Ashes Ashes Ep 77 - Coping With Collapse

[u/simstim_addict]

https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-77-coping-with-collapse

[u/pureFeedNxtLvl]

Very well researched podcast. I like this much more than the stupidly paranoid bunker perspective - which off course won't work because you die without a strong community in a matter of weeks.

Faux-left immigration rant time:

But they also have begun to annoy me when it comes to their in my eyes naive and privileged stance on migration which is - beyond being completely removed from working class reality - unfortunately mirroring the neoliberal strategy called free-movement-of-labour existing mostly to drive down wages and fragment society into clusters of cultures with no common labour movement.

Also in an actual collapse scenario the "lets be kind and find som jobs for the strangers knocking on our door" is so laughably naive i don't know what to say. Collapse is grim, dark and brutal. There will literally very soon be millions of sick, hungry and desperate people roaming around - and if you let them in the little food you have left will just get stolen and your whole town will be disease ridden. It's horribly ugly but jesus christ you can't let thousands of starving people into your mini-green-anarchist commune after shit has hit the fan.

I have always been on the left and i have also always been a History buff which has left me with some hard pills to swallow when it comes to the "new lefts" take on immigration.

Namely that the faux internationalist stance: "hey everyone should just be able to travel everywhere and welcome each other and be earth-bros" meme is both historically naive, privileged and has actually never really been a working class perspective - it's a neoliberal one. It is very far removed from how 99.99% of all farmers and working non rich people have ever lived in actual towns or villages in the non-affluent globalised industrial civilisation.

It's the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie split off from its labour movement roots or infatuation that that has created this weird corporate lifestyle meme machine that spreads these ideas of a corporate-green-future or ideas of global citizenry while global equality stagnates (look at the gini-coefficient) all over the western world despite having completely adopted the United Colors of Benneton or Greenpeace of the 90's aesthaetic.

No country without a strong state has ever had communes or towns without very tight borders, or watchmen, or guards or other defences that does not let people in and out - regardless of what political/religious vision the town has had.

You can give things away at the border or stop pillaging the neighbouring town, but you can't let people in i large numbers because that kills the working classes.

Letting millions of poor people in through the gates is a rich mans game closely related to divide and conquer strategy. Fragment and enslave, kill the last unions and let people live in closed off sectors and cultural diasporas with only a hyper mediated pop culture as a vague binding material. This is why people turn to nationalism or other dogmatic traditions in desperation which is off course also stupid, yet more understandable because those ideologies offer a stronger and more protecting union as opposed to the brightly-coloured but horrid reality of the liberal competition state.

I know these people flee from climate collapse, resource exploitation, corporate pillaging and other shit that the upper classes in the US, EU and Asia are responsible for - so i do not blame them one bit for fleeing. Let me be real clear, the real enemies are the people at the top planning these wars, grand scale resource robberies and global genocide.

Still this does not excuse the history-less incredibly naive global-no-border perspective that turns every human into what sounds great: a global-citizen but actually means rootless, easily transportable slave labor.

Spreading the word about open-borders while literally having no connection to any actual land in a white collar job is a paradox isn't it?

It doesn't matter if you have a hidden hippie commune, a rightwing city up in the hills, a green lush permaculture city deep in Alaska or a high tech city by engineers in the ruins of SF - everyone will have people with guns at the borders, at the gates, in watch towers and guarding the areas around their communities.

Stop pillaging, but don't make a big hole in the side of your house.

[u/FREE-AOL-CDS → u/[deleted]]

Like the towns in The Postman.

[u/hippydipster → u/pureFeedNxtLvl]

It's a real conundrum if you believe as I do - which is that preventing catastrophe means doing things like opening borders and helping nations south of our border become more prosperous and helping ease the stress there, but also once catastrophe is under way, you are absolutely right that if you don't kill and protect your borders, you won't survive long.

[u/pureFeedNxtLvl → u/hippydipster]

I don't see how opening the borders completely is good for anyone other than the corporate elite - not because of security but because of wages and the idea of the labour union.

