I was in Longyearbyen, the northernmost settlement in the world. But that title used to belong to Pyramiden, the Soviet settlement that was bigger and better. You look at both experiments—capitalist and communist—and then the melting glaciers in the ever-receding distance. Makes you think; collapse is really just a timing difference, regardless of your political system.

There was a time when communism could have succeeded, ie human communities taking control of Das Kapital, and using it for human needs. And yet, all human political systems suffer from the same fatal flaw. Human supremacy. Both Pyramiden and Longyearbyen were coal mining towns, sealing the fate of the seals. All economic activity in Svalbard (and everywhere) has been devastating to the ecosystem, whatever political system it's under. Dictatorship of the proletariat is better, but it's not dictatorship of the planet, which is what's needed.

Communism's saving grace is that it has a brake. At least the possibility of a brake, instead of forever growth for growth's sake. A planned economy can have five-year plans, and 20x that vision across a century, and see that we're going off a cliff posthaste. Hence China's first centenary goal is “to finish building a moderately prosperous society” and the second is “to build China into a great modern socialist country in every dimension.” Every dimension, in the CPC's Constitution, means “building a socialist ecological civilization” and they have taken real action in that direction, but it's too little, too local, and too late.

The CPC can theoretically build up China as an industrial civilization and then slow down into an ecological one, but practically, we are facing a planetary problem. It doesn't matter if your house is in order if the neighbor's is on fire, and he's huffing gasoline. We had a fire drill when humanity should've united to fight COVID-19, but while China beat it within its own border, they eventually had to give up because the Americans were so insane. In the same way, the climate cake is already baked. White Empire is leaning more into fossil fuels even as it becomes more fossilized itself.

At this point—decades past the decisive point predicted in The Limits Of Growth—there's no coming back from climate collapse. I hope I'm wrong, but the math is simple and simply terrifying. The way to avert the collapse we're seeing now was totalitarian climate communism in the 1980s. Someone (unspecified) seizing the reins of the global economy and slowing down and turning round. As The Limits Of Growth said (read it and weep), “the most basic definition of of global equilibrium is that population and capital are essentially stable, with forces tending to increase or decrease in a fully controlled balance.”

Who controls this balance? Who ensures what the Chinese call a harmonious society? This is global climate communism going unnamed, specifically rigid and violent control over the forces of production to apply a brake. This of course didn't (and couldn't) happen because capitalism applied all its productive forces to world war against global communism, and communism had to match pace, burning more fuel in wars between humanity rather than against the shared threat of humanity (collectively). Now even this theoretical idea—totalitarian climate communism—wouldn't work. It's simply too late. As I've said,

Even if Lenin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh hopped out of embalmment right now with a newfound respect for vegetables, we’d still be completely fucked. We’re already way too late. If you run the same climate communism program in 2000 (again, still in the past! still too late!), it doesn’t work.

The program I'm referring to are the computer models in The Limits Of Growth ran in the 1970s, which have sadly been proved right since. You can check the models or just look around places like Svalbard (and contribute accordingly). The coal resources are largely exhausted and the glaciers are melting apace. Even the scientists are basically there to gawp, there's no more data needed at this point, the glacier tours are stopping because the glaciers are moving away.

The archipelago's lapse is our climate collapse in microcosm, the macro picture is the same. Hell, the melt affecting the seals (and thus the polar bears) isn't from coal burning on Svalbard, but rather BMW using the same coal to make steel far away. The planet is all connected, but international communism never happened, so we have no coordinated way of averting our fate. From the northernmost settlement to settled human civilization in general, that whole climate is going away. As they say to someone staring too long (like me), take a picture, it'll last longer.