[seahorse2]

Unfortunately, we have a depression looming on the horizon at exactly the time in history when we need strong gov't and private finances to transition to other energy sources, or at least drill more oil to offset declines in existing fields. As most know, the IEA will reportedly release its latest report which shows declines in existing fields about 6%. This simply means we still need to find and drill oil just to run in place. Unfortunately, the oil to be found is in hard to reach places like the bottom of the ocean, and it takes a lot of money to get at it, at a time when we don't have the money to do it.

At any other point in time, physical labor was energy, so that even 100 years ago, if there was a depression, people could literally be put back to work by physically building and doing stuff. But, to sustain a world population of six billion people and keep them gainfully employed and not throwing rocks, it takes lots of jobs, lots of stuff, lots of energy to do it, and not the manual labor kind.

In our modern world of six billion plus people we need ever increasing per capita acre crop yields (never heard of in history) to simply sustain this growing population. It takes a lot of fossil fuel energy to do that, we can't do it with horses or slave labor. We simply cannot use slaves to get the energy out of the deep water or in the icy arctic. People can't hold their breaths that long or handle the pressure. Just when we need strong balances more than we needed strong backs, we have neither.

[nobodypanic]

plenty of energy left in the system. plenty. it just needs to shed load to continue. sadly, shedding load equals human misery, which sickens me, but which is par for the course for the industrial barbarians and their monstrous, inhuman economic system.

[Twilight]

In South East and central England, farm labour pays the national minimum wage, sometimes more. A man can live on that. It is doubtful he can support a family, but he can live on that. That's $9 per hour, for those across the pond, although I have heard it can be better.

Journalists have been to the towns and job centres and asked men about the employment picture and that work, and while some undoubtedly do it, there seem to be plenty with the attitude that it is better to be answering phones in a call centre (if they can get it) or claiming unemployment benefits for the money instead of working dawn to dusk in a field in cold and rain or in a greenhouse or packing plant. So workers get flown in from Eastern Europe, Portugal, places like that instead. I guess the taxes from the money they put back into the local economies go on paying the locals to kill time fixing their cars and drinking beer.

That will change. Sterling is falling, the construction industry is failing, EU workers are going home. Before anything so dramatic as slavery, I think those country town lads will simply reconsider the £6 they're offered. Those vegetables are not going to harvest themselves.

Stuff like road maintenance is similar in a different way if you will excuse the potential oxymoron. Look at the photos of not so long ago and you see men with spades, not tracked excavators. Every time I see some country lane being surfaced, the desolation of the scene strikes me, a mile with work for half a dozen men.

I think the loss of seasonal workers and de-automation will absorb quite a lot of volunteer labour for a long time before we see actual slavery, and it will be no bad thing.

[seahorse2]

The point of this post, not well made, was to point out that modern society, and the requirement to support six billion people, requires lots of fossil fuel energy. The problem is, in a financial crisis, tt is no longer possible, really, to extract oil using manual labor (I called it slave labor, being sarcastic, but I just mean we can't get at the oil using manual labor anymore). Exploring for the oil requires lots of money to buy lots of machines to do the searching, finding, and pumping. So, if the financial system continues to break down, we as a society can't fill that void of machines with manual labor to get at the oil in the bottom of the ocean. Again, to grow our way out of the financial crisis and put people to work to make money, we have to build things, we have to grow the economy. To build things and grow the economy, it takes finances, finances come from a healthy economy, and it takes finances to build the machines to get the oil. Unfortunately, we may now be witness both a financial depression and declining oil reserves, at a time when we need to be exploring and drilling just to stay even. Unfortunately, we don't have the balance sheets to make the necessary investments to keep exploring and drilling in these expensive areas to offset existing declines. So, the point of this post is to say the most unfortunate, which is, we have a depression on our hands at a time when oil fields are declining at a point in human history where we can't reach the oil we need by human hands, we need machines built from oil and finances that we are lacking. It seems to me we have painted outselves into a corner.

[Twilight]

That much is true, though here and there I am sure someone will find a way to cannibalise some other area of economic activity for its energy. That is only temporary relief in the grand scheme of things of course. I agree that the coming depression has peak oil walking with it, waiting for its moment to shine.

