Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Age of War and Revolution Page 2 of 19

Democrats will not adapt to this defeat

By

On November 6, 2024

Comments

There won’t be any introspection.

Empires, like fortunes, are lost slowly and then all at once.

I’m afraid what is coming is going to fall on every American fairly equally like the snow on the graveyard at the end of James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Democrats who have themselves not yet fallen into precarity or the economic abyss can not and will not accept that our system is completely rotten and we need to change course and leadership.
It took the GOP from 2008 to 2016 to admit that the Reagan/Bush playbook and leadership class was bankrupt and had to go.
It will likely take multiple election cycles before some figure or movement arises that can win a Democratic primary. And given that the Democrats have a long and proud history of sabotaging the most popular and most likely to win the general election candidates it might require a whole new party emerging.
Democrats had their chance at a new direction and likely multiple administrations and an even longer dominance of the Congress with Bernie Sanders but rejected the clear will of the overwhelming majority of the young voters of their party.
Those young voters are drifting away in multiple directions.
Of my comfortably retired upper-middle classic acquaintances none are even willing to admit publicly (some will in private) that the Democrats make poor tactical choices, much less admit that the whole party and every individual needs to really re-evaluate their approach and even core beliefs.
Trump is at least a wild card which presents some chance of positive change, but the odds of radically negative change are much higher.
Regardless, the status-quo has been thoroughly rejected by the majority of the American public.
That is a fact people need to accept in order to try and steer that majority in the least self-destructive direction possible.
It’s unfortunate that the members of professional-managerial class (and those of us who have pretensions to it) have never truly accepted the idea of majority rule.
We’re going to lose a war in humiliating fashion — with an outside chance that it will be over quickly — which will trigger economic collapse (and that’s if we don’t start nuking people).
Then and only then will our ruling elites turn on each other in something that will be like a post-modern parody of the first American Civil War.
Hopefully it’ll be over in 5-7 years and some of us will be alive to adjust to the new normal and enjoy a few decades of relative peace as we adjust to penury, plagues, and rapidly worsening climate change.
Jonathan Cook had some good observations:

Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black.

She lost because, if your political and media system – rigged by donors – limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as “communism”, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge.

Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right. You can’t stop that relentless shift by voting for one of the two symptoms of your diseased political system.

You have to rise up against the diseased system itself.

As did Freddie de Boer:

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Jill Stein.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Putin and the Russians.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Bernie Sanders and his supporters.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Rogan.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Glenn Greenwald and The Young Turks.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the decision to run with Tim Walz.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on the New York Times and its occasional Democrat-skeptical opinion pieces.

You can’t blame losing the popular vote and all seven swing states on Joe Biden for getting out of the race too late.

You can’t pull all the usual Democrat tricks. You have to actually figure out what’s wrong with your party, root and branch. Because you called the guy a fascist, again, and he walked right through that insult to the Oval Office, again. And the eternal question presents itself: what are you going to do about it?

No Gods, No Demons, No Superpowers

By

On October 30, 2024

Comments

The era of the superpower is over. The new missile and drone technologies have made naval dominance impossible and ended the ability to devastate relatively advanced nations without them being able to shoot back. There is no power in the world that has the capabilities and might of the old USSR and the USA from 1945 to 2010 or so.

We have three great powers: China, the US and Russia.

There are regional powers: Brazil and Iran and the EU and Turkey and Japan and even India, which punches way below its population numbers.

But even a backwards, bombed to hell country like Yemen can defy America’s hold on the seas.

(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)

The EU is particularly amusing, in that they could have been one of the great powers, but over and over again chose austerity, contraction and vassalage to America. The ship is sailing out of port, it’s theoretically possible they could turn it around, but politically impossible. Their day: indeed, their centuries, are done. Pathetic.

This is going to be a fair different and more constrained world. There will be more wars and revolutions. Great Powers will actually have to seriously compete for the allegiance of important minor powers, though China’s been doing this for a couple decades now, offering huge benefits compared to the US.

Russia’s getting in on the game. Where China offers development, Russia offers to fix your military problems for you, or at least make them manageable and to sell you oil and grain cheap.

America and its allies offer your elites membership in the club, in exchange for impoverishing or otherwise screwing over your own population. If you don’t do what they say, they lecture the hell out of you and try to sanction you into an early grave, if they don’t launch a coup or use you as a cat’s paw in a war.

