I'll Get To It

In regard to the standing deposits of unused or even used things, such as infrastructure and wastes - like China's ghost cities - for the most part you can eventually get to them and absorb them or use them or reincorporate them in some way, so long as you're not too excited and moving too fast. 

For example, we have these big limb piles all over the property. This is a biproduct of annual limbing and the processing of trees, with the logs used for timber or firewood. Felling trees, you're going to have all sorts of limbs to deal with. You can either use them or try to scatter them in the woods; of course it is good to put material back in the woods too, but the sitting limbs can add to ground fuel for a wildfire if they don't have time to rot and break down. 

The limb piles can be useful for all sorts of things, like building with them, or adding coarse woody debris to fill in with or mound things up with. We just got the chipper-shredder running again, which is a gnarly piece of machinery that just loudly chews them up and spits out wood chips, a valuable resource for fill, pathways, and mulching. 

Before you get to them, the limb piles make for eyesores, and besides they just take up space that you could be using for something else. Though on the other hand they will break down over time as they sit, and after a while the bugs get to them and enjoy them, and they can serve as habitat. 

Anyway, the piles can eventually be processed and used when you get to them, or they can just pile up and sit and take up room and look bad, especially if you keep processing trees without taking a minute. And certainly they make for marvelous fuel for a wildfire if one gets going. 

That's part of what sleep is for the individual. The brain and body have time to downshift and process all of that weird chaotic stuff you've been absorbing day in and day out. The brain gets rid of all that gunk building up in its inner recesses and so on. 

Capital, as manic and restless as it is, is fond of getting excited about one thing or another, and then transforming it into various forms of product and waste, and then moving on to the next exciting thing as the old processes peak and collapse, or grow too difficult and/or boring, before it all gets to be properly absorbed. All those shells of old coal towns in the US for example, which boomed in the early industrial period, with the mines spitting out tailings and the people spit out and used all the same, the towns drying up into ghost towns after they were no longer useful, especially as oil power came online. 

Or the nuke stations, humming away and producing wastes that have to be buried deep underground or otherwise stored, which sometimes re-emerge after geological changes or water infiltration and there's a spill, the consequences of which are usually hardest on the most vulnerable such as native peoples, poor people, and communities of color, whoever for whatever reason gets the least valued land containing these flaws, or whose least valued land becomes acceptable receptacles for wastes. 

How exciting are the products and wastes? How far are they taken and transformed from the normal rhythms of nature? And if they can be absorbed on a human timescale, then you do have to take the time and the care to actually incorporate them into what you are doing, or let them re-enter the regular circulations of the natural world. Otherwise it all starts to build up and take useable space, or otherwise conflict with the other forms of life it is incompatible with.  

This problem is made much more difficult when you have a world stage full of rival powers pursuing their own objectives, harnessing and developing the flows of global capital in their own ways, constantly juicing the pace and scale of change. 

It's Good To Be King

So I briefly compared the new capitalist to the king-figure in terms of the impulse to selfish control and the concentration of power. A couple more words on that. 

There are many forms of human organization and their accompanying distribution and varying concentrations of power, which denote different scales, and which have varying connotations and meanings as well. 

These forms arise appropriate to the geographies and environments that give rise to them, and they have unique histories of their own. And to further complicate things - at least as is apparent in the last couple of thousand years of the history of human civilization - these forms seem to evolve through cyclical processes of succession. 

These processes themselves are subjects of contention, debate, and competing theory. One of the more memorable and long-running theories is Polybius' theory of anacyclosis, which posits that societies move cyclically through phases of ochlocracy (mob rule), monarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and then back to ochlocracy again. 

Implied in this succession is a gradual dispersion of power from points of concentration, a centrifugal process in which power is gradually pulled outward, seeking more broad and stable patterns, before settling into stable concentrations of their own, eventually corrupting further and dispersing further, until dispersal is so complete that it can be gathered up and concentrated more completely again, beginning the process anew. 

