Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on February 9, 2023 | 32 Comments
I’m in the final manic editing phase of my little book, and if I don’t get a post out now it won’t happen for a while. So coming right up is my review of Peter Zeihan’s recent book, as per the title of this post. I wrote it a while back and had planned to edit it a bit, but I don’t have the luxury of time for that just now. However, I hope to see readers of thsi blog soon on the other side of my book project. In the meantime, feel free to listen to me talking small farm futures with Manda Scott on her Accidental Gods podcast.
And so to my review:
I’ve recently read Peter Zeihan’s book The End of the World Is Just the Beginning (Harper Business, 2022) and I’d commend it to readers of this blog as an informative complement to the issues laid out in my own book.
Two general points as an opener. First, for those of us who’ve long been saying in the face of much derision that the days of the present global order are clearly numbered, it’s gratifying that a major publisher should bring out a hefty book articulating this very point. It strikes me that you don’t have to peer too hard through the diversionary froth of the day to day news cycle to see this writing on the wall, but it still surprises me how few people are doing so.
Second, Zeihan has different political convictions and analytical concerns from me, but he ends up painting a pretty similar picture of where the world is headed. I find this interesting. It would be easy for me to devote a lot of words to all the points of disagreement I have with him (I do highlight a few below), but I think more interesting to examine the overlaps. I’ll begin by summarizing some of Zeihan’s main analytical optics, then I’ll draw out the links with my own arguments.
Geographies of success: Zeihan offers potted histories of global economic development and political power based on various physical and topographical features that favoured certain areas of the world and rendered others ‘strategically irrelevant’. He argues that the advent of fossil fuels as the motive force of the modern global economy eclipsed these geographies because the easy availability of prodigious power means that more or less anything can now be built more or less anywhere. But this card has an expiry date, after which geographic constraint will return to haunt us – some of us more than others.
Aging societies: Zeihan places a lot of emphasis on demography, and particularly the aging character of most rich and middle-income countries as the postwar boom and following fertility crash works its inexorable logic through time. His main point about this is that capital in the hands of older people does less work, and countries with aging populations will find it hard to sustain the growth that their economic models rely on.
‘The Order’: Zeihan argues that today’s globalized economy has largely been underwritten by the USA, particularly in the form of its hard naval/air power, which is the ultimate guarantor of safe passage for the otherwise vulnerable commercial shipping that makes modern urbanized consumerist society possible. And also in the form of open global markets that have allowed poorer countries to develop their economies. This postwar order – ‘The Order’ – arose in the now defunct Cold War context of superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union, a role the US is increasingly uninterested in continuing to play. In the coming ‘disorder’, there’s likely to be a lot of aggressive jockeying for position and resources by countries and local/regional power centres, while some places will get frozen out altogether.
Credit: Zeihan emphasizes the huge extent to which the global economy in its present form is dependent on credit, mostly under the aegis of the world’s more powerful governments. This means that a lot gets done. Too much, in fact – overproduction is a constant problem. But it accumulates into a bill that future generations and/or the Earth ultimately have to honour, and probably can’t. Zeihan is particularly sceptical about China, and the extent to which its extraordinary economic development in recent decades has been based on over-easy credit that will soon come due.
Energy and materials: the physical requirements underpinning economic ‘success’, globalized ‘order’ and easy credit are cheap fossil energy and a plethora of materials like copper, cobalt and lithium. Most of these are limited or have difficult geographies of security around them that will make them hard or impossible to source at present prices and quantities. Low carbon renewable energy sources will not bridge this gap. A reversion to the use of widely distributed, high-carbon dirty coal might do, partially.
Labour and localism: whereas in the preindustrial and pre-globalized world, many or most people acquired many or most of the skills needed to furnish themselves with a practical livelihood locally, nowadays this is not the case and, Zeihan says, people largely possess either hyperspecialized skills or few skills to speak of, i.e. they lack skills of practical local livelihood-making either way. Due to supply insecurities, he thinks it’s likely that in the future there will be a lot of local work in machine shops and gardens geared to producing simple things securely, not complex things at low cost for global markets – if there are the people with the skills to provide them.
