Sedimentary Change

One macro aspect of historical change to keep in mind is the sedimentary layer-nature of accumulated development. We have layers upon layers of persistent change over centuries and even millennia, interacting well into modernity. Technologies, techniques and traditions, debt and finance forms, philosophies, mathematics, political and legal concepts, cultural and organizational forms, stores of information and memory, and so on. 

Large portions of this are destroyed as a given civilization declines and falls, especially those forms closely coupled with the cultural life and perceptions of that particular civilization, but then there are plenty of other forms that are transferrable, especially certain "hard", abstract and general, and non-perishable technologies and traditions. Wheels, aqueducts, and monies are difficult to "un-see" or phase out after they have entered into usage for example.

This is not a completely linear progression to be sure, with documented cases of independent inventions around the world taking place in different cultures which are attempting to solve similar problems and come to similar conclusions, such as with various forms and instruments of money, political and cultural organization, infrastructure, and warfare.  

But a rising power may salvage more tangible knowledge, traditions, and techniques from the written stores of a fallen one for example, carrying on their own translations of inherited histories, philosophies, political and legal traditions, financial instruments, mathematics and so on out of reverence and pragmatism.  

And much of these developments are cumulative and synergistic once they are layered atop one another. Once something has already been done, there is a little less room to do it again, so change and innovation must spread out. "Reinventing the wheel" is regarded with befuddlement and even contempt, so what works continues to be put to use, accelerating that given facet of daily production, as the thing no longer has to be developed through trial and error, freeing up time and resources to explore other avenues. 

The technology advances and we have more durable and lasting knowledge stores for example, and we know much more in higher fidelity. It still remains to be seen whether all of this layered development can support itself in perpetuity however, especially as the power and reach of the development itself produces more global and catastrophic harms alongside its benefits. 

Historical Economy

Ironically, many orthodox Marxists tend to "fetishize" the radically unique nature of capital as a historical phenomenon, a condition that could be readily analyzed and rectified by their own concepts and terminology. It makes sense to focus in on the unique nature of capital at the expense of other distracting elements for the sake of a clear analysis, but then oftentimes history itself is compressed into a background phenomenon leading up to the birth of capital, itself the object more worthy of intensive spotlight and study. 

It does seem true that there is a historical specificity to capital as an economic form, corresponding with greater modernity in general. Just a couple of hundred years ago, most of the world's population were still subsistence farmers, their surplus scraped off through local military force as opposed to it being a regular intrinsic occurrence in the cycles of daily capitalist production. That was before the disintegration of the feudal world clumped back up into a collection of larger and more rapacious landholders, and capital coalescing out of the consolidating commons of the agricultural and artisanal crafting realms would concentrate its factory systems in the growing and accelerating urban realms, and then soon enough a large portion of the developed world would transform in wage laborers, that system steadily absorbing and transforming the outer reaches of the world system's core. 

People, resources, materials, and monies would be "alienated" and set free to circulate in domestic and world markets, a process which owed its power and comprehensiveness to the parallel processes of accelerated technological development and intensified energy production, including the progressive utilization of coal and then oil, and then these developments in turn would be furthered by the very explosions in trade and industry they were setting off.  

But then these patterns and behaviors go back quite a ways into the last couple of thousand years of the history of human civilization. Capital had to emerge fully formed from scattered cyclical patterns and tendencies that have been with us for some time. 

Metal coinage might have emerged organically as more firmly coupled with its given originating state for instance, but then the material was still capable of being "alienated" from its home economy, especially as the technology grew to be accepted in its standardized form by participating regional powers in a global economy. Gold and silver for example were perfectly suitable to the various functions of money: a transportable, and non-perishable medium of exchange and store of wealth, settler of debts, and numerical measurer of value. 

There were most likely dominant powers presiding over trade that were producing it and standardizing it, which put pressure onto its universal usage as a particular substance and form. So it was then that Philip II's Macedonian empire could descend upon silver mines and stores in the ancient Greek world and take the silver up to finance the further development of their military, bringing about the flowing in of materials and resources, alienated from producers desiring and requiring the alienated silver themselves for their own purposes, bypassing the general uneasiness in the Greek world of Macedon's rising star. This is but one of a multitude of examples of a process that would make up the cyclical flows of resources across powers around the world and through history. 

Money is a magical substance in a way, which, as it circulates, facilitates the rhythmic circulation of alienated resource and surplus, provided there is an overarching trust in that particular form's value. If you are handed a legitimate token of exchange, say a US 20 dollar bill for example, you can feel instantly that settling or that pull of an obligation fulfilled or an obligation created. 

