Sorry I didn’t see your comment for so long. I guess the length of it got caught up in our moderator software or something.

In any case I’ll work backwards in a reply.

3) I’m a worker and I know how I’m being screwed over every day, however I also know that I’m vested in this system and that I’m complicit in it. Ignoring relationships between people is THE error of the doomers. I’d agree with you there. However, pretending that the natural world doesn’t exist, or that there isn’t a pressing urgency behind a revolutionary project of changing our social relations based on natural/use value issues is to be in denial.

2) Production and consumption are both threatened by by resource depletion, and the extent to which production is aimed at profit making and not providing useful products for people or providing for the public good is the extent to which ecological catastrophes are intensified.

1) I agree that Capitalism must be destroyed before it destroys us. The question before us is whether a Late Capitalism will mean a Late Human Race or not. Suicide or Revolution?

I read your post with interest, and I appreciate you taking this argument seriously. What I set out to do in those posts was historicize the doomsters. There is a long tradition – going back to Malthus – of claiming there are technical limits to consumption. It’s not that I think this is wrong necessarily, but that it misses the point, for three reasons.

1) Peak oil is an interesting thesis, and I remain to be convinced either way. However, the end of oil will not spell the end of capitalism. Capitalism is defined by a global market in labour power. The drive to destroy the ecosphere will not stop until that market is ended, which requires revolutionary change. Changing what we consume – or, more broadly, the carbon-fuelled basis of the economy – will not change capitalism’s inherent drive to expand, and leave environmental costs as externalities. So I dispute the idea that “the end of this system is nigh.” It will not change until mass democratic movements take it over. It will simply slip into barbarism – which, as I’ve pointed out, already exists for most people.

2) What defines capitalism as a system is we are forced to sell our labour power for a wage. Consumption is one moment in the circuit of capital, and, I’d argue, not the most important one. Once we’re separated from the means of production, commodity fetishism results: we see relations between things instead of between people. American workers aren’t exploited by the objects they consume, but by the universalization of the labour market. Which is why I don’t think castigating them for being greedy gets us anywhere.

3) I don’t think doom motivates people. Workers already know they’re being screwed over, every day. Castigating their consumption reinforces powerlessness. We have to speak on the contradictions that workers themselves identify – which in the credit crisis are numerous – not on the ones we find most important. I wrote more about the topic:
http://orangepolyester.blogspot.com/2006/05/is-marxism-elitist-part-two-electro.html

Finally, what struck me about so much doomster literature is its moralism. Not only do I find its hectoring tone personally off-putting, I think it gets us further away from socialism, which is about encouraging people’s capacities to confront capitalist power.

Thanks for the opportunity to have this exchange.

I plan on writing another post on the subject of ideologies soon that will answer both of your posts I believe.

Doug

As far as ‘ideological thinking’ — I prefer to think of ideology in a way that differs from the orthodox view. The orthodox view is that ideology “tricks” people, hiding the truth. The idea being that people who think ideologically are essentially mistaken. The problem I have is that this implies that those who call others ‘ideological’ or criticize some aspect of a specific Ideology have it right. They have access to the truth. They are objective.
I guess I prefer (with althusser) to think of ideology as more than ‘false consciousness’… I don’t think that anyone is outside of ideology, nor could humans really exist even in theory outside of ideology. it is productive. it is a structure we require to be human as we mean that colloquially, when we speak of humans as people who have goals, roles, meaningful actions, “I”s, names, etc.
I agree that ideology can be used repressively. I don’t doubt that at all. It’s just that there is no “true consciousness” as opposed to the “false consciousness” of ideology.