Subtitled "How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive", this book ⁽¹⁾ puts the author's views on what leads to the disintegration or persistence of human societies, and how this relates to present-day society. He supplies a wealth of description of previous societies in support of these views. However, as the author himself acknowledges, the focus of the book is slightly narrower than the title implies, as only those instances of collapse or survival which involve a substantial element of environmental degradation are considered. This book is nonetheless relevant to the problems capitalist society faces today in relation to environmental degradation and particularly global warming and the use of oil and other fossil fuels. It illustrates how class societies are more likely to regress into lower social organisations, or even extinction, than societies with less developed differences of class interest. It shows how extinction can occur where the ruling class attempts to retain their class privileges no matter what the cost. Although the book is written from a bourgeois perspective and the author appears to think self interested reform by the ruling classes can solve the problems the world now faces, much of the material included refutes this view. The argument that a classless society is the only way to escape from the environmental catastrophe towards which capitalist society is now hurtling, is actually supported despite the views of the author.

Easter Island

On Easter Day, 1722, Jacob Roggenveen and his crew became the first recorded Europeans to see the 170 square kilometres comprising the island created by the volcanoes Poike, Rano Kau and Terevaka2 in a series of eruptions ending 200 000 years ago. They were met by the descendants of an earlier wave of explorers, those involved in the Lapita (proto-Polynesian) expansion starting in around 1200BC from the Bismarck Islands roughly 10 000km to the West. The last hop - from the Marquesas 3000km away - of this journey was completed around 600AD. (Thor Heydahl's stupid theory that the inhabitants of Easter, who spoke a Polynesian language, were descended from ancient South Americans - South America is 3000-4000km away - has been comprehensively disproved by cultural and genetic studies).

Despite their ancestors' impressive marine exploration and colonisation efforts, the islanders possessed only a handful of leaky boats. A more spectacular puzzle, though, was afforded by the now famous Easter Island statues.

The heaviest of these statues (moai), which all depict the upper body and head of a male with long ears, weighs 270 tons, and the tallest is as high as a modern 5-storey building. Moreover, some of the moai were equipped with pukao, a headdress sculpted from a piece of red scoria which substantially adds to the moai's weight and height.

But all of the statues - which had been transported for several kilometres from the quarry (in the Rano Kau crater) where they had been cut and placed on platforms called ahu - had been toppled, and often deliberately in a way which caused them to break. Many of those which were still to be finished in the quarry had also been vandalised.

On a treeless island such as confronted Roggenveen, how had the Islanders erected these statues on the ahu? Without trees, they would have had no strong ropes, nor any scaffolding. How had they moved them from Rano Kau? Even if the Islanders had developed ways to make these things technically possible, how had they been able to afford the immense non-productive expenditure of labour to actually accomplish them, given that the desolate Easter of 1722 could only support a few thousand people living by subsistence farming. And why had the moai been attacked and toppled?

Archaeological and oral evidence shows that when the Islanders arrived, the island was covered by trees and the Islanders themselves had pigs and dogs as well as the chickens which were still present in 1722. The Islanders were at first able to harvest the seas as well as the land, and the highest proportion of their animal protein intake came from the common dolphin. Later, the Island supported a peak population of at least 15 000, which was initially well-fed. This population and its efficient means of obtaining food was sufficient to support the unproductive expenditure of labour on the erection of moai. The structure of Easter society, dominated by an aristocracy (whose habitations were larger and in distinct areas separated from peasant accommodation) headed by a dozen chiefs, was the context for competition for prestige symbolised by the quality of the moai. But the production of these statues, believed to be representations of famous ancestors of the chiefs, consumed the trees of Easter Island. As the trees disappeared, the soil became eroded, agricultural production slumped, seaworthy boats became impossible to construct and seafood much more difficult to obtain. Thus the material basis for the survival of a relatively large population vanished. The chiefs and their ancestor worship were overthrown and class struggle ushered in a new, lower mode of production. The statues were toppled in the class struggle. The previous mode had become unsustainable, and that unsustainability had to result in a different mode, whether through an organised transition by the previous elite, or by that elite being overthrown. The population adjusted itself to the level that was now possible through starvation and cannibalism, and the only domestic animal to survive the process of adjustment was the chicken.

A contrast - Tikopia and the New Guinea Uplands

Tikopia is a small island (5 square kilometres) which has been continuously inhabited for 3000 years. In the early part of that occupation (by descendants of the Lapita, whom we have already met), there was some environmental degradation, with several food species being affected. Six bird species became locally extinct and many other species declined (bats, fish and shellfish) and their remains were much less frequently seen in domestic rubbish. As a result of this, there was a shift towards the present-day agricultural system found on Tikopia - a kind of layered orchard, with taller and shorter food crops being grown on the same land.

In contrast to Easter Island, the Tikopia oral tradition reveals that, when their mode of production allowed unsustainable practices, they consciously ceased to follow them. In their case, when they found that keeping pigs was incompatible with their orchard production of food crops, they slaughtered all of them, in about 1600AD. As the pig is traditionally a highly-prized foodstuff, this decision would not have been taken lightly.

