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July 31, 2010
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Closing the Collapse Gap
Spring 2009
by Dmitry Orlov
I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is. [This article] is about the lack of collapse-preparedness in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union prior to its collapse.
From what I’ve seen and read, it seems that there is a fair chance that the U.S. economy will collapse sometime within the foreseeable future. It also would seem that we won’t be particularly well-prepared for it. As things stand, the U.S. economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act. And so I am eager to put my observations of the Soviet collapse to good use.
An economic collapse is amazing to observe, and very interesting if described accurately and in detail. A general description tends to fall short of the mark, but let me try. An economic arrangement can continue for quite some time after it becomes untenable, through sheer inertia.
One such untenable arrangement rests on the notion that it is possible to perpetually borrow more and more money from abroad, to pay for more and more energy imports, while the price of these imports continues to double every few years.
Free energy does not occur in nature. This must therefore be a transient condition. When the flow of energy snaps back toward equilibrium, much of the US economy will be forced to shut down.
We should expect shortages of fuel, food, medicine and countless consumer items, outages of electricity, gas, and water, breakdowns in transportation systems and other infrastructure, hyperinflation, widespread shutdowns and mass layoffs, along with a lot of despair, confusion, violence and lawlessness.
One important element of collapse-preparedness is making sure that you don’t need a functioning economy to keep a roof over your head. In the Soviet Union, all housing belonged to the government, which made it available directly to the people. Since all housing was also built by the government, it was only built in places that the government could service using public transportation. After the collapse, almost everyone managed to keep their [home].
In the United States, very few people own their residence free and clear, and they still need an income to pay real estate taxes. People without an income face homelessness. When the economy
collapses, very few people will continue to have an income, so homelessness will become rampant. Add to that the car-dependent nature of most suburbs, and what you will get is mass migrations of homeless people toward city centers.
The population of the United States is almost entirely car-dependent, and relies on markets that
control oil import, refining, and distribution. They also rely on continuous public investment in road construction and repair. The cars themselves require a steady stream of imported parts, and are not designed to last very long. When these intricately interconnected systems stop functioning, much of the population will find itself stranded.
Economic collapse affects public sector employment almost as much as private sector employment. Because government bureaucracies tend to be slow to act, they collapse more slowly. Also, because state-owned enterprises tend to be inefficient, and stockpile inventory, there is plenty of it left over for the employees to take home and use in barter. Most Soviet employment was in the public sector, and this gave people some time to think of what to do next.
Private enterprises tend to be much more efficient at many things. Since most employment in the United States is in the private sector, we should expect the transition to permanent unemployment to be quite abrupt for most people. To keep evil at bay, Americans require money. In an economic collapse, there is usually hyperinflation, which wipes out savings. There is also rampant unemployment, which wipes out incomes. The result is a population that is largely penniless.
In the Soviet Union, very little could be obtained for money. It was treated as tokens rather than as wealth, and was shared among friends. Many things – housing and transportation among them – were either free or almost free. Soviet consumer products were always an object of derision – refrigerators that kept the house warm – and the food, and so on. You’d be lucky if you got one at all, and it would be up to you to make it work once you got it home. But once you got it to work, it would become a priceless family heirloom, handed down from generation to generation, sturdy, and almost infinitely maintainable.
In the United States, you often hear that something “is not worth fixing.” This is enough to make a Russian see red. I once heard of an elderly Russian who became irate when a hardware store in Boston wouldn’t sell him replacement bedsprings: “People are throwing away perfectly good mattresses, how am I supposed to fix them?”
Economic collapse tends to shut down both local production and imports, and so it is vitally important that anything you own wears out slowly, and that you can fix it yourself if it breaks. Soviet-made stuff generally wore incredibly hard. The Chinese-made stuff you can get around here – much less so. The Soviet agricultural sector was notoriously inefficient. Many people grew and gathered their own food even in relatively prosperous times. There were food warehouses in every city, stocked according to a government allocation scheme.
In the United States, most people get their food from a supermarket. Many people don’t even bother to shop and just eat fast food. When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect on the nation’s girth is visible. People who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what comes next. If they suddenly had to start living like the Russians, they would blow out their knees.
In the United States, medicine is for profit. People seems to think nothing of this fact. There are really very few fields of endeavor to which Americans would deny the profit motive. The problem is, once the economy is removed, so is the profit, along with the services it once helped to motivate.
Dmitry Orlov was born in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States at the age of twelve. He was an eyewitness to the Soviet collapse over several extended visits to his Russian homeland between the late eighties and mid-nineties. He is an engineer and a leading Peak Oil theorist. The complete article may be found online here.
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