Woodfire

Nothing quite like sitting next to the barrel stove with a beer. One thing about woodfire is the slow localized radiation of its heat. Ah, the contrast. Coming into a warmer room, even if it chillier than room temperate, feels great if it is cold enough outside. And sitting in a cold room next a radiating fire feels great. 

Late Fall

Fall has finally come here in Washington, dousing the fires of a seemingly never ending summer, a preview of things to come. I'm learning to savor the winter, like one savors the last couple of swigs of a glass of whiskey. Paradoxically (yeah yeah, so it seems) it is the dynamism of the seasons that allows one to slow down and switch gears. The elongated summer this year felt as a stasis: the constant oppressive heat, the halting of the winds and the drying up of the moving streams; there was a stillness that was more menacing than peaceful, as one knew that the soil and trees were drying up, and the fuel was piling up for the fires that would pour suffocating smoke into the canyons. With the coming rains and chill everything moved again and was flushed out, and the perpetually growing vegetation that demanded constant labor and attention slowed and went dormant, and one could retreat to a warm place and have the inner thoughts come back. 

Counterpoint to My Counterpoint

Yes the prevailing regime is eternal, but a quick survey of current affairs in the West. There is mounting evidence that the so-called economy is cannibalizing itself, as opposed to re-organizing the supply chain, flushing out the calcified political and economic incumbents, and radically paring down resource usage and re-orienting the direction of existing energy flows. Apparently reinvention is too hard, and self-destruction is a little easier and thus the order of the day. 

Cannibalization is a strong word, so perhaps a quick glance at that. We have a decent idea now of where all of the inflation is coming from, and it is possible that enough of the ruling elite to effect change do too, yet all of the prevailing free market and anti-labor propaganda has effectively cordoned off those avenues, so the treasured national pastime of smashing labor is what is rolled out. Let's keep in mind that a lot of the effective demand comes from labor, which is already smashed anyway, and there is also collateral damage involved: the deliberately blunted tool of raising interest rates to induce a recession and crush labor also happens to drag down investment and deflate those inflated asset and credit markets too. 

Another aspect of this general instinct to double down on failed policies is to refuse to meaningfully address the supply chain issue - connected to the labor issue I might add - which apart from resulting in emptier and emptier shelves, higher and higher prices, and general uneasiness, also results in incredible reports such as defense contractors buying up the available washing machines to tear the computer chips out of them, which if true at a certain scale, substantiates the cannibalization accusation. 

The only thing left is a harder and harder throttle on propaganda to move forward - a technique when overused actually destroys the capacity to direct with image and symbol, so that we are left in a state where no one actually knows for sure what is going on or what will happen. The engine is making strange and troubling sounds and we are nevertheless pumping the accelerator, which is only the most obvious and local lever for forward movement, which can actually accelerate the destruction of the engine if it is not running right. 

I get this image of the drunkard, mumbling: "no no I'm fine, let me do it," before lurching forward and flat on his face. Again, it could take a while or it could be any minute. The regime seems most eternal when it is ready to fall. 

Membrane

Previously I mentioned the eating from the inside out of the Western Roman empire by the Germanic tribes. There is quite the story there. For now I'll get a rough sketch in, focusing on the changing borders and the composition of Roman society. 

Early Rome saw constantly expanding frontiers which were relatively open and porous, but as the empire matured and its boundaries reached their peak, and the surrounding processes of exploitation advanced deeper, their traditional enemies in the form of barbarian tribes grew more organized and unified, and began to pose a greater threat to the frontier. The borders were fortified and became less porous. 

These fortified borders would begin to weaken with advancing political and economic stress brought about by military overreach and resource depletion, plague, social and cultural crises, and so on, culminating in the crisis of the third century, which accelerated profound changes in the composition of the body politic. 

There is debate over whether key defensive and logistical changes in this period were deliberate or simply came about through necessity and chance, but the important part is that the growing invasions were more and more managed by relaxing border controls and fortifying key cities, garrisons, and supply centers, so that as the various invaders advanced deeper and deeper into the empire, their supply chains would be lengthened and strained and their efforts and pillage and local resupply would be frustrated, as more localized military forces would triangulate on their location like a closing net. These structural changes would precipitate the walled city state as the eventual center of gravity in medieval society, which would expand again and unify until greater empires with expanding borders were again instantiated, another interesting story itself. 

