Breaking the Frame: Confronting Three Challenges of Techno-Utopianism (original) (raw)

It is now widely accepted that the ecological crisis and fourth industrial revolution are urgent concerns for political parties of all stripes. But how well these phenomena and their shared origin are understood is debatable. Can the Labour party, with its eclectic mixture of intellectual traditions, properly confront them? There is reason to doubt that either the current left or right of the party are capable of doing so, as both contain elements of a techno-utopianism that uncritically affirms instrumentalist thinking. And on the horizon lies perhaps the greatest manifestation of techno-utopianism yet: the biotechnological transformation of humanity itself. Successfully navigating these technological storms requires, firstly, a philosophically adequate understanding of their origins, and secondly, a rediscovery of the left’s ethical socialist heritage that can account for the intrinsic value of nature and the human condition.