“The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically” (v. 1 p. 21).

I’m not familiar with Marx’s theory on war and economy. I’m not sure if he even addresses the matter. I will look it up as I often have to.

The website address attached is not mine. The principled, non-violent resistance towards war for the sake that excesses may be reabsorbed into the growth of equal shares is partial to my own sensibility. (awk) Please take time to read.

I do think that we need to reject the idea that *scarcity* is the fundamental human condition.

But don’t you reject the need of labor in case of rejecting scarcity? So whats left from the human condition in a Marxists reflection when labor is not being fundamental?

Thanks for the feedback–in which I actually do discern the preliminary outlines for a general philosophical approach to the contigency I mentioned. If I may infer a formulation, it would seem to go something like this: we shouldn’t allow the incipient consequences of a socially-produced scarcity (e.g. the end of petro-industrialism) to reinforce the ideological reification of scarcity into a supposedly “natural” fundament of human social relations.

This idea actually seems to have valuable empirical applications in regards to the shape of the future. For instance: should we be forced to return to a predominantly agricultural mode of production, it could be used to resist the instantiation of a neo-feudal order. Or, supposing the post-petro landing is softer than that, it could be used to resist the corporatist or statist monopolization of alternative energy (a new form of capital accumulation).

In my more dire moods, my fear is that despite their produced character, the types of scarity with which we will soon be forced to reckon are going to have too catastrophic an effect on social condtions to leave much room for anything like organized resistance or the exercise of mass agency–at least throughout much of the present century. There simply may not be enough time left for a soft transition to an alternative energy economy. But then, even in the midst of chaos, there is still the question of agency.

I wonder what your thoughts might be regarding the possibility that capitalism may ultimately undermine itself by exhausting the material resources that sustain it, thereby triggering a socio-industrial collapse. What light does this possibility shed on the problems of subjectivity and old-school Marxist teleogy?

Despite his diagnostic acumen, there is no way Marx could have foreseen peak oil, global warming, the mass extinction of species, and the approaching threshold of planetary carrying capacity. His takes on both capitalism and its revolutionary alternative seem to presuppose that industrial civilization will go on forever. But what if that’s simply not the case? What notion of agency–and what manner of systemic thinking–do we appeal to in the face of such a contingency?

These issues seem to complicate the current dilemmas of radical politics in ways that current thinkers are not really ready to confront. Hardt and Negri in particular seem to give short shrift to the question of industrialism’s temporal horizon. Any thoughts?