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 August 16, 2026 | 39 Comments
A few further thoughts in this post on the matter of the state – what it is, what its past and future involves, and what does it mean to live within the jurisdiction of a singular state (‘the state I’m in’)? – arising out of discussions under my last post.
But first, to go with the wordplay of my title, something a bit more autobiographical about my personal state. Which is, for one thing, quite busy with some other writing and life projects, so posts here are likely to be sporadic at best in the near future, although I hope I’ll have a few more things to share soon.
Also, I’m wrestling with some issues that are making me grumpier than usual, which may or may not be relevant to my recent ban of a commenter on Substack for the first time. Writing about ‘renewable’ energy seems to be a particular flashpoint these days, with people routinely wanting to take me to task for being either too sceptical or not sceptical enough about the possibilities for a transition of the existing global energy system to low-carbon sources (my position in a nutshell: it’s not going to happen).
Anyway, a commenter apparently of the latter persuasion wrote in response to my post tracking the latest global energy figures, “Look up ‘Jevon’s paradox’ so we can read useful articles. Tyvm”. Regardless of the point that Jevon’s paradox seems irrelevant in this instance, I find the tone of such comments objectionable and I don’t think I’m up for hosting them. Subsequent engagement with the commenter got worse, but anyway … I’m open to (polite) counterarguments, but I think my general position nowadays is that politeness and not talking down to me are basic requirements of online discussion with me on my websites. My tolerance for ad hominem insults has become increasingly low.
I am, on the other hand, more open than I used to be to waving through political opinions that I find problematic or objectionable (short of incitement to violence or unmitigated bigotry), provided the politeness criterion is met. But, just to mention, I’ve been kind of shaken and saddened by the Jason Arday story recently. It’s a sh*tshow in which none of the main players emerge looking rosy, but ultimately someone lost their life who probably wouldn’t if they hadn’t been black. An old story. Hence a polite request to avoid phrases like ‘DEI hire’ on my sites.
But moving on now to the main business of this post: the state – what is it, where did it come from, and where is it going?
Every human society involves government in the sense of collective, supra-individual and supra-familial forms of political organisation (the anthropologist in me wants to immediately deconstruct all those terms, but I’ll resist the temptation). However, not all forms of government involve a state. So, what is a state? People usually talk about it as if it’s obvious, but as is often the case, the more you try to home in on a definition, the more it slips between your fingers.
Pioneering sociologist Max Weber offered probably the most famous definition of the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. The problem with this as I see it is that it begs the question – what can possibly make physical force legitimate to those at the sharp end of it? ‘Legitimate violence’ is an oxymoron, especially in societies that emphasise individualism as a value, like the modern western ones that have done the most to emphasise the singular power of the state.
The benefit of Weber’s definition is that it at least directs our attention to something important: how is legitimacy effected, how do some human communities succeed in making their violence seem justifiable? In practice, the main answer has been through imperfect but quite successful historical processes of creating legitimacy through developing a sense of a sacred, unified nation for which the governing body acts as guardian, using the primarily intellectual labour of poets, writers, folklorists, historians, artists, musicians, cartographers, soldiers and suchlike.
Another (twin) aspect of the state that’s evident in its early manifestations like the ancient agrarian states analysed by James Scott (particularly in his book Against the Grain) is their ability to trap people within their territorial jurisdictions and to make them visible to state power through bureaucracy and record-keeping. Scott shows how the early states often failed in this task and collapsed, but ultimately figured out ways of succeeding – mostly by setting themselves up in such a way that the other options facing ordinary people were worse. So … violence, sacred legitimacy, bureaucracy, authoritarian capture = the state, more or less.
The journey from those original agrarian states to the present world system of states (what I call the ‘sun state’ in Finding Lights, given the uniform gravitational pull of state power towards its centre for everyone living within its territorial limits) has been long and tortuous, and only really completed in the twentieth century. That century also saw the completion of capitalism as the economic basis of global livelihood-making and livelihood-breaking. The modern state has had a curious role in that process, both as the orchestrator and instigator of the global capitalist economy (in ‘capitalist’ and ‘communist’ countries alike) and also to a greater or lesser degree as a bulwark against the destructive effects of that economy on ordinary people, in the form of the contemporary welfare capitalist state. So much so that, in contrast to previous eras, if modern states ceased their functions overnight, most people in the world would probably die in short order.
This latter reality is why it’s so easy for present-day pro-state/pro-capitalist neo-Malthusians to dismiss those of us arguing for the need to build local self-governing agrarian resilience as ‘the cruel fantasies of well-fed people’, or related jibes. The problem with this, aside from its tendency to misrepresent agrarian localism as merely elitist or nostalgic, is that it neglects the multifaceted disorders now unavoidably inflicting contemporary welfare capitalist states. These encompass the squeezes of energy, materials, climate change and nature loss, the demise of economic growth, the crisis of state legitimation and the crisis of state welfare capitalism. Agrarian localism may be a long shot, but don’t expect the existing systems of commerce and state power to be there for you.
How all this plays out in any given place is anybody’s guess. Various commenters under my previous posts have expressed the view that further projection and entrenchment of state power and violence is likely, and indeed is already happening. I agree, but a lot of this projection lacks legitimacy in Weber’s sense and will not deliver the (literal and non-literal) goods that previous projections of state power did during the emergence of the modern world-system of states. That doesn’t mean the state will simply wither away and disappear, but I think it does mean that local micro-politics around material livelihoods and wellbeing will get complex and interesting (‘interesting’ being different, of course, from ‘good’), with many gradations of state, non-state and anti-state actors crowding the local political field.
