In the last post I made the claim that the American empire topped out in the seventies as the cost of energy rose. It's misleading, though, to look at the price of oil over this time because it doesn't include other costs that were absorbed through other entities, such as U.S. government spending, or through the expansion of the dollar. It's these twin deficits born by American beneficiaries that reflect what is, in essence, the increased demands of the energy system as a whole. This would include military spending, which occurred with the expansion of American military presence around the world, and oil infrastructure like supertankers and pipelines. But it also includes the need for more dollars available to the market for global trade to function, as almost every single commodity on the global market is priced in dollars. The reason the U.S. has run continuous trade deficits since the seventies is because dollars are produced through credit. It's akin to running a four-decade long bar tab and never settling up, with the added counter-intuitive aspect in which the bartender uses the credit represented in your bar tab to make mortgage payments on your house. This last part is why any discussion of money always has a gloss of weirdness. It is an abstract representation of real wealth and not the wealth itself.
As the long as the flow of money has a parallel activity in the maintenance and functioning of wealth, then the money can be said to be good. When the parallels diverge. in other words, when the representation of money rises without a corresponding rise in wealth, then the system gets into trouble. What has been the case since the seventies is that the money system has grown faster than the wealth system, which is evident in the amount of total debt and why the percentage of debt compared to GDP is so monumental. Now we've entered the territory of bad money defined as debt that cannot be repaid. Why? Because the story of the past few decades has told us that wealth doesn't just simply grow in accordance with the growth in the money. To answer this second "why" question it's necessary to talk about what oil is and does.
Oil is a form of natural wealth. In fact, it is the single most important form of natural wealth in the current globalized industrial economy. This is because oil is a concentrated energy source that enables every other form of wealth, natural or otherwise, to come into being. Oil has advantages over every other important energy source, like coal, methane, sunlight, or nuclear in that it has properties, such as it's especially high concentration favorable to all others except nuclear, and it is a liquid which makes it good for storing and transporting, for use in engines, and for extracting from the ground. For all these reasons it is considered the ur-(original) resource. It makes all other forms of wealth much easier to generate than all other sources do. So when oil's costs rise, and they have been rising remorselessly, the cost of everything else rises along with it.
The oil shocks of the seventies destroyed the Keynesian global money system established at the end of World War II. This is not the view of conventional economists, so if you're at a party populated by these or other market creatures, expect pushback. With that said, the inflation brought on by rising oil led to an event not thought possible at the time called stagflation, which simply means that there was a condition of simultaneous rising prices alongside stagnant economic growth. The remedy for this, among other things, was the system of debt based money and the necessary expansion of credit, which served to cause the current crisis, by backing the dollar with commodities rather than with gold. You could say this was the beginning of globalization, or at least a major advance of it, characterized primarily by globalizing markets in currency, credit, and labor. This system is why it now seems like everything is made in China.
So the rise in debt is a measure of decline. If you go back to Tainter's observations, it is increasing societal complexity in order to solve problems. Doing this comes with added costs, fixed costs like infrastructure, that need to be maintained. Think of the container ships that bring goods from China to the U.S. They are both massive and numerous. Or all the new factories that had to be built in China to supply American markets. Because of these new investments, globalization only works if energy is cheap, which it had been for the entirety of the eighties and nineties when globalization came into being. However, when the price rose from something like $15 in 2000 to $148 in 2007, the globalized system began to falter, causing a massive debt unwind, beginning with the sell-off of oil. The system of globalization could not function with such high prices and ultimately manifested itself in a credit crisis starting with mortgages, and then everything else. The entire system of globalized finance was at risk of complete failure.
Increasingly complex systems require an increase in available energy. The increase in available energy effectively stopped sometime in the mid-2000's. The cost of new energy, as seen in North American fracked oil and other non-conventional methods, have not provided the economy with a significant increase in available energy. The reason is that the cost, in energy terms, is too high for getting a new barrel of oil. Here is the point at which you see available energy as the heart of the problem for the system. Each new barrel of oil comes with a lower net energy that can be used outside the system to get the new barrel of oil. By this I mean for the use of society. You may have an increase in the number of barrels on the market, but each barrel now is either less energy dense, as is the case with biofuels, or that the extraction of that barrel cost something like 30% of the energy the oil in the barrel embodies. Either way, you are looking at a reduced available energy and it directly explains the higher cost.
So the narrative goes like this: Since the original oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, the response has been to globalize the economy by off-shoring jobs to save money on labor, to make global arrangements for the free flow of credit and investment to enable a build up of the necessary infrastructure for globalization, and to expand the role of floating currencies like the dollar to create money on demand. This enabled a resurgent economy throughout the eighties and nineties because of the efficiencies of labor and money (with increased energy), helped along by instantaneous transfers of capital to anywhere in the world with computers. Globalization added fixed costs that become burdensome to maintain once the cost of energy had risen to the point that globalization no longer serves as a solution to the problems that began with the first energy shock. So what happens next?
Americans and other Westerners like to talk about the "power of innovation", or believe that the only limit is the imagination, or the will to do something. Hard to prove either way. But I wonder what new system could salvage our current lifestyles here in the rich countries. Aside from the doubtful new energy sources waiting in the wings to replace fossil fuels, what other system could we possibly innovate to replace globalization? How much bigger can it possibly get, given that the system is compelled to grow? Is there a yet-to-be- innovated "super-" or "mega-" globalization out there in the future? Seems unlikely, given the nature of energy supply. Innovation rides on the back of efficiency in money and labor productivity. The entire project of globalization has been built with the collapse of oil prices in the early 80's. The energy shock of the 2000's had a different and permanent cause from the two in the seventies, which was geological rather than political. The question of what the future holds will be a matter of what we can do without and still live dignified lives. It is no longer about having more.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Saturday, November 22, 2014
A Word on Collapse Narratives
To be sure, predictions of doom have always been with us humans. But then again, so has doom, in one form or another, punctuated our shared history and made history an interesting subject. Trying to match doomsayer to doom event throughout history would make for a fascinating book, but I'm not the one to write it. I'll just consider it self-evident that humans carry an ongoing concern about an event that reliably occurs from time to time.
