I like MacLeod's The Early Days of a Better Nation. Yes, it's somewhat bi-polar, alternating insightful comments with emotional outbursts, and has that impotently alienated stance of the old though bright child, but I find it useful anyway.

This post, Surveying Information Age Warfare, is an interesting example. It responds to a paper, War in the 21st Century, by the late Paul Hirst, a thinker well loved by many for his public evolution of thought as he developed from an early committment to paleo-socialism to something less economically clueless. Unfortunately, he died too soon and incompletely evolved.

The Hirst paper is a litany of despair about our future relieved only by his conclusion that at least we won't have major war between powers. Instead we will have universal and ceaseless local wars of Darwinian struggle to survive in a world degraded by environmental collapse etc. - the standard position of intellectual retreat for the displaced survivors of socialism.

MacLeod selects one passage from Hirst's paper...

This is not a pleasant prospect. It could be that this analysis is too pessimistic and the forces outlined here will be less powerful, that climatic change will not be so dramatic, that the R[evolution in]M[ilitary]A[ffairs] will prove more limited in scope, and that the developed countries will shift resources dramatically to tackle poverty on a world scale. For that to happen the attitudes of ordinary citizens in the developed countries would have to change radically: accepting the massive reduction of emissions (and the changes in lifestyle that would have to accompany such moves) to check climate change, paying for more for aid, welcoming migrants, and seeking to eliminate the sources of conflict rather than repress those who take up arms. It would be a remarkable reversal and it will have to happen soon.

And responds:

It is not, of course, likely to happen at all. The comrades at SIAW would no doubt see the considerations adduced by Hirst as an argument for the democratic socialist world revolution for which they are waiting. But if the economic calculation argument is valid, we must accept that (Marxian, non-market) socialism, however democratic (etc, etc), would result in industry grinding to a halt and people dying like flies, as indeed it has done whenever it has been seriously attempted. (Fortunately it has not been seriously attempted in most socialist countries, hence the otherwise inexplicable prevalence of state capitalism, and the inevitable reversion from state to private capitalism.) If so, it's time for responsible Marxists to follow Hirst's excellent example and stop blathering on about socialism, in the sense of some post-market order about whose actual economic mechanism that is supposed to replace the market they (like the rest of us) have (when you part the thickets of wearisomely familiar verbiage) no fucking clue, and which won't arrive no matter how long we wait.

There is an instructive symmetry to the retreat from predictions and hopes for economic collapse in liberal societies due to their defects, and the parallel predictions and hopes for ecological collapse that have largely replaced them as liberal societies have rudely refused to fail, disproving predictions of economic collapse. Temperamentally pessimistic people are drawn to disaster scenarios, comforted by them, since they resonate with their emotional reality.

Liberal economies could have collapsed had humanity lost its ability to think clearly, adapt to change and invent its own future on the fly as it had always done previously. It still might do so. Macleod's useful insight is that the cures proposed by economic pessimists were worse than the defects of liberal societies. Honest analysis of those proposals reveal that they were preposterous - completely inadequate replacements that made things worse rather than better.

We can benefit from this experience by applying the same analysis to current predictions of ecological failure and proposals for remediation. The predictions are wrong for the same reasons; they select data to support their desired future scenario and extrapolate it in the least likely ways while assuming that humanity will remain static in its responses. The proposed remediation is the same; seize command and control of behavior and harshly manage things to avert the false predictions. As with their economic remedies this will make things worse rather than better.

Neither economic nor ecological collapse are likely and command takeover wouldn't help anyway. It would make things worse. That is the true danger we face though it seems unlikely. We could face economic and ecological collapse if they were able to seize control, and it is worrying that this threat of socio-political collapse persists.

Stepping back from these sweaty nightmare scenarios a bit helps put things in perspective; we have always been threatened by these apocalyptic threats and always will be. That's life. None will go away, ever. They work individually and severally to keep us on our toes. We can't win, can't break even and can't get out of the system. In the long run we face heat death but we can enjoy the struggle rather than whine about unfairness. Those who slip into despair are a danger to themselves and society but can be seen as being damaged as well as dangerous, not truly enemies to be despised but as casualties that can sometimes be helped.

» Apocalyptic Threats from Crumb Trail
Interested in avoiding ecological, economic and political collapse? M&M has no solutions. There is an instructive symmetry to the retreat from predictions and hopes for economic collapse in liberal societies due to their defects, and the parallel pred......[read more]
Tracked: June 30, 2004 05:31 PM