I tried to give a sense of some of the ways I can see this playing out in my own region in Finding Lights, and perhaps I’ll try to return to it in future writings. Meanwhile, I find it frustrating that so much everyday political discussion is still focused around what the state in the form of The Government should or shouldn’t be doing. State power and agencies will increasingly be almost as hapless in the face of emerging circumstances as the rest of us ordinary citizens, and I think it’s about time we gave more attention to politics outwith ‘the state’.
To cite David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, albeit from a slightly different context, “…we may well discover that “the state” that consumed so much of our attention never existed at all, or was, at best, a fortuitous confluence of elements of entirely heterogeneous origins (sovereignty, administration, a competitive political field, etc.) that came together in certain times and places, but that, nowadays, are very much in the process of once again drifting apart” (On Kings, p.22).
Anyway, I’m interested in further discussions about how state power might mesh or fail to mesh with local politics and local livelihood-making in challenging future times. To put it another way, using the terminology I coined in Finding Lights, I’m interested in how the sun or supernova aspects of state power might engage in particular corners of the solar system. I’m not so interested in suns and supernovas in themselves.
Meanwhile, I shall shortly be voting in a local election for a new councillor, after my friend Mick had to resign his role following his prison sentence for climate protesting. Legitimation crisis indeed.
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IMHO , the future is far rosier than all the doom and gloom , travel / entertainment will become far more local , governments will be too far away to enforce their edicts ,time will become fluid not clock orientated , locals will have no option but to organise locally . It takes ten days for a letter to get to Washington from here and ten days back , electronically its instant , so anything it needed to do / know and act on would take at least twenty days . Austin would take two weeks , the town hall is two hours ride so control / governance becomes local by default . What’s more we know the buggers and can vote them out if nesisary .
I’m sorry your struggles are leaving you grumpy. Good boundaries around polite conversation are a good thing, I think, as are good boundaries around anything that dehumanises another.
The problem with this, aside from its tendency to misrepresent agrarian localism as merely elitist or nostalgic, is that it neglects the multifaceted disorders now unavoidably inflicting contemporary welfare capitalist states. These encompass the squeezes of energy, materials, climate change and nature loss, the demise of economic growth, the crisis of state legitimation and the crisis of state welfare capitalism.
I think one of the biggest not-quite-discussed aspects of contemporary capitalist states (whether welfare or warfare — or both — though I tend to think that the rallying cry of “benefits [and pensions] are just too expensive” is usually a misunderstanding of economics applied (willfully or not) as an othering method to create a scapegoat…) is that modern states are mostly playing the extraction game, whether from resources within territory they claim as “theirs” or more of a global north colonialism of global south sort of thing. I found this article on the “staple trap” interesting in that respect.
I am far too tired this evening to get very far into the weeds on the definition of a state, but I am sure I have said before that what most people today think of as a state, the modern nation-state, seems to me to be a pretty recent development; the further back I go in history the more porous things like borders seem to be, and the more varied the loci of control that ordinary people had to deal with every day.
I have a month until I move away to student halls of residence set in a monastery, and hideous amounts of work to attempt to complete before that happens. I keep thinking things like “it’s good that I’m not having last year’s ridiculous bumper crops this year, there’s no way I would have time to process that much fruit and veg” and then still somehow ending up with a kitchen full of fruit flies because I am harvesting melons or plums or tomatoes or whatever faster than we can eat them. This strikes me as both extremely modern (oh, the luxury of an excess of something like melons!) and rather timeless (I am sure my ancestors faced seasonal gluts and then shortages, and both heavy and lean years.)
I think a definition of the modern state needs to include reference to a technocratic center. Along with a monopoly on legally-sanctioned violence, a state needs to know (or “see” ala. James Scott) its constituents as a set of data points so it can act as the efficient manager, delegating from the political center to the periphery.
I would almost consider surveillance even more important than physical force. A military is just wasteful brute force without surveillance.
And to relate this to local livelihoods, I guess the question is whether you want to be surveilled by the state and benefit from any services I might provide, or whether local livelihoods are and will be more productive and resilient outside the purview of the state. Perhaps if the state would allow for subsidiarity, there could be a happy medium.
Subsidiarity can’t be taxed .
Corporate surveillance is at least as pernicious as state surveillance, though one could argue that in the current situation they amount to much the same thing…
One large power cut or grid collapse and the billions spent are junk , the vulnerability of technological policing is a no sum gain as we saw last week when a power failure closed down the west coast main line rail system
” I would almost consider surveillance even more important than physical force. A military is just wasteful brute force without surveillance.”
Tim B.
That’s already been done , the SS ,Stazi ,NKVD and a plethora of others all tasked with watching , then silencing / executing dissidents ….
I have a simpler formulation: the state is an instrument of coercion.
Just read these materials to understand what a state, even the most incompetent and dependent on foreign aid, is decoratively and declaratively democratic. This did not happen even in the post-Stalin USSR. These people have two options: death or death, and both are not of their own free will, the prison option simply does not exist.