I think generically people harbor the fear of a collapse of social order however it is caused. What people don't recognize and therefore don't fear, is societal collapse. That is, when the activities of the society produce the conditions which become the very cause of the collapse, like an underground river eroding support for the land above. It's not going too far to say that it is a natural occurrence because the ultimate cause is reducible to natural laws which play out over long stretches of time.
In the world we live in today, this comes in two related forms simultaneously. Climate change and resource depletion, including and especially of energy, both have the potential to cause society to collapse. I only say potential because it has yet to happen, but really it is inevitable due to the "nature" of it. What humanity does as a collective to respond to the collapse matters a lot, but the collapse itself is inevitable. So I'll need to define what I mean and what I don't mean, by collapse.
I've mentioned Joseph Tainter in a past post but I'll expand on what I said. He is an archeologist who wrote "The Collapse of Complex Societies" published in 1987. His definition of collapse is simply a loss or reduction of societal complexity. It's a rather clinical definition, necessarily, because he is generalizing all collapses. But don't be lulled into complacency by this innocent-sounding terminology because societal collapse is a frightening event to experience. If you want to learn more then this here video has most of what you need to know.
Tainter mentions a lot of subjects that should sound familiar to the currently living. Rising taxes, rising debt, rising cost of doing things, and attendant problems that arise from these trends like falling living standards for most people. Complexity is a central theme of this blog and this is where it comes from. It is abstract but that doesn't make it any less real, it just means that it is hard to notice
unless you take a wide view. A simple way to start pulling the threads of what a complex society is to compare the complexity of a small city-state with that of a large empire, say Sparta and the Roman Empire. Rome had many more layers of administration, much wider trade systems, much larger military, and much more infrastructure to maintain than Sparta ever did. Thus, Rome was more expensive to operate and to maintain, and as the complexity increased over the centuries, so did the costs, which weakened its ability to respond to crises, such as German attacks, or bad harvests.
The collapse phase of Rome was centuries long. There's no record I know of that says anybody ever talked about it or understood at the time what was happening. I suspect the Roman peasants, squeezed by tax collectors to fund the growing demands of the elites, had a hunch when they eventually threw in their lot with the Germanic hordes late in the game, but they were illiterate.
The most important tidbit to mentally stow away is that it happens over historical time. The experience of a collapsing society is one of generations, with the inflection point only seen after decades in hindsight.
So how does the experience of Rome apply today? A lot of conflicting views have been advanced as to why Rome collapsed and haven't we learned something in the meantime? To answer the second question first, maybe we have learned, certainly we've learned, but maybe we haven't learned this. The British Empire was the first global empire, and the U.S. took responsibility for it once the British could no longer do so. It's not enough to talk about Britain, though, because there were many maritime global empires which sprang from Western Europe from the 15th century on. So it's more accurate and more complete to say it was a Western Empire, of which the U.S. is the latest and greatest manifestation of a long, singular period of history. All of the European empires have crumbled leaving the U.S. the last one standing.
Now it's possible to talk about inflection points. There are different inflection points for the different empires and all the points are in themselves stretches of time. The British Empire began its decline in the second half of the 19th century. Spain began its decline in the early 17th century. The whole of Western Europe began it's decline at the onset of WWI, after the imperial competition had reached a zero sum situation when the world held no more fruitful lands to conquer. The Great War was about a rising Germany, at the time probably the most powerful country in the world and late to the race for empire, found it would need to take from the other empires in order to fulfill it's ambition. Thus the zero sum game was played.
The U.S., I think, probably reached it's point of diminishing returns in the early 70's. It is when the costs of the entire system of industry, geopolitics, military, and the bread and circuses of social programs rose dramatically. The inflation blowout during that decade was resolved through heavy borrowing and the advent of the petrodollar system that required trade and fiscal deficits to work. The 70's was when the increments of growth began to diminish and the cost of obtaining that growth started to rise. This process is no where better understood that in the debt to GDP ratio, either nationally or globally.
In the wake of the 2008 financial smackdown this process of increasing debt to get diminishing GDP growth has gone into overdrive. Hence my gloominess about the future prospects of growth or even particularly happy times. But it all takes time to unfold. People do respond to slow the process down. As Tainter mentions, this normally involves adding complexity to the system. Of course, that new complexity in time grows to be a bigger burden. Societies pile on more complexity because it adds efficiency to the system, but efficiency itself runs into diminishing returns. So call it a trap, but one that is natural to fall into because people see "problems" they want to "solve". They do not think in terms of predicaments, because doing so means accepting there is no solution that can be applied to get things back to the way they were. Only adapting to new conditions remains, and, though adaptation sounds like a nice word, adapting to conditions constrained by the nature of the predicament means there are only bad and less bad choices available.
I think generically people harbor the fear of a collapse of social order however it is caused. What people don't recognize and therefore don't fear, is societal collapse. That is, when the activities of the society produce the conditions which become the very cause of the collapse, like an underground river eroding support for the land above. It's not going too far to say that it is a natural occurrence because the ultimate cause is reducible to natural laws which play out over long stretches of time.
In the world we live in today, this comes in two related forms simultaneously. Climate change and resource depletion, including and especially of energy, both have the potential to cause society to collapse. I only say potential because it has yet to happen, but really it is inevitable due to the "nature" of it. What humanity does as a collective to respond to the collapse matters a lot, but the collapse itself is inevitable. So I'll need to define what I mean and what I don't mean, by collapse.
I've mentioned Joseph Tainter in a past post but I'll expand on what I said. He is an archeologist who wrote "The Collapse of Complex Societies" published in 1987. His definition of collapse is simply a loss or reduction of societal complexity. It's a rather clinical definition, necessarily, because he is generalizing all collapses. But don't be lulled into complacency by this innocent-sounding terminology because societal collapse is a frightening event to experience. If you want to learn more then this here video has most of what you need to know.
