From the Age of Empires to the Age of Communities (very short English version)

Inhaltsverzeichnis dieser Seite From the Age of Empires to the Age of Communities (very short English version)    Understanding the Madness    The Myth of the Interregnum – Why China Cannot Replace the USA    The Collapse of Modernization    The Multiple Crisis    The Polydynamic Crisis    A Necessary Shift: From Critical to Visionary Intelligence    The Answer: Systemic Resilience – Community Supported Everything    Toward the Age of Communities

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Dear listeners, this is Franz Nahrada from Bad Radkersburg, welcoming you to the 69th edition of Welcome to the Global Village, first aired in July 2026 on Radio Helsinki Graz. ˧

After two very hands-on broadcasts about our current projects – Mitmachräume and MuraCalling – today I want to return to a more fundamental, theoretical level. As you will see, this theoretical level is deeply connected to the practical intentions behind our projects. ˧

Understanding the Madness

Christoph Pfluger begins his recent essay in Zeitpunkt with the sentence: “It is a high ambition to want to understand the present.” ˧

Reality seems to slip through our fingers even as we try to grasp it. Everything is being rebuilt while it is still under construction; plans change constantly; events from small states to global powers pile up; explanations contradict each other; shared understanding shrinks; and the search for culprits becomes ever more popular. ˧

We see egomaniacs, despots, ideologues, and puppets at the levers of power – East, West, and at home. We wonder: Are they ignorant? Misled? Bought? Blackmailed? Or is the problem larger than the individuals we point at? ˧

Most people simply want to live – a roof, food, a future for their children, safety, peace. And yet the world rushes toward confrontation with almost suicidal energy: rearmament, wars that can expand, economic conflict where everyone may lose, societies drifting apart, political systems losing control. ˧

A dangerous gap opens between the speed of our systems and our ability to make reasonable collective decisions. Democracy needs time; good decisions need patience, information, contradiction, and dialogue. But the present moves at breakneck speed: financial markets react in seconds, digital outrage waves in minutes, military escalations in hours. ˧

And the larger our political structures become, the longer the pathways of influence – and the more decisions escape democratic control. ˧

The Myth of the Interregnum – Why China Cannot Replace the USA

A familiar narrative says: The United States is declining, therefore China must rise. The West loses dominance, therefore a multipolar world emerges. One empire falls, another rises. ˧

But what if this narrative is wrong? ˧

What if we are not witnessing a transition from one hegemon to another – but the end of hegemony itself? ˧

China’s industrial rise, technological acceleration, and global investments seem to mirror earlier hegemonic transitions. The U.S. appears overextended, indebted, polarized, deindustrialized. ˧

But Tomasz Konicz argues: This time is different. ˧

China is not inheriting a healthy world system waiting for a new engine. It is part of a world system whose engine is already sputtering. ˧

After 2008, China compensated for collapsing export markets through massive credit-financed investment – cities, railways, factories, above all real estate. Growth continued, but increasingly on debt. ˧

Unlike the U.S. after WWII, China lacks a long phase of real industrial expansion ahead. Its “New Silk Road” loans meet a world already drowning in debt. ˧

And beneath all this lies a deeper contradiction: the crisis of value production itself. ˧

The Collapse of Modernization

Robert Kurz argued that capitalism contains a structural contradiction: ˧

It seeks to expand value through human labor – yet competition forces every enterprise to eliminate labor through automation. ˧

For decades, new industries compensated for lost jobs. Fordism created millions of new workplaces even as it rationalized production. But with microelectronics – and now AI and robotics – rationalization penetrates all sectors. New industries are automated from birth. ˧

The mass of value-producing labor shrinks. ˧

Capital flees into finance: stocks, real estate, derivatives, speculative assets. Claims on future wealth grow faster than real production. ˧

Globalization and the deeper crisis of value intertwine: production spreads worldwide, but the underlying engine weakens. ˧

The immediate answer was not collapse – it was credit. Future wealth pulled into the present. A global deficit economy emerged. ˧

This created a unique symbiosis: China produced, America consumed. China financed U.S. consumption through U.S. debt. ˧

A gigantic loop – but one with an expiration date. ˧

The Multiple Crisis

A second limit emerges: ecological boundaries. ˧

Past hegemonic cycles expanded material throughput – more energy, more resources, more transport, more consumption. ˧

But how can billions more people reach Western consumption levels while climate systems destabilize, soils erode, oceans collapse, water becomes scarce, and resource conflicts intensify? ˧

Konicz argues: China may fail not because it is weak, but because the world in which a new hegemon could stabilize the system no longer exists. ˧

We may not be in an interregnum between empires. We may be in a world where the conditions for empires themselves dissolve. ˧

The Polydynamic Crisis

We speak of many crises – economic, ecological, democratic, geopolitical, social. ˧

But what if these are not separate? What if they are interconnected expressions of one polydynamic crisis? ˧

Konicz describes a crisis that migrates across decades: breaking first at the periphery, then moving toward the centers. ˧

Each crisis is treated separately – but they reinforce each other. ˧

Climate change → droughts → crop failures → rising food prices → social conflict → political instability → migration → new conflicts. ˧

War → destroyed infrastructure → broken supply chains → rising energy and food prices → new debt → shrinking political space. ˧

Resource scarcity → geopolitical conflict → rearmament → fewer resources for ecological transition → deeper ecological crisis. ˧

The crises feed each other. The net becomes unstable. ˧

In such a world, hegemonic stability becomes impossible. ˧

A Necessary Shift: From Critical to Visionary Intelligence

Konicz’s diagnosis is powerful – but diagnosis alone is not a future. ˧

If crises are interconnected, our responses must also be interconnected. ˧

We must ask: ˧

How does agency emerge from below when large systems lose their ability to guarantee security, supply, and cohesion? ˧

The Answer: Systemic Resilience – Community Supported Everything

For decades, we relied on two systems: market and state. ˧

But there is a third: community. ˧

People can organize, finance, use, and maintain things together. ˧

Modern communities are cooperative, open, and practical: ˧

• cooperatives ˧
• commons ˧
• maker spaces ˧
• energy communities ˧
• housing communities ˧
• community-supported agriculture (CSA) ˧

“What does it cost to run a farm for a year in a way that sustains people, soil, and quality?” ˧

The community shares cost and risk. Producers and consumers become co-responsible. ˧

Why only agriculture? ˧

Why not energy, housing, mobility, care, repair, education, culture? ˧

This is Community Supported Everything (CSX) – community-supported economy. ˧

Local agency combined with global learning. Not autarky, but resilience. Not isolation, but connected self-organization. ˧

Toward the Age of Communities

Perhaps we truly witness the end of an epoch. ˧

But the end of the Age of Empires need not mean chaos. ˧

It may be the beginning of a different kind of order – one that grows from below, from many interconnected places. ˧

This may be our historical task: ˧

From the Age of Empires to the Age of Communities. ˧

And perhaps the Global Villages are one small part of that answer. ˧