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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Domestic labour being fought over by black and white feminists

the union Was tour state had been recruited. Given the enormous dithculties ot or- ganizing domestics, however, this was hardly a small accomplish- ment. White women-feminists included-have revealed a historical reluctance to acknowledge the struggles of household workers. They have rarely been involved in the Sisyphean task of ameliorat- ing the conditions of domestic service. The convenient omission of household workers' problems from the programs of "middle- class" feminists past and present has often turned out to be a veiled justification—at least on the part of the affluent women_ of their own exploitative treatment of their maids. In 1902 the author of an article entitled "A Nine-Hour Day for Domestic Servants" described a conversation with a feminist friend who had asked her to sign a petition urging employers to furnish seats for women clerks. "The girls," she said, "have to stand on their feet ten hours a day and it makes my heart ache to see their tired faces." "Mrs. Jones," said I, "how many hours a day does your maid stand upon her feet?" "Why, I don't know," she gasped, "five or six I suppose. "At what time does she rise?" "At six." "And at what hour does she finish at night?" "Oh, about eight, I think, generally." "That makes fourteen hours.• •.. (S)he can often sit down at her work." "At what work? Washing? Ironing? Sweeping? Making beds? Cooking? Washing dishes? ... Perhaps she sits for two hours at

her meals and preparing vegetables, and four days in the week she has an hour in the afternoon. According to that, your maid is on her feet at least eleven hours a day with a score of stair-climbings included. It seems to me that her case is more pitiable than that of the store clerk." My caller rose with red cheeks and flashing eyes. "My maid always has Sunday after dinner," she said "Yes, but the clerk has all day Sunday. Please don't go until I have signed that petition. No one would be more thankful than I to see the clerks have a chance to sit ... "39 This feminist activist was perpetrating the very oppression she protested. Yet her contradictory behavior and her inordinate in- sensitivity are not without explanation, for people who work as servants are generally viewed as less than human beings. Inherent in the dynamic of the master-servant (or mistress-maid) relation- ship, said the philosopher Hegel, is the constant striving to annihi- late the consciousness of the servant. The clerk referred to in the conversation was a wage laborer—a human being possessing at least a modicum of independence from her employer and her work. The servant, on the other hand, labored solely for the purpose of satisfying her mistress needs. Probably viewing her servant as a mere extension of herselt, the feminist could hardly be conscious of her own active role as an oppressor. As Angelina Grimke had declared in her Appeal to the Chris- tian Women of the South white women who did not challenge

Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Davis’ discussion of how transactionally (that is, feeling the need for immediate reciprocity, even at theirpartner’s expense) the women’s movement viewed solidarity with black men

There was a strong element ot political naiveté in Stanton's analysis of the conditions prevailing at the war's end, which meant that she was more vulnerable than ever to racist ideology. As soon as the Union Army triumphed over their Confederate opponents, she and her co-workers insisted that the Republican party reward them for their wartime efforts. The reward they demanded was woman suffrage—as if a deal had been made; as if women's rights proponents had fought for the defeat of slavery with the understanding that their prize would be the vote. Of course the Republicans did not lend their support to woman suffrage after the Union victory was won. But it was not so much because they were men, it was rather because, as politicians, they were beholden to the dominant economic interests of the period Insofar as the military contest between the North and the South was a war to overthrow the Southern slaveholding class, it was a war which had been basically conducted in the interests of the Northern bourgeoisie, i.e., the young and enthusiastic industrial capitalists who found their political voice in the Republican party. The Northern capitalists sought economic control over the entire nation. Their struggle against the Southern slaveocracy did not therefore mean that they supported the liberation of Black men or women as human beings. If woman suffrage was not to be included in the postwar agenda of the Republican party, neither were the innate political rights of Black people of any real concern to these triumphant politi- cians. That they conceded the necessity of extending the vote to newly emancipated Black men in the South did not imply that they favored Black males over white females. Black male suffrage —as spelled out in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments proposed by the Republicans—was a tactical move designed to ensure the political hegemony of the Republican party in the chaotic postwar South. The Republican Senate leader Charles Sumne…

