Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects | Dmitry Orlov

Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects | Dmitry Orlov | The End of American Empire, and much more?

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Reinventing Collap...

	Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects Dmitry Orlov New Society Publishers, 2008 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An Essential and Timely Look at America's Near-Future

My wife doesn't like to hear about the forthcoming end of the world, and I have a couple of otherwise intelligent friends at work who don't like to think about the fact that the American way of life is barreling over a cliff at 90 miles an hour, either. Most of the discussions I've had with them are based on my readings of James Howard Kunstler's work. Kunstler recommended Dmitry Orlov's Reinventing Collapse on his blog recently, and now having read it, I know I probably shouldn't discuss it with my wife or my friends at work, because Orlov's detailed comparisons of the collapse of the Soviet Union with the impending collapse of the United States (the SU and the US, as he symmetrically notes) are far, far scarier than the pictures Kunstler has painted to date.

Orlov was born in the Soviet Union and witnessed its dissolution first hand. He sees both the similarities and differences in the two cultures, and in the way the SU disintegrated and the US is disintegrating. Most impressively, he details how the citizens of the former Soviet Union coped with collapse, and how Americans are likely to respond to similar exigencies: "We should definitely not expect any grand rescue plans, innovative technology programs or miracles of social cohesion," he notes, bluntly.

Orlov speaks in very plain English, with sometimes biting humour, about how the soft, entitled people of the US are unlikely to be able to adjust to a quickly-changing lifestyle. Russians were used to the privations of the Soviet regime, he notes, but most Americans will not know what to do when consumer goods are no longer available, when gasoline is largely or entirely unavailable, or when justice is something that you and your family and community will have to decide for yourselves.

Orlov's book is not meant merely to frighten readers, capture media attention and drive up sales, however. It is essentially a guide that anyone can use to figure out the best way to survive the forthcoming changes the world is facing. Orlov's advice is customizable in the sense that he urges the reader to prioritize for themselves what they need to continue to live when society has broken down and irrevocably changed. It's not a workbook and there are no forms for you to fill out, but you'll be far better prepared for The Long Emergency once you've read Reinventing Collapse. As he points out, the only true necessities in life are air, water and food. Clothing, shelter, companionship, work and other non-necessities are likely to be difficult-to-impossible to come by in the areas hit worst by the collapse of the US society and infrastructure.

And if you're a victim of, as Kunstler calls it, "the psychology of previous investment" -- that is to say, you somehow still believe that gas prices will go back down, we'll always have centrally air-conditioned shopping malls, we're winning the war against Iraq (or at least, might not lose it) and a dollar will always be worth a dollar -- well, Orlov's prose is highly readable and wildly entertaining, so there's no reason not to give Reinventing Collapse a read. If you like to read before bedtime, though, do it now, while you still have lights by which to read.

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The End of American Empire, and much more?

Orlov's REINVENTING COLLAPSE argues that the United States is on the verge of a political and economic collapse largely similar to the one experienced by the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Orlov proceeds from the insight which I first tentatively proposed in MANDARINS OF THE FUTURE, and which Odd Arne Westad developed in magnificent detail in THE GLOBAL COLD WAR, namely that the United States is in essence a "modernist" twin of the Soviet Union, both of which built vast complex societies based on boundless faith in physical and organizational technology.

In a variety of symbolic and material senses, the two lands shared a faith in the capacity of men to improve social conditions via technological progress. They raced each other to see who could most successfully dominate space, build the most insanely large military establishment, jail the vastest sector of their population, manage the most widely hated evil empires, squander the most natural resources and commit the worst globally-significant ecological crimes--and, most crucially, borrow the most from abroad to fund these endeavors. While the Soviets were more poorly organized than the United States, and hence collapsed first, Orlov argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union in fact was only the first half of the collapse of this broadly shared modernist vision of state and society.

While the Russians realized by the 1980s that idea of modernization is a mirage (see Kagarlitsky's book), the U.S. has yet to do. Orlov argues that the U.S. too will give up the modernist ghost in the machine when we (soon) experience a similar collapse. An old "peak oil" hand, Orlov argues that what will precipitate the endgame for the U.S. liberal faith in modernization is the end of cheap energy supplies, which will render the entire American way of life untenable, and indeed collapse the American dream's fundamental belief in the classlessness of American society. The U.S. today, like the Soviet Union in the 1980s, is sustaining itself only for one last gasp by running up huge foreign debts to import energy. When the energy exporters finally refuse to subsidize American energy consumption, the game will be up.

I recommend the book in the strongest terms, if only as food for thought.

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thought-provoking, insightful, but missed a bit

Dmitri Orlov has written an entertaining and thought-provoking comparison of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-oil end-game here in the U.S. By his own account, "entertaining and thought-provoking" were his goals for the book, and he has succeeded very admirably. I can recommend the book wholeheartedly, even as I respectfully disagree with some of his conclusions.

1. The collapse of the USSR was a political act; the USA is facing a resource-depletion-financial crisis. Now a financial collapse (K-Wave "winter," or the repudiation of all debts, public and private) certainly could lead to political collapse, but that is by no means set in stone.

The cultural and structural differences between the USSR and the USA are significant, and if Orlov had been an anthropologist his book might have drawn somewhat different distinctions. His primary thesis is that the Soviet Union was actually better prepared to weather collapse than the U.S., but I think he missed this critical difference: Russia and the other constituent states of the former USSR were resource-rich. Once they got their politcal house in order, they had immense resources to aid their financial recovery.