For now, the invading tribes would gradually make inroads in settlement, striking deals with a weakening Roman state to coexist, offering to serve in Roman armies as part of the agreements, becoming more and more integrated in Roman society, so as to shore up the weakening state and be played off against still hostile tribes. 

There was eventually a period of warfare in the late 300's AD with the Goths in particular which would prove transformative, and it is a fascinating period to pick apart and analyze in its own right. 

A large group of Goths arrived on the Danube border, seeking refuge within the empire itself, as they were fleeing a Hun invasion themselves. The tides and pressures in borderlands like the steppes, within which more and more powerful nomadic tribes in the centers would put more and more pressure on and invade weaker tribes on the outer edges, putting pressure on the borders of settled societies in turn, is another fascinating dynamic to keep in mind for another time. 

Anyway, it was agreed that the large Goth contingent could settle, but they were improperly settled at that, from the perspective of the Roman empire anyway. They were settled as one coherent and continuous group, as opposed to breaking them and scattering them throughout the empire and assimilating them, and allowing much of them to remain armed, for various speculated reasons. 

There was a resource shortage where the large group was settled, and logistics like food supplies were botched and/or sabotaged, and the group, starving and desperate began to enter into exploitative agreements with Romans such as selling their children into slavery for dog meat. Unsurprisingly, this situation became intolerable and the Gothic contingent revolted and raged across the countryside. 

Typically, the nomad peoples were not skilled or equipped for siege warfare, so they would roam and pillage the countryside while avoiding the fortified cities, circulating indefinitely and ravaging the landscape, as material and political resources were insufficient to defeat the circulating force (sound familiar?) setting resources and allies and Roman detractors free to gather strength as a marauding force, culminating in the disastrous Battle of Adrianople in which a terrible rarity occurred: a Roman emperor was killed in the course of the defeat. 

A settlement would be reached and the Goths would be reintegrated into Roman society, bringing about political transformations in which the integration of barbarian tribes would advance and accelerate, plugging them deeper into civil and military life, their leaders rising in the political leadership in Rome, gathering social resources in the process, eventually sacking Rome under Alaric and gaining greater political and economic footholds as the Western half of the empire continue to fragment. 

Modern Imperialism

I was getting excited drawing up this vivid and dramatic characterization of US imperialism as incredibly reckless - and it is certainly that, all things considered - but such a characterization misses a large part of what has also been achieved: there is a deftness and astuteness to modern imperialism that has to be addressed, especially for what it reveals.  

As even anti-imperialist detractors admit, the US has been able to bend the will of nations more through financial chicanery, debt, and ideological persuasion, bypassing the brute force required to invade and militarily conquer a land (eh, usually), or even to establish a colony within it, giving its victims the illusion that they are a willing and autonomous partner in a business relationship with a wealthy power that only wants them to become a free democracy so they can become prosperous like itself. 

Of course it does take terrible acts of violence and sabotage to establish regimes amenable to such relationships, but then once the deed is done, the real work can be done to manufacture consent and get the imperial exploitation running more quietly and less visibly, requiring less raw military violence once it gets going. It is like cooking with gas instead of woodfire: all that is needed is a spark and that stream of gas becomes a steady flame without the mess and smoke. But there is an important point I'll get to here: exploiting that gas requires specialized infrastructure built up over centuries and even millennia. And of course different political and economic situations called for different methods of domination.

You saw these gradations in the ancient world too. Rome was famous for incorporating conquered nations and assimilating them into its empire, which made for a more stable process of exploitation. But depending on how tortured a conflict was, and how they felt towards a certain enemy at a certain political period, they would have no compunction with razing the town or city, killing off all the male population, and selling all of the women and children into slavery. 

But the really astute rulers would prefer the diplomatic route, particularly through economic means. If they could smooth the relations with their rivals and subjects with bribes and persuasion, it would sure beat the resources required to mobilize the military and do it the old-fashioned way. And it would keep one's enemies closer, so to speak. They were usually a bit sheepish about this in the ancient world: in Rome especially bribes and cloak and dagger politics were seen in the mythology as weak-willed and cowardly, with the need for bold and glorified battle to settle one's conflicts as a core part of their self-conception. Nevertheless, those rulers who knew how to hold power would only dream of having the avenues available that the United States had in its golden age. 

But that is just the thing. Reflecting the fact that coinage and markets were still quite young in the ancient world, there was still a broad cultural uneasiness of them and a limited understanding of them. Aristotle would be scratching his head over how the commodity was even possible, in which so many disparate objects with profound differences could be reconciled to that single medium: money. 