As fascinating as all this is, the point I wanted to make for now is that complicated processes such as these, as well as their vast temporal and spatial distributions, and their relative position to varying interests looking to label and qualify them, make possible all kinds of terms for the varying concentrations of power we see in human societies: we have kings, monarchs, emperors, tyrants, dictators, presidents, prime ministers, chiefs, CEOs, lords, warlords, generals, parliaments, senates and bodies of representatives, boards, communities, and so on across all kinds of concentrations of power across time and space. 

And to cut through what all of these terms mean, I think it is probably safe to say that what all of them have in common is that they are all ways of describing certain distinct patterns and concentrations of power, which are affected in order to organize groups of individuals on varying scales in order to achieve certain results collectively. 

Even in smaller scale egalitarian tribes, you're likely to have certain individuals that emerge as "leaders," in that they have accumulated a certain body of experience and knowledge of their respective domains, who are deferred to if one is to properly achieve what one sets out to do. You have elders and chiefs and shamans, who have reached a certain level of achievement in medicine, spirituality, building, hunting, diplomacy and interpersonal relations, and what have you. 

And there is power in a given title of designation, because it does suggest a certain level of attainment, though these things can certainly diverge, which is another matter entirely. Because anything worth doing can be done well or poorly. As Eric Hoffer put it, even switching from picking peas to string beans had in it an "element of fear" (he was a Depression-era migratory worker) because the two picking processes were different, and learning one didn't necessarily mean the mastery of the other, which you could still screw up, depending on how high the stakes were. 

Which is to say that if you've been doing something well for a long time, you should probably be listened to and deferred to, because this experience and knowledge tends to produce correctly the results you want, that in turn produces wealth and lets you do further things, which thusly affords power. Now, the really interesting thing  about this is when you start scaling this issue up and factoring in these longer cycles of power succession, as we see in the last couple thousand years of human history. 

I mentioned that mismatch between title and attainment: at larger scales and under certain amounts of stress and pressure, you might need to concentrate more power in less individuals and have that concentration much more durable, as much more is at stake. In a dangerous environment for example, where the risk of ruin is high, you might want to follow the person who at least claims to know what they are doing, which if there are competing claims, tend to be demonstrated through violence anyway. 

In regard to the king or warlord designation for example, there are accounts out there of societies that were relatively peaceful and egalitarian, getting by somewhere stable on perhaps farming or hunting and gathering, who had to migrate because of some sort of disaster like an erupting volcano, and who emerged transformed and much more warlike and hierarchical. For now I'm working off of memory and this should be treated as hearsay; I'll try to get more specific and nail this claim down when I come across more data.  

But anyway taking this pattern for granted, this creates new internal problems. You want a durability in power concentration so as to guide the collective through a dangerous time, and that durability may outlast its usefulness or appropriateness. For example you might have a succession of kings that have lived off of their ancestors' legacies, who become progressively more inept and corrupt, whose ineptness and corruptness becomes the threat that that institution was built to stave off, giving rise to that historical cycle of power dispersion we briefly touched on earlier. 

And over time, you have such a concentration and frequency of rising and falling powers that there is basically a constant social and political danger of relaxing that concentration of power, however destructive and self-defeating that concentration becomes. History is replete with broad and creative social movements, with their constituents seeking to keep power balanced and social trust high, only to have all of their creative energy siphoned off and cordoned off by concentrating king figures, and the kings end up winning again and again and again. 

You have the mellow hippies stomped in the coalescing of the Roman Republic, and then again in the history of Christianity, in the centralization and concentration of the Viking kingdoms, in the Renaissance, in the Protestant Reformation, in the colonization of North America and the formation of the United States, within political and cultural and economic movements within the history of the United States, and so on. 

As far back as classical antiquity, the Greeks viewed the processes of anacyclosis as largely destructive and undesirable, scheming up contrivances to get around the problem such as Plato's philosopher king and republic, among others, which in turn influenced founders of the US, who were largely in agreement, scheming to contrive their own mechanisms of republic to account for the problem. 