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Sojourner Truth intervening against hecklers in early women’s movement meetings

BARLY WOMEN'S RIGHTS CAMPAIGN 61 female weakness was incompatible with sutrage-and she did this with irrefutable logic. The leader of the provocateurs had argued that it was ridiculous for women to desire the vote, since they could not even walk over a puddle or get into a carriage without the help of a man. Sojourner Truth pointed out with compelling simplicity that she herself had never been helped over mud puddles or into carriages. "And ain't I a woman?" With a voice like "rolling thunder,"44 she said, . "Look at me! Look at my arm," and rolled up her sleeve to reveal the "tremendous muscu- lar power" of her arm.45 I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't l a woman?46 As the only Black woman attending the Akron convention, Sojourner Truth had done what not one of her timid white sisters was capable of doing. According to the chairperson, "there were very few women in those days who dared to 'speak in meeting. Having powerfully pleaded the cause of her sex, having com- manded the attention of the white women as well as their disrup- 1a. She had not only dealt a

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Davis does a good job of showing the women’s movement was already integrated with the class movement, even if the big conventions weren’t

EARLY WOMEN'S RIGHTS CAMPAIGN 55 oppression they suffered as women and as industrial workers. In Dover, New Hampshire, for example, the mill women walked off the job in 1828 to dramatize their opposition to newly instituted restrictions. They "shocked the community by parading with banners and flags, shooting off gunpowder."27 By the summer of 1840, when the Seneca Falls Convention took place, conditions in the mills—-hardly ideal to begin with- had deteriorated to such an extent that the New England farmers' daughters were fast becoming a minority in the textile labor force. Replacing the women from "well-born," " "Yankee" backgrounds were immigrant women who, like their fathers, brothers and husbands, were becoming the industrial proletariat of the nation. These women—unlike their predecessors, whose families owned land— had nothing to rely upon but their labor power. When they resisted, they were fighting for their right to survive. They fought so passionately that "in the 1840's, women workers were in the leadership of labor militancy in the United States. Campaigning for the ten-hour day, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association presented petitions to the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1843 and 1844. When the Legislature agreed to hold public hearings, the Lowell women acquired the distinc- tion of winning the very first investigation of labor conditions by a government body in the history of the United States. 29 This was clearly a blow for women's rights-and it predated, by four years, the official launching of the women's movement. Judging from the struggles conducted by white working women -their relentless defense of their dignity as workers and as women, their conscious as well as implicit challenges to the sexist ideology of womanhood-they had more than earned the right to ore of the women's movement. But their trail- hers ex-

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Angela Davis describing Frederick Douglass’ role in the first American Women’s Rights convention passing a pro-suffrage resolution

EARLY WOMEN'S RIGHTS CAMPAIGN 51 refuted. If intelligence is the only true and rational basis of govern- ment, it follows that that is the best government which draws its life and power from the largest sources of wisdom, energy and goodness at its command. 15 Among the approximately three hundred women and men at- tending the Seneca Falls Convention, the issue of electoral power for women was the only major point of contention: the suffrage resolution alone was not unanimously endorsed. That the contro- versial proposal was presented at all, however, was due to Freder- ick Douglass' willingness to second Stanton's motion and to employ his oratorical abilities in defense of women's right to vote. 16 During those early days when women's rights was not yet a legitimate cause, when woman suffrage was unfamiliar and un- popular as a demand, Frederick Douglass publicly agitated for the political equality of women. In the immediate aftermath of the Seneca Falls Convention, he published an editorial in his newspa- per, the North Star. Entitled "The Rights of Women," its con- tent was quite radical for the times: In respect to political rights, we hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for men. We go further, and express our conviction that all political rights which it is expedient for men to exercise, it is equally so for woman. All that distinguishes man as an intelligent and accountable being, is equally true of woman, and if that govern- ment only is just which governs by the free consent of the governed, there can be no reason in the world for denying to woman the exercise of the elective franchise, or a hand in making and adminis-