Zeihan also discusses the geopolitical imbalances between capital and knowledge-rich countries with scarce and high-cost labour costs and capital and knowledge-poor countries with abundant and low-cost labour. While acknowledging the dangers of colonial power relations between the two, he takes a more upbeat view of this as a potential win-win arena of economic cooperation. This leads him to speculate about how the geopolitical map might be redrawn in a post-Order world – for example, a NAFTA area incorporating the UK and Colombia, which stretches the definition of ‘North America’ a bit, but anyway.
Capital- and other isms: Zeihan argues that at their core all economic models are systems of distribution, and the salient ones he emphasizes are capitalism (like, he says, in the USA), socialism (like in Europe), communism (like in the former Soviet Union – but also in early postwar South Korea), and fascism, where he especially emphasizes economic corporatism, whereby businesses are government-linked and directed towards perceived national goals, but are not government-operated. His premier example of a fascist regime in the present world is China.
I’ll pick up from that last paragraph now to start appraising Zeihan’s analysis in relation to a small farm future. And to be honest, his global economic schema isn’t all that great – you’re better off reading A Small Farm Future to understand the way capitalism works and the role of the US and Europe within it, if I say so myself. There isn’t a capitalist US and a socialist Europe so much as a global economy of so-called welfare capitalism where some parts are more redistributive (Europe, generally) and other parts less so (the USA).
However, I do find the way Zeihan invokes the spectre of fascism informative. This nationalist-corporatist model, with business interests subordinated to the nationalist goals of an authoritarian centralized state and civil society policed for enemies within and without, does seem to be the direction a lot of the world is travelling – not surprisingly, since it’s probably the best option available for governments to try to retain power and keep the urban-consumerist wagon rolling in circumstances of economic contraction, collapsing credit and resource conflict. Zeihan is still pinning his hopes on more liberal/libertarian forms of capitalism-as-usual pulling through, but I think these hopes are vain. Away from the pull of fascist political centres, there will probably be areas of what Zeihan calls ‘strategic irrelevance’ where people will develop local agrarian systems to meet their needs, because they will have little call upon resources from elsewhere to meet them. Ultimately, I think the fascist political centres will fail to resolve their contradictions, and I hope that the small farm societies pioneered in their ‘strategically irrelevant’ margins might then take off and plot a more renewable route into the future.
In doing so, their populations will have to reckon with local physical and biological realities that fossil fuelled modernity has allowed most people to forget, or to shrink from. Reckoning with them again may not be as bad as a lot of people – Zeihan probably included – seem to think, but while I don’t entirely buy all aspects of his ‘geographies of success’ analysis, I think he’s right to emphasize that in the future geography and topography will matter again in ways they scarcely now do in urban high energy society that unconsciously colour so much modern thinking.
Part of this new geographical reckoning will involve the noisy regional power politics I mentioned, once the US-backed ‘Order’ crumbles. Now, for the record I think Zeihan paints way, way too benign a picture of US actions and intentions globally, but I’m not sure how much this matters in terms of future implications. He writes of US disinterest in future world affairs: “The Americans can access what they need without massive military interventions. This will generate not the sort of heavy American involvement most countries would find distasteful, but instead large-scale American disengagement that most countries will find terrifying” (p.320).
This strikes me as broadly true, if only because US power has shaped the modern world such that most countries have few options but to attach themselves to the US Order. And US hard power is still prodigious – its military expenditure exceeds that of the next nine biggest spending countries combined, most of which in any case are US allies. I know nothing about strategic affairs of this sort, but Zeihan doesn’t rate the military or economic chances of countries like Russia and China, and on the face of it I’m not seeing evidence to suggest he’s wrong (though I’d find his claims more trustworthy if he’d used the footnotes in his book for references instead of jokes, and if he hadn’t written on page 205 that after Brexit the British left “fell under the control of barely whitewashed neofascists” – huh?)
Anyway, I like Zeihan’s coolly cynical (or ‘realist’, in the jargon of international relations scholarship) projections of how various countries will behave in the disorderly scramble for material resources and economic security that’s upon us. But I think he underplays the extent to which many countries are subject to fragmenting forces that they may not weather in their present form, making the scramble even more disorderly. This, I suspect, applies even to the USA, the big winner in his account. From my admittedly distant vantage point, it seems to me there are political pressures in the country that could easily rupture it, and it may be harder than Zeihan supposes for the US to reshore its manufacturing capacity and ally with low-wage client countries. I suspect the likely end of the US-backed global Order won’t come simply because the US doesn’t want to bear the burden any more, but because it can’t. The same applies a fortiori to many other countries.
