A History of Societal Collapse

Previous posts have tried to do justice to the idea of collapse. 

Luke Kemp, of Cambridge University, has just published a voluminous (almost 700 

pages) book on the subject Goliath’s Curse – the history and future of societal collapse 

(2025) which I find rather disappointing since, despite its subtitle, it doesn’t try to 

summarise the previous work in the field. 

I’ve extracted the following text from his Epilogue

OUR FRAGILE FUTURE

We live in a uniquely dangerous time. Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads. Since the invention of the atom bomb the world has come frighteningly close to nuclear war at least a dozen times.

The climate change we face is an order of magnitude (ten-fold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90 per cent of life on earth 252 million years ago. Viruses can now spread at the speed of a jet plane, and computer viruses at the speed of an internet connection.

The better-known and more deeply studied threats of nuclear war and climate change are joined by new, more hypothetical technological terrors.

In 2023, hundreds of AI scientists and other luminaries (strangely including the CEOs of the main companies building these new AI systems, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind) released a statement warning against the risk of human extinction from AI. They fear that an uncontrolled, ultra-intelligent machine whose interests are not aligned with those of humanity (or at least most of us) will either destroy or enslave us. Other scholars, including biological scientists, have warned of advances in bioengineering that could create doomsday diseases – far more contagious and deadly than anything that has ever existed. And those are just the present threats. Who knows what new hazards rapid technological change could conjure in the coming decades. The confluence of these different threats has led some to call our current predicament the ‘metacrisis’, ‘the precipice’, or a ‘global polycrisis’.

Decreasing nuclear stockpiles, slashing carbon emissions, and making our societies more democratic are all completely feasible, and doing so in the long term will mean escaping these traps and digging up the root causes of existential risk. We’ll need to do what few societies have successfully done: kill Goliath.

Collapse may seem inescapable. This is an illusion. Most of the challenges we face are entirely solvable. If our world falls apart in the cold of a nuclear winter or the unending blaze of climate change, it won’t be because there was nothing we could have done. There are many ways to reduce the risk of global collapse, to defeat Goliath, and even actions that individuals can take.

We need to introduce open democracy, with deliberative juries and assemblies creating national policies for governments and providing oversight of corporations. If decision-makers are randomly selected from society, we will no longer be selecting for those who crave status and power or who rank higher in the dark triad. The constant cycling through new citizens to make decisions will also help ensure no one is in authority long enough (or holds enough power) to be corrupted.

There are many other options, such as banning the revolving door between regulators and industry. Corporations such as Exxon or the East India Company have been just as destructive as empires, and firms today are less accountable and less democratic than most states. Corporations could similarly be democratized by reforming them into large-scale worker cooperatives governed by workers alongside deliberative juries, and with an overriding legal goal of providing social and environmental benefits, not short-term returns to investors.

Levelling political power won’t be enough. Even a deep democracy that uses citizens’ assemblies and juries, as well as digital technology to carry out regular direct votes, will eventually be undermined if some people have billions of dollars with which to rig any system we come up with. One could argue that we have democracy and massive inequality in the world today, and that the two are not in tension. It’s a mistaken idea. What we ordinarily call democracy – systems in which a subset of people (who are aggressively propagandized by political marketers and billionaire-owned media empires) vote every four to five years for a tiny number of (usually rich) representatives who are funded and lobbied by corporations (for whom they frequently work afterwards), who then enact policies which usually better represent elite interests than popular opinion – is better described as an oligarchy with democratic furnishings.

It is far more inclusive than most governments throughout history, but that is a low bar compared to what is possible. Even this threadbare democracy is being frayed by increasing wealth inequality. It is no coincidence that (with a slight time lag) democracy started backsliding after inequality began rising across the world in the 1970s. Inequality in one form of power or another will eventually spill into others: the rich buy elections, overly powerful generals launch coups, and autocrats amass fortunes.

