[A-List] Mark Jones on energy and imperialism

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The death of Mark Jones has robbed us of many things, including an
unfinished book on the political economy of oil and imperialism. Here is a
message sent by Mark to the Marxism list on 4 December 2002, which has some
bearing on an article recently forwarded to the list concerning the
geostrategic orientation of the US vis a vis China:

see http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/a-list/2003-May/025791.html

-----

The whole debate about energy crises only makes any sense if you insert it
into the wider and more crucial debate about imperialism and hegemony. As
everyone keeps rightly saying, what's really wrong is the completely and
hopelessly irrational way that the West and especially the USA *consumes*
energy and resources. Of course, this is true and is the point that Escobar
(like a lotta folks) makes in his article. But there is a somewhat
contradictory theme in Escobar's thinking and a lot of other people's. On
the one hand there is the view that technology and production is fine, it's
just the gross waste, inefficiency ad irrationality of greed-driven systems
like US capitalism which needs to be corrected. Get rid of corporate greed
and the US military behemoth, and then we can all live happily ever after
knitting yogurt and thatching our own condo-home/office roofs. And drinking
the communal beer etc. Socialism + renewables = happiness. That seems to be
the logic. On the other hand there is a deeper sense of foreboding, for
example in Escobar's comparisons of contemporary USA with the fate of
ancient Rome, namely that this surface irrationality probably reflects a
deeper, more deterministic, less solvable historical impasse. I think this
is the point at which we tend to go into denial, because then the prognoses
seem to get just too scary and apocalyptically awful. You can't sell the
party newspaper if all you have to offer is terminal doom and gloom.

My own position, argued at boring length here and elsewhere already so I
won't repeat myself ad nauseam, is that any Marxist analysis of accumulation
cycles and crises worth its salt must take the view that phenomena such as
stock market bubbles, war hysterias, and the rapid (and highly deflationary)
increase in social inequality, are only forms-of-appearance of the deeper
and long run secular crisis of accumulation which Marx analysed in a twofold
way, as (a) the law of the tendency of the profit-rate to fall and (b) the
general law of population (which Marx called 'the most important law'
governing the social logic of capitalism).

Relative overpopulation (Marx's term, not mine) is a by-product of
accumulation and a form of over-accumulation. Another by-product is the
immense accumulation of surplus capital, immense waste in production, and
immense gulfs opening up between rich and poor. Paradoxically, there is at
once too much capital and too little. This is a theoretical result of
Marxian value theory, but it is also a basic truth about the modern world
which you can only avoid noticing because you don't want to see it. On the
one hand there is a powerful global deflation going on, massive idling of
plant and labour and capital, massive overproduction. On the other, there is
not only a vast amount of unmet human need, a stupendous amount of
pauperisation and mass misery, dwarfing anything ever seen before in
recorded history.

The true weakness of American capitalism is expressed by this central fact:
the very low level of social productivity, and the great paucity of
available capital and resources, explains the existence of these vast pools
of human deprivation and misery comprising up to 4 billion persons. If
productivity was higher than it is, more effective demand would appear in
the market because more people would be employed because it was profitable
to employ them. But because social productivity is so abysmally low
(compared to the scale of human need) that there is no way to mobilise the
pools of moribund capital and labour which exist everywhere. Attempts to do
so, i.e. to raise the level of economic activity by for example Keynesian
stimuli, only result in the economy accelerating briefly and then hitting
the wall; the entire experience of global stagflation which began in the
1970s has proved this. Arbitrary demand management only produces inflation
followed by deeper recessionary crises. Capitalism has adapted to this long
run endemic and systemic crisis by adopting avowed and open deflationary
policies such as balanced budgets, forced debt repayments etc, which have
had the general effect of exporting crisis from the metropoles to the
peripheries.

I would argue (and Stan Goff and others as well--people like Alf
Hornborg--have been so arguing) that there is an entropic dimension to this
crisis. Stan Goff has a very good paper on this in the A-List archive.
Summarising ad absurdum, his point is that if your tried to stimulate the
world economy sufficiently to get real renewed growth and to take the
pauperised billions out of poverty and to give them decent homes, jobs,
infrastructure etc, then even if you didn't fail economically (thru renewed
stagflation) you'd fail entropically. You'd either run out of available
energy, steel and other basics almost at once, or you'd get runaway global
warming, or both. There is a lot of evidence to support these conclusions.
The heart of the so-called oil, or energy, crisis is this speculation: even
if you reduced US and western per capita energy consumption by some
arbitrary number, say 50% (which is not enough, but surely not politically
feasible in the normal run of events) and increased the per capita
consumption of the Rest by say 200%, then it is absolutely clear that the
oil and gas will run out in a decade or less, long before any alternative
technologies appeared on the scene, even supposing they existed, which they
don't. You can't even let the population of Iraq and Saudi Arabia consume
energy on anything like western per capita terms. So you have to keep them
under your boot or exterminate them. That's how consumingly awful, how
terrifyingly dangerous, the conjuncture now is. That's the political or
strategic reality which now stares not just capitalism but Bush and Blair,
Schroeder and Putin etc, hard in the face right now.

This is the global context in which we have to think thru our revolutionary
politics. It is a worse crisis than 1914-1917, worse than 1941, worse by far
than any in the history of either the capitalist class or the working class.
We should find a political rhetoric, as well as an organisational mode,
which does justice to this.

Mark