Sustaining Generativity under Epistemic Capitalism: A Praxis for the Epistemic Proletariat

This paper develops a praxis for sustaining inquiry under unequal control of its material and institutional conditions. It defines the epistemic proletariat relationally through the dependence of inquiry-capable people and collectives on externally governed means of production and reproduction. Historical materialist diagnosis is joined to a differentiated account of ocean–atmosphere dynamics and to conditional models of viable action. Oceanic transport, water–property transformation, air–sea exchange, topographic mediation, waves, and moving coastal boundaries supply distinct causal roles for conceptual construction. An explicit translation procedure connects these roles to social hypotheses. Process I, generative upwelling, concerns viable changes in access, capabilities, relations, and constraints. Process II concerns adaptive intervention under changing conditions, combining a revisable local model with supervision of action windows, controllability, uncertainty, and continuation. The analysis distinguishes field-mediated cost reduction, stable transient amplification, critical slowing, and actual transition. Worked derivations establish how limited action depends on control channels, target geometry, response delay, and resource reserves. Generative layers are represented as overlapping regimes of constraint, with control and return operating across them. Reproduction and recirculation connect immediate outcomes to the possibility of subsequent inquiry and to collective changes in governing institutions. A constructed research-association case and bounded historical contrasts clarify the scope of the framework. The contribution is an integrated theoretical account of viable access, timed intervention, and governed continuation. Physical laws and mathematical results remain distinct from empirical social explanation and situated normative judgment.