Years ago, I had a brief infatuation with the theory of peak oil. This is the idea that we are now reaching, or will soon reach, a point at which the total amount of oil being produced in the world begins to decline due to a lack of new discoveries. Since the global economy is still highly dependent on oil to fuel economic growth, this is obviously a big problem.

People often talk about “running out” of oil, but that is not really the right way to think about it — the effects of diminishing reserves of easily accessible oil will be more complex than that. Hegel and Marx liked to talk about the dialectical relationship between “essence” and “form of appearance”: the former is the more fundamental but not directly perceptible substance of things, while the latter is the concrete form in which those essences are reflected. Marx saw his work as an attempt to work from capitalism’s form of appearance — wages, profits and rent, markets, business cycles, and so on — to its underlying essential forms, which turned out to be value and the process of capital accumulation.

With regard to oil, the essence of the situation is more or less as the peak oilers have it: less new oil reserves are being discovered, and what is discovered is much more difficult to extract. However, the form of appearance of this crisis will not necessarily be skyrocketing oil prices, as everyone seems to assume. Paradoxically, the aftermath of peak oil may turn out to be a period of low oil prices, accompanied by a prolonged global economic slump.