Tainter mentions a lot of subjects that should sound familiar to the currently living. Rising taxes, rising debt, rising cost of doing things, and attendant problems that arise from these trends like falling living standards for most people. Complexity is a central theme of this blog and this is where it comes from. It is abstract but that doesn't make it any less real, it just means that it is hard to notice
unless you take a wide view. A simple way to start pulling the threads of what a complex society is to compare the complexity of a small city-state with that of a large empire, say Sparta and the Roman Empire. Rome had many more layers of administration, much wider trade systems, much larger military, and much more infrastructure to maintain than Sparta ever did. Thus, Rome was more expensive to operate and to maintain, and as the complexity increased over the centuries, so did the costs, which weakened its ability to respond to crises, such as German attacks, or bad harvests.
The collapse phase of Rome was centuries long. There's no record I know of that says anybody ever talked about it or understood at the time what was happening. I suspect the Roman peasants, squeezed by tax collectors to fund the growing demands of the elites, had a hunch when they eventually threw in their lot with the Germanic hordes late in the game, but they were illiterate.
The most important tidbit to mentally stow away is that it happens over historical time. The experience of a collapsing society is one of generations, with the inflection point only seen after decades in hindsight.
So how does the experience of Rome apply today? A lot of conflicting views have been advanced as to why Rome collapsed and haven't we learned something in the meantime? To answer the second question first, maybe we have learned, certainly we've learned, but maybe we haven't learned this. The British Empire was the first global empire, and the U.S. took responsibility for it once the British could no longer do so. It's not enough to talk about Britain, though, because there were many maritime global empires which sprang from Western Europe from the 15th century on. So it's more accurate and more complete to say it was a Western Empire, of which the U.S. is the latest and greatest manifestation of a long, singular period of history. All of the European empires have crumbled leaving the U.S. the last one standing.
Now it's possible to talk about inflection points. There are different inflection points for the different empires and all the points are in themselves stretches of time. The British Empire began its decline in the second half of the 19th century. Spain began its decline in the early 17th century. The whole of Western Europe began it's decline at the onset of WWI, after the imperial competition had reached a zero sum situation when the world held no more fruitful lands to conquer. The Great War was about a rising Germany, at the time probably the most powerful country in the world and late to the race for empire, found it would need to take from the other empires in order to fulfill it's ambition. Thus the zero sum game was played.
The U.S., I think, probably reached it's point of diminishing returns in the early 70's. It is when the costs of the entire system of industry, geopolitics, military, and the bread and circuses of social programs rose dramatically. The inflation blowout during that decade was resolved through heavy borrowing and the advent of the petrodollar system that required trade and fiscal deficits to work. The 70's was when the increments of growth began to diminish and the cost of obtaining that growth started to rise. This process is no where better understood that in the debt to GDP ratio, either nationally or globally.
In the wake of the 2008 financial smackdown this process of increasing debt to get diminishing GDP growth has gone into overdrive. Hence my gloominess about the future prospects of growth or even particularly happy times. But it all takes time to unfold. People do respond to slow the process down. As Tainter mentions, this normally involves adding complexity to the system. Of course, that new complexity in time grows to be a bigger burden. Societies pile on more complexity because it adds efficiency to the system, but efficiency itself runs into diminishing returns. So call it a trap, but one that is natural to fall into because people see "problems" they want to "solve". They do not think in terms of predicaments, because doing so means accepting there is no solution that can be applied to get things back to the way they were. Only adapting to new conditions remains, and, though adaptation sounds like a nice word, adapting to conditions constrained by the nature of the predicament means there are only bad and less bad choices available.
Friday, November 14, 2014
Elusive Alternatives.
At the end of the last post I said the ongoing economic crisis is really an energy crisis masquerading as an economic one. By talking about empire as a manifestation of the Maximum Power Principle I merely wanted to connect fundamental bio-physical realities to grand scale human behavior. From this point it's possible to generalize about all sorts of other grand scale human projects based on this underlying logic. If humanity is going to address the global crises of energy, environment, and economy in a decent and civilized manner, this is a good place to start, because it all comes down to taming our appetites for consumption, status, and expansion. Our appetites start at this level.
The most important feature to remember about the American led global system of exchange and power (political) relations is that it must grow, materially and nominally as represented by GDP numbers, and enters a crisis phase when the growth slows or stops. The global economy is in a crisis now because it has essentially stopped growing and has even started to shrink. Economists, policy makers, politicians, and other creatures of the market are flummoxed about it. No one has publicly aired the view that maybe the jig is up on economic growth. The different economies around the world have tried various strategies to revive the patient, but none are successful and only make the problem worse.
There is a fundamental reason for this. Economists see their discipline as distinct and independent of other fields of study. This might be because they see it simply as a field of study as opposed to a representation of a distinct reality. A physical scientist, on the other hand, who looks into the place of the economy in a broader spectrum would see it as a system nested within larger systems. So the economy is nested within society which is in turn nested within the biosphere. A smaller system cannot grow to be bigger than the system which encompasses on. The space all life occupies is a thin layer of favorable conditions on the surface of the planet which operates according to it's own laws. This fact is not accounted for in the discipline of economics even though it is the biggest system relevant to human economic life.
The effect of this is that economics cannot explain in it's own terms what is causing the economic crisis. Having said that, it can still describe what is happening. So it's very useful to understand what is happening in the economy as it is a manifestation of the underlying energy crisis. Because the Earth can cough up only so much fossil fuel, the cost of that fuel goes up. Eventually it will be infinitely expensive. The trick is to find alternatives to replace fossil fuels. The problem is that the signal sent by the market seems to be that there is no replacement that will keep this system going.