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Tag yourself in a tall mountain review

Hardest and best experience of my life - 5 stars

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The story for women, who do not need to disidentify with the mother, and who consequently are prepared to be viewed the same way as the boy views his mother

boy's early difficulty seems to occur in making the switch to a mascu- I emale development that leads to masochism. Whereas the line identification, the girl requires no such shift in identification away from her mother. This makes her identity less problematic, but it is a disadvantage in that she possesses no obvious way of disidentifying from her mother, no hallmark of separateness. The feminine tendency therefore is not to emphasize but to underplay independence. As Chodorow has argued, mothers tend to identify more strongly with their daughters; whereas they push their sons out of the nest, they have greater difficulty separating from daughters.38 Thus it is more likely that girls would fear separateness and tend to sustain the tie to mother through compliance and self-denial. If not acute, this tendency would be unremarkable. But the girl's relationship to the mother,

emphasizing merging and continuity at the expense of individuality and independence, provides fertile ground for submission. Submission, as we saw in Story of O, is often motivated by the fear of separation and abandonment; masochism reflects the inability to express one's own desire and agency. In submission, even the fulfill- ment of desire is made to appear as the expression of the other's will. The masochist abrogates her will because the exercise of independence is experienced as dangerous. To the extent that the mother has sacri- ficed her own independence, the girl's attempt at independence would represent an assertion of power for which she has no basis in identifica- tion. (As we shall see in chapter 3, the girl may identify with her father, but this has its own difficulties.) The girl's sense of self is shaped by the realization that her mother's source of power resides in her self-sacrifice. For the girl the agony of asserting difference is that she will destroy (internally) her mother, who is not only an object of love but also a mainstay of identity. Thus she protects the all-good, all- powerful maternal object, at the price of compliance. She becomes unable to distinguish what she wants from what mother wants. The fear of separation and difference has been transposed into submission.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The way that gendering in a world where mothers handle the majority of childcare developmentally leads to misogyny, according to Jessica Benjamin

attached. This process of disidentification 2 explains the repudiation of the mother that underlies conventional masculine identity formation, and results in a kind of "fault line" running through the male achieve- ment of individuality. The tendency of erotic love to become erotic domination can be seen as a casualty of this characteristically male form of establishing separation. The need to sever the identification with the mother in order to be confirmed both as a separate person and as a male person and for the boy these are hard to distinguish-often prevents the boy from recognizing his mother. She is not seen as an independent person (another subject), but as something other—as nature, as an instrument or object, as less than human. The premise of his independence is to say, "I am nothing like she who cares for me." An objectifying attitude comes to replace the earlier interactions of infancy in which mutual recognition and proud assertion could still coexist. Male identity, as Nancy Chodorow points out, emphasizes only one side of the balance of differentiation-difference over sharing, separation over connec- tion, boundaries over communion, self-sufficiency over dependency.. In breaking the identification with and dependency on mother, the boy is in danger of losing his capacity for mutual recognition alto- gether. The emotional attunement and bodily harmony that character- ized his infantile exchange with mother now threaten his identity. He is, of course, able cognitively to accept the principle that the other is separate, but without the experience of empathy and shared feeling that can unite separate subjectivities. Instead, the other, especially the female other, is related to as object. When this relationship with the other as object is generalized, rationality substitutes for affective ex- change with the other 34 This rationality bypasses real recognition of the other's subjectivity. The process might be called "false differentia- tion."

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

The ‘good side’ of sado-masochism that doesn’t fit neatly into the master-slave dialectic according to Jessica Benjamin