We talk about free enterprise and unrestricted entrepreneurial endeavor and all the like, but really upon examination you find that the organizations of capital - the corporations and financial institutions - are broadly autocratic, full of unhappy and alienated people, which act on the broader public, also making them unhappy and alienated. Institutions, that left to themselves and freed, continuously produce bondage and coercion where they grow and prosper. 

There is a broadly popular dislike and distrust of corporations, yet they continuously coalesce into the forms that they do in fairly reliable processes of succession, concentrating into monopolies that ever more intensely exploit their surroundings and then even themselves, oftentimes cannibalizing themselves in the process. 

And this repetitive production of undesirable results, which continues apace outside of our collective stated intentions, can be analyzed, and certain deep historical influences and causes can be pointed to which accounts for these results. And due in part to these historical influences and ongoing forces in motion, we've collectively set up our institutions and organizations to work this way and to get things done this way, though it doesn't have to be so. We've explored some of this, and will continue to explore this in time.  

On Capital

Capital is often personified as this simultaneously organic and mechanical demigod, a self-augmenting machine, sometimes with moods and appetites, which takes inputs and reliably and repetitively manufactures products and/or services, and in realizing that production, accrues award and resource, which it plows back into itself, and so then augments and grows, continuously taking in more input and producing more product, augmenting further, and so on. 

And this is sort of a rough way to imagine and conceptualize it. It captures part of its general character. But capital is also built and maintained by human beings, human beings that are responding to very deep and old historical traumas, and who through personal instinct and collectively produced custom and institutional structure have developed particular ways of imagining and organizing labor. 

One could do well to investigate the conditions of that crucible where modern capital emerged: the crisis of the late Middle Ages. The story I got in high school European history was that Middle Ages Europe was a violent and tumultuous place, which starting in the 14th century, experienced a series of religious wars, popular revolts, and civil wars, eventually leading to the Western schism in the Catholic Church, further weakening the hold of the Church, and sparking the Protestant Reformation. 

Further on down the line, modern nations were continuing to centralize and spread their wings as the Church's public roles disintegrated and localized, further shedding religious ideology and iconography in favor of newly emerging Enlightenment principles. Beyond the high school story, with further research one could make out early capital emerging in that process, becoming ever more private as the states conversely centralized. Indeed, capital developed first in England where the state was centralizing the quickest, which was poised to muscle out and destroy the commons on behalf of its budding oligarchs. 

All well and good. All of that did happen. But for me the more interesting question was why? What was it that was impelling all of that tumult? Where was all of that violent and explosive energy coming from? 

One thing that immediately becomes apparent upon investigation is how bad things got in the late Middle Ages. The formation of feudal Western Europe was a violent enough process, as we explored in the era of the Migration Period of the Germanic tribes and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and the subsequent smashing together of classical antiquity and the nomadic tribes as they settled into the decaying shell of the Western Empire and propped back up those crumbling foundations, which happened in waves, such as when the Viking Era was set off, and so on. 

Eventually that process stabilized and Western Europe enjoyed several centuries of stability, in which a centralizing Catholic church oversaw a period of growth and prosperity, with that latent violence nevertheless lurking, at the ready. 

It was in the early 14th century when the Little Ice Age began - there were several cooling events before that, but nothing quite this dramatic - which was called "little" because it didn't resemble a proper global ice age, but a more regional one, with various speculated causes such as volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation, and changes in oceanic circulation and planetary orbit. And these changes could have been intensified and elongated by depopulation from Genghis Khan's campaigns, the Great Famine and Black Death, and then the conquest of the Americas some time after that. 

The Great Famine and Black Death largely resulted from the cooling, which fed back into that process. The Great Famine of 1315-1317 was bad enough for Western Europe: even the summers became cold and rainy, which resulted in widespread failed grain ripening and harvest, among other failing crops. This led not only to human hunger, but to livestock hunger as well, which weakened them and made them vulnerable to disease, killing more of them off. If that wasn't enough, even the brine couldn't be evaporated in the wet weather, cutting off salt production, a key ingredient for preserving what meat there could be had. 

