Update I thought I’d repost this a year on, and reopen the discussion 10 September 2015
Reader ZM points me to a paper with this title, by Graham Turner of the University of Melbourne. Not only does Turner answer “Yes”, he gives a date: 2015. That’s a pretty big call to be making, given that 2015 is less than four months away.
The abstract reads:
The Limits to Growth “standard run” (or business-as-usual, BAU) scenario produced about forty years ago aligns well with historical data that has been updated in this paper. The BAU scenario results in collapse of the global economy and environment (where standards of living fall at rates faster than they have historically risen due to disruption of normal economic functions), subsequently forcing population down. Although the modelled fall in population occurs after about 2030—with death rates rising from 2020 onward, reversing contemporary trends—the general onset of collapse first appears at about 2015 when per capita industrial output begins a sharp decline. Given this imminent timing, a further issue this paper raises is whether the current economic difficulties of the global financial crisis are potentially related to mechanisms of breakdown in the Limits to Growth BAU scenario. In particular, contemporary peak oil issues and analysis of net energy, or energy return on (energy) invested, support the Limits to Growth modelling of resource constraints underlying the collapse.
A central part of the argument, citing Simmons is that critics of LtG wrongly interpeted the original model as projecting a collapse beginning in 2000, whereas the correct date is 2015.
I’ve been over this issue in all sorts of ways (see here and here for example, or search on Peak Oil). So readers won’t be surprised to learn that I don’t buy this story. I won’t bother to argue further: unless the collapse is even more rapid than Turner projects, I’ll be around to eat humble pie in 2016 when the downturn in output (and the corresponding upsurge in oil prices) should be well under way.
Given that I’m a Pollyanna compared to lots of commenters here, I’d be interested to see if anyone is willing to back Turner on this, say by projecting a decline of 5 per cent or more in world industrial output per capita in (or about) 2015, continuing with a sharply declining trend thereafter. [minor clarifications added, 5/9]
John Quiggin 
@Ikonoclast
Goodoh then! My own age and inclination. I think you’ve just mounted the best argument for open insurrection I’ve read for a while. Don’t panic though. You’re not so much advocating a course of action as advocating self defence against an insane ruling class. But when was it ever sane?
We are in crisis. This presents us with an opportunity for personal growth (see Joanna Macy) or cold feet. Personally, I’ll go to my grave hot rather than live as a cold cadaver of cowardice.
@Tim Macknay
Fair enough. I have regular bouts of that and also its mass broadcast equivalents. 😉
@ZM
We ALREADY know the LTG runs are completely wrong. The book makes a major point about oil, and that its depletion all play a major role. If you look at the “resources” plot, it started a rapid decline some 20 years ago. Oil reserves are now stretching out to the end of the century. This is precisely the problem with models. There are always variables that are unexpected or unaccounted for.
Jack King,
You are very silly. If you start with 100% mineral/fossil fuel resources and dig them out and use them the resources left in the ground decline steeply because they are only replenished on a very lengthy geological/planetary time.
The Limits to Growth did the best they could with the knowledge at the time. If you think there is no way people can know anything you should go join a monastery and take a vow of silence so as not to hardly do anything wrong , instead of making unfounded arguments about climate change and resources not declining despite their being dug up and used.
I don’t believe there will be a collapse in 2100 as the coming ecological and economic disasters will force a change in the way the world does business well before then.
I am more in the Paul Gilding camp of a great disruption caused by a series of ecological disasters being seen more widely and deeply as too many humans taking too much from our planetary resources.
I see the world economy now as a dead cat bouncing along the bottom, the bottom being a false floor.
Our business and political leaders can either continue to gain a greater share of power and wealth in the hope it will insulate them from what is coming or they can use their power and wealth for the good of humanity and start shifting the economy away from the dead cat bouncing on dangerous ground to a steady state economy.
I’m prepared to say that next year could well be a very evident beginning of the great disruption and I have felt for many years now that by 2020 we will drag our business and political leaders kicking and screaming to stop encouraging population growth.