If America wants to compete, it’s going to have to start offering some deals that don’t suck.

Nations will be more free to act as they choose than they have been in, literally, centuries. Since they were forced into unnatural shapes and relations by the great powers and superpowers, this will lead to significant changes, especially in places where ridiculous borders were drawn which ignored geography and ethnicity. (This is most true in Africa, but not only there.)

But the most important thing is simply that the age of the military colossus is over. China is the new industrial colossus, but climate change and environmental collapse is likely to spike that before they reach their full growth.

Welcome to the post-European Age.

Postliberalism, Liberal Apogee, Routine Elite Failure and Then?

By

On October 23, 2024

Comments

I was alerted to Nathan Pinkoski’s “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” by N.S. Lyons’ response “The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism,” and enjoyed both tremendously.

Pinkosi’s piece is an excellent short history of the public-private partnership currently aiming for absolute global cultural control via the weaponization of finance that he calls postliberalism.

I thought it would be fun to excerpt all the times Antony Blinken’s name appears in the piece.

First mention:

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony (sic) Blinken.

Second mention:

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Lyons applauds Pinkoski’s essay but rejects the notion that this is a revolution against liberalism — instead, it is its apogee.

Sadly, he doesn’t mention Blinken, but he does elaborate on the frightening ambition of this movement:

The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

In response, a comforting tonic from The Archdruid, John Michael Greer at Ecosophia, whose reader “Dave” asks him:

I’ve noticed a growing and extremely worrying trend of the “elites” of politics and entertainment pursuing reckless and (to me) clearly wrong courses of actions that blow up in their faces, and then instead of honestly looking at the situation they’ve had a large hand in creating and doing a mea culpa, either doubling down and getting mad at regular people when they’re less keen to do what the elites tell them, or trying something else without ever really honestly accounting for their mistakes. The actions remind me of signs of elite collapse that this blog has talked about for years now and it’s very surreal and worrying to see happening in real time. What is going on and why can’t the “elites”, the people with access to more data and resources and advisers than anyone else, seem to realize what’s going wrong? Do they not care or are their actions part of a larger plan, not to sound conspiratorial?

Greer’s response was just what I needed to hear:

Dave, I don’t think that it’s any kind of plan. Quite the contrary, this is normal elite failure, the thing that comes right before an elite replacement crisis. Just as the capitalist elite of the 1920s crashed and burned, and was replaced by a managerial elite in the 1930s and 1940s, the managerial elite of the 2010s is crashing and burning, and will be replaced by an entrepreneurial elite in the 2020s and 2030s. The entitled cluelessness of a class that has remained in power too long is a familiar thing; comparisons to French aristocrats just before the French Revolution also come to mind.

Although, honestly if this means that Elon Musk and company are going to win what Chris Hedges calls “The Choice Between Corporate and Oligarchic Power”…eek!

Kamala Harris, anointed by the richest Democratic Party donors without receiving a single primary vote, is the face of corporate power. Donald Trump is the buffoonish mascot for the oligarchs. This is the split within the ruling class. It is a civil war within capitalism played out on the political stage. The public is little more than a prop in an election where neither party will advance their interests or protect their rights.

And what do the oligarchs want?

Warlord capitalism seeks the total eradication of all impediments to the accumulation of profits including regulations, laws and taxes. It makes its money by charging rent, by erecting toll booths to every service we need to survive and collecting exorbitant fees.

Trump’s cohort of Silicon Valley backers, led by Elon Musk, were what The New York Times writes, “finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world.” They planned to “plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, [and] replace generals with artificial intelligence systems.”

As much as I eagerly anticipate the long-overdue fall of our current elite, I truly dread what’s coming up in their wake.

The End of Austerity & Reindustrialization

By

On October 23, 2024

Comments

Austerity Is Mostly Stupid… Mostly.

This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.

But there is some logic to it, especially in places like Britain. The fundamental problem is de-industrialization. You can print as much money as you want, sure, but if almost everything you need is made or grown or dug somewhere else well, you have a problem. The US avoids this thru having dollar hegemony, for now, but the UK doesn’t have that and the Euro ain’t what it used to be either. The solution is simple in concept: you need to re-industrialize with than printed money.

(This is a theme and topic we’ve covered before, but forgive me running thru it again from another angle.)

Industrializing or reindustrializing is hard, especially with open markets. You need very careful use of tariffs and subsidies, and you need to cut deals with the current hegemonic industrial power: aka. China. You need real industrial policy, in other words. And neoliberalism doesn’t believe in that.