Wealth becoming more unequal may be close to an iron law throughout history, but reversing it is surprisingly easy. The simplest way is through taxation. The US had an income tax of above 90 per cent on the highest earners from 1944 through to 1963 (the highest rate in the US is now 37 per cent). It didn’t lead to an economic bust. It actually helped to usher in an economic golden age for the US. A highly progressive taxation system should be combined with an even higher tax on wealth such as land and stocks.

Other measures include placing a cap on wealth, $10 million for example (a level that is well beyond what any individual needs), or capping the income of the highest earners within companies at five times that of the lowest-paid worker.

Democratic Control of Information and the Military; One of the best ways to distribute the control of information is to break up existing monopolies, specifically in big tech and the media. This could mean creating new legislation as well as rigorously implementing existing anti-trust tools, such as the Sherman Act and Clayton Act in the US, which have already been used to block big mergers.

Rebalancing power will inevitably require increased protest and activism in the coming decades. Yet governments have made a concerted recent effort to curtail the right to protest, such as through the UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act 2022, or the 323 different bills that have been introduced in the US since 2017 that restrict the right to protest, and even encourage violence against peaceful protesters. Finding ways to roll these back and unshackle concerned citizens will be critical to levelling power and holding the Agents of Doom to account.

This is not a complete blueprint for solving our problems. Trying to foist a vision of utopia on the world has never ended well. Instead, we should democratize the world, level power, reduce Goliath fuel, reduce existential risk, and see what world blossoms from this new civilization.

Other recommedations include

• Don’t Be a Dick; First, I propose a simple pledge to not be a dick. This is a pledge to not work for, invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk. Don’t work for an Agent of Doom, whether it is an AGI lab, a fossil-fuel company, or an arms manufacturer. No institution should be financing our global descent, and no one should support one which does.

• Be a Democrat; Second, practise democracy. Democracy is not just a form of government; it is a culture and a way of life. One that all of us need to recapture. Be a democrat: don’t just vote every few years, but join a union, join an activist group (while there is no group fighting against all the sources of catastrophic risk, there hopefully will be one soon), advocate for workplace democracy, and discuss political matters in a productive way – whether it be nuclear weapons or mass surveillance or climate collapse – with friends and family members.

• Vote Against the Apocalypse; Third is voting. You are first and foremost a citizen, not a consumer. While democracy is more than voting, voting is a fundamental part of democratic practice in the modern world. If you know about climate change, a nuclear winter, and the other real risks to the survival of our species but base your vote on who promises to cut your taxes, then you are culpable for our current path towards self-destruction. It is a travesty that no election to date has been decided by the candidates’ positions on nuclear weapons and climate change. There is no reason to contribute to that trend in the future.

• Don’t Be Dominated; Fourth is to re-cultivate the counter-dominance intuitions that guided us through the Palaeolithic. Oppose domination in all your relationships, whether they be personal, family, or workplace. Whenever you come across a hierarchy, whether it is based on wealth, gender, or age, ask whether it is legitimate and whether it justifies domination. If it doesn’t, then try to overturn it.

See also Collapse, you say?
Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
Collapse You Say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020
Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021
Collapse You Say? Part 10 / Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022
Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022
Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022
Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022

A Million Readers – and counting

I’ve apparently just had my millionth click and registered my highest monthly 

audience 60,000 so far (with two weeks still to go). Many thanks to my readers! 

IMMIGRATION as the number one issue in Europe and the US

For 35 years, I’ve been a foreigner living in a country in which I wasn’t born. “Ex-pat” is the name we tend to call ourselves – but that is a bit high-falutin compared with the “immigrants” that we actually are. Sam Freedman puts it well with this comment

Migration has rocketed worldwide, driven by warfare, climate change, rapid population growth in lower-income countries and the relative ease of travel. Since 1990, the number of people living outside the country of their birth has doubled to 300 million. But as well as greater supply, there has been rising demand. The birth rate in all rich countries, apart from Israel, has fallen well below the replacement rate at which population levels are stable. This is the first time in history that there has been a sustained drop in populations without war, famine or disease as a trigger. As a result, more and more countries are becoming dependent on migrant labour to sustain shrinking and ageing workforces.