This is evident in the failure of alternatives like solar and wind to find a lift-off point of investment. The only way it ever gets done, like in Germany, is through very large government subsidies. Even so, the market still does not give the signal that a revolution in energy sources is at hand. Why that is the case is a long story, but the alternative energy market, with the historically enormous incentives of cheap credit and high oil prices, doesn't gain traction without subsidies. The way I read this is that the future will be smaller, less energetic, and more expensive. Not a recipe for economic growth.
This is the essence of the energy crisis impact on the economy. We are forced to change fuels but our means to do it (the market system) doesn't want to go there. The market will not pick these alternative sources because they cannot replace fossil fuels. We, as a human society, will have to adapt to the limitations of these other fuels. And that means accepting a reduced capacity to do the work fossil fuels do for us. The only question is by how much.
Now for some headlines.
Further disincentives for alternative energy.
Which will whipsaw energy prices at some point.
The only ones who can afford electric cars.
Running out of capital.
The most important feature to remember about the American led global system of exchange and power (political) relations is that it must grow, materially and nominally as represented by GDP numbers, and enters a crisis phase when the growth slows or stops. The global economy is in a crisis now because it has essentially stopped growing and has even started to shrink. Economists, policy makers, politicians, and other creatures of the market are flummoxed about it. No one has publicly aired the view that maybe the jig is up on economic growth. The different economies around the world have tried various strategies to revive the patient, but none are successful and only make the problem worse.
There is a fundamental reason for this. Economists see their discipline as distinct and independent of other fields of study. This might be because they see it simply as a field of study as opposed to a representation of a distinct reality. A physical scientist, on the other hand, who looks into the place of the economy in a broader spectrum would see it as a system nested within larger systems. So the economy is nested within society which is in turn nested within the biosphere. A smaller system cannot grow to be bigger than the system which encompasses on. The space all life occupies is a thin layer of favorable conditions on the surface of the planet which operates according to it's own laws. This fact is not accounted for in the discipline of economics even though it is the biggest system relevant to human economic life.
The effect of this is that economics cannot explain in it's own terms what is causing the economic crisis. Having said that, it can still describe what is happening. So it's very useful to understand what is happening in the economy as it is a manifestation of the underlying energy crisis. Because the Earth can cough up only so much fossil fuel, the cost of that fuel goes up. Eventually it will be infinitely expensive. The trick is to find alternatives to replace fossil fuels. The problem is that the signal sent by the market seems to be that there is no replacement that will keep this system going.
This is evident in the failure of alternatives like solar and wind to find a lift-off point of investment. The only way it ever gets done, like in Germany, is through very large government subsidies. Even so, the market still does not give the signal that a revolution in energy sources is at hand. Why that is the case is a long story, but the alternative energy market, with the historically enormous incentives of cheap credit and high oil prices, doesn't gain traction without subsidies. The way I read this is that the future will be smaller, less energetic, and more expensive. Not a recipe for economic growth.
This is the essence of the energy crisis impact on the economy. We are forced to change fuels but our means to do it (the market system) doesn't want to go there. The market will not pick these alternative sources because they cannot replace fossil fuels. We, as a human society, will have to adapt to the limitations of these other fuels. And that means accepting a reduced capacity to do the work fossil fuels do for us. The only question is by how much.
Now for some headlines.
Further disincentives for alternative energy.
Which will whipsaw energy prices at some point.
The only ones who can afford electric cars.
Running out of capital.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Going Deep on U.S.-Russia
It's tempting for people when trying to comprehend a complex situation, or an apparently simple situation with a complex set of causes, to reduce the complexity into a single simple frame. It might be through overestimating the power of the actors involved, as is the case with the more conspiratorial minded among us, hallucinating all-powerful world governments and such. An "us vs. them" mindset falls into the oversimplification mode, which will overlay a warfare construct onto the reality of an event and provide an inviting ontological easement for brains beleaguered by too many moving parts. A number of well-intentioned but failed policies, for example, have begun with a warfare approach, like the "war on drugs' or "war on poverty". That people habitually oversimplify in the normal flow of consciousness is a fair assessment, and it allows the bearer of that consciousness to unload the burden of consciousness with a more streamlined flow for the unconscious to have. This is the state of things.
The aim of this blog post is for the above paragraph to make sense.
In the last post I ended with what I consider the drivers of the conflict between Russia and the United States. There are many classifiable drivers for this conflict, involving geostrategic, geopolitical, and geofinancial dictates, based on the logic of the immediate situation nested within longer term goals. These three geoclassifications serve one another and constitute the realm of the geoelite. But rather than put "geo-" in front of every word, I will state that the conflict heating up between the U.S. and Russia cannot be properly understood without first understanding how these three forces operate and serve each other in the ambitions of the main benefactor, the United States.
To put it another way, the United States is an empire and it behaves as such. In every important way, the necessities of maintaining an empire are played out in the expansionist policies of the United States. The reason is simple: Empires must expand in order to maintain themselves. Once an empire has stopped expanding it faces a crisis of maintenance and begins the decline towards it's ultimate collapse. After the Cold War the U.S. saw the world as full of promise for the reason that it had no rivals. An enormous global power vacuum opened up after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum.
Some people have a problem with talk of an American empire. Others do not. It is a word that has become fraught with moral judgements, or with a sense that empire is a pre-modern political form that took American values of liberty, democracy, and political freedom to transcend through the example of it's history. Others, such as Dick Cheney, Robert Kagan, or much of the world's population outside the U.S., have neither a problem with the term nor feel that a hegemonic imperial power is anything unique. It just happens to be America at this juncture. With that said, the way I use "empire" is mainly descriptive and I find it useful because the meaning is familiar and places it into a history that reaches beyond World War II. It's also not too hard to think about what an empire is for, as opposed to, say, what a superpower, or a hegemon is for. Otherwise, there is not a shred of difference among them.
