Much human discourse on a range of social problems and challenges is often needlessly “burdened” by excessive human-centeredness. By this, I mean that many problems in the human domain are not strictly limited to what takes place in human hearts, minds, and bodies. Instead, there is the context of “context.” Specifically, there is the “environmental context” (the Mother of All Contexts!) to be considered. I therefore propose that we must willfully triangulate the typical human-to-human discourse, to include the voice of Nature, the voice of the Earth so to speak. Only by understanding that human relationship with the Earth can we properly and fully contextualize our relationships with one another.
However, many of our most brilliant minds have fallen down in this area. The example of the radical political-economist David Harvey will help to make my point.
On his web site (http://davidharvey.org ), Harvey wrote “Why the U.S. Stimulus Package is Bound To Fail” In this blog, Harvey makes note of the seemingly inexorable factors that contribute to any world power’s rise and decline. In the extended excerpt which follows, below, he notes a series recurring historical patterns (falling back on the monumental work of world-systems theorist, Giovanni Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times). My critique of Harvey’s critique will follow, thereafter.
I am using a “thick description” process, wherein we hear (read) Harvey’s words in considerable detail, prior to commenting on them. I use this process so as to thicken or deepen the context in which we critique the author’s material.
We start here, with the idea of world economic power (ergo “political” power) shifting back to East Asia, after approximately two and a half centuries of western (Euro-American) economic dominance.
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In November 2008, shortly after the election of a new President, the National Intelligence Council of the United States issued its delphic estimates on what the world would be like in 2025. Perhaps for the first time, a quasi-official body in the United States predicted that by 2025 the United States, while still a powerful if not the most powerful single player in world affairs, would no longer be dominant. The world would be multi-polar and less centered and the power of non-state actors would increase. . . .
This “unprecedented shift” has reversed the long- standing drain of wealth from East, Southeast and South Asia to Europe and North America that had been occurring since the eighteenth century (a drain that even Adam Smith had noted with regret in The Wealth of Nations but which accelerated relentlessly throughout the nineteenth century). The rise of Japan in the 1960s followed by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong in the 1970s and then the rapid growth of China after 1980 later accompanied by industrialization spurts in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia during the 1990s, has altered the center of gravity of capitalist development, although it has not done so smoothly (the East and South-East Asian financial crisis of 1997-8 saw wealth flow briefly but strongly back towards Wall Street and the European and Japanese banks). Economic hegemony seems to be moving towards some constellation of powers in East Asia and if crises, as we earlier argued, are moments of radical reconfigurations in capitalist development, then the fact that the United States is having to deficit finance its way out of its financial difficulties on such a huge scale and that the deficits are largely being covered by those countries with saved surpluses – Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan and the Gulf states – suggests this may be the moment for such a shift to be consolidated.
Shifts of this sort have occurred before in the long history of capitalism. In Giovanni Arrighi’s thorough account in The Long Twentieth Century, we see hegemony shifting from the city states of Genoa and Venice in the sixteenth century to Amsterdam and the Low Countries in the seventeenth before concentrating in Britain from the late eighteenth century until the United States eventually took control after 1945. There are a number of features to these transitions that Arrighi emphasizes and which are relevant to our analysis. Each shift, Arrighi notes, occurred in the wake of a strong phase of financialization (he cites with approval Braudel’s maxim that financialization announces the autumn of some hegemonic configuration). But each shift also entailed a radical change of scale, from the small city states at the origin to the continent-wide economy of the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century. This change of scale makes sense given the capitalist rule of endless accumulation and compound growth of at least three per cent for ever. But hegemonic shifts, Arrighi argues, are not determined in advance. They depend upon the emergence of some power economically able and politically and militarily willing to take on the role of global hegemon (with its costs as well as its advantages).
The reluctance of the United States to assume that role before World War II meant an interregnum of multi-polar tensions that could not halt the drift into war (Britain was no longer in a position to assert its prior hegemonic role). Much also depends on how the past hegemon behaves as it faces up to the diminution of its former role. It can pass peaceably or belligerently into history. From this perspective the fact that the United States still holds overwhelming military power (particularly from 30,000 feet up) in a context of its declining economic and financial power and increasingly shaky cultural and moral authority, creates worrying scenarios for any future transition. Furthermore, it is not obvious that the main candidate to displace the United States, China, has the capacity or the will to assert some hegemonic role, for while its population is certainly huge enough to meet the requirements of changing scale, neither its economy nor its political authority (or even its political will) point to any easy accession to the role of global hegemon. Given the nationalist divisions that exist, the idea that some association of East Asian Powers might do the job also appears unlikely as does the possibility for a fragmented and fractious European Union or the so-called BRIC powers (Brazil, Russia, India and China) to stay on a common path for long. For this reason, the prediction that we are headed into another interregnum of multi-polar and conflictual interests and potential global instability appears plausible.