Zeihan’s analysis of the fantasy economics behind present credit-fuelled growth, financialization and the inflation of land and property values strikes me as sound, along similar lines to my discussion of the ‘symbolic economy’ in my own book, but much more detailed (so I’ll admit it, on this point you might be better off reading his book than mine). Likewise he has a more detailed analysis of energy and material futures, with similar conclusions – low carbon renewable power is all very nice ‘n’all, but it’s not going to furnish rich, urbanized countries with the abundant, cheap flows of energy and materials we’ve come to rely on. I’ll say more about that in another post soon. For now, I’ll just home in on the implications for urban life, which Zeihan assesses as follows:
“Modern cities – and especially East Asia’s modern megacities – are particularly screwed. All only exist because the Order has made it easy for them both to source the building blocks of industrialized systems as well as to access end markets for their exports. Remove the global system, remove global transport, and cities will be responsible for their own food and energy and industrial inputs.
That is, in a word, impossible. Only cities that are part of a bloc with sufficient reach can hope to keep populations employed, fed, and warm. For most of the global urban population, this leads to the same place: massive deindustrialization and depopulation as people are forced to return to the countryside” p.155
That pretty much aligns with my reading of the runes in A Small Farm Future. Which is why my book has ‘farm’ in its title, because that’s basically what people in the countryside have to do. Zeihan turns to the question of farming in the last part of his book, and in view of his preceding analyses of collapsing capital, trade and inputs unsurprisingly comes to a similar conclusion as me: “large-scale, export-driven monoculture will give way to small-scale, local-driven polyculture” (p.429) – a kind of farming, he correctly concludes, that’s more like gardening and can be “wildly productive”.
Then he goes a bit awry, arguing that the volume of foods produced on Earth in aggregate in this scenario must decline, and that for current food-importing countries like the UK “Gruels, porridges and mush beckon – with a little cabbage on Sundays” (p.430).
I’d say rather that the volume of agricultural commodities produced must decline, but since a large proportion of these aren’t actually food that’s needed for direct human consumption, since local-driven polycultures do a better job of feeding people than export-driven monocultures, and since countries like the UK are net food importers largely out of policy choice it’s debatable whether the volume of foods produced will decline, or that cabbage will be only a Sunday luxury here in Britain. Barring, that is, drastic climate change or political mismanagement, both of which I concede are pretty likely.
Anyway, let me conclude by trying to meld Zeihan’s intimations of our global future with my own. In the coming century or so, we face a situation where the global political and trading system will disintegrate, and where the strongest political centres will try to hang on to their high-energy urban-industrial lifeways through various coercive and authoritarian means, including forms of neocolonialism and neofascism. Resurgent but fragile nationalisms will loom large, and there will be a lot of boundary policing of enemies within and without. Yet, as their populations age, these power centres will through gritted teeth admit young adults from poorer places, surveilling and discriminating against them all the while. In places of ‘strategic irrelevance’ that aren’t hollowed out by this outmigration or destroyed by climate change, small farm societies more or less thrown back on their own resources will figure out local ways of making their livelihood and building political culture. When the high-energy authoritarian political centres fail, which ultimately they will, my hope is that some of these ‘irrelevant’ places will have forged resilient material cultures and mature political institutions that will enable them to usher our descendants into the next chapter of human history.
It’s not, I regret, a particularly cheery vision, but it’s not an entirely hopeless one. Our modern epoch, like many of its predecessors, will die in the froth of its own contradictions, but – more than Zeihan – I consider that a bittersweet conclusion rather than merely a bitter one. The story from there on gets more interesting, and even perhaps more uplifting.
As I said earlier, it surprises me that more people don’t take a cold hard look at events and come to conclusions similar to Zeihan’s (and mine). Maybe it’s because writers and thinkers are under pressure these days to tell stories with a happy ending or a ‘we can do this’ toolkit. So I find it refreshing that Zeihan lays things out so bluntly. But a doubt remains. The prospects look appropriately bleak in Zeihan’s account for most places apart from North America, where presumably most of his readers are located. So maybe he’s offering a feelgood story after all, at least for the readership that matters. For numerous reasons, I suspect things may not play out nearly as rosily in North America as he thinks. Actually, I wonder if Zeihan secretly thinks that too, but had to speak in code to get his manuscript past his publisher. Otherwise I fear he may be suffering from a touch too much nationalist insouciance. In the coming years, there’s going to be a lot of that about.