But there are some differences, some aspects of American society that are unique to history. The rights that form the basis of our laws, the rule of law itself, and universal suffrage found in the United States and it's inner circle of allies are triumphs of the modern age. The modern age itself, however, is singularly unique in the material well being of those who live in it. I say "however", because it has also allowed us moderns to push this material basis for empire (society, economy) into the background noise of our unconscious, and that comes with psychological and other costs. In the enumeration of modern achievements the biophysical basis for it's existence has been undervalued so totally that we, formally and systematically, believe that we have transcended it. Or just forgotten. By using "empire" I also hope to draw this biophysical basis back into the mix.
The thrust of this argument is that Empire is a manifestation of the Maximum Power Principle acting through the medium of the human mind. The Maximum Power Principle is a physical principle used in ecology and other physical systems to describe the behavior of a thermodynamic system. It has been proposed as the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, which is an interesting side note. These systems could include ecosystems, economies, or as the process of competition among species in evolution. It is an energy principle which states that an organism will maximize it's consumption of useful energy to maximize it's (re)production. It explains why an invasive species can dominate an ecosystem, even to it's own eventual detriment, if there is no natural predator or other limiting factor to it's growth. The fruit flies in your first grade science experiments, for example, whose population swelled only to die off when the food ran out demonstrated the Maximum Power Principle. If you are a living organism then the Maximum Power Principle applies to you.
Here's Howard Odom's quote from Wikipedia: "The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."
The Maximum Power Principle has the added benefit of operating subconsciously. In a human system, this means that decisions made by the conscious mind are necessarily within and constrained by the legal limits of the organizational properties dictated by useful energy. Whether the system prevails or not depends on the competition. A system that is more efficient at maximizing it's energy intake, it's transformation into productive forms will out compete less efficient systems. Sounds like capitalism to me. But it also describes how empires work.
You could consider the U.S. as a capitalistic empire and there would be no contradiction from this perspective. The contradiction in the system lies between democracy and empire and, by extension, capitalism. Democracy becomes an effort to apply an inefficiency onto a power maximizing social tendency. But that's another story. A capitalistic empire has a built in, self-reinforcing mechanism with the two pillars of financial and military power in the service of political power. It's true that all states operate this way and always have. Once you add the imperial element, the character changes, and what changes the character is the growth imperative. because that makes it qualitatively different from other societies.
The Maximum Power Principle describes a natural process. By saying that it describes the process of empire is to say that empire is a natural ordering of large scale human activity. It is not a moral system in the same way capitalism is not moral. Morality (or moral judgement) can be applied to each and is applied to each, but the process itself is not moral. Most people, if you ask them, would say "growth" is a good thing, and could justify it in moral terms. But it is more accurate and useful to say that growth is natural and to leave morality aside.
By looking at it this way I want to clear out the clutter of preconceived notions and judgements not because I believe a moral judgement is unwarranted, but in order to make better judgements, moral or otherwise. A capitalistic empire has a double-growth imperative which explains the behavior of the Untied States today. That it is the aggressor in this historical instance of conflict with Russia could be considered a moral judgement, but it can also be a statement of fact. I consider it a statement of fact because of the growth imperative. The way capitalistic imperialism grows is through the expansion of the markets through client states. By incorporating new client states into the system enables the imperial center to benefit from the activity of a client states economy. In fact, it benefits more from this economic activity than does the client state, which I think explains the growing divide in the wealth distribution both globally and within the U.S. The global maldistribution of wealth is not a principle cause of the crisis (in credit or investment), however, it is only a symptom. It is a symptom, of course, which causes other problems, but these are secondary.
The aggression by the United States against Russia originates from the unwillingness of Russia to become a client state of the U.S. Putin affirmed this in his Sochi address. The U.S. has a dual purpose in making Russia a client state. The first is that American and Western capital could flow freely into Russia to work more efficiently than Russian capital. The second is to neutralize Russian (real and imagined) military and commercial ambitions against smaller states that used to be a part of the Russian Empire, especially in eastern Europe. The conflict between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine is primarily over strategic military factors. The Ukraine isn't worth much outside of it's purely geographical location. However, the Ukraine is worth much more economically to Russia than it is to the West, and by denying Russia a greater measure of control over Ukraine, and it's port in Odessa, the West can weaken Russia strategically and economically. And that is the fundamental objective for Western intervention in the Ukraine.
So why does the United States need to be so aggressive? Because it needs to grow. It may declare that it simply wishes to grow (growth is good, after all), but why is it willing to risk an open war with Russia over Ukraine? I posit that the American system is increasingly desperate to grow the global capitalist system in order to solve the financial crisis that threatens to overcome it. Because it is desperate, it is more willing to lie to mask the real purpose. This desperate bid to increase it's market share is not something overtly stated but is, rather, largely unconscious. It is a driver of the consumption machine that feeds global capitalism, serving the function plunder did in earlier empires. The imperial system depends on an increasing flow of plunder.
And this brings us back to the orient of nature. Because this system of global capital is essentially natural, in terms of energy flows through the system, then more efficient western capital will exploit Russian energy more effectively. The key is to control the resources, and Russia is the biggest store of untapped natural resources left in the world. To bring that into the fold is quite a prize for the system as a whole and gratify the need for it to expand. You can decide for yourself the moral implications of this and weigh all the factors you see fit. But nature itself isn't necessarily moral. Morality comes out of a consciousness capable of empathic imagination. By describing what is happening between Russia and the U.S. as a problem of natural impulses that are largely unconscious, a broader understanding of all the critical, material crises facing humanity right now staring us in the face can be grasped. Whatever the "problem" is, from climate change to debt to fossil fuel depletion, is made clearer through recognizing the unconscious forces behind them. Understanding these forces by plopping them into the conscious mind is truly the only way humanity can decide to avoid a global calamity.
It's important to point out that the ongoing economic crisis is really an energy crisis masquerading as a debt problem. That is a subject for some other time but that is key to understanding why the national politics really don't work anymore. Big statement, but I'll explain later.