This compliance is associated with another kind of failed childhood destruction, one in which the self has not survived. The "masochistic" child has endured not caving in but retaliation, in the form of either punishment or withdrawal. He destroys the other only in fantasy; he will never take a full swing at the parent to test if she will survive. His rage is turned inward and apparently spares the other, yet the loss of a viable external other overshadows the struggle to differentiate. The masochist despairs of ever holding the attention or winning the recognition of the other, of being securely held in the other's mind. Contemporary Freudian ego psychology has often understood sub- mission as a failure to separate and as an inhibition of aggression. But, as Ghent suggests, framing masochism as the desire for self-discovery in the space provided by the other allows us to recognize the wish as well as the defense. The masochist's self is "false" because, lacking this space, he has not been able to realize the desire and agency that come from within. He has not experienced his impulses and acts as his own, arsing without direction from outside. This experience is what he longs for, although he may not know it.28 Masochism can be seen, therefore, not only as a strategy for escaping aloneness, but also as a search for aloneness with the other: by letting the other remain in control, the masochist hopes to find a "safe" open space in which to abandon the protective false self and allow the nascent, hidden self to emerge. Within this space, he seeks an opportu- nity for Winnicott's transitional experience free of the self-conscious-

ness and adaptation that inhibit him. The masochist's wish to be reached, penetrated, found, released——a wish that can be expressed in the metaphor of violence as well as in metaphors of redemption-is the other side of the sadist's wish to discover the other. The masochist's wish to experience his authentic, inner reality in the company of an other parallels the sadist's wish to get outside the self into a shared reality. These dynamics, then, are not merely the stuff of domination; they are also what make mutuality possible. They allow us to maintain connection so that we are not shut off from the world in the monadic capsule of the mind. Mental omnipotence signifies the absence of this connection, a breakdown of differentiation in which self is assimilated to other or other is assimilated to self. Internalization then replaces interaction or exchange with the outside. The state of omnipotence, with its absence of tension, gives birth to domination. In the absence of a differentiated sense of self and other, the vital sharing between separate minds is replaced by almost exclu- sively complementary relationships. In infancy, the complementary interaction, in which the parent facilitates a positive change in the infant's states, is often a prelude to intersubjective sharing. The other must often do something to regulate, soothe, and make the self recep tive for such exchange. But increasingly the relationship should shift in emphasis from regulation to the true exchange of recognition itself.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Jessica Benjamin describing the contradiction of recognition via mother-infant play

THE BONDS OF LOVE depressed, or when baby is unresponsive and this makes mother anx- ious. Then we will see not just the absence of play, but a kind of anti-play in which the frustration of the search for recognition is Painfully apparent. The unsuccessful interaction is sometimes almost as finely tuned as the pleasurable one. With each effort of the baby to withdraw from the mother's stimulation, to avert his gaze, turn his head, pull his body away, the mother responds by "chasing" after the baby. 34 It is as if the mother anticipates her baby's withdrawal with split-second accuracy and can only read his message to give space as a frustration of her own efforts to be recognized. Just as the baby's positive response can make the mother feel affirmed in her being, the baby's unresponsiveness can amount to a terrible destruction of her self-confidence as a mother. The mother who jiggles, pokes, looms, and shouts "look at me" to her unresponsive baby creates a negative cycle of recognition out of her own despair at not being recognized. Here in the earliest social interaction we see how the search for recognition can become a power struggle: how assertion becomes aggression. If we take this unsuccessful interaction as a model, we can see how the fine balance of mutual recognition goes awry. The child loses the opportunity for feeling united and attuned, as well as the opportunity for appreciating (knowing) his mother. He is never able to fully engage in or fully disentangle himself from this kind of sticky, frustrat- ing interaction. Neither separateness nor union is possible. Even as he is retreating he has to carefully monitor his mother's actions to get away from them: even withdrawal is not simple.35 Thus the child can never lose sight of the other, yet never see her clearly; never shut her out and never let her in. In the ideal balance, a person is able to be fully self-absorbed or fully receptive to the other, he is able to be alone

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Spinoza really saying facts over feels

Two chapter headings:

Of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions

Of the Power of the Intellect or of Human Freedom

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

She also has a good note reviewing the history of psychoanalysis of fascism

The first important psychoanalytic discussions of the problem of domination
occurred in the context of the triumph of fascism in Europe and the consequent
failures of lett-wing social movements. Wilhelm Reich, known for his work
in both the theoretical and the social pedagogy projects of the twenties, had
already begun formulating the idea that authority works through the repression
of instinct. His writings, The Mass Psychology of Fascism and "What Is Clas
Consciousness," represented the strongest defense of instinct against culture. The
alternate point of view, the defense of rational, democratic authority, emerged
in the work of the Frankfurt "critical theorists," Max Horkheimer, T. W.
Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and (for a short time) Erich Fromm. (See Studien über
Autorität und Familie.) The critical theorists affirmed Freud's view of the instincts
as dangerous, and gradually assumed the position of defending the old moral
authority of the paternal superego over the new "seamless" forms of domination
in mass society, fascist or bourgeois (see Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment; Horkheimer, "Authority and the Family Today"; Marcuse, "The
Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man"). Thus the antinomy of instinct
and civilization was reaffirmed, not resolved, by that generation of social
psychoanalytic theorists. This antinomy underlies the idea of the "fatherless
society" and the defense of paternal authority. See also Alexander Mitscherlich's
post-war analysis, Society Without the Father, and Russell Jacoby's discussion of
the Frankfurt theorists in Social Amnesia.
Rejecting instinct theory, but using Freud's notion of the mass leader /Group
Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego Erich Fromm developed the idea of the
search for the "magic helper" in Escape from Freedom. Fromm's emphasis on the
avoidance of anxiety rather than on instinct, while useful, lost sight of the erotic
nature of submission, and the fact that the primal parental relationship…

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

How Stormy sleeps knowing she scared the crap out of me

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Jessica Benjamin with a very helpful overview of object relations theory in a footnote

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Fellow writers: without any context, what’s the first line of your current work in progress?

Chapter 1 - The Woods

The shanty man waited anxiously for his precious cargo. Letters had been sent ahead with his signature, JR. The old man was coming to Fossmill

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Her reading of liberal neutrality, which I could be in favour of I think

For ex-
ample, those whose conception of the good involves widespread partici-
pation in civil society will find their good more fully secured by demo-
cratic equality than those who prefer to lead their lives in insular
religious cults. Democratic equality is therefore biased in favor of certain
conceptions of the good.
This objection misunderstands the point of neutrality. As Rawls has
stressed, given the fact the people hold conflicting conceptions of the
good, liberal states need some basis forjudging claims ofjustice that does
not rest on partisan views of the good. The point of view of citizens acting
collectively- the political point of view- does not claim authority in vir-
tue of promoting the objectively best or most important goods but in
virtue of being a possible object of collective willing. Neutral goods are
the goods we can reasonably agree to collectively provide, given the fact
of pluralism.94 Thus, the capabilities citizens need to function as equals
in civil society count as neutral goods for purposes ofjustice not because
everyone finds these capabilities equally valuable, but because reason-
able people can recognize that these form a legitimate basis for making
moral claims on one another.95 By contrast, reasonable persons need not
recognize the desire to build a temple to their god as a legitimate basis
for a claim to public subsidy. A person who does not worship that god
could reasonably object to the state taxing her to subsidize someone
else's involuntarily expensive religious desires.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Zionists having the temerity to call other people vicious

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Elizabeth Anderson's "What's the Point of Equality?", which argues for a socialist theory of justice ("democratic egalitarianism") kind of describing the biopolitics of neo-liberalism accidentally in criticizing luck egalitarianism

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

[hits bong] "Make the Little Abitibi Flow the Other Way": Blackflies and Labour Struggles in North Ontario(io)

A call for papers on Labour in the History of Rivers

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

My favourite scientific report (published in the British Medical Journal)

My most unfortunate experience
Eating a manchineel “beach apple’’
Last year I went on holiday with a
non-medical friend to the Caribbean
island of Tobago. On the first morning
we found one of those idyllic deserted
beaches, exactly as described in the
brochure: white sand, swaying palms,
turquoise sea. While searching for
exotic shells and coral fragments, I saw
some green fruits among the scattered
coconuts and mangoes lying on the
beach. They were round, the size of a
tangerine, and had apparently fallen
from a large tree with a silvery bole
and oblique based leaves.
I rashly took a bite from this fruit and found it pleasantly sweet.
My friend also partook (at my suggestion). Moments later we
noticed a strange peppery feeling in our mouths, which gradually
progressed to a burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the
throat. The symptoms worsened over a couple of hours until we
could barely swallow solid food because of the excruciating pain
and the feeling of a huge obstructing pharyngeal lump. Sadly, the
pain was exacerbated by most alcoholic beverages, although
mildly appeased by pina coladas, but more so by milk alone.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

