The values you aspire to rekindle will come of their own accord because of a new awareness of the *interconnectedness of things* – happening now thanks to the web, ecological awareness and the banking crisis. The ‘aversion of the gaze’ needed to preserve capitalism will become impossible to sustain.

We are going to enter into a new era of *personal responsibility* – something negated by capitalism and communism. A greater awareness of the broader consequences of actions will create a common-sense morality that is not dictated from above.

In the future we will probably be far less concerned with politics and big ideas and be more practical and problem-focused.

Trying to dream up big overarching structures, however attractive they seem on paper, is dangerous and unnecessary. Isms in general should be tossed away by anyone who cares about the future of humanity!
Amen

Бабка за дедку,
Дедка за репку —

Тянут-потянут, вытянуть не могут.
Позвала бабка внучку.

Внучка за бабку,
Бабка за дедку,
Дедка за репку —

Тянут-потянут, вытянуть не могут.
Позвала внучка Жучку.

Жучка за внучку,
Внучка за бабку,
Бабка за дедку,
Дедка за репку —

Тянут-потянут, вытянуть не могут.
Позвала Жучка кошку.

Кошка за Жучку,
Жучка за внучку,
Внучка за бабку,
Бабка за дедку,
Дедка за репку —

Тянут-потянут, вытянуть не могут.
Позвала кошка мышку.

Мышка за кошку,
Кошка за Жучку,
Жучка за внучку,
Внучка за бабку,
Бабка за дедку,
Дедка за репку —

Тянут-потянут — и вытянули репку.

One of the main reasons Marxism-Leninism failed as an ideology was because it failed by its own standards – increasing living standards and egalitarianism (both deteriorated from the 1970′s). By rejecting these goals, Green Communism will not be discredited by its economic “failures” (which will in any case be inevitable in any scenario of accelerated transition to sustainability). Furthermore, by tossing aside the materialism impulse, there will no longer be a materialist incentive to undermine the system through corruption, internal politicking, etc (a major bane of the Soviet system).

Another improvement over the Soviet system – the more advanced state of operations research and electronic networks available to the planner today. A sustainable economy can now be planned much more efficiently without invoking drastic reductions in living standards using technocratic supercomputers, while corruption and free-riding can be kept in check by implementing a transparent society based on ubiquitous p2p sousveillance.

I basically agree with you that a return to transcendental values, with their emphasis on the ascetic, could in combination with targeted technological developments pull industrial society back from the brink of collapse and back into sustainability.

The problem (actually, predicament) is our reality, in which societies balance between transcendental and materialist values not on the basis of what would be most effective for them in the long run, but on the basis of acquired beliefs from the past. For industrial society, the past for the last 200 years has been one of almost uninterrupted progress, above all in the US, which has been driven by the exploitation of cheap, plentiful hydrocarbon resources. This has created a self-sustaining “myth of progress” based on the idea that Mammon and the Machine (markets, science, and technology) will always ensure that tomorrow is better than yesterday. Even traditional religion has been overtaken by this materialism, e.g. see the commercialization of Protestantism in the US.

This “myth of progress”, of course, is rather fragile, because its base is actually very shallow. As soon as progress is interrupted substantially, for a few years, there appears political unrest, social instability, which does not bode well for the future as recessions have become ever harder to recover in recent times. The medium-term consequences of all this, I suspect, will not be a return to transcendental values, but the appearance of strongman rulers who will forcibly use the tools of the past to sustain industrialism (yet which will no longer be effective in an age of hard limits to growth), and blame the inevitable failures on scapegoats (including scientists and intellectuals), locking society into yet another vicious circle of decline – a political and intellectual negative feedback loop.

So yes, society will eventually return to pre-industrial (or should I say post-industrial) values. The thing is, I suspect it will take a major collapse to give the decisive shove, just as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire opened up a space for the emergence of a vigorous Christianity.

