Toward the End

Faithful readers will know that, at the start of the new millennium, I started to express my own personal anxieties about the direction globalisation was taking us all – and to muse about where a guy with my age and experience should be putting his energy and resources (not least time)

The global crisis of the past 6 years confirmed my worst fears – but I still haven’t found an answer to my simple question. In the meantime I’ve continued to try to identify the people who are writing seriously about the various issues involved……

Several years ago I was very impressed with the work of people such as Richard Douthwaite and, in the past couple of years, with the (rather more apocalpytic) books and blogs of JM Greer and Dmitry Orlov - see also here.

The latters’ recent blogspost have been reassessing the scale of the global crisis (in its various forms - fuel, economic and environmental) here – and here, suggesting that things have now gone beyond the point of no return.

Before I give you a flavour of these posts, let me share with you the eloquent final thoughts of a seasoned campaigner which were found on his laptop after his death

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behoves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?

I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together — whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

 Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices — of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.

 Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things — impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.

 We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport. 

Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

 If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value. 

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it.

We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative. We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability.

When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together. It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything.

A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles Ecotopia is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book. Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details.

We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class.

But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences — which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear. The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

The first sketch at the top is one I found in several drawerfuls of Ilia Petrov rough sketches. I suppose its from the 1944 period here.....The aquarelle is one of several (from the 1970s) I have from Vassil Vulev (when I met him a couple of years ago) who's still going at 79/80

The Long Descent

I’ve been quiet because I’ve been reading two books which, in different ways, expose the fragility of the world around us; and the theories and images so many people use to sustain their belief that, ultimately, the world is a benign place which can be controlled to ensure the continuation of the way of life portrayed in advertisements.

The first was The Long Descent – a user’s guide to the end of the industrial world which appeared in 2008. The book positions itself in the tradition of the 1972 Club of Rome's "Limits to Growth" and argues that the window of opportunity we had then to take action is closed; that. as fossil fuel production dwindles, the Industrial Age will gradually unravel, leaving humanity where it was about 200 years ago. The "gradual" part is one of the author’s distinctive arguments. As supplies contract, he argues, we'll scale back. Prices then go down, and we begin to use more...resources run low and prices spike...so we scale back again, over and over until we are finally, hundreds of years from now, de-Industrialized. We will then rebuild society in a sustainable fashion. As he rightly observes

Most people in the developed world have never had to feed, clothe, house, or protect themselves with their own hands, and have only the vaguest notions about how to do so. They rely for every necessity of life on the industrial economy. Even the most basic requirements of life are tied to the industrial system; how many people nowadays can light a fire without matches or a butane lighter from some distant factory? The skills necessary to get by in a non-industrial society, skills that were still common knowledge a century ago, have been all but lost throughout the developed world.This disastrous situation results from the modern obsession with progress. When a new technology is introduced, the older technology it replaces ends up in the trash heap. Since new technologies almost always demand more resources, use more energy, and include more complexity than their older equivalents, each step on the path of progress has made people more dependent on the industrial system and more vulnerable to its collapse. 

You can see him presenting his ideas here (don't be put off by his appearance - his arguments are more sound than any in the mainstream) and read his weekly essays on his blog. One of his posts has an interesting reading list. The book complements Orlov's which I wrote about last September here and here.
I remember, forty years ago, being impressed with EJ Mishan's powerful attack on the worship of "growth" which seemed to have become Europe's new religion - The Costs of Economic growth (1967). The books's emphasis was on the social costs of wealth. Then came the environmental critique - the damage we were doing to ecological balance - with a lot of talk about (but little support for) "renewables". Latterly have come the peak-oil arguments which, at last, are recognised and clearly speak more loudly than the first two sets of arguments. The new wave of books such as Greer and Orlov basically argue that it is now too late for political action (as well as being unrealistic to expect it); that "renewables" have been over-hyped; and that we need to prepare individually and at a local level for a new type of living.

The second book was McMafia – crime without frontiers which destroys the illusion that anyone may have had that the mob, triad and Mafia-type operations are a thing of the past. It demonstrates that they are stronger than ever and traces the modern spread of transnational crime to the combination of the break-up of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc in the late Eighties and early Nineties and the simultaneous deregulation of global markets. The link I have given above is a 20 minute presentation Misha Glenny (an expert on the Balkans) gave in 2009 about the book. There are longer presentations here and here 

One review explained the background succinctly - 

The Soviet bloc incubated such favourable conditions for the development of criminal motivation and expertise. In Bulgaria, for example, the secret service played a key role in arms and drugs smuggling during the communist period. According to Glenny, 80 per cent of western Europe's heroin went through the sticky hands of the Bulgarian DS (equivalent of the KGB). At the same time, the communist system created a management class steeped in corrupt practices. When communism fell, there were suddenly thousands of unemployed cops and spooks in Bulgaria with first-hand experience of international crime. And there were also a great many wrestlers and weightlifters, pumped-up on state-issued steroids, who would make for ideal muscle in the protection rackets that quickly sprung up. Drugs, prostitution, car theft, money laundering and extortion followed on an industrial scale.

