Inverting the inverted pyramid and dealing with lesser matters first, my comment about clubs and boardrooms was sarcasm -- not assumption -- and that you thought otherwise is merely the unavoidable legacy of my often-too-deadpan delivery. The same applies to nearly all my other alleged assumptions about an unknown individual‘s identity: sarcasm, not purported biography. However, in the interest of civility, I'm truly sorry you were offended.
The question of stolen work is a somewhat more serious matter. You seem to be claiming (or misunderstanding) that I regard ALL work for hire as stolen labor, when in fact (I thought) my analogy -- "the paycheck equivalent of a despised company-store merchant who habitually short-changes all his customers" -- would have clearly demonstrated otherwise.
Sidestepping the whole debate over the ultimate determinants of the monetary value of labor -- the absurd anti-Marxist claim that the sole value of labor is whatever pittance an employer deigns to pay "his" workers versus the classic but impossibly utopian Marxist assertion that the true value of labor is the non-material cost of producing a given item (lessened under capitalism by the "theft" represented by the employer's profit) -- I will focus instead on the concept of a "fair wage" or a "living wage": a notion that, by the way, has arisen not through any implicit capitalist humanitarianism -- a contradiction in terms if not an outright oxymoron -- but rather as a direct result of Marxist agitation expressed via organized labor.
Slashing through the specific economic determinants -- cost of essentials (food, shelter, clothing) plus various calculations as to the dollar-value of "pursuit of happiness" -- the real "fair wage" or "living wage" is merely the lowest wage at which the ruling class can reasonably expect guaranteed suppression of the impulse toward reform and/or revolution. This is a functional definition -- in fact one that just now occurred to me -- but considered in the context of class-struggle it is a very precise, absolutely accurate, utterly revealing and therefore dangerously useful definition: once again my debt to Marx.
However to make my point it is necessary to detour briefly through a history more specifically political before we return to the particular economic pathway down which we are walking. From the Industrial Revolution until the first third of the 20th Century, American capitalism was every bit as savage as its Russian and Western European counterparts: labor agitation was routinely suppressed by death squads and military action (Google "Coal Creek War," "Mingo County War" and "Ludlow Massacre"), and workers were routinely treated as subhuman (Google "Triangle Shirtwaist Fire"). But in 1932, with the country in the depths of the Great Depression and on the brink of both socialist revolution and fascist counter-coup, the various Leftist elements in the United States -- LaFollette Progressives, Jeffersonian Democrats, socialists of sundry viewpoints, Communist Party members (this at a time when the Communist Party was the third largest and best-organized party in U.S. history) -- all united under the aegis of the New Deal to create a hybrid without human precedent: the Marxist truth of class-struggle grafted onto the uniquely American principles of Constitutional governance and individual liberty.
The singularity of the New Deal lay in its effort to achieve a working compromise between forces that in one form or another have been at war with one another since the dawn of human time. The New Deal thus acknowledged the innate savagery of capitalism even as it recognized the vital role capitalism played in the national economy. Capitalism would therefore be subject to rigid control -- the analogy of nuclear energy comes to mind -- but it would not be totally suppressed, as the Communists proposed. Meanwhile the role of government would be expanded to include a wholly new dimension of its ancient function as defender of the nation: protector of the working class against the sociopathic greed and sadistic malice of the ruling class, and therefore guarantor of what eventually came to be known as the "living wage" -- informally, and for the too-brief years of America's now-forever-lost prosperity, the wage at which the working class could afford luxuries hitherto attainable only by the ruling class: not merely the basic essentials of survival but a home genuinely one's own, an automobile of one's own, quality education, material security beyond the point at which one became too old to work, etc. In short, the achievement through non-violent political means of a national redistribution of wealth hitherto accomplished only by violent revolution.
The New Deal was, of course, immediately recognized by the ruling class as a peaceful pathway to the kind of egalitarian economy envisioned by Marx -- “from each according to ability; to each according to need” -- and as such, simply because it demanded a sharing of wealth, it was fiercely opposed from the very beginning, first by the thwarted fascist coup of 1934, next by subversion, finally by the assassinations of the 1960s: President John Fitzgerald Kennedy , Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy. After a mere 36 years -- from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s blessed victory in 1932 to the resurgence of American fascism signaled by Richard Milhous Nixon’s election in 1968 -- the New Deal and all its implicit promise was dead.
What has changed since then -- and where the element of "theft" enters this picture (specifically as I referred to theft and not as Marx used it) -- is that since about 1973, American employers great or small have predictably, steadily and increasingly defined the "living wage" downward even as the cost of living steadily increases.
Indeed it is the overwhelming impetus inherent in the fact I have witnessed this whole process -- the initial optimism of the New Deal (into which I was born) and its subsequent methodical destruction by the always malevolent forces of a never-compliant capitalism now fully resurrected in all its tyrannosauric viciousness -- that swept away my earlier doubts as to the final and ultimate relevance of Marx and the entire concept of class-struggle.
