This gets to the heart of things, please read it in it's entirity.
The current ecological disaster is straight out of Marx. Consider Marx’s call for the “associated producers” to “rationally regulate” humanity’s “interchange with nature” (the production process, essentially), something he knew to be impossible under the unelected dictatorship of capital. It is plainly irrational to build the many precarious deep water offshore oil drilling operations that British Petroleum and other leading multinational corporate petro-tyrannies manage around the world. It only takes one big and inevitable screw up for such operations to yield a colossal ecological catastrophe like the one currently underway in the Gulf.
Sane and reasonably knowledgeable and engaged citizen-workers organized as empowered and “associated producers” would never agree to let such a genie out of the bottle, with such potentially disastrous consequences for livable ecology. As the liberal New York Times columnist Bob Herbert noted yesterday (I am writing on the morning of Wednesday, June 2, 2010): “If a bank is too big to fail, it’s way too big to exist. If an oil well is too far beneath the sea to be plugged when something goes wrong, it’s too deep to be drilled in the first place.”<4>
Money Speaks for Money
Consider also Marx’s core analytical distinction between “use value” and “exchange value.” For rational and associated citizen-producers, the point of liberated humanity’s core economic activities (its “interchange with nature”) would be to create goods and services of real and lasting human utility without damaging people or the environment. Under capitalism, however, everything, including the core human activities of work and production, is “drowned in the icy water”<5>of capitalists’ egotistical profit calculation. The holy market (supposedly “free”) is the reigning regulating mechanism, the master arbiter of economic decisions. The dominant consideration determining what gets produced and how and for who is exchange value: how much money can investors make off this or that economic activity in the near term? “Money speaks for money, the devil for his own.”<6>
British Petroleum (BP) has been raping the Gulf’s Coast sea-beds for many years in the obvious and simple pursuit of capitalism’s holy grail: market reward in the form of investor profit, In service to that simple objective, the sine qua non of capitalist production, BP and other giant transnational corporation have quite logically and normatively (within the amoral reckoning that lay at the soulless heart of the profits system<7>) used bribery and threat to discourage and undermine anything approaching rational public regulation of their own particular deadly “interchange with Nature.” Now that their perverted priorities have interacted with its awesome techno-destructive capacities to produce the Deepwater calamity, we confront their socially produced and record-setting oil slick as a “blind force of Nature.”
snip
The core problem here is that U.S. “democracy” has always been merely “political” and has not extended to the purpose, structure, technology, and essence of the core economic activities that constitute so much of the essence of humanity’s “interchange with nature” and of the material basis of daily life, We need to correct, abolish, and overcome that separation, giving egalitarian material meaning to the devalued currency of democracy by organizing as “associated producers” to govern that interchange in accord with the common good. “The most promising place to start” Wood writes at the end of her aforementioned book, “is the democratic organization of production, which presupposes the re-appropriation of the means of production by the producers”<13>.
As the ongoing eco-cidal BP-Deepwater calamity suggests and as a growing mountain of scientific evidence shows, the overdue correction – the restored communal regulation of production – is more than merely desirable and recommended. It is an existential requirement for the human species, for which it has long been (as the prolific Hungarian Marxist Istvan Meszaros puts it) “socialism or barbarism if we’re lucky”<14>. The barbarism has already begun and the fight is now both against that and for mere survival. The corporate state is leading us on a death march at an ever-escalating pace. Deepwater and Bhopal are us. It will not do to tinker around the edges in response. Only revolution can save the Earth<15>.
http://www.zcommunications.org/deepwater-lesson-expropriate-the-expropriators-by-paul-street 
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