1) https://babel.ua/texts/127938-shturmoviy-polk-skelya-maye-boyovi-zaslugi-i-dobre-zabezpechennya-a-shche-kazhut-ochevidci-tam-katuyut-i-zabivayut-lyudey-na-smert-rozsliduvannya-babelya
2) https://www.slidstvo.info/en/articles/i-heard-gunshots-ran-out-he-was-already-lying-there-how-ukraine-s-skelya-regiment-deals-with-those-who-go-awol/
3) https://texty.org.ua/articles/117979/nykakyx-svoyx-ne-sushchestvuet-zahorodzhuvalni-zahony-yamy-i-derevo-pravdy-vijskovi-svidchat-pro-225-polk/
The law against a simple person for the sake of his coercion or obligation becomes uncompromising. The law for his protection, avoidance or alternative choice simply ceases to exist in fact. People are kidnapped on the street by the police together with unknown people in masks, without reason, trial and investigation, without questions. And for the refusal of his own person to sign a contract, he can be killed by staging a hanging or falling from a window. And NO ONE can do anything to protect him. Self-defense from this is severely suppressed by the motive of the LAW, court complaints are not considered or are removed from consideration, are lost or not executed. The higher echelons of power know all about this. Everything is planned that way. Instead, a senseless war continues, longer than the First World War, where more than 2 million people died, money is stolen, and everyone else becomes hostages in their own country where the western border is surrounded by barbed wire and they are shot to death. And it’s hard to even talk about what’s happening on the front lines, people sit in dug holes for six months to 8 months (!) and eat energy bars brought by drones, drink water from puddles because the supply is difficult or non-existent due to constant drone flights. Imagine that it’s winter outside and -20°C, and you have no heating or light in your house, at all. Imagine that you are disabled or an elderly person, imagine that a kamikaze drone or ballistic missile flies in almost every day, there is little food, because shopping malls are destroyed, and soon there may come times without sewage or water supply. And on the street gangs catch people. And you survive in this chaos from day to day, year after year without end. On the other hand, in Europe and the USA, people complain that it’s hard for them to live because they can’t afford the usual products or buy a new car. Merz recently said that Germany paid a high price in the war in Iran, losing 16 people. It seems so surreal when 16 people die every day in one hour.
People here have been told and they believe that when Russia comes it will be worse, but I don’t know how much worse.
Warren Mosler starts his MMT Money story with: ‘The state wants to provision itself…’
Usually followed by something like: how many nurses, policemen etc does the state want to hire in order to achieve some goals which are subject to political debate. E.g. do we want an army, if yes, how big?
In order to ‘motivate’ the population to apply, it would levy a tax in the state’s money of account, rendering the population ‘unemployed’, i.e. looking for paid work (in the currency of the state). The monopoly over violence part is I believe strongly connected to tax collection and monopoly issuer of the currency. Counterfeit is punished strongly.
If we see certain (agrarian) areas in the country not being served by the state, but local communities see that there should be more roads, food produced for schools, etc. I think it is definitely possible to create new local currencies to have local states help provision themselves. They have to however not be pegged to other currencies, and the local authority should be able to levy the tax (in that currency) effectively, otherwise it wont have value and work.
I can recommend the following books:
– Reclaiming the State – Bill Mitchell
– How China Escaped Shock Therapy – Isabella Weber
– Against Money – Mason & Jayadev
– Mitchell Innes – What is Money (1913)
I wonder if food shortages might be the catalyst for the relocalisation of our society. I was talking to some friends in Bristol yesterday about the demise of the Bristol farmers Market – it seemed to be a combination of Covid and a growing disparity in the supermarket price and the higher price at the market – possibly the market price better reflected costs of production for all but the largest producers.
But now we have climate change impacting in a more significant way – farmers in Hungary are reporting harvests upto 70% lower than average, spring sown grains in southern England have been fairly disastrous and I read that North American harvests are projected to be lower than average – although I didn’t dig into the figures at all so who knows what’s hiding behind the headline. Secondly there’s the ongoing mess in the Middle East which is probably going to drive yields down due to reduced availability of fertilisers and drive costs up due to increased fuel costs.
I think these things will break our current model of food production – low unit cost high volume sold to large aggregated buyers – UK and European farmers are now faced with lower volume which would push unit costs higher even without the upward pressure on input prices. They can no longer afford to sell to supermarkets,
The only logical turn for farmers is going to be to capture more of the value chain – consumers raised on the variety and abundance of the supermarkets aren’t going to naturally turn to local food but unreliable supply and empty shelves may well change that. Our local veg box scheme thrived during Covid, especially at the start when supermarket shelves were often poorly stocked. We buy our milk from a producer who sells through a small number of local shops – their cows are on grass all year round and are only milked once per day and yet they’re profitable. In an uncertain world there’s plenty of room for local or family food security to be premised on relationships with producers rather than on unreliable and impersonal global supply chain.
I’m not necessarily anti-state but I think its capture by corporate interests has left it lacking legitimacy or the ability to act in the interests of the population it claims to represent. It seems to me there’s also a political movement to create an idealised state or nation that’s detached from interests of the population – Locally we have the Bristol Patriots putting St Georges flags on lamp posts and talking about having lost their country – if you look at the parts of Bristol where most of this happens its the parts where State has done least to meet the needs and interests of the population. So its not really surprising that this is where you see this surfacing but the response, which, beyond putting up flags, seems like a call for less immigration, fewer Muslims and more ‘patriotism’ (whatever that might mean) seems like political program that allows the captured state to continue and to avoid scrutiny or challenge.
I actually think the state could play an important role in helping us through the challenges ahead (climate, ecological breakdown, energy descent etc) by acting as a facilitator, redirecting resources, creating economic frameworks, building infrastructure etc in ways that allowed resilience to be built at more local levels. But I’m dreaming
Watch the Black sea grain exports which are at a standstill , Odessa is closed so no Ukrainian grain is finding its way out and the Azov ports are under attack so no Russian grain either , all being glossed over by western media until starvation breaks out .
In addition to the warfare-induced supply chain issues Diogenes cites, I understand that low river water levels are impacting nuclear electricity supply, manufacturing capacity, and inland water-based transport.
Thanks Chris.
