Stirnerian
5th March 2015, 04:41
Not sure where to put this, but I guess I'll stick it here.
I like indulging in flights of fancy, much of it irrational. This is something I've been speculating on for awhile, and maybe one or two of you here might find it interesting.
Let's imagine that there is a nuclear war a few years from now. Maybe the 'Second Cold War' turns hot; maybe the United States and China turn overtly hostile. Say too that the end result, while staggering and catastrophic, does not result in the total annihilation of human life as was occasionally expected in the twentieth century.
A large proportion of the global population is dead. Essentially all globally 'important' cities are destroyed - New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Los Angeles, Beijing. The electronic infrastructure of practically every major nation is wiped out, as are their economic cores. Those who did not join the billions who died in the initial strikes became part of the hundreds of millions who perished in the disease and famine which followed.
Still, some things remained. In America, much of the Interstate Highway System is left intact, as are many of the public works located in rural areas (though rural areas were targeted more heavily than one would expect, given the tendency during the Cold War to locate silos in underpopulated areas). In a minor miracle, the Three Gorges Dam stayed intact. The Nile did not overflow its shores.
Life goes on.
Now, I have a couple of questions about this kind of midway scenario which, by their very nature are probably unanswerable. But it might be worth asking anyway, and I'd like you to answer from a materialist perspective. First I need to explain my assumptions, which can be corrected if any of them are wrong.
1. As I've said, urban populations around the globe fared far worse in the initial strikes than rural and agricultural populations. I think this is a logical assumption, though I make no pretentions to knowing that this is exactly what would happen. I'm a complete layman in this area.
I'd expect rural areas to be damaged far more by the aftermath: chronic shortages and mass starvation; crop failures; possibly nuclear winter, if that's still regarded as a likely outcome. Not to mention incidental deaths from accident and murder, which would doubtless multiply exponentially.
Still, on the whole, I would think rural regions would be relatively better positioned for survival - their physical infrastructure, certainly, if not their populations.
2. I am going to further assume that basically none of the possible combatants in this kind of full nuclear exchange (the United States, Russia, the People's Republic of China) are so structured as to survive one in any real way. No doubt remnants of their power structures would continue to exist and attempt to assert authority, legitimately or not, but no real continuity of control will exist in any of them.
3. I have assumed that nuclear war is basically unwinnable. Even the game theorists agree.
A few questions for you as Marxists:
A. Do you believe that capitalism would continue to function as the dominant mode of production and economic arrangement in this world? I am going to assume most of us accept the PRC to be capitalist in some sense or another.
B. If not, do you think that it would retard capitalism as a system, perhaps even 'knocking it backwards' into some earlier phase of development? I often think this, because of my assumption that rural areas would tend to have far higher survival rates than urban clusters, and my feeling that capitalism is basically an urban phenomenon.
On the other hand - and this betrays my unfortunately American-centric understanding of the world - rural areas in my personal experience are today highly capitalist in their ideology. I have also thought that this might reproduce itself after such a collapse.
B(2). If you do believe capitalism would retrograde, do you believe it would fairly uniformly default back to some sort of protectionist mercantilism in most areas, with a focus on resource hogging and, eventually, capital accumulation? Or might it revert further yet, to some sort of neo-feudalist structure? Could perhaps a form of agrarian collectivism be practicable on a small scale, with the remnants of the current society?
Of course I grant that this probably depends on the area and the pre-existing culture.
B(3). If you do not believe it would regress to an earlier stage of development, what forms do you think capitalism might take to adapt to this infrastructural collapse? Would it inhibit the growth of a proletariat?
I apologize for the long-windedness.
I like indulging in flights of fancy, much of it irrational. This is something I've been speculating on for awhile, and maybe one or two of you here might find it interesting.
Let's imagine that there is a nuclear war a few years from now. Maybe the 'Second Cold War' turns hot; maybe the United States and China turn overtly hostile. Say too that the end result, while staggering and catastrophic, does not result in the total annihilation of human life as was occasionally expected in the twentieth century.
A large proportion of the global population is dead. Essentially all globally 'important' cities are destroyed - New York, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Los Angeles, Beijing. The electronic infrastructure of practically every major nation is wiped out, as are their economic cores. Those who did not join the billions who died in the initial strikes became part of the hundreds of millions who perished in the disease and famine which followed.
Still, some things remained. In America, much of the Interstate Highway System is left intact, as are many of the public works located in rural areas (though rural areas were targeted more heavily than one would expect, given the tendency during the Cold War to locate silos in underpopulated areas). In a minor miracle, the Three Gorges Dam stayed intact. The Nile did not overflow its shores.
Life goes on.
Now, I have a couple of questions about this kind of midway scenario which, by their very nature are probably unanswerable. But it might be worth asking anyway, and I'd like you to answer from a materialist perspective. First I need to explain my assumptions, which can be corrected if any of them are wrong.
1. As I've said, urban populations around the globe fared far worse in the initial strikes than rural and agricultural populations. I think this is a logical assumption, though I make no pretentions to knowing that this is exactly what would happen. I'm a complete layman in this area.
I'd expect rural areas to be damaged far more by the aftermath: chronic shortages and mass starvation; crop failures; possibly nuclear winter, if that's still regarded as a likely outcome. Not to mention incidental deaths from accident and murder, which would doubtless multiply exponentially.
Still, on the whole, I would think rural regions would be relatively better positioned for survival - their physical infrastructure, certainly, if not their populations.
2. I am going to further assume that basically none of the possible combatants in this kind of full nuclear exchange (the United States, Russia, the People's Republic of China) are so structured as to survive one in any real way. No doubt remnants of their power structures would continue to exist and attempt to assert authority, legitimately or not, but no real continuity of control will exist in any of them.
3. I have assumed that nuclear war is basically unwinnable. Even the game theorists agree.
A few questions for you as Marxists:
A. Do you believe that capitalism would continue to function as the dominant mode of production and economic arrangement in this world? I am going to assume most of us accept the PRC to be capitalist in some sense or another.
B. If not, do you think that it would retard capitalism as a system, perhaps even 'knocking it backwards' into some earlier phase of development? I often think this, because of my assumption that rural areas would tend to have far higher survival rates than urban clusters, and my feeling that capitalism is basically an urban phenomenon.
On the other hand - and this betrays my unfortunately American-centric understanding of the world - rural areas in my personal experience are today highly capitalist in their ideology. I have also thought that this might reproduce itself after such a collapse.
B(2). If you do believe capitalism would retrograde, do you believe it would fairly uniformly default back to some sort of protectionist mercantilism in most areas, with a focus on resource hogging and, eventually, capital accumulation? Or might it revert further yet, to some sort of neo-feudalist structure? Could perhaps a form of agrarian collectivism be practicable on a small scale, with the remnants of the current society?
Of course I grant that this probably depends on the area and the pre-existing culture.
B(3). If you do not believe it would regress to an earlier stage of development, what forms do you think capitalism might take to adapt to this infrastructural collapse? Would it inhibit the growth of a proletariat?
I apologize for the long-windedness.