Marxism as a response to peak oil

benzoil

Ok. I'll toss this out. After reading Jared Diamond's Collapse, it occurred to me that the only societies that seemed to avoid collapse were either dictatorships (Dominican Republic) or absolute "from the ground up" democracies (New Guinea highlands). Everything in between eventually failed. Not in Diamond's book, but the most recent example of this would be Cuba's narrow aversion of disaster after losing their Soviet oil.

If there is a connection between absolute power of the state and/or absolute empowerment of the community and ecological management then perhaps there *might* be something to be said for Marxism as a possible viable response to either peak oil or global warming.

Personally, I don't think it would work, but there it is.
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EnergyUnlimited · Fusion Joined: May 15, 2006 Posts: 3103

americandream

[quote="EnergyUnlimited"]

americandream

edpeak · Heavy Crude Joined: Feb 04, 2005 Posts: 166

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing..and
from what I've herad about Cuba and Peak oil,
we're at risk of the kinds of mistakes that
quote refers to.

You'd think, well, Cuba is a 1-party dictatorship
and well, Cuba pulled off survival of sudden
peak oil pretty remarkably, so, you'd
be tempted to conclude, the former
has to do with the latter.

But hearing folks at Community Solution
tell it, folks who visited Cuba extensively,
what Cuba did when peak oil hit
was the opposite of the 1-party rule..
the state gave much more power,
control, and authority to the local
level...if anything this is a victory
for decentralized anarcho-communal
(self-)government, not for centralized
planning.
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seven

I don't think any approach will get us out of substantial hardship - while some form of/ideas of Marxism could possibly ease our transition, you can bet that it would never be called Marxism.
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gg3

Interesting exercise! And yes it's good to see a Marxist who says they're a Marxist up front.

I have a pretty deep libertarian streak and am highly skeptical of full-on socialism or communism. However it is objectively true that Cuba did manage to pull off their own PO transition with zero fatalities and that is an admirable accomplishment. And it is also objectively true that there are inherent flaws with market systems, such as the tendency to externalize costs and fail to plan long-term.

And last but not least, facing PO and climate change will require shifting to a no-growth economy, so there is an interesting question of whether this is more likely to succeed under a Marxist model than under a market-based model.

That being said, I'm looking at this with an open mind.

AmericanDream, what I'd like to suggest is this: Talk to us about the goal-state scenario first, rather than the means (elections or revolution or whatever) of getting there. What does the Marxist model look like when it's implemented? How do people live, work, and play? What is the level of technology, what are the sources of energy, and so on?

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If we accept Diamond's conclusion that grassroots democracy and authoritarianism are the only types of cases that have avoided collapse, then we should consider each type for both a capitalist and a Marxist scenario. For the moment we can assume that all four types are theoretically possible, and focus on outcomes.

This is going to be very interesting.

I'll say this about that, as a starting point.

If the choice is between only a hard-right vs. a hard-left version of authoritarianism, I would tend to believe that the hard-left version would work out better for the average individual and for the cohesiveness of the society. In theory the hard-left version would include a basically flat distribution of resources: everyone gets basically the same thing, no one gets a whole lot more than anyone else.

One of the known major causes of social instability is extreme disparity of wealth, particularly where the majority sees no means of improving their own condition. It seems to me that the hard-left "forced equality" is conducive to a culture of "shared sacrifice," thereby reducing social unrest; whereas a hard-right model that results in significant disparities of distribution would lead to continued social unrest from "have-nothings" trying to get enough to survive from the "have-too-muches."

Just a starting point... but I want to hear what AmericanDream has to say about this.

benzoil

Chaparral

^ got the same conclusion from reading Diamond. Re; Tikopia, Tokugawa Japan, Dominican Republic etc.

I actually went and purchased Das Kapital around the time I read Daniel Yergin (2004) and began to suspect that Jimmy Carter may have been the greatest president in recent times rather then the worst. I bought Kapital in order to get Marx's take on things for myself because I could no longer trust second hand commentary from any other source.

I'd argue that some form of disciplined form of collectivism will be neccessary given the commons that we all share. To what extent this collectivism penetrates down to our personal lives and decisions remains to be seen and hopefully, fleshed out in this thread.

My greatest concern about the "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" credo is that the loafers on the bottom of the capability scale and the manipulators on the bottom of the moral scale will start taking from those near the top who are working their butts off. Ultimately this would turn a collectivist establishment into a fascist one. I guess this is where the "discipline" that americandream speaks of would come into play. Squealer and Napoleon in Orwell's Animal Farm versus the Horse and the other believers are what comes to mind. Having experienced this first hand I've sort of developed an allergy to things collective (and I was raised to be egalitarian across the board).