I’m with you – I don’t believe we will see a widespread transition to renewable energy sources either. Though there are currently big moves in China to watch.
Here in my town, there has been much talk (no action so far) about closing the big coal-fired electric generator. The only ‘action’ has been extending its operational lifetime. But there is a plan creeping through local government approval process to put up a ‘solar farm’.
Which would cover many acres of the best river bottom farmland in the region. Many of my nice, educated, liberal friends are all in favor of this plan. One actually told me “We don’t need that farm land…” His point was that growing commodity corn and soy was ruining the soil too, and I didn’t disagree, but I believe that wasting that good soil is a crime.
One of the main reasons for putting the PV farm there is that it is just across the river from the existing coal plant & all those distribution cables. But right next to the coal plant are a number of warehouses and truck parking lots. Easily as much acreage as the proposed farm land ruination. Why not lease space above those buildings, etc, and not ruin the farm land? I can’t see much cost difference between one installation vs. the other.
The only answer I can see is: ownership. The solar developers wouldn’t own the warehouses, but they would own the farm land. And the value of a share of the solar farm corporation would be much enhanced by that asset. I can only conclude that the priority of the developers is not power generation, but instead to get rich by selling shares in their project.
Similarly, we don’t see large ‘renewable’ installations anywhere without substantial subsidies from government agencies. Bringing us back to the actions of the state.
Sorry if off topic, If electric tractors are part of how we feed people in the future ,we are off to a bad start. Both Solectrac , which I own, and Monarch have gone out of business and left farmers without any way to get their tractors fixed when they break. So the technology and infrastructure of tractors is still 100% fossil fuel and without fuel we have no food.
I bought solar and batteries, they work great, but the tools to turn electric power into farm equipment that works, has sufficent power to till, and is dependable , just doesn’t exist . The farmers who spent money on etractors got burned and all the government support went nowhere.
There is no plan, no government planning, no corporate planning , no coordination towards answering how farming extracts itself from fossil fuel.
If there isn’t fuel, or electrics then there is nothing left but Neolithic’s to feed people…yourself . Government will follow till it is as powerless as my grubhoe.
To add to the problem ,Dairy Farmers of America ( DFA ) have bee. testing battery and hybrid tractor units round here , they haul milk from farms to daries , they seem to work while its dry but heavy rain kills them , the drivers first warning seems to be the regenerative braking quits then the whole thing quits . their mechanics will not work on them , too dangerous , they are 800 volt and near unlimited amps . they are hauled back to California to be fixed . Companies keep a couple of old diesel units ready just in case m ilk is perishable and has to be kept cool and it keeps some keeping cool it was 44 degrees C here yesterday .
They park them in cold weather ( Texas is rarely cold ) the cold batteries reduced mileage results in them unable to do a normal days work .
You’d think they’d be able to figure it out, my milkman uses an electric milk float and has for ages.
Like everything else now too much thechnology too many chips that don’t like vibration or getting damp and to damn complex to fix on the side of the road plus no one has thought about training people to fix them , technitians don’t like lying under a truck dripping god knows what onto them , its not a clean job and they will not do it .
With much smaller-scale production tillage starts to matter less, I think.
I think there is great potential in open-source, micro-mechanised projects like FarmBot — but not to replace current large-scale industrial monoculture growing. What I don’t know is whether it’s too late for those kinds of tools to gain a foothold.
I really love my solar drip irrigation set-up at the Far Allotment, though, and am seriously considering splashing out for several such systems for the Near Allotment next summer, simply because at the moment we seem to spend all our time walking back and forth with watering cans. Drip irrigation would use much less water and save huge amounts of time; and having several systems instead of one big one would mean that if we did have a technical problem that we didn’t catch, we would be endangering one part of the harvest but not the whole plot…. the trick will be in getting the IBC tanks and placing them where we need them before the winter rains come. I’d prefer to dig a well — and have the equipment — but lack permission, and have limited capacity to engage with the committee on this.
In the current world, there seems to be a wide range of national government budgets (revenues and expenditures) *per capita*, which might correlate with varying levels of intersection and involvement (benefits, burdens, interference) that present-day nation states have with their inhabitants’ lives.
For example, statistics from the World Bank show a range of around 20,000-30,000 USD (equivalent) for the annual government expenditures per capita in some places including the UK, USA, and a bunch of European countries.
What would it look like if those national government expenditures were reduced by a factor of 10, for only 2,000-3,000 USD of annual government expenditures per capita? There are a couple dozen examples (including Mexico, South Africa, Colombia, Malaysia, and some countries of Eastern Europe) which might provide some clues.
What if the annual government expenditures were further reduced by another factor of 10, for only 200-300 USD per capita? There are around 30 examples with annual government spending below USD 300 per capita (including Pakistan, Tajikistan, and a bunch of African countries) which might provide some clues.
It reminds me of the William Gibson quote, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Of course, these statistics have distortions (related to agendas, exchange rates, incomplete reporting, accounting methods, the weaknesses of Wikipedia, etc.), but they might give a rough indication of the varying degrees of involvement that nation states may have with their inhabitants’ daily lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_government_budget_per_capita
Re: State:
I persist in my bad attitude. I continue in my failure to see the ‘state’ as anything but parasitic in origin. Yes, our current states do often provide services. And for the last century or two, the level of taxation and the level of services have often had some correspondence. But…
You mention “…intellectual labour of poets, writers, folklorists, historians, artists, musicians, cartographers, soldiers and suchlike.”
But my reading of Sumeria is that all of those except the soldiers (and perhaps cartographers) came long before the kings. The musicians sang odes to the gods in the temples, overseen by priests. There was doubtless social coercion, but violence would have not generally been necessary. People came to cities for the ceremonies and stayed, settling and farming the outlying land to make their living.
