Transition Towns Post-Mortem: An Opportunity Lost

Transition Towns Post-Mortem: an Opportunity Lost

[Editor: this article stems from my ten years of doctoral research and thinking about Transition Towns, a movement for local resilience and climate change remediation that was active between 2007 and 2020.]

My reflection on Transition Towns, post-mortem, has led me to see that Transition Towns almost had it. It came very close to being a resilience movement for subsistence and survival of the precariat in economically and ecologically deteriorating conditions. 

But for one flaw: they failed to address the political issues. I don’t mean political as partisan, but political as in polity, understanding the political nature of their project. It was only until the second Transition Guide that the leaders understood that what they were doing was “deeply political”, but still failed to articulate that through their groups and networks. 

In terms of political economy, the movement provided a grassroots safety net of mutual support for the precariously [un,under] employed. Politically, it was a project of self-organization and self-governance. 

If they had used political models such as Murray Bookchin’s municipalism, or Marina Sitrin’s horizontalism, or John Holloway’s autonomism, or Inhabit Global’s anarchism, all of which connect to on-the-ground movements such as the Italian autonomists, the Zapatistas, the Rojava autonomists, the Palestinians, the Myanmar Resistance, Indigenous sovereignty, and the Favela survival projects, they would have been able to articulate a geo-political consciousness that would have strengthened and coordinated their movement for the long term. 

Transition Towns saw their dependence on fossil fuels as a vulnerability, but they still did not see the broader form of economic and political decline and social collapse that they were about to encounter. They were so focused on issues of energy scarcity and dependence, and then climate change, that they failed to see the broader economic and political impact of their project. The movement was driven by participants who were largely and comfortably middle class, who still had regular employment, who were still housed, indeed, who could afford solar panels, private garden plots and electric cars.

That kind of middle class comfort and security is now being threatened and diminished. As more middle class jobs are replaced by automated computer systems (AI), or lost by the abandonment of the service sector (e.g. privatized health care), they become the truly precariat, and must turn toward a movement for subsistence and survival, regardless of what energy regime is extant.

I would like to see a revival of the Transition Towns movement that is steered by the precariat, that is politically self-conscious, and therefore organized as a class interest. The ascendent Techno-fascist class continues to replace the middle class with platform precarity and contract slavery, or simply to eliminate “surplus labor” through death, starvation, incarceration, warfare and deportation. These are no longer just billionaires who want to make money off the middle class; these are techno-politicos who want to engineer society to operate without labor, exclusively for the richest strata of society. This could create conditions for the Transition Towns movement to coalition with the rest of abandoned humanity: the precariat, the poor, the migrants, the colonized tribes, the slum dwellers, the urban underclass, in a generalized resistance to techno-fascism. 

The Energy Connection

The techno-fascists have direct control over energy extraction and distribution, and they need ever more of it, from any source, carbon-heavy or carbon-neutral. Their enormous consumption of energy creates an ever-expanding cloud of carbon pollution and poisoning, and energy scarcity for the rest of us. This threatens our ability to survive in a complex society that can function only with exponentially increasing energy. They have no concern for carbon pollution, for climate change, environment, or the continued survival of planetary life. They have no concern for the destruction of the ecosystem, so long as they can live in eco-bubbles that serve them. 

The Political Connection: Techno-fascists as the new ruling class

Techno-fascists are just that: political neo-fascists with very sophisticated digital technology that can be used to control individuals, communities and societies at micro- and macro-levels. The Techno-fascists will increase their direct governance over forces of control: the military, the government, the surveillance and carceral state; and forces of subsistence: energy production, cities, housing and all urban infrastructure, and agricultural land, ergo, all resources needed for subsistence and survival. 

The Techno-fascists already have nearly total control over the ideological sectors of society; information, knowledge, media, and all forms of communication. This forces movements like Transition Towns to see the ideological impact of Techno-fascism, and organize itself as a form of ideological, and therefore political, resistance. 

Furthermore, unlike neoliberal corporations that compete with each other, Techno-fascists will dominate through a much more organized, coordinated network of mutually reinforcing connections among corporate entities. Market competition per se will be seen as entropic waste and minimized. Energy efficiency will require monopolization, market integration and cooperative agreement within the techno-fascist class. Even now, around 2,000 of the most elite billionaires control the wealth and infrastructure of two-thirds of the global population.

As the Techno-fascists emerge as the new dominant class, I would like to see a Transition Towns movement that recognizes the Techno-fascists as the ruling class and actively organize against it as a class interest.

Inhabit Global is where I see the clearest articulation of this kind of geo-political analysis, linked to an on-the-ground organizing model.

For now, here is the crux of their analysis:

Watch as Silicon Valley replaces everything with robots. New fundamentalist 

death cults make ISIS look like child’s play. The authorities

release a geolocation app to real-time snitch on immigrants and political 

dissent while meta-fascists crowdfund the next concentration

camps. Government services fail. Politicians turn to more draconian

measures and the left continues to bark without teeth.

Meanwhile glaciers melt, wildfires rage, Hurricane Whatever drowns

another city. Ancient plagues reemerge from thawing permafrost.

Endless work as the rich benefit from ruin. Finally, knowing we did

nothing, we perish, sharing our tomb with all life on the planet.

This is their brief analysis of the collapse, but they also have a model of resilience, resistance and survival, which I will link to and post in a follow-up article. 

July 2025 by the Cyberpunk Buddhist