Instead neoliberalism believes in this weird idea that markets are self-correcting and that whatever markets do is right. Nor does it believe in increasing wages for domestic demand, because it came to power during the oil shocks/stagflation period.

Raising wages and thus general domestic demand when you don’t produce enough domestically means money flooding out of the country. This isn’t necessarily bad. A lower pound or Euro is an export subsidy and helps reindustrialize, but it’s still a hard sell and it has to managed.

You can’t let the trade and balance of payments deficit grow too large. And you have to manage domestic demand: pushing people to buy what is produced locally and making imports for consumer goods expenisve, while funneling import buys towards capital equipment.

This playbook has been run many times. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the US in the 19th century, China most recently. We know how to do it. But it does require discipline and an ideological change from neoliberalism, plus a willingness to cooperate with the main industrial power

It’s damn near impossible to industrialize or re-industrialize without aid from the current industrial hegemon. That means getting into a trade war with China is counter-productive. You need to import capital goods from them, and sell them what you produce at competitive prices.

Japan and the USA had Britain. Japan (2nd time), South Korea, China and Taiwan had the United States. You need the markets, knowledge and capital goods.

This mean, in effect, that you need to cut a deal with the current industrial power. They don’t precisely have to be good deals (China offered to make American rich people richer), but the deal has to be something they want.

For US/China one obvious deal is to let them get goods like EVs into the US without tariffs if they build branch plants and help create a supply network in the US. Another obvious deal is to stop supporting Taiwan so much & another is to let them have the South China sea. The EU and Britain can make the same deals.

If the last two bother you, well, look at it this way: they’re going to get Taiwan and the South China Sea anyway, you’re just making it easier for them. You’re giving up things you’re going to have to give up anyway.

This requires a psychological change among Western elites. They need to be willing to admit that they are no longer the top dogs, at least economically and that they can no longer just impose the terms they want.

The longer you leave cutting deals with China to help you reindustrialize, the worse deals you’re going to get. Leave it too long, and reindustrialization may be essentially impossible.

Of course there’s much more to it than this. A complete rejiggering of internal markets is necessary. You have to gut finance and put it at the service of industry. Private equity has to be destroyed wholesale. People can only get rich by exporting or making goods for the domestic market which replace imported goods. Anyone doing significant import of anything but capital machinery (with an eye to building your own) can only be allowed to survive, not prosper.

Generally speaking, to use econo-speak, incentives have to be aligned for re-industrialization, and dis-aligned for anything predatory. Betraying elites must be crushed.

There is no solution to declining standards of living in the Anglosphere and the EU without re-industrialization (maybe Canada and Australia could find another way.) You’ve got to either produce what you need, or produce what others want to buy from you. It’s that simple.

 

Germany Honors Biden For Destroying Nordstream & Their Economy

By

On October 19, 2024

Comments

I cannot believe this is happening:

Germany honored U.S. President Joe Biden for his contribution to trans-Atlantic relations on Friday, ahead of his meetings with European allies on Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

TIME Magazine: Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

Germany Honors Biden for His Contribution to Trans-Atlantic Ties as the U.S. Election Looms

The sheer delight the pathetic “Traffic Light” coalition government takes in abasing itself before the US hegemon is pornographic in its shameless indecency. Especially the same week that the Danes reported this:

Just days before the Nord Stream gas pipeline attack in September 2022, warships belonging to the U.S. Navy were on the scene and ordered nearby officials to keep away.

That is according to John Anker Nielsen, who is harbour master at Christiansø, the easternmost part of Denmark in the Baltic Sea, northeast of the island of Bornholm and close to the sites of the Nord Stream explosions.

Map showing the route of Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the southern Baltic Sea and location of the leaks. AWZ=Exclusive Economic Zone
Map: AFP / Nadine EHRENBERG, adapted

Nielsen late last month told a reporter at Politiken, a major Danish daily, that he went out with a rescue team four or five days before the blast to check on nearby ships with switched-off radios, suspecting there might have been an accident, only to find U.S. warships, whose staff ordered the team to turn back immediately.

Never forget Biden threatened Nordstream:

Biden: If Russia invades uh that means tanks or troops crossing the uh the border of Ukraine again then uh there will be uh we there will be no longer a Nordstream 2. We will bring an end to it.
Reporter: What? How would you how will you do that exactly since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?