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Very interesting read with many points that should worry the inhabitants of the planet ( though most are acting like ostriches )
The USA is very fractured and becoming more tribal in many ways . America’s ” great ” military has been found wanting , billions spent on arms yet loose wars to militias ( Afghanistan ) , high tech weapons that takes years to learn to use them prooved too fragile and expensive to take the beating of real war ( Ukraine ) .
The USA is a great financial power that has shot itself in the foot , the sanctions against Russia have been a total disaster , the locking of Russian private and public capitol was bad enough but now these funds are being taken and given to Ukraine , billions of dollars invested in us treasuries / banks / companies is lost , every other country that could get itself on the wrong side of the usa and super rich person is now selling and or removing their funds from the USA ( can you blame them ?) it will become more and more difficult to finance the US deficits , ( think Harold Wilson and ” this will not affect the pound in your pocket ” )
On many levels the USA is a dying empire , it’s shiny high tech weaponry is too expensive to use or loose ( one cheap hyper sonic missile in a aircraft carrier costing multi millions …. ( Think HMS Coventry ) . A financial system that relies on others to park their money in U.S. banks in hope that they don’t get into the bad books and loose it all in a country that can’t even count ballots in an election and never mind the open border where between two and four million have entered in the last two years .
I could go on .
“Gruels, porridges and mush beckon – with a little cabbage on Sundays”
Oh this made me laugh! I mean, tell me you don’t know much about gardening without telling me you don’t know much about gardening… has Zeihan heard the good news about potatoes?
After a few years of allotment gardening I am finally re-ordering our back garden somewhat, to give easier year-round access to greens and herbs — things that I grow at the allotment but don’t always remember to bring home on my visits there. That, and the black raspberry from the end of the garden is going in a giant pot and closer to the house, so I can keep it under better control.
That said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with porridge, I just haven’t gotten around to growing oats yet.
And just from your review I was thinking “well, you can’t publish a book saying the USA is doomed and expect people in the USA to read it” — I’m glad you came to a similar conclusion.
But the USA isn’t necessarily a cohesive country in the first place, but a bunch of republics in a trench coat. So I would expect that within the US, geography will start to matter even more than it already does. Keeping train networks functional and existing river and canal systems suitable for barge transport of goods might be wise moves.
A bunch of republics in a trench coat…
The first half of that assertion is certainly on point. And from my perch as a current and former resident of several of the various republics I actually imagine this a strength rather than a liability. The significance of the trench coat half eludes me…
Is Europe, a bunch of republics, somehow more cohesive? Is Great Britain, more cohesive? Brexit, Scottish independence, the Irish question… from the other side of the pond these pictures don’t impress as cohesion on display. If his majesty’s isle – roughly the size of Michigan – has such rough edges on display to the world, what sort of trench coat must be necessary?
I will agree with your assessment that geography in the US will matter in the future – though whether the significance will be greater than it has always been …. I’m less convinced.
And to another point “well, you can’t publish a book saying the USA is doomed and expect people in the USA to read it” … I just popped over to my local library link here so I could get my hands on a copy. Turns out the local system (one of several dozen within one of the 50 trench coat republics) has more than 25 copies of the book, and the waiting line to see one of them is more than 25 people deep. For comparison, the same library system owns one copy of SFF, which is out right now, but no one is in line for it.
“well, you can’t publish a book saying the USA is doomed and expect people in the USA to read it” —
Actually, Clem is right, there is quite a market for talk of US collapse.
It’s kind of like the fascination of watching a car crash. And this sense of collapse is much of the impulse of “Make America Great Again”.
The trouble comes from what people mean when they say “Great”.
As I see it, most of the headline political fighting is between factions that believe the US remains “Great” and those who want to make it “Great” again. (And who exactly benefits from the “Greatness”)
Nobody will listen if you even suggest that “Greatness” is a bad idea.