Also in contrast to Easter Island, Tikopia society is not highly marked by class distinction.

Chiefs and their families produce their own food and dig in their own gardens and orchards, as do commoners.

@Collapse, p293

Although the inhabitants of the coastal regions of New Guinea have been known to the rest of the world for at least four hundred years, the very existence of the population of the interior uplands came as a surprise in the 1930's, the time of the first flights over the interior. However, millions of people live there, and their ancestors have done so for 3200 years.

Like the Tikopians, despite the initial human-induced degradation, including deforestation, the New Guinea upland people have developed sustainable agricultural practices. Because their society has no chiefs and no hereditary positions at all, these innovations, which include silviculture, can only be the result of groups of individuals noticing the damage that their practices were causing, in the same way as the Easter Islanders must have noticed what was happening to Easter, and then being able to reform these practices without class interests obstructing these reforms, contrary to what happened on Easter. The reformed practices then spread from village to village in the New Guinea uplands, despite the almost continual warfare which the various villages there indulge in.

This is not to say that class societies never reform their environmental practices, but that ruling class interests often damage society as a whole by overriding the intelligence of the collectivity.

Collapse - yesterday and today?

Across the globe, capitalist production is causing environmental degradation on a massive scale. Deforestation, which started long ago, perhaps even before class society, is today proceeding on a massive scale (at present rates, one quarter of the world's forests will disappear every 50 years, leading to a global Easter Island in 200 years). Even those countries, like Japan, which have reversed deforestation at home, are simply exporting the phenomenon by importing the product of the modern deforestation of New Guinea and Haiti.

The poorest half the world's population depend on seafood for their protein, but wild fish stocks are over fished, so this resource, instead of being available in perpetuity, is nowadays continually on the verge of being wiped out. This is a clear example of how capitalist society threatens its own material basis. In a rational society, the fisherman's livelihood would not depend on his catch, but on his humanity. Society as a whole would simply manage fishing at a sustainable level and distribute the fish according to peoples' needs. Instead, under capitalism, fishermen have to sell their fish as a commodity on the capitalist market in order to obtain the other commodities they need to survive. If they do not submit to the capitalist market they face drastically reduced living conditions or death. The perversity of capitalism is further illustrated by the introduction of fish farms. Instead of alleviating the problem, these have made it worse by lowering the cost of fish, meaning that fishermen have to catch more to maintain their families' standard of living.

Soil erosion, mining pollution, reduced water quality, water shortages, air pollution, loss of biological diversity, transportation of animal and plant species into inappropriate environments and the exhaustion of fossil fuels, etc., are all problems which have to be solved if society is not to eat away at its own material basis.

Diamond's conclusion appears to be that the enlightened self-interest of companies and states will lead them to work to solve these problems, and where that self-interest is not sufficient; it can be bolstered by consumer pressure.

This ignores the fact that enlightened self-interest of society was insufficient to overcome the unenlightened self-interest of rulers in the past when class distinctions were sharp enough. Under capitalism, where class distinctions in terms of wealth are greater than ever before, even though great ideological efforts are made to blur these distinctions, ruling class short-term selfishness is an even bigger obstacle to the necessary social changes.

Moreover, the above are problems whose solution is made more difficult by the capitalist mode of production itself.

To take just one example: the impending exhaustion of fossil fuels. The lack of a free, comfortable and reliable public transport system means that people are forced to use their own cars to satisfy most of their transport needs, which is an inefficient way of satisfying those needs, and a waste of fossil fuel. But a comfortable and reliable public transport system is impossible under capitalism, and a free one unthinkable.

Similarly, for reasons which are explicitly linked to the class struggle, goods are transported by road rather than rail (the rail workers have historically found it easier to organise their struggle than have lorry drivers), which is massively inefficient.

The slower consumption of fossil fuel under a rational organisation of society would give humanity more time to devise alternatives and switch to their use.

Class struggle

In Diamond's book, class struggle plays a role in the transition from a higher mode of production (competing chiefdoms managing production) to a lower one (subsistence farming), but a positive role for it in today's world is completely unmentioned. This is not surprising, because Diamond shows no sign of conceiving of a mode of production beyond capitalism.

However, it is class struggle which is humanity's only chance. The falling rate of profit increases the competitive struggle between capitalists, and this struggle makes the longer term interests of humanity, and of the capitalists themselves, something abstract and irrelevant to the task of avoiding bankruptcy today. It also means that capitalism must attack the living and working conditions of the working class. It is in the working class's practical answer to this attack that the possibility of overthrowing the present organisation of society and replacing it with a more rational one arises. This is the only real hope for humanity to avoid a global environmental catastrophe and reverse the descent into barbarism.

(1) Collapse, Jared Diamond, Allen Lane, £20

(2) In the light of its later treeless condition, Terevaka has the ironic meaning "the place to get canoes".