I don’t see lack of energy being a problem. I don’t see diminishing oil being a problem.
The state of the oceans is a disaster and many fisheries are on the verge of collapse.
We are also on the brink of disaster for terrestrial food production with the threats being extreme weather caused by climate change, high fertiliser prices due to shortage of phosphate and potassium and water shortages due to over-exploitation.
As if all this were not a big enough threat to world peace, such as it is, we have a $315 billion dollar arms industry as part of a $multi-trillion military complex which depends on conflict for survival and since 2010 there has been steep rise in arms supplies to developing nations.
I agree with Salient Green about where the crash will come from. I would add, destruction of soil stock by poor farming practice, limits on arable land and the massive inequalities in food production. Something’s going to give in agriculture long before we run out of minerals.
I’ll add debt/credit.
$x per tonne, $y per litre, $z per hour and so on…
The world debt clock says $59 trillion and rising fast, but depending who you ask it could be much higher. I can’t find any source that suggests it’s going down rather than up.
As long as we can keep creating money there won’t be a global collapse – if you measure collapse in dollars. But as many others have pointed out already, we’re well on the way to real collapse measured in other values.
yes, but would a collapse of the world-wide “debt/credit” regime exacerbate the “real collapse measured in other values” or would it ameliorate it? -a.v.
On the website of the Australian Securities Exchange “asx.com” they have all sorts of interesting stuff.
This one is there at the moment, it’s a video to ‘help’ people:
I must admit I didn’t watch it. I had wine coming out my nose.
@Tim Macknay
Dimethyl ether fuel is for wimps. Check out this.
@Ivor
This one brief sentence raises a number of questions. What is “self-managed” socialism? We were talking about Marxism…is that what you mean? Which country (s) would be your model?
@Jack King
Dear Jack, Have you heard of the idea that you can find out stuff for yourself using the internet?
The internet is a cooperative venture that provides people with the opportunity to find out a lot of stuff for themselves. So don’t you be lazy or stupid; get yourself up to speed with the new thing called “googling”.
These days you do have an obligation – you know about how we are supposed to be taking responsibility for ourselves, don’t you? – to do some basic research first, before asking other people to explain the obvious to you.
Or perhaps if you have been a decent person during your life, you might have children or grandchildren who like you and are willing to teach you how to find out stuff for yourself, instead of hanging around like a bad smell and asking other people to educate you.
You are such a leaner. Even Greg Hunt can wiki things.
@Jack King
Every functional family household is a unit of self-managed socialism. Each working adult contributes income according to his or her ability and each member receives goods and services according to their need. Does mother or father carve up the roast dinner and say “What am I bid for this fine food?” Or do they hand around plates of food according to each family member’s needs? When a child needs paid medical care does mother or father say, “Uh, uh, you have to pay us for your medical needs. How much is in your money box from your paper run?”
Every family owned and family run business is a workers’ cooperative. The tradesman across the road runs a workers’ cooperative. He plies his trade, maintains home, shed, equipment and yard. His wife child rears, cooks, cleans, answers his calls and does the bookkeeping for the business.
This is self-managed socialism. It works. One model for the next step are the type of worker-owned, worker-managed businesses like Alvarado Street Bakery located in Petaluma, California. Another model for the next step is The Mondragon Corporation in Spain. It is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region.
There is no essential requirement that entrenched oligarchic ownership of capital be the only way to create large capital-intensive enterprises. State owned natural monopolies have served many countries very well in the fields of utilities, services, railways and so on. The privatisation push to break them up has been a disaster in most cases leading to higher prices and lower levels of service for consumers
There are a number reasons that concentrated oligarchic ownership is a bad idea and I can only touch on them here. Firstly, concentrated, undemocratic power is always a bad idea. Hint, that’s why we got rid of monarchs (other than titular ones). Now it is time to get rid of the monarchs of capital who are termed oligarchs. Concentration of ownership is autocratic and thus anti-democratic. Every capitalist corporation is an autocracy run by one or a few rich oligarchs and their paid CEOs.
