Bloggers Note: Those of you who know me are aware that I have been a little busy as of late, what with the whole 'get married, go on honeymoon, write your thesis' thing. I'll try and write a little more regularly and a little less splenetically* than previously.
Th tragedy of the commons refers to how unregulated grazing on common land would eventually exhaust said land, and lead to the impoverishment of all those using it, whereas proper management could have ensured it's equitable use. It's also become a shorthand for why everything should be privatised and how common use or property held in common will inevitably fail.
And oh how it has been criticised. That's not my aim here, except to note that the whole thing depends upon a presupposed market society. If the herders involved aren't able to exchange their cattle for some imperishable abstract value (whether that's grotes, guilders or goodwill) then the nature of competition is somewhat changed and simply becomes about collective survival. In other words can we (herders) raise enough cattle to feed our families collectively, and how willing are we to starve our neighbours in order to say have one or two more children ourselves.
I'll note at this point that the *cough* "peasantry" *cough* (otherwise known as people) of the world managed to feed themselves and generate considerable surplus with all kinds of cultural, regulatory and financial ways of managing commons. For about 10 thousand years.
Now, let's see where we are today. If we accept that common management and ownership is impossible, the logical outcome is that one person should own the world. All of it. They will then delegate, and so on and so forth. So then. Feudalism. Of course, the actual management of the world will proceed in basically the same way as it would under common ownership, as owners typically can't manage every aspect of a system. But of course nobody apart from the one owner would have any say in how the system was run.
So, there we go. I'm sure people can pick apart my argument and make the counter argument. It's just that that puts you firmly in the "starve your neighbour" camp. It's your choice.
*[sic] Pratchett
Tuesday, 27 September 2016
Monday, 27 June 2016
On Geopolitics
My previous post was, well, quite theoretical and maybe not particularly connected to anything, um, real, I suppose. So I'd like to bring in a bit of direct connection to history past and present. Specifically a loose theory of conflict and resolution.
I also ground quite a lot of my views of geopolitics in the
ideas espoused in "Unrestricted Warfare" by Qiao Liang and Wang
Xiangsui. Let's take the argument that "War is the continuation of
politics by other means [... "with the admixture of other elements"
... is a better translation]. Then we could argue that economic sanctions,
tariffs, export subsidies, international law, hacking and espionage can all be
seen as methods of waging war. This is not a normative judgement. I'm not
making a morality call here. It's just a way of expressing the conflict and
competition inevitable to some degree between societies.
Anyhow,
"Unrestricted Warfare" was written in 1999, and discusses these
various measures as methods of making war in the context of there being a
conventional military superstate in the USA, which could easily crush any
conventional military threat. The ineffectual flailing of the US armies
in the middle east and their absolute failure to achieve (or, in fact, to lay
out) any kind of goal suggests something is a bit lacking in the idea of conflict as armies slugging it out, and when the other side give up you've won*.
I think that their analysis is a very apt and
general analysis of what it means to be in conflict, and how conflicts are
started, escalate, are ended and won. If I can give a contemporary example,
China is currently providing a 91% export subsidy to their steel manufacturers.
The UK has to imposed tariffs on this, which means that UK steel has to compete
with Chinese steel selling at around 10% of market value. This means that a
strategic industry in the UK is collapsing**. Now, I don't mean to say that "Ooooh, scary, China has declared war on us. And our government is on their side." It's more that taking this analysis, we can look back on the history of Britain and see that it used all kinds of similar economic policies (e.g huge import tariffs on Indian calico) to give it's own industry a leg up. And rather than saying oh well, just jolly good old British ingenuity, we can see it for one of the oldest tricks in the book. The book of conflict, advantage, competition. Politics by other means one could almost say.
*I'm ignoring the whole domestic aspect to US wars in this post by the way. GWB was
right to call it a crusade, as it's definitely an ill thought out and
futile war based entirely on misconception and misunderstanding, which
has basically been arranged in order to displace serious conflicts in American society and government onto some unfortunate people on the other side of the world.
**This is an important but often overlooked point. There are a lot of types of steel. Used for everything from construction to surgical instruments to precision tools to god knows what all else. Seriously, try googling "Table of steel grades". This table is basically a recipe book for being able to have a modern industrial society. And don't be fooled thinking that you can just mix up a batch 904L or LDX 2404 without knowing what your doing and how to heat, mix, melt, work and cool the stuff properly. You lose the steelworks you lose all the people who know how to make the stuff. And god forbid you need a job-load of 153 MATM steel for a bit of high temperature work now there's no works in the country to smelt it and nobody who knows how to forge it.
Post Scipt to Beginnings
Well, I attempted to neatly sidestep producing a fully referenced article by writing in blank verse. This has the advantage of sitting on the less offensive side of the polemic. I hope that it might be inspiring.
As some context for why and how I am writing, and where my theoretical and factual groundwork comes from.
My predominant theoretical framework is grounded in the work of Fernand Braudel, specifically the three volumes of "Civilization and Capitalism: 15th - 18th Century". Braudel is probably best described as a dialectical materialist. He is especially interested in the "longue duree" or long duration of economic history. He derives some interesting ideas about the roots of long period economic swings (the so called Kondratievs) related to changes in communication and the maturation of relationships, the codification of what are initially innovative means of exchange into established facts of life. To encapsulate this, economic realities are grounded in long term arrangement between many individuals and institutions which slowly change over time. These changes, following naturally from the interplay of human creativity and competitiveness with changing technologies, social values and moralities, lead to long term up- and down-swings in the world economy.
