Modern slavery

"The coming convulsion we face in the 21st century is not so much moral but no less stark: the collapse of a faltering industrial polity in the face of depleting energy supplies. Like the earlier dilemma of slavery, our national leaders refuse to face it."
Depleting energy supplies are but the surface of the real problem.
Which is still a problem of slavery, even if we could talk of a different kind of slavery.
The "abundance society" is built on the abundance of food and technical devices that should make our lives heaven, but whose production reduces man to a bigger slaveery than before.
Bigger because it is hidden and inevitable.
We are the slave of a system whose survival is in the more and more production which is based in a bigger and bigger consuming to allow a bigger production.
We have to work more to produce more and we have to consume more in order to have the need to produce more, so that the economical machine can run.
We have to work more and more to be able to afford more and more useless things, so that we will be able to make a useless world running on a useless production.
The only constant and useless depletion is still the energy supply.
We should consume less and produce less, so that we consume less energy.
But then, how would the actual machine run?