This is partially the same reason why Marxists don't think of their social scientific inquiries as 'scientific' btw - the underlying thing changes too quickly and experiments are not under meaningful conditions (reading a statistics for reliability data textbook)

Laboratory tests are used widely, especially to test new materials and components
where there is little past experience. Such testing is generally expensive and may
have limited ability to predict product field reliability. Special care must be taken
to assure that test conditions can be related accurately to actual field conditions (as
described in Chapters 18-21, laboratory tests are often accelerated with the goal of
getting component reliability information more quickly). Carefully collected field
data, when available, provide the most accurate information about how components
and systems behave in the field. Field data collection, however, is also expensive.
Warranty data often have serious deficiencies. For example, warranty data often
contain no information on units that do not fail (see Robinson and McDonald, 1991,
for further discussion of this and other related issues). Ireson ( 1996) describes some
general issues relating to the collection and storage of reliability data. Reliability
handbooks and data banks can be useful (e.g., Klinger, Nakada, and Menendez,
1990,and MIL-HDBK 2 17E, 1986). One common complaint about such handbooks,
however, is that data become obsolete by the time they are published and that reported
hazard rates and failure probabilities may be off by an order of magnitude or more.
Technology, in many areas, is moving faster than accurate traditional reliability data
can be obtained. Expert knowledge is often used when no other source of information
is available. Unless data are collected from carefully conducted statistical studies,
quantifying uncertainty may be impossible.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Day 4 of my wife being out of town for a conference

A vista of the Oman coast near the Strait of Hormuz

Followed by a DM saying: What if we kissed in the Strait of Hormuz

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

That said, this is an important point in the Indian context

Industrial and commercial tariffs rose to compensate for India’s high levels of subsidies and theft, becoming some of the most expensive in the world. In states with powerful farmer lobbies, such as Punjab and Andhra Pradesh, this “zero-sum game” sometimes became explicit when governments imposed power cuts on industrial consumers rather than politically important agrarian constituencies (Kale 2014a). The proliferation of subsidies left many states’ power sectors financially crippled, creating a cycle of underinvestment and unreliable supply that particularly harms large consumers sensitive to the quality of power, and discourages private firms from moving into the distribution segment.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

That seems like a pretty major problem for the fossil developmentalism story - unless you have a story for the other 75-97% of India's carbon emissions

The surge in household electrification between 1981 and 2011, when power reached 650 million additional people, could directly explain only 3–4 percent of the huge rise in the country’s total emissions—though up to one-quarter indirectly (Pachauri 2014).

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

There's a tension here between two understandings of fossil capital - one being fossil consumers, the other, fossil producers. When Malm talks about fossil capital he often means the latter, who are pushers of fossil fuels due to the needs of M-C-M'. This only really shows that fossil consumers...

More than this, democracies tend to direct a greater share of electricity to residential rather than industrial consumers (Brown and Mobarak 2009). As this suggests, democratic politics appears to increase opportunities for other socioeconomic groups to challenge “fossil capitalist” interests, directing resources away from capital accumulation towards alternative objectives.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Electrification is thought of broadly as a right and an indication that your government serves you - rather than being something pushed by capital

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Decarbonization still takes the form of the centralized megaproject, and democratization mainly means "users are added to the grid"