2. The Soviet Union was not a nation of immigrants; the U.S. is and has been since its inception. Even the Native Americans came from somewhere else, albeit a long time ago (though 12,000 years is merely a blink in geological time). Now on the surface immigration is driven by a number of things: hunger, poverty, desire for religious freedom, etc. But fundamentally it is a form of natural selection. Among any group of people, there wil be some who look around at the poverty, corruption, hopelessness and lack of opportunity for non-elite people and decide the best way to change their lives is to leave.

3. Religion plays a unique and powerful role in the U.S. in ways which it did not in the USSR. A quick glance at Russian art suggests the central role of the Church in Russian culture. But if Orlov were African-American, I believe his dismissal of religion might not have been so quick and assured.

Rather than the non-factor Orlov expects, I would reckon religious institutions will play critical roles in organizing people for their own betterment. People didn't come here to ignore their religion, they came here to practice it, and that goes for every religion. It's been said that the black church is the only institution owned lock, stock and barrel by the African-American community, and it will not be a non-factor in that community but a central institution of stability, hope and communal services.

4. Wandering around as a homeless migrant is not a good survival strategy. Orlov suggests at the end of his book that wandering between two or three sources of resources would be a good strategy. My own view is that freeloading is frowned upon in the U.S. and your best bet to is either stay put (yes, even in ghettos and urban neighborhoods) or move to a place where you have some roots (where you grew up is always a good place to start) or where there is some commonality: a church you belong to, an ecosystem you love and will nurture, etc.

5. The U.S. is on par with Sadr City, Iraq in terms of firepower in the hands of citizens. As the most heavily armed society in the developed world, the U.S. can easily go the way of well-armed criminal gangs controlling urban zones or well-armed militia sprouting up to take out the criminals. There is historical precedents for either scenario. A third scenario (common in the 3rd World) is for wealthy enclaves to hire private forces to protect the enclave.

While I can't predict which will play out in various circumstances, we should be aware that the U.S. has millions of military veterans and millions of weapons. The USSR had the vets but not the weapons in private hands. People will eventually choose to support an alternative to anarchy or criminal/mob rule, unless the criminal gang is the only alternative to something worse (i.e. the Sadr City scenario). Or people will pay extra to maintain a top-notch police force and let go of the other city services, performing them communally via volunteer labor.

My point is simply that a heavily armed culture with tens of millions of firearm-trained vets is not going to follow the route of a society without those two elements.

6. Orlov underestimates the power of the Web/Internet. Orlov is extending his experience in a pre-Internet Russia, in which you had to stand outside in the cold in order to hitch a ride. Assuming the Internet backbone will be maintained--and why wouldn't it be placed ahead of every other use except hospitals and the public safety centers?--then virtually everyone will be able to arrange barters of almost unimaginable range via the Web.

Despite these points (which are all debatable, of course), it's a very worthy exercise to read his work and make your own analysis.

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Honest but one-sided

I always worry a bit when an author proclaims near the beginning of a book that he is not an expert or researcher on the topic he will cover. Orlov presents what he considers to be observations and parallels between the collapse of the Soviet Union and an impending collapse of the US. In spite of obvious differences, he finds a number of similarities between the two superpowers that he believes lead to the potential for economic collapse. Among these are things like inability to provide enough energy to sustain the industrial economy, excessive foreign debt, and military debacles.

It is obvious that Orlov is a disciple of the more extreme, doomsday-type scenarios envisioned by the worst-case peak oil crowd. He quotes James Kunstler, and appears to be acquainted with the work of a number of other writers that envision a severe and impending production shortfall in oil, natural gas, and even coal. In some ways, the collapse he imagines in the US is even more severe than Kunstler's Long Emergency. Additionally, the only differences he allows himself to see between the US and old Soviet Union are ones in which the Soviet Union was previously pre-disposed towards things that made it less susceptible to the worst parts of a collapse. However, he fails to see any attributes in American culture that could mitigate a crisis. It seems to me that it's possible any crash or collapse in the US could be offset somewhat by evolution in the way things are done and ingenuity. Orlov's imagined scenarios depend on a drastic collapse of many interconnected aspects of the American system that may or may not happen. For example, peak oil doesn't necessarily imply that oil will be outright unavailable in a short period of time. It may simply constantly increase in price leading to adaptations along the way.

On the other hand, Orlov presents a very unvarnished an honest appraisal of some very disturbing trends in the US, and uses some interesting examples from the Soviet experience to show that bad things can happen. He points out that the US is heavily in debt, makes use of an unsustainable energy habit that has very few backup options, is creeping towards a justice system that incarcerates increasingly more citizens, and is involved in unaffordable military operations around the world. It is definitely a thought-provoking book in this sense, and offers some areas in which we could definitely consider new ways of doing things.

The final part of the book is sort of a survivalist guide on how to get by in the coming rough times. This is all fine and good, but he imagines a scenario in which the US reverts to a sort of 19th century existence. An unavoidable aspect to this kind of argument is the obvious point that if things get as bad as he imagines, chaos will probably reign supreme to the point that survival won't be an option for many people.

This is an interesting book, and I tend to think that a number of the things he talks about will definitely be problems we will face. However, it seems to me that there is only an outside chance that things will get as bad as he imagines.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7

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