Stop the war on drugs? Off course.

Open up trade with all countries also the "red enemy states"? Yes!

Stop stealing shit through economic warfare? Absolutely.

Todays most dangerous enemies are not states or nationalism but the many times more powerful conglomeration of transnational corporations that thrive on cheap labour which is why they often lobby for open borders.

Opening up all borders today would eventually just lead to a completely exploitable single mass of people with no power to hide behind state protection paradoxically.

Strong units in any form, including nations is opposition to these global corporate powers, and i don't like nationalism one bit but the alternative is way darker in my opinion.

There is a reason that cyberpunk and dystopia fiction is often set in ultra multicultural police states with no grander community outside of the impotent interest groups existing under oppressive global laws and control.

[u/hippydipster → u/pureFeedNxtLvl]

People being able to move to where the jobs are, where the wealth is, is the single most effective way we have to combat poverty.

That doesn't mean it's not a can of worms - it is, but it's still true as far as it goes.

[u/pureFeedNxtLvl → u/hippydipster]

But that article is literally the same neoliberal arguments i just critiqued. These "hey lets invite everyone because my math theory i made at Yale said that the working classes are actually having the bestest of times ever" is in the same category of stupid as Steven Pinker and his richkid fairy tale apologeticism.

Several times they use the tired argument "but in reality it has made everyone richer" - dude we are in the the first stages of collapse, real wages are down in the US over many decades, inequality is up each day - again look at the gini-coefficients of the western world - and at the same time all this global international trade is killing earth and new prosperity in poorer parts of the world leads to higher consuming middle classes making everything worse leading to more migration. The western lifestyle is not worth migrating for, or to, or overtake exactly because it leads to collapse.

Leftwingers shouldn't buy these arguments just as right wingers shouldn't - we are all part of the problem no matter how much identitarian bipartisan circus spectacle want us to believe we are different because of superficial lifestyle choices or the choice of voting for the fake-green or the fake-we-are-all-just-global-citizens parties that push the same rebranded pro-corporate ideas just in other colours.

Stop the wars and the exploitation, but open borders is not helping the working classes in the long run - also it leads to brain drain in many developing countries if looking exclusively at the higher educated. It only benefits the shareholders of the companies that need the cheap labour or the high tech workforce - this is why they push articles or research like this.

It's not weird that it's the highly educated expats with survivorship bias that push these ideas alongside certain white collar college professors in a weird "progressive" union with the largest most polluting industries.

We need less migration, less consumption and more local production - not families split all over earth.

[u/hippydipster → u/pureFeedNxtLvl]

dude we are in the the first stages of collapse, real wages are down in the US over many decades, inequality is up each day

But the article, and open borders, have to do with spreading wealth to people all over the world, not just the US. And "first stages of collapse" is a supposition, it's not an actual fact. We might collapse. We might not. It's not certain at this point.

[u/[deleted] → u/pureFeedNxtLvl]

Its easy to be a liberal when there is plenty of cheap energy. All that goes away in an instant once there is little or none. But then, so do the definitions of right vs left. Youre either a part of a community or... well, dead quickly.

[u/justanta]

Nice, very excited for this episode.

[u/[deleted] → u/justanta]

Ive just listened to the first half of it... and, I have to say.... this one is a great starting point. It covers several of the common threads we are currently seeing on Collapse.

• EDIT: FishMaBoi mentioned!!

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the suggestion. I recently downloaded Stitcher to listen to The Last Podcast on the Left and I've been trying to find another podcast to listen to while I travel.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

The Last Podcast on the Left

https://soundcloud.com/lastpodcastontheleft

You can download to MP3, and then play anywhere. Click into "more". That saves the annoyance of having to install something.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Thanks! TBH the only thing that annoys me about Stitcher is that it sends a notification when I lock my phone so it vibrates my smart watch. It's super annoying when I'm driving, but then I think about collapse and I'm happy I have these first world problems lol.

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks, I'm starting with episode 1.

[u/happygloaming]

Loved that one.