Resilience.org | February 5, 2024
We are entering can era of severe scarcity in which centralised and top-down systems will fail to provide for us and we will have to develop cooperative and self-sufficient localized economies. The achievements of the Spanish anarchist workers collectives in the 1930s show what miracles ordinary people can do.
One of the strong beliefs reinforcing the acceptance of consumer-capitalist society is the assumption that it has to be run by authorities up there somewhere, by governments, bureaucracies, corporations, experts, CEOs, via big complex systems that ordinary people like us can’t fathom and couldn’t possibly run. People take it for granted that there is a vast distinction between our governors and we who are governed, and this is inevitable in a modern complex technocratic society. Our only role in government is to elect our governors occasionally, then submit to their rule. Meanwhile it is best if we devote ourselves to working diligently, consuming, football, celebrities and trivia.
It is very likely that consumer-capitalist society will soon be over. It is extremely unsustainable and unjust. There is no possibility that the per capita rates of resource consumption the 1.5 billion rich have can be extended to the other 7.5 billion we will soon have on earth. The Australian footprint of 7-8 ha of productive land per capita is about 10 times the area that will be available per capita in 2050. Well before that we will have run into savage and insoluble shortages of oil, water, food, fish, minerals, and the ecological consequences of the carbon emissions, destruction of soils and forests, and a holocaust of species loss, the social and political impacts of collapsing states, resource wars and massive refugee movements.