The aim of this blog post is for the above paragraph to make sense.
In the last post I ended with what I consider the drivers of the conflict between Russia and the United States. There are many classifiable drivers for this conflict, involving geostrategic, geopolitical, and geofinancial dictates, based on the logic of the immediate situation nested within longer term goals. These three geoclassifications serve one another and constitute the realm of the geoelite. But rather than put "geo-" in front of every word, I will state that the conflict heating up between the U.S. and Russia cannot be properly understood without first understanding how these three forces operate and serve each other in the ambitions of the main benefactor, the United States.
To put it another way, the United States is an empire and it behaves as such. In every important way, the necessities of maintaining an empire are played out in the expansionist policies of the United States. The reason is simple: Empires must expand in order to maintain themselves. Once an empire has stopped expanding it faces a crisis of maintenance and begins the decline towards it's ultimate collapse. After the Cold War the U.S. saw the world as full of promise for the reason that it had no rivals. An enormous global power vacuum opened up after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum.
Some people have a problem with talk of an American empire. Others do not. It is a word that has become fraught with moral judgements, or with a sense that empire is a pre-modern political form that took American values of liberty, democracy, and political freedom to transcend through the example of it's history. Others, such as Dick Cheney, Robert Kagan, or much of the world's population outside the U.S., have neither a problem with the term nor feel that a hegemonic imperial power is anything unique. It just happens to be America at this juncture. With that said, the way I use "empire" is mainly descriptive and I find it useful because the meaning is familiar and places it into a history that reaches beyond World War II. It's also not too hard to think about what an empire is for, as opposed to, say, what a superpower, or a hegemon is for. Otherwise, there is not a shred of difference among them.
But there are some differences, some aspects of American society that are unique to history. The rights that form the basis of our laws, the rule of law itself, and universal suffrage found in the United States and it's inner circle of allies are triumphs of the modern age. The modern age itself, however, is singularly unique in the material well being of those who live in it. I say "however", because it has also allowed us moderns to push this material basis for empire (society, economy) into the background noise of our unconscious, and that comes with psychological and other costs. In the enumeration of modern achievements the biophysical basis for it's existence has been undervalued so totally that we, formally and systematically, believe that we have transcended it. Or just forgotten. By using "empire" I also hope to draw this biophysical basis back into the mix.
The thrust of this argument is that Empire is a manifestation of the Maximum Power Principle acting through the medium of the human mind. The Maximum Power Principle is a physical principle used in ecology and other physical systems to describe the behavior of a thermodynamic system. It has been proposed as the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics, which is an interesting side note. These systems could include ecosystems, economies, or as the process of competition among species in evolution. It is an energy principle which states that an organism will maximize it's consumption of useful energy to maximize it's (re)production. It explains why an invasive species can dominate an ecosystem, even to it's own eventual detriment, if there is no natural predator or other limiting factor to it's growth. The fruit flies in your first grade science experiments, for example, whose population swelled only to die off when the food ran out demonstrated the Maximum Power Principle. If you are a living organism then the Maximum Power Principle applies to you.
Here's Howard Odom's quote from Wikipedia: "The maximum power principle can be stated: During self-organization, system designs develop and prevail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency."
The Maximum Power Principle has the added benefit of operating subconsciously. In a human system, this means that decisions made by the conscious mind are necessarily within and constrained by the legal limits of the organizational properties dictated by useful energy. Whether the system prevails or not depends on the competition. A system that is more efficient at maximizing it's energy intake, it's transformation into productive forms will out compete less efficient systems. Sounds like capitalism to me. But it also describes how empires work.
You could consider the U.S. as a capitalistic empire and there would be no contradiction from this perspective. The contradiction in the system lies between democracy and empire and, by extension, capitalism. Democracy becomes an effort to apply an inefficiency onto a power maximizing social tendency. But that's another story. A capitalistic empire has a built in, self-reinforcing mechanism with the two pillars of financial and military power in the service of political power. It's true that all states operate this way and always have. Once you add the imperial element, the character changes, and what changes the character is the growth imperative. because that makes it qualitatively different from other societies.
The Maximum Power Principle describes a natural process. By saying that it describes the process of empire is to say that empire is a natural ordering of large scale human activity. It is not a moral system in the same way capitalism is not moral. Morality (or moral judgement) can be applied to each and is applied to each, but the process itself is not moral. Most people, if you ask them, would say "growth" is a good thing, and could justify it in moral terms. But it is more accurate and useful to say that growth is natural and to leave morality aside.
By looking at it this way I want to clear out the clutter of preconceived notions and judgements not because I believe a moral judgement is unwarranted, but in order to make better judgements, moral or otherwise. A capitalistic empire has a double-growth imperative which explains the behavior of the Untied States today. That it is the aggressor in this historical instance of conflict with Russia could be considered a moral judgement, but it can also be a statement of fact. I consider it a statement of fact because of the growth imperative. The way capitalistic imperialism grows is through the expansion of the markets through client states. By incorporating new client states into the system enables the imperial center to benefit from the activity of a client states economy. In fact, it benefits more from this economic activity than does the client state, which I think explains the growing divide in the wealth distribution both globally and within the U.S. The global maldistribution of wealth is not a principle cause of the crisis (in credit or investment), however, it is only a symptom. It is a symptom, of course, which causes other problems, but these are secondary.
The aggression by the United States against Russia originates from the unwillingness of Russia to become a client state of the U.S. Putin affirmed this in his Sochi address. The U.S. has a dual purpose in making Russia a client state. The first is that American and Western capital could flow freely into Russia to work more efficiently than Russian capital. The second is to neutralize Russian (real and imagined) military and commercial ambitions against smaller states that used to be a part of the Russian Empire, especially in eastern Europe. The conflict between Russia and the U.S. over Ukraine is primarily over strategic military factors. The Ukraine isn't worth much outside of it's purely geographical location. However, the Ukraine is worth much more economically to Russia than it is to the West, and by denying Russia a greater measure of control over Ukraine, and it's port in Odessa, the West can weaken Russia strategically and economically. And that is the fundamental objective for Western intervention in the Ukraine.