[pedalling_faster]

America already has slave labor. Prison slave labor.

sometimes i wonder if this is one of the main reasons the
US keeps its Drug War policy, those extra 750,000 non-violent
drug offenders make good low cost workers.

[Kristjan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', 'A')merica already has slave labor. Prison slave labor.

sometimes i wonder if this is one of the main reasons the
US keeps its Drug War policy, those extra 750,000 non-violent
drug offenders make good low cost workers.

[seahorse2]

Can that slave/prison labor get to the bottom of the gulf and extract the oil? No. We are dependent on machines. Machines require money and fossil fuel energy to build and operate. I'm thinking out loud here, but I hope we have not painted ourselves into a corner with lack of foresight, but it appears we may be in a paradox where the economy, oil, finances are so interrelated that we can't have one without the other, when one falls, they all fall.

Everyone assumes that "man" can generate a "technological fix" but maybe the only "fix" is the fact that mankind is unable to personally intervene as the hero, because man has made himself obsolete. He doesn't even have the ability to revert, because he has has lost the collective ability to take care of himself without his machines. Man will not simply wither and die, evolution doesn't allow it. It will be survival of the fittest, but who and what form of society emerges, it will be interesting to find out. I only wish I were reading about it in a history book and not wondering about it in the present.

[ColossalContrarian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pedalling_faster', 'A')merica already has slave labor. Prison slave labor.

sometimes i wonder if this is one of the main reasons the
US keeps its Drug War policy, those extra 750,000 non-violent
drug offenders make good low cost workers.

[heroineworshipper]

For slavery to happen, the workers have to be involuntary. Otherwise it's volunteering. There will be 100% taxation. With 24/7 internet media flogging them, they will work for free & like it. No previous generation had a way to get the same message fed to them as many times as now.

[sparky]

.

Slavery can be voluntary !

When the Lassale minimum is reached , the point when the familly income fall below the cost of the food needed to stay alive ,
in thoses circunstances it is perfectly rationnal to give oneself and one's children to someone for the guaranty of a square meal ,
the alternative is a slow death , since less food means less chance of earning money to feed oneself and less ability to produce hard work
, a common circunstance is for the wage earner to get most fo the food available to keep working ,
the grand mother and the little ones are sacrified .

That is what life on the margin means
when one spend 60% of the familly budget on food and the price of food double, then double again but wages don't follow or have disappeared

Incidentaly it was a bastard act to free old slaves when they couldn't work anymore , the master play the generous soul and save the food , leaving the old broken slave to starve .

Freedom is not worth a square meal .

.

[ReverseEngineer]

Who is going to buy the slaves, with what money? Who is going to run the prison to employ the slaves doing exactly what here to make a profit?

I gather we are talking about some kind of return to the old South or to the Pharoahs here, with our new debt slaves strapped to wooden hoes to plow the land. In order to accomplish such a transition, you will need to round up the slaves, which isn't going to be so easy to do since about every area will fracture off with their own militias all fighting each other. To get to the point you could effectively run a slave economy, you would actually have to consolidate and win enough territory and land you could defend, and also have enough surplus to keep your slaves fed enough to do work and your soldiers fed well enough to both defend your territory AND keep the slaves in line and working.

The quality of life problem here undermines this model. 99.99% of people currently living in America would make very poor slaves in an agricultural model, they simply are too flabby and out of shape. Even if they wanted to stay alive as a slave, they wouldn't make it anyhow. Without enough slaves to make such an economy work, the Masters who managed to round them up would eventually be forced into doing the work themselves.

I have no doubt the model will be tried, but it cannot work. Your slaves will just die off too fast to be useful here. Besides which, you just have too many people in debt to actually use as slaves, so in the scenario of mass economic deprivation, you get uncontrollable anarchy long before you would get controllable slavery as an outcome.

A bit of Wisom here. You CANNOT collect on debt from a dead man. Way more people will either involuntarily end up dead or effectively choose death before beign enslaved, thus you end up holding the bag on their debt if you own them. It would not make any sense to buy up a failing company like GM, you just get stuck with all their debt even if you buy the whole kit and kaboodle for pennies on the dollar. Neither does it make any sense to enslave people who are more liabilities than they are assets. There are too many people on the earth, each person alive is a Liability.

