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.