Ian Welsh – Page 117 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

The baseline is that China is now the dominant economic power: the greatest great power. This is not evident to everyone yet, it will be soon. They produce more science, are ahead in most technological areas and have the largest industrial base. I’ve written about this plenty, so I’ll leave it at that.

The next baseline is that we have three onrushing issues: climate change, ecological collapse and running out of various resources. The third isn’t obvious to most people yet, but it will be. China has won the lead horse position on a style of life and economy which is genuinely unsustainable, in the sense that continuing to run our economies on planned obsolesence: building lots of stuff to just throw it out in a few years, cannot be sustained because it’s destroying the conditions which allow for human life and a predictable economy.

This doesn’t mean that taking lead horse isn’t useful to China: if they have sense they can use all that industrial capacity and scientific and engineering expertise to speed thru the necessary transition. So far they aren’t, beyond some steps towards the renewable electrical economy, which is necessary but insufficient.

To put it simply, civilization collapse is on the way. Everyone is going to be hit by it, even China and America. I’d expect China to hold on longer than most, unless there’s an early inundation of their croplands in the North, but by 2070 to 80 at the latest, China will be in warlordism again.

However, let’s run thru some shorter term notes about various nations.

Europe is in terminal decline. Maybe a few parts will avoid this, but they are no longer leaders in new science and engineering (China, the US, Japan and South Korea are all ahead of them) and are losing their industrial base because of their high input costs, primarily energy. Making Russia their enemy is costing them their legacy heavy industry, since American energy costs much more than Russian.

Of the major European countries, the UK is in fastest decline, since they sold all their industry long ago and decided to try and live off finance but the entire subcontinent is moving back to its usual place in Eureasian affairs: a backwater.

India isn’t going to make it. Sorry, too many internal problems, too little time. To much corruption and the authoritarianism is clumsy and stupid (there is smart authoritarianism, India is not practicing it) and climate change is going to hit India fairly hard and early. But overall, the signs of takeoff aren’t there, and there isn’t enough time. India will be broken up by 2050 to 2060 and 2035 to 40 is entirely possible: when they have real crop failure, they will have famines which kill hundreds of millions and cause vast violence and displacements. And they are going to have vast crop failure.

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South Korea and Japan are the American allies which actually matter. Everyone else is meaningless. These two countries still have industrial bases and fast scientific and engineering advancement. In per capita terms South Korea is first in the world, Japan is second. For now they’re fairly firmly on the US side, but if China is smart and willing to cut them a good deal and they’re smart, they make their peace with the other side. The sooner they do this, the better deal they’ll get.

Russia was done a vast favor by western sanctions, which have forced its oligarchs to actually spend money at home and which has allowed Putin to create new oligarchs based on seized western assets. No more wasting money on British football teams. The Russians are working hard on civilian aviation, they’ve vastly increased their military industrial output and in general sanctions have forced them into industrial policy. Their risk is being swamped by China, and they will have to be smart and cut deals where China lets them keep and extend certain industries.

Saudi Arabia and the oilarchies are screwed. They’ll have their little days in the sun, but they have no real industry or research and aren’t going to be able to ramp up enough. As the age of oil ends, and it is, they will fall into well-earned obscurity and meaninglessness. The only one which stands a chance is Iran, since sanctions forced it to create its own industries. As with Russia and pretty much everyone else, they’ll have to cut a deal with China to keep and extend that industry, but as early allies, that’s easily doable if neither they nor the Chinese get too stupid.

The Developing Nations have a window in which to cut good deals with China. I wrote an entire article on how to cut good deals with China, so I’ll leave it at that. If they don’t, well, the new order will still be more friendly than the late neoliberal order, but most such nations are not in a position to handle climate change and ecological collapse well. It’s going to be ugly. That said, for a few, there will be an opportunity to come out the other side comparatively much better off.

Overall we are moving into a period like that from 1914 to 45 or any other major power reset: the old power is falling, the new power has risen. America was actually ahead of Britain by 1890, and it took quite a while for the British to fall, but this isn’t an exact analogy, because in this case the old and new powers are in conflict and there is an onrushing global near-apocalypse.

