Status Quo-oh

Jim Kunstler examines the current Status Quo-oh as the perfect storm of climate change, financial instability, and peak oil combine to make life interesting for the planet.

The real tragedy of industrial agriculture is the subsitution of energy for knowledge.

Behind that magic is an agribusiness model of farming cranked up on the steroids of cheap oil and cheap natural-gas-based fertilizer. Both of these "inputs" have recently entered the realm of the non-cheap. Oil-and-gas-based farming had already reached a crisis stage before the flood of Iowa. Diesel fuel is a dollar-a-gallon higher than gasoline. Natural gas prices have doubled over the past year, sending fertilizer prices way up. American farmers are poorly positioned to reform their practices. All that cheap fossil fuel masks a tremendous decay of skill in husbandry. The farming of the decades ahead will be a lot more complicated than just buying x-amount of "inputs" (on credit) to be dumped on a sterile soil growth medium and spread around with giant diesel-powered machines.

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The farmer has become another worker drone that follows a set of instructions. Ten thousand years of agricultural knowledge wiped out over the span of three generations.

Capitalism requires more and more of the workforce to become members of the proletariat in order to drive wages down and profits up. Standardised ways of working reduce training time and the bargaining power of workers. If they could give a set of instructions to monkeys, Capitalists would have no compunction about doing it as they would only have to pay peanuts.

In my own profession of computing, we complain about the skill levels of the new people but they do a good enough job for the Capitalists at a cheap price. So what if a computer system crashes and kills people? Tort Law Reform caps the liabilities anyway.

Preventable deaths are just another business cost. Profit is the only thing that matters.

How will anyone react to this looming crisis?

Perhaps more ominous is the discontent on the trucking scene. Truckers are going broke in droves, unable to carry on their business while getting paid $2000 for loads that cost them $3000 to deliver. In Europe last week, enraged truckers paralyzed the food distribution networks of Spain and Portugal. The passivity of US truckers so far has been a striking feature of the general zombification of American life. They might continue to just crawl off one-by-one and die. But it's also possible that, at some point, they'll mount a Night-of-the-Living-Dead offensive and take their vengeance out on "the system" that has brought them to ruin. America has only about a three-day supply of food in any of its supermarkets.

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It has been a similar situation in Australia. The last real rumble about fuel prices was back in 2005 when Trucker Blockades were mooted and Trucker Blockades - One Day On, they folded.

The demoralisation of the proletariat is so complete that people could well lay down and die.

The problem with revenge against the system is that there is no obvious target. There are rumours of secret societies running things.

At least with the French Revolution, there were the obvious symbols of Feudalism to be destroyed: the Bastille; the Monarchy; the Church; and the Aristocracy. What are the equivalents for Capitalism? The Stock Exchange? Maybe, but so what? It is just a building.

The Capitalist system is a way of thinking about social relations between people. It is expressed in laws, customs, and expectations. These cannot be changed by force only by patient reasoning.

Unfortunately, patience requires time and time is running out.