Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Marx on cover of Time (Europe)
Time Magazine (European edition only)
Several articles go along with the familiar shaggy head of Karl Marx that appears on the cover.
Rethinking Marx
Dr. Crankley’s Children (cover story – reprint of a 1948 article, typical of the Cold War)
Stormy Weather
Potholes On the Path to Prosperity
Neither the cover nor the articles appear in the U.S. edition of Time.
From Rethinking Marx by Peter Gumbel:
… From Washington to Vladivostok, the task of warding off financial collapse and economic depression is now the overwhelming priority for government leaders, central bankers and regulators everywhere. Solutions differ, but all agree that the current situation is both dire and extremely perplexing: nobody younger than 80 has experienced such a rapid decline in global confidence and economic activity. Markets have failed, and in so doing they have destroyed the conventional wisdom about how to run an efficient economy. It’s as if an intellectual fog has descended, and the global positioning system has broken down, leaving the world to grope its way out as best it can. “Ask the experts what to do,” says Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, “and the most honest reply is ‘I don’t know.’ “
Searching the library for ideas, many have rediscovered the 1930s policy prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated massive government spending programs of the type now being promoted by U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others. Other great thinkers of the past are also being rediscovered, from Adam Smith to John Kenneth Galbraith. But hovering out there in the fog, unavoidably, is the towering specter of Karl Marx, the grandfather of political economists, whose damning critique of capitalism’s inadequacies played an outsized role in world history for a century after his death in 1883. (Read a TIME cover story on Marx.)
Marx’s utopian predictions about revolution and the triumph of socialism were dead wrong; indeed, many of the policies carried out in his name in the 20th century brought misery to millions in countries ranging from Russia to China, and including large chunks of Africa. Yet 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet-style socialism, it’s still instructive to take the Karl Marx road trip around Europe, starting in Trier and ending up where he ended, in London. It’s instructive because if you leave aside the prophetic, prescriptive parts of Marx’s writings, there’s a trenchant diagnosis of the underlying problems of a market economy that is surprisingly relevant even today. Marx, too, lived through an era of rapid globalization. (A famous passage in The Communist Manifesto, which he wrote with Friedrich Engels in 1848, is almost uncannily prescient about globalization’s costs and benefits.) He was moved by glaring inequalities between rich and poor that are more topical than ever today. He thought work should bring personal fulfillment, and that labor should not be treated as a simple commodity — foreshadowing today’s controversies over outsourcing and poor working conditions in developing countries. He wondered whether the middle class would be squeezed out of existence. And he identified how profits were taking an ever bigger share of the economy at the expense of wages, just as they are once again today.
There’s another reason why a journey through the places that marked Marx’s career is worthwhile. The intellectual debate about how to fix capitalism to ensure a more stable and just economic system is particularly lively in the three countries where he spent most of his life — Germany, France and Britain. Some version of this debate is taking place everywhere, of course, including Washington, where a new President is bringing in a new team with fresh ideas. It will also top the agenda at this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. It’s a difficult, nuanced debate, and even within those three European countries there are starkly differing visions. Yet there’s a strong sense that a new road map is needed. If governments “are not in a position to show that we can create a social order for the world in which such crises do not take place,” warns German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “then we’ll face stronger questions as to whether this is really the right economic system.”
(2 February 2009 issue)
My continuing prediction: socialism and Marx will make a comeback, even in the U.S. If economic conditions continue to deteriorate, the comeback will be stronger and faster than almost anyone expects.
Marxism is a complex system, and movements from all over the political spectrum have borrowed ideas from it. -BA
Coming Chaos? Maybe Not
The Oil Drum: Campfire
This essay was written by Michael W. Foley (TOD user greenuprising), a former professor in the social sciences at an eastern U.S. university who I now know as a local farmer. At a recent Farmers’ Market, I suggested that we needed a more empirical and scholarly discussion of the potential for social breakdown, especially violence, during energy descent. Thankfully, he agreed to write the following for The Oil Drum. – Jason Bradford (TOD)
A sizable subset of what some on this site call “doomers” are convinced that the demise of the petroleum economy will bring social breakdown and a violent struggle of all against all. Some are even preparing for the chaos to come. I’m convinced we have to take end-of-affluence scenarios, including the scarier ones, seriously. But it can help everyone confront these possibilities if we try to think more intricately about how people might respond. In particular, we need to face head-on the question whether social breakdown and violence are inevitable.
