We’re Knee Deep in the Age of Collapse

Along with Three Levels of Extinction, And Where We Are Now

Smoke from the Canadian wildfires reaches Europe. Image Credit: NASA

Maybe once upon a time you thought that when I said things like “Age of Collapse,” I was being dramatic. Emotional. “Provocative.” And yet here we are. A smoke plume the size of a continent drifts over the Atlantic. You can smell Canada burning in Chicago, taste in the haze over Europe. And meanwhile? I woke up to the headline that — LOL — Britain’s water system has, uh, literally collapsed. Hard to get more literal than that.

So here we we are. Knee deep in the Age of Collapse. How are we doing? Let’s talk about it. What, exactly, is collapsing, and where do we go from here?

Let’s use Britain’s imploding…LOL…water system…as an example. Water: the most fundamental necessity of life. How does your goddamned water system collapse…in a (once) rich, modern nation? Like this. 

Welcome, class. This is lecture number infinity on the same topic, privatizing public goods. We don’t do it, or we shouldn’t. Because what happens when you hand control of a monopoly over necessities of life to…profit-maximizing “entities”? Collapse does.

By way of what? Underinvestment, because the goal is to of course maximize profits today. That creates a situation of neglect. In Britain’s case, 25% of water is now…just…lost. And its rivers and beaches are literally covered in sewage. Look at the pictures — they’re astonishing (and gross.) All of this adds up, and there comes a point of emergency. Bang. The system no longer works. It’s no longer viable, even to extract profits from. It’s been loaded with debt, while bills have skyrocketed, because people are on the hook for that debt. Collapse.

When we see things like water systems collapse in nations like Britain, the world is in a profoundly troubled place.But what is the lesson here? What’s it really telling us?

Welcome back, class, to lecture number infinity plus one, on the same topic. Capitalism is failing, and it’s failing for the last time. You see, Britain’s conservatives got this dumb, dumb idea from America’s fanatics. America privatized most of its systems in the 80s and 90s, and the result, of course, is that the average American is basically impoverished — we’ll come back to that, shortly, when we discuss Bidenomics. So the Tories in Britain have been playing this game — privatize, harvest a public utility for profit, collapse it, oops, time for the average person to pay the bill — for decades now.