In fact, apart from a few people who rode the dot-com rollercoaster and a tiny handful whose effectively inexhaustible wealth defines them as members of the ruling class (even if the dishonesty of their present-day politics denies their status), I do not know a single American who has gotten a real raise -- that is, an increase in income large enough to yield surplus or discretionary funds -- since 1973. Not one -- and most of the people I know are cultural workers or skilled craftspeople: writers, editors, photographers, visual artists, printers, machinists, mechanics, carpenters, merchant seamen, commercial fishers, a smattering of social-service executives, teachers and professors. To be sure, some are doing better than others; people represented by unions usually manage to stay abreast of inflation, though just barely. But not one of these people has been truly "well off" since the first Oil Crisis -- and the official statistics prove the malaise is nation-wide: thus the relevance of the figures I cited in Post 40.
If the imposition of forcible wage-and-salary reductions were part of an overall downward economic trend in which prices and ruling-class wealth were also decreasing, it would not be "theft." But look at the simple statistic that executive compensation -- that is, the income of a professional sociopath whose sole virtue is endlessly scheming greed and whose only skills are manipulation and exploitation -- has risen so high it is now typically 419 times that of the average employee paycheck, an 898 percent increase over its already obscene 42:1 ratio in 1980. (Google: “executive compensation has risen by” with and without quotation marks.) Thus again the relevance of the data cited in the OP:
Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the… 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. From where do these ruling-class gains come? Obviously, in large measure from the forcible reduction of working class wages and salaries -- not to mention the looting of pensions and ever-more-brazen price-gouging as well. If this is not theft in the classic sense -- “taking with intent to deprive the rightful owner” (with the underlying implication the owner is powerless to resist) -- I do not know what else to call it.
Once again applying the lens of class-struggle, the hitherto-unspoken lesson becomes obvious: the ruling class is ever-more-assured the mechanisms of oppression are sufficiently well emplaced (and commanded by sufficiently ruthless functionaries) they will not only suppress any genuine effort by the working class to restore its ever-more-dwindling share of the proverbial pie, but eliminate such effort forever.
Given the added elements of a population not only deliberately denied vital historical knowledge but deliberately under-educated (“dumbed down” ) in general and then further immersed in zomboid darkness by the bread-and-circus/Josef Goebbels functions of corporate mass media, the analogy is already increasingly medieval: not to feudalism -- a common error of misstatement -- but to manorialism, though utterly devoid of any of its inherent obligations the lords and ladies of the manors provide for their serfs. (Manorialism was the economy; feudalism was the military organization by which it was maintained and defended; the Church was the ideological glue by which the entire system was bound together.)
Whether due to the total absence of education and the total suppression of information by the Church or due to deliberate mis-education and methodical distraction and disinformation via corporate mass media, the result is pretty much the same. Thus today in the United States we have a whole people -- and in particular the electorate -- increasingly reduced to serfdom and all its associated benightedness. Whether accompanied by the obvious degradation suffered by serfs and proletarians in Czarist Russia or the degradation concealed beneath the increasingly desperate trinket materialism of the post-New Deal U.S., the psychodynamics are similar. As only Marx could save Russia, now might only Marx or at least re-acknowledgement of his truth of class-struggle also again save the United States. It depends entirely upon the extent to which the ruling class is willing to restrain its own Ted Bundy ruthlessness whether this salvation might take place via peaceful electoral processes and restoration of the New Deal (the John Edwards alternative, which I wholeheartedly support), or whether its rightful seekers might be forced by oppression to other more extreme measures.
In this context, the significance of Peak Oil (and environmental depredation/exhaustion in general) is that it grants us a statistically supported vision of precisely what is at stake. Here, for the sake of readers unfamiliar with the concept, is an explanatory (and non-hysterical) link:
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.phpIn summary, the cheap-resource treasury that is the foundation of the industrial economy is running dry, the global equivalent of a binge-spender approaching an ultimate credit-card limit. When the cheap oil is gone, there will be nothing to replace it save reversions to earlier technologies. Some cultures -- those indoctrinated by socialism in genuine community and the collective sharing of hardships -- will survive:
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/657 Other cultures -- precisely as we saw in post-Katrina New Orleans -- will suffer total and permanent collapse.
Ultimately of course the exhaustion of petroleum and other natural resources will bring about the collapse of civilization itself -- collapse of a magnitude humanity has never experienced, not even in the aftermaths of the Minoan and Graeco-Roman downfalls (where relevant knowledge and residual technologies survived even if the political and economic systems did not). The debate among futurists is not the either/or of collapse versus no collapse; it is merely over the magnitude of the debacle. Some see humanity literally and inescapably reduced to the stone-age level. Others -- the more optimistic futurists with whom I happen to agree -- predict a radical step backward to 19th Century technological levels: a total and permanent end to flight, widespread and permanent de-electrification, the restoration of steam locomotion on railroads, the permanent resumption of animal-powered agriculture and horse transport, the permanent disappearance of internal combustion engines, the emergence of the bicycle as the only viable means of personal transport in cities. The space program will at last be recognized as the ego-phallic absurdity it has always been; nuclear energy will vanish entirely simply because of its vast associated expense. The entire petroleum-based economic folly will probably eventually be labeled petroleumism -- the ultimate perversion, humanity’s brief and nearly suicidal orgy of trinket materialism spawned by the Abrahamic contempt for nature.