If you favour capitalism, you favour autocratic dictatorship over ordinary people’s working lives. It’s as simple as that.
@Julie Thomas
Wow Julie…..you really told me. Do you feel better now? I’m familiar with a “self-managed” economy, which is a decentralized one. But socialism tends to be a command economy so to say it is decentralized is an oxymoron. That’s precisely why I asked for specific current examples.
P.S. Yes, the internet is a great tool, but, by the same token, it is glutted with misinformation.
@James Wimberley
LOL! That’s excellent James, and mostly true too it would from the comments. Thank you.
@Ikonoclast
OK…got it. But my question was which country or countries have this economic model? In short, is there a track record of success that the whole world can see an emulate?
@Jack King
You project your own emotions onto others; that leads you to be making a fool of yourself but that is not a problem for me. It also isn’t apparently a problem for you at the moment. But, there is room for a lot of self-development that would lead you to develop a sense of shame for your inappropriate and foolish self-regard.
The problem of the glut of misinformation on the internet is not a problem for those of us with the nous to distinguish between blowhards like you and considered thoughtful comments.
I think you exaggerate your ability to ask appropriately for information from others. It could improve your internet experience if you were to adjust your tone of writing, because you came across as a very ordinary someone who goes around just looking for a gotcha moment as a way of bolstering your flagging self-esteem.
Well it appears that way to an ordinary person like me of course. But that is the burden that truly great men have to bear eh? Putting up with the drones and those who would pull you down to their level?
I am surprised – not really – that you bothered to brush me off. If I was you, I think I would have put me in my place by not responding. But whatever 🙂 You go Jacky.
@Tim Macknay
“Obviously, if you want to be pedantic, both ‘energy consumption’ and ‘power consumption’ are gibberish, since neither energy nor power can be ‘consumed’ (because, y’know, the conservation of energy, and all that). ”
I think ‘consumes’ is ok to describe what’s taking place, Tim. When a fire ‘consumes’ a house, the house loses its stored energy to the fire.
Or, if you use a vacuum cleaner for 60 mins, it quite literally ‘consumes’ 1 pound of coal.
That’s not a bad figure for people to remember actually: every 1kWh of electrical energy consumed ~= 1 pound of coal
An Australian household consumes about 8 kgs of coal every day, on average. No different than if you burned it in your own house to cook and keep warm. It was just burned somewhere else.
In response to various comments, I’ve clarified that I meant to refer to output per person (the difference is only about 1 percentage point) and also matched Turner in referring to “about 2015”.
I don’t see that the second point makes a lot of difference given that the prediction is being made right now, in late 2014. If someone asserted that President Obama was going to leave office “about tomorrow”, I would expect that we could determine the truth or otherwise of this by next week at the latest. To see them come back and claim vindication in January 2017 would be unimpressive.
@Jack King
Which country had capitalism before it existed at all? What track record of success in capitalism could the whole world see and emulate before capitalism itself arose? You see my point I hope. A new system by definition arises in its first manifestations without clear and fully developed exemplars. With the benefit of hindsight we can see historical forerunners and contributing developments. With the benefit of foresight we can now see the possible development of self-managed socialism and workers’ cooperatives and their extension throughout economic life.
Capitalism was revolutionary and progressive when it arose. It broke up and supplanted Feudalism and the monarchical / aristocratic system. It arose when the capitalists and to some extent their merchant predecessors overthrew the feudal system. Political power slowly devolved from the aristocracy to the oligarchs of industry and commerce. Eventually power devolved partially to the people via Parliamentary democracy and the slow extension of suffrage.
