Note: there is now a revised version.  See this later post.

This is my new working paper. It attempts to deal with the question of peak capitalism and ecological crisis on two levels – the post-industrial wastelands of the core capitalist countries and the global exhaustion and toxicity of capitalism as a system for appropriation, commodification and accumulation. It has an explicit degrowth perspective and asks the question, how adequate are policy proposals, mainstream and alternative in this challenging context. Finally it suggests that a criterion for their adequacy might be their relevance to a “better collapse” of “civilisation”. Obviously it is a working paper, exploring, thinking aloud questions for which there is no adequate answer, but possibly suggesting a compass rather than a roadmap.

NEW: I’ve also uploaded it to the academia.edu site where I’ve invited readers to join the discussion and comment on the paper.

After peak capitalism: the livelihood challenge.

download (revised version)

Mark H Burton

Summary

The former industrial towns of the global North have already seen capitalism peak locally. Globally we may be living through a similar peaking as the system exhausts both its options to fix its internal contradictions, and more critically, the capacity of the planetary systems that sustain it. This essay begins with the first sense of peak capitalism and moves on to the second. Strategies, mainstream and alternative, for economic and social restoration, are criticised in the context of the relentless expansion of global capitalism that, having created these places in conjunction with colonial pillage, has now moved on. It is suggested that the reform strategies, whether proposed by mainstream or critically inclined bodies and campaigners, are inadequate to the scale of the challenge posed by footloose capital. Moreover, such strategies, insofar as they require growth in the material scale of the economy, are ecologically illiterate and will both hasten and be rendered powerless by the coming resource and climate crisis and catastrophe. Given this picture, the counsel of the degrowth and similar movements, North and South, to live better with less, makes sense, as practice and as policy. Given that a global economic and social collapse will happen, the only policy and practice approaches that make sense today are those that provide scalable resources that will aid (but not guarantee) communities to make a livelihood under turbulent and harsh conditions. Helpful guidance can be found from permacultural thinking on materially and socially retrofitting urban and suburban human settlements.

Read the (revised) working paper.