The concerns I’m adddressing here are pretty U.S.-centric, though I’m drawing on examples from around the world. Images of marauding bands sacking grocery stores and small farms and of neighbors guarding their hoards with shotguns mainly come out of the American imagination, I suspect. In places like Western Europe and Latin America, with old traditions of militant social organization, acute shortages might bring people out into the streets all right, even entailing looting and such (remember the Latin American “food riots” of the 70’s and 80’s?), but crystallizing pretty quickly into organized efforts to get governments to respond. But I’ll try to suggest some conclusions that might have broader relevance than the U.S.
First, some reasons to be concerned. As Richard Heinberg notes, we’re facing not just peak oil but “peak everything” — cheap energy, cheap food, abundant water with which to grow it, clean air and water and soil, a reliable climate, and government resources to deal with the cascading crises. The financial crisis and world recession/depression won’t be turned around by a few hundred billion dollars for the bankers, and “restarting growth” is little more than a recipe for widening the gap between the economy and the real, physical limitations of the planet.
(25 January 2009)
Slouching Towards the Barackalypse
Albert Bates, The Great Change
Watching the drama unfold in Washington last week, and listening to the sound as it echoed around the planet, I was struck by how bi-polar our shared political reality has become.
Many of us, probably the majority, are still hoping and praying that now that the wicked witch is dead, the Wizard will whisk us back to Kansas and Auntie Em will have a hot apple pie waiting. People in that category think either the recession will be shortened by Keynesian infusions and Rooseveltian public works, or if that fails and it enlarges into The Greater Depression, it will rebound eventually, perhaps a decade hence, just in time for the bulk of the baby boom to retire to their gated communities and golf courses, bent but unbroken.
The other hemisphere of our brain is populated with EROIers, Malthusiasts, the Club of Rome, 2012ers, and The Doomsayers of various stripes. Of course, one is only a “doomer” if one turns out to have been wrong. If one turns out to have been right, the better term is “visionary.”
We inhabit the bicameral mind of Joan of Arc or Nostradamus, and wonder, are the voices to be taken literally, or can we just write them off to hallucination?
… So if, in distant days, our progeny look back to where we coalesced our will, assembled our tattered permaculture army, joined hands between city and country, laid back the carbon under our desertifying farmland, and Hudson-River-landed our rusting steel spaceship into a brighter, more realistic future with a sustainable volume of frugal humans once again living in harmony with nature, then let them say this is where it began.
(25 January 2009)
Massive Corporate Layoffs Announced – Where Will New Jobs Come From?
Alex Knight, The End of Capitalism
A massive wave of layoffs was announced yesterday by 12 major US corporations, including Caterpillar, General Motors, Home Depot, Sprint Nextel and Pfizer. Microsoft also announced its first-ever mass layoffs of 5,000 workers. Overall, more than 75,000 jobs are being cut from the workforce after Unemployment levels were reported as 7.2% in December, the highest level in over 16 years, with no end to the bleeding in sight.
As more and more workers fill the unemployment rolls, it’s time to ask: where will future jobs come from? While government and corporate bigshots plan yet another “economic stimulus” and bailout of the banks, what long-term jobs can we realistically create right now?
Lots of answers present themselves if we look through the lens of peak oil, and start replacing our oil-based economy with a people-based economy. Instead of relying on greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels, we can tap into the power of human labor, which happens to be our greatest renewable resource.
Certainly there is a need to employ millions to weatherize homes and build and install solar panels and wind turbines (which Obama may address), but there is also a huge need to re-tool Detroit automakers to STOP producing gas-guzzling individual cars, and start making buses, trains and other forms of public transit. Bicycles are also desperately needed, so we need workers to build them and more to repair them too.
We also need lots more doctors and nurses if we make health care universally available, and social workers and therapists to help deal with the psychological trauma our population has suffered from militarism and soulless consumerism. Since many of these jobs require education and training, we need to hire lots more teachers, and we also need education to be a lot more affordable to so more people can access these kinds of careers.
Perhaps the largest gains in the job sector can be achieved by shifting food production away from mega-scale agribusinesses and fossil-fuel intensive monoculture and factory farms, towards community-based, local, organic, family farming and free-range livestock raising. By breaking up the huge corporate farms into family-size and community-size plots, we can repopulate rural America (and stop suburban sprawl), produce better, healthier food, respect animal rights, and create millions of new landowners. Simultaneously we can follow the example of Cuba and turn our blighted inner-cities into gardens, by utilizing permaculture and organic community-run agriculture, which would reduce crime and poverty in our decaying urban areas, bring quality food to places currently plagued by malnutrition, and create millions upon millions of rewarding and meaningful jobs.
How will we finance it?
(27 January 2009)
From the Left… -BA
