In a recent post elaborating on the movement and persistence
of wealth, I kind of just did a “throw everything at the wall and see what will
stick” kind of bit, sketching out the many and sometimes-contradictory effects
of wealth circulation and accumulation, both spatially and over time. There are
times when you just have to tip over that tool bin and scatter everything on
the floor so you can get a look at everything and think about what you’re going
to do next.
This time, I’d like to pull back to a structural analysis and put some of these odds and ends together. So, in so many words, the processes of the accumulation and circulation of wealth are very much a social phenomenon: it takes associations of people working together to produce wealth at larger and larger scales.
There is the more immediate fact that when you have multiple people working together, you get all sorts of added effects, such as a more efficient usage of space and repetition, combined strength, simultaneous coordination, competitive vigor, social enjoyment, and so on. More important though are the divisions of labor that develop, where having a certain amount of people allows for certain techniques, traditions, and knowledge sets to be built up more thoroughly and then preserved through a given branch of laborer.
There is only so much time in a day, and so branching specializations allow for the deepening and perfection of a given branch of discipline which can be split off into ever-finer designations as population grows and a culture advances. The sum total of all of this activity - which results in something greater than its parts - is an economic culture which has a distinct and effective structure.
This structure forms the basis of a body with a certain character, which is at once a great power and a dangerous trap. Let's first imagine this dichotomy in a single resource and work up from there. Let's say that your culture persists in a heavily forested landscape, and that you make heavy use of timber to produce a lot of your wealth. Processing a single tree - even a small one - is a hell of a lot of work: you fell the tree, and then you have to de-limb it, and then figure out what you're going to do with all of those limbs. Then you've got to move the actual log or logs around and process those, and then store and refine and process those worked-over materials further.
If you're watching your resources and you have a limited labor force, you're making use of as much of that tree and as much of that process as is possible. And then your infrastructure is made up of those trees, and your economic culture is made up of the knowledge of those processes as they are passed down generations. Your buildings and furniture and tools and your energy and so on are made up of those trees, and as they break down they need to be repaired or replaced by those trees, and so on. These trees in a sizeable part make up your material lifeblood.
In our society that lifeblood is oil, and to a lesser extent materials like steel and concrete, which involve fossil fuels in their production anyway. Oil is an incredible substance: all those millions of years of sunlight and decomposed living things, and we can do just about everything with it. Energy, transportation, feedstocks, plastics, and that's just scratching the surface. At this stage we need it to function; we use it every day. And at the same time it is a substance and power that is regarded with the utmost fear and hatred.
Because as wealth is concentrating, forming structure and body, that body becomes delimited by the energy differentials it is made up of, and as that body is augmented and maintained, it acts on its environment at greater levels of intensity as it is scaled ever further. This is part of what makes up the trap. For example when everything is built upon steel and concrete, you have all of that infrastructure constantly wearing out and needing replacement. You have to produce more of it to reproduce what it makes up, and all of your economic activity takes the shape that that infrastructure allows, and so requires it in turn. Repeatedly using that power to gain power welds you to that power, even as that power begins to turn against you as energy sources dry up and pollution grows.
And as more energy is burned everything is constantly speeding up, and so you also have to keep up with that socially-bound speed. Part of the difficulty of administrating a homestead for example are the property taxes, and the supplementary foods and materials and tools and other resources that have to be purchased with money, and embedded in that money are all of the economic relations that are implied in that social resource, and all of the speed and scale of mass production and commerce. If you intentionally try to slow down, you start to find that you are falling behind: the money is drying up because you aren't producing fast enough, and so the money itself speeds you back up. There are plenty of ways around this, and ways to achieve the lifestyle you want through effort, but I'm just outlining a rough example of this that is always in the background and which acts as a real constraint. The short of it is that it is very hard to get off this moving train.
What's more is that the powerful are made powerful in part by the repeated operation of such a structure, and their position in it as a stable and persistent thing, which they have the knowledge and conferred legitimacy - however tenuous that might be - of navigating it and exploiting its riches, and so they are extremely motivated in maintaining its given shape as indefinitely as possible.
It is one thing for a single economic body to act in this way, but as the dominant and hegemonic body its form has been spread to all of the reaches of the earth, and so the alternative powers challenging the hegemon have to partake in the general project of industrial civilization, and so it becomes a global and totalizing phenomenon, changing the calculus of partaking in a given wealth form as history unfolds.
Much of what we have previously discussed can be folded into the dynamics of this totality, and the structures which take shape as a result have shapes and boundaries whose natures can account for the contradictory effects and considerations of wealth in general.
Hopefully that ties some of the loose ends together at least, though I'm not sure I've succeeded in making things any clearer. Not to worry: this is an incredibly complex subject and difficult to get a handle on, and we'll be returning to this issue from different perspectives, again and again.