Capitalism, fully enabled by the industrial revolution, moved the economic centre of power and wealth generation from the land to the city. The bulk of workers went in the same direction, leaving serfdom and cottage industries for wage work in the manufactories. Power is always where the bulk of the most productive workers are. While this is true in itself, the power is not often in the workers’ own hands. In feudal times the local power was in the Lord’s hands (the Lord of the Manor). In capitalist times, the local and corporate power is in the Oligarch’s hands.
We might wonder how the few (Feudal Lords or modern Capitalist Oligarchs) maintain power over the many, over the workers and their dependents. It is by the power of “ownership”. Some are deemed by grant, inheritance or their personal accumulation to own capital, both as money and as productive capital goods (factories, machinery and so on). The financial mechanism is clear. (The deeper sociopolitical power mechanisms are not so clear and are outside the scope of this post.) A worker produces goods which are sold for more than worker’s wage. Part of this surplus pays for resource inputs and the capital goods of production (establishment and maintenance). The remaining part goes to the capitalist as profit.
Thus capitalism is for the secure, established capitalist a kind of perpetual money making machine. He/she puts in money and gets more money out in return. The cycle continues over and over. Like all apparent perpetual motion machines there is actually an unaccounted outside source of work keeping the machine running. In this case it is the work of the workers who are not paid the full value of their work.
A small capitalist entrepreneur may manage and run his own business. In that case, the first part of the true value he/she should be paid is the value of his/her labour in managing and bookkeeping. The second part of the true value he/she should be paid is a premium on risking capital. However, the workers also risk something and should be paid a premium on that risk. The workers risk life and limb. In the classic days of the industrial revoultion and even today there are many risky jobs and professions. Let us assume the business is a small coal mine. The workers risk life, limb and health going into the pit. Historically, workers have not been compensated for much of this risk although today in enlightened jurisdictions things are better with workers’ compensationa and insurance.
The third part of the true value that the capitalist entrepreneur should be paid is for innovation, vision and drive in creating a new business. This is a very subjective area and any fair or just rewards are impossible to quantify objectively. This is the area where capitalist ideology and mythology go into overdrive and make various claims, often spurious to justify enormous incomes (sometimes in the order of billions) to individuals.
It would take too long to fully examine this last part of the subject in a blog post. Suffice it to say that reports of individual brilliance and drive are often (though not always) greatly exaggerated. Of the many individuals who take serious financial risks, many fail and few succeed. Of the few who succeed, luck can often be seen to be a significant factor. In addition, some get rich on land and minerals, that is on private onwership of what should be the common wealth of the entire nation. Some get rich on fiancial shyterism and even crime and then later go “legit”. Some get rich on stealing ideas from scientists, workers or from gneral cultural knowledge by patenting and thus “owning” the idea or buying the idea “for a song”.
All this goes to the question of how “ownership” is constructed in our capitalist society. The current system of ownership is not natural and not even justifiable in egalitarian terms. It is based on oppression, exploitation, appropriation, alienation and often violence. Again, it would make this blog post much too long to go into all this.
@James Wimberley
Gold. 🙂
@Nick
I don’t think we’re in disagreement, Nick.
John, the article is not saying that the collapse will happen tomorrow. It is investigating the accuracy of reports from 40 years ago that the crash will start tomorrow, with small changes that may be identifiable. Turner has an article in the Guardian making the argument more simply, in which he says:
That’s a 15 year period. The 2015 start is stated explicitly as “industrial output per capita starts to fall – in the book, from about 2015”.
So really your gotcha needs to be reduced to “sometime between now and a few years from now, if the original 1972 prediction is to remain on track, industrial output per capita (globally) needs to start to decline.” Your demand for a particular value on this is unnecessary. And it should also be clear that the authors of this report are checking in on the accuracy of old predictions – not making new ones – so rather than playing gotchas with “their” prediction you should be honest and thank them for making the effort to identify whether old predictions have value.
Given the way LtG was received at the time, and your own interest in agnotology, I would have thought you would be slightly more respectful of efforts to reassess old debates about the economic and environmental future. Sadly, it seems not.