So why does the United States need to be so aggressive? Because it needs to grow. It may declare that it simply wishes to grow (growth is good, after all), but why is it willing to risk an open war with Russia over Ukraine? I posit that the American system is increasingly desperate to grow the global capitalist system in order to solve the financial crisis that threatens to overcome it. Because it is desperate, it is more willing to lie to mask the real purpose. This desperate bid to increase it's market share is not something overtly stated but is, rather, largely unconscious. It is a driver of the consumption machine that feeds global capitalism, serving the function plunder did in earlier empires. The imperial system depends on an increasing flow of plunder.
And this brings us back to the orient of nature. Because this system of global capital is essentially natural, in terms of energy flows through the system, then more efficient western capital will exploit Russian energy more effectively. The key is to control the resources, and Russia is the biggest store of untapped natural resources left in the world. To bring that into the fold is quite a prize for the system as a whole and gratify the need for it to expand. You can decide for yourself the moral implications of this and weigh all the factors you see fit. But nature itself isn't necessarily moral. Morality comes out of a consciousness capable of empathic imagination. By describing what is happening between Russia and the U.S. as a problem of natural impulses that are largely unconscious, a broader understanding of all the critical, material crises facing humanity right now staring us in the face can be grasped. Whatever the "problem" is, from climate change to debt to fossil fuel depletion, is made clearer through recognizing the unconscious forces behind them. Understanding these forces by plopping them into the conscious mind is truly the only way humanity can decide to avoid a global calamity.
It's important to point out that the ongoing economic crisis is really an energy crisis masquerading as a debt problem. That is a subject for some other time but that is key to understanding why the national politics really don't work anymore. Big statement, but I'll explain later.
Thursday, November 6, 2014
The Growing Context Over Ukraine
So I had been writing a rather longish Contribution to the blaboshpere when I realized that I needed to write one in between. The struggle before me is to craft this so that it grooves with the next topic, which is to place the current U.S.-Russia imbroglio into a wider point on wise ape behavior generally.
I left off promising to dig a little further into Vladimir Putin's "Iron Curtain" speech. I said we should view Putin's words as a true and truthful statement about what he sees happening in the world and what he thinks should be done about it. I think he truly wants to avoid war with the United States, for starters, and his mentioning it shows his thinking about the possibility is advanced. I think his statements on the deterioration of the world order is accurately couched in terms of American unilateralism opportunistically ignoring or cynically enforcing rules when it suits it's interests. Lastly, he charges that since the end of the Cold War America has been trying to reshape the world in it's image and has trampled on the principle of sovereignty in the process. I can accept this, though sovereignty has always been on a sliding scale depending on how powerful you are.
Be that as it may, Putin is observing the deterioration of the global order through his own eyes. Now, the "forces of chaos" are at his doorstep strangling his country with heavy duty economic sanctions and military encirclement. Of course, the military encirclement has been ongoing with the expansion of NATO and this, coupled with the "shock therapy" economic prescription, certainly wounded the ego of the Russian ruling class, but it's hard to see that as the real or ultimate cause of the Ukraine crisis. This leads me to another point Putin makes, one that has more of the politicians touch, and that is when he characterizes Russia's own interests and behavior.
The allegations and statements that Russia is trying to establish some sort of empire, encroaching on the sovereignty of its neighbors, are groundless. Russia does not need any kind of special, exclusive place in the world – I want to emphasize this. While respecting the interests of others, we simply want for our own interests to be taken into account and for our position to be respected.
This is the bugaboo right here. The question of Russia's character having been transformed from the nation hated by it's neighbors, many of whom were more than happy to join NATO, into a peaceful, respectful regional cohabitor is a little too rich. That Russia is a mafioso-style autocratic oligarchy presented cynically as a parliamentary republic doesn't allow for much confidence from those in the liberal West. On top of that, it might be a matter of opinion, but one informed by some history, that Russia does indeed consider itself to be rather special. And, in it's way, it certainly holds a singular spot in geopolitics. After all, there aren't a whole lot of recently-made-former superpowers hanging around the global scene. Putin might be a rough analog to Charles de Gaulle, which, to my mind, would be innocent enough.
Another element of Russia's unique position is it's mixed bag of high-tech savvy coupled with lots of poverty, all stirred in with a mishmash of modern and unmodern social attitudes. You could say, not too simplistically, that Russia is a traditional society infused with a heavy dose of scientific and technological culture. At the same time, Russia has always been skeptical of the political and commercial openness which sprang from the Western Enlightenment ideals of liberalism. As a result, Russia has been regarded throughout history as backward by the West. This teleological view may be correct on it's own terms but teleology is itself a flawed Enlightenment notion. In other words, Russians don't share the view that history is necessarily going anywhere. That Communism shares this belief with capitalism doesn't mean Russians as a whole adopted it. If anything, it made them more wary of the promises of teleology. By contrast, Americans belief in the direction of progress is a powerful rationale for it's expansionary practices which have at last arrived at the Russian border.
From where I'm sitting, the world is not big enough for both Russia and the United States. One, or both, has to change in order for the two to coexist. This sounds like the revisitation of the Cold War but that's a silly analogy. The Cold War is more usefully understood as representing a particular era of competing ideologies and systems contained by MAD. What we see today is a more conventional interstate conflict between a hegemon and an unsubdued lesser power. But "conventional" ways of looking at the present are bound to be limited because the natural limits to growth on a finite planet is a new phenomenon, at least at this scale. So it is best to view this conflict as another manifestation of the global zero sum game. Putin, I believe, rightly understands that the growth of the West comes automatically at Russia's expense. Russia would lose it's natural wealth and gain little in return if he were to allow global capital to rampage through the Russian hinterland. Putin wants to rampage it on his own terms.
