Apocalypse Now (or Never)!

Today, we do not need prophets or prophecies to tell us what the future holds. It is obvious to anyone who is aware of what is going on in the world today. These include:

• ecological crises: as a result of global warming (industrial pollution), the earth's environment is rapidly deteriorating, producing more severe storms and weather extremes, all of which are impacting on social and economic systems.
• economic crises: recent financial crises (falling stock markets, collapse of US housing market, etc.), have resulted in growing unemployment, homelessness, a decline in industrial production and consumerism.
• food crisis: closely connected to the ecological and economic crises is a growing food crisis that has hit the Third World especially hard in 2007-08, when prices for commodities such as wheat, rice and corn dramatically rose resulting in riots in Haiti, Mexico, Egypt, the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and other countries. The main contributing factors to this crisis: rising energy costs, loss of land due to urbanization and industrialism, climate change including droughts & storms, and switching of food crops to bio-fuels.
  
• expanding police states: in response to the overall systemic decline, national security states have grown their capability for social control and repression of social movements. This includes more military & police, new surveillance technologies, etc., all of which are based on counter-insurgency (insurgency being the final form of warfare national states, organized into a global system, will be forced to fight, that is say against their own domestic populations).
• expanding military conflicts: as the final resources of the world are exploited by transnational corporations, intense struggles are occurring between regional and global powers. The US invasion & occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are manifestations of this, as the US seeks to gain control of vital oil and gas resources upon which the western industrial system is based. These and other wars carry the potential to become larger regional and international conflicts, possibly involving the use of nuclear, chemical and/or biological weapons.
  

These trends tell us the future will be subject to extreme changes resulting from sudden or growing crises for which the system will be unable to respond effectively. The legitimacy of the state itself will be further questioned and eroded. Social and military conflicts will expand, contributing to ever greater chaos.

These trends will only increase as the ecological and economic crises continue to deepen in the years to come. Unlike previous crises (i.e., the Great Depression of the 1930s), the present situation is characterized by these unique conditions:

• it is global: an economic crisis now affects the entire global system and travels far faster, with far greater impact, than at anytime in history.

• it is a convergence of crises: there is not only one crisis unfolding, but multiple threats inc. economic, ecological, military and social.