And continues with this article

Compared to the years immediately after World War Two, with much of the country in rubble and a ruined economy, or the mid-1970s with runaway inflation, blackouts and a three day week our troubles are small scale. But spend a little while scrolling through X, or reading a right-wing paper, and one would think Britain was on the brink of civil war, with endless warnings of imminent ethnic conflict and a tidal wave of violent crime. Last week one of the Telegraph’s resident apocalypse correspondents Alison Pearson took to wondering when there would be a military coup to save us from the hell in which we live. Nigel Farage made a speech warning about “societal collapse” and “civil disobedience on a vast scale” in protest at immigration and crime. The Government are not being quite so hyperbolic but have been briefing about society “fraying at the edges” and the risk of more riots. Last month, culture minister Lisa Nandy talked about her concerns that the North would “go up in flames”.

It's true that there’s plenty of anger around and it is likely that we’ll see further protests 

this summer along the lines of those in Epping over the past few weeks. Some of these could 

turn violent. But summer riots, even if they happen, are hardly a new phenomenon. 

We saw them in 2001 in various northern cities following racial tensions, and in 2011 after 

the police shot Mark Duggan. The 2011 riots led to 3.5 times as many arrests as last year’s. 

In each case the damage has been done by fairly small groups catching the police by surprise 

and violence has been contained within a few days. The vast majority of Brits, regardless of 

political views, wouldn’t go anywhere near a violent riot. 72% of people thought the sentences 

for those convicted of rioting last year were either fair or not harsh enough and an even 

larger percentage said the rioters don’t speak for them. 87% said the people who cleaned up 

after the riots represent “the real Britain” compared to the rioters, one of the highest 

percentages I’ve seen on any poll.
Britain isn’t on the verge of civil war but the relentless doomerism is damaging nonetheless. 

For a start some of it, particularly from the radical right, is clearly designed to encourage 

violence and disorder. But it also stops us focusing on the real, more boring, problems of debt 

and governance. And it can be self-fulfilling even for those who wouldn’t dream of rioting. 

People’s perceptions of crime, migration, social cohesion and the economy can be warped by 

unending negativity, which then makes things worse. Public confidence really matters. 

Ben Ansell puts it best with this analysis -

OK throat-clearing over. What I want to argue today is that there are three important 

stylised facts about British public opinion over immigration.

• Stylised Fact One: National Public Support for Immigration is Thermostatic

• Stylised Fact Two: People in More Diverse Areas Like Immigration More

• Stylised Fact Three: Local Public Support is Thermostatic but only Sort Of

A lot of our public confusion comes from mixing these things up. Facts One and 

Two feel contradictory. Fact One implies that national changes matter: when 

immigration increases nationally, support for immigration goes down. 

But Fact Two implies that in places with higher levels of immigration, support for 

immigration is also higher.
In other words, the dynamics and statics of immigration public opinion work in 

opposite directions. This helps explain why the people who are most upset by 

rising immigration are in places that don’t have many migrants.
Facts One and Three by contrast, seem to go together. If local areas that see 

higher immigration become more opposed to immigration that helps explain the 

national thermostatic effect.
Facts Two and Three, on the face of it, also clash. Local areas with high levels of 

immigrant population have higher support. But local areas with higher changes in 

immigration become less supportive. It is perhaps less surprising when you 

consider that places with very proportions of non-UK residents back in 2011 

tended to have lower rates of increase, or indeed declines, compared to places 

that began as less diverse.
This split between levels and changes helps explain why our political debates 

over immigration produce so much talking past one another.
Anti-immigration commentators see rising national discontent when net migration 

rises nationally - and indeed in some localities; and they chat to fellow travellers 

who left that there London for whiter destinations.
Pro-immigration commentators point to the disconnect with on the ground experience, 

noting that their friends who live in diverse places love diversity and it’s in places 

without immigration that people seem angriest.

