The Owl of Minerva - World History for the Left - Essay Version

The Owl of Minerva

World History for the Left in Three Parts

Terry Leahy 2021

Part One

Stateless societies of the past

What can we make of previous history that might help us to map a way forward? A way that can deal with the enormous environmental crisis we are facing and also end up with a society that is democratic and harmonious.

A common summary of world history has it that greed is the worm in the apple, frustrating every attempt to live well and to achieve sustainability. As Ted Trainer wrote recently, “What does history tell us? It tells us that we humans are an extremely aggressive, selfish, greedy and stupid lot”. Before 10,000 years ago we lived in small tribal groups with a high degree of cooperation and sharing, and little organised warfare. After agriculture developed, history has been “primarily about the quest for wealth and power, the struggle to get richer and dominate”. Collective human nature has been about greed, the “constant craving for more and the refusal to be content with enough”.

So, this interpretation of history is often linked to the idea that we originally lived in societies that were environmentally benign, egalitarian and peaceful. It is agriculture that allowed a surplus. Human greed ensured that a ruling elite would take this over and control it for their own benefit. I want to challenge this bleak picture.

In some parts of the environmentalist movement today, these considerations have led to the view that we should return to a pre-industrial technology. Adam Sacks maintains that we need to give up our cars, electricity, iPods and bananas – our Nikes and our nukes. If we are to live, we need to live locally, getting everything we need within walking distance. “We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years”. I will show why such an outcome is unlikely. Indeed, certain kinds of technological knowledge are necessary to overcome social class.

A more conservative framework treats agriculture as a great boon. With the invention of agriculture, it became possible for some people to live from the agricultural production of others. This specialization was beneficial, allowing the large populations permitted by agriculture to be organized efficiently. Ruling elites functioned to organize society and used armed force to maintain social harmony. Consequently, we just have to find some way to make class society sustainable. This account is equally problematic.

Those are the themes of this essay. The structure will be chronological. In the first part I look at pre-class societies. What were they really like? In the second part I unpick the mechanisms that originated class and still drive it. In the third part I consider capitalism as a kind of class society. How can we save a habitable planet, ending class and patriarchy once and for all?

Human nature

The basic nature of humans as a species is a set of fundamental drives.

The drive to eat – hunger.
Sociability – the desire to be well regarded by other people, to have social contacts, the pleasure of caring.
Autonomy – the desire to get what you want.
Sexual desire – polymorphous perverse, as Freud argued.
The desire to be comfortable and the desire for good health.
Creativity – the desire to express oneself by making things, the use of imagination, aesthetic appreciation.

Within this framework, aggression is not a basic drive. There is no basic desire to harm other people. Nevertheless, the capacity to be aggressive is an aspect of human nature – a tool which people use when their desires are frustrated. Particular kinds of socialisation also socially construct competitive aggression.

The stages of world history can be understood by using this framework. Both patriarchy and class society are not caused by innate greed or an inborn competitive streak. They are social mechanisms which benefit one part of society at the expense of another. They come about when the ruling group manages to gain an advantage that allows them to live well (to satisfy their human nature) at the expense of the rest of society.

What Marx called “modes of production” can be seen as social machines. They are informed by a set of largely unconscious and illusory beliefs. For any given mode of production these constitute what Castoriadis calls the “social imaginary”. Such imaginings inform the workings of a particular social machine. A social machine must work with the drives and capacities of human nature. Equally, it depends on a particular relationship with the natural world and a set of technological options that have been historically created.

The great divide between stateless and class societies

The great divide in human societies is between stateless (and classless) societies and state-based class societies. Social class was invented about ten thousand years ago. It took hold then and has proven very difficult to undo.

Stateless societies

Belief in a harmonious golden age, predating imperialistic warlike societies has been a theme in some critiques of current capitalism. In Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, pre-colonial Australian society is seen as sustainable, egalitarian and peaceful. A system of pan-continental government was enforced at the local level, with tribal sanctions implementing shared visions of the cosmos. According to Pascoe’s account, rock art shows the respect accorded to the female principle. In Heide Goettner-Abendroth’s view, societies such as these were gender egalitarian and peaceful – “matriarchal”, though not controlled by either sex. Nature was revered and the economy governed by reciprocity and sharing. While some of this fits with the archaeology and anthropology, some does not.