There’s only so much time left before everything starts falling apart in ways which can’t be ignored. Smart nations and smart people will use that time to prepare.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 17, 2023

By Tony Wikrent

On December 17, 2023

15 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

Oligarchs’ war on the experiment of republican self-government

Constitution in the Crosshairs: The Far Right’s Plan for a New Confederacy

Nancy Maclean, Arn Pearson, December 11, 2023 [progressive.org, via Naked Capitalism 12-15-2023]

Frustrated by the surprise defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, a group of breathtakingly rich and highly strategic actors on the radical right, including the Koch brothers, quietly launched an ambitious new campaign to lock in their political control once and for all. They had used their immense wealth and institution-building savvy to capture a majority of state legislatures in 2010, so the groundwork was already in place.

This campaign would be spearheaded by a corporate pay-to-play group they had long funded to influence state laws—the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—and a dark money group with deep ties to Charles and the late David Koch (who died in 2019), as well as the Tea Party movement—Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG). When legislators arrived at ALEC’s annual meeting in August 2013, they were given detailed instructions and model text to bring back to their statehouses for a resolution demanding the first Constitutional convention since 1787….

In the decade since those first secretive meetings, Meckler’s Convention of States has managed to rack up wins in nineteen states for a convention that would address sweeping proposals to radically curtail the powers of the federal government. ALEC-led groups also claim to have twenty-eight states behind their call for a more limited convention to propose a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Should a convention be convened, what is it that the ultra-rich backers want? Their chosen so-called grassroots leaders mince no words when speaking to friendly audiences. Meckler has declared that the purpose is “to reverse 115 years of progressivism.” In fact, the endgame is even more consequential: to return this nation to its pre-Constitution roots under the Articles of Confederation, with a weak central government and sovereign states….

Indeed, most of what ALEC, CSG, and their billionaire backers want to achieve flies in the face of public opinion. And that’s what makes their plan so devious. “Voters have no role to play in the right’s vision of a Constitutional convention,” a report by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) concluded. Delegates would be handpicked by legislative leaders, and here’s the kicker: The votes taken at such a convention would be based not on population but on one vote per state in order to grossly underrepresent the majority of Americans.

In audio obtained by CMD, former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, told an ALEC audience in 2021 how this strategy could be used to circumvent what most Americans want. “Because their [Democrats’] population is concentrated and ours isn’t,” Santorum said, “rural voters [Republicans] . . . actually have an outsized power granted under this process.”

He added, “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though . . . we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

[TW: The most disconcerting aspect of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza is not the brutality and inhumanity of it, or the shamelessness of Israeli officials, but the complete lack of any plan or even proposal for a constructive alternative to the killing and destruction.

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On December 16, 2023

15 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Being Human Alone: Maslow Was Wrong

By Ian Welsh

On December 14, 2023

9 Comments

This is the fourth chapter of my book “The Construction of Reality.” It is about what makes us human. Construction of Reality is about really fundamental principles and is somewhat dry (it’ll get a rewrite), but the fundamentals are worth learning.

It’s first draft, so not completely edited, and is a reward for reaching a milestone in our fundraiser. The next milestone is $8,350 (a little over $800 from our current total), and will include chapters:

5. Identity and Identification (how we expand our bodies beyond our physical selves)

6. The Ritual (how we create identification)

7. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

We learn to be human from other humans. Identity, ideology, language, empathy and role taking all require other humans initiate us.

Once we have learned to be human we can be humans alone. There is a long tradition of hermits, men and women who go into the wilderness for years at a time to seek themselves, God, or another way of understanding reality. But before they could escape from humanity to find out what being human means, they first became human by the example and work of others.

Still, each of us exists for ourselves, with an internal experience which is known completely only to ourselves. It is not entirely unknown to others, we are able to feel the pain and pleasure of other people, but it is never quite the same as our own pain or pleasure.

We may guess at other people’s thoughts, but we do not hear them. We become human thru other people, yet never completely know them. This is appropriate, because as many hermits would tell us, we don’t know ourselves very well either, for all that we have access to our own experience.

Humans have bodies and those bodies give rise to drives and needs and near universal emotions. If we wish to continue living we need food and water and to be neither too hot nor too cold. We must avoid injury, but live by harming or killing other living creatures: plants and, usually, animals.

Most people want sex, they want recognition, they want to feel safe and they want to feel accepted.

A psychologist named Maslow created a famous pyramid of needs, positing that we worked our way up the pyramid. Maslow said we had physiological needs like food and water, then safety needs, then love and belonging needs, then esteem needs (feeling good about ourselves), then a need for self-actualization.

Maslow was on to something, but the needs aren’t entirely a pyramid, except that one needs to meet physiological needs to keep living. Different people, different subcultures and different cultures value different needs.