And all the time, the forces of sorting and selection produce geographic communities 

that don’t understand one another. Immigration can lead to balkanisation where a 

group of ethnically homogenous residents don’t talk to outsiders and become 

increasingly detached from their fellow citizens elsewhere. 

But enough about white British residents of Essex.

Recommended Reading
Select and Respect Ben Ansell (2025) article
Immigration and Freedom Chandran Kukathas (2021) rather too philosophical a book for my taste 
Exodus – immigration and multiculturalism in the 21st Century Paul Collier (2013) Collier comes 

from a richly migrant background and has produced a profoundly interesting and challenging book

Political Scientists Don't Understand the Public

One of my favourite writers is economist Branko Milanovic who has an interesting post about a conference he attended recently on the theme of “democracy and inequality”

I would like to go through a short historical excursus. The most compact definition of 

democracy is by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: 

the struggle of political parties for the largest number of votes and thus for the right to 

rule. With that very narrow definition of democracy, we must acknowledge that the 

1930s authoritarian regimes came to power observing it. NSDAP won the largest 

number of votes in the German Parliament in the last two elections in 1932 and was 

kept out of government precisely because it was believed that it would rule dictatorially 

once it came to power. Eventually large industrialists and large landowners decided to 

somehow fence Hitler in and Hindenburg gave him the mandate to form the government 

(see, for example, Henry Turner’s excellent Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power). 

They did so because the country was becoming entirely ungovernable not only in 

Parliament but in the streets. Similar autocratic and dictatorial regimes ruled practically 

all of Europe in the 1930s: Metaxas in Greece, King Alexander in Yugoslavia, 

Marshal Pilsudski and Colonel Beck in Poland, Admiral Horthy in Hungary, 

Schuschnigg in Austria, Mussolini in Italy, Smetona in Lithuania, General Franco in 

Spain, Salazar in Portugal. 

Mark Mazower describes the period very well in Dark Continent. “Dark” of course refers 

to Europe of the 1920s and the 1930s. 
What we notice is that all these leaders were popular, some very popular, and many 

came to power by democratic or semi-democratic means. Ian Kershaw in his two-volume 

biography of Hitler writes that Hitler in 1937 was surely the most popular head of state 

in Europe. His popularity increased after Anschluss, and even more so after he got most 

of Bohemia and united the Sudeten Germans who lived there.

Let us now move to the current situation. We see something similar: governments that 

ruling opinion-makers believe are bad do seem to do well in the polls. At this very moment 

the genocide in Gaza is being conducted by a fully democratically elected government 

of Israel. The invasion of Ukraine against all international norms is being led by Putin 

who won all the elections since 2000 and although there was certainly a significant 

amount of fraud nobody denies that even if the election were totally free he would win 

them. Erdoğan who is now trying to crack down on the opposition has nevertheless 

ruled Turkey for 22 years and won the elections whose outcomes were accepted by the 

opposition (except the last one where the opposition contested the validity of the vote). 

Other so-called undemocratic leaders like Orbán in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia and 

Vučić in Serbia might at some point lose elections but, so far, for more than a decade, 

they had won them all and they still enjoy significant or even majority popular support. 

Milanovic then goes on to question the difference between the thinking of 

political scientists and the wider public 

We need to reassess why there is a gap between what most political and social scientists 

believe is desirable, and what normal people who participate in the process find attractive. 

This gap has produced many other negative effects. Those who believe that people tend to vote 

wrongly disparage them by calling them malcontents, envious, deplorables or fascists. 

The other side accuses in return various elites to be supercilious and estranged 

(precisely thanks to their education and wealth) from what normal folks really want. Both

 accusations have some truth. 

