Timing The Collapse

For anyone without income, a home or even hope, the collapse has already happened. The number of those people on the ropes certainly seems to be increasing daily.

On the other hand, in this personal sense, you may not experience collapse during your lifetime. Of course that is not what the doom and gloomers say.

I used to be a doom and gloomer, an authentic doomsday freak pointing out the failures of our system and its imminent collapse. I’ve learned to temper my fears simply by living long enough.

However, in a larger more empirical sense, we may ask what exactly constitutes a societal collapse. Here we are asking about the nature of the collapse of the Euro-American Empire indicated by the ongoing disintegration of its global hegemony.

If you are someone who does not want to read social criticism, stop now.

If you are worried about you head exploding when you are presented with new information, stop now.

OK, now that I know you are willing to deal with this, I will continue.

As a first step, we have to acknowledge certain conclusions by Karl Marx. I know he is widely disparaged in the mainstream media, at community colleges nationwide and in state universities structured to provide occupational training in technical fields.

Rest assured, at elite institutions training the nest generation of leaders Karl Marx is read and discussed. The children of the hegemonic elite destined to inherit the reigns of power over 99.5% of the rest us know and study his work.

Well, they do if they actually did the work and didn’t just have their families purchase their degrees with another endowment. But that is another issue.

Sure, Karl Marx gets a bad name because of the abuses of the word ‘communist‘ by authoritarian megalomaniacs. To be honest, the world has never seen an authentic communist system in operation.

Part of the problem is that in the day and age of Karl Marx communication was a problem for those living in rural areas. Most people living today cannot imagine the isolation experienced by those living outside of city limits.

Karl Marx proposed an urban workers’ vanguard party to represent those in the hinter lands. This idea of a vanguard party has been much abused by totalitarian regimes around the world that bear little resemblance to his proposed communal life.

He was spot on in exposing the fatal flaw in capitalism. Bear in mind that Karl Marx thought capitalism was a good thing at the time and a step in the right direction away from the manorial serfdom that was the previous norm.

Anyway, capitalism depends upon continuous growth.

The capitalistic system just does not function as a steady state model.

Growth is required to pay off the interest charged on the debt incurred during the capitalization of industry and business. Without growth, only enough profit is made to pay off the principle.

Karl Marx realized that the earth is finite and possesses limited non-renewable resources. Once capitalism went world-wide it was destined to collapse.

In the time of Karl Marx, world-wide pretty much meant Europe in the predominant narrow ethnocentric view. And there were those of his (and later) generations who just couldn’t wait.

Just like the early Christians who grew impatient with God’s promise to destroy the world and started setting fires to help God out, early adopters of the Communist Manifesto perceived revolution as the fast track to post-capitalism.

That turned out badly for all concerned, both Christians and communists.

Karl Marx merely pointed out that given the requirements of capitalism regarding growth, eventually it would hit the limits of growth. With this realization he predicted the certain collapse of capitalism and projected forward from there, betting on human intelligence to come up with something better.

Of course, he thought he was as smart as anyone and perhaps he was. Anyway, communism was merely his projection into the unknowable future and the actual shape of things to come is totally up for grabs.

It is understandable that capitalists the world over took offense. This became the primary driver for political acrimony and national conflict ever since, at least as far as the general public was concerned.

Anyway, capitalism did hit the wall in the early 1970s. China, the last big holdout market, joined in capitalist expansion and left capitalism with no place else to grow.

A whole slew of events indicate the truth in this. Not only did we see the abandonment of the gold standard in the U.S. and the free floating of the U.S. dollar but we also saw the beginning of the first giant debt bubbles.

I first ran away to the mountains in the 1970s believing the collapse was in motion. I was right about that but wrong about the timing regarding my personal situation in the U.S.

The capitalistic hegemons turned to their own populations and began capitalistically monetizing every aspect of personal life, expanding into spheres of influence long felt to be intrinsically off limits. They did this with the full support of governments indebted to their central banks.

The FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the economy merged to form the financial services industry once government regulations that previously prevented this were abandoned. We now live in the era when all biopolitical production falls under capitalist control through the monetization of the once common property of social networks.

Without real growth, growth that is only possible through capitalist expansion into new markets, debt accumulates with no possibility of ever being paid off. The ballooning consumer debt, commercial debt and government debt are merely symptoms of the current crisis of capitalism.

The global debt crisis is a symptom of capitalism reaching the limits of growth.

This largely financial crisis will predictably cause a great deal of needless pain, suffering and death but all by itself is something that the human race as a whole can overcome. History is full of examples of empires falling in part due to the debasement of their currency by corrupt politicians and their financial handlers yet people survived to prosper again.

However, in the effort to extract greater profits by depressing the price of labor through population overshoot to produce a surplus supply of labor, other limits have been quickly approached. Paid labor, after all, originated after the population collapsed during the Great Plague and is part of the foundation of capitalism itself.

History indicates that the loss of productive farm land through extractive agricultural methods and the resulting decrease in productivity, coupled with erosion, also contributed to the collapse of empires. Despite so-called advances in food production, decreasing food value and exploding populations drive us towards a Malthusian Catastrophe of global proportions.

The so-called advances in food production have literally been fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons. Not only that, but civilization itself, especially as we have experienced it, has been literally fueled by the extravagant use of non-renewable hydrocarbons.

The remaining hydrocarbon reserves are being used by the global hegemonic elite to maintain their positions of privilege and power rather than used to enable a transition to another form of civilization. The U.S. armed forces is the largest user of non-renewable hydrocarbons and it is a safe bet that they will use the last of the extractable reserves maintaining the privilege and power of the global hegemonic elite.

This greatly complicates things.

Empires have fallen due to financial collapse and agricultural collapse but none have faced the exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons. This evokes the specter of peak oil.

All the statistics surrounding peak oil originate from within the oil industry itself. We simply cannot know if peak oil is real or simply a clever ploy to increase profits.

In any event, either actual or engineered scarcity will drive huge profits even higher until it is no longer economically viable to extract hydrocarbons from the earth. People just are not prepared for that and, in fact, the global hegemonic elite works against even the possibility of energy independence.

Then there is the issue of climate change as it seems no longer politically correct to refer to global warming. In the end it does not matter if it was caused by people or not because it is happening and the hegemonic elite refuse to risk their privilege and power to enable meaningful change.

Population overshoot, financial collapse, agricultural collapse, exhaustion of non-renewable hydrocarbons, climate change and the machinations of the global power structure to stay in power creates an environment ripe for rampant deadly new diseases. The next Great Plague is now overdue and the ability to globally respond to it with adequate measures simply degrades by the hour.

Plastic pollution, acidification of the oceans and the collapse of one fishery after another are all further symptoms of an impending global collapse of Biblical proportions. This situation is real and very few are even thinking about preparing for it.

Think about preparing for collapse now.

Do you really want to be dependent on society as it is currently structured?

It seems to me that in order to prepare, concerned people need to be reducing dependence upon the status quo. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do because every effort to disengage from the system will be perceived by the system as an act of rebellion, criminal and terroristic.

I believe some people will survive and a few will continue to live relatively well. But to be able to do so will involve becoming responsible for all aspects of your own life.

It may well be that it will be only the minority who actually does the work to prepare will become the few who survive. And eventually, as the facts of the case become irrefutable and obvious to many more people, the remaining carrying capacity of the planet will not support those who start too late.

As long as the system prevails, you will have access to the Internet. The Internet offers more possibilities for creating income independent of mainstream employment than any brick and mortar opportunity in the world.

Perhaps you should be thinking about creating your own Internet business sooner rather that later. Then you will have a measure of control over timing the collapse, at least as far as your personal life is concerned.

What do you think?