One of the traits that stuck out for me in childhood was an obsessive tendency, and traits that stick out like that are always targets of ridicule coming from one's peers, a consequence of how children are socialized in this society at least.
I'm not too worried about that now. An obsessive personality carries with it advantages and disadvantages like everything else, which I'm now well aware of.
But it is always worth investigating the nature of those advantages and disadvantages. I might have touched on this previously - though a little repetition can be healthy - but I always feel the need to reevaluate obsessions, in this case my obsession with the concept of capital.
Besides the fact of capitalism being a central defining feature of our society and world, and the fact that it is very interesting to me, its relevance and fascinating quality don't necessarily justify an obsession on it. For me, it is not simply enough to discover the nature of capital, evaluate it, and formulate a response to it. That has already been done plenty.
What I find to be so useful about capital is that it seems to me to be a massive process of disintegration, at least in terms of its effects, and so this necessarily implies that something is disintegrating. And if something is disintegrating, that must mean that something was born and lived for some time. I have in mind here a civilization, which in turn begs the question: why civilization?
So it is really just a method - a method that is suited to my strengths - for strengthening an analytical starting point, which in this case is the end of something, so that it can be traced back to illuminate a beginning, and in putting it all together, hopefully reveal something about the cosmos.
The questioning forms the basis for a ritual of warding off the danger of over-obsession, which we now know takes the place of the reality in its extreme effects, as reality and one's perception of it is really ultimately related to where the energy is going. And the energy in my case travels in accordance with surroundings and moods. Obsession is very energy-intensive, to be sure. So I'd like to take a deep breath: all of this is useful, but it is not all there is.
The idea is to study capital not as an alien thing that emerged with evil intent, but as something that has been collectively produced by all of us, and therefore it is also in us. Oftentimes to attempt to separate ourselves from something has the ironic consequence of reproducing it.
Further, the question for me is not just, "how can people do this to us?" it is, "how has the universe produced this, and what to do?"
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
Snake
We know that capital advances itself steadily to crisis, through its own operation, and that it generally surmounts a given crisis in one of two ways. Either it approaches or reaches catastrophe, and through necessity, must rearrange or revolutionize itself in some way, such as through international war, civil war, mass labor or political unrest, or through other related modalities, or it simply displaces the crisis by displacing the conflict, such as by opening foreign markets, new fields of production, or new labor processes in different countries, or it displaces people or logistical obstacles that stand in its way. Both ways resolve crises by ultimately delaying them.
This is because capital at its very base tends to proceed towards a general crisis of the cradle. Capital may have to continuously revolutionize itself as it becomes stable on various tiers of organization at various times, but its antagonism to the very environment and ecosystem that gives rise to it cannot simply be surmounted, displaced, or revolutionized. Environmental degradation is the equivalent of the metaphorical brick wall: once you finally reach its limits, you're done.
I'm thinking here of that old "Snake" video game, where you have to navigate and steadily grow a snake, that must not cross itself or it is game over. Of course, the game inevitably advances towards this outcome, and it is up to you, the player, to get as far as possible and reach a high score before experiencing catastrophe.
A high score! Our captains of industry/finance/war/etc. are playing a game of their own, and going for that coveted high score. But the game may only be reset so many times.
The "Snake" quality of capital is coming out in several different ways, and we can start with a mounting crisis that doesn't even have to be completely terminal. As stressed capital concentrates itself around national entities, an increasingly globalized and interconnected world market is further threatened the more those very processes of globalization and interpenetration advance nationally domestic crises like inequality and resource depletion, thus the stressed and concentrated capital, which rends the world market as nations retract and bristle.
For example, theres been much hand-wringing over the effects of growing trade wars, and it is true that there are large amounts of Chinese capital tied up in things like international real estate, and the Chinese also hold a large amount of U.S. dollars, and they act as a global raw material consumer of last resort. There is also much to speculate about the sheer amount of manufacturing infrastructure in Asia, which a great war would certainly endanger.
To give another more specific example, there are foreign owned businesses like the Russian-owned aluminum smelter in Ireland, that upon having their operations withdrawn, could cause quite the stir in the European automotive industry. And so on. This is all precluding a simple acceleration into nuclear war, which makes these questions moot anyway.
