Robert Owen, Peak Oil and The New Polarity

The great English Socialist, Robert Owen, blamed social problems such as crime on the fact that the social conditions of his time were so bad that they forced many people to become criminals, and therefore that society prepared the crime and the criminal commits it. This has been the basis of socialist thought since Owen.

Owen blamed the Church of England, and religions in general, for peoples squalor for creating a society, and morality, that tolerated such abuses as bad landlords, rich capitalists, the greedy rich and abusive employers. Owen blamed the CoE for saying that it was Gods will that the people were meant to be poor, and he rejected this as political Calvinism. Owen said that the system caused people to be bad and that material conditions created a criminal consciousness. Employers and government forced people to live and work in conditions that forced them into squalor, poverty and dishonesty. Owen said that whilst the social systems, and religions, that allowed society to degenerate existed then the social problems they cause will exist. The victims could never improve themselves or their physical and social conditions.

The employer said Owen was conditioned to be a heartless profiteer. The CoE said that because of Original Sin the poor were poor because they were sinners and that the rich had no duty to the poor and that it was essentially futile to help them. The rich and powerful were meant to be rich and powerful, as the poor were meant to be poor. The Divine Right of Kings that the Church of England had legitimised when it became the established Church also ensured the second class status of the poor.

Qwen was both right and wrong. He diagnosed the wrong disease but offered the perfect cure. The collapse of the Church of England as a moral force and a social power in today’s society, the rise in legislation that has given welfare rights, the welfare state, the minimum wage that has protected the workers and the laws that have stopped exploitation have changed the very nature of our society for the better. And yet we still have a criminal class and a rise in poverty. Therefore this means that the Church cannot still be blamed for all the faults and problems of society. The socialist ideal has proven itself totally flawed both in its diagnosis of the problems of society and its cure - as in the end the individual is responsible for their own plight. The Church may be an accomplice to the crime, as is the State and the ruthless employer, but in the end the individual in today’s society is responsible for their own actions. The individual chooses to commit the crime is the ultimate truth. That even though the grinding poverty of the past has been alleviated, that material circumstances have improved and that the Church has become a social and moral irrelevance it is true that mans nature and our society has become more degraded than ever. We must look elsewhere for the problem, and the solution.

There are different forms of poverty - spiritual poverty, material poverty, cultural poverty, moral poverty.

Our society is sick because of the spiritual, cultural and moral poverty of our society. Society is now simply an economic nexus. There is no such thing as community. We pay our taxes and buy things we don’t need and that replaces social interaction. Mass immigration and the social policies of the Establishment have assisted in the destruction of our communities. Today there is no such thing as society, and we are united only by our shared dependence upon oil and our constant monitoring by the minions of the Surveillance Society. We are social beings in that we are all totally dependent upon foreign oil for our basic social and individual functions, we all pay taxes, we all buy the same crap we don’t need and all whilst we are being watched on CCTV. There is no such thing as Community or Communities anymore, merely private homes and strangers. Our society has a heart as black and toxic as the oil is depends upon.

The historic opportunity given to humanity with the discovery and use of oil has been wasted. Man has achieved technological process but at the same time has undergone a moral, spiritual and cultural collapse.

We must create new communities and install a different ethos to create a New Society now or we face an apocalyptic collapse as a civilisation.

A New Society must be based on our ancient values and traditions of liberty, fraternity, federation, free speech and the British Constitution. Co-operative farms, schools, factories, hospitals, housing, shops will replace the out of town shopping centre and the asset stripping private equity firm. Co-operation will replace competition. The process that will usher in this New Society is Peak Oil.

After Peak Oil we can build a new society based on the principle of Localism.

The State, and the powers of the state, are merely aspects of the energy capture process. A law cannot be enforced unless it can be policed and prosecuted. When the impact of Peak Oil begins to hit their will be a corresponding collapse in the ability of the state to exercise power and impose its will. As the economics of Peak Oil begin to bite then the lights in the countryside will be the first to go out. The rural poor will return to candles to light themselves at night and allotments to feed themselves. The lucky few will have solar panels and wind generators, most will not. The economics of sustaining the present energy infra-structure such as power lines and sub-stations will no longer make any sense. Once broken they will not be fixed by the power companies. Gradually the countryside and the cities will darken.

