There is no such thing as Peak Oil (the Russian version)

"Radio, Science, Technique and Society" was translated by Leonard Hussey from volume 21 of the Collected Works of L.D. Trotsky, published in the famous city of Moscow in 1927. The speech was delivered by Trotsky on March 1, 1926 and is the inaugural address at the First All-Union Congress of the Society of Friends of Radio. It was broadcasted live from the Polytechnic Museum, where the Friends of Radio convened. My copy of this little pamphlet is dated September 1974, and is said to be a reprint from the November-December 1957 issue of Labour Review. In other words, the text was published by Gerry Healy's followers. The cover shows a portrait of Trotsky surrounded by some kind of surreal-looking sci-fi art. Very Soviet 1920's. A couple of excerpts follows.

"Scientific and technical thought, not without interruptions and failures, marches on. (...) I think that in the centuries immediately ahead of us, scientific and technical thought, in the hands of socialistically-organized society, will advance without zig-zags, breaks or failures. It has matured to such an extent, it has become sufficiently independent and stands so firmly on its feet, that it will go forward in a planned and steady way, along with the growth of the productive forces with which it is linked in the closest degree".

"Then the possibility will be opened up of replacing coal and oil by atomic energy, which will also become the basic motive power. This is not at all a hopeless task. And what prospects it opens before us! This alone gives us the right to declare that scientific and technical thought is approaching a great turning-point, that the revolutionary epoch in the development of human society will be accompanied by a revolutionary epoch in the sphere of the cognition of matter and the mastering of it... Unbounded technical possibilities will open up before liberated mankind".

"Under the socialist system science and technique as a whole will undoubtedly be directed against religious prejudices, against superstition, which reflects the weakness of man before man or before nature. What, indeed, does a `voice of heaven' amount to when there is being broadcast all over the country a voice from the Polytechnical Musuem?"

"This will show that our radio-communications have brought nearer the transformation of Europe into a single economic organization. The development of a radio-telegraphic network is, among so many other things, a preparation for the moment when the people of Europe and Asia shall be united in a Soviet Union of Socialist Peoples".

Amen to that. There is no such thing as Peak Oil. There is only Pik Kommunizma.