{topic moved from Suggestion Box by Shannymara}

gg3

There'll always be loafers, and they'll alays try to manipulate whatever structure exists in order to loaf. Under communism you get the classic case of "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work," Soviet apartment blocks with empty vodka bottles stashed between the walls and all that. But our system produces such oddities as the ex-CEO of Home Depot who was fired after turning in a miserable performance (either a loafer or an idiot), and got off with a $14mm golden parachute.

The way I look at it, greed isn't a problem if those who want "more stuff" are willing to work for it, and loafing isn't a problem if those who want to loaf are willing to accept "less stuff" in exchange for less work.

The question is how to minimize the risk of the combination of the two: "greedy loafers" i.e. people who want "more stuff" and don't want to work for it, whether at the level of cheating on welfare or at the level of cheating the shareholders. This is easier on a smaller-scale, more closely-knit society, than it is when the level of social complexity increases to the point where greedy loafers can manipulate the system for their gain at others' expense.

The other question is how to reward healthy ambition when there simply isn't a way to produce "more stuff" as rewards. Some people are just driven to work, produce, build, innovate, invest, invent, and so on, and if they get jack-squat for it, there goes the incentive for anyone to follow in their footsteps.

I am thinking that the "reward issue" can be solved without burning through resources. Some things will always be scarce and thus their prices will bid upward: original artwork, for example. Some things can be made to exquisite standards of beauty or quality without any additional resources other than the craftsperson's skill and attention.

The common denominator of most of these relatively scarce rewards is not embodied information: that element is nearly free. "Everyman" can today afford a desktop computer that would have been the envy of NSA when the agency was first started (language translation applications included). And as we said at the inception of the internet, "information wants to be free" (John Barlow, a man who it can truly be said brought soul to the machine). In fact information itself appears to be a fundamental quantity (akin to matter, energy, space, and time), and appears to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but that gets into a huge digression best left for another forum.

The common denominator seems to be "embodied time," as in the time spent by the genius craftsman or the accalimed artist to produce an artifact that becomes a fitting reward for the productive ambition of whoever can afford it. Now here we reach an interesting paradox. If the reward for working hard or working smart is given as time, how shall that time be spent? Giving someone free time who is driven to produce, only means they have another opportunity keep producing: e.g. the camping vacation in the woods becomes an excuse to catalogue all of the edible and medicinal plants encountered along the way. But if we monetize the value of the time, then the "accumulated free-time equivalent" can be spent paying for the time of others who in turn can produce goods and services to the highest standard based on their own productive genius.

This would appear to be the answer to the ambition question: an identified and recognized group (subculture, class, guild) of master artists & artisans who are the best in their field and whose works (i.e. objects of their embodied time) are in turn the rewards for excellence. They would also be the standard-setters for their respective fields, whose example would be held up for others to emulate, thereby producing a ripple effect throughout the culture-at-large to shift it from sheer quantity of "stuff" to the quality of embodied time. (I could see working this theme into the background of relevant science fiction in order to illustrate.)

---

Meanwhile, where's AmericanDream, and where's the Marxist scenario for the future? I'm not being rhetorical, I'm quite interested to see how this works out. Cuba pulled it off and lived to tell about it. How would it work out for the rest of us?

fireplaceguy · Heavy Crude Joined: May 04, 2006 Posts: 271

dooberheim

I think the history of the world shows that authoritarian, communal regimes do better in areas that are beginning industrialization. The populace can unite behind the idea of a better life for all. If they continue to be authoritarian after a crash, like Cuba and North Korea - even Russia to an extent, they do better because people are used to sharing, and much of the infrastructure is publicly owned.

Where you get fascism is when democratic, developed nations crash, like Weimar Republic Germany. A potential leader gets people excited about returning to their countries former greatness, and finds scapegoats among the population, or externally.

I see the US going down that path after the depression starts. I think candidates will get a lot of mileage from blaming Muslims for everything wrong with the country. Woe betide a leader that tells the American people that we did it to ourselves...

DK
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Kingcoal

So I guess the question is; will freedom survive in a world of diminishing resources?

According to Machiavelli, there really are only two forms of government; Principalities and Republics. Dictatorships are principalities and thus Cuba is a principality. Any government that does not respect private property ownership is by definition a principality. A republic is by definition a society based on individual rights and the most fundamental right is that of private property ownership. Either you own what you labor for or you yourself are owned (and thus the fruit of your labor) by a principality.

So is our survivability better if we are not free and are instead owned by the government? The problem with totalitarianism is that those in control are human beings and very fallible. Generally they are in power because they are good at acquiring and defending their power. That does not make them good at everything. On the contrary, totalitarian societies are generally inefficient, fantastically wasteful (when viewed on light of their lack of scientific progress, etc) and huge polluters (also in light of their GDP.)