Stateless societies took two basic forms: hunting and gathering societies; and horticultural (agricultural) societies. The common myth of the invention of class society – that it was an effect of agriculture – is not supported by the evidence. “Horticultural” societies were in fact “agricultural” in the ordinary sense of the word. They depended on the intentional systematic cultivation of food plants. Many also used domesticated animals. These technologies did not cause class to happen. Such classless agricultural societies were flourishing ten thousand years after the establishment of class society in other parts of the world.

There was much that all stateless societies had in common. They were egalitarian and cooperative. Decisions were made by face-to-face gatherings of all members of the group or by a same sex set. Even when there was a hereditary chief their role was to mediate conflicts rather than impose their own will. Such societies lived sustainably, existing for millennia. Religious beliefs linked humans to the natural world, emphasizing kinship with other species. “Greed” as we understand it was absent. People with influence might gain temporary control of valued goods but their aim was prestige through the distribution of these goods. The kit of privately owned goods was much the same for all, with many resources owned in common. When a section of a residential group had particular user’s rights (over an area of land for example) these rights were balanced with similar user’s rights held by another section of the community.

The stateless societies that we know about were patriarchal. Despite the egalitarianism of the polity, women had less social power and their labour was exploited. Because this is rarely acknowledged, it is worth giving an example. The Mundurucu of the Amazon were researched by Yolanda and Robert Murphy in the seventies, a time when it was still possible to discover what the society was like in pre-colonial times. Men lived much of their time in a communal men’s house and visited their wives and children in their separate dwellings. Women did most of the childcare and most of the hard work in gardening and in mashing and washing manioc tubers – a long day of monotonous work. Men earned status through hunting and by going on killing raids to other villages, bringing back trophy heads. In gatherings of both sexes, women sat at the back and walked behind the men. Women who offended against the authority of the men could be gang raped. Sex was in the missionary position and was conducted for men’s pleasure. The religious beliefs of the Mundurucu included a myth in which men stole the sacred flutes from women, forcing women to do the domestic work and gardening. In an initiation ritual for boys, men took the initiands from the village while dressed as terrifying spirit beings. They played the sacred flutes – normally kept secretly in the men’s house. Women stayed in their houses and were not permitted to look on.

It is unlikely that an original matriarchy preceded patriarchal societies and was maintained in some corners of the globe up to colonial times. Archaeological evidence adduced to support the theory of a primal matriarchy looks at depictions of female goddesses, sites without walled defences, and mythologies of a past dominated by women. Yet such indicators are not convincing given other evidence. For example, Catal Huyuk in Turkey has been presented as a matriarchal urban civilisation. This is on account of the goddess clay figurines discovered there. However other finds challenge the matriarchal account of the site – ritual spaces with horned bull’s head statues, male warrior graves with weapons, elite graves of women with jewellery. For societies extant at the time of colonial expansion, none of the cited examples are really convincing. Men are dominant in political relations between groups, in ritual and religion, in daily interactions with women. For example, the Iroquois, the Minangkabau, the !Kung, the BaMbuti. While there may have been some exceptions to the universality of patriarchy, it is necessary to understand why it has been so widespread – and to assess its impact on other aspects of society.

Much opinion on the left treats patriarchy as totally socially constructed – very likely an effect of capitalism. It accordingly imagines a huge variety in gender regimes in different times and places. This does not fit with the anthropological and historical evidence. The most common explanation for patriarchy in popular discourse is the conservative theory. Men and women have innate differences in temperament and intellect. A casual glance at an AFLW match might suggest otherwise. A more convincing account is that given by early second wave feminists. Men have been able to gain dominance in the great bulk of quite different societies. They have not been disadvantaged in power struggles by the necessity to give birth and the emotional ties to children typical of mothers.

Competitive aggression in human societies cannot be understood except in relationship to patriarchy. Patriarchy has led to a particular process of recruitment into masculine identity, as feminist anthropologist Nancy Chodorow explains. Men as fathers avoid much of the responsibility for early childcare. They maintain distance and the freedom to act politically without hindrance. Infant boys have a more intimate and daily connection to their mothers and other women. As they reach adolescence, they are urged to “become men” and take advantage of a man’s social power. Yet this is a baffling task when proximate adult males are not intimately known. Boys are urged to solve this problem by expelling femininity, cutting ties with women and rejecting the nurturing behaviour modelled by their mothers. Initiation rituals separate boys from the tribe and subject them to torments at the hands of adult men, with a final passage to adult masculinity. The effect is to produce adult men who compete for prestige and continuously strive to prove their masculine identity.