I wouldn't say I'm a dialectical materialist however. For two almost opposite reasons. One is, that as a natural scientist I recognise that there is a material aspect external to humanity which is largely missing from the discussion. That is, we actually live on a planet, wherein there are given physical constraints on human behaviour. My wife (well, in two weeks anyway. Feels like we're already married so ...) uses the word metabolism to describe these relationships, and I think that's pretty apt. So the relationship between humans must also include a metabolic relationship with the earth and with each other. In fact we have to conceive of economic activity as part of a larger metabolic cycle. Jared Diamond is a real pioneer of this approach, specifically with "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," in which he discusses a number of societal collapses in the historical or archaeological record*.
It's a general concept: Human beings are part of the metabolic cycle of the earth. Not in a cutesy "We're all one with nature" way, but more a "all that trash ends up in the guts of fish and seagulls and rats" kind of way.
The second issue against dialectic materialism is that it doesn't take into account that human beings have a psyche. There's an argument that colonising other planets would be impossible because our spacecraft would have to perfectly reproduce the entire metabolic cycle that the earth performs for us now. There's another argument that says it only takes one hormonal
So we have a strange concept of our reality and our place in the world which doesn't actually sit quite right with the objective reality we occupy. This is basically Slavoj Zizek style transcendental materialism. That is, physical object and systems can have entirely unique qualities which actually have no objective existence, but are based on our perceptions and emotional attachments to them. My favourite example is Slavoj Zizek's description of a toilet as a powerful machine of ideology. You see, when you flush it, it makes your shit disappear. Yes, I know, doesn't seem to profound. Now, if you've ever taken a wild poo, you'll know that the place you went is something that stays in your mind, as you don't want to go stepping in it the next day, or get a drink downstream from it. Whilst the toilet makes that disappear. Clever!
Many human constructions have ideological (i.e. mass psychological) functions. Michel Foucaults "Discipline and Punish" is great for this kind of analysis of prison and school architecture and its wider context in society. Buildings are an example of physical ideological machines. There also exist institutional, social and moral 'machines' which serve to maintain and preserve relationships between people, but have no physical existence.
Well, that's enough for one post. Next - Geopolitics. Yay.
Ah, I assure you all I will be writing more in the future. So hopefully this can serve as something of a reference for some of my conclusions. When I'm jotting down some quick thoughts I'd rather not try to "show my workings" as it were.
*I'm not going to take a specific example, I'm largely unconcerned if new evidence shows that, well actually this particular society didn't collapse, it actually moved somewhere else and downsized, or the concept of collapse is just an imposition, the people were fed up of living in cities and having kings. Whatever. The point is to situate humanity within a metabolic cycle, within natural systems.
**By the by, I don't think astronauts would behave like this. They are pretty awesome people. But colonisation means you need to take all sorts with you, and maybe even raise several generations. But we're getting off topic here.
Beginnings ...
I suppose I should introduce myself. But I won't.
The decades from 1950 to 1970 saw the most consistent rate of economic growth recorded in the Western world. These decades also saw the rapid transformation of social orders.
This ended in 1973. An oil embargo was imposed, by Saudi Arabia, in retaliation for the US support of Israel in the 1973 war. This embargo caused a dramatic slowdown in the economies of the UK and US. Oil had become the energy source of choice.
Oil became the energy source of choice out of efficiency. It has a very high energy to weight ratio, and the energy can easily be liberated by combustion.
Oil fueled power plants, oil fueled transport. More than anything else, oil fueled agriculture and fed the world. It was easy, and most importantly, cheap, to build this world. A man could make a lot of money. By 1973, women could make a lot of money too.
So profit follows the easiest route. Water flows downhill. In 1973 the easiest route was for the economies of oil dependent countries was to invest heavily in oil exploration. A lot of money could be sunk into the North sea to recover the newly expensive oil.
Economies were flush with energy and money. Most importantly, this had secured domestic sources of energy. Once their energy supplies and finances were secured, money flowed.
In the UK, investment in research and development was slashed. A disproportionate amount was slashed from energy research. We had the energy now. Water flows downhill.
Investment in industry was slashed. We had the money, we could buy what we needed.
Money from oil, and the energy it gave us, was plowed into farms and invested in the City of London.
Farms grow food, so food became cheap. Money grows money, so money became cheap.
We knew that oil worked. We knew that farms worked. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why invest in new ways and means. Why invest in new people. Everything works just fine. The oil flows, and the money grows.
In the past four decades, the technology in our pockets has changed. We imagine a high tech future. Everything is smart. Except.
The growing miniaturisation of our computers is matched by the stagnant bloat of technologies barely changed in forty years. Ships are ships, they burn diesel. Airplanes are airplanes, they burn kerosene. Except for when they are drones and then they burn people.
Farms are farms. Diesel tractors turn soil, eroding away seasons. We burn oil to power the chemistry of fertilisation and mix it into the earth.
There's no blame here. It's just that we've set ourselves up to take the easiest route. It's the way that makes the most money. We reward risk takers but we don't take risks as humanity. We just accept the inevitable end.
We need to understand energy, and how our lives are powered. Most importantly, we need to appreciate that doing things differently isn't just more expensive. It's more expensive because it's worth more.
I'm a scientist. It is my job to try and achieve the impossible and fail repeatedly. That's what has built our modern world. And it's a complete waste of money. But it makes everything worth more.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The more parts, ever greater the whole.
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