home » Projecting 19th-century ideologies onto decline @ Energy Bulletin

Projecting 19th-century ideologies onto decline @ Energy Bulletin

by Paula | 10 November 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: entrepreneurship, peak oil
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Jerry Silberman, a union organizer, has an article at Energy Bulletin which published the other day and which I missed until just now. Silberman’s article embodies the blind spots and problems with projecting the Marxist model onto decline I tried to articulate previously in Marxism is dead, too. I wrote:

The net result is a near total eradication of the concept “personal agency.” Nothing is worth accomplishing unless it accomplishes everything, and no one can achieve anything unless everyone achieves everything together.

Almost simultaneously, Silberman wrote:

Don’t Bail Out this System – Let Us Bail Out of It, Altogether

We have already seen the federal government generate $1 trillion in an effort to blow another bubble. There will be additional requests for bail outs and “economic stimulus”. The instinct that led the overwhelming majority of Americans to oppose the Wall St Bailout of early October is the foundation on which to organize. We must demand that all future efforts at solutions build new values of economic justice, sustainability, and sufficiency into all policies and appropriations.

Silberman is calling for everyone to accomplish everything, all together. No sense of boundaries; no sense of personal agency.

Silberman misses the entire point of popular sentiment against the bailouts. It is rooted in the exact opposite logic that Silberman advocates: Wall Street made its own bed, now it should lie in it. In other words, let the markets dole out punishment where it is due.

After a lengthy discussion of why the concept of ROI is dead, Silberman thinks we should demand that “all future efforts at solutions build new values of economic justice, sustainability, and sufficiency into all policies and appropriations.”

I have just one question for Silberman: how do you expect to pay for such things if everyone jumps on the anti-ROI bandwagon together? There is no bailout money for anyone, not even the most disadvantaged people and most dire environmental problems, unless businesses and entrepreneurs are generating sufficient ROI to pay the enormous taxes such a proposition entails.

Marxist solutions suffer from diminishing returns of their own because Marxism is itself a product of capitalism and is equally rooted in the notion of permanent growth: it must take over everything, everywhere, so that everyone can achieve everything together. It must continually expand until no individual, no issue, no patch of ground lies outside its physical and intellectual grasp. Catabolic collapse is built into its lifecycle.

Collecting everyone together to demand this, that, and the other from a government in the process of being hollowed out is not only not the answer, it prevents genuinely effective responses from bubbling to the surface. Projecting 19th-century ideologies onto 21st-century decline is not the way forward. The way forward is decentralized networks of decentralized networks of autonomous economic actors who are smart enough to align resiliency with self-interest — a definitively entrepreneurial endeavor.

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