Recent moves to decarbonize electricity sectors have so far more reinforced than disrupted the political logic of fossil developmentalism. In China and India, the rapid development of renewable energy has relied heavily upon state support to facilitate learning and investment, though green industrial policy has been rather more successful in the former (Lewis 2013). Both countries continue to favor huge, on-grid mega-projects such as solar parks, at the cost of the displacement, environmental damage, and local resistance that similarly characterized the earlier generation of big dams. Its advocates claim that decentralized renewables will usher in a new era of participatory “energy democracy,” emancipating marginalized communities through grassroots production. In many Asian countries, electrification has indeed brought a form of halting and incomplete democratization, as we shall see, but solely in the domain of consumption. State utilities and elites will give up control over centralized grid electricity only with the greatest reluctance.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

In the 90s there was a wave of liberalization of the power sector, but this was crested and has since blown over

For all their talk of liberalization, government agencies were reluctant to relinquish control over bureaucratic turf, natural resources, or the public utilities used to dispense populist electricity subsidies (Chen 2010). Lucrative private deals and public-private partnerships came to coexist with powerful upstream public corporations and politicized and increasingly insolvent public distribution utilities (Victor and Heller 2007). The resulting state- market hybrid systems produced a series of financial scandals and energy crises that further tarnished the so-called “World Bank template” for power reform. Both the political feasibility of the liberalization prescription and its very content were thus increasingly questioned.
Although multinational electricity corporations—including some Asian players, such as the Hong Kong firm China Light & Power—remain visible, there is a widespread sense among electricity practitioners that liberalization has had its day. Even its greatest advocates conceded that the sector’s unique characteristics make continued state intervention essential. As the liberalization template has lost its luster, public sector behemoths have flourished. Today the world’s largest utility is the State Grid Corporation of China, with operations across five continents and annual revenues of $339 billion in 2014. Such state-owned enterprises have not survived the liberalization era unchanged. Headed by entrepreneurial officials, the best of them have embraced market discipline while leveraging their political connections to secure resources and room for maneuver (Chatterjee 2017; Xu 2017). The state-led character of fossil developmentalism in Asia has thus proved remarkably resilient even in the face of sustained critiques.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

India's complete adoption of coal was guaranteed by the nationalization of coal, whereas China's adoption of coal was in part the result of market reforms that allowed coal to compete with hydro

Elsewhere in Asia, in any case, the window for post-fossil development was narrowing as coal dependence solidified. The degree to which fossil developmentalism had been internalized was visible in India’s first major energy planning document, which surveyed the sector in terms of “coal replacement units” (Government of India 1965). After the coal industry was nationalized amid the power shortages of the early 1970s, the country committed to coal as the pillar of its energy policy. In China, meanwhile, coal mining had briefly declined with the disruptions of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and on the eve of the reform era scarce electricity was seen as the major bottleneck restricting economic development. For a brief moment in the early 1980s it looked as though hydroelectricity had won the day, with the merger of the water and electricity ministries (Xu 2002: 89–90). Later that decade, however, decentralization and market reforms brought a rapid acceleration of coal mining.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

I feel like if the purest form of "fossil developmentalism" is a hydro dam, the concept may be misnamed

Worldwide, then, the postwar years witnessed rapid expansion of physical electricity assets not in the hands of private “fossil capitalists”—multinational electricity corporations had all but disappeared by 1978—but within broadly state-owned frameworks.
Once centralized electricity systems began to be installed, the logic of state-led gigantism took on its own momentum. Some scholars of Anglozone fossil capitalism have seen waterpower as a labor-friendly alternative to the early days of coal (Malm 2016). Yet in postcolonial Asia it was with hydroelectricity that the technonationalist pride and utilitarian calculations characteristic of fossil developmentalism found perhaps their purest expression. Dams were the temples of modern India, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru famously declared, consoling displaced villagers that “if you are to suffer, you should suffer in the interest of this country”

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Mentions the Communism = Soviet Power + Electrification formula

