Re: Hubbert's peak

[Ted Winslow <egwinslow@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood wrote:

> Which brings me to a question about the politics of this. Mark Jones,
> may he rest in peace, was a big fan of Petroconsultants, who are
> major catastrophists, right? But aren't the catastrophists in the oil
> industry eagerly lobbying for tax breaks and reduced environmental
> regulations? Aren't they, in a phrase, apologists for the industry?
> Is this another case of politics making strange bedfellows, or am I
> missing something?

Like the sadism to which they are closely linked, envy and insatiable 
greed are protean.  Marx points to them as the psychological basis of 
"crude communism".

> General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which 
> greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. 
> The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least 
> turned against wealthier private property in the form of envy and the 
> urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge 
> even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism is only 
> the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding 
> from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard.
>
> How little this annulment of private property is really an 
> appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire 
> world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural 
> simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not 
> only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even 
> reached it.
>
> The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages 
> paid out by communal capital — by the community as the universal 
> capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined 
> universality — labour as the category in which every person is placed, 
> and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the 
> community.
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>

A more modern psychology can explain both the number mysticism (Keynes 
says insightfully of the mistaken use of mathematics and statistics in 
"econometrics" that "it becomes like those puzzles  for children where 
you write down your age, multiply, add this and that, subtract 
something else, and eventually end up with the number of the Beast in 
Revelation") and the catastrophic, apocalyptic Book of Revelation 
conclusions the number mysticism is used to "prove."

Ted