In hunting and gathering societies, this competitive masculinity was expressed as men competed for pre-eminence – through their control of women and children, through religious leadership, through hunting prowess. Feuds between men were handled through processes of community justice, often with violent sanctions. In horticultural societies, low key warfare was common. Men gained status through raids on other villages or small-scale wars. Sometimes women and children were taken captive. These conflicts were never conceived as economic – to take territory for hunting or gardening. As Marshall Sahlins demonstrates, such societies always owned a lot more territory than they could ever need.

In the next part of this essay, I will show how this background helps us to understand why social class was such an effective invention.

The Owl of Minerva

World History for the Left

Part Two

Class societies

Class society is an invention of the human species. Psychologically, it depends on some of the same social machinery that animates classless societies.

In stateless societies the hierarchical psychology fostered in the patriarchal family expresses itself as contests for positions of prestige and influence between men. Those with influence gain status but not the authority to command obedience.

In class societies, the patriarchal construction of gender provides the psychological foundation for the relationship between the ruling class and the subordinate classes. The ruling class present themselves as the “fathers” of society, authoritative protectors of the community. The subordinate classes are assigned the role of “women” or “children”. Socialisation in the patriarchal family prepares the child for an adult experience in hierarchical relationships.

In class societies, competitive masculinity is yoked to viewpoints and behaviours which maintain the class machine. The ruling class stigmatize and terrorize the subordinate classes. The soldier class express their masculinity through hostile control of the peasantry, allegiances to factional elites and wars with other states.

Class societies also depend on a social machinery organized around the human desires for physical well-being and food, as Marx recognized. They depend on an agriculture that can regularly produce a storable surplus; a surplus that can be appropriated and distributed by the ruling class. There is a basic three class model. The ruling class controls the means of production of food. They take control of the surplus produced by the subordinate class. In this they are aided and abetted by the soldier class. The soldier class avoid the danger of hunger and starvation that bedevils the subordinate class.

This system was invented 10,000 years ago and is still current in modern capitalism. It developed across multiple sites where cereal agriculture had taken hold. It seems likely, as Pierre Clastres maintains, that in each location, class society started up as an effect of a newly invented cult, giving authority to religious leaders to expect tribute from the subordinate masses.

The early class societies cannot be explained as being the outcome of an over population crisis. Classless societies managed population to ensure that there was always more than enough territory for any conceivable climate event. In class societies, all parts of the class structure had an interest in maximizing fertility: the peasantry because they were insecure in their livelihoods; the ruling class looking for subordinates to produce surplus and win wars. Over population was an effect of class society rather than a cause.

Neither can the original class societies be explained as a by-product of agriculture – an invention that supposedly improved people’s well-being and secured a surplus to allow specialisation and civilisation. Neither cereal agriculture nor class society led to an improvement in overall well-being compared to stateless societies. Archaeology reveals a peasantry generally shorter and less well-nourished than people from comparable stateless societies at the same time in history. We know that many attempts to establish class did not succeed in the long run – for example in the Mississippi basin, in Europe at the time of Stonehenge. In such cases, a class society (signified by elite burials with luxury goods, fortifications and monumental buildings) collapsed and was replaced by a more egalitarian polity. Michael Mann argues it is no accident that class finally established itself permanently in irrigated river valleys. The subordinate population could not just escape into the hinterland when life got too difficult, they were trapped within the class machine. From these secure bases class spread out to other centres and was maintained by the pressure of competition between class-based states.

Agricultural class societies were able to defeat egalitarian horticulturalists and hunting and gathering societies. The soldier class in class societies were full time professionals, not part time gardeners. The surplus produced by the peasantry funded their weapons and armour. The dense populations of class societies supported armies that could not be easily defeated by independent stateless people – spread out to maximize their chances of living well in whatever environmental circumstances.

It is a mistake to think of the behaviour of ruling elites in class societies as driven by “greed”. It is true that ruling elites are acquisitive and accumulate more wealth than they could possibly need to live well. To account for this, we need to start by looking at the motivations behind the formation of class societies and then to consider the context that developed out of that.

