[Ibon]

I agree with your last two posts Ralfy. There is a growing global consuming middle class, certainly many times more compensating for whatever decline we see in the American middle class. My point though is that within this anomaly of consumption there is that reserve that will be drawn down, whenever resource constraints reverse this growth.

Also true about the black swan. I mentioned 2 long centuries from now as an example of the possible resilience still remaining in the status quo.

[basil_hayden]

On top of all the stuff y'all have mentioned, I reckon I'll keep coming back until I know Aaron and his family are OK, since he's responsible for this free for all that I cherish.

[Hawkcreek]

With me there is a little bit of inertia involved. I spent a lot of time on PO when I first found it (2004), and have watched it change a lot over the years. Yes, it has had better days, and yes, most of the topics have been hashed over about a thousand times, but every once in a while you run into an interesting conversation.
I closed my FB account because too many of my “friends” used it for a political forum. I got tired of wading through hundreds of conservative clips telling me how stupid I would have to be if I entertained any “liberal” ideas.
This is still a good site. I have lived off grid for over twelve years in the Northwest, and made that move in large part due to what I learned on PO. Information gleaned from this site, and others like it, has turned me into a bona-fide prepper, and I am not ashamed to admit it.
I don’t know when the peak will come, but at this point I really don’t care. I am as prepared as possible and I just enjoy my retirement and find many new projects to work on.
I have plenty of popcorn and booze to watch the show.

[ROCKMAN]

H - "I don’t know when the peak will come, but at this point I really don’t care. I am as prepared as possible" Good for you. And you emphasize the point I keep tossing out: the effects of PO, whether PO is here now or the actual date is still years down the road, are here now and you've adjusted to it. It sounds as though the cost of oil going up 300% in the last 10 years hasn't impacted you very much. Few can say that. I think some who accept the idea of PO still think the time for major adjustments in their lives has yet to be reached.

BTW I also keep my supply of single malt scotch replenished...just in case. LOL.

[h2]

americandream, apparently you have never been on a farm, to say that labor was not involved in creating the wealth of the feudal times I'd say is a bit confused, and I doubt you'd be able to find any farmer in the world to agree with that statement. This is the problem with dealing with abstractions like Labor in the first place of course. Where do you think the crops came from that enabled the landed aristocrats to pursue their various power/wealth games? And who built those castles etc in the first place? The only real difference was that, as you note, wealth / power was generated by control of land, whereas in capitalism, it's generated by control of resources in general, including labor, land, and whatever else can be exploited to create non sustainable levels of conversion of matter into power. As we expand what we consider worth extracting and manipulating, those levels of resource extraction/exploitation also expand, until we reach the point where we are essentially in the process of completely destroying our ecosystem, which is quite an achievement. The problem is, when you look at real history, which any real Marxist should do always, you have to actually look at it, and not ignore the parts you don't like, like what happened when Marxist ideas were implemented in various social systems/cultures. That's what it is, there is not 'pure' state of this idea, it is what it is as it is developed over time.

I've always liked certain things in Marxist analysis, The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi, I thought was a very well constructed work, for example, and more useful to understand where we are today in many ways, but what I have never liked is the complete ignoring of material reality, ie, our world, the matter of our world, it's 'substance', something I have a bit of difficulty understanding to be honest given his claim to be a 'materialist', I'm a materialist in most regards, but a real one, that is, I believe that the matter we manipulate and burn and extract and exploit is not dead or neutral, to be ignored in a quest for an ever receding 'utopia' where large scale cultural realities like power and control suddenly vanish and we all dance through the halls with little angle wings, all 7 or 8 billion of us, or whatever number we reach before the ecosystems we inhabit groan and begin to fail at higher and higher rates, which is already happening here and now, today. Some of this matter is used to generate more humans, something that is generally accepted today as inherently good or at least not to be questioned, no matter what it costs the planet. And those humans can then be used to generate more extraction, wealth, power, and unsustainable use of the planet's systems.

From my latest reading, species dieoff is already at a point roughly 1000 times higher than 'normal' through the ages, all due to human activity.

The problem we are seeing is that this matter is not in fact dead and neutral, it's alive and active, and forcing our planet into extremely bad changes, the outcomes of which are going to be uncertain because global changes like this haven't happened for about 65 million years, the date if I have it correct of the last major full on die-off event in terms of the actual life forms that inhabited our planet.

As with all religions, the fact of the utopia always being in the future, never here or now, and all faults with the religious system being due to failing to adhere to some vague 'pure' understanding of said system generally is no obstacle to dedicated marxists.

However, given that Marx explicitly designed Marxism as a religious system to compete with other ideological systems, it's unlikely I will have much luck getting further along this track given you actually identify yourself as a Marxist, which is an uncommon thing to see anymore, but I do kind of like it in a sense, so I'll leave it at that.

As a tool to examine specific functioning of Capitalism, Marxism is not bad at all, generally better than the alternatives, quite a bit better in fact, but as a prescription or solution, it's always proved to be fundamentally useless since it ignored how large organisms like societies allocate and designate power and control over its resources. Not to mention the somewhat tiresome inclusion of the christian ideal of 'the end of times', 'heaven', etc, lightly rebranded and renamed, but not fundamentally altered. Marx carried the original mistake of Hegel onward, without much critical thinking, and certainly without any historical or material justification. One funny thing though when talking to most marxists, since they not only never have read Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, it's quite doubtful they could read it given it's incredible denseness and complexity, yet they feel comfortable talking about the dialectics of this or that without actually really understanding the word or the concept at all.