Like those hermits, who put self-actualization above all other needs and drives except staying alive. They live on almost nothing and see no other people. To them, self-actualization is more important than anything else, and one can even find accounts of Indian renunciates (Saddhu) killing themselves.

Kamikazi pilots gave up their lives for their community. Samurai would commit suicide rather than face dishonor. Monks, the communal version of hermits, often gave up sex and followed ideologies like Christianity which told them they were innately sinful, bad people. In fact, Christianity, one of the main world religions, has as a primary tenet that we are all sinful.

There are those who make food their lives, like chefs and gourmands and indeed many families where food and eating are the most important activities each day. There are those who despise food, eating only as much as they must.

American Plains Indians would fast from food and water for 3 days during the Sun Dance while inflicting pain on themselves by, say, threading rawhide through their nipples.

Maslow’s hierarchy isn’t a bad generalization, but it is a generalization. Humans are different, and very plastic: even the need to stay alive can be trumped by other concerns.

One a Saint, another a Gourmand, a third a soldier, a fourth a brigand, a fifth a faceless bureaucrat.

All human.

Why can humans be so different? When are humans very different from each other?

Why?

The Three Piece Experience Model

Human experience has three pieces. Sense events. Attention. Interpretation.

Events are happening all the time. Some demand our attention, like putting your hand on a red hot element. Others are less determined—a hundred cars on the street, pedestrians, the music playing at the outdoor cafe, billboards above.

Sense events are what is happening around us and to us. Attention determines which of those sense events we pay attention to. Interpretation is our judgment of them: good, bad, pleasurable, shameful, and so on.

Thoughts are sense events. We experience thoughts, we do not control them most of the time, and we interpret our thoughts. Those who doubt this are invited to start noting down what they will be thinking in 5 minutes and then see if they are. (X)

One person can think “gun” and feel warm, another scared. One person will think “sex” and be happy, another will feel shame. Thoughts carry connotations and the connotations are not the same for everyone.

The same is true of other events. There are people who enjoy pain, who seek it out. There are those who hardly feel it or don’t care, who in religious festivals, have themselves nailed to crosses or hung on hooks and tell everyone they are having a grand old time.

You and I may both eat a delicious chocolate cake and one of us may feel satiated and happy, while the other one feels shame and guilt.

Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so

– Shakespeare, Hamlet

Even thoughts are made good or bad by thinking, or rather, by interpretation.

Human experience is what happens, plus how we interpret it. That means the primary force in creating our world and ourselves: our personality and our identity, is conditioning.

Everyone is conditioned. Personality is a pattern of conditioning. We do not, as a rule, logically work out the pluses and minuses of our actions, we simply act, based on how we feel about possible actions. The more we have interpreted something as good, the more we want of it. The more we have interpreted it as bad, the less we want of it.

We can be conflicted: the chocolate cake tastes great, which we want, but we think it will make us fat, in which case we may believe no one will love us, we’ll be unhealthy, and good looking people won’t want to have sex with us.

That’s a lot of weight for a piece of cake.

We gain most of our interpretations from other people. We are thinking their thoughts: the parents who told us sex was bad; the priest who said God loves us and that we’ll burn eternally if we have gay sex; or the teacher who told us America is good and Russia is bad. Most of our thoughts didn’t start as our thoughts nor did most of our emotions, they were transmitted to us by other people, and we came to be believe they were ours.

Chocolate cake may be an intrinsic good, but all freight comes from other people. Children are told not to hit other children, to share their toys and so on. In some societies people are taught to compete as children, in others they are taught to cooperate. In some to be generous, in others to be greedy.

We are tall in comparison to others; we are smart or stupid in comparison to others. We are good at sports in comparison to others. We are handsome or ugly in comparison to others and in relation to our culture. Today women are judged beautiful if they are skinny, in the Victorian era fleshier women were considered beautiful. Traditional Japanese society associated breasts with children and didn’t find them sexy. Displaying teeth when smiling was seen as disgusting, it was considered “showing one’s bones”.

Who we are, our identity and our personality, is shaped by our environment, and most of our judgments about what is good or bad and who we are determined by other people, not ourselves.

This is not to deny biology. A tall man has a different experience of the world than a short woman. Personality is partially based on our individual bodies: parents often comment that babies acted differently from each other right out of the womb, far before environment could have changed us.

Still, humans are made by other humans and much of the outlines of identity and personality are created from the outside-in; from other people telling us or showing us how we should interpret the events of our lives.