Like that other nuclear crisis of the cradle, the environmental crisis, most readily articulated in climate change sets aside all questions of human catastrophe and capital in its aftermath, and cuts straight to the annihilation of most living things currently on the planet.
And so it is. To make use of a rather crude but effective metaphor, capital's tail is so long, that it cannot but shit where it eats - or sleeps. Even in the short term, all of the production infrastructure which has been concentrated in developing nations or protectorates for reasons of economic and political expediency is now threatened by the effects of climate change that are especially harsh in those very regions, as we saw with the saline bag shortage that was a consequence of the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico.
Yes, the worlds greatest polluters are rich industrial nations, and the worlds most climate-besieged territories are poor developing nations which are less able to defend themselves - a great injustice. But those places too make up the cradle of capital, which has extended itself across the globe, and concentrated and centralized its supply chains and production centers in those places. One may have guns, tanks, and concrete barries, but those things won't do much good when one can no longer replace them as they age or are destroyed.
And indeed, this is merely relevant to the short term. In the long term, capital and cradle and all are set to transform far beyond any picture of continuity that those things might imagine to themselves.
This is because capital at its very base tends to proceed towards a general crisis of the cradle. Capital may have to continuously revolutionize itself as it becomes stable on various tiers of organization at various times, but its antagonism to the very environment and ecosystem that gives rise to it cannot simply be surmounted, displaced, or revolutionized. Environmental degradation is the equivalent of the metaphorical brick wall: once you finally reach its limits, you're done.
I'm thinking here of that old "Snake" video game, where you have to navigate and steadily grow a snake, that must not cross itself or it is game over. Of course, the game inevitably advances towards this outcome, and it is up to you, the player, to get as far as possible and reach a high score before experiencing catastrophe.
A high score! Our captains of industry/finance/war/etc. are playing a game of their own, and going for that coveted high score. But the game may only be reset so many times.
The "Snake" quality of capital is coming out in several different ways, and we can start with a mounting crisis that doesn't even have to be completely terminal. As stressed capital concentrates itself around national entities, an increasingly globalized and interconnected world market is further threatened the more those very processes of globalization and interpenetration advance nationally domestic crises like inequality and resource depletion, thus the stressed and concentrated capital, which rends the world market as nations retract and bristle.
For example, theres been much hand-wringing over the effects of growing trade wars, and it is true that there are large amounts of Chinese capital tied up in things like international real estate, and the Chinese also hold a large amount of U.S. dollars, and they act as a global raw material consumer of last resort. There is also much to speculate about the sheer amount of manufacturing infrastructure in Asia, which a great war would certainly endanger.
To give another more specific example, there are foreign owned businesses like the Russian-owned aluminum smelter in Ireland, that upon having their operations withdrawn, could cause quite the stir in the European automotive industry. And so on. This is all precluding a simple acceleration into nuclear war, which makes these questions moot anyway.
Like that other nuclear crisis of the cradle, the environmental crisis, most readily articulated in climate change sets aside all questions of human catastrophe and capital in its aftermath, and cuts straight to the annihilation of most living things currently on the planet.
And so it is. To make use of a rather crude but effective metaphor, capital's tail is so long, that it cannot but shit where it eats - or sleeps. Even in the short term, all of the production infrastructure which has been concentrated in developing nations or protectorates for reasons of economic and political expediency is now threatened by the effects of climate change that are especially harsh in those very regions, as we saw with the saline bag shortage that was a consequence of the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico.
Yes, the worlds greatest polluters are rich industrial nations, and the worlds most climate-besieged territories are poor developing nations which are less able to defend themselves - a great injustice. But those places too make up the cradle of capital, which has extended itself across the globe, and concentrated and centralized its supply chains and production centers in those places. One may have guns, tanks, and concrete barries, but those things won't do much good when one can no longer replace them as they age or are destroyed.
And indeed, this is merely relevant to the short term. In the long term, capital and cradle and all are set to transform far beyond any picture of continuity that those things might imagine to themselves.