Given the reality of cultural collapse, a major underlying question is the extent to which scientific discovery will be restricted -- which in turn will determine the possibility of developing technologies compliant with Gaea’s newly imposed limits. The stone-agers say there will eventually be no science at all, and never again: that our lives will henceforth and forever be indistinguishable from those of other primates: a bitterly ironic achievement of the ultimate Marxist goal of the final withering-away of the state. The back-to-the-19th Century people say science will be severely restricted -- that all of the research dependent on petroleum and petroleum byproducts (which includes nearly all modern medicine) will be terminated forever, and that what is left will be limited to expansions of earthly knowledge and improvements in organic agriculture, animal husbandry and external-combustion engines. (As an example of the latter, the world’s greatest railroads -- that is, railroads in the U.S. and Soviet Union -- were experimenting with steam-turbine propulsion when the process was artificially halted by the sudden adoption of diesel/electric locomotion during the 1950s and 1960s. Steam turbines are extremely efficient, and external-combustion engines can be powered by virtually anything: coal, wood, sawdust, wheat chaff, corn cobs, even garbage. Turbine development would thus probably begin anew -- that is, if the earlier results are not lost, as in some instances they already are.)
There is also another end-of-science scenario, an unspeakably horribly possibility complete with the screams and moans of accused adulteresses dying under hails of punitively hurled stones and the agonized shrieks and nauseating scent of witches and heretics burned alive: ultimate conquest by the forces of capitalism’s ongoing and thus far entirely successful campaign to impose global theocracy -- Christian in the West, Muslim in the East -- the resurrected strategy by which the ruling class hopes to ensure the permanent enslavement of the working class. This is not hyperbole: imposition of theocracy is obviously the unspoken and unifying purpose behind Bush Regime policy, whether domestic or abroad. If it succeeds, the grotesques of the Inquisition will again become everyday reality; not only the death of science (save as applied to perfecting the means of oppression) but the end of knowledge itself, with all learning murderously tabooed. If this happens -- if it is allowed to happen -- the resultant Dark Age will endure forever, with individual human consciousness perpetually shrunken by torture and our species' only hope eternally limited to the release finally granted by extinction.
But even if history follows the most optimistic scenario, the results will be unimaginably grim. And unlike the successful society exemplified in the link above (which was always an agrarian nation and therefore never too far from the requisite knowledge base) -- much of the industrialized world (and especially the United States) has become so hopelessly dependent on petroleum-derived technology (and therefore so hopelessly divorced from the knowledge essential to post-apocalyptic survival) that its ignorance can only be fatal. A few more days in the New Orleans Convention Center and everyone there would have been dead -- with the ruling class no doubt using its soldiers, goons and death squads to ensure no one escaped to tell the tale. And even extensive survival experience is no defense: I myself know how to live off the land indefinitely, not to mention possessing a variety of vital rural skills including organic gardening, trapping, hunting, etc., but I would probably never escape the savage lawlessness to which even smaller U.S. cities typically descend in genuine crisis. Americans are methodically conditioned to fear collectivity and despise community -- this to further facilitate the disunity essential to exploitation in the workplace: thus the scene in the Convention Center. Unless the oligarchy can be again overthrown as it was in 1932, such is the true and unavoidable future of the whole United States.
Which finally brings us to the real issue implicit in Peak Oil: the distribution of the post-Peak-Oil resources and the remaining wealth so derived. Will the resources be shared, as they already are in the society described in the above link? Or will they be hoarded by a tiny ruling class to the murderous denial of everyone else? I am frankly terrified by the extent to which the latter intention -- and only the latter intention -- is increasingly obvious in outsourcing, downsizing, wage-reduction, pension-looting, destruction of the social safety net, re-imposition of indentured servitude, price-gouging and -- yes -- the methodical subversion of civil liberties and civil rights. Bush truly is American capitalism's ultimate achievement. Never before has this nation faced such an irrevocable choice -- and never before have the progressive elements in the U.S. body politic been so isolated, whether in the global sense (that is, in the total absence of overseas support) or in the context of our own society. Moreover, the calculated belittlement of Marx has been an especially cunning part of the process by which we have been marginalized. But only through Marx -- that is, only through recognition of class struggle -- can we understand what is being done to us and why: the fact I hope is now sufficiently obvious it will bring into sharp focus the direct relevance of all of the citations -- Lenin, Marx, Engels -- that precipitated our dialogue.
_________
Edit: tired-eyes typos.
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