So, you had a massive contraction in population, not only from hunger, but from various diseases like tuberculosis resulting from the hunger, and so the plummeting of the agricultural labor pool ensured that the food supply wouldn't recover for some time. And this was even before the Black Plague, which hit a famine-weakened population all the harder, further destroying the labor pool and stunting the food supply. 

Yes, the sharp contraction of the labor pool did eventually benefit labor, and the dramatic effects of the plague eventually completely upended existing hierarchies, but it would take centuries for the population to recover, especially considering the extended effects of depopulation and reforestation on the climate cooling. 

Given this grim process, the ensuing population revolts, civil wars, and religious wars (including the Hundred Years War) make a lot more sense, in which the unity of the Church was shattered, partially sparking the Renaissance and then the Protestant Reformation, among the many knock-on effects. 

It was in the tumult of this great contraction and its extended effects that you begin to see early capital gaining its legs. The population collapse and the steep resource cliff hit the regional feudal lords hard, making them more aggressive about military conquest and seizure of productive land, which squeezed what labor was left. And so there was a new kind of merchant/landholding class that split off, interested not only in arbitrage and global trade, as per its historical lane, but also in the land and production on the land itself, and improvement of the land and of production, which began opening up as the feudal kingdoms disintegrated. 

There was an existing level of human development and standard of living - especially as experienced by the aristocracy - that was suddenly rapidly degraded and cut off, and so there was a rapacious effort to claw back those gains. But suddenly those communally organized and church-directed bodies of organized labor were in steep contraction and fragmenting. 

Part of the solution to this could be seen in the intellectual output in the 17th and then the 18th centuries. There was a growing distrust of the fragmenting church to direct governance over an organic whole: the church and that enforced sense of piety didn't go away immediately - which you can make out in the odd contortions of Descartes' thought. However there was a growing emphasis on personal "autonomous reason" which then gave way to "technical reason," a solution to a profound and collective loss of religious feeling which gradually became more and more material, with a growing emphasis on material development. 

The organized laboring bodies of the Middle Ages were losing their temper, and so the individual was breaking away, guided by reason. But something had to pick up the slack for the collapse in organized labor and the loss of human resource. This was to be the machine, organized by the budding merchant and then capitalist, who was to midwife the birth of capital. 

Simultaneously as the necessity for intensified productivity was biting, a population was growing of landless laborers who had to sell their labor as enclosure set in, who would first be absorbed into the consolidating farms selling for a market that was also growing, and then into the factories as urbanization advanced. 

It was apparent that the laboring body of wage earners was what was first to be seen as the machine: a manipulable mass of depersonalized individuals, ideally interchangeable and bought and sold, placed together in a specific organization that is continuously refined so as to maximize efficiency and production. 

Eventually the machines gelled out of the mass of human technological development and were inserted into this process. Iron and then steel could brace and then bind together organized labor, maintaining its shape and function against the sloppiness of the individual. 

To circle back to our humans, capital could be seen as a profoundly selfish impulse, in which labor is sharply organized into a steep hierarchy, controlled at the top by a single individual or a couple of individuals, controlling a lion's share of the resources coming in from those efforts, who trusts neither the land that is seized upon nor the organized labor that transforms the products of that land, who is content to expropriate those products and sell them into an impersonal market, always hovering above the ground and above beastly labor, accumulating ever more wealth and power, getting as far away from the earth - that great betrayer - as possible. The emerging capitalist might have asked himself: "The king seemed to have it good, but how to get it for myself as I broke away?"

The average individual may have a poor intellectual grasp of this history, but the instinctual and spiritual sensibilities in a given age go long, and impress themselves in the individual whether welcomed or not. And besides, the interactions of a multitude over generations tends to pass on those sensibilities socially and culturally and snap them in for some time, producing model individuals to be emulated as well. Though now that sensibility is rapidly breaking down in the face of climate catastrophe, among other pressing issues. 

Here, Catch!

