John Michael Greer -- The Archdruid Report
Nov. 2, 2006 -- It's a well-known maxim that, in the final analysis, all politics are local. The political dimensions of peak oil are no exception to this rule; for that matter, the global politics surrounding the decline of American empire, the subject of last week's post, draw their force from everyday issues in the lives of 300 million Americans -- not to mention the six billion other human beings on this planet, most of whom must make do with less so that Americans can continue to live their unsustainably extravagant lifestyles.
It’s considered impolite to mention this last detail, of course. The mythology of progress treats it as a temporary state, and claims that someday or other, everyone in the world will be able to live like the affluent middle classes of the world's industrial nations. This faith is so widely held -- at least among those same affluent middle classes -- that few of its believers notice two awkward facts. The first is that the vast majority of the benefits of industrial civilization go to a tiny fraction of the world's population, while nearly all the costs are spread among everyone else. The second is that this state of affairs has persisted throughout the history of industrialism, and shows no signs of changing in the foreseeable future.
In his brilliant 2001 book The Power of the Machine, human ecologist Alf Hornborg argues that the disparities aren’t accidental. An industrial system concentrates resources in what Hornborg calls “centers of accumulation.” Those resources let the industrial system achieve economies of scale and concentrations of influence that distort economic exchanges in its favor. This allows it to gain control over more resources, allowing it to further expand production in a self-reinforcing cycle. The downside is that in a world of finite resources, what’s needed to build the industrial system must be taken from somewhere else, and the return to that “somewhere else” is less than what’s taken by at least the cost of building the industrial system. Thus the centers of accumulation accumulate by impoverishing other regions, classes, or economic sectors.
To see how this works, imagine two equally sized countries, Industria and Agraria, that trade only with each other and have preindustrial economies. One day, however, a rich man in Industria builds a shoe factory that produces as many shoes as the people of Industria can use. The resources demanded by that project equal those used by the local cobblers who used to make Industria's shoes, and any economic gain to Industria from the factory will likely be offset by the losses caused by putting the cobblers out of business. The chief difference is that the wealth once earned by thousands of cobblers now goes to one Industrial magnate, who pays his workers a fraction of what the cobblers once made. His accumulation is their impoverishment.
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