But the tectonic shift away from United States dominance and hegemony that has been under way for some time is becoming much clearer. The thesis of both excessive financialization and “debt as a principal predictor of leading world powers’ debilitation” has found popular voice in the writings of Kevin Phillips. Attempts now under way to re-build US dominance through reforms in the architecture of both the national and the global state-finance nexus appear not to be working while the exclusions imposed on much of the rest of the world in seeking to re-shape that architecture are almost certain to provoke strong oppositions if not overt economic conflicts.
But tectonic shifts of this sort do not come about as if by magic. While the historical geography of a shifting hegemony as Arrighi describes it has a clear pattern and while it is also clear from the historical record that periods of financialization precede such shifts, Arrighi does not provide any deep analysis of the processes that produce such shifts in the first place. To be sure, he cites “endless accumulation” and therefore the growth syndrome (the three per cent compound growth rule) as critical to explaining the shifts. This implies that hegemony moves from smaller (i.e. Venice) to larger (e.g. the United States) political entities over time. And it also stands to reason that hegemony has to lie with that political entity within which much of the surplus is produced (or to which much of the surplus flows in the form of tribute or imperialist extractions). With total global output standing at $45 trillion as of 2005, the US share of $15 trillion made it, as it were, the dominant and controlling share-holder in global capitalism able to dictate (as it typically does in its role as the chief shareholder in the international institutions such as a the World Bank and the IMF) global policies. The NCIS report in part based its prediction on loss of dominance but maintenance of a strong position on the falling share of global output in the US relative to the rest of the world in general and China in particular.
But as Arrighi points out, the politics of such a shift are by no means certain. ***
END of extended excerpt from Harvey
***
These “politics” are “by no means certain,” indeed. I basically agree with the fundamentals of Harvey’s analysis—as far as it goes. My only point of contention is that it does not go quite far enough. Missing entirely from Harvey’s analysis is the role of primary natural resources in providing the initial opportunity (the catalyst) for any would-be regional or global hegemon. In short, without consistent access to relatively cheap primary natural resources (e.g., iron, oil, human-beings-as-labor), there can be no sustainable, stable financial resources (as in “capital”).
In short, Harvey has fallen into the not-uncommon “humanocentric” analysis, which eliminates (or at least dis/misplaces) the central role of Nature, in large-scale and long-term political-economic processes. This is reflected in one of Harvey’s otherwise strong conclusions, as follows, when describing one of the key problems for the US:
The problem for the United States in 2008-9 is that it starts from a position of chronic indebtedness to the rest of the world (it has been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last ten years or more) and this poses an economic limitation upon the size of the extra deficit that can now be incurred.
The problem for the United States is that it has greatly depleted its natural resource base—starting with energy resources, and most especially starting with petroleum. Most of that $2 billion /day loaned to the US, mentioned by Harvey, above, is to cover the direct cost of imported oil (Heinberg 2003; Klare 2004). We in the US used to have sufficient oil to meet all of our domestic needs. We don’t have it anymore (as of mid-20th century). The problem with America does not begin with the country’s banks—problematic though they may be. Nor does it begin with the housing industry—problematic though it may be. It begins with what has been underneath our feet, underneath the foundations of our highly leveraged houses. It begins in the very soil of this country, and the primary resources contained therein (Catton 1980; Hubbert 1988).
The famous geological scientist, M. King Hubbert, made note of the “inherent incompatibilities” of these two notions—natural resources (“the matter-energy system”) and financial resources, as follows:
Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely, exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doubling, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest. This disparity between the monetary system which continues to grow exponentially and a physical system which is unable to do so leads to an increase with time in the ratio of money to the output of the physical system. This manifests itself as price inflation. A monetary alternative corresponding to a zero physical growth rate would be a zero interest rate. The result in either case would be large-scale financial instability.
(http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/monetary.htm)
This obfuscation between matter-energy systems and monetary systems is a by-product of a unidirectional, growth oriented framework. That obfuscation now infects many of our dominant paradigms on human and organizational systems, operating on all scales. This is especially apparent at the bureaucratic and political level of human activity. It is especially apparent in many of our academic departments within our universities, as well.
I am therefore now making a case for the analysis of not just what happens in the political-economic sphere, and not just what happens in the natural resources management sphere. I am instead making a case for what happens at the nexus of these two spheres. Let us recall that the Greek root word for eco-nomics and eco-logy are one in the same (management of the house/community, and knowledge of the house/community, respectively). Let us now work toward reuniting these two segregated concepts. Let us regain the necessary fundamental knowledge of the physical resources we need to manage.
This must be the new direction of all progressive politics or all critical analysis involving large-scale and long-term human events. It is unabashedly “green” in hue. It has been painfully late in coming.
Blaine
References
Catton, W. R. (1980). Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change. Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press.
Heinberg, R. (2003). The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, New Society Publishers.
Hubbert, M. K. (1988). "Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture." Retrieved 15 April, 2004, from http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/monetary.htm.
Klare, M. T. (2004). Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum. New York, Metropolitan Books.
13 years ago
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