OK, a basic objection. Why did this happen in Britain, which had a continuous class-based society for about 1000 years, instead of in much older civilizations which had class-based systems for thousands of years?

I think I’d prefer to continue believing in more conventional explanations for the origins of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

2. My main emphasis is not on the “dictatorship” but on its socialist and “ecotechnic” aspects. Preferably it would be democratic socialist, but in practice is will likely have to resort to coercion to maintain itself in power as it carries out the managed decline in material throughput.

3. Awkward wording. “or restrict access to food to PRIVILEGED groups” = “or grant good access to food only to members of privileged social groups”. I was not arguing with you there.

Actually when I wrote that I had in mind the tinpot African dictators who use control of the food supply as a tool of political power, granting access to it for privileged groups and denying it to their political enemies. Mao’s and Stalin’s famines were more disasters of planning and conception than intentionally democidal.

And I repeat the question – was it really democracy that saved India from famine, or the Green Revolution?

2. Kerala is DEMOCRATIC socialist – there has been no Great Leap Forward there, thankfully. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese famines could have happened if the starving had possessed the power to kick out Stalin or Mao through the ballot box. Those leaders’ invulnerability to electoral removal was the necessary (and maybe sufficient?) explanation for both famines.

3. “I do not dispute that when society begins to tinker with traditional market mechanisms or restrict access to food to PRIVILEGED groups, the risk of famine increases.” Could you expand on this? Are you suggesting the Great Leap Forward was all about starving PRIVILEGED people, like senior Politburo members?

“Theoreticians are always misinterpreted one way or another, so following this to its logical conclusion there is no point to doing anything theoretical at all. Nonetheless, in many cases the overall contribution of theory can be judged to be positive.

You have mistaken the point I am trying to make. Theorizing is a sum positive, yes. However, unless the theorist has control of the means by which to make reality reflect his or her ideas, then the vision of the theorist will inevitably corrupted as outside actors attempt to utilize it.

To put this into simpler terms – any “safeguards” you may develop belong to a Platonic world of ideals (“theory”) that is extremely unlikely to reflect the actual programs and policies that will be implemented men and women from the real world begin to implement them.

“You are certainly free to choose collapse for yourself, but I don’t think you (or anyone else) has the right to make the choice for all humanity. I for one would rather take my chances under an ecotechnic dictatorship than face a Malthusian collapse, which in our present circumstances is a horror so vast it is scarcely imaginable.

This is a discussion for another day. It was a mistake to include that quip in a post otherwise devoted to the realities of your plan. It will be broached upon in a different forum or post, I think. (Although a quick note off hand — just as I have not the authority to choose collapse for any but myself, you have not the authority to prevent others from choosing it. This game works both ways.)

Despite the name, the “ecotechnic dictatorship” will not be presided over by a dictator or Great Leader. The Idea of Green Communism will be at the apex, and the only embodiment it is ever going to get is as an all-encompassing cybernetic organism – Project Cybersyn Relaunched. Further down the chain, there will be distribution of powers between social groups – technocratic planners / the executives, the priesthood / judges, committed Green Communists whose lives are made to be transparent / legislature – which will hopefully stymie the appearance of a corrupt nomenklatura class or old-school despotism.

You have painted a wonderful picture Mr, Karlin. I wonder though, how many blue fairies will be needed to make your dream world come to be?

Once again I must ask you to step out of the world of ideals and into the world as it is. Consider three statements, onerous but true:

*The system you imagine allows for a concentration of power humanity has not seen in its existence.

*By its nature, this power can only be held by a small clique (small being a relative term of course – we are talking of the governance of 9 billion people) of men capable, through intelligence and training, to administrate the machine.

*The system you imagine will come to pass only with an incredible amount of violence. (You acknowledge such with your last two questions).

*The system you imagine is constructed upon a powerful narrative of revolutionary redemption.

Please, remember these when you talk things to come. The incentive to secure and abuse positions of power in this system are incredible. As with all Utopian projects, the means to hijack the system will come in times of terror that will inevitably accompany this transition of regimes. And of course, the justification for the atrocities and betrayals that will mark the system’s decline into tyranny will be found in the wonderfully unquestionable Mandate of Gaia that will fuel the revolution.

Not really. Even today there are plenty of other taboos and restrictions that exist without the political system being despotic.

This is logically inconsistent. Allow me to restate the arguments made:

TG: Your system has no institutional checks, and will not allow dissent.

AK: Not really. There are places that do that today anyway.

Your two claims are in contradiction to each other. You befall another fallacy in the attempt as well: that one man’s crimes are not lessened because another man committed sins similar in form.

It is true that in most cases Malthusian dynamics largely dissipate soon after a society begins to enter modernity. However, if the more pessimistic energy and climate projections materialize soon enough, they will return. No matter how literate and capital-rich a society is, it is going to starve if there is no liquid fuels to run the machines servicing their food system or if their arable land turns to desert.

2. Yet today half of India’s children are malnourished, while the figure is much smaller in China and indeed the socialist-like Indian state of Kerala.

OK, so let’s talk specifically about famines. I do not dispute that when society begins to tinker with traditional market mechanisms or restrict access to food to privileged groups, the risk of famine increases. Liberal democracies tend to prevent either from happening.

But the future does not always resemble the past. Should food availability go down, will democracy even survive so that we could test Sen’s hypothesis? Furthermore, was it really democracy that prevented post-independence famine in India – or did the Green Revolution have more to do with it?

The major element of ecotechnic dictatorship is that its coercion, in so far as absolutely necessary, will be leveraged specifically to prevent and mitigate against collapse. This is in contrast to the kind of coercion seen in pre-collapse traditional authoritarianisms, which will instead focus their coercive apparatus on the protection of the short-term interests of privileged corporate groups.

I don’t know if they really believe any of this. I’m hoping to write a blog post on this topic myself, but I reckon that logic and rationality have created a tortoise/ hare scenario whereby the progressives think because they have data on their side they deserve to win. Maybe, maybe not, but I think that victory goes to those with the most interesting stories rather than those with the best factual research.

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