Economic vs. Military

We could cast doubt on even making the distinction between economic and conventional warfare, as there are so many overlapping relationships between them that they often bleed into each other spatially and temporally. A more useful distinction for long term analysis might be forms of soft power and hard power, with the latter coming up out of necessity when the former is not present or is exhausted. Indeed, soft power is often the preferred channel for a hegemon grown comfortable with its status, often becoming addicted to the exercise of that power long after its hard backing stores are used up. 

What even is an economic society, or a military society in the first place? Why does it come about? Is the distinction truly significant?

Nevertheless, in a large complex society there does seem to be differentiated economic and military spheres, in which more specialized individuals reside which excel at one sphere over the other, and so at present we're making use of these contrasting sites to further the analysis. 

The terminology is by no means fixed at present, and could be considered interchangeable depending on the illumination or the point being made. We can see what proves more useful. 

Hot Cold Hot Cold

It is not that conventional warfare is a simple thing and economic warfare is a complicated one; only that these forms of warfare have different sets of dynamics and considerations, but they do also tend to beget one another. 

The victorious power that emerges as hegemon out of a general condition of  conventional warfare may come out with some loftier ideals and a desire for peace, especially after a long period of instability and strife, and that power may have the means to bring some of that about in its domain, but that basic antagonistic instinct towards the Other never quite goes away. 

There is a constant drive to expand, seeking out further security and stability, pacifying and homogenizing difference to make it predictable and controllable, and as the hegemonic power decays that drive becomes less "soft" and less "benevolent" and presses its subjects further up against the wall than they're already accustomed to, eventually creating the conditions for conventional warfare to break out again. 

Death by Econ

We’ve discussed these processes in numerous ways over the years, but perhaps we can try yet another angle so that we can better plug it in to the present analysis.

When we were talking about the economic imperialism and warfare of the United States, we glossed over the actual mechanics of the economic warfare, which is an important part of the story. Naturally, there is a lot going on here, but we can at least illustrate some of these mechanics and tease out some of the patterns that structure them, which could prove to be illuminating. 

Economic imperialism is striking in that it turns creative production itself into a mode of warfare. This sort of warfare seems to emerge – and is only possible with – extraordinary wealth accumulation. It takes a massive surplus to marshal enough material flows across borders to overcome the material powers of outside societies and reverse their own surplus flows. This is a process whose initial stages are backed by military power, which is able to agitate outside production enough to get that suction and that reverse flow going, so that the productive forces of that outside power are directing the surplus away from that power and into the hegemon. And then this implies existing trade and transportation networks which can facilitate those flows, oftentimes which are rebuilt in the target societies after warfare or colonial devastation, retooled to favor the machinations of the hegemon. 

There is a soft and cultural power that comes with hegemonic dominance, which provides an ideological and magnetic pull to assist that suction as well. Outside powers look up to the hegemon and want to be like the hegemon, and so enter into economic and military relations with the hegemon so as to partake in that power, even if at the expensive of a siphoned off surplus, which shouldn't be a problem as long as the pie isn't shrinking too much and too quickly. Oligarchies then develop among the outside ruling classes and the points of contact with the hegemon, and in the case of somewhat wealthier vassals, middle classes through skimming off of the resource flows, greasing the wheels of extraction. Typically, it is the direct producers and laborers lower on the value chain which are squeezed the hardest. And so these gradations of economic class and relative benefit in the political system can introduce additional social and political complexity, allowing for additional leverage in propaganda efforts, slowing the accumulation of antagonism to the extraction.  

With the United States presiding over what is considered to be the most wealthy and powerful empire in human history, it is tempting to point to the superiority of economic imperialism as a mode of violence, but it wasn’t always that way. The Spartans with their military power were the dominant force for a large portion of ancient Greece’s history, edging out the economic imperialism and naval power of Athens in the Peloponnesian War in particular, and then the military society of Rome was able to defeat Carthage – itself considered to be an economic society – in the Punic Wars. There are plenty of other examples. And of course, these various powers waxed and waned throughout the passage of history. 

However at present, we have the formidable power of the U.S. economic empire to contend with, coming right on the heels of Britain's powerful economic empire, both of which were nestled in a particular stage of history, with numerous interacting and sympathetic political, social, cultural, material, and technological dimensions to account for. 

On a basic and individual level, if you're looking to physically threaten someone, or even destroy that person, what is happening there is readily apparent. The same is the case if you simply take something from someone without consent. The calculus is fairly clear: the value of what was lost can be determined, and whether the loss of that value is enough of a threat to justify the organization and exercise of power to get that value back, or otherwise simple retribution is a clear enough motivating force.  

But what if you make a trade that ends up being detrimental for the other person? Maybe you got something good, the other person got something bad, and then the other person ended up worse off. Well that failure could be attributed to the misapprehension of the situation by the losing party, written off as a loss. Ain't the winner's fault; let them have the winnings. Better luck next time. 