It took quite a bit of time for a modern understanding to develop of modernity itself, which is readily apparent if one surveys the thought of classical political economy, with thinkers wrestling over the nature of markets, capital, and value, much like the Christian mystics wrestling over the nature of their god centuries before. And someone who really understands modern imperialism like Michael Hudson likes to regularly remark that the US state was interested in his work because it helped them understand what it was that they were actually doing. 

And if it took a lot of time and work for that understanding to develop, it also took a lot of time and work to develop the means and infrastructure for those processes themselves. Financial tools of control presuppose not only thousands of years of development of finance, but also developments of money and markets and capital and the very understandings that make those things work more efficiently. Ideological forms of control like PR and propaganda in general presuppose complex and stable social arrangements and long histories of the development of the semantics and the realities that make those semantics work. 

That's where the recklessness of the whole thing comes in. The West is burning away all of that hard-earned manufactured consent just as it is burning away all of that gas and oil, all of those hundreds of millions of years of captured sunlight. 

And I'll repeat this until I'm blue in the face: I'm one of those anti-imperialist detractors. My amazement at the power of the evolution of empire is well-mixed with horror and repulsion. But even I can look at what the late imperialists are doing and say, "eh that's not a good idea for you either."

Stretching and Flexibility

This vacillating between opinions sounds a little wishy-washy I know. But there is a reason for it. Concentrating on world affairs and forming judgements and opinions about them, especially in terms of how one lives one's life, can really serve to tense up one's faculties of perception, at least for me. Like a hand gripping a lever, applying mechanical pressure, the joints start to ache, the muscles start to burn. One's opinion and judgement emanates from one's self, and reaches into the movements of the outer world: conclusions start to take on an existential quality; they must be right! There is a moral significance to what must happen, in accordance with those elusive natural laws. Living in an unstable world, bad judgements could serve not just as an embarrassment to one's ego, but as negative effects on one's very life. 

But there is a self-defeating quality to this heightened significance. To attach too tightly to one's opinions is to hitch one's fate to the movement of the opinions themselves, which don't always align with the reality, especially as one's ego runs away with itself. One's perception about what is possible constricts. One misses things. One may eventually go down with one's own faulty perceptions in turn. 

I find it useful to regularly loosen up the grip and stretch out the perceptions; build up a little flexibility. If one is going to think hard, then think hard about all of the many possibilities and ways of doing things also. Yes we're going to do some work here, and apply some force and grip. But let's do it limbered up. 

State of Play

In the course of these brief elaborations, I wanted to contribute a bit more to this picture we have of the world system and its tensions and shifting character. We are living in this moment in which the empire we call the "West," presided over by the United States, is in a gradual state of decline after having enjoyed almost a century of hegemonic control over much of the activities of the global economy. We could easily resituate the gradients of the rising and falling of the empire in that period, or argue a different naming scheme altogether, where the "West" - or whatever we would want to call it - is something that extends much further back. For now, I just want to look at the US-led order that rose out of the challenges of the World Wars and then accelerated its decline in time for a new round of global upheavals. 

Yes it is true that regime changes on this scale can take quite a bit of time given the study of history, setting aside the argument that the modern era is characterized by a profound acceleration of the movement of energy and transformation of matter, which could involve time dilation as well. But surveying the Western-constituted world system, it does appear desperately unsustainable and growing more unstable by the minute, and as such, an increasingly unwelcome place for a US empire desiring its brand of control, or at least its brand of controlling and encouraging the spread of chaos anyway; we'll get to that. 

The Western imperialist could cast a worried glance at a number of red flags: the processes of de-industrialization that shifted the central locus of control and center of industrial gravity away from the US, processes that can be readily attributed to a degradation in national coherence and coordination and competence of the ruling elite. And let's be clear: it is the control and leverage of industrialization that is the modern king-maker in this world. Also, the degradation in domestically controlled raw materials and energy products. The shredding of what was left of public feeling and political trust. The shutting down of novel problem-solving forms, and the subsequent never-ending stream of collective problem-solving failures in the form of derailing supply chains, collapsing public health systems, random and senseless violence, and so on. There is the cultural cynicism and despair. There is the prominence and priority of propaganda and manipulating image. I could go on. The average person can look at a rotting wooden plank, and perhaps put a little weight on it and tease out its strength, and then judge that the plank will not bear weight and it is only a matter of time before it falls through, refusing to trust it any further. The Western world system is certainly looking that way. 