Then the big men got bigger and set themselves above the priests and started taking from the public by force. A classic protection racket. Which protection became much more necessary when the kings started having wars with the next king over.
You mention “…societies that emphasise individualism as a value” but if you look at the actions of those societies, you see that the individualism is really only available in a practical way to the upper strata.
So here we are today. The kings have incorporated, and most of the (western) public has forgotten any other way to be. Occasional revolutions have forced the kingships to actually provide some services to the public to mask their chief business of theft.
I’m not certain I would go as far as your assertion: “…if modern states ceased their functions overnight, most people in the world would probably die in short order.” But I think you are pointing in the right direction. And this state of affairs is wholly because of the states’ mismanagement of resources. There is nowhere to go to escape the state. Alaska? Patagonia? Kalahari? Siberia? All the good places are captured by states.
And I agree that the Malthusian argument is deeply flawed, but our recent human population curve matches petroleum production, which is unsustainable. This is also resource mismanagement.
So what to do? I don’t expect to live long enough to see how this plays out, but I’d suggest surfing the collapse as best as possible, and meanwhile building social structures that could provide for and defend themselves, while keeping small enough to make concentration of power not worth anyone’s effort.
@Tim B – Interesting point about subsidiarity. It seems to me that subsidiarity happens in practice in every state because no state, however totalitarian, can manage everything top down. But at the same time no state can really tolerate subsidiarity, because it undermines the monism of the state. So subsidiarity is a good concept to use to illuminate the state and its limitations: it can be a true property of government or governance, but not really of the state, or at least not of the modern welfare capitalist state, which is deeply committed to coercive extractivism.
Good points also about surveillance. Surveillance has always been a priority of the state, but perhaps modern cyber-surveillance is different and interesting, both in the way it can be directly monetized and in the way it purportedly substitutes technocracy for politics.
@Kathryn – thanks for that, and best wishes for your next steps … a student hall of residence in a monastery conjures another kind of oxymoron! I agree with your scepticism on the ‘benefits are too expensive’ argument, although I also think there IS a contradiction between extraction and benevolence that welfare capitalist states (and also communist ones) will always struggle to resolve.
@Chris H – interesting points, thanks. In some ways I think you’re illustrating Tim’s subsidiarity point with practical examples there. Local nodes of organisation colliding with the monism of the state.
@Bruce – a lot of resonances there. At the end of your comment, I agree with you about what ‘the state’ could, but won’t do – another resonance with the subsidiarity point. The St George’s flags seem to represent a kind of empty nationalism at the point where our increasingly theatrical politics has run out of any real economic logic behind nationalism. Hopefully it’s a passing phase, though I’m not so sure!
@Eric – on solar, yep agreed. Although I don’t support building PV facilities on good farmland and agree that the driver – as always in modern society – is ultimately enrichment, it may be hard for the PV providers to act otherwise. They’d need very secure long-term property title to recoup all the upfront investment, which I’d guess would be hard to achieve via agreements with a commercial facility, and could easily involve transaction costs that would kill the project. PV only thrives with secure title and cheap land!
Agree also with your take on the parasitism/coerciveness of the state, but it’s a long road back. A protection racket is a good analogy for the state in one of its more naked guises. Maybe the problem is that nowadays it more commonly presents itself in the form of an insurance scam, which is harder to spot. On musicians etc, indeed – my point isn’t that musicians and other creators are inherently state-oriented or nationalistic, just that state nationalism was a major customer of creative talent in its early modern guises. Regarding individualism, perhaps I’ll try to clarify what I’m getting at another time, but yes for sure there are gradations of privilege in being yourself. By ‘neo-Malthusian’ I basically mean ecomodernist – salvation is available only through high-energy techno-fixes.
@Yevhenii – thanks for that chilling exploration of the totalitarian state at its ultimate limit – giving nothing and taking almost everything. I like to think that this is not a usual or enduring situation, but perhaps that’s naïve.
@Steve L – thanks for that interesting line of thought. I’d be interested in probing it a bit further.
@Bruce S – interesting illustration of what I suppose could be called a stranded asset problem with the electrical transition. Given its inevitable incompletion, this seems likely to become an increasingly common problem. The way we’ve encountered it is in trying to get micro-EV delivery vehicles – either bespoke innovative designs that lack the supportive infrastructure, or trying to import tried-and-tested models from southeast Asian countries, which throws up a mountain of bureaucratic and economic obstacles.
@Diogenes – I hope you’re right! (In your first comment)
Thanks, Chris. I am looking forward to not having to plan all my meals around whatever glut the allotment has given us, while also still having access to 22 acres of grounds, some of it semi-wild, some more managed — orchards, beehives, some horticulture, and from what I can see the place is at least self-sufficient in rhubarb. When I went to the open day I saw wild garlic and lemon balm and thought “ah! plant friends!” and I had a good conversation for a while with the brother who is sortof in charge of said grounds — he had dirt under his fingernails, and apparently he’s also known for his very left-wing sermons, so I think we will get along just fine.
I think welfare capitalist states are subject to some of the same problems as capitalism as a method of food production and distribution: when you don’t really know where your food comes from it’s easy to not care about the details, and when you don’t know where the money for your pension or your healthcare comes from it’s easy to be led into thinking it’s cheaper than it really is. In short, we don’t measure the externalities, but the externalities don’t care about that and just go right on existing.
In the strip-mining/contraction/privatisation/etc of the welfare state, it is most often local communities who are patching up the gaps in provision, and this can be miserably difficult to do at scale.
