The descent

How will collapse play out and how deep will it be?

Let’s continue our descent into collapse. First, let me be clear: “I don’t know” (credit to Nate Hagens). You don’t either. We can’t know or predict something as complex as a human society and its trajectories.

I note that collapse is gradually coming out of the shadows and into the mainstream culture. When I was young, future dystopias were often framed around nuclear wars or alien invasions. When those threats were fading, the more unlikely zombie threat was common. This was followed by environmental disasters or pandemics. Now, causes of collapse in popular culture seem to be caused by energy shortages, climate, AI hostility or just collapse of social order. Collapse is increasingly taken for granted. Meanwhile, neither societies nor individuals take steps to prepare themselves.

Do like you did before

How the current system will collapse will impact what comes after. For the better and the worse, human cultures carry many things forward, both virtues and sins. Patterns, norms and institutions are also often maintained even if their original cause and context is lost. I wrote in the first article how many components of the Roman empire shaped Europe for centuries after the fall of Rome, and still today. This path dependency is very pronounced in the make up of the metabolism of society. Once you embark on agriculture as the main source of food it is hard to move back to foraging or fishing (even though it has happened several times in history in limited geographic areas). Also on an individual farm level, path dependency plays a big role. The way you farm is manifest in machinery, buildings, field infrastructure as well as in crop and livestock selection. Path dependency in energy systems and machinery is also strong. Just look at the car industry and how hard it has been tied to fossil fuels and combustion engines.

Railroads are prime examples of path dependency. Shadowmeld Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In my third essay I discussed the drivers of collapse in more detail. Just a brief version here:

Capitalism as such is built on growth that can’t continue forever, and which de facto has slowed down. Some, such as Tim Morgan, mean that real growth of the economy has already ended, at least in the high-income countries. The growth we can see in GDP-figures is not representing any real increase of prosperity or wealth, just an increase in debt. Coincidentally, in an ongoing parallel book project I try to explore the biophysical foundations of the economy and how the linkage between the GDP, wealth and the Earth looks like (I am a bit stuck at the moment, which is probably why I write this in the first place....). It is obvious that the nominal wealth of financial capital and the productive capacity of the economy is out of sync. Financial wealth is inherently a claim on the economy; in the end you are supposed to be able to convert your dollars, bitcoins, treasuries or stock into stuff, material assets or services of other people. But this is simply not possible with the exponential growth of financial capital and debt.

Capitalism will not survive no-growth, and even less de-growth, for any extended period of time. The reason is its inherent properties as well as the social reaction to the raising inequality that is inevitable in a slow-no-de-growth capitalism. Capitalism will either wane or be overturned by popular discontent, probably a combination of both. Or as I wrote earlier, some people might just opt out, walk away.

Increasing inequality is inevitable in a slow-no-de-growth capitalism

The reversal of the global economic system, the end of growth and the collapse of huge parts of the financial system will lead to that a lot of real capital will be stranded, either because of lack of markets or because a shortage of inputs needed. This is compounded by an energy crunch, with fossil fuels being increasingly costly (this is the case already without climate effects, but it is obviously even more so when you add carbon taxes or if you count the “external costs” caused by climate change) and the alternatives being even costlier, in particular for transportation.

The combination of the effects of the destruction of capital, increasing inequality and lost supply lines with lead to the collapse on many nation states, and in particular of international an supranational polities. As I wrote earlier, it is not hard to envision that the USA and the EU will collapse. In general, a lot of complexity will be shed, financial, economic, political and technological. On a national level, power will be devolved to regions and local polities, either by design or by default (i.e. local polities simply claiming authority).

The simplification and the destruction of capital will also have a huge impact on urbanization. Urbanization, on the scale we see today, is a result of mechanization of agriculture (without it, most people would still farm and thus few people could live in cities), cheap transportation, largely by fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers allowing a linear flow of nutrients to cities. Another, less recognized, aspect of urbanization, is that it is largely a result of, and enforces and multiplies disparities in power and capital. Most cities are like a colonial power in relation to its rural surrounding. I envision an exodus from cities. As land becomes more important, again, the huge disparity in land ownership will, again, be a focus for political struggles.

Land reform will be a prominent demand

The development of technology is also highly dependent on capital, population size, division of labour, global supply lines. In a shrinking economy there will be little technological development and some existing technologies will simply be lost. Some because they are too costly, others because they are dependent on components sourced from many different places, or that there is not enough people to hold up the qualifications needed to keep them going. In my next essay, I will look more into the energy and technology situation after a collapse.