The trouble comes from what people mean when they say “Great”.
I’ll agree with that wholeheartedly…
No question that the UK faces disintegrative forces. I mean, it’s not even a single country to begin with… But I’m not sure that gainsays the point that Zeihan’s vision of the USA’s future is over-rosy.
I was at a meeting the other day where somebody remarked that the key words in the respective big political slogans of 2016 US and UK politics – ‘make America great again’ and ‘take back control’ – are ‘again’ and ‘back’. Which maybe underlines the point that politicians are unable to articulate positive and enticing visions of the future, for reasons I probably don’t need to spell out…
But I’m not sure that gainsays the point that Zeihan’s vision of the USA’s future is over-rosy.
Not sure that was my goal. More of a ‘those who live in a glass house should not throw stones’ sort of admonition.
As for rosiness forecasts for anyone’s future – doom and gloom might sell, but I’ll keep some rosiness in my pocket to cheer me through rough patches. Getting to a favorable result can call upon more patience and resilience than one has immediately to hand. Doom and gloom tend not to refill the spirit.
I think you might be misunderstanding, and also illustrating, the point: that if Zeihan had painted a more doomy (and perhaps accurate?) picture of the US, the book might not have been approved by publishers.
I don’t think anyone is pretending that “Europe” is a single country. There is no trench coat to be seen; if you ask someone from Spain what country they are from, they don’t say “Europe”. Certainly some people in England (and the English-colonised world) think or try to impose the idea that the UK is a single country, but it isn’t; and the ongoing arguments over how much power Westminster has in Scotland or Wales are striking — and are framed as issues of national sovereignty.
The governance issues are at least as complex as the identity issues, and if course people from various US states can have strong feelings of local identity too. But the “trench coat” is the bit where if you ask almost any American what country they are from, they will tell you America is a country.
Thanks Chris for an excellent review.
“Zeihan paints way, way too benign a picture of US actions”
Exactly.
I must have seen you recommend this book, and so I got it from my local public library.
While I found Zeihan’s writing style irritatingly folksy, what caused me to toss the book aside was his strong and pervasive case of US chauvinism.
Anyone who talks about the US propagated “World Order” as anything but an ironic phrase for imperial theft, will not get any respect from me. The fact that Zeihan lists his consulting for the CIA as one of his bona fides is a tell.
I’m willing to believe that there are those in official US power agencies who are actually interested in facts, but I do not believe that any of them will tolerate anyone who speaks plainly about how this nation was founded (and continues) on a basis of theft, murder and enslavement.
Another example of obvious ideological bias: calling China “fascist”.
So either he is a wanker, or he is (at least partially) lying, or both.
I’m willing to accept that Zeihan gets the broad outline of decline right more or less, but as you say, “Small Farm Future” is a better read.
The real shame with Zeihan’s book is precisely his unwillingness to look the US in the face. The US is one of the main sources of international violence today. It is my country too, I understand why people don’t want to admit this. I am appalled at the behavior of my government, and I have no power to change it. It’s hard to try to live a good life in the empire of evil. But we needn’t let that distort our vision.
We are all tipping toward collapse, but some will fare better than others. Since the ’national character’ of the US, if we can speak of such a thing, is the character of a violent spoiled child, I don’t expect it to go well here. I am not talking about the character of individual people of course, most of whom are nice most of the time.
So yes, Zeihan gets the trajectory right, but it will be way worse in the US, and much of the rest of the world is doubtless impatient for us to collapse already.
And as you say, I also hope that:
“these ‘irrelevant’ places will have forged resilient material cultures and mature political institutions”.
That’s why I’m in Kansas.
Thanks.
Dimitri Orlov gives a interesting account of his thoughts of the differences between the Soviet collapse and the coming U.S. collapse , Russians grew most of their own food in gardens outside the cities , they lived in housing owned by the state and were not made homeless when it all came apart , Americans mostly don’t grow food and owe huge amounts of rent and mortgage loans they will be made homeless .
Small mixed farms have been proved to be more efficient than the giant agro businesses but today they have little chance of winning over big ag , just look at the new farm bill , subsidise everything accept growing food , million dollar combines that after tax breaks and subsidies cost little .
