Climate Crisis, Biosphere & Societal Collapse

It's interesting, his whole terminology of "Goliath states" is essentially a re-framing of the emergence of class society from Ur-communism as already theorised in the 19th century. He must have been aware of this after working on a scholarly work like this for seven years.

Goliath states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and resources, he argues, but need three specific types of “Goliath fuel”. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be “seen, stolen and stored”, Kemp says, unlike perishable foods.

[...]

The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel “caged land”, meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants.

[...]

“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”

[...]

All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: “They are cursed and this is because of inequality.” Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more.

[...]

Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

[...]

He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.

I can't help to see this as "I want to expand on basic class conflict theory, but without using the bad 'commie words'" I'd love to see how its framed in the actual source, when not summarised by the article. His demands for a radical transformation are rather modest, when viewed as-is - more democracy and a wealth tax capping wealth at roughly 10 million. But sadly that already needs enormous shifts and global taking of power from the ruling class, and at least in the article itself it leaves open the questions of how production will then be organised, which is one of the main reasons communist theories developed around democratic self-organisation of the working class originally, which could transcend the cycle of accumulation -> reinvestment -> more consolidated accumulation. but I wonder how aware he is of all this, after all, he adds something I can only read as a reference to Mark Fisher, or to Ẑiẑek:

“It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That’s because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,” he says.

“Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It’s complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We’re a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we’re built for.”

Even though he quite vehemently tries to say he clearly doesn't have a left-wing model of history:

Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. “There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,” he says. “Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That’s just making our economy more honest.”

Personally, I am pessimistic about any outlook, that wants a world still with corporations but just curtailing them, because I always see the material dynamics of accumulation putting exactly the kind of "Dark Triad" people he is talking about into power. But I think I understand and can definitely see value in his position. Was an interestind read, thank you for sharing!