When the oil runs out, the power of the state will slowly wither away. Economics, and economic activity, will also shrink as the Energy In / Profit Out Ratio which is the basis of capitalism, Globalism and consumerism will also shrink. The era of imported cheap goods will end as the energy required to produce and transport those goods will outstrip the potential profit to be made from selling them. Only the very rich will have the money to buy the expensive goods. The poor will return to an economic subsistence lifestyle. Incomes will fall, poverty will rise, the welfare state collapse, the rich grow richer, monopoly capitalism will increase, choice will diminish in consumer goods and

There will be created a society which will be a return to the Middle Ages, where the rich and powerful live in gated communities in cities guarded by private security armies that exist alongside shanty towns of extreme squalor. The very rich will become richer, whilst the rest of society rapidly become poorer. The very rich will be those who own the oil, the rich those who control the supply of oil and the wealthy and powerful those who are sponsored and subsidised by the oil owners. With their new riches the oil owning elite of the world will buy the last of the remaining profitable industries that are left and then the land itself and become a new aristocracy. Even the old aristocracy will be replaced as a class as they are forced to sell their lands to sustain their lifestyles and status. The New Aristocracy will be the Middle East oil owners, the Islamic charities, corporations and associations in the UK that they fund and assist. As the last of the oil is extracted, the faster the concentration of wealth in the hands of the Middle Eastern theocracies via the capitalist system will occur. This will leading to the complete takeover of the global economic system by Middle East theocracies and Islam. As the price of oil rises then the more money the people who own the oil will have and the more money they will have to purchase our industries, corporations and land. Unless we deal with the Peak Oil nightmare, then Islam will establish a Global Caliphate and control over our country via the capitalist system.

The end of the Oil Age will lead either to the Rule of the Imams, Global Eco-Conflict, The New Feudalism or The Community State.

If we are to survive the next stage in the evolution of human civilisations which is the end of the Oil Age and the transition into the Green Energy Age, and avoid us becoming hostages to Islamic Oil or Russian gas oligarchs, then we must begin the process of creating an Renewable Energy Economy based on national energy independence, reconnecting extended families and kin based communities and creating sustainable communities.

Nations will either surrender their sovereignty to the Imams of the Middle East who control the last of the oil supplies or they will have to embark on endless eco-conflicts and resource wars to gain energy and material resources in order to sustain their social complexity.

We as a nation are therefore faced with two paths - that of the Rule of the Imams and New Feudalism or the Renewable Energy Economy the Community State.

The New Feudalism will be where the rich and powerful will control the last of the economic system, power and wealth will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands - via the breakdown of the present capitalist system the Marxist process of Immizeration will occur. Central to Marx’s economic model is the thesis that a contraction of the capitalist class will occur through the process of capitalist competition and a corresponding increase in the population numbers of the proletariat. What Marx didn’t foresee as happening was the pragmatic decision on the part of the capitalist class to continuously allow the standard of living to rise among the workers in a controlled way, such as through the imposition of a minimum wage that ensures the poor do not become the revolutionary poor, thereby easing social tensions caused by absolute penury that may lead to a revolutionary social situation and at the same creating a market for their wares. Capitalism as a functional system also became more complex structurally than the Marxist model posited. The moment that the capitalist system became dependent upon oil for the next stage of its expansion, it imbedded within its structures the inevitability of its own downfall. The public ownership of corporations via the stock market and the rise of a new class, the technician (brought about by an explosion in manufacturing technology), also blurred the lines of societal stratification as the increasing technological and social complexity of advanced societies created a technocratic elite whose indispensability as part of the energy capture and supply system ensured their social empowerment.