Conditioning is not intrinsically bad, most decisions do not require analytical thinking, and most important decisions (run from that lion, sympathize with my friend) don’t allow time to think.

The most effective conditioning is conditioning we like. People who don’t like their conditioning try to change it, so conditioning we don’t like is less effective.

Still, conditioning is reflexive, largely unthinking and hard to change, as anyone who has tried to change their personality or habits knows. And mostly, we don’t choose our conditioning.

It comes from outside, and the most influential conditioning we receive is done when we are children and almost unable to resist. As adults, we may reject or seek out particular conditioning, but we judge it good or bad based on other conditioning.

There is no escape from the fact that our selves and our interpretation of our lives are mostly created by other people.

But we can learn something by looking at how people live and what they were like when they live in the way humans evolved for, rather than in our old, very artificial societies

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The Entire West’s Military Is Weak

By Ian Welsh

On December 12, 2023

58 Comments

This has been lifted from comments and made into a post. It is by Altandmain.

The US hasn’t fought a serious opponent since WW2. Even then, the US vastly overstates it role and understates the USSR’s role in defeating Germany.

Likewise, the UK had this problem. The UK was not prepared for WW1. It also suffered from that problem in WW2. The reason is because it was focused on imperialist colonial wars. It’s military in early parts of WW1 and WW2 didn’t do so well at first and had to undergo a very steep learning curve.

The US has this problem now as well.

The first problem is that industrial warfare is fundamentally different than guerilla warfare. It means that the US doesn’t have overwhelming industrial strength. US troops and mercenaries that have served in Ukraine didn’t do so well. They aren’t used to fighting in an environment without total US air and artillery supremacy. That’s a huge shock. One fear is what the US will do if the US gets into a war and they take losses of carriers and the like. The main risk, in other words, is that it would go nuclear after the US ruling class panics.

A second problem is doctrine. Early WW1 era fighting was built around fighting a war in the 19th century. If one looks at the tactics that the European powers used in the opening phases of WW1, it was almost like they were fighting the Napoleonic Wars again. They ignored the trends that had developed during the Industrial Revolution, along wars like the US Civil Wars and the Crimean War about the implications. Similarly, the US and NATO doctrine is built around the Gulf War, with a very limited appreciation of what had changed and how it affected war.

The US is in a similar position, having waged wars against Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. These were mostly Neo-colonial wars meant to enforce US hegemony and steal the natural resources of the nation they were invading. In other words, they were like the wars the British Empire waged.

A third problem is greed. The US military industrial complex is not built around weapons made for best combat effectiveness, but corporate profit maximization of companies like Lockheed Martin. Western governments are all corrupted by the rich, who act through intermediaries like lobbyists to corrupt any pretensions of democracy and accountability.

A fourth problem is declining Western innovation relative to the rest of the world. Russia for example has more advanced electronic warfare and hypersonic missiles, which the West doesn’t have.

This will be an even bigger problem if the US is stupid enough to go to war with China.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/02/china-leading-us-in-technology-race-in-all-but-a-few-fields-thinktank-finds

As for who has more manufacturing, China has more manufacturing than the US and EU combined. Most of China’s military is closer in structure to Russia’s, with large state owned enterprises that do both military and civilian products.

It’s not just Israel which is weak, it’s all of the Western armed forces.

(This is a 100% reader supported Blog. Your subscriptions and donations make it possible for me to continue writing, and this is my annual fundraiser, which will determine how much I write next year. Please subscribe or donate if you can.)

Russia Is An Imperial State While America Is A Plutocratic Oligarchy

By Ian Welsh

On December 11, 2023

19 Comments

An oligarchy, as we use the word today (the dictionary definition is different) is rule by the rich, because they are rich. (A feudal king may be rich, but his power is not primarily a result of his wealth, but rather his wealth is primarily a result of his power.)

As I have written a number of times before, Russia is NOT a plutocratic oligarchy. America, on the other hand, is. What wealthy American elites want is what they get, and what ordinary people want they don’t get: this was shown clearly by the Princeton Oligarchy Study.

When Putin took control of Russia he broke the oligarchs.

In the summer of 2000, Putin met in the Kremlin with about two dozen of the men regarded as the top oligarchs. The meeting was closed, but reports later said he made them a sternly clear deal: Stay out of politics and your wealth won’t be touched…

…

By then, Berezovsky had already begun criticizing Putin. Within months, he left Russia for the United Kingdom and was granted asylum in 2003. Ten years later, he was found dead in his home; a disputed post-mortem examination said he appeared to have hanged himself.

