It's
good to see a few other blogs coming to grips with the coming social
and economic collapse of our unsustainable civilization, and talking in
practical, non-ideological terms about preparedness for it. One of the
best is Adaptation, a 'zine and blog by Paula Hay, which Dale Asberry put me on to.
Paula recently wrote a two-part series called 'Fear of Money' (part 1, part 2), which makes some important points about preparedness. She writes:
We
will all face economic problems much sooner than we will face
blackouts; we will lose our jobs and our homes long before the lights
go out...Preparation effects which ignore economic issues will actually
put any given community in a worse situation than had it not prepared
at all...Ignoring economic issues as they relate to collapse
preparation sows the seeds of community violence, both from within and
from without. A community that sinks its energies into preparing for
what comes after collapse, without considering the 15-20 or more years
of economic hardship between now and the time when hand tools become
necessary, is essentially committing suicide.
The basic problem is not that money, markets and
commerce are evil. The problem is that these are currently structured
to be tools of governance for the ruling elite—in other words, money is
a weapon used to keep the masses in check. We all know how this works:
we work longer hours just to stay in place, which robs us of time and
energy we would otherwise spend pursuing creative projects, athletics,
education, politics, or even our own entrepreneurship. Entertainment
becomes our shore leave, and “stuff” becomes our reward for making it
through yet another year with no reprieve, save our two-week vacation.
Economists admonish us that our doom-and-gloom is silly, because the
Invisible Hand will save us from collapse. This is absurd on its face,
and anyone with a shred of common sense can see why: hitting the brakes
after we drive off the cliff will not save us from driving off the
cliff. Markets are reactive, and are therefore not an appropriate hope where proactive strategy is required.
This
is brilliant stuff, and it's about time we started talking about it.
But I have a few quibbles with Paula's arguments, and they're not minor
ones:
- There's More Than One Kind of Economy:
In the first place, it's not 'fear of money' that causes the
neosurvivalists to shun currency, trade, and the idea of an organized
economy. Money is, as Paula points out, merely a medium of exchange.
There is a certain ideological romanticism at work here, and it's all
about the folly of trying to go backwards (to a pre-industrial life)
rather than forwards (to a post-industrial
one). What the neosurvivalists (she calls them "peakniks" and
"preparation paradigm" -- versus "powerdown paradigm" -- advocates)
fear is that any non-anarchic
economy will simply perpetuate the unequal distribution of wealth and
resources, and must therefore be avoided. Paula is so distraught about
this that she is abandoning the Northwest home of the "peakniks" to
take up the "powerdown" cause. The peakniks' error is equating economy with market economy
(this is another "it's the only way we know" problem). Paula is right
in asserting that the post-industrial chaos will be worse without an
economy. But there is more than one kind of economy, and some of the
alternatives don't require money at all. As my readers know, I'm
partial to a Gift Economy -- or what I think is more accurately called a Generosity Economy.
- It's Coming, But Not So Fast:
I think Paula makes the very common mistake of seeing what's coming
accurately, but seeing it as more imminent than it is. We usually tend
to over-estimate the degree of short-term change and under-estimate the
degree of long-term change. I believe the economic depression that
Paula predicts will occur between 10 and 30 years from now (somewhere
between 2015 and 2035). A post-industrial society, where oil (and its
products, from 90% of what we eat to 90% of medicines, plastics,
textiles, asphalt, protective coatings etc.)
and electricity are as rare and costly as gold, is likely to take a
half-century longer, and come into effect gradually (so it will
dominate the last two or three decades of this century) and unevenly. So what we need to be doing now
I think is learning the lessons from the last great depression and
preparing for the next one in our lifetimes, and helping prepare future
generations to do things without oil, oil-dependent products and
electricity. Just as the alarmists of the 1970s were wrong to
predict a massive population crash would occur in the 1980s, and
retreat to subsistence farms in Montana, it would be foolish for us to
try to stock up on hoes and canned goods today.
- We Are, By Nature, Reactive: Paula says "markets are reactive, and are therefore not an appropriate hope where proactive strategy is required". She is right that markets are reactive, but all
systems in our society -- economic, political, social, technological,
educational -- are reactive and always have been. It is human nature to
think short-term, and we cannot change that. I think Paula is naive to
believe we can develop any kind of organized plan for any major change
that has not yet occurred, at least until we are absolutely
positive it will occur. Just look at New Orleans, global warming, or
our lack of preparation for the next influenza epidemic as proof of
that. Paula uses as examples two things we are starting to do that
would/will be very helpful in coping with the coming crisis:
file-sharing and buying local. But both examples were reactive,
not proactive. File-sharing was a work-around in reaction to oligopoly
and price-gouging in the music 'industry'. Buying local is a reaction
to growing awareness that the food we eat and the goods we buy from big
corporations that travel huge distances to reach us are bad for our
health and bad for our local economy. We have reaction to corporatist
greed, not proactive thinking, to thank for these innovations.
- How the Last Great Depression Worked:
The scenario Paula lays out for the coming economic depression -- "loss
of jobs, hyperinflation, dollar collapse, loss of manufacturing
capacity and distribution infrastructure, home foreclosures and
apartment evictions" in which the neosurvivalists become the new
"haves" and the unprepared rest of us the new "have nots", is mostly right, but ignores some of the important lessons of the last great depression (my grandparents were wise enough to tell me many stories about the 1930s).
The workers suffered the most from the last depression, because they
were the ones with the greatest debts: the middle class owned their own
homes or had relatively small mortgages that they could continue to
make some payments against, so they weren't the ones who lost their
homes to foreclosure and eviction. It was the generosity of the middle
classes, in giving anything they didn't need to the oceans of poor, in
hiring people they didn't really need as domestics, and in providing
them with food or room and board, that helped prevent a descent of
society into civil chaos and anarchy. Most
people pitched in and helped each other. Even ardent "not my brother's
keeper" conservatives, when they saw people they knew, in rags, begging
for food, realized that blaming the poor for their lot, their
unpreparedness for this disaster, was folly.
In fact, I have argued
that for many reasons, including the need to make the transition from
industrial to post-industrial society, we need to be working now to actively disrupt
the existing market economy and replace it will an economy that will be
better suited (to put it mildly) to a sustainable, post-industrial
world without oil. The four elements of that economy are: peer-to-peer
information and exchange networks; local, natural enterprises; personal 'radical
simplicity' sustainable living programs; and intentional communities.
We need to start learning now
how to live in a post-industrial society, so that our grandchildren and
great-grandchildren will be prepared and will be able to establish the
radically new infrastructure needed to make this economy work. In the
meantime, these four elements will also serve us very well during the
pre-collapse economic depression, perhaps as little as a decade away.
And they're good for the environment, and will make us healthier and
happier as well.
The key, as we are hearing more and more, is not utopian or dystopian disaster planning, but learning, and teaching, resilience. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