And goes on to argue -

Those who attack majorities that vote wrongly seem to speak, when it comes to international 

organizations, in tongues that come from an entirely different era. They call for 

international solidarity, inter-country cooperation etc. at the time when the world is being 

divided Into political, economic and military blocs. 
It is a fantasy that under the current conditions which are likely to prevail for at least 

several decades there will be anything but the very minimal ability to do things internationally 

whether it be fighting climate change, epidemics, or coordinating monetary policies, 

rescheduling of debts, trade rules. All of it basically has to go out of the agenda and 

would be dealt with either bilaterally or from position of force by whoever is in that position. 

So the presumption that there is some general interest shared by all citizens of the world 

is entirely inapplicable in today’s times. When one hears some such speakers, one feels 

that they have been stuck in the 1990s (when such illusions could at least have been 

entertained) and to not have observed that the world has since changed. 

The two sides speak past each other: one speaks about things which existed in 

the past and no longer exist today, and the other tries to speak of the things that 

exist today but is accused of glorifying the present and of lacking aspiration or vision 

for the betterment of humankind. This leads both sides to produce unhinged, one-sided, 

and in some cases borderline crazy arguments. 

What’s Wrong with Britain?

In the early 1960s, Penguin had a series of books under the general title “What’s wrong with Britain” which focused on its institutional failures. Some 50-60 years later the focus seems to have shifted to its failures in its political culture. This post discusses Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge – a memoir from within (2023)

We are trapped by the rigidity and shallowness of our political parties, the many weaknesses in our Civil Service, and the lack of seriousness in our political culture. We are trapeze artists, stretching for holds, on rusty equipment over fatal depths. A slip is easy. But I don’t consider my brain, or that of any of the others, adequate for our historical moment. In our case, the profession has developed not an expanded memory centre, but a capacity for shortcuts and sinuous evasions. Our brains have become like the phones in our pockets: flashing, titillating, obsequious, insinuating machines, allergic to depth and seriousness, that tempt us every moment of the day from duty, friends, family and sleep.

I had entered Iraq supporting the war on the grounds that we could at least produce a better society than Saddam Hussein’s. It was one of the greatest mistakes in my life. We attempted to impose programmes made up by Washington think tanks, and reheated in air-conditioned palaces in Baghdad – a new taxation system modelled on Hong Kong; a system of ministers borrowed from Singapore; and free ports, modelled on Dubai. But we did it ultimately at the point of a gun, and our resources, our abstract jargon and optimistic platitudes could not conceal how much Iraqis resented us, how much we were failing, and how humiliating and degrading our work had become. Our mission was a grotesque satire of every liberal aspiration for peace, growth and democracy. Most striking was not the failure, but the failure to acknowledge our failure.

Professional managers in Manchester or London saw almost all these small local institutions as examples of inefficiency. Health specialists explained that closing our community hospitals and forcing patients to take long journeys to larger hospitals would ‘improve patient outcomes’. Education specialists told us that our students would benefit from the closure of our small rural schools. Our local police stations, banks, auction marts and post offices were to be closed; so too were the volunteer fire engines in Penrith and Lazonby, the community ambulance in Alston, the community hospitals in Wigton and Brampton, and the magistrates’ courts, which had operated in Appleby since the Norman Conquest. The people making these decisions were generally based hundreds of miles from the constituency, and had little idea, I felt, of what it was like to be trapped behind a 3,000-foot snow-covered pass in Alston waiting for an ambulance from Lancaster. If they had been elderly – or going into labour –they too might have preferred a hospital which was not an hour’s drive from their family.

I joined, and sometimes organised, campaigns to save assets such as the community hospitals. We failed with police stations, magistrates’ courts, the peat works and post offices. But I was also part of the successful drives to save the volunteer fire stations in Penrith and Lazonby, the community ambulance, the Penrith cinema, the school in Alston, the community hospitals in Wigton and Brampton and the Longtown munitions depot. In every case, I made impassioned pleas to ministers, and in many cases led a crowd through a town with a megaphone. The real secret to these campaigns was not me, but people like Dawn Coates, a volunteer firefighter who had divided us into seventy different task groups for the campaign to save the Penrith cinema, writing letters, organising petitions, placing press stories, soliciting expert legal and professional opinions, and lobbying councillors of every political party.