The “Idea Of Progress” is hard-wired into Marxist ideology. That’s one reason Marx eulogised the new urban proletariat while despising the “idiocy of rural life”. Many of the political leaders who embraced Marxism did so believing that it would accelerate their countries’ modernisation. Whenever I think of the USSR the iconic images are proud posters of steelworkers, Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin – not Edenic green idylls or tree-hugging hippies.

In practice Soviet-style command economies aren’t as good as Asian state-capitalist economies (Japan, S Korea, China) at growth. So what if we give up on growth and play a different game instead? Be careful here. If someone always loses at chess, it doesn’t follow they’ll always win at suicide chess.

You acknowledge the Soviet system was basically inefficient. So the question is, was it inefficient in a generalised way, or only narrowly inefficient at the specific task of promoting growth? If the Brezhnev politburo had set itself the task of converting Russia to green energy and reducing pollution, would it have been really efficient at these tasks? I don’t think so.

The world may soon reach peak oil, but there is still this huge nuclear reactor in the sky that’s got a good few billion years of energy left to give us. The problem we face is technical. What’s the best way of capturing and storing that energy, and delivering it to six billion people? I think this requires innovation, novelty, willingness to try all manner of new ideas. If anything, the Soviet contribution to this may come primarily from its ambitious Khruschev-era space program, helping develop solar power from space, for instance.

Personally, I think sustainability is over-rated. The history of life on Earth across the past 4.5 billion years suggests it’s adaptability, not sustainability, that is the key to endurance. Again, I’m not sure the Soviet system was especially good at rapid adaptation to changing circumstances.

I am rather pessimistic about the future myself, though I do not go nearly so far as you with respect to the utter collapse of industrial society. That said, you always raise legitimate long-term problems that the current elite refuse to acknowledge, even if I think yor response is not feasible or necessarily correct.

I would argue that the key to making it possible to downgrade raw materialism’s ever intoxicating allure is to revive tradition of transcendental vintage. Nothing else will speak to the human soul (or enough human souls) in a way to effectively change, or more accurately curb, the natural acquisitveness of man, especially man that has been shown what he can, theoretically, have from a material perspective.

Indeed, I would argue that it is only transcendentalism, more accurately religion and faith, that has any potential of creating universality among all men. Obviously, it has failed to do so in the past and the odds are very much against it in the future too. However, nebulous concepts of “unity” devoid of anything external beyond biological considerations (or even ethereal virtual reality considerations) are not going to provide the spiritual sustenance necessary for anything remotely approximating some of your suggestions.

This renewal of tradition, combined with what superficially could be considered a paradoxical continuing push along the technological front to achieve more sustainability might avert some of the apocalyptic scenarios you detail.

Man is not a machine. Though capable of rational thinking, man is not, fundamentally,a fully rational creature. He needs more than the current world offers through materialism. He will also need more than to plug into a post-singularity cyber-based ether. Amazingly, the old should become new again. Even with its contradictions, it alone may buy us the time to expand ourselves and understand the God or Deity that has set all in motion.

2) This is called “market socialism”, and has been tried in the NEPist USSR, Hungary’s “goulash communism”, modern Belarus and Venezuela, even Putin’s Russia to a limited extent (though of course these were all far from “petit bourgeoisie laissez faire”). One possible problem is that by providing a (legal) free market alternative, the most talented personnel will migrate there, starving the state-owned enterprises of managerial talent. This has indeed usually been the case in such political economies, hence I suspect the reason why today countries like Belarus, Venezuela, even Russia, etc, possess some of the most stringent bureaucratic regulations on S&M businesses in the world.

Control of the “commanding heights” will become necessary in the coming era when you have to keep things running on a diminishing energy budget and cut back on pollution. But it’s quite possible that the Collapse Party will end up having to renege on the “petit bourgeoisie laissez faire” part of its program just to prevent the decay of the strategically-significant “commanding heights”. So ultimately there might be a reason why “petit bourgeoisie laissez faire with large scale nationalisation” has never been really implemented, and why attempts to do so might fail.

Thanks for a great site, your writing i second to none, with an unbiased and curious approach to the various phenomena of our existence.

Best Regards!

- gar