labor scarce, particularly in agriculture, are the very forces that have gotten us into the environmental mess that we are in. Getting out of it, or through it, might require breaking free from those conditions. Replacing workers with energy-using machines is, after all, how economies' throughputs have grown beyond critical sustainability thresholds. In an ecosocialist world, I argue, we will likely have more time to work on food provisioning and other tasks of production and subsistence, and less energy to fuel machines that might do these things for us