I also have to give the begrudging admission that I am constantly impressed by the sheer persistence and longevity of a system that seems like it should blow up just by looking at it. Historically the US has been incredibly reckless in its foreign policy, and continues to behave that way as some very obvious and noisy chickens come home to roost. The history of its foreign policy has been to smash any alternative systems that attempt to maintain some sort of coherence to the bounded nations it trashes and drains of wealth, and then to set all of the tattered and flaming constitutive elements free, to be taken up into a rigged world market, with benefits funneled to the hegemon and costs sprayed about everywhere else.  And part of why it can do that is the unprecedented material bounty it has presided over, helped along by an intense exploitation of the most powerful energy source known in human history, at least in terms of net return to human needs. 

There is such an incredible and sheer ebullience of material production and reproduction: it is a system that proceeds to literally cheapen life, allowing it to continuously and messily expand with wanton waste and ruin. Which is where my nagging hesitation comes from when calling the pocket of that eight-ball shot where the whole rotten, yet blooming edifice tumbles down. Figuratively anyway: we know about major shocks and shifts, but the change is messier and more gradual than all that. Historians still debate when the Roman empire actually collapsed after all, with some wondering whether it ever collapsed at all. 

From the outside looking in, there is also the impression that China and its allies - with the obligatory reciting of their own serious problems - does in fact display a problem-solving dynamism, or at least problem-solving that is more dynamic anyway, and an overall seriousness in intent that suggests a future direction for the greater system to take. Much of this endeavor does have a tragic quality however, considering our collective predicament. 

Why Bother?

I wanted to take a minute to set aside a few posts here and elaborate briefly on a couple of points I was trying to make in a previous post. I can only claim to understand and anticipate the longer term movements of our prevailing world order. I have confidence to claim that because I have spent a lot of time studying a wide range of subjects that help to elucidate those longer term movements, such as political, economic, military, and social histories, histories of thought and technology and technique and tradition, natural and geologic histories, and then of course the shorter range political, economic, social, etc. histories that help situate those longer term movements in our present timeline, backed up of course with scientific, sociological, mystical, and experiential understandings of how human thought, greater ecologies, thermodynamics, natural necessities, spiritual considerations, subjectivity, and so on all interact to structure and influence those movements. 

I'm much less confident about anticipating the shorter term movements, at least in terms of nailing down any sort of definitive timing or finality with any sort of precision, because as I'll also briefly elaborate in an accompanying post, these things are complex and take quite a bit of time. In terms of really historically significant shifts such as changing world regimes or even changing empires, these things can take centuries, and the breadth and depth of my own personal experience is limited to less than a century, assuming I make it to old age. 

Why would this matter? Why not relax and stick with contemplating longer and more stable timelines and then throwing one's hands up about precisely nailing down the subjective experience of the turbulent and uncertain present? For me some of the most interesting and compelling subjects have to do with the immediate present and the ensuing short term movements: for a limited living being, I have a temporary but very vivid access to a first-hand apprehension of world events as they unfold, and those events have a direct bearing on the course of my life and what that life looks like, and how I ultimately should attempt to live it. So of course it feels compelling and worthwhile to attempt some kind of comprehension and anticipation of current events. 

Of course the longer term understanding itself is refracted through our current historical accumulation of facts and data, structured by the prevailing ideologies and cognitive tools of understanding, but at least with an understanding like that you can set aside a perpetual work in progress and refine and revise it as you wish, whereas it seems to me a trickier task to live well, on the run, as a once stable order begins to shift and to lurch and to shudder. 

Corruption

Corruption is oftentimes a measure of how sordid the activities of the "other guys" are, but the process of corruption - whatever that means really - also has to take into account the ambient atmosphere and all that entails. In other words, concentrated wealth itself is inherently corrupting to whomever bears witness to it, which in a highly interconnected world with advanced communications technologies, is virtually anywhere at any time. So it becomes the high watermark - within wealthy society and without - of what will always be possible, and there will always be a portion of any population that desires it, so that there is a relentless striving towards it that pervades a society's efforts and activity. 

On Propaganda Further

Propaganda itself remains a constant as an essential tool in complex societies: with the many intersecting interests and perceptions, it is important to establish a centralized ideological "north star" so to speak which orders perceptions and directs the activities of a multitude, however crudely it stamps out deeper resolutions of the underlying reality itself. However in excess and in ascendancy, such a tool begins to do serious damage to the communication faculties of its target, and severely constricts the avenues of productive action that its recipients can take. 