Fewer of us

The global population is rapidly moving from a rapid growth to stagnation and soon enough to contraction. Falling population will play a big role in two ways. A shrinking population means fewer hands in production and fewer mouths on the consumption size, it also means falling prices for housing. As such it will make the collapse quicker and more profound. Meanwhile a smaller population will, in some regards, make it easier to establish a new culture. The combination of a smaller population and considerably smaller ecological foot print per capita will allow for a partial recovery of nature.

Will there be war?

The big unknown, and the fear of many, is if a collapse leads to war. By and large, I put more faith in humanity than what is reflected in various dystopias. Contrary to common belief, there is ample evidence that in times of shortages and strife, people cooperate and share resources rather than fighting over them. I am not the only one that has observed both at home in Sweden and in many very poor countries that poor people tend to be more generous than rich people. The Global Flourishing Study shows that most people in most parts of the world puts being ”a good person” on top of the list of what is most important in life. People do evil things but they are largely not evil, or, at least, they don’t want to be evil.

Conflicts and wars mostly originate in the institutional level, with nations, corporations and others claiming more resources or in clashes over values, culture and religion between groups. And I don’t rule out wars in the future as there have been wars all through written human history. But even if we end up in wars, they will end and life will continue, unless the war was an all out nuclear version.

Linked to war is also the question how deep a collapse would be. Theoretically, I don’t think the biophysical conditions and the human overshoot would have to lead to a very deep collapse. Sending the high income countries back to the 1960s, where middle income countries are now, and poor countries reaching a similar level of material conditions would probably be sustainable (forgive the use of that highly manhandled word) with a high level of equality, organic agriculture and a reasonable build up of renewables. Obviously, with war or other expressions of civil strife the fall will be deeper – and quicker – than with an orderly descent. Society, and in particular its powerful groups – capitalist and the political and economic managerial class – will try to maintain order and status quo by investing more into keeping the system going, pumping more oil and gas, spending more money, priming the economy to increase consumer spending etc (sounds a bit familiar, where did I hear “drill, baby drill”?). Exactly what has been going on for a while. All those efforts just makes it harder to avoid a collapse and will make the collapse deeper than ‘necessary’.

Throwing good money after bad will deepen the collapse

My assumption (a finer word for guesstimate) is therefore that a collapse will be deeper than necessary. Let’s say that we land on an economic development more in the range of 5,000 dollars per person (that is Nigeria today or Western Europe in the 1920s). Admittedly, GDP-figures and monetary values are very crude measures of how livelihoods may look like, so don’t get too hung up on that figure. My next essay on the topic will be written with this as a starting point.

Inspiration from others

While preparing for that, let me point to two sources of inspiration for how a post-collapsic world would look like. I, as any other human, hardly have any original thoughts. When it comes to society we all process other people’s ideas and human cultural evolution, again and again.

I just read Chris Smaje’s Finding Lights in a Dark Age and wrote a longer review of it in Swedish. It covers a lot of ground and introduces many perspectives that don’t fit into mainstream debates and framings, particularly not with those that are used to see the main conflict line to be between the left and the right or between the market and the state. The focus of the book is social and not technological or economic. The perspectives of Chris Smaje carry extra weight as a result of the practical experiences he and his wife Cordelia have had with converting their farm into a diversified operation with a lot of social interaction. I will not try to summarize the book here, just point to some perspectives that interested me or that I think is interesting for my readers.

Chris Smaje considers humans to be complex animals who are not inherently good or bad and the future will (also) be messy. For solutions, he points towards distributism, agrarian populism and immanentism and some other concepts which might be ”new” for many people. The foursome, families, households, commons och communities are major, complementary building blocks in the future, as they have also been in the past. He rehabilitates the family from its rather tarnished rep among “progressives”.

Another book that gives an interesting perspective on how a post-collapsic world could (should) look like is News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris, the Arts and Crafts guy. In the novel, Morris, through an imagined visit in the future, close to our time, paints a pastoral future without industries, schools(!), pollution and private property. Nature has been restored, not primarily into some kind of pristine wilderness but into a terraformed garden country (Trafalgar Square is an apricot garden). His take on work is especially interesting. In William Morris’ utopia, people like to work, they see work as a creative joy and they even fear that if they are too efficient there will be too little work in the future. This is really another perspective than our civilization’s view, and also very different from the view of most 19^th century socialists, on work as a necessary evil that should be minimized. Through this view of work, also the divide between production, leisure, reproduction and care vanishes. There are no factories, but there are common workshops were people inspire each other and make joint projects. It is a utopia, of course, but a rather appealing one. There are obviously many others that have written about another possible world, such as Eli F Schumacher, Ivan Illich and Peter Kropotkin. All worth a read.

---

The previous essays in this series.