At the same time, new political considerations accelerated this convergence on centralization and state direction across the ideological spectrum. Science and technology were increasingly viewed as the key drivers of development. In Lenin’s famous formula, communism meant “soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country,” an association so close that incandescent bulbs became affectionately known as “Ilyich lamps.” The Soviet Union’s early prototype for later Five-Year Plans, the GOELRO plan, focused on a distinctively centralized mode of electrification as the pillar of economic modernization (Coopersmith 1992). France and Britain nationalized their electricity industries in 1946 and 1948. Even in the United States, powerful interests came to a monopolistic “utility consensus” in the early 1900s: private monopolies operated in non-competitive markets, supplemented by heavy state regulation (Hirsh 2000). The Great Depression prompted a new phase of intensive state intervention, aiming to alleviate market failures through federal mega-initiatives like the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Rural Electrification Administration, which more than doubled the number of electrified American farms in just its first five years. At least in the energy realm, then, the most iconic avatars of market capitalism and socialist planning in certain respects looked remarkably similar at least until the 1980s. Both the Soviet Union and the United States pursued energy-intensive heavy industrialization, while preserving a crucial guiding role for the state. The difference may simply have been in their degree of efficiency and environmental destructiveness (Allen 2003).

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

Coal extraction was done privately by the Qing dynasty, not due to foreign investment

The relationship between imperialism, geology, and coal was still more complicated in China, where formal European colonialism advanced little beyond port concessions and asymmetric trade treaties. As in India, initial interest in the country’s vast mineral resources was provoked by Western geologists (Wu 2015). Yet further exploration did not simply follow the India model, whereby Europeans established key institutions and amassed data. After training in various European schools—there was no single model of European geological knowledge to be passively assimilated in any case—Chinese researchers established their own geological society, surveys, and journal, trained their own students, and became increasingly bound up with nationalist projects of resistance to the European powers (Shen 2014). As in India, politically connected Chinese entrepreneurs and European engineers together established the first mines and energy-intensive industries. From the 1900s the Qing state increasingly moved to take direct control of mining rights (Wu 2015, 96–147). Nationalists increasingly argued that fossil fuel exploitation was essential for economic development and to resist further European encroachments.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

When you accept electrification as the framing, then the big bad for fossil fuel adoption is "fossil developmentalism" rather than "fossil capitalism" - a state-driven process rather than capital-driven

The article then turns to examine Asian energy sectors and the Great Acceleration. Rather than an imitation of Anglozone fossil capitalism and its logic of commodification, the expansion of electricity across Asia is more accurately characterized as a broadly shared moral project of fossil developmentalism. It was not private capitalists but the state that led electrification, especially favoring monumental mega-projects—an emphasis that persists despite more recent global turns towards electricity liberalization and renewable energy.

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

The background here, Malm is a 'capitalocene' theorist in this framework

The comparative stability of the Holocene climate is coming to an end. Our planet has instead entered the “Anthropocene,” increasing numbers of natural scientists and cultural critics agree, a new epoch in which humanity’s influence has reached geological scale. Stratigraphers may have begun to favor an official start-date of around 1950,1 but many historians and social scientists have responded with their own, quite different definitions.
The most influential of these critiques argues that the responsibility for our present environmental predicament lies in the commodification of nature at the hands of a narrow capitalist elite, and accordingly relabels the new epoch the “Capitalocene.” The exemplars are Britain during the First Industrial Revolution, where “fossil capitalism” was invented and exported, and the New World settler colonialism that fueled its emergence. Both of these accounts extrapolate global narratives from a narrow range of regional and temporal examples, centered on the socioeconomic dynamics of Atlantic colonialism or British industrialization. The rest of the world often appears in these accounts as a passive receptacle in which universal logics play out their inevitable historical course.
As scholars in these pages have recognized, recentering our field of vision on Asia complicates such grand narratives

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 05/06/2026

The whole screwworm thing seems like a winning issue, amazing how much it is DOGE’s fault

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Like the lung cancer risk ratio for smoking 10 or fewer cigarettes a day is >5 (and just goes up from there), and we're talking about a risk ratio here of, what 1.25?

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Pseudospectre @pseudospectre.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Can someone tell me if I'm crazy, I've heard that the alcohol is up there with smoking and it seems to me like all that's changed is that we've gone from a U shaped risk curve to a linear curve? And the risk ratios don't seem like they're really in the same universe as smoking?