Greed is not an innate disposition of human beings, waiting to break loose and create havoc. The original class societies were most likely invented by people who were seeking social status rather than wealth. Their role as religious leaders allowed them to rise to prominence and call for tribute from the rest of the population. Class society came about when they discovered that they could fix this unequal relationship in place by paying a class of armed retainers, with the wealth derived from the tribute. Their motivation for this was to ensure food supply, status, autonomy, sexual satisfaction – the usual motivations of human beings in any social context. By being the ruling party in what had become a social machine they could ensure all this. Once this system had been established the acquisitive behaviour of the ruling class was partly an attempt to maintain their superior status and well-being. But as is obvious, it went well beyond this.

The “excessive” acquisitiveness of ruling classes relates to the competitive political situation set up by class societies. Ruling classes amassed more wealth than they could possibly use because they needed to be sure of defending their supreme position – their rule always vulnerable to internal dissension and takeovers by rival states. Their displays of wealth, their excessive monumentalism, their wars and human sacrifices were displays of power intended to intimidate anyone who might challenge their rule – motivated by fear more than greed.

Class societies have had a tendency to overuse and exploit their environments, leading to collapse. The concentration of political power in the hands of the ruling class meant a concentration of production around the city. The countryside had to be close enough to be reached by an army carrying its supplies on foot or horseback. There was always a motive to increase population density to expand the surplus available. This combination could lead to overuse of land near a city.

Everything a ruling class did to extract surplus was an act of fine tuning in relation to the potential for wars with other states, factionalism within the ruling class, army coups or peasant revolts. So, it was always very difficult to turn around any part of the social machine, even when irreversible ecological damage became obvious. For instance, irrigation might be causing a loss of soil fertility through salinity, but it would be impossible to try a radically different agricultural strategy. The grandiose monumentalism of class societies has been both politically necessary and very often an environmental problem. An often-cited example is the gleaming white temples of the Mayans, decorated with a lime plaster manufactured in wood burning kilns. Deforestation, soil erosion and starvation were the effects. Some civilisations of the past managed to avoid ecological collapse, by staying within a certain frontier and by maintaining the same sustainable agricultural method indefinitely – for example China, Bali or Japan.

As ecofeminists, such as Ariel Salleh, Rosemary Ruether and Val Plumwood have noted, class societies are quite likely to have religions that denigrate the natural world as uncivilized. The ruling class presents itself as purified and spiritual, people who rise above merely “animal” motivations, even as gods. The subordinate class is portrayed as an unruly natural force, that must be tamed by the rational elite. The psychological model is men’s domination over women. As a metaphor for the agricultural strategy of class societies, nature is tamed and forced to produce a surplus. This pattern of belief is not always deployed to stigmatize the natural world. For example, traditional Balinese Hinduism stigmatized the wild and untamed “lower” side of human beings and the lower classes, while also respecting the natural world and deities related to it.

Capitalism as a class society

Capitalism is unique as a class society. Two mechanisms are central to this difference, as Marx recognized. In all previous class societies, the means of production were owned by the ruling class as an inherited right or allocated by the king. The ruling class was secure except through warfare between ruling elites. In capitalism, the means of production are owned by the ruling class as private property, commodities that can be bought and sold on the market. Consequently, in capitalism, ownership is contestable through market processes. The second is that in capitalism, wealth is created by producing goods for the market. A surplus is extracted through the labour contract. The worker is paid in money for their work. Their wage in money gives them a capacity to access what is produced by other wage earners. However, the wage is never the total monetary value of the work that they do – they cannot buy the quantity of hours of work that they put in through their own labour. The employer receives the surplus value that the workers are not paid and makes a profit by selling what has been produced. Yet of course this a very uncertain process, money can be advanced to start production, but market conditions can cause a loss rather than a profit. Ownership of wealth is always vulnerable to market uncertainties.

One effect is constant technological change and growing technological power. To be sure of making a high profit and in order to maintain the value of their capital, the owner of the means of production attempts to produce more products at a cheaper cost. One way of doing this is to improve technologies so that less labour is used in production.

The next part of this essay will explore capitalism in more detail and look at the changes brought about by globalisation and neoliberalism. It will consider likely options for the present and explain what is necessary to defeat class society and establish environmental sustainability.

The Owl of Minerva

World History for the Left

Part Three

Our current predicament

Capitalism up to 1970

As Immanuel Wallerstein and other left critics explain, capitalism is unique in being a world system, depending on relationships between a “core” of more powerful regions of the world and exploited “peripheral” regions of the world. According to Wallerstein, the core regions are capital intensive and the peripheral, labour intensive. It is a mistake to think that certain regions of the world are “developing”, moving towards the affluence of the rich world. Instead, the relationship is complementary; the affluence of the core depends on the exploitation of the periphery.