It's hard to say what will happen over Ukraine. Personally, I think the U.S. should allow the break-up of Ukraine and let Russia annex the Russian speaking parts of it. Of course, this has it's own serious difficulties, but I'm not going to go into that because a larger context needs to be sketched out, which will constitute the next post. I'll end with one last insight at the beginning of Putin's speech that I think is most important to remember:
As we analyze today’s situation, let us not forget history’s lessons. First of all, changes in the world order – and what we are seeing today are events on this scale – have usually been accompanied by if not global war and conflict, then by chains of intensive local-level conflicts.
History is messy and often tragic. Misapplying history and misreading the present is a real danger at any time, but especially at times of "change". Change in this context might just be a synonym for upheaval. The context in which events are occurring needs to be well and deeply conceived. Without this the wise ape simply gropes blindfolded in the dark in a room with moving furniture. To lift the blindfold, flip on the light, and nail down the furniture requires an innovative new approach, one that accounts for and encompasses all the confusing phenomena we see around us. The best hope for that is the biophysical perspective.
I left off promising to dig a little further into Vladimir Putin's "Iron Curtain" speech. I said we should view Putin's words as a true and truthful statement about what he sees happening in the world and what he thinks should be done about it. I think he truly wants to avoid war with the United States, for starters, and his mentioning it shows his thinking about the possibility is advanced. I think his statements on the deterioration of the world order is accurately couched in terms of American unilateralism opportunistically ignoring or cynically enforcing rules when it suits it's interests. Lastly, he charges that since the end of the Cold War America has been trying to reshape the world in it's image and has trampled on the principle of sovereignty in the process. I can accept this, though sovereignty has always been on a sliding scale depending on how powerful you are.
Be that as it may, Putin is observing the deterioration of the global order through his own eyes. Now, the "forces of chaos" are at his doorstep strangling his country with heavy duty economic sanctions and military encirclement. Of course, the military encirclement has been ongoing with the expansion of NATO and this, coupled with the "shock therapy" economic prescription, certainly wounded the ego of the Russian ruling class, but it's hard to see that as the real or ultimate cause of the Ukraine crisis. This leads me to another point Putin makes, one that has more of the politicians touch, and that is when he characterizes Russia's own interests and behavior.
The allegations and statements that Russia is trying to establish some sort of empire, encroaching on the sovereignty of its neighbors, are groundless. Russia does not need any kind of special, exclusive place in the world – I want to emphasize this. While respecting the interests of others, we simply want for our own interests to be taken into account and for our position to be respected.
This is the bugaboo right here. The question of Russia's character having been transformed from the nation hated by it's neighbors, many of whom were more than happy to join NATO, into a peaceful, respectful regional cohabitor is a little too rich. That Russia is a mafioso-style autocratic oligarchy presented cynically as a parliamentary republic doesn't allow for much confidence from those in the liberal West. On top of that, it might be a matter of opinion, but one informed by some history, that Russia does indeed consider itself to be rather special. And, in it's way, it certainly holds a singular spot in geopolitics. After all, there aren't a whole lot of recently-made-former superpowers hanging around the global scene. Putin might be a rough analog to Charles de Gaulle, which, to my mind, would be innocent enough.
Another element of Russia's unique position is it's mixed bag of high-tech savvy coupled with lots of poverty, all stirred in with a mishmash of modern and unmodern social attitudes. You could say, not too simplistically, that Russia is a traditional society infused with a heavy dose of scientific and technological culture. At the same time, Russia has always been skeptical of the political and commercial openness which sprang from the Western Enlightenment ideals of liberalism. As a result, Russia has been regarded throughout history as backward by the West. This teleological view may be correct on it's own terms but teleology is itself a flawed Enlightenment notion. In other words, Russians don't share the view that history is necessarily going anywhere. That Communism shares this belief with capitalism doesn't mean Russians as a whole adopted it. If anything, it made them more wary of the promises of teleology. By contrast, Americans belief in the direction of progress is a powerful rationale for it's expansionary practices which have at last arrived at the Russian border.
From where I'm sitting, the world is not big enough for both Russia and the United States. One, or both, has to change in order for the two to coexist. This sounds like the revisitation of the Cold War but that's a silly analogy. The Cold War is more usefully understood as representing a particular era of competing ideologies and systems contained by MAD. What we see today is a more conventional interstate conflict between a hegemon and an unsubdued lesser power. But "conventional" ways of looking at the present are bound to be limited because the natural limits to growth on a finite planet is a new phenomenon, at least at this scale. So it is best to view this conflict as another manifestation of the global zero sum game. Putin, I believe, rightly understands that the growth of the West comes automatically at Russia's expense. Russia would lose it's natural wealth and gain little in return if he were to allow global capital to rampage through the Russian hinterland. Putin wants to rampage it on his own terms.
It's hard to say what will happen over Ukraine. Personally, I think the U.S. should allow the break-up of Ukraine and let Russia annex the Russian speaking parts of it. Of course, this has it's own serious difficulties, but I'm not going to go into that because a larger context needs to be sketched out, which will constitute the next post. I'll end with one last insight at the beginning of Putin's speech that I think is most important to remember:
As we analyze today’s situation, let us not forget history’s lessons. First of all, changes in the world order – and what we are seeing today are events on this scale – have usually been accompanied by if not global war and conflict, then by chains of intensive local-level conflicts.
History is messy and often tragic. Misapplying history and misreading the present is a real danger at any time, but especially at times of "change". Change in this context might just be a synonym for upheaval. The context in which events are occurring needs to be well and deeply conceived. Without this the wise ape simply gropes blindfolded in the dark in a room with moving furniture. To lift the blindfold, flip on the light, and nail down the furniture requires an innovative new approach, one that accounts for and encompasses all the confusing phenomena we see around us. The best hope for that is the biophysical perspective.
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