Not Fair
It is easy enough to imagine one person bopping another person on the head with a club, and then to parse out exactly what is happening there. The person with the club has no interest in anything like a golden rule. The action is entirely asymmetrical: those who use clubs to inflict social or political violence on others have no interest whatsoever in having clubs used on them in turn.
The flow of power, the exercise of the muscles to swing the club and all the like, is not being used to renew and maintain a relationship between two plays of energy, but to diminish one at the behest of the other.
Less simple is imagining and parsing out exactly how this is happening on a societal level, though I think this same basic relationship of one-sidedness can be sketched out if one thinks about it enough.
There are plenty of ways to illustrate this issue, but one useful way consists of taking a hard look at mainstream political individualism and how it functions in the West in particular. It is the actual mechanism in action that provides the tell, and less the content of the ideology.
To further illustrate, the ideological basis for inequality requires the successful individual, who by means of personal fitness, has earned the outsized resources doled out. By the same coin, those who are poor, in debt, and/or have serious unaddressed health problems are incompetent fools who essentially screwed up in some fundamental way.
But curiously enough, the efficacy of the individual stops right about there, at the point of immediate relevance it has to wealth accumulation. Somehow, individual realities melt away when it comes to, say the individual's preference of whether to participate in a market society or not. Even the Libertarian dream of the free individual is predicated on the objective and absolute reality of a market society being the only rational way to organize a society.
Admittedly this is a project that is in development, and will be indefinitely, until it isn't. There are plenty of individuals that can still get by on activity that falls outside of market forces. But capital is always seeking new frontiers for privatization, and can never rest until every unabsorbed individual is accounted for.
Regardless of the reality, the neoliberal ideology contains in it both the idea of the efficacious individual and the negation of the idea of a subjective individual outside the objective reality of the market.
This is an inconsistency that is built in, and is required for the functioning of this social system as a whole, just as the employment of political violence is inconsistent with any sort of golden rule. The point is not to be consistent, it is gain benefit at the expense of another.
The flow of power, the exercise of the muscles to swing the club and all the like, is not being used to renew and maintain a relationship between two plays of energy, but to diminish one at the behest of the other.
Less simple is imagining and parsing out exactly how this is happening on a societal level, though I think this same basic relationship of one-sidedness can be sketched out if one thinks about it enough.
There are plenty of ways to illustrate this issue, but one useful way consists of taking a hard look at mainstream political individualism and how it functions in the West in particular. It is the actual mechanism in action that provides the tell, and less the content of the ideology.
To further illustrate, the ideological basis for inequality requires the successful individual, who by means of personal fitness, has earned the outsized resources doled out. By the same coin, those who are poor, in debt, and/or have serious unaddressed health problems are incompetent fools who essentially screwed up in some fundamental way.
But curiously enough, the efficacy of the individual stops right about there, at the point of immediate relevance it has to wealth accumulation. Somehow, individual realities melt away when it comes to, say the individual's preference of whether to participate in a market society or not. Even the Libertarian dream of the free individual is predicated on the objective and absolute reality of a market society being the only rational way to organize a society.
Admittedly this is a project that is in development, and will be indefinitely, until it isn't. There are plenty of individuals that can still get by on activity that falls outside of market forces. But capital is always seeking new frontiers for privatization, and can never rest until every unabsorbed individual is accounted for.
Regardless of the reality, the neoliberal ideology contains in it both the idea of the efficacious individual and the negation of the idea of a subjective individual outside the objective reality of the market.
This is an inconsistency that is built in, and is required for the functioning of this social system as a whole, just as the employment of political violence is inconsistent with any sort of golden rule. The point is not to be consistent, it is gain benefit at the expense of another.
Friday, April 13, 2018
Ideas in Motion
As Hannah Arendt observed, social atomization, stress, and catastrophe help to produce totalitarian ideas in a modern society. So much energy is transferred to the idea itself, so that the vessel of the idea, the human individual and eventually mass society is taken up with it and moves in the direction it dictates.
Like a growing tree digging its roots deep into the earth, the growing idea extends its roots far into history and firmly anchors itself. The individual becomes bound to the idea, and it takes a great energy to dislodge it.
This is a very interesting aspect of modern society. We have this extreme amount of potential energy built up, ready to be set free, and it takes the destruction of a great idea to set it free, and it will also take an idea great enough to contain and direct its future course.