We can see these phenomena as expressing relationships between classes in the world system. The capitalist class is a global class. An affluent section of the subordinate class is mainly located in the rich countries, while the poor of the world are mainly located in the peripheral countries. The global capitalist class mediates the relationship whereby the affluent working class of the core countries benefits from the poverty of the peripheral countries. So, the affluent members of the subordinate class in the core countries are somewhat like the soldiers, traders and craft workers of previous class societies. They are the ones recruited to armies for imperial conquest and wars to put down rebellions. They benefit from the exploitation of the peripheral subordinate class, but they are not merely dependent parasites. They are also a productive and exploited part of the global subordinate class.

Until recently the experience of the subordinate class in the peripheral countries was not markedly different to that of feudal peasants. Their role was to produce basic resources for export to the rich countries. In many peripheral countries, members of the subordinate class were slaves or feudalized dependents. In other peripheral countries, workers were free wage labour. Yet governments have been authoritarian, not permitting labour movements. Incomes have been kept low. A large unemployed underclass has meant severe competition for jobs.

In the core countries themselves, conflict between the ruling class and the subordinate class produced a stalemate. Starting from the middle of the nineteenth century, wages rose above a bare subsistence and some democratic control was achieved. Capitalists sold consumer goods to the subordinate class, making profits by doing that, rather than only selling to the rich. By the fifties, workers in the core countries had even started to eat into the relative share of wealth owned by the rich – through taxation, the expenses of the world wars and social welfare programmes.

Paul Cardan argues that a key factor explaining working class power in the core countries is the nature of capitalist production. Given the technological complexity of industrial production, it is impossible to control an industrial labour force through simple instructions and coercive sanctions. In this, capitalism is radically different from the class societies of the past, with their relatively simple productive base. Capitalism must depend on the willing cooperation and participation of workers in production processes. Of course, the capitalist class always attempts to break workers’ power in production, defining tasks into simple steps that can be readily supervised. But these attempts can only go so far, as new complexities require participatory commitment.

In relation to the environment, a number of factors make capitalism particularly destructive. As eco-Marxists have explained, competition to make profits leads to externalisation of environmental costs. Firms (and countries) that spend money on environmental safeguards lose out in competition with firms that do not. In addition, the competitive pressure between firms works to create economic growth. Firms do well by producing more with less labour and less expense. New technologies allow this – leading to growth and increasing environmental impact. These behaviours cannot be simply attributed to greed but come out of fundamental economic structures.

This expansion is also premised on pressures for growth coming from the subordinate class. These pressures cannot be attributed simply to “greed”. The accommodation between capitalists and the subordinate class in the core countries is premised on wage increases. The freedom to express social and creative needs through leisure and consumption balances the coercion and boredom of the working day. It becomes expected that consumer spending will increase constantly, as enabled by the technological advances of a capitalist economy. There is little security in one’s standard of living. It seems sensible to spend when you are earning well, buying expensive hedges against an uncertain future. Related to this is the “work ethic” as a dominant cultural message. You can prove your respectability by demonstrating your hard work. Expensive purchases show you have worked hard. Finally, as Annette Hamilton persuasively argues, there is the socialisation experience, until recently typical of childhood in the rich countries. Infants and young children have been tightly controlled – as though their desires would otherwise become insatiable. Fed on a schedule, deprived of the breast as soon as they can process solid foods, barred from dummies, shut away in a separate room at night, punished severely for disobedience, schooled to tolerate extreme boredom. The paradoxical effect has been to instil a sense that you cannot expect anything from other people. This also drives obsessions with acquisition, rampant consumerism and anxious hoarding. All these mechanisms drive political pressure from the subordinate class, fostering growth at the expense of the environment.

Capitalism from the seventies

The standoff between capitalists and the subordinate class in the core countries took a new turn in the seventies, generally identified with neoliberalism. The capitalist class saw their power eroded to the point of no return, with increasing spending by governments and increasing wage demands – backed up by strikes, industrial sabotage, left terrorism, rebellions and riots. In the meantime, workers in peripheral countries had been educated in the skills necessary to manage industrial work. Containerisation allowed goods to be shipped around the world. Digital communication facilitated production across multiple sites. Exploiting these options, manufacturing was shifted from the core countries to peripheral countries with low wages, high unemployment and minimal taxation. Wages in the core countries stagnated and industrial power dribbled away.