Perhaps totalitarianism and subsidiarity (in general, not Catholic social teaching specifically) are just two sides of the same coin: both are aiming for a perfect and final social order, with each assuming there is an ideal type of political actor (whether that is a single dictatorial leader or an infinite network of local agents).
I also think about the implications of increasing surveillance and its impact on personal freedoms, especially as they relate to productivity in the home. Take YouTube as an example: I can now teach myself to tile a bathroom, and although it might take me 3x as long as a professional, I can enjoy the satisfaction (and the correlated frustrations) of having completed a home renovation project using my own two hands. However, in the process I’ve provided a slew of data points to numerous companies who can use this information for their own gains (which I have unwittingly consented to as someone who clicks “agree” without reading terms and conditions of a platform like YouTube!). How much of this information makes its way into the lap of the state I’m unsure, although I know states and corporations like YouTube often work in lock-step when it comes to privacy regulations.
Say this cyber-system of surveillance was extended: could a state-corporate technocracy potentially provide for widespread self-provisioning, rather than undermine it? With the the kinds of digital intelligence that’s being predicted, it’s at least theoretically possible that networks of technical and ecological feedback loops could allow for a kind of techno-feudalistic society in which information and logistics are so sophisticated, the localization of food and fibre production would become the most logical solution to energy and natural resource scarcity. We might assume that for now the state and its corporate partners have too much vested in a top-down monopoly on productivity to consider such a reversal of productive demographics. But that could change if digital intelligence affords new degrees of rationalization – and totalitarianism(/complete subsidiarity!).
I’m not especially bullish on AI, but i do think it’s worth speculating what a new age of intelligence could mean for the kinds of future societies and livelihoods being sketched out in places like this blog. I used to think “well it will never work because we’ll run out of energy and resources” – which is probably still my base case, but I’m increasingly seeing the possibility of AI-driven social organization as a feasible future scenario.
I think that should information technologies really start to drive social organisation (I know they already do) then we’ll look back on our current forms of statehood and wish we could get them back.
Gil Duran is really good on this stuff https://www.thenerdreich.com/
Many tech billionaires are heavily invested in the creation of what Duran calls the Network State – crypto is a big part of this – move economic decision making outside the possibility of democratic oversight.
The end point is Curtis Yarvin’s idea of CEOs acting as absolute monarchs within their own domains – see Peter Theil’s bankrolling of Prospera. As far as I can see these people are demented but they increasingly have the resources to bend the world towards their visions – and if they have control and it’s a question of whether you have energy or their data centre has energy they are not going to choose you.
I’m starting to think the internet is a disaster for human societies and I love the internet – look at the amazing discussions that have been hosted here for years. However I’d suggest that beyond the enjoyment we’ve all derived from that they’ve had little real world impact while the net negatives of the internet have continued to accrue – increased polarisation within societies, disinformation or simply too much information (flooding the zone with shit), the acceleration of a culture of celebrity and trivia (you can get rich being an ‘influencer’).
Like most technologies the internet was promoted with idealistic fervour – setting knowledge free, connecting all of humanity etc with no thought or discussion of potential negative consequences – yet reading Elul or Mumford would have told us what they were likely to be – surveillance, coercion and control in forms so perfect that we willingly embraced them until we now find ourselves in a position where it’s virtually impossible to avoid them even if we wanted to
In the book Against Money, the authors write that money acts a bit like a wildfire which overturns non-monetized processes upside down, but after it has passed these processes don’t necessarily need to stay monetized. They make the point that many processes inside large corporations are better done by command economy, not with internal markets. There is more planning happening (as opposed to markets) than we probably realize.
Chris, I hope not—but I also hope that no other country in the world falls into such a senseless trap. Ukraine’s case should serve as a stark lesson—especially for the public—regarding the monstrosity a state can devolve into. Just imagine: the country’s prime minister is leading a nation through a war marked by massive casualties and destruction, yet his close associates (some of whom even served in the government) are under investigation for corruption; the aforementioned abuses are taking place; and anyone who speaks out is branded an “enemy of the people” and sent to their death—all while the powers-that-be demand the continuation of a spectacle whose finale is already known, yet whose mere postponement is the primary objective.
Yevhenii – what has happened to Ukraine is a tragedy and I’m really not sure ‘The West’ has done much to help or to what extent it may have helped create the situation – I suspect the origins of the war are hidden in layers of deceit, misinformation etc. Here in the UK there seems to be a very strong section of the political/military/industrial/media complex that’s pushing a narrative of inevitable war and for increased spending on arms. There is very little space to publically challenge that narrative. The fact that it’s pushed so hard makes me suspicious of it even while admitting I have no way of assessing it’s veracity or that of any other narrative about the situation. I listened to Zack Polanski’s podcast on just this topic today and it was very interesting – I’d recommend it to anyone with the time to listen.
On the subject of the states – they do seem to like to have an ‘enemy’ against which to define themselves. And there’s always some part of the political class willing to characterise any compromise as defeat. You can see this logic in the evolution of the UK’s relationship with Europe even before Brexit. And then the same logic applied after the referendum. But it’s not a logic that leads to peace and unfortunately at the moment I see it everywhere.
” . . . the anthropologist in me wants to immediately deconstruct all those terms, but I’ll resist the temptation.”
My suggestion Chris, is to put your anthropologist hat back on and deconstruct the terms. That is what the field of anthropology is for after all – to provide a structural study of human society and culture. I will not weigh in on the question of the state, where it came from, where it’s going, etc.; mostly because I have done so ad nauseum on this site, other websites, other blogs, my own blog two decades ago, on my own Substack, and in three books. But I am glad everyone is discussing this topic. It is timely.