@John Quiggin
Okay, fair enough. But in return, if you don’t subscribe to “collapse” or even de-growth soon, then you have to state how long you think the world population and physical economy (infrastructure, built environment, physical plant etc.) can keep growing. Ten years, a hundred years, forever?
I read a humerous article where the writer complained that his 190 cm 19 year old son had stopped growing. He wanted to know what he could do to get his son growing again! He then made the point that all things that grow in nature eventually stop growing. They hit genetic, phenotypic or environmental limits. He asked why we expected our world economy, which is ecologically speaking a supercolony of humans, to keep growing indefinitely. It really exposes what a foolish and maladaptive goal this is.
When humans grow much too tall it is due to one serious medical condition or another and it always proves to be maladaptive. This endless growth ideology is also a pathology. If we grow our supercolony world civilization too big it will be highly maladaptive perhaps even to the point of sending us and most other macro animal species extinct. If someone can’t accept the basic fact that physical growth of our global civilization supercolony must cease at some point then they are living in fantasy land.
Sooner or later we must collide with the reality of biological and physical laws. The question is this. Do we make the collision with our foot on the accelerator or our foot on the brakes? This is really simple stuff. It’s not rocket science. It’s as easy to understand as knowing that an exponential growth curves will run off any finite piece of paper no matter how big that finite piece of paper is.
Oops, I meant “humorous” but no doubt the lad’s humerous was very long.
@Julie Thomas
You yourself have said it.
As everyone has pointed out it depends on what you measure collapse by;- world population total, people running in the streets, living standards not rising so fast ,GDP growth stalling ,environmental degradation ,moral decline ,industrial output ,environmental overshoot ,life expectancy falling ,etc, etc – there are alot of possibilities.
My current favorite TV show is Doomsday Preppers on ch 73. These folk are getting ready for the ‘people running in the streets’ stage .Economic collapse is only one of the possible triggers they worry about. There is some amazing things being done by private citizens with decommissioned nuclear missile storage/launch bunkers ,but its the survive off the land and nothing else types that have the best hope I think.
The other problem with the challenge is that the way we measure “outputs” is so limited. If you are just measuring outputs in monetary terms, and money keeps being printed, then you could have 30% (or whatever number you like to think of) of your GDP devoted to addressing disasters and fixing problems caused by environmental and social breakdown, without having a measurable decline in output per capita, couldn’t you?
Cf currently ‘health expenditure” is about 10% of GDP, and much of that is actually going to treating the diseases of capitalist affluence. But you know all those GPs and diabetes educators and so on are still beavering away producing services (“outputs”).
@sunshine
Didn’t see your comment before I commented sunshine but I think we are saying similar things, yeah.
@Jack King
I thought you would ‘like’ that bit!
But can you explain why a superior intellect – that’s you, according to you – would choose to engage in a childish verbal exchange with me, rather than engage with Ikon’s considered and thoughtful explanations of that thing you were so keen to understand?
@Ikonoclast
Thank you the dissertation on Capitalism. But the question was about countries that could be called self-managed socialism. I guess the answer is none. Are there any that are at least toying with the idea???
@Julie Thomas
Because I like it, and maybe your hot, and would like to have a little drinky with me. Are you hot Julie?
@Jack King
Not hot for you Jack. I like intelligent and funny women and men.
But I think you need to back off with your ‘instincts’ to sexually dominate or humiliate anyone here.
Uh oh, I think I have been a bit confused. I see the challenge relates to “industrial output” per capita declining as from next year or thereabouts. Although I don’t see a clear definition of “industrial outputs” here or in Turner, I think it means manufactured goods (things) right?
Actually Turner’s historical graphs (see FM’s link) do suggest that industrial outputs are slowing while services continue to rise. Turner and/or LtG suggest services will decline a bit later (c2020-30), basically also due to resource constraints but with a slightly delayed impact I think.
