Jesse Goldstein
Jesse Goldstein is a PhD candidate in Sociology at CUNY’s Graduate Center. His research aims to understand the shifting forms that waste has taken through the history of capitalism. His dissertation focuses specifically on how proposals to ‘green’ capitalism are re-working the category of waste, which is increasingly being articulated at the scale of impending planetary, or biospheric, destruction. Before coming to CUNY, Goldstein received an MA in Politics at York University, and before that was a practicing artist and member of the collective art studio Space 1026 in Philadelphia, Pa. He is a founding member of the Historical Materialism: New York organizing collective, and the Space Time Research Collective. His work has appeared in Capitalism, Nature and Socialism and Socialism and Democracy.
Collected Work
Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the Contradictions of Green Capitalism
In Planetary Improvement, Jesse Goldstein examines the cleantech entrepreneurial community in order to understand the limitations of environmental transformation within a capitalist system. Reporting on a series of investment pitches by cleantech entrepreneurs in New York City, Goldstein describes investor-friendly visions of incremental improvements to the industrial status quo that are hardly transformational. He explores a new “green spirit of capitalism,” a discourse of planetary improvement, that aims to “save the planet” by looking for “non-disruptive disruptions,” technologies that deliver “solutions” without changing much of what causes the underlying problems in the first place. Goldstein charts the rise of business environmentalism over the last half of the twentieth century and examines cleantech's unspoken assumptions of continuing cheap and abundant energy. Recounting the sometimes conflicting motivations of cleantech entrepreneurs and investors, he argues that the cleantech innovation ecosystem and its Schumpetarian dynamic of creative destruction are built around attempts to control creativity by demanding that transformational aspirations give way to short-term financial concerns. As a result, capitalist imperatives capture and stifle visions of sociotechnical possibility and transformation. Finally, he calls for a green spirit that goes beyond capitalism, in which sociotechnical experimentation is able to break free from the narrow bonds and relative privilege of cleantech entrepreneurs and the investors that control their fate.
“Net Zero and Settler Futurity”
Net Zero ideology promises that current and ongoing emissions can be partially offset by 'negative emissions' strategies such as carbon capture and sequestration, allowing carbon intensive firms to narrate themselves as agents that are solving—not causing—the climate crisis. This represents a shift in liberal and corporate environmentalism away from both denial and delay, towards a new strategy acknowledging the need to end fossil fuel use while urgently deferring transformations to a future made possible by not-yet developed technological innovations. Supporters see this as a sign that industry and governments are meaningfully considering the need to decarbonise, yet for detractors there is little faith in these narratives. This paper argues that a through-line of settler futurity provides affective infrastructure potent enough to transect opposing positions in minority world eco-politics, from pro-market green growth champions to pro-growth, anti-market ecosocialists. Settler futurity offers visions of possible and desirable futures where the affordances of modernity persist unchanged. To show how this infrastructure settles pro-capitalist and anti-systemic thinkers alike, I examine a variety of texts, from an industry-funded docuseries and a climate solutions book published by Bill Gates, to the ecosocialist work of Matt Huber. These strangely resonant environmentalisms comfort the discomforted, offering ontological security that 'this' life need not be undone in the pursuit of a viable and just future that extends abundance to all. Accordingly, settler futurity can be seen as an affectively charged presencing of the future, mobilising feelings of purpose, hope and confidence through promises to (eventually) become green, clean and carbon neutral. This raises important questions about what it might mean to work against/despite the allure of these pervasive narratives, which eliminate space for situating alternative visions, decolonial to degrowth. Unsettling settler environmentalism may require experimenting with approaches to confronting climate crisis that do not shy away from the difficult entanglements of life making and industrialised production, and that grapple with the affective work required to allow other futurities—and therefore other ways of living well with, against and beyond the fossil-fuelled, imperial-capitalist present—to exert their orienting presence.