Neoliberalism is so clearly hated, but it is just as clear that all of that antagonistic energy is still bound up to failing commitments, waiting for a new vessel, which currently, is forming amidst coalescing and competing visions, which upon achieving a certain cohesion, is set to send everything in motion once again.
Like a growing tree digging its roots deep into the earth, the growing idea extends its roots far into history and firmly anchors itself. The individual becomes bound to the idea, and it takes a great energy to dislodge it.
This is a very interesting aspect of modern society. We have this extreme amount of potential energy built up, ready to be set free, and it takes the destruction of a great idea to set it free, and it will also take an idea great enough to contain and direct its future course.
Neoliberalism is so clearly hated, but it is just as clear that all of that antagonistic energy is still bound up to failing commitments, waiting for a new vessel, which currently, is forming amidst coalescing and competing visions, which upon achieving a certain cohesion, is set to send everything in motion once again.
American Fires and Rivers
According to the NYT, Mr. Comey, in his cash-grabbing memoir, has described the Trump administration as a forest fire that is destroying America's norms and traditions. Well, maybe so, but what forest fire doesn't love a drought-stricken, disease-ridden, beetle-bitten forest?
It was hard to resist. I'm sure so many others have run with the forest fire metaphor, creating alternate spins of their own, merrily passing on the banner of banality. And now I've done the same. But as with any banality, there is a convenient jumping-off point here. The metaphor is now ready-made, easy to play with, and constantly in our face. It beckons interrogation.
Because after all, where was this once-healthy forest? What norms and traditions are being destroyed here? What is it that is in a state of deterioration, or even immolation, and why?
Is this a cleansing flame, a flame of doom, or a warning flame that sounds the alarm, instigating us to begin the healing process? The longer one thinks about it, the less clear it becomes that the fire will go out anytime soon, and how long has it really been burning anyway? I could go on.
It is also hard to resist imagining American liberals sitting down with this book, pumping their fist for an ex-leader of an institution as illiberal as the FBI, taking Comey's arguments at face value, believing that he was an honest beacon simply trying to get to the truth and save our beloved country, and that his mishandling with the Hilary case was just a big whoops.
It is true that there is a growing political backlash to the Trump presidency and the greater neoliberal project in general, which is much needed. It is inspiring to see the Me Too reversals, the student protests, the teachers' strikes, and the growing indignation across the country, indignation that is finally not reactionary and mean, but compassionate and hopeful.
But to insert another naturalistic metaphor here, if we are being allowed another breath of air as we tumble down whatever river this is, we best take a deep gulp, because this ride is far from over.
It was hard to resist. I'm sure so many others have run with the forest fire metaphor, creating alternate spins of their own, merrily passing on the banner of banality. And now I've done the same. But as with any banality, there is a convenient jumping-off point here. The metaphor is now ready-made, easy to play with, and constantly in our face. It beckons interrogation.
Because after all, where was this once-healthy forest? What norms and traditions are being destroyed here? What is it that is in a state of deterioration, or even immolation, and why?
Is this a cleansing flame, a flame of doom, or a warning flame that sounds the alarm, instigating us to begin the healing process? The longer one thinks about it, the less clear it becomes that the fire will go out anytime soon, and how long has it really been burning anyway? I could go on.
It is also hard to resist imagining American liberals sitting down with this book, pumping their fist for an ex-leader of an institution as illiberal as the FBI, taking Comey's arguments at face value, believing that he was an honest beacon simply trying to get to the truth and save our beloved country, and that his mishandling with the Hilary case was just a big whoops.
It is true that there is a growing political backlash to the Trump presidency and the greater neoliberal project in general, which is much needed. It is inspiring to see the Me Too reversals, the student protests, the teachers' strikes, and the growing indignation across the country, indignation that is finally not reactionary and mean, but compassionate and hopeful.
But to insert another naturalistic metaphor here, if we are being allowed another breath of air as we tumble down whatever river this is, we best take a deep gulp, because this ride is far from over.
Both Sides Do It
Of course Marxist political economy and market fundamentalism are similar in that they produce metaphysical frameworks that both illuminate and obstruct, but their similarities stop there. The set of motivations and visions that underlie both systems are very different.