The book then goes on to cover Stewart’s time in the Ministry of Environment 

with Liz Truss; his experience with flooding; the referendum on Brexit; his promotion 

to DfiD where he felt the tension with old colleagues who found it difficult to adjust 

to the divide between Civil Servants and Ministers; with Jihad controlled councils 

in NE Syria. He then became Minister for Africa – joint with DfiD – under Boris 

Johnson. After that he had a spell as the Prisons Minister in the Ministry of Justice 

(5 appts in 2 and a half years). The final chapters are on the campaign to become 

the Prime Minister.

Suggested Books

How they Broke Britain – James O’Brien (2023)

How Did Britain Come to This – a century of systemic failures of governance? Gwyn Bevan 

(2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGRvpppzA8E&t=496s 

Late Soviet Britain – why materialist utopias fail Abby Innes (2023) which argues that the 

Russian State and neo-liberal Britain share a common approach to the state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb07GSYG_sY 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1EJWW6p3yY 

How Westminster Works – and why it doesn’t  Ian Dunt (2023)
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ian-dunt-on-how-westminster-works-and-why-it-

doesnt/id1579722735?i=1000609622457 

Why Don’t We Revolt More Often?

I posted on this a couple of months ago but let me return to the question – with a rather fuller set of suggested reading. It is, of course, a variant of the question I confronted at University – namely why we obey. This, I learned, was answered by Max Weber in his talk about government “legitimacy” gained from one of three traditions, ”charismatic”, “traditional” and “rational-legal”. We obey because we consider the government is legitimate. When questions begin about its legitimacy, that’s the beginning of the end. That’s what happened in the countries of the eastern bloc in autumn and winter 1989. And that’s the situation currently in the US. 

If it was communism that people in the East were rebelling against in the 1980s. 

In America these days it’s Fascism.

Recommended Reading.

• Discussion Guide for Practical Radicals Deepak Bagharva and Stephanie Luce (2023) 

A highly recommended, short (just over 100 pages) guide – with lots of bullet points

• Revolution, rebellion, resistance – the power of story Eric Selbin (2021) 
  

  • In particular,  by using the concepts of myth, memory, and mimesis, it is possible 

  • to identify and illuminate four basic stories of revolution which show up in a 

  • surprising number of places and cultures across impressive stretches of time. 

  • These four stories are the Civilizing and Democratizing story of revolution, the 

  • Social Revolution story, the Freedom and Liberation story, and the Lost and 

  • Forgotten story.

  People without Power – the war on populism and the fight for democracy  Thomas Frank

  • One name scholars have applied to this tradition is the “elitist theory of democracy.” 

  •  It holds that public policy should be made by a “consensus of elites” rather than by 

  • the emotional and deluded people. It regards mass protest movements as outbreaks 

  • of irrationality. Marginalized people, it assumes, are marginalized for a reason. 

  • The critical thing in a system like ours, it maintains, is to allow members of  the 

  • professional political class to find consensus quietly, harmoniously, and without too 

  • much interference from subaltern groups. The obvious, objective fact that the 

  • professional political class fails quite frequently is regarded in this philosophy as 

  • uninteresting if not impossible. When anti-populists have occasion to mention the 

  • elite failures of recent years—deindustrialization, financial crisis, opioid epidemic, 

  • everything related to the 2016 election—they almost always dismiss them as inevitable. 

  • If only it were possible, they sigh, to dissolve the people and elect another.

  Revolutions – how they changed history and what they mean today ed Furtado (2020) 

  • The aim of this book is to look at revolutions around the world and through history: 

  • not only at their causes, crises and outcomes, but also, for the more distant events, 

  • at their long-term legacies and their changing, sometimes contested meanings today. 

  • Historians, mostly native of or active within those societies, have been asked to reflect 

  • on the following questions: What were the essential causes of the revolution? 