Breaking up these behemoths will be the stumbling block , prizing land out of their corporate hands and then allocating it will be a huge headache , with luck the diesel shortages will make them just walk away .
I recently read the book and at the end had this thought: What if conventional agriculture is right, it is the only system that can feed the world, but this does not matter because other forces will prevent ANY farming system from feeding the world?
I am somewhat skeptical about his “the US is uninterested in continuing it’s part…” as I don’t see much evidence for this in his book or otherwise, but I’m just an agronomist. It will be interesting, and as you and the book says, more for some countries than others.
“Which is why my book has ‘farm’ in its title, because that’s basically what people in the countryside have to do.” I heard this wry line in your voice, and it made me laugh.
Great review. Maybe bleak, honest, natural realism (both philosophical and internationalist) becomes more attractive in the 21st century because one becomes sick of the nagging, obvious doubt behind every 19th century ideological “we can do it” silver bullet.
And yet, who can live without hope?
Sean
Couching this in the most secular terms I can…
I “hope” to die in my bed of old age at around 120, surrounded by loved ones, in a world where everyone has the resources they need to live a dignified and good life — not necessarily free from all hardship, but free from oppression and the fear of destitution, and in the knowledge that they are loved.
I also have no realistic expectation that this desire will come to pass in my lifetime. I’ll be pleased if I make it to 80. I’ll be unsurprised if I die in my 60s.
It’s still a world worth working toward, though, and I guess my more realistic hope is that I use the time allotted to me to help all of humanity move toward that vision, even if by an infinitesimally small increment. I’ll probably mess up a lot too; I hope my errors don’t make things worse.
Maybe hope is more about meaning than outcomes.
Yes! I wrote to Manda saying you need to speak to Chris Smaj! I will listen to that today. It is surprising how many people haven’t fully grasped the reality that SFF describes – Alice and I met with the Transition Town Brixton (voluntary) directors just yesterday and none of them had heard of it – they have now. I think there is lingering eco modernish perspective that lingers in the urban environment but equally people were ready to move onto the care home farm!
Hilarious! Cabbage on Sundays! Surely that’s some epigenetic hatred of ‘the British’ ? And as for his definition of fascism as government corporate melding, er, the American MIC, Big Pharma,, anyone?
Cabbage lol. Strange that I have just planted four different types of cabbage and two of brokoli .The
As for corporates they are legion !
Apologies for my absence here of late. My short but intense book-writing project is now almost done, leaving me nursing a heavy cold and a desire to spend less time sitting at my computer in the immediate future. But also a desire to re-engage with my blog, so I will try to ease my way gently back in…
Thanks for the interesting discussion points in my absence. For now, I’ll just weigh in briefly on a couple of points.
(1) I found Zeihan’s fascist optic for contemporary China thought-provoking, but I can see the counter-arguments. I think all political labels are so bashed around with historical baggage that they’re all more or less meaningless, but maybe the F word is best avoided because the baggage is worse than most. Where I see the word fitting contemporary China better than the contemporary US is in 3 areas: (1) Not just a tight government-corporate relationship of the military-industrial complex type, but a relationship where business, while economically autonomous, is politically completely subordinate to government, (2) a pseudo-socialist framing of citizenship, where ordinary people can expect significant government social support, provided they’re the ‘right kind’ of ordinary people, and (3) a pervasively authoritarian political structure, where any significant critique of existing structures or attempts to organize politically against them isn’t tolerated. It seems to me there are tendencies along these lines in contemporary US and European politics, but not (yet) at the levels attained by China. There are other examples, like the PRI government of Mexico through much of the 20th century that people have also likened to fascism. Only one way of framing it, of course, but interesting IMO.
(2) On the matter of optimism and doominess, I will perhaps come back to this. My feeling is that it’s not inherently pessimistic or doomy to predict or even to welcome the demise of the present global political economy. Increasingly it just seems to me like a done deal. The question then is what kind of world comes next, and how much optimism (or better, IMO, ‘hope’, a distinction I’ve written about before) can I entertain for it. Zeihan entertains a lot of hope for North America along business as almost usual lines and not so much for just about everywhere else. I’d spread the hopefulness around a bit more evenly than him, but lightly sprinkled – and with fewer business as usual options anywhere. Still, I think his general analysis of where the existing global political economy is coming unstuck has quite a lot to commend it.
