A bird's eye view of the future, from the past
A precise identification of the present moment, in the context of the historical development of human society, has always been a pertinent problem. This problem becomes significantly more urgent and haunting in the face of several planetary crises such as climate change, pollution, collapse of biodiversity and the impending energy crisis. While these crises have slowly started affecting us, their worst impacts will be experienced in the future. At the same time, in response to these crises, the capitalist political economy engenders a political reality that narrows the political space and time to discuss these crises with sobriety and draws a veil of unconvincing technocratic optimism over these crises. In 'The Breakdown of Capitalism: 2000:2030', author Ramón Fernández Durán uses a political fiction with a strong dose of reality to provide an assessment of the tectonic shifts that are happening in the socio-political economy, as a consequence of the impending crisis. The value of this assessment comes from the combination of lenses that he uses to zoom in to minute details of environmental and economic changes, and zoom out to picture a planetary landscape over several decades to come.
Durán argues that we are at a unique moment in the history of capitalism when it faces a definitive degrowth due to the energy crisis. Time and again, the capitalist world system has faced temporary energy crises which dealt massive blows to it. However, for the first time, it faces a sustained energy crisis without a loophole. Durán engages with the future of energy scarcity and climate change, and the adaptation of current capitalist structures to it. The work published in 2011, has stood the test of time in predicting sharp consolidation of regional state-backed capitalisms against the end-of-history triumphant globalisation. The author explores the frictions between rural and urban worlds, global south and north, cultural identities, and gender roles, and its exacerbation in the context of industrial decline due to the energy crisis. With this exploration, he warns of dangers and opportunities that the decline can bring forth. In this work, the author doesn't offer a manifesto for the future but only lays bare the gloomy future itself, in an amoral manner. However, its robust and willing confrontation with what the future may hold provides a bitter anti-dote to the brimming anxieties of today. It's only after we understand and accept the gloom, that we can think to combat it.
A decade and more after the book is written, we already are in the midst of the beginning of the collapse of industrial society. While the effects of the decline are evident from economic indicators such as inflation, industrial output, etc., the advent of monopoly internet has put up a potent mechanism of distraction, normalisation, control and surveillance which dilutes the severity of the decline. In these times of crises, we are scrambling to react to a series of crises, overwhelming us. This overwhelm and the transience of the modes of communication inhibit processing of the present and future in their totality. Therefore, it is perhaps pertinent to visit this bird's eye view of the future from the past and commit ourselves to such thought-experiments.
While it is prima facie a pessimistic view of the future, it comes from a founder member of Spain based Ecologists in Action and an ardent activist who believed in people and their ability to change the world. Durán had been an active organiser at grass-roots level as well as a prolific academic commentator on the issues of environment and social justice. This book makes an instalment of a larger project which remained unfinished due to Durán’s tragic death.
The book is available freely at this link (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence).
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