The Oil Crisis—Socialist Answers

The energy crisis illuminates the nature of late-capitalist society. Let us hope that it will also make possible a political challenge to it.

I will not argue the details of this statement. Dankwart Rustow’s article in this issue provides ample proof (and I, too, have documented the point in a series of articles in the Newsletter of the Democratic Left). Let me simply recall the facts before proceeding to some practical problems. In general, late capitalism is characterized by the integration of public and private bureaucracies within a (sophisticated) profit-maximizing framework; it is a system of corporate collectivism. The oil companies, as Rustow shows, have been the special beneficiaries of extraordinary aid fr...