Anyway I think overall the Turner paper is interesting but without a more detailed analysis of climate change impacts, it’s not exhaustive enough to be the basis of challenge such as JQ has mounted.
We (people who comment on this blog) probably all find the challenge engaging because we are living in an unstable political state in Australia, caused by impending climate change and resource constraints (and the associated impacts of resource constraints, such as the battles over fracking that are going on) and a government that refuses to acknowledge these problems and is reducing our capacity to act on them. So I guess we are generally feeling that something is going to have to give soon. The challenge maybe serves as a kind of psychological proxy: betting on when it’s all going to start going down.
#32
Time for something to be done about Jack King, by the look of it.
@Julie Thomas
Julie, I didn’t say “hot for me”. I asked “Are you hot?” LOL. Julie, you need to lighten up….let your hair down and don’t be so serious.
@Val
The intellectual standard of Jack’s conversation seems to have undergone a sudden and rather large deterioration…
Jack King, what you wrote above is sexual harrassment. That is no longer tolerated by society and has always been unethical. If you want a place where that sort of thing is accepted why don’t you go to 4chan? I’m sure they’ll welcome you with open arms. Or at least cupped fists. Please leave and never come back.
@Ronald Brak
Oh paleeaase. If you look back at some of Julie’s comments to me she was down right insulting. Rather than strike back with invectives I took the high road with some light hearted humor. But obviously I am dealing with people who can be summed up in one word…humorless.
haha, the High Road. You stick at it Jack, you’ll go far. Once you learn how to use apostrophes properly, anyway.
Jack, I don’t care. I saw your comment. I pointed out what it was. Please leave.
@Ronald Brak
No…why? Because I like being a troll. I know it irritates the hell out of you.
@Jack King
lol Jack it is you who is irritated. It is so obvious but you can’t see it?
I wonder why you think I am humourless when it is you who can’t laugh at yourself?
And just to sum up before I cease to provide you with any more opportunities to demonstrate just how ordinary and indeed what badly brought up man you are, I didn’t mean to insult you, you know. I do have some skills in psychology – not in helping people I don’t do that – but in seeing the patterns that exist in human personality and behaviour and I offer them – not thanks required – to mostly unappreciative people.
You are just one in a growing category of failed old ‘great’ men who know not what they have done and the harms they have caused.
@Ikonoclast
Mind you, the limits to growth are fairly soft constraints: witness the newest of our sauropod discoveries, the dreadnoughtus, a beast so large it must have eaten itself out of house and home…
Personally, I don’t think collapse is imminent. Humanity’s capacity to rapidly adapt is something we regularly mis-judge, and it is definitely a factor in averting potential for collapse. That doesn’t rule out some potentially harsh corrections to our future course, but outright collapse (which would need to be global in order to be more than just a correction) seems less likely than likely. Even the depression wasn’t a global phenomenon, however painful it was for western countries: would the Great Depression be classified as a collapse, or just a painful correction, when we look back from today? At the time I’m sure it felt like wholesale collapse to those affected. I guess I’m posing the question, what do we mean by a collapse?
Like Ronald says, please leave. Catallaxy is another place that might appreciate you.
Jack, you’ve provided us with ample data on creationist/denialist modes of thinking, but we have all we need now.
Please leave before you are barred.
As advised, you’re permanently barred
I’ll give a longer post on limits to growth when I can. But here are my main views, most of which I’ve stated previously
(1) It’s important that global population should stabilise and ultimately decline. Plausible scenarios have this happening around 2050, but the adoption of pro-natalist policies (paging Peter Costello) could stop this
(2) Constraints on the availability of mineral resources aren’t important. In particular, we will have to leave lots of fossil fuels in the ground if we are to stabilise the global climate. No other mineral is in short enough supply to matter
(3) With current or clearly foreseeable technology we have sufficient energy resources to supply the needs of a global population of 8-10 billion living at standards comparable to those of the developed world today, and also sufficient resources to feed such a population
(4) Continuing improvements in living standards in developed countries are feasible, but they will need to take the form of improved services (including IT and communications) and more leisure rather than greater material throughput
(5) Just because all these things are feasible doesn’t mean they will happen. We need urgent action to stabilise the climate, substantial changes in food policy and in the long term the replacement of the current capitalist model with a more sustainable and equitable economy and society
@Jack King
Social and political evolution takes a long time. If anyone was prescient enough in the Late Middle Ages to consider that a new economic order could arise and end Feudalism, would he/she have been countered with the argument “Are there any examples of this new system which hasn’t arisen yet?” This illustrates the self-contradictory nature of your proposition.