Changing of the Regime?

There seems to be a broad sense that the Ukraine Invasion and the ensuing war is proving to be an early century-defining conflict, drawing in its participants and transforming them and their relations with one another as it intensifies and generalizes. Despite the plethora of hot takes emanating from all quarters however, anticipating the direction of the conflict - and even the conflict's nature - continues to be difficult and elusive.

So much of the information pouring out of the conflict is showing itself to be unreliable, which is to be expected from a theater of war where information and perception make up additional aspects of weaponry, which doesn’t help. But further, making sense of the larger dynamics at play and attempting a speculative extrusion of the deeper currents is exceedingly tricky as well.

A key obfuscating tendency is the construction of the delineated combatant players "Ukraine" and "Russia," which as far as military necessity goes, makes sense concerning the immediate kinetic theater. As wars tend to do, there is a bifurcation in larger interconnected systems in which geographically circumscribed combatants concentrate power to do violence to one another. 

But this late industrial era is quite the interconnected one. Ukraine, with its history as an intermediary between jostling empires is suffused at this historical juncture with jostling oligarch factions from differing regions of the world system, and as a delineated nation its political and economic goals can be seen more as being shaped by its nature as a medium and as a pawn. Russia, on the other hand, is less the Soviet bogeyman of yore and more the composite of a series of regional and historical images, attempting to prop up a geographical claim on global capital. 

For decades the Russians were attempting to turn their nation inside out and join the Western economic and military unions, and then the Western powers - lead by the US anyway - relentlessly encircled them and continued to demonize them, as they were simultaneously directing wealth and resources into the very shared system dominated by the West in the form of raw materials, engineering talent, privatized public resources, and etc. And much of the Russian middle class still identifies favorably with the West, viewing the Western system as dynamic and promising, whereas so much of the Western middle class views Russia as the recurring evil empire; the various regions of the world system understand each other little. 

What this conflict really communicates is the breakdown and gradual realigning of a highly integrated world system. With each turn of the news cycle we see a superficial summary of factional ebbs and flows, but which are all connected to contracting resource flows and growing system-wide tensions: the buckling of various sections of either aligned side of the world system under the weight of sanctions, sabotage, and political tensions. 

But to reiterate a previous point, the character of the system can change, in accordance with the designs and machinations of the established hegemon. There are regional differences in character of vying empires for the position of hegemon, and the outlooks and associated methods for acquiring and maintaining power do matter. 

As hegemon, the US and its Western allies have taken to an increased emphasis on propaganda and the manipulation of a previously acquired surplus, while Russia and its allies - not without their own serious structural problems common to the industrial world - waiting in quiet desperation are more interested in national survival and eventual angling to hegemon, favoring a shift in more practical and utilitarian methods of attracting and directing surplus. 

This division is reflected in the observation that Russia is attempting to fight an early twentieth century-style war, in which material logistics and practical considerations drive progression in the theater, but that in the twenty first century, effective PR and the navigation of huge, complex industrial associations into directing overwhelming energy flows in one's favor is the way to win the day. It has also been observed that the recent surprising Ukrainian victories are also PR wins, that will eventually translate to an increased flow of material and fighters, restoring their forward momentum. 

However, given the increasingly severe resource contractions and increasing instability of the natural and political world, the time will come when the industrial world does regress back to that material utilitarian nexus of considerations. The pertinent question here however would be when? 

Not that this is a directly comparable historical parallel, but I think of the Lusitanian leader Viriathus who was far more accomplished military than a lot of the individual Roman generals sent in his direction, but that his people were eventually worn down by the relentlessness and the persistence of the Roman advance, until he was assassinated via bribe. And then it would be centuries before the western half of Rome would eventually be eaten from the inside out by the Germanic tribes, illustrating that the character of a world system can take quite a long time to change, regardless of the more localized gradients and contrasts between powers vying for hegemonic control. 

And besides, with the clash of nuclear-armed powers, it behooves the enterprising hegemon to reach the top of the value chain, as it no longer works for a simple plane to drop a simple warhead, calling it good. It takes a complex network of offensive technologies and defensive technologies to maintain military supremacy in such a climate, which itself requires a shift to PR in order to direct those complexes of industrial activity to maintain such technologies and infrastructures.