Even granting the total artificiality of the thesis - antithesis - synthesis construct in the first place, none of those social ideas had anything to do with our actual physical environment, our ecosystem, which doesn't follow those ideas, it just reacts to inputs in ways that are generally decently well understood by science, ie, increase green house gases, raise global temps, remove top level predators, see huge disruption of ecosystem, fill the oceans with co2 and create an acidic environment that starts to slowly destroy the ability of the oceans to function and sustain life. A much better model than dialectics is the punctuated equilibrium concept, that actually applies better to our systems and the planetary systems as a whole, and avoids the tendency to religicize the story with utopias and paradises, always somewhere out there in the future, never here or present. Better to focus on our present, that's where the problems exist, and that's where the solutions start.

Obviously capitalism, which always seeks to maximize profits, will seek out whatever region offers the best perceived way to achieve that end, low labor costs, lack of environmental controls, ruthless exploitation of natural systems, and so on. But note there, labor is one part, and in many ways, the least important at this stage of our development. There is no doubt in my mind that in our present state, we are far far far too wedded on fundamental levels to the core abilities of capitalism to maintain global populations at their radically non sustainable numbers to imagine that those very people, whose lives basically rely on it literally, to actually move away from it willingly, voluntarily.

So it will be the ecosystem that forces our hands, mother nature that is, not a workers revolution, that's the most likely scenario today, it doesn't take rocket science to note this since it's already present everywhere you look, assuming you take the time to look. Meanwhile I support anything that can weaken corporate systems, increase localization, and decrease resource consumption and population sizes.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e should be careful about this assumption. Because fossil fuels are the source of the growth to where we got to does not mean that the decline itself will be the trigger of change. This is perhaps obvious for many but worth repeating.

Fossil fuels have allowed us such exponential growth in population, biosphere degradation, globalization, technological advances, a host of resource constraints, a global financial and economic system deep in unknown territory, migration of pathogens and invasive species, etc.
In other words we have a world today that is novel, anomalous to anything in the past, fueled by oil. But any of these anomalous examples could be triggers or catalysts of change. Climate change is just the most often discussed example.

[americandream]

H2

I will keep this quite simple so as everyone can get the gist of social economy:

1 Feudal times....labour largely pastoral, not urbanised, no factory economy. Work seasonal and servitude based, no formal exchange of labour value (barter for example) and not of any magnitude to suggest organisation. No market. Return to feudal landlord largely limited to maintaining his garrison and larder....incremental gains in land through war ensured food security. Hence land was hereditary security. Modern farms of a different magnitude in their integration into the JIT. Unless corporatised, modern farms are instances of sole trading (small business....wanting to be corporatised )

2 Capitalism. Labour organised around factories and specialisation with a systematic extraction of labour surplus. Market prioritised for exchange. Hence the massive and growing resource usage as every additional garden gnome (dividends growth) requires more steel, paint and of course energy.)

Hopefully that will help clear up some of the confusion.

[SeaGypsy]

Certainly one of the best spiels on here in a long time h2
For a long winded one it's quite succinct at nailing many of the key dichotomies we live in these times.

[Ibon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', 'C')ertainly one of the best spiels on here in a long time h2
For a long winded one it's quite succinct at nailing many of the key dichotomies we live in these times.

[careinke]

h2, I really enjoyed your piece. Thanks.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('h2', '
')A bit more study of history however shows how things will probably turn out, the black plague is worth examining, that only took about 10 years, and essentially nullified all beliefs about what human existence was and was going to be almost immediately. At some point humans have to grasp that non sustainable means non sustainable.

[americandream]

AND....we come back to socialism....primitiive socialism albeit (American Indian social economy).....and a culture without the profit motive.

I'll keep banging this one here for as long as I post here as this is the crux of the matter. Wittering on about why the people are the way they are at the moment and invoking the horrors of mass death etc, etc, abolutely misses the point....the masses are as much victims of a global social economy of profit as are the capitalists.

Unless you remove that cancerous logic (by revolutionary change), you will be pissing in the wind...and yes....this system and any "post capitalist" variant of it will tilt us over the edge.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('careinke', 'h')2, I really enjoyed your piece. Thanks.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('h2', '
')A bit more study of history however shows how things will probably turn out, the black plague is worth examining, that only took about 10 years, and essentially nullified all beliefs about what human existence was and was going to be almost immediately. At some point humans have to grasp that non sustainable means non sustainable.

[Strummer]

To remove profit you would need to remove private property, which in turn would mean to remove agriculture and settled civilization. John Zerzan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zerzan), as radical as he may be, is spot on.

[americandream]

I disagree unless we are going to fully discount the agriculture of tribal cultures (primitive socialism) and the commons (prior to the Enclosures in Europe)....(note: I specifically excluded agriculture under feudalism....another hierarchical system....ONLY agriculture in older socialised systems....or civilisations.)

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Strummer', 'T')o remove profit you would need to remove private property, which in turn would mean to remove agriculture and settled civilization. John Zerzan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zerzan), as radical as he may be, is spot on.

[Shaved Monkey]

The Organopónicos in Cuba dont require private ownership of land in fact they work because of a lack of it.

[jaxon]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shaved Monkey', 'T')he Organopónicos in Cuba dont require private ownership of land in fact they work because of a lack of it.

[John_A]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ibon', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('John_A', 'C')ould go even higher. Maybe it SHOULD go even higher, if people are serious about cutting CO2 emissions from burning the stuff.