Briefly in relation to some of the new comments –
@Kathryn – your new setup sounds great. I hope we’ll hear more about it here. Agree with you on the trajectories of welfare capitalism.
@Tim – I suppose there are idealised versions of subsidiarity that implicate the same kind of monism as the modern state, but as I see it the point of it really is a more plural, pragmatic and flexible approach that refuses the idea of ultimate authority (not that I’m an expert on it). On AI, consideration of AI-related futures is a bit outside my lane, but I think your points are interesting – my guess is that if humanity’s current parameters were put before a good quality AI with the question ‘how do we save our arse?’ it would go all in for a small farm future. And then it would be sacked.
@Bruce – also interesting, thanks for that. I suppose prioritising data centres over people for limited energy resources might help usher in a small farm future. I found Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Survival of the Richest’ book interesting on tech bro billionaires, and their well-founded fears about what might happen to them. Tech bro comeuppance or tech bro dystopia.
@Chris – yes, Ronald Coase also made this point about the bureaucratic/rational planning processes internal to the firm quite a while back … the problem is that it’s oriented to profit maximization rather than human wellbeing.
@Walter – well ye-es, although the problem is that while critical theory can be a useful tool, it can also be a sledgehammer to crack a nut. In relation to ‘the family’, for example, anthropology has pretty much critiqued itself into the position that there’s no such thing as the family and that it’s not an area of research interest. Meanwhile, most people’s daily lives are endlessly implicated with concerns about family. In cases like this, the deconstructive urge can impede structural understanding.
Also, more discussion about renewable energy futures over on my substack: https://chrissmaje.substack.com/p/stop-press-same-news-no-energy-transition/comments
Oh, you don’t have to put on a tinfoil postmodernist hat. A structural beanie/toque will do.
Chris, I laughed out loud when you wrote “And then it would be sacked” – well put! I wonder if the Big Cheese asked it a similar question about politics and if it’s response would be “civil republicanism” (presumably with the same “you’re fired!” response).
With it’s origins in ancient Greece and Rome, civic republicanism is clearly bound up with a kind of state-oriented political system, but seems to have some guard-rails built in to prevent the kind of extractive tendencies distinctive of welfare state capitalism.
Relatedly, I’ve seen Doomer-adjacent folks speculating about the potential revival of city-states in a low-carbon future. That might trigger folks who are horrified by the idea of corporate monarchies with CEO heads-of-state, but it’s not necessarily the only structure a city-state-like political system could take. I strikes me as just as useful a way to think about localized politics as bioregions or watershed-based polities.
Now we are in the early days of de industrialization I have yet to come across a decent argument over where the funds come from to keep governments running , you could print funds but that always brings Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe , where government script ends up cheaper than toilet paper . in a communist system people still need to be paid especially the government enforcers . where there is government t there has to be a tax base to fund the scribes , this I think has been forgotten be the EU . Big government can not survive DE industrialisation , there are far too many ” civil servants ” and NGO’s , cuts and drastic cuts are on the way , there is no need for the DVLA when there is nothing to run vehicles on , vast numbers of universities will not be needed too many over educated with no available jobs , , government will want farm labourers , not degrees in sociology or even engineering . when energy gets tight central government will shrink it will happen over time its happening now with the NHS and pensions plus the military debacle ,farm subsidies , water and sewage systems and general infrastructure falling apart , look around you are surrounded by failing systems falling into penuary and squalor . The government has run out of things to tax !
Yes, I expect governments (states) to fail catastrophically. First, because the monetary systems that make it possible for extremely complex economies to self-organize will fail. Second, there are no viable backup plans for those economies to be operated without money, not even in authoritarian states like Russia or China. North Korea might pull it off, but I think that is also unlikely. Without self-organizing markets there will be no organizing at the state level anywhere.
There are numerous other single-points-of-failure for complex modernity, like the internet, electric grids and industrial agriculture, but the loss of money is the thing that can take it all down virtually overnight.
And even if the global monetary system remains intact, resource depletion will cause a gradual, but exponentially increasing death spiral of systems failure until one of the big systems fails and causes everything else to collapse.
So I expect state failure and state dissolution will be extremely rapid. In that scenario everyone will be on their own. Folks in large metropolitan areas will die, many poor farmers in the Global South will carry on, and SFF types in (presently) rich countries will have their mettle sorely tested.
From a Gaian point of view and for those descendants of humanity who will have to make their way in an already horribly maimed natural world, collapse can’t happen soon enough. If there were a switch that could cause instantaneous global state(s) collapse, I would flip it. And we should all prepare as if someone’s finger is poised above that switch right now
I just finished reading a review of House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France (2024)
by Justine Firnhaber-Baker in the London Review of Books, Vol. 46, No. 20, 24 October 2024. (I am always a couple of years behind on my reading.) The reviewer was Rosamond McKittrick, who is herself the author of Rome and the Invention of the Papacy (2020); her own book was probably the reason she was chosen to review this book. Here is a link to the review if anyone is interested. It doesn’t seem to be behind a paywall. I get a tremendous amount of info from book reviews. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/rosamond-mckitterick/nation-building
At any rate, the role of kings in medieval France is of importance to me, as well as the whole Medieval period in France. After all, I can see the Château de Montségur from our front yard and the well-worn paths of the Cathars are all around us and still used. Montségur was the last gasp of the Cathars and was taken by force in 1244. Over 200 people – some children – were burnt alive after the castle was taken. Kinda puts the brutalities of the US and Israeli militaries into focus doesn’t it?