It can be somewhat amusing - if you can avoid those familiar incandescent feelings of frustration and rage that can well up in such circumstances - to read the steady stream of pearl-clutching Western economic analyses that wail on about how hopeless and irrational China's national economic policy is, and how it is all going to come toppling down any moment.  

I mean really, why did China build all of those ghost cities? Why are they pouring all of this money and all of these resources into profit-losing infrastructure domestically and internationally? What about all of their shadow banks and all of that overhanging debt? What's with all that unfair currency devaluation and mercantile behavior? Irrational Asiatic despots!

OK, barring the racist caricature at the end, there are some legitimate questions in there that can lead to legitimate analysis. There are serious analysts pointing to some of these problems, offering their own sobering concerns through thoughtful argument. And China does have some very serious and very difficult problems to deal with as a nation, even setting aside the intractable problems we collectively face as industrial societies. 

But also, China is a society that is structured very differently from the West's, where energy moves through it very differently as a result, and so collective action problems will emerge very differently and be solved very differently as a result. Ah, if only China could become a good neoliberal free-marketer and get behind the US' trade program, harmony could be restored. But I jest. Simple projection ain't gonna get it. There is more going on here than a simple misunderstanding of a rival power though.  

To go back to our Western economic pundits (I know, shooting fish in a barrel), it was as if their society existed completely removed from the rest of the world system, and for that matter, those very pundits could stroll outside and break into a hover, never actually touching the dirt below their feet. For one thing, the ostensibly "global" financial crisis was really just a disembodied hiccup, a cloud of "mistakes that were made" which dissipated into the nothing it mysteriously emerged from. And this is the bizarre solipsistic perception that pervades the Western ruling class, and which informs their equally bizarre decision-making process, which in the end threatens all of us, which I'll get to.  

No, no, the global financial crisis couldn't have been a traumatic cardiac event - as David Harvey more or less put it - for the whole world system, in which the global designated-consumer of the West seized up in a fit of delusion and self-dealing, blowing up the financial system, and then through economic superstition and panic, retreating into contractionary and senile fits of austerity, while all the while lashing out at the failing states most vulnerable to such policies as those states buckled, threatening to derail the global processes of resource extraction, production, and manufacturing, which feeds that consumption, along with the constant circulation of monies facilitating those flows. 

Why do they think China poured all of those record-breaking masses of concrete in record time, and built out those historic masses of infrastructure, jumpstarting the resource extraction economies around the globe, filling in the global demand for concrete and energy and steel and other materials, so as to stave off that circulating blood slowing and turning to stone? Who do they think kept that multitude of resource flows pumping? 

I think of that famous I Love Lucy episode, in which poor Lucy and Ethel get trapped on an assembly line on the factory floor of a chocolate producer, increasingly unable to cope with a working pace that is constantly accelerating, and so the wreckage of the backed up chocolates grows and grows in front of them, the results growing ever more chaotic and desperate, no matter how many surplus chocolates they absorbed by eating them and stuffing them down their shirts. 

Concerning the global financial crisis, it was as if in that moment of assembly line distress, a bowling ball was tossed into Lucy's arms as she frantically manipulated the assembly line, and then the Western pundit proceeded to concern-troll her for suddenly handling the bowling ball and letting all the  surplus chocolates continue to pile up somewhere else, while somehow maintaining the integrity of the assembly line. 

It would be one thing if this ignorance appeared intentional and malign, which would be contemptible and unfair, but also understandable. Which is something that you could call out. And sure, some of it certainly is. But I'm not so sure that a lot of mainstream Western commentators are even aware of the actual workings of the world system, beyond a pinpoint perception of a particular actor, in this case China as a circumscribed nation, a perception that wanders from subject to subject in accordance with whatever happens to be fashionable and expedient to comment on at the moment. Do they have a clue about what they don't know? Maybe some of them? That seems a little bit more difficult to address, which is all the more pressing as foreign policy makers continue to turn the economic screws while the sabers rattle.    