The book starts with 2 assassinations – one in a London suburb in 1994 of an innocent woman, the other in central Sofia in 2003 of a gang boss, Ilya Pavlov, one of many characters profiled in the book, revealing the intertwining of crime, government and security in a growing number of countries. Another review explains

- a former wrestler who married the daughter of a high-ranking secret police officer, Pavlov began his career as a small-time thug. In the 1990s, the combination of a collapsing state, unregulated markets, and lawlessness created enormous opportunities, which he exploited with entrepreneurial zest and murderous violence. Misha Glenny explains that in less than a decade, Pavlov had created a conglomerate that spanned many sectors (extortion, prostitution, smuggling, drug trafficking, car theft, and money laundering) and many countries, including the United States, where his subsidiary Multigroup U.S. owned two casinos in Paraguay, then the Latin American epicentre of the illicit trades (since displaced by Venezuela). By describing the thousands of mourners who attended Pavlov's funeral in 2003, Glenny conveys how deeply entangled his criminal enterprise was with Bulgaria's power elite. Everyone who mattered in business, politics, government, trade unions, sports, religion, the media, or the military seemed to be there.

Neal Ascherson’s review brings out well one of Glenny’s underlying points - “Mobs, mafias and global rackets are often performing useful and occasionally vital social functions that no other institution – governments, legal systems, the police, the economy itself – is capable of providing”.

The state had almost given up law enforcement, and organised crime stepped into the gap. In Russia, criminal outfits like the mighty Solntsevo Brotherhood, led by the ex-wrestler Mikhailov, not only provided bodyguards but also took on the enforcement of commercial contracts.In the courtyard of Steam Baths Number Four, on Astashkina Street in Odessa, there are two marble plaques with bunches of flowers laid on the ground beneath them. The first is engraved with the image of a man in his mid-forties, sporting cropped hair and looking sleek in a suit over a T-shirt; the second has on it a poem written by his closest friends after he, Viktor Kulivar ‘Karabas’, was felled on this spot by 19 bullets from an unknown assassin’s semi-automatic: ‘The sacred clay holds the remains/Of Viktor Pavlovich, our dear Karabas’.Karabas was gunned down in 1997. He and his mob had taken over the port city of Odessa as law and order disintegrated in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. One might call his reign a comprehensive protection racket. But, looked at in another way, Karabas became the only reliable source of authority and social discipline. He arbitrated the city’s commercial disputes (10 per cent of net profits was his price); he kept the drug peddlers to one area of Odessa, and prevented the horrific people-smuggling in the harbour district from infecting the rest of the town. Using a bare minimum of thuggery, he kept the peace. Karabas seldom carried a gun. Everyone looked up to him, and levels of violence stayed lower in Odessa than in other Russian and Ukrainian cities. His murderers were probably Chechens hired to break Odessa’s grip on the local oil industry, a grip coveted by Ukraine’s then president, Leonid Kuchma, who ‘during his ten years in power . . . presided over the total criminalisation of the Ukrainian government and civil service’.

Glenny is particularly strong on the bizarre economic liberalisation that took place under Boris Yeltsin and which produced the bloody reign of the oligarchs in the early Nineties. All price restrictions were removed by government, except those of Russia's natural resources: oil, gas, diamonds and metals. Overnight, a vast number of Russians were impoverished, while a tiny minority was able to buy up vital commodities at up to 40 times less than their global market price. 'This process of enrichment,' Glenny writes, 'was quite simply the grandest larceny in history and stands no historical comparison.' In turn the oligarchs required protection, and jailbirds and former KGB agents alike moved into the lucrative if deadly business of the 'kryshy' protection rackets, or 'armed entrepreneurs'.

Nowadays, Glenny quotes a US official as saying, a Russian businessman is as likely to be a member of the intelligence services as a criminal cartel, and quite possibly to be part of both.

The effects of the Russian organised crime boom have been experienced as far afield as Tel Aviv and New York, and all parts of Europe (although Nigeria, Japan, Colombia and China and others all have their distinctive mobs). In this reading, the East is little more than an opportunistic supplier to the West's insatiable demand. 'Organised crime is such a rewarding industry,' writes Glenny scathingly, ' ... because ordinary Western Europeans spend an ever burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; sticking €50 notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labour on subsistence wages; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; or purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.'


The painting is by Zlatyu Boiadjiev (1903-1976) - often known as the Bulgarian Breughel