Such is the case with "progressive" and "conservative" political projects. One seeks to dissolve existing political and economic systems and replace them with another, based on an alternative ideal, or even restore some older set of systems hearkening back to that alternative ideal, while the other seeks to freeze them in the image of a previously existing ideal, or even revolutionize them in order to further reach that existing ideal.
But here the divisions grow very complicated very fast. Because a given political project is not only conceptually underwritten, but historically and socially underwritten as well. So you have the absurdity of a modern "conservative" clamoring to preserve a state of radical change, and a modern "progressive" racing to restore a social balance based on ideas of social order and stability. The political concept becomes unmoored from the lingual and logical concept and takes on a life of its own through its historical development.
I'd love to work at "conserving" a system that has been found to work well, and justly, but you won't see me marching and pumping my fist with "conservatives." And so on.
And this is the interaction between political tribe and concept that one should look out for. What exactly is one looking to preserve, and in what direction is one looking to progress? What matters for these projects is the unit of social organization that one is looking to ensconce oneself in, and preserve or transform, as it is the social organization, through its amplified powers of labor and transformation that determines the character of all involved.
An empire that imagines itself progressive, will, like a glacier, grind its way to the same mean that a conservatively self-styled empire will move to, through its sheer mass and momentum. But conversely, the individual that seeks to break away and start anew will be subsumed by whatever juggernaut happens to form next. None of this was ever supposed to be easy.
Such is the case with "progressive" and "conservative" political projects. One seeks to dissolve existing political and economic systems and replace them with another, based on an alternative ideal, or even restore some older set of systems hearkening back to that alternative ideal, while the other seeks to freeze them in the image of a previously existing ideal, or even revolutionize them in order to further reach that existing ideal.
But here the divisions grow very complicated very fast. Because a given political project is not only conceptually underwritten, but historically and socially underwritten as well. So you have the absurdity of a modern "conservative" clamoring to preserve a state of radical change, and a modern "progressive" racing to restore a social balance based on ideas of social order and stability. The political concept becomes unmoored from the lingual and logical concept and takes on a life of its own through its historical development.
I'd love to work at "conserving" a system that has been found to work well, and justly, but you won't see me marching and pumping my fist with "conservatives." And so on.
And this is the interaction between political tribe and concept that one should look out for. What exactly is one looking to preserve, and in what direction is one looking to progress? What matters for these projects is the unit of social organization that one is looking to ensconce oneself in, and preserve or transform, as it is the social organization, through its amplified powers of labor and transformation that determines the character of all involved.
An empire that imagines itself progressive, will, like a glacier, grind its way to the same mean that a conservatively self-styled empire will move to, through its sheer mass and momentum. But conversely, the individual that seeks to break away and start anew will be subsumed by whatever juggernaut happens to form next. None of this was ever supposed to be easy.
Tuesday, April 10, 2018
Reading Marx's Capital with D
As David Harvey has pointed out, countless mainstream economists are often quick to denounce Marx's theory of value as so much mystical claptrap, with its elusive and unscientific claims, and then they turn around and act as if the invisible hand of the market exists, and pour over economic models that assume preposterous things like market equilibrium and perfect information in order to carry out their economic inquiries.
If you do look at the theory of value, yes, value is indeed a metaphysical thing, but so are so many other intellectual products, which happen to be useful for investigating all sorts of phenomena through a rational lens.
What you see with the theory of value is the construction of a sort of machine, with all sorts of moving parts that exist on their own and work in relation to each other, but which remain elusive if you try to locate them in the real world. You see concepts like value as socially necessary labor time, and surplus value, which take on more significance as the whole metaphysical project of Capital is elaborated. And the further the project is elaborated, the greater explanatory value is derived, up to a certain point.
Much of Capital is built in order to reveal capitalism as something destructive, so the entire project is a metaphysical outgrowth of that conviction. And then on the other hand, you have classical economics, which is meant to naturalize and stabilize capitalism, which is a project that is increasingly seen as necessarily obstructive of certain realities.
But such is the case with any intellectual project: the more you reveal in one direction, the more that you obstruct in another, and what you reveal and obstruct is related to your convictions and what you are trying to prioritize, which has real world effects.