Slavery seems an unworkable resolution to the problems, but that does not mean it won't be tried of course. Like Capitalism and Economic Slavery however, it just doesn't work in the end. Going down that road just guarantees our extinction.

What is sustainable is not Slavery, but COOPERATION of COMMUNITY. As we shrink down through the period of anarchy to come, it will be those who cooperate and share, who work together for the common good who will make it thru. It will take time for this to happen, with much suffering and inequity along the way, but in the end as we Reverse Engineer the Human Race back to its pre-agricultural tribal roots, this is the CORE of Humanity which is sustainable. If we do not go extinct, this is where we MUST end up.

I won't be here to see that end, its a long ways off in the distance still. But I will see it from the Other Side.

See you on the Other Side.

Reverse Engineer

[sparky]

.
a few point of detail in Egypt the slaves were valuable house servants the peasants who build the pyramids were paying their taxes by working for a set time for free during the slack in the farming season , that's called corvee duty
I'm not talking about the south , it was a pretty stupid system , due to the interdiction of the African slave trade there was a lot of speculation on trading negroes and prices were inflated
the slaves also were used to grow cash crop such as cotton , tobacco and rice , it was industrial farming by the very low standard of 19th century unskilled labor ,
it did not stop the south from fighting long and hard ,

mediteraneen Europe , middle east and far east had various form of " bonded servants "the relation with their masters was usually pretty relaxed ,especially if the world outside was bad and mean



When one reach the starvation point nobody buy the slaves they give themselves for free to survive , some of the slaves act as foremen ,there is no prison the system cost nothing and the slaves are not crushed , it's uneconomical .keeping them reasonnably contented and healty is both smart and an economic nescessity

In the case of labor camp like the gulag , pol pot killing fields or the nazis concentration camps , people are worked more than they are fed , so they die , more inmates are brought in to refill the ranks t guards are needed but the whole thing is usually a waste

[sparky]

.

You say that 99.9 % of present day America would not make good slaves .
well.... let half watch the other half starve in the cold and take a poll again .
once the flabyness is gone , the hunger remain , it's a choice of living or dying and the dead don't count for much

Slavery was often a luxurie , poor farming societies couldn't afford it ,

I suspect the ones who will make it are going to be the worst bastards , the most backward in far off places and the minority groups with a strong familly bond

I agree that the best human model is the pre farming one
old folks still would be grumbling that things were better then ,
mothers would still wonder what the kids are up to ,
men would plan a war against the neighboors with creative and entertaining ways of making the prisonners dies
toddlers would still be in a state of permanent amazment
and come spring time the young folks would still feel the powerful attraction of the furry magnet .

Nothing really change


.

[ReverseEngineer]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')
a few point of detail in Egypt the slaves were valuable house servants the peasants who build the pyramids were paying their taxes by working for a set time for free during the slack in the farming season , that's called corvee duty

[sparky]

.

well it took them 3000 years to fail ...
it took us less than three hundreds ..

and as I've said above the builders of the pyramids were NOT slaves they were free peasants , in medieval Europe the Corvee system was used for building Castles and roads , the Peasants didn't like it much but it was better than paying taxes in cash or kind .

whatever happen will not happen as a result of deliberate concious choices , it will be random and natural , it probably is not going to be pretty either .

.

[Pretorian]

Slavery was abolished because free labour is much cheaper. It might come back once die-off is over and most people will be self-sufficient, hence lack of labour on the market. so, unless we talk about brothels, poppy plantations and some hard-core mining activities, it will be awhile before you'll see a slave in your favorite pizza joint.

[ReverseEngineer]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')

well it took them 3000 years to fail ...
it took us less than three hundreds ...

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')

well it took them 3000 years to fail ...
it took us less than three hundreds ..

and as I've said above the builders of the pyramids were NOT slaves they were free peasants , in medieval Europe the Corvee system was used for building Castles and roads , the Peasants didn't like it much but it was better than paying taxes in cash or kind .

whatever happen will not happen as a result of deliberate concious choices , it will be random and natural , it probably is not going to be pretty either .

.

[vision-master]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ReverseEngineer', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('sparky', '.')

well it took them 3000 years to fail ...
it took us less than three hundreds ...