The Answer to Petrocapitalism is Petrocommunism
Everyone knows that the goal of the people’s revolution must be to seize the means of production. Energy is a key means of production. No one buys a gallon of gasoline because it smells good: fuel is combined with human labor to accelerate productive output. It must be seized.
So, the revolution will declare itself the sole owner of all the earth’s coal, oil, and flammable gas. It becomes illegal to sell fossil fuel energy except by the government monopoly, governed by a bureaucracy that is able to use the science of central planning to allocate the rest of our “carbon budget” to where it is needed the most. Companies, restructured to be employee owned and controlled, can provide the Oil Ministry with services and infrastructure, but they can’t own what’s inside the pipeline. That’s owned by all the people, the state. As a product of oil, all plastic. If it’s made out of plastic, then you can own its shape, intellectual property, and metadata, but the government owns the underlying material. And so on as necessary.
This is necessary because although there is no scarcity of these commodities, we need to be able to cap their use. The sooner and more drastically we can decrease energy combustion, the better. The market is unable to make fuel expensive enough to reflect its true costs. Only the people can. There will be hardships. Everyone and every employee-owned company will be allocated a daily energy minimum, and everyone will be subject to energy maximums.1
People will have to re-shape their lives and will be forced to return to the wealth of technologies developed over the two thousand somatic years of human history. Solarpunk can be curated, but energy scarcity will also result in true suffering: heat deaths and famines in the heart of the metropole, endured by all to give the rest of the world their share of a greatly-limited carbon budget. That kind of suffering may be coming no matter what, but still, people will only submit to energy rationing under threat of force. We will need a coherent and disciplined People’s Party backed by a low-tech but effective People’s Army. The first thing that means is resisting American imperialism, even if that means supporting post-Soviet Russia, and embracing a multipolar world that allows China to lead.
It will be legal and perhaps even profitable to privately buy and sell electrons generated by other means, creating a hybrid energy market on the model of the New Economic Policy. This industry will be tightly regulated, supervised, and price controlled. Those regulations will limit use of chemical batteries, preferring compressed air storage. Individuals and collectives will still be subject to daily energy maximums, which can be modified according to need, with an awareness of historical injustice perpetrated by capitalist imperialism.
Don’t worry; it won’t happen. I see almost no points of vulnerability in petropower. The denial machine is heavily funded and surprisingly effective. They have now mobilized a magical psyop machine that has even infected the Left and seems to be endemic on this accursed platform. If you don’t believe the world is warming, I am prepared to fight you in the comments.
Shout out to Low Tech Magazine. Read it.
