Archive for February, 2010

Orlov on Collapse – Thoughts

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Orlov wrote a nice article, The Five Stages of Collapse about what he sees as the general tendency of collapsing societies, based on what he saw when the USSR failed. Orlov is delightfully witty in a dark sort of way.

I think he may be making a slight mistake though in thinking that the US collapse is going to look like the USSR collapse, which is what he wrote about mainly, the countries are very different in terms of the cultures, politics, social systems.

But what is not different is the fundamental requirement of our system for raw materials and resources, and the serious lunacy of believing in debt fueled and funded ‘growth’, which was supposed to replace growth based on resource exploitation, ie, manufacturing . Sadly trying to restore debt fueled growth is the method Obama is trying to keep floating, like the Bush group before him (oh, if the banks would just lend again everything would be ok…).

When growth stops in a system based on Capital and debt, ie, a system requiring growth to survive, that system will not have a neat elegant wind-down, that much you can be absolutely certain about. But I think one major difference is found in the respective histories of the US and Russia.

Russia has always been fond of oligarchs, with basically unlimited power, whether czars, Putin, Stalin, or Lenin.

The US has at least some checks and balances, and people have a certain expectation that they won’t get totally screwed by the system. Not to idealize our political process in any way, but we do have a system that, although damaged severely by corporatism, can be altered, and we have political documents, which if we follow them, are actually all the tools we need. But the people need to be really pissed off before this happens, and ready to support a party that is willing to cut off corporatism and its perks.