There are of course certain problems with this. The three volumes of Capital are huge, gigantic even. The amount of ground that Marx is covering, and the resolution he is trying to cover the ground in, is staggering, and even then, the project was only partially complete.
So this had to be seen as an event: Marx, upon becoming opposed to capitalism, and having to surmount the constructed intellectual arguments of bourgeois economists at the time, and then suffering through a series of misfortunes, found himself in a library going through a shit ton of books and putting his own project together.
The size and scope of this project can be attributed to the intensity of the work, and how much time Marx had for intellectual coherence, with his death putting an end to the project altogether. A mountain rises in the image of upward movement, and then is halted by the natural limits of gravity and upward energy.
This is a work that is always going to be vulgarized. One can retort that "you don't understand Marx," but then who can really? To construct a sufficient response to such a work would take the kind of intellectual intensity and energy that Marx himself put into the project.
And with each project comes the mass production of countless books of great size to house all of the material, which requires the felling of fields upon fields of trees, and the marshaling of industrial and commercial infrastructure to produce and distribute it, and then we don't even take account of its dissemination over the Internet.
And so the process begins again, with all of those other authors over the course of history clamoring to respond. One can climb a mountain to gain a view of the landscape certainly. This is one of the things that mountains are great for. But one should always be aware of what one is doing, lest one wants to become a mountain onself. There is only so much room for so many mountains: they take energy and space to form, and only so much life can take place on them.
If you do look at the theory of value, yes, value is indeed a metaphysical thing, but so are so many other intellectual products, which happen to be useful for investigating all sorts of phenomena through a rational lens.
What you see with the theory of value is the construction of a sort of machine, with all sorts of moving parts that exist on their own and work in relation to each other, but which remain elusive if you try to locate them in the real world. You see concepts like value as socially necessary labor time, and surplus value, which take on more significance as the whole metaphysical project of Capital is elaborated. And the further the project is elaborated, the greater explanatory value is derived, up to a certain point.
Much of Capital is built in order to reveal capitalism as something destructive, so the entire project is a metaphysical outgrowth of that conviction. And then on the other hand, you have classical economics, which is meant to naturalize and stabilize capitalism, which is a project that is increasingly seen as necessarily obstructive of certain realities.
But such is the case with any intellectual project: the more you reveal in one direction, the more that you obstruct in another, and what you reveal and obstruct is related to your convictions and what you are trying to prioritize, which has real world effects.
There are of course certain problems with this. The three volumes of Capital are huge, gigantic even. The amount of ground that Marx is covering, and the resolution he is trying to cover the ground in, is staggering, and even then, the project was only partially complete.
So this had to be seen as an event: Marx, upon becoming opposed to capitalism, and having to surmount the constructed intellectual arguments of bourgeois economists at the time, and then suffering through a series of misfortunes, found himself in a library going through a shit ton of books and putting his own project together.
The size and scope of this project can be attributed to the intensity of the work, and how much time Marx had for intellectual coherence, with his death putting an end to the project altogether. A mountain rises in the image of upward movement, and then is halted by the natural limits of gravity and upward energy.
This is a work that is always going to be vulgarized. One can retort that "you don't understand Marx," but then who can really? To construct a sufficient response to such a work would take the kind of intellectual intensity and energy that Marx himself put into the project.
And with each project comes the mass production of countless books of great size to house all of the material, which requires the felling of fields upon fields of trees, and the marshaling of industrial and commercial infrastructure to produce and distribute it, and then we don't even take account of its dissemination over the Internet.
And so the process begins again, with all of those other authors over the course of history clamoring to respond. One can climb a mountain to gain a view of the landscape certainly. This is one of the things that mountains are great for. But one should always be aware of what one is doing, lest one wants to become a mountain onself. There is only so much room for so many mountains: they take energy and space to form, and only so much life can take place on them.
Capital and Nations
As capital extends out over the entire globe, transmitting its particular sublime pleasures through cultural transmission and through example by material good, it encourages the growth of sympathetic capitals, with their own growing masses aided by the supportive structures of nation states, and the historical material developmental patterns peculiar to those regions.
