Relations of Production

Although it is recognised that the individual and the external world are linked in complex and mutual ways and can only be treated together as one phenomenon there is little evidence that transactionalist approaches, despite potentially providing a truly distinctive approach for environmental psychology, have been fully understood or operationalised. We take as our starting point the theoretical proposition that individuals are the sum of their social relations, i.e., they are the cause and consequence of their relations to others and the environment. Therefore environmental psychology should give priority to examining the reciprocity between people and environment and the ways in which they mutually reproduce the material conditions for their existence. Drawing on the example of sustainable development, they argue that any attempt to develop a sustainable society has to understand how the relationships between individuals and their social contexts can be changed. Thus the emphasis in a transformative environmental psychology should shift to the relations of production and consumption and the social and political relations within which values, attitudes and behaviours are formed, and unsustainable ways of living and working as well as the environment are produced and reproduced.

In the German Ideology, Marx defines consciousness in terms of human conscious being in her real life-activity. Furthermore, in Capital, he conceives of conscious individuals (the capitalist and the worker) as ‘personifications of capital”—self-conscious capital. Such formulation does not refer to a top-down constitution of subject as an “ideological” sham as much as it signifies the formation of consciousness in face of human-made alienated and alienating structures, which eventually dominated their creators. The contradictory nature of dominating capitalist structures, on the other hand, yields the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory consciousness. Vygotsky’s analysis of the genesis of language, concepts, and consciousness, alongside Ilyenkov’s concept of the “ideal” facilitate a proper understanding of the process of formation and the ideological structure of consciousness. Consciousness is an “ideal” structure, where ideality defines the universal norms of a culture that the subject internalizes in order to conduct her life-activity. The ideal is conceptual; concept signifies the form of understanding the meaning. That being the case, the ideal is actualized through sign systems—first and foremost through language as a system of “reflexes of social contact,” formed in reaction to human-made stimuli such as words, which in turn act as stimuli that anticipate other reflexes. Thus, as an ideal structure, consciousness is real and objective; it signifies norms of historically specific, objective human activity concretized, actualized, and internalized in form of language (sign systems) as the means of production of meaning.

One of the differences between knowledge-production activity of Modern science and pre-Modern science and other systems of belief is that the former attributes a universal character to its product. This unique aspect of modern scientific activity is related to its conceptuality. Modern natural science develops in response to the social needs that are determined by the continuous demand of capital for self-valorisation. The conceptual structure of modern natural sciences is the consequence of sciences’ subsumption to capital and their realisation through the mediation of abstract labour. The universality of scientific knowledge is the expression of this mediation.

This paper puts forward an alternative view on sustainable development, arguing that the separation between the economy, the environment and the social in the Brundtland model obscures the societal character of the economy, the economic bases of the social, and the fact that the environment is a societal product. We differentiate between strong and weak sustainability arguing that the threat of environmental degradation can only be addressed at the level of the relations of production, consumption and political relations. Building on this perspective, we advocate a form of transformative environmental education which engages learners and teachers in a process of self-reflective transformation. We illustrate this through two examples: action competence and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

Production of meaning under capitalism is institutionalized (e.g. academia and schools). These social institutions have a two-fold function: they tend to standardize/stabilize the socially-produced meaning; they regulate the expansion of meaning by appropriating the surplus-meaning produced both within and without the institutionalized production. Lexicon functions as the “middle term” in the two-fold process of expansion-stabilization of meaning as it determines the socially acceptable sense and the to-be-appropriated surplus that amounts to the expansion of meaning. As lexicon subsumes the process of production of meaning, the expansion of the latter appears in a fetishistic form as the process of the self-movement of substance-subject—the Concept.

本研究連結全球化之下台灣的移民與產業議題。透過參與觀察與深度訪談，本書呈現新移民女性與中小企業結合的新現象：一方面，中小企業大量聘僱新移民女性成為生產主力，是企業得以成功「根留台灣」的關鍵因素；另一方面，為了兼顧母國原生家庭與台灣當地家庭的經濟需求，新移民女性進入製造業工廠工作，成為她們下半輩子「根留台灣」安身立命的重要基礎。在理論層面，本文修正Michael Burawoy的霸權理論，提出兩個主要論點：第一，把工作現場以外的外部結構帶入分析，建立一個更寬廣的理論架構，提出「工人的甘願在進行『結構中的選擇』時就已經產生」，反駁Burawoy所言甘願是在工作現場中才製造出來。第二，生產過程中的權力關係不是階級支配就能完全解釋，工作場所中的權力可能透過階級、性別、國族三種軸線的交錯關係來運作，既相互強化又交叉掩護，階級宰制關係得以更細膩而隱約的方式被執行，甚至轉化成甘願。本研究最後以「不對稱相依」（asymmetric interdependence）這個概念總結中小企業與新移民女性兩者之間的生產關係。