To further complicate matters, liberal democracies began to manage national economies, thereby stabilizing the capitalist system itself from the excesses of free market capitalism and as a result apparently ending the old bust-or-boom business cycle. Though the energy crisis of the 1970’s should have awakened them to the inherent weakness of the oil based capitalist system, it didn’t. The oppressive nature of 19th century industrial capitalism seemed to be giving way in the 20th century before a more egalitarian consumer society, fueled by an ever rising standard of living and an aspirational consumer lifestyle. Put simply: capitalism was successful as it gave the people what they wanted. The problem was that it could only do this as long as the cheap oil was still available to fuel this growth in living standards, economic expansion and the welfare state.

A central thesis of Marxism is the idea that ideology and thought are dependent upon the circumstances in which a person lives. Material circumstances determine consciousness rather than consciousness determining reality. Engels in his book The Assumptions and Tasks of Social Democracy (1899) rejected the heresy of Economism, which was an attempt to work to improve the conditions of impoverished workers in society, as an obstacle in the path of the process of creating the proletarian dictatorship. Instead of improving the conditions of workers, the left actively sought to worsen the conditions for the poor and workers as to do so would accelerate the demand for revolutionary change in society. The more that the poor became poorer, then the sooner they would rise up and overthrow their overlords.

The Labour Party put this theory into direct effect with its social policies. After the Second World War the old kin based working class estates with their extended family units and kin based community networks were regarded as obstacles to this process of changing society in order to change the individual. The left realised that the old working class estates had to be broken up, the families split up and their communities eviscerated and their financial poverty exacerbated by moral and social poverty before they could become the broken foot soldiers of the socialist revolution. Only by exacerbating their poverty and hopelessness by destroying their communities that nourished them and supported them could the left create the millions of isolated families in atomised communities that would become factories for the production of social problems and alienated and angry proletarians of the revolution. If financial poverty alone could not break the loyalty and patriotism of the working class then perhaps the destruction of their own communities would create the crisis that would finally drive them into the arms of the socialists. Ever since the working class had failed to rise up in support of the socialist revolution during the Great Strike in 1926 , but had volunteered in their millions to put on uniforms and fight for their country in 1914, the left had worked to worsen the interests of the poor and working class. The unlocking of the vast energy supplies of oil in the 20th Century could have led to the creation of a British society that ended poverty, instead both the political right and left made it worse.

As Marx wrote “ The hand mill gives you society with the Feudal Lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist “. The Oil Age has replaced the steam mill society which was based on coal. It is cheap oil that has led to the system of Globalism ( which is international corporate fascism ) and the global corporate nexus. This is due to the global nature of the locations of oil and the necessity to create stable economic systems in nations state where the oil is to access and exploit the oil that will protect the massive investments that are required to construct oil refineries.

The US became a global power in the 20th century primarily because of its own internal oil supplies.

The Oil Age will lead inevitably to the Rule of the Imams and the New Feudalism unless we act now. Marx, along with the capitalist like Adam Smith, did not pick up on the central factor of social complexity and social development which is energy. Both Marx and Smith saw capital as the main dynamic in Capitalist societies but this was wrong. The hand mill society, the wood age society, the coal age society , the charcoal age society and the steam mill society are all societies defined by their energy capture and supply processes. Economics is an aspect of the energy systems available to that society. In the 20th Century the primary factor in the existence and growth of all societies, whether Fascist, liberal, Communist, Capitalist, Consumerist or Globalist, was the presence and availability of cheap oil. As the last of the oil is drained away then the very nature of society will change.

The hand mill age, based on sheer physical human labour, was controlled by the Feudal Lord who controlled the land that fed the workers - which shows that control over the calories consumed by the workers in the form of agricultural produce (food) was the energy nexus at the heart of that society. Who owned the land, grew the food and controlled the workers. Who owned the land owned the wood which built the houses, that cooked the food and that warmed the houses.

The Steam Age was based on coal and the industrial capitalists who owned the mines and who built the factories were the masters of the age itself. The energy source in that era was coal, and it was coal that fuelled the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution. The land owning class that prospered as a result of the feudal age, became the masters of the capitalist class as their wealth allowed them to build the factories and own the mines that then dominated the Industrial era. It was Great Britain’s large coal deposits that allowed it to dominate the era of the Industrial Revolution.