The current tendency is hard to determine. Demands for democratic control in the peripheral countries may escalate and be hard to resist in the context of industrial production. All these jobs could be outsourced to robots. Perhaps the ruling class will cut itself off from demands for political power and wage affluence, reinstating a production system geared to luxury goods. The capitalist class would maintain most of the global population on meagre handouts. Firms would consolidate, fortunes would become predictable, and the capitalist class would start to look like a feudal nobility.

Hanging over all this is the environmental crisis. The political deal in which increased consumer spending compensates for alienated labour is no longer an option – given the necessity to re-jig energy systems and transport, the extreme unlikelihood of managing to produce an amount of energy equal to what we now use in the rich countries, the limits to growth on a finite planet. Frantic and delusional remedies will fail in the core countries. In the peripheral countries, promises of future affluence will no longer be effective in damping down current discontents.

What we are up against

It can be easy for us to imagine that we could just go back to a much simpler lifestyle – following the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Indeed, we could live well without modern industry: with permaculture to grow food; with iron tools, weaving and pottery; with composting toilets and water harvesting – stabilizing population with the rhythm method. There would be no need for war or exploitation. Life might be a bit sparse compared to current affluence, but there would surely be plenty of time for creative pursuits. The hobbit vision.

My problem with this scenario is that I cannot see any reason why such a technological basis would not be accompanied by one or all three of the social machines which have already been tried and certainly work.

Stateless hunting and gathering
Horticultural stateless societies
Feudal and imperial class societies

All of these past modes of production can be sustainable. All three work with technologies of the kind often proposed for a simpler lifestyle utopia. Indeed, that technological vision is a collection of the best of what was already available in mediaeval times. In those times, these technologies were accompanied by famines, pogroms, epidemics and warfare. While we might like to envisage a hobbit lifestyle, it is more likely that cereal agriculture would again become the basis for some nasty version of feudalism.

We might believe that humans have now learned their lesson and will avoid re-establishing the unsatisfactory social machines of the past – that a collective act of cultural change will imprint itself on the future. Yet these unsatisfactory options from our past were established in a great variety of contexts across space and history – because they work. They are social machines which fit with patriarchal power and human nature. They are all very far from what we might hope for in a degrowth future. To forestall these options, we need to be aware of the social mechanisms that lie behind them and have the technological capacity to develop a more satisfactory alternative.

Patriarchy has played a central part in all three of these social machines. It is premised on the reproductive role of women, as argued by early feminist theorists of the second wave such as Shulamith Firestone and Ti Grace-Atkinson. Responsibility for childbirth and the emotional links between children and women have given men an advantage; allowing them to take control. Accordingly, patriarchy has been maintained and constantly reinvented in a great variety of social contexts. It is only since the late nineteenth century that women have gained some leverage in challenging patriarchy. This has been due to developments premised on medical technologies.

Reliable and safe contraception.
The falling infant mortality rate, the end of death in childbirth, the longevity enabled by medical technologies.
The consequent drop in family size – the demographic transition.

For the left to replace the three options of our past with something new, we must maintain these medical technologies. A technologically simple utopia is impossible. Beyond a first phase of enthusiastic cultural transition, patriarchy would re-establish itself. Similar consequences would follow to those already experienced in human history.

The “othering” of groups of humans has been an integral feature of all three of these previous social machines – facilitated by the fact that people in other classes, villages, tribes, countries and cultures have not been intimately known. Digital technologies of media such as film, television, popular music and literary communication are necessary to help people go beyond localized ethnocentrism. This is particularly important if the basic economic format is small, largely self-sufficient village economies, the most likely settlement pattern for sustainability.

None of this is impossible. In my view we do not need a state (or money) to organize technological production. Village economies could specialize in particular aspects of any technological process and liaise with partners in other villages. Digital communication assisted by face-to-face meetings would facilitate organization across the production chain. Train services run on renewable energy would transport machine parts. This high-tech production would be but a small part of any particular village economy.

If there is any reason to be optimistic it is this. We have accumulated much scientific knowledge in the last ten thousand years, and a much better understanding of ourselves as psychic beings. A new environmentalist mode of production would begin with what we know now and also go on to develop new technologies to enable a gender egalitarian and open society.

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