The way I see it is that the only thing that has ever saved us through our history has been technology and governments have always looked to the private sector for technology. I’m not talking rocket science all the time. For example, the invention of bread was a form of Stone Age technology. Bread was a way to increase the nutrients from the grain and also make it into a form that would keep for a while. The invention of bread was a boon for Stone Age man. We need technology more than ever and totalitarian societies are not the place to look for it. In fact, I would argue that the former Soviet Union could not have existed if there were not technology to steal from the west.
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fireplaceguy · Heavy Crude Joined: May 04, 2006 Posts: 271

Well said, Kingcoal. I am fascinated by the left's inability to see the inherent flaws in marxism. You bring up one of the more glaring examples when you mention the awful environmental record of communist countries. The worst corporate polluters in the west don't come close to doing the environmental damage done by by the USSR (or still being done by the PRC).

The inability of communist countries to make technological progress is a factor in the vast environmental damge they end up doing, and in part this is traceable to the absence of incentive inherent in marxism. Witness the glaring lack of progress in motorcycle technology in the Soviet Union - they continued to make pre-war 1930's era BMW bikes in a captured East German plant right up till the wall came down!

You're absolutely right when you observe that without our technology to steal, the USSR couldn't have existed at all. To technology I would add western agricultural output and global diplomatic victories handed out by fellow travelers in the US, UN, etc. Subract all this and see how marxism REALLY compares...

As to that, Cuba is not a valid post-peak-oil success either. They still rely quite a bit on oil to achieve what little they have - it's just that a good bit of that oil is burned elsewhere and then conveniently arrives in the form of tourist money, cigar export revenues, etc., etc., etc.

Contrast this with any country that has true human, intelllectual and real property rights and a reliable legal climate in which to function.

Sadly, where you have no rights, no framework, no competition, no incentives and no accountability such results are predictable to the point of being a physical law. Only those who follow marxism as their religion could be blind to this...
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gg3

I would argue that the ecological externalities of communism are not so much a result of lack of incentive, as they are a result of lack of checks and balances: both in the form of parliamentary democracy, and in the form of the market.

Beyond that, I recall an online debate I had with someone on the left many years ago when toilet paper made from recycled paper stock was first introduced. In those days, it had 10% post-consumer content. My leftie opposite-number in the debate said that this was a typical example of how capitalism exploits the image of sustainability. I said that once people started buying toilet paper made with recycled paper, they would look to buy brands with higher and higher levels of recycled content: in other words, that recycling would become an axis of competition in the market. Turned out I was right: now ther are three or four brands on the shelf, each with @ 80% post-consumer recycled paper content.

The point of this is, the Marxist ideologies (plural) seem to operate on the assumption that markets cannot possibly allocate goods & services & resources effectively i.e. in a manner that is beneficial to humans-at-large. Whereas traditional capitalist ideologies argue that markets are a kind of metaphysical force that allocates all resources with supreme efficiency.

My arguement is that markets represent a form of distributed or decentralized intelligence in the processing of economic decisions. They solve the combinatorial overload problem that would (and does) arise in central planning, by decentralizing decision-making down to the leve of each individual's (or enterprise's) own inputs & outputs. Beyond a certain level of complexity in society, markets are both necessary and inevitable, otherwise a central planning system would overload and break (as it did in the USSR).

This being said, markets have their limitations, notably the inability of pricing mechanisms to take into account the potential for finite resources to decline. For example rather than using oil wisely from the very beginning and having enough to last for perhaps a thousand years, we first got it at such a cheap price as to establish a pattern of wasteful use that has not changed much to this day. As a result of the pricing mechanisms, we will not move toward inelligent use of oil until its very scarcity bids up the price to the point where there is no other option: and as a result, we will have foreclosed an enormous range of options that would otherwise have been open.

For example, would you trade fifty years of traffic jams for a colony on Mars and the prospect that your great-great grandchildren would see the first humans launched on an interstellar mission to a probable second Earth elsewhere in the galaxy...? As things presently stand, we have ended up ith the former and as a result may have forfeited our chance for the latter.

Ecological externalities are the result of the absence of competition and checks & balances. But the lack of competition can arise as readily in an unregulated market (which tends toward monopolies, and their bastard kin, oliopolies) as in a one-party state that controls the proverbial means of production. The key evil here is concentration of power, and it matters not whether that power is concentrated in the public sector or the private sector. Competition and checks & balances are each needed at all three levels: between private sector entities (e.g. free & fair markets), between public-sector entities (e.g. multi-party representative democracy), and between the private and public sectors (e.g. strong property rights and rational regulation).

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But this is my third posting in this topic, in which I end up going on at length about democratic libertarian philosophy, and I'm interested in seeing how our self-proclaimed Marxists deal with these issues. One doesn't often hear those particular voices in the public debates of our times, and after all they could have something interesting & relevant to say. If nothing else they need to speak up for their own side in the debate.