The Oil Age, which began in 1912 when Winston Churchill ordered that the coal fired engines of the ships in the Royal Navy be replaced with oil fired ones, signalled one of the most momentous moments in world history. At the end of the Capitalist Age the old elite was still in charge. This was based on their control of the oil at its source. Global oil supply was initially controlled in the early 20th century by the Imperial powers, such as the British government who dominated the Arab states, and their Capitalist Class who owned the International Oil companies such as Anglo-Persian that controlled the oil supplies and refining plants that supplied the world with the oil it depended on.

The creation of Globalism was based on the requirement for oil companies to have global access to oil supplies, and the growth of the global financial market and the international corporations, is an aspect of this process. The Capitalist Class In the post-Empire era were booted out of the Middle East and the oil fields and foreign oil companies nationalised. Their control over the oil was lost, but our dependence upon it as a society remained and grew stronger every day.

The end of the Oil Age will lead either to the Rule of the Imams, Global Eco-Conflict, The New Feudalism or The Community State..

If we are to survive the next stage in the evolution of human civilisations, and avoid us becoming hostages to Islamic Oil or Russian gas oligarchs, then we must begin the process of creating a Renewable Energy Economy, reconnecting extended families and kin based communities and creating sustainable communities.

Nations will either surrender their sovereignty to the Imams of the Middle East who control the last of the oil supplies or they will have to embark on endless eco-conflicts and resource wars to gain energy and material resources in order to sustain their social complexity.

The global geo-political order is undergoing a political, theological, economic and military realignment based on the securing of oil energy supplies in the imminent Peak Oil Era. At the same time this rational energy capture process by participant nations is also exacerbating an irrational theological conflict within Islam. The major military nations of the world are clustering around the nations with the last of the oil supplies in the Middle East, which happen to be nations that are at war with each other within Islam.

This process can be seen by the actions of the players in this drama. America invades Iraq for Iraqi oil. Russia supplies Iran with anti-aircraft missile systems in exchange for oil contracts and money made from oil sales. Britain supplies Saudi Arabia with Euro Fighter jets for billion pound arms deals paid for out of oil sales. Israel attacks Lebanon, and Arab OPEC nations led by Sunni Saudi Arabia refuses to stop the flow of oil or raise oil prices to help the Shiite dominated Lebanese nation. Iran sends Iranian agents into Iraq to attack American troops to ensure they get bogged down in the Iraqi quagmire of ethnic and religious civil war. Saudi Arabian backed Sunni insurgents explode bombs outside Iranian funded Shiite mosques in Iraq. Russia fights Saudi Arabian funded Al Qaeda militants in Chechnya. China gives Iran satellite and nuclear technology in exchange for energy contracts and oil currencies. China fights Sunni Islamic separatist militants in its Northern Provinces.

This is not just a clash between civilisations, but also an energy and theological conflict.

The developed nations of the world are arming Islamic nations with nuclear weapons and modern weapons systems due to their dependence on oil.

The world can be seen as developing two new polarities ;

Sunni Islam - Saudi Arabia, America, Israel, Britain

Shiite Islam - Iran, Russia, China, Syria, Central Asian republics.

We must not become part of this new polarity - we must break free from it and claim our own national destiny.

The next stage for our nation and people then, must be the Green Energy Stage, Community State and Eco-Nationalism.

As part of this process we must reconnect extended families, create kin based community networks and also restore the British Constitution as the framework upon which our democracy is built.

A return to sustainable indigenous communities, Green Zones - voluntary associations of people who work together in co-operative structures for both individual and social benefit. Local energy production and distribution.

Self governing workshops, co-operative stores, credit unions, builder guilds, doctors guilds, community farms with shared profit schemes. The new trade unions would be formed from these workers guilds.

Communities as opposed to society.

No longer Top Down State - Community State - local courts, local laws, community courts. Power devolved to community level.

Land Reform -taxation schemes to be based on land ownership and taxation on the supermarkets at the same time as taxation is eased on the worker and small farmer.