Congratulations Chris, on your project progress, and welcome back.
I will freely admit that I don’t know anything about China, but your assessment here sounds reasonable. But as you say, the ‘F’ word has gotten so polluted that when people use it, I take that as a statement of how they feel about the group they are naming, rather than any useful definition.
I do know a little about the US, having lived here for so many decades. I also have personal friends in my state government. And while the situation is complicated, it is fair to say that there is “a tight government-corporate relationship of the military-industrial complex type” here as well. Except that the government is effectively owned by the chiefs of the business community, rather than the reverse. And while the remains of the US industrial complex are still largely military, the financial and ‘health care’ sectors occupy a large swath of the economy.
So what we see is petty squabbling between the oligarchs about which of them gets the benefits of imperial wealth extraction. There is no actual concern for the welfare of the public. Dissent is tolerated as long as it fails to build a large movement, then it is either co-opted or crushed.
Is this fascist? Probably not. I don’t think the US has the capacity for group cohesion that ‘real’ fascism requires. We aren’t willing to subordinate our individual greed to an overarching ethos – no matter how fake such national stories always are.
Given all this, I try to concentrate on nicely distracting practical tasks like rebuilding my pedal-powered threshing machine.
Otherwise, the main topics that have been occupying my thoughts are despair management strategies, and what useful graffiti I might scrawl on railroad tanker cars.
Thanks.
Re: railroad tanker cars
If I were a graffitist, I would write something like,
“For your PVC siding and decks.”
There’s too much ignorant demand for those toxins.
Those tendencies are a good description of a certain kind of right-wing government, maybe “nationalist corporatism”? To make it fully “fascism,” at least as popularly conceived, we may need to add personal hero/leader worship (over and above abstract ideological worship of the nation/state) & public rituals of state violence against the ‘enemies’ (everyone does this, of course, but fascism seems to get rid of the remorse, subtlety, or shyness often involved).
I had exactly the same reaction to the book as yours, Chris. I can see the reasons why Zeihan thinks that North America will be the last modern economy standing, but that status will not last long at all.
My personal opinion is that Russia will be the last economy standing , it has all the basic needs of a economy at hand , energy , raw materials and a smallish population in a huge country ,and that because of sanctions is learning how to thrive outside wall street and ” western ” capitalism .
” I don’t think the US has the capacity for group cohesion that ‘real’ fascism requires. ”
True , the first cry ” ein volk ” of a fachist dictatorship is not part of the USA , the West likes / wants ” diversity , ” which negates and makes impossible ” one folk ” .
Though somewhat tangential, this touches on the current topic slightly and on the wider blog theme in general…
Many of us have curiously followed the development of artificial intelligence (AI) and the plusses, minuses, and overall angst that follow from its deployment. The OpenAI bot called ChatGPT has struck a cord in many areas.
My own curiosity finally got the better and I thought I’d have a peek.
I started with a couple questions in a realm I know fairly well to see if the bot could at least appear relevant. The first couple answers were straight forward, well written, and not controversial. Then I posed:
Is a small farm future inevitable?
Earlier queries generated replies within seconds. The first attempt by the bot to wrangle with a SFF seemed co cause a meltdown. After many seconds all it had to offer was “Whether” (and at the end of the chat box the continuous run of dots – so it appeared to still be thinking). After a several minute wait I aborted the attempt, answered a query from the website, and went back to the interaction page. There was a ‘Regenerate Response’ button there, so I gave that poke. Low and behold on second go the software came with this response:
The question of whether a small farm future is inevitable is difficult to answer definitively, as it depends on a wide range of social, economic, and environmental factors that are difficult to predict with certainty.
That being said, there are a number of trends and forces that are driving interest in small-scale and sustainable agriculture, and that could contribute to a shift towards a more decentralized and locally-oriented food system. Some of these factors include:
1. Climate change and environmental degradation: As the impacts of climate change become increasingly severe, there is growing recognition of the need to transition towards more sustainable and resilient forms of agriculture that can help mitigate and adapt to these changes.
2. Health and nutrition: There is growing awareness of the link between diet and health, and the importance of fresh, nutritious, and locally-grown food for promoting health and well-being.