Firnhaber-Baker’s book focuses on the unbroken succession of fifteen Capetian kings from 987-1328 CE. The reviewer does a very good job of integrating the foibles of the kings, their impact on French society and the world, as well as exploring the bias of the author. Here is an example.
[Begin quote]
Such is the emphasis in House of Lilies on the unrestrained sexual behaviour of the Capetians that the book might almost be read as a subversive portrait of the ineffectiveness of kings. What did kingship entail? Firnhaber-Baker notes that the ‘two most important ingredients of power’ in the 12th and 13th centuries were friendly relations with influential churchmen and victorious armies. . . In contrast to the little kingdom to which Hugh Capet had laid claim in 987, France by 1328 was a major political presence in Europe.
[End quote]
The reviewer also delves into wider social themes.
[Begin quote]
Yet lectures given in 1937 by the Annales historian Marc Bloch and published posthumously by Fernand Braudel in 1958 as France sous les derniers Capétiens (Bloch was executed by the Gestapo in 1944), similarly associate the Capetians and their administrative structures with the formation of France. Bloch integrated the history of the Capetian rulers with the development of every aspect of French society, culminating in the ‘expression of French mentality’ in literature and art.
[End quote]
It should be noted that the Annales School is gaining credibility again with The Defeat of the West (La Défaite de l’Occident – 2024) by French historian, demographer, and sociologist Emmanuel Todd. Todd is the originator in this book of American Nihilism, a paradigm I have signed onto and fully support based on my own research and life experiences. Marc Bloch has been the go-to guy on medieval slavery, serfdom and manorialism for nearly a hundred years. Two of his books are: Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages (a collection of his earlier essays in French but collated into an English publication in 1975) and his masterwork Feudal Society (La Société Féodale – 1939, English translation 1961).
Bloch’s Slavery and Serfdom explores the transition from ancient slavery to medieval serfdom, the evolution of peasant legal status, and the social structures of the Carolingian and feudal eras. Obviously, this would be a good historical background for the coming collapse in Europe. The US and the UK may have different trajectories, especially as they are both hypercomplex rather than just complex societies like France, Germany and Spain.
The broader theme of the state itself is bound up with the contrast between so-called “democracies” and authoritarian regimes. I look at kingship as a chiefdom on steroids and not really a state because of its access to power by rank versus class. This then gets into the whole class argument, which I abhor because it invariably calls up the Marxists, who are on-call 24/7 and guaranteed to inject a tremendous amount of drivel into the argument. All Marxists should strive to be like Ernest Hemingway and write in simple sentences, instead of their convoluted arguments guaranteed to make even the interested reader’s frontal cortex glaze over and lapse into sleep.
Another point about kingship is its reliance on kinship/families. In the US we see this element in the interlinked Witkof-Trump-Lutnick kinship group, all of whom are making tremendous amounts of money off The Donald’s grip on the Presidency. I think it was Democracy Now which mentioned that Trump himself is making $1 million per day in his second Presidency. The amounts being made by the rest of the Trump family group is considerable and unknown, as is the amounts being made by the Witkofs and Lutnicks. The point here is access to resources by rank and/or access to the “king.”
And now for something completely different, to quote a favorite source:
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/09/wheres-the-beef-lab-grown-meat-erin-somers/
Haven’t even read your post yet, but saw this and wanted to share.
The question that is asked, is are they in the trough of disillusionment or is this the beginning of the end?
Article is much too long, but does give an on the ground picture (with details) of the synthomeat industry. Props to anyone who reads the whole thing.
From that article, after it became apparent that 100% cultivated meat is unfeasible as a supermarket product, due to how prohibitively expensive it would be, here’s what is being called “cultivated meat” these days:
“That [cultivated] slurry is then combined with plant protein to create the final product, which typically contains less than 10 percent animal cells per serving.”
Thus it’s arguably a plant-based product now, essentially farmed plant protein with only a bit of cultivated meat added. Even then, it seems rather expensive, as “they were priced at $13.99 for a tray of eight [meatballs]”. I looked up that company’s products and their eight meatballs weigh 304 grams, which means the price is equivalent to $46 per kilogram.
For comparison, the Swedish company IKEA sells bags of real meatballs in the US for $15 per kilogram. As an plant-based alternative, IKEA also sells “plant balls” based on “five traditional Scandinavian ingredients” for an even lower $14 per kilogram.
“Can pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apple feel and taste like meat? Yes! The HUVUDROLL plant ball is based on these five traditional, Scandinavian ingredients – beefed up by natural flavoring and balanced by mushroom, tomato, lemon, black pepper and more. Still, it’s got the look, taste and juicy texture of a meatball.”
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/huvudroll-plant-balls-frozen-20483592/
So who would pay more than three times the price for a product with a little bit of cultivated meat added to the mixture? As the article puts it, “Who was the imagined consumer of this product?”
The On Kings quote seems about right. As with “capitalism” as a distinct mode, “state” is probably largely meaningless they way people want to use it. And I agree we are going through something akin to the collapse of the Qing. With rebellions and cults and the whole nine. The incumbent regime seemingly okay in spite of challenge…
I have been reading a great deal about the Russian Ukraine debacle , it seems to have expanded to civi!Ian systems , Ukraine attacked Russia supply networks / distribution , result not much , each town village and city has its own system , each has its own bakeries , butchers , dairy distribution and many have gardens for fresh produce .
Ukraine is like us centralized warehouses on a just in time system , Russia has destroyed them , there are many reports that food is getting scarse , empty shelves while warehouses burn .
Time will tell which is true but I would rather have my own garden than Wal-Mart’s produce isle .