With a growing concentration of power in the winner however, it becomes easier and easier to manipulate these trades, making them look equal to the perception, when they are in fact steadily draining the resources and faculties of the losing parties. You can run with this sort of slow violence for quite a long time, constantly patching up the worst of its effects with overwhelming power, perpetual growth, and the steady application of propaganda. 

The brutality of this process is slower to suss out, though it can certainly be done with enough clarity to indicate its effects. Say, on the individual level if you are being assaulted economically, it is the case that the same amount of energy and exertion it takes to reproduce the basic fundamentals of daily living - food, water, shelter, heat, clothing, medicine, tools, transportation, etc. - is garnering less and less of those things over time, and in late stage cases it takes more effort to get less resource in the trade. 

Decisions have to be made regarding the general economy of the household: get enough food to stave the wasting away of the body? Clean water to keep away illness? Maintenance of the shelter to avoid exposure? Purchase of energy to allow for heat, cooking, various forms of production and leisure? Purchase of medicine to stave off ill health? Some of these decisions are foregone entirely by the geographies of impoverishment and the depredations of class and intersecting identity markers. And so the self contracts and degrades at an accelerated rate in relation to natural baseline. 

Systemically, one witnesses the gradual crumbling of one's home and one's neighbors' homes, as well as the disrepair and degradation of community infrastructure, the creeping in of numerous poverty-related social problems and conventional violence, the prevalence of disease and hunger, debt stresses and related violence, applications of state violence, steamrolled by urban renewal and gentrification and so on, and so whole communities too are sucked dry and then abandoned to degrade and disintegrate. 

There is an overlaying element of psychological warfare and its attendant pathologies as well, as all of these pathological effects of economic warfare prefigure some kind of justifying ideology which posits the actual fairness and justness of such a state of affairs, so as to maximize the effectiveness and duration of the numerous modes of extraction. And so the afflicted are not only cast in a low grade state of perpetual strain and suffering, but it is their fault for being in such a position, an attitude that is often internalized and which manifests in various forms of community sanction, substance abuse, and self-flagellation. 

This would all be bad enough, but the real trouble with this is that with empire, the modalities of domination typically have to be reproduced and multiplied in a fractal manner throughout the empire as it sustains itself. There is never one monolithic economic empire, but a complex of powerful economic actors conspiring together to coordinate their class interests so as to sustain their assault on both their own populations and foreign populations as well.

Within such an arrangement is a multitude of perpetual exploitation, with each actor angling to accumulate more than the other to avoid going under, and then so on down the line, multiplying the reach and effects of exploitation, degrading everything simultaneously. It is the constant rolling ambition of newer generations coming upon the old, looking to overcome and outdo previous generations, that drive the process on for centuries, with ever-increasing instability and political strife within the sacrifice zones, and even attrition within the richer and more fortunate sectors of competing powers. The precariat grow, the rich grow in power, and the middle hollows out.

And then such a process of corruption and disintegration endangers the entire geopolitical and environmental arenas through a growing coarsening of public feeling and mounting mismanagement and an eventual return to hard power, as there is nothing soft left to offer. 

It can take decades for these effects to gain real traction, but when they do, not only are they devastating, but also immensely confusing and bewildering. Eventually more conventional warfare is breaking out, often to the surprise of the more fortunate, rationalized as some materializing evil proceeding from the unknown: the inscrutable birth of a supernatural antichrist from a dubious but otherwise earthly mother.  

Back At It

Back in the canyon now and back to work. The physical and psychological strain of hitting the ground running and becoming intensely active after a long hard and sedentary winter has derailed my current writing streak, which is fine. It happens with enough regularity now that I know I can pick things back up when I recover. Plenty to cover that I left off with previously; that’ll come.

At present a storm front approaches and the wind is passing in waves through the forest: that oscillating shuddering that happens in a transition season, in this case as cold passes into warm. I’ve described it before: you can hear the hissing and gathering motion of the wind at a distance, and then it passes through as a roar and the trees are dancing and then everything is set at ease again as the wave moves on.

Concurrently I’m having a particularly bad long covid flareup. Like the wind, it moves through the body as circulating nutrient and waste flows call the various productive systems into action, and the movement briefly reveals the damage as the activity passes through. In my case it starts with digestion: 20 minutes or so after eating the nausea and dizziness comes; inflammation mounts and the body aches; the heart gets going and the breathing gets strained; the thoughts get foggy. The body becomes set against itself as it works and is set against the mind in turn, after which the metabolic processes wind down and the turbulence wanes and then it is relatively calm again, albeit with that lingering feeling of being beat up and run down: persistent headache, joint pain, fatigue and windedness, brain fog, and the like.

The bulk of the writing queued up will have to wait. Plenty to say in time; as it goes.