ABSTRACT
An analysis of the energy crisis in the United States is advanced that draws upon Marxist dialectical materialism. The character of U.S. energy policy is explained as the outcome of the interplay of a young, newly powerful managerial class and the older, still powerful capitalist class. The rise of the managerial class points toward the emergence of a post-capitalist society where power still does not pass to the masses, as the working class remains excluded from control over social policymaking. A special case of this exclusion is the design of U.S. energy policy. Equity concerns in the context of energy policy and the creation of strategies to promote greater equity reflect the interests of the managerial class. Therefore, the relationship between energy policy and social inequality has been limited to income inequality rather than touching the more fundamental inequality that is tied to the nature of the mode of production.
171“There are basic divisions in this society regarding energy. They involve disagreement about the kind of future people want, about the prospects for attaining different futures, and about the distribution of the benefits, costs, and risks from acquiring and using energy. The nature of these disagreements is much broader than those encompassed specifically within the energy sector, but the events which forced energy decisions to the fore have focused these conflicts on energy matters. Energy has become the testing ground for conflict over broader social choices.”
Sam Schurr, Joel Darmstadter, Harry Perry, William Ramsay, Milton Russell Energy in America’s Future: The Choices Before Us (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, for Resources for the Future, 1979), p. 543.“Quite apart from the points made so far, it was a mistake anyway to lay the main stress on so-called distribution and to make it into the central point.”
“The distribution of the means of consumption at any given time is merely a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves; the distribution of the latter, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only in possession of their personal condition of production, labour power. If the elements of production are distributed in this way, the present distribution of the means of consumption follows automatically. If the material conditions were the cooperative property of the workers themselves a different distribution of the means of consumption from that of today would follow of its own accord. Vulgar socialists…have followed the bourgeois economists in their consideration and treatment of distribution as something independent of the mode of production and hence in the presentation of socialism as primarily revolving around the question of distribution. Why go back a step when the real state of affairs has been laid bare?”
Karl Marx “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875) in The First International and After (New York, Vintage Books, 1974), p. 348.“… [W]e are, perhaps understandably, more anxious for salvation than for knowledge; but experience ought to teach us that genuine salvation is possible only on the foundation of knowledge.”
James Burnham The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (New York, The John Day Co., Inc., 1941), p. 8.