Therein lie some of the frightening consequences of a solipsistic hegemonic power as it wrestles with the growing wreckage of a global system intimately bound up with its own flailing activity. Which bears a macrocosmic relation to that of the monopolist, residing as a paradigmatic economic actor in its bosom: the monopolist fought and clawed to control every aspect of its domain and stamp out any sort of competitor. And then, having a wide open and desertified arena to act in, the monopolist was left with a complete lack of any sort of self-governing province internal to it to correct dysfunction, a problem which grew worse as the monopolist peaked, and then degraded and weakened, its faculties of governance degrading with it. 

Concerning this poverty of understanding, you can make out very real consequences of the decision-making processes connected to this understanding, which are more readily felt in the kinetic arenas of the Ukraine War and the Israeli destruction of Gaza. Even setting aside the human and moral horror of either conflict, and the serious complex of consequences stemming from that horror, it is clear to see growing economic dysfunction, which causes its share of problems downstream, connected to the progression of those conflicts. And you could certainly point to that dysfunction and address the moral fool: "Look, by your own abominable interests and metrics, this ain't workin'!"

The lighting on fire of inadequate military resources for one thing, and the destruction of Europe's industry, and then the failure of sanctions and the disruption of supply chains in the form of resources such as grain and energy on the one hand, and the intensifying strain put on the Arab world on the other, with the agitated Yemenis alone greatly disrupting shipping traffic in the Red Sea, forcing the rerouting of commercial shipping, doubling and tripling (and more) shipping costs in many cases, putting ever more inflationary pressure on the entire system, prompting senile Western institutions like the Fed to continue to put pressure of their own on interest rates, intensifying the debt strain and slowing economic activity, and so on. And all of this undisciplined destruction and its consequences only puts ever more pressure on an already over-strained world system. 

Which of course is something that usually motivates and accelerates the rise of rivals to edge out the failing monopolist and refill the vacuum left in its wake. 

It has been somewhat encouraging to see China surge ahead on various technological, infrastructural, economic, and governance questions. However inadequate these measures might be for the collective action problem concerning the climate, I'll take what encouragements I can get while living in the late neoliberal world, which more or less refuses to do anything other than cobble some disembodied images together and watch numbers go up as the world burns, largely by its own hand. But one thing I find very concerning is the underlying dynamic between the powers in relation to a greater system. 

You have a very old, vast, highly populated, and advanced nation like China - with the incredible geopolitical center of gravity all of that implies - acting the way it did when a global shock like the global financial crisis dropped, transforming that global cardiac event into great standing deposits of whole ghost cities and tottering shadow banking instruments loaded up with mind-numbing masses of debt, deep in the heart of that nation. And China had just emerged stronger out of its century of humiliation, discovering the necessity of rapidly industrializing and liberalizing to cope with the movements of global capital, unleashing Covid in the tumultuous processes of production, among other things. 

If that is what survival in the world system and its tightly coupled instruments of production and supply chains demanded of a giant like China, what about the rest of us? Of course, I suspect much of this is what has been motivating China and the rest of the world to decouple, to be sure. Time to unhitch from the bozos asleep at the wheel. But is there enough time to complete such a delicate, complex, and fraught process while avoiding systemic catastrophe? Is it even possible? 

Granted, we've seen this sort of thing occur throughout history, in which multiple great powers eventually become more and more economically and politically integrated, only to gradually and then rapidly pull out of those commitments and either re-align towards simpler and smaller alliances or pursue ever more autarky, or both simultaneously at varying rates and scales, based on what is working, as the existing larger scale political and economic agreements break down. 

What we've also seen however is an unprecedented level of global integration and the corresponding breadth and depth of global trade and division of labor in the modern age, which is in the process of breaking down. Nations like China and Russia do have more recent experience with rapid contraction and simplification, and a more direct experience of what approximates autarky, even in the face of such extensive global integration. As for the US and the rest of the West? There's quite a long way to fall still. And historically, it takes quite a long time - along with heaps of trauma - to get back up again. 

Oh, and that falling monster is pretty tightly coupled to everything else.