3. Economic inequality: Large-scale industrial agriculture has been criticized for contributing to economic inequality, as it often favors large-scale producers over small-scale farmers and can result in the consolidation of land ownership.
4. Local and regional food systems: There is growing interest in local and regional food systems that support small-scale and sustainable agriculture, and that can help build community resilience and food sovereignty.
However, it’s important to note that there are also many powerful forces that are driving consolidation and industrialization in agriculture, including corporate interests, government policies, and global trade agreements. These forces could continue to pose significant challenges to the development of a small farm future.
Ultimately, the future of agriculture will depend on a complex interplay of social, economic, and environmental factors, and it is impossible to predict with certainty what form it will take. However, there is certainly growing interest in small-scale and sustainable agriculture, and it is possible that this could be a significant part of a more resilient and equitable food system in the future.
The snarky side of me thought for a moment that the long pause the first time round was due to the bot’s need to read Chris’ book first so that it might have something salient to offer. As I doubt the full text of SFF is available on the web, I’m left wondering how much of the bot’s generated response was gleaned from our conversations here at the SFF blog over the last many years.
The curious can check out ChatGPT here:
(you’ll need to start an account, but there is no fee – as of the date of this posting)
https://chat.openai.com/chat
As a follow up I’m planning to try this again in a week or so to see if there is much difference in response. I’m hoping the software might continue to ‘learn’ as it goes along.
Thanks Clem, you’re bolder than me – jumping into the AI chat.
Maybe the time lag was what it took the AI to scan the correspondence in the online identities you listed when establishing an account with ChatGPT.
Which suggests an opportunity: Find a topic that nobody has mentioned yet, and seed the AI memory with your personal biases.
Changing the world for fun and profit.
Cheers!
” Ultimately, the future of agriculture will depend on a complex interplay of social, economic, and environmental factors, ”
It should have added energy !
Perhaps I should add this , which will affect the future in a lot of ways perhaps a leader of a whole slew of problems .
Under the radar Mercedes Benz has increased the price of their vehicles by 47% in TX claiming energy prices driving the increase , though not if you can find one made in China ,so tells me the manager from a dealer in Houston ( who has not sold a new car this year ) , it is to be hoped this is not a fore runner of what is happening to Europe and it’s economy or the small farm future is set in stone .
First thoughts on Clem’s experiment are that I’m out of job and why have I spent so much time these past 11 years writing blog posts when there are bots to take the strain. Second thoughts are, hmm, it’s a bit of an undergraduate essay, no? A bit ‘there are many different perspectives and it’s all very complex’. Though I daresay I’ve written those very words on here more than once. Perhaps I should let you folks be the judge of whether I should continue. Or perhaps I’ll subject you to my own version of the Turing test…
On the F word, all good points and Sean’s additions have some weight. But then we start getting into debates of the sort ‘situation x has features a and b but not c and d so is it really fascism?’ And that’s when it all starts to get a bit too definitional.
A bit off-topic on a slow comments day, ICYMI:
A Bloomberg article earlier this month explained how “Lab-Grown Meat Has a Bigger Problem Than the Lab.”
It seems that lab-grown meats are made from tumour cells.
“The big honking asterisk is that normal meat cells don’t just keep dividing forever. To get the cell cultures to grow at rates big enough to power a business, several companies, including the Big Three, are quietly using what are called immortalized cells, something most people have never eaten intentionally. Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous.”
Businessweek Feature
Lab-Grown Meat Has a Bigger Problem Than the Lab
Leading scientists agree that cultured meat products won’t give you cancer, but the industry doesn’t have the decades of data to prove it—so it’s trying to avoid the question instead.
By Joe Fassler
February 7, 2023
https://archive.is/i99ZA
(Note: Lab-grown meats are not the same as the microbial proteins made from mold or bacteria.)
[…] fire up my blogging machine again – but let me know if you think the small farm future bot that Clem’s being trialling does a better job than me. If so, I’ll be able to save myself some time, close […]
Noam Chomsky described current AI as predictive text on steroids! He said he was thankful for the real time subtitles as he is hard of hearing, in the same way he’s glad of a snow plow for clearing the snow! I see it like a super charged cut and paste, so nothing to worry about there Chris, there is clearly no thinking involved. Great interview with Manda and look forward to the new book and is there still a pamphlet?