  • What narrative of events, protagonists and ideologies is most commonly accepted? 

  • What impact is it believed to have had? What legacy does it have today in national 

  • self-perception and values? Has this changed significantly over past decades?

• Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads – technological change and the future of politics 

• Carles Boix (2019)

Technological pessimists foresee a brave new world where, once artificial intelligence makes its final breakthrough into the so- called “singularity moment,” workers will become completely redundant or will draw, at most, a meager salary. Sitting at the top of a mass of unemployed and underemployed individuals, there will be a small creative class— a thin layer of inventors, top managers, and highly educated professionals— enjoying the benefits of automation and globalization. The system of democratic capitalism that has so far prevailed in the advanced world will crumble under the weight of so much economic inequality. Policy makers will not be able to reconcile free markets with representative elections and deliver both economic growth and a generous welfare state in the way they did during the better part of the twentieth century. The new technologies of information and communication invented in Silicon Valley will take us back to the contentious politics of nineteenth- century capitalism, finally vindicating Karl Marx, who, more than 150 years ago, predicted the eventual substitution of machines for workers, the immiserization of the masses, and the collapse of capitalism at the hands of a horde of angry men, armed with pitchforks and torches, marching down on the wealthy few— now huddled in their Manhattan and Bay Area mansions.

On the other side of the aisle, technological optimists concede that automation will disrupt the labor market and hurt the wages of the least educated, alienating them from politics and elections. That “process of industrial mutation”, to employ Schumpeter’s renowned words, “incessantly revolutionize[d] the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one”— modifying the relationship between capital and labor, the patterns of employment, and the distribution of income over time (Schumpeter 1950, 83). In doing so, it periodically generated a (changing) number of critical political challenges that were then met with a particular set of policy responses.

The same logic applies to today’s technological innovations. Because they have already heightened economic inequality and may result in an even more extensive robotization of substantial numbers of (low- and semiskilled) jobs, they could put an end to the broad social consensus around democracy and capitalism that prevailed during most of the twentieth century— particularly in the advanced world. That does not necessarily mean, however, that they will— and that they will make us travel back in time to the nineteenth century, when the industrial capitalism invented in

Manchester and its cotton factories turned out to be incompatible with the construction of fully democratic institutions. The reason is simple. The growing economic and political tensions we are witnessing today are happening in very affluent societies: their average per capita incomes are more than ten times higher than at the beginning of the first Industrial Revolution. So much wealth, jointly with the presence of stable democratic institutions and relatively well structured bureaucracies, should give us much more maneuvering room than any generations before us ever had to respond to the technological and economic challenges of today. Therefore, the task ahead of us is to think about how to harness those economic and institutional assets to the advantage of the many.

Rules for Revolutionaries – how big organizing can change everything B Bond and Z Exley 

(2016) Basically the tools used on the Bernie Sanders campaigns

• Beautiful Trouble – a toolbox for revolution ed Andrew Boyd (2012) Highly recommended

•  – with bullet points for all the key tactics

Transnational Protest and Global Activism ed Della Porta and S Tarrow (2005)

Organising for Social Change – manual for activists S Max et al (3rd ed 2001)

The 8 stages of successful movements Bill Moyer (1987) an article by a social activist which 

in some 40 pages gives the essence

• From Mobilisation to Revolution  Charles Tilly (1978) one of 2 great US writers on revolution, 
  the other being Sidney Tarrow  

Rules for Radicals Saul Alinsky (1972) The basic guidebook for change agents everywhere 

by the radical Chicago community organiser

Why Men Rebel Ted Gurr (1970) a rather academic study of the phenomenon

UPDATE
Why Reform isn’t enough (The Peaceful Revolutionary 2025)

immigration 
Peter McCormack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C4h0pYzY7M 
David Starkey on UK doom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5emeJ_XyM4 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McZOj3j7gPI UK commander 
David Betz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgwO9G1hmDQ