home » Peak oil means Marxism is dead, too: breaking free of a 19th-century dichotomy

Peak oil means Marxism is dead, too: breaking free of a 19th-century dichotomy

by Paula | 8 November 2008 | permalink | comments
Tags: peak oil, entrepreneurship
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Recently I took part in two frustrating online conversations related to money and decline. I’d been trying to argue for the role of business and entrepreneurship in steering our economy into powerdown and as soft a landing as might be reasonably created. But those who actively follow peak oil and related issues, it seems, aren’t willing to consider any role for business, entrepreneurship or money in adapting to the changes at hand.

This is really tragic. Business is the one force to which everyone (in Western countries anyway) has access that affords the power to effect change on a mass scale. Business can change whole cultures, allocate resources at global scales, change the trajectories of nations. The power of the market is such that one person’s innovation can kick-start entire sectors of the economy in just a few years. And it is open to participation by absolutely anyone who knows how to use some basic communications technologies and is willing to learn on the fly. That’s a huge amount of access to power; but instead of seizing its opportunity, peak oilers turn their backs on it, vilifying those who would use it.

I have been scratching my head trying to understand where this extreme resistance comes from. It is related to an ideological bent toward Marxism, certainly, but why does it carry over to peak oil and decline issues? Marxism was born in reaction to growing industrialization, but what we face is de-industrialization. The entire physical plant that gives meaning to such concepts as “labor,” “workers,” “ownership of production,” and “wealth redistribution” is falling apart and cannot be rebuilt. Peak oil means Marx’s progression is as dead as globalization. Yet those who see the disintegration still cling to the prejudices of this ideology, born in reaction to 19th-century industrial economics.

In my opinion, and in my experience, the rejection of private ownership, business, and money is only superficially related to peak oil preparation. Below the surface it is rooted in boundary issues that get projected onto the entire landscape of decline. Every community-building effort in which I’ve ever been involved — about a half-dozen now altogether, and four related to relocalization — has functioned according to the rules of domestic rape: create an economic dependency, then assume unrestricted access to the dependent’s resources. Would-be community builders do not see where their individual selves end and another’s self begins. They have effectively no ownership over themselves — no boundaries — and see anyone else’s ownership of self and establishment of boundaries as a threat to their access to resources. The word “no” becomes grounds for rejection from the community, and fear becomes the crumbling mortar holding the community together for a time.

Lack of ownership over one’s self also makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to delineate between the end of one’s responsibility and the beginning of another’s, no way of determining where one has the power to effect change and where one does not. Without self-ownership and the boundaries it implies, a person’s responsibility seemingly extends to the whole world, as does everyone else’s. But no one can be responsible for the whole world; each person is finite, and when faced with Herculean responsibility the natural response is paralysis. 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.

When transferred from its 19th-century context and into an era of decline, Marxist ideology serves to validate this state of mind and to block individuals from recognizing and exercising personal agency. Rejection of ownership across wide swaths of the population translates into abdication of wide swaths economic responsibility that would ordinarily lie within the boundaries of individuals, effectively handing power to those who wield it irresponsibly; this reinforces rejection of ownership, generating deeper abdication of responsibility, and an even greater concentration of capital in irresponsible hands. The view from within this feedback loop reveals only one solution: eradicate ownership, and the concentration of capital into the wrong hands will stop. Everyone works together to eradicate ownership without even noticing that they are simultaneously eradicating personal agency at the granular level.

Many learned people have suggested that if Western society is to achieve sustainability, it must begin contracting economically — in other words, capitalism must be destroyed. I submit that those who favor such a “solution” need to come clean about their goals: are you trying to achieve sustainability, or are you trying to eliminate other peoples’ ability to say “no” to you?

The peak oil crowd needs to understand that by shutting down any discussion of the role of business in adapting to decline, it is actively preventing appropriate and sustainable responses from disseminating throughout the economy. From a business perspective, there is only one obstacle to be overcome in creating a sustainable society: profits need to be aligned with decreased consumption and increased well-being. That’s it. This is far from impossible; it only appears impossible when the only possible solution is to eliminate ownership and personal agency.

By way of example, a single permaculture landscaping company could create a relocalized and sustainable food supply faster than all the permaculture design classes in the world. It could also potentially give suburbia some productive role in a low-energy economy and save thousands of people from starving to death. Franchise this business model and its effects multiply in cities all over the country, if not the world. Take the company public, and suddenly self-sufficiency becomes something a whole lot of people can buy into, even those who do not own land, driving up demand for other peoples’ self-sufficiency. A handful of people driven by a strong sense of personal agency could make this happen in less than five years. This is profitability aligned with decreased consumption.

By way of another example, Derrick Jensen favors blowing up dams to save river ecosystems. Jensen’s desire to rescue river ecosystems would be better served if he were to raise stock for the project of dismantling the dam and then attach the future value of the stock to the health of the ecosystem. Decline in the health of the ecosystem means a decline in the value of the stock; increases in the health of the ecosystem mean an increase in the value of the stock. Everyone who’s invested would raise holy hell if someone else came along to put in a new dam, and they would have both environmental and business law on their side to stop it. This is profitability aligned with environmental sanity.

The crowning example of profits aligned with sustainability is the brainchild of Catherine Austin Fitts, which she calls the Solari model. Fitts no longer promotes her Solari model but has done the world a tremendous favor by making it available for free via Google video. A Solari is a financial corporation that amasses data about the flow of money within a particular neighborhood. Where it can, it renegotiates contracts such that money is prevented from leaving the neighborhood and reinvested locally — say, by hiring residents to carry out garbage collection rather than contracting with some far-off company, or by creating a fund in which residents can invest that then extends lower-interest credit to other locals to dig out of debt. Tracking and optimizing the wealth of a neighborhood causes the value of the Solari database to increase substantially, and it then issues stock against the value of the database: “A”-stocks are issued only to locals and allow for voting privileges but do not pay dividends; “B”-stocks are issued to anyone, pay dividends but do not allow voting privileges. Thus the Solari only profits as the well-being of the neighborhood increases, whether that be through environmental, social, financial, or other kinds of improvements.

This is not terribly complicated, but it took me the better part of a year to wrap my head around, not because it is so mysterious but because I could not get past my conviction that “wealth is bad.” I suspect Fitts stopped promoting her Solari model because most of her audience is comprised of people who wish to abolish private ownership and who have no sense of personal agency; without these, the Solari model — which really could potentially turn the whole Titanic around — is incomprehensible.

Environmentally and economically, our situation is dire. Time is of the essence. We cannot afford the luxury of indulging dead dichotomies and boundary confusions any longer; we need to work with what’s available to achieve sustainability as quickly as we can. Ideologies can be sorted out later. Far from helping in this regard, the peak oil crowd clings to a childish notion of powerlessness and would have everyone else powerless as well, would even sacrifice much of the natural world to achieve universal powerlessness. It is time to grow up and realize we are adults with access to economic tools that can effect massive change, even within the limits of our finite individual boundaries. Our refusal to pick these up and use them is complicity with those who use them irresponsibly. Business and entrepreneurship need to be placed squarely on the relocalization table for consideration along with the purely political solutions that have not, and very possibly cannot, yield much that can be useful.

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