It is in the nature of capital to colonize, and through that colonization, it begets itself, only to become antagonistic to itself. The self-preserving and other-antagonizing instincts of capital are manifested in popular political rhetoric, so we see the glowering specters of Russias, Chinas, North Koreas, and Irans coming to take our freedom.
The elites in those countries may very well be interested in the bullish and negative freedom that the U.S. empire has so pugnaciously secured for itself. Who knows what shapes the other national empires would form in the absence of real constraints brought about by the machinations of the hegemon. No doubt we have seen all sorts of terrible cruelties occur in the maintenance of those other empires, but as is often the case, these are cruelties that are rising up to and mirroring the cruelty of a world empire that really does want all of it.
We saw in the run up to the great wars, and throughout the course of those wars, an increasingly muscular German empire that had its sights set on the majesties of the British empire itself, and which sought to mimic it and eventually acquire its status. And conversely, all of the early industrial world admired and sought to replicate infrastructure like the German post office, and eventually, German industrial engineering.
And so much of the popular contemporary political rhetoric is obvious projection on the part of a paranoid and entitled nation fearing for its outsized privileges. The interconnectedness and interdependency of the world-system is partially revealed by those other nations' mild geopolitical responses to extremely aggressive claims and intentions on the part of the United States. Certainly there is much tough talk and political theater in many of these nations which is more for the benefit of the mainstream ideology of their citizens, but all in all the geopolitical behavior of other nations has betrayed a realistic understanding of the interdependency of their capital on the hegemonic capital itself, so we see measured negotiations and mild defensive steps taken in the face of U.S. aggression.
Of course we do see this state of affairs gradually shifting as sympathetic tensions arise. The BRICS quietly make their arrangements to set up separate trade agreements, infrastructure, and banking systems, and the U.S. grows more aggressive in encircling them, interfering with their elections and global influence by proxy - ironically enough, and ramping up popular rhetoric against them.
And so empires not only rise, they inspire others to rise in turn, and the momentum from the rising continues on and begets more rising. And all of it is connected to itself, and influences itself, like the alternating waves and valleys in a churning ocean.
It is in the nature of capital to colonize, and through that colonization, it begets itself, only to become antagonistic to itself. The self-preserving and other-antagonizing instincts of capital are manifested in popular political rhetoric, so we see the glowering specters of Russias, Chinas, North Koreas, and Irans coming to take our freedom.
The elites in those countries may very well be interested in the bullish and negative freedom that the U.S. empire has so pugnaciously secured for itself. Who knows what shapes the other national empires would form in the absence of real constraints brought about by the machinations of the hegemon. No doubt we have seen all sorts of terrible cruelties occur in the maintenance of those other empires, but as is often the case, these are cruelties that are rising up to and mirroring the cruelty of a world empire that really does want all of it.
We saw in the run up to the great wars, and throughout the course of those wars, an increasingly muscular German empire that had its sights set on the majesties of the British empire itself, and which sought to mimic it and eventually acquire its status. And conversely, all of the early industrial world admired and sought to replicate infrastructure like the German post office, and eventually, German industrial engineering.
And so much of the popular contemporary political rhetoric is obvious projection on the part of a paranoid and entitled nation fearing for its outsized privileges. The interconnectedness and interdependency of the world-system is partially revealed by those other nations' mild geopolitical responses to extremely aggressive claims and intentions on the part of the United States. Certainly there is much tough talk and political theater in many of these nations which is more for the benefit of the mainstream ideology of their citizens, but all in all the geopolitical behavior of other nations has betrayed a realistic understanding of the interdependency of their capital on the hegemonic capital itself, so we see measured negotiations and mild defensive steps taken in the face of U.S. aggression.
Of course we do see this state of affairs gradually shifting as sympathetic tensions arise. The BRICS quietly make their arrangements to set up separate trade agreements, infrastructure, and banking systems, and the U.S. grows more aggressive in encircling them, interfering with their elections and global influence by proxy - ironically enough, and ramping up popular rhetoric against them.
And so empires not only rise, they inspire others to rise in turn, and the momentum from the rising continues on and begets more rising. And all of it is connected to itself, and influences itself, like the alternating waves and valleys in a churning ocean.
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