Mastering nature

pp. 122-141

in: Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its radical critics, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1998

Abstract

The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man (Walter Benjamin).¹