THE WORK/ENERGY CRISIS AND THE APOCALYPSE

The litany of natural stuffs — petroleum, natural gas, uranium, coal, wood, water, sunlight — apprehension about their limits, joy in their abundance, and skepticism about their benefits, pass for the bulk of "analyses" of the "energy crisis" that "we" face. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, Nature was "under control" and the robots (e.g., Hal in 2001) were rebelling, now it appears that Mother Nature is turning a new face. Instead of the obedient, invisible, and infinitely malleable material of social development, the terrestrial abode seems stingy and treacherously seductive. For the energy crisis is usually traced to two problems:

(a) The "limited" or "finite" amount of fossil and uranium fuels in the earth;

(b) The increasingly "surprising" discovery of interactions between the use of these fuels and their biological and social effects.

Although the analysts place different emphases on these two "problems," their "solutions" usually address both. Indeed, the "great energy debate" (at least what passes for it) is a confrontation between the anti-limitationists, who are anxious about the rapidly approaching abyss of zero-oil-coal-natural gas-uranium and are ready to introduce any "way out," however untried, and the collective interactionists, who argue that the "balance" or "fabric" of Nature is so intricate and fragile (to mix metaphors) that any of the schemes of the anti-limitationists would drive Mother Nature into a schizophrenic breakdown.

From this debate, one would presume that these are momentous times.

They are, but not in the way that is being implied. On the one side, the anti-limitationists cringe in terror at the prospect of a "day the earth stood still" repeated so often that "civilization" (sometimes with the proviso "as we know it") collapses into an age of social anarchy — starvation, rape, murder, and cannibalism ("What's new?" we might ask). On the other side stand the equally apocalyptic interactionists envisioning huge floods let loose by the CO "hot house" effect, or the end of all biological life due to the depletion of the ozone layer causing a tidal wave of high-energy radiation to penetrate the chromosome linkages and break down the proteins, or a festering mutant jungle released by the radioactive wastes of nuclear reactors. Conclusion: either social anarchy or natural anarchy. "Take your choice," we're told. But must we choose? Are these our alternatives?

This debate, with its apocalyptic overtones, indicates a crucial crisis for capital and its attempt to carry through a major reorganization in the accumulation process to overcome it. The Apocalypse is no accident. Whenever the ongoing model of exploitation becomes untenable, capital has intimations of mortality qua the world's end. Every period of capitalist development has had its apocalypses. I'm not referring here to the microapocalypse of death: everybody dies, and even if everybody dies at the same time (I mean everybody), what's the problem? The earth becomes a cleared tape and why should the angels grieve?

I am talking about those functional apocalypses that mark every major change in capitalist development and thought. For the Apocalypse was approached at other times in the history of capital, when the class struggle reached a level that jeopardized capital's command.

In the seventeenth century, a pervasive premonition of apocalypse was voiced by the "philosophers," "astronomers," and "anatomists" (i.e., capital's planners) in the face of the revolutionary upheavals of the newly forming proletariat that was being introduced to the capitalist discipline of work. In this phase, questions of inertia, time, and order were paramount. The control mechanisms were manageable only by external forces. Capital's concern with its apocalyptic potentialities can be seen reflected in Newton's theory of the solar system: the planets revolve around the sun, but their revolutions continually deviate from the equilibrium path because of the random, irregular gravitational impulses they communicate to each other. Ptolemy's crystal suddenly looked like a mob that with this-and-that, slowly, imperceptibly, became unruly, though it was nominally dominated by the gravitational field of the sun. The deviations accumulated to a point where some planets would spin off into the stellar depths while the others would dive into the sun's inferno. Hence Newton's argument for the necessity of God's existence, whose function in the universe was to prevent this catastrophe by periodically returning the planets to their equilibrium orbits via a true miracle. The solar system was the "Big Watch" and God was not only the watchmaker but also the watch repairer. Otherwise the mechanism, however finely wrought, would snap and break through its blind obedience to the laws of inertia. God must intervene to create orderly time from chaotic mixtures of inertia and attraction. Given the universal identification of God with the state in the seventeenth century, it is not hard to decipher Newton's prescription for the state policy vis-à-vis the apocalypse portended by its "wandering stars," the proletariat. (A prescription Newton embodied in his job as the inquisitor and torturer of counterfeiters for the Royal Mint.)

In the Newtonian period, capital's main task is the regularization of time as a precondition for lengthening the working day. Medieval production time was circular and the pacing of work and "rest" fixed by "eternal" seasonal and diurnal dichotomies. Summer and days could not be stretched; winter and nights could not be shrunk at will. Newton and his fellow "century of genius" planners had to create a nonterrestrial work-time that would be the same in winter and summer, in the night as in the day, on earth as it is in heaven. Without this transformation of time, lengthening the working day would be impossible to imagine, much less impose "with fire and blood."

By contrast, the "revolutions" and organizational forms thrown up by the working class in the first half of the nineteenth century spelled the end of a period where profits could be created by stretching the working day to its limit. Capital had to "revolutionize" the technical and social conditions of production to turn the proletarian revolt against work into an intensively productive working day. Absolute time was no more of...