I have written nine essays about why a collapse is coming, how it will play out and what comes after. As I pointed out at the onset, they were essays in its real and original meaning, trials (from French essayer). I don’t pretend to know. The only thing I really know is that this constant ever growing socio-economic system that I call global industrial capitalism is bound to collapse – I just don’t know when.

Many thanks to those that give comments and feedback. I read and I try to react or respond to the comments I get. In this post I will just raise a few matters emerging from the process, from your comments or from my emerging thoughts.

Even among those that seem to agree that this growth-addicted system is doomed to fail and collapse, there seems to be quite different perspectives on how fast that will happen. Equally important is of course how deep the collapse will be and what will collapse. Some seem to believe that most things can continue as they are, just with some adjustment in how things are managed; others seem to see the world as a smorgasbord where we can pick the good stuff that this current civilisation has brought us and skip the rest. Yet others have the view that when the current civilisation will fall, life and the human condition will revert back to a pre-fossil fuel era, both technology wise and socially. Let me call the first group sustainable degrowthers, the second transition idealists and the third total collapsniks. Just take it as shorthand and don’t feel attacked, and I am aware of that there are many strains with opposing ideas in all three categories.

I find myself attuned to all three in some regards but not in others. Below I highlight the main weaknesses of each of them. I believe I have outlined my own ideas in the previous essays and will not repeat all of them here.

The sustainable degrowthers seem to believe that we can manage a transition away from business as usual to a fair society, by putting the brakes on global capitalism, or abolish it altogether, and at the same time redistribute wealth and resources not only nationally but internationally. It is a proposal that assumes that societies will be cooperative, people will voluntarily choose this development, and that global systems of governance much stronger than the current ones are put in place. It also assumes a highly engineered and managed process akin to a planned economy. While I am a degrowther in its essential meaning, I have less faith that such a process is likely to happen by management. First, I do think that growth will end and capitalism will not survive. The current lifestyle is so entrenched, however, that the general population and the politicians will engage in all kinds of futile efforts to keep the system going instead of taking the necessary measures in time. This will aggravate the crises and make the inevitable economic recession very steep. When the system ultimately collapses, the chances for globally coordinated or managed processes will be very low. We can be happy if global solidarity can prevent war from happening. Even in the unlikely event that a managed global degrowth process would start, I am quite certain that it would degenerate into a Soviet style of society. After all it was not ”communism” that was the problem of the Soviet state, but the power vested in an overreaching and overbearing central government controlling everything. Having said that, I don’t exclude that some countries or regions could manage a kind of degrowth process.

The transition idealists views the world and human societies as shells we can fill with whatever we like. We can abandon fossil fuels, avoid some of the worst practices, keep advanced welfare and medical care and high science, consume more culture and less trinkets and go on with a merrier life than before. To some extent they are right, but society, human expression and technology develop in tandem. And in order to be strong they need to reinforce each other. And one technology assumes, or dictates, that many other technologies are in place and that society is organised in certain ways. Even something basic as beer assumes agriculture, and agriculture assumes and requires a sedentary culture. Sedentism, in turn, implies a lot of things, even though I don’t subscribe to the idea that agriculture and sedentism is the fall of man, the cradle of tyranny or the broken link between humans and nature. Some claim that beer preceded or even initiated agriculture and sedentism in that case means that it is beer that is the culprit, quite an entertaining thought….

It all started with beer, image: Gunnar Rundgren

As I tried to explain in one of my articles, you can’t just choose to have internet or advanced medicine unless you have a society with advanced technologies and extensive global networks to ascertain all the material needs for such a marvel to exist. Some things can be done but become prohibitively expensive to do unless embedded in a certain technological system. For example, you might think that it is unsustainable that almost every person has a car, but that people living in remote places ought to have an electric one. But the relative costs of cars (electric or not) and the cost of a car-adapted-road and service network per km driven will increase at least one order of magnitude, perhaps more, if there is no mass car usage.

The total collapsniks predict a very deep and quick collapse, which will throw us back hundreds of years. In the process, or as a result, billions will starve and societies will collapse from a combination of inner strife, war and lack of resources. The result will be an agrarian scarcity society, sometimes under a Hobbesian rule. Of course, I am not in a position to say that this will absolutely not happen. But I see several reasons for why not. First, I don’t see a particular reason why humans will lose all of the abilities and knowledge gained in the last two hundred years, even considering my criticism of the cuddly transition narrative above. Even if we did lose much of it, there are such huge quantities of steel and other useful stuff to keep us going for centuries to come. For sure they are not edible, but they will make food production much easier.

Secondly, even if we would lose much of the technosphere, on a pure material level, I don’t think a radical scarcity is the normal human condition. I believe most of the narratives of how it “was” in the past are severely biased and shaped by the dominating narrative of progress. Just the other day, new research shows that It is likely that urbanisation in England during the Roman era resulted in limited access to resources and overcrowded, polluted living situations with long-term negative impacts on health. In contrast, rural communities did not similarly experience any of these stressors. I believe agrarian cultures have been, and can be, able to provide for a decent way of life if they are not subject to oppression and extraction from authoritarian elites. I believe, that even if the varnish of modernity is rather shallow, the ideals of egalitarianism* and respect for human life is not a result of modernity, but is embedded in the human culture from a very long time ago. So even with a deep collapse, I think the dystopian agrarian scarcity narrative is exaggerated.

For sure, regardless of which future we foresee, the very big global human population will put an enormous strain on resources. Fortunately, the population growth seems to be stalling and will soon cease, and it has already gone into reverse in many countries – this may delay an environmental collapse, but make the economic and social collapse even more certain. This also gives some clues for the urban-rural equation. You don’t need a massive urban exodus from cities to readjust urbanisation rates, you just need that people live longer and have more babies in rural areas than in urban areas.

Of course, my debate here is currently a fringe debate, The two prevailing mainstream narratives are very different. The first is the business as usual will just go on and more growth will give us new opportunities to deal with the bads and make more goods. The second is the green growth, ecomodernist story that says, yes, we have a problem but we will solve it with replacing brown technology with green. Essentially, there is little difference between the two. It is more a question of strategy of what comes first, economic growth or green transition. This, in turn, has more to do with how the proponents rate the severity of the environmental situation, ranging from “immediate disaster” to “some problem”. Anyway, here I don’t discuss these perspectives.

With this, I take four weeks break from this blog. I have a book project that I want to focus on to see if I can shape it up or if I should drop it altogether. It is about the economy as a socio-eco-bio-physical (you get it?) system.

* This recent article give an interesting overview of the topic: Egalitarianism is not Equality: Moving from outcome to process in the study of human political organisation.