Since the Renaissance and especially since the rise of the disciplines of science, sociology, history and political economy, humanity broadly have become much more self-aware and able to think analytically or at least speculatively about current social, political and economic structures and future possibilities. Though one could argue this process began with philosophers like Plato and Confucious or perhaps even their antecedents. We now think consciously about developing new and better systems.
Political evolution is not without setbacks and social catastrophes. Was the road to English, French, American or Indian democracy (to name a few) clear, simple and free of bloodshed? The answer is no. There were civil wars, revolutionary wars, wars of independence, insurrections and so on. There were reactions and setbacks on the way and there was no detailed “roadmap” for getting there only broad theories, moral precepts and general principles.
The same is true for self-managed worker socialism. Historical false starts and failures have occurred. Lenin, Stalin and their apparatchiks made a set of egregious errors. Russia exchanged one form of totalitarianism, Czarism, for another, State Capitalism falsely called Communism or Socialism by supporters and detractors alike. Soviet “Communism” in toto was morally indefensible. Nevertheless, the system modernised Russia and turned it into an industrial and military superpower albeit at great human and environmental cost. Russia did far more than any other nation to defeat Germany in WW2. It took the brunt of the fighting, did most of the heavy lifting until D-Day and then got to Berlin before the chest-thumping “look at moi” allies. This last perhaps occurred because the allies honoured the Yalta agreement not out of any honour but for fear of the high casualties. As they did all through the war, they cynically let Russia bear most of the casualties. Note, the same is not true in the Pacific Theatre where the USA did do the heavy lifting and took the casualties.
After WW2, the Soviet Union and a few satellites was excluded from the new world order of capitalism. The Soviet Union was forced to be at least partially autarkic during the Cold War and perforce joined in the arms race alone against the entire West. Even then it took until 1991 to break the autarkic Soviet state capitalist system. Seventy years survival against all that the West could throw at it including WW2 and the Cold War is not a bad effort for a flawed system.
We have reached that point in history where it is clear that capitalism is reaching its limits to expansion and coincidentally its limits to growth. Once it fully “conquers” Russia and China, and maybe it already has done so, capitalism will be fully ascendant everywhere. This is precisely what Marx predicted, that capitalism would fully triumph over the entire globe. However, Marx understood that history would not end at that point. He understood that industrial capitalism itself had its own internal and external contradictions and that these dynamic forces would not allow history to stand still.
Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually break down under the impacts of these internal and external contradictions. He, along with a great range of other thinkers, proposed possible solutions. Again we have no detailed “roadmap” for getting there only broad theories, moral precepts and general principles. But get there we must because capitalism, a great modernising system which has done its job and served its purpose, has now become the enemy, not the friend of further necessary human progress. If we persist with endless growth capitalism and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor we will wreck our civilisation and the biosphere.
It’s simple. Every meerkat knows it. (Meerkats live in communal groups and demonstrate biological altruistic behavious.)
@Julie Thomas
Thanks for that. If you don’t mind, I used it almost verbatim on a local clone of Jack with much effect 🙂
Great discussion crew, learned heaps, keep on going and thanks to the good Prof JQ for this opportunity. I have been waiting for an intelligent open discussion of the LtG for some years now. But generally I am with Salient Green and faustusnotes re Paul Gilding and great disruption.
Also Ikon is on the money