Gusinsky, whose media holdings were critical of Putin and even satirized him, was hauled into jail amid an investigation of misappropriated funds; within weeks, he agreed to sell his holdings to an arm of Russia’s state natural gas monopoly, and he left the country.

Khodorkovsky, regarded as Russia’s richest man at the time, lasted longer, establishing the Open Society reformist group and showing increased political ambitions. But he was arrested in 2003 when special forces stormed onto his private plane and spent a decade in prison on convictions of tax evasion and embezzlement before Putin pardoned him and he left Russia.

I remember reading an article where one of the oligarchs shut down a factory and there was great protest. Putin not only forced the oligarch to re-open the factory, he was there when the oligarch made the announcement, glaring at him and treating him with contempt.

The oligarchs are not in control of Putin or the Russian government (though they have some influence at the provincial and civic levels.)

Now the AP article points out something very smart: that Putin is creating a new group of oligarchs loyal to him, by giving them resources seized from foreign countries leaving Europe. Smart to notice, and smart of Putin, though his successors may regret it. In a way this is very similar to feudalism, though it involves money and resources not armed men and land.

The new oligarchs will be loyal to Putin and probably this successor. Their children may well not be loyal to Putin’s successor’s successor, however, and that person will have to show the whip hand or cut a deal, or both. If they ever succeed in taking control of the government (and they will eventually if the system continues) then it will be very bad for Russians, same as oligarchic control of the US has been very bad for Americans. A “King” often uses the commons against the nobility and thus supports the commons to some extent, a king who is ruled by the nobles acts with them against the commoners.

Let’s add another data point: Russia has vastly ramped up its military production. The US could not do so, the companies who make the weapons said they’d do it, but have been very slow about it because they make more money that way. In Russia, however, in 2022, Medvedev, Putin’s lieutenant stated:

“The goal has been set for a scrupulous execution of the government’s defense contracts in all of its key parameters, [and] prevention of disruptions in the supply of equipment,” he wrote on Telegram. “Attention has been drawn to the fact that all contractors could be held to account, including on criminal charges… Supervision over the execution will continue.”

Although I can’t find it, in another case he gathered them together and explained to them what Stalin did to those who didn’t make production quotas.

You can’t get clearer, or more threatening than that.

Russia’s weapon manufacturers serve the state. They make a profit and those who run them are allowed to become rich, but only if they meet their quotas.

Russia is a modern imperial system, similar to the early Roman one. The governors are hand chosen by Putin from his loyalists (he likes ex-bodyguards) and the bourgeoisie serve him. When Wagner rebelled, not one governor supported their rebellion, even in the first 24 hours when they seemed to be doing well.

America is an oligarchy, Russia has an emperor. The emperor is old, and the question is who will be his successor, which is why key lieutenants like Medvedev and Kadyrov (the governor of Chechnya) are competing in loyalty and fervor.

Both countries have elections, in both countries the elections have little effect most of the time, though their existence does allow the possibility of change thru them. In America, the leader changes, but since Reagan, the fundamental policies haven’t. In Russia, well, Putin is always re-elected, though it is also true that he has always been popular in Russia, with his opposition a minority.

Indeed, that opposition, largely urban professional types, are weaker now than ever, with many of them leaving Russia due to the war.

Putin, like the kings we discussed above, uses the commons against the nobility, to help keep them in check. He does care about his popularity.

So, again, the US is a nominal democracy which is actually a plutocratic oligarchy, and Russia is a nominal democracy which is actually an imperial system without family succession.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – December 10, 2023

By Tony Wikrent

On December 10, 2023

5 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

War in Ukraine

Seymour Hersh, Anatol Lieven and the desperate DC gambit to end hostilities in Ukraine while claiming ‘victory’

Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 12-04-2023] Excellent.

Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine

[Washington Post, via Naked Capitalism 12-07-2023]

Key elements that shaped the counteroffensive and the initial outcome include:

● Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting force in a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.

● U.S. and Ukrainian officials sharply disagreed at times over strategy, tactics and timing. The Pentagon wanted the assault to begin in mid-April to prevent Russia from continuing to strengthen its lines. The Ukrainians hesitated, insisting they weren’t ready without additional weapons and training.

● U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces, in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days.

● The United States advocated a focused assault along that southern axis, but Ukraine’s leadership believed its forces had to attack at three distinct points along the 600-mile front, southward toward both Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and east toward the embattled city of Bakhmut.