Biden: We will. I promise you we’ll be able to do it.

and Nuland did it too. This video is still up on the State Department’s official Facebook page because they’re proud of it:

“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

And Never forget what Nuland said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on January 26, 2023:

“I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you [Ted Cruz] like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

Blinken celebrated it as an economic opportunity:

“…ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity.  It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.  That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come…”

And then there was this from Anne “It’s Time to Prepare for a Ukrainian Victory” Applebaum’s husband who’s a Polish official:

Former Polish FM thanks US for damaging Nord Stream pipeline

The consequences of this have been the deindustrialization of Germany:

German industry increasingly struggles to compete on the world stage. Particularly hard hit are its mighty chemical and heavy industry sectors, which are now in rapid decline. One of the main drivers is policies that have made energy costs skyrocket, and there Germany serves as a canary in the coal mine for other leading industrial nations.

It’s kind of grimly amusing that Forbes’ use of the euphemism “policies that have made energy costs skyrocket” rather than say “self-defeating sanctions on cheap Russian gas combined with the biggest act of industrial sabotage in modern history” and it also doesn’t mention that it’s been America’s policies that have deindustrialized Germany.

It’s also so humiliating as an American that the neo-conservative cabal of psychopathic nitwits has been in sole control of US foreign policy since the Clinton administration and now they have a lock on US corporate media as well.

The above mentioned Anne Applebaum provided the perfect example of their delusion and idiocy with her September, 2022 prediction that Ukrainian victories in Kharkov would bring down Putin.

But that brings me back to Germany’s pathetic ruling coalition. This is how well they’ve done in recent state elections:

In the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, the far-right AfD received more than double as many votes as the three parties which make up the federal coalition government — the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) — combined. These parties’ results are each in the single digits. The Greens in Thuringia and the FDP in both states even failed to meet the 5% threshold to be represented in the state parliaments.

And on the left:

A newly established populist party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), managed to score votes in the two-digit range in their very first election.

The German people are chomping at the bit to vote out the gang of traitors who have allowed the US to annihilate their economy.

Although in fairness, they also gave the last US President who walloped the Germany economy the same award:

“Biden received the highest class of Germany’s Order of Merit, which was also bestowed on former U.S. President George H.W. Bush for his support of German reunification.”

Kind of fitting that the era of American unipolarity is framed this way. Bush at the beginning. Biden at the end. The Germans footing the bill for American foreign policy.

 

 

 

The Death Throes Of The American Empire & Western Hegemony

By

On October 2, 2024

Comments

One theme of this blog, for the last four years or so, has been the end of the unilateral, American, order.

Let’s review:

The US & NATO poured support into Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are losing the war. This is clear now, and anyone denying it is either lying, stupid or a complete captive of propaganda.

The West can’t produce enough weapons or ammo. There have been massive drawdowns of stocks and production is not enough to replace it, nor is production ramping up either enough, or quickly enough, to deal with the issue.

Russia, however, was able to ramp up weapons and ammunition production fast. At the start of the war, and for far too long afterwards there were cries that the Russians would run out of missiles, shells and so on. No such thing. Their allies came thru, plus they massively increased their production.

China’s ahead in most scientific fields and has the larger industrial base. Ever since the industrial revolution, the most powerful countries have been those with the most production capacity, which is not the same thing as GDP or Economy.

China and Russia are closer together than ever. With China as Russia’s ally, sanctions can’t work. With Russia as China’s ally, China has a guaranteed, land-based supply of food and resources.

China’s ship construction capacity is more than the entire West’s, including Japan and South Korea. America doesn’t even figure in, they have almost no ability to build ships, the ships they build often aren’t combat-worthy, and they take two or three times longer to build and are far more expensive.

BRICS continues to expand, the percentage of trade conducted in US dollars continues to decline and BRICS is prioritizing a payment system which bypasses the West. Bottom line, the West now produces less than it needs from other nations, but dollar privilege has allowed us to get away with it. This era is passing.

Much of the third world would rather do business with China or even Russia. Multiple African nations have kicked the US and France out. China offers cheaper goods, cheaper infrastructure and loans are usually cheaper. Plus outside of Asia they mostly don’t interfere in other nations politics. Russian mercs are brutal, but they are preferable to Western garrisons, which are ineffective at putting down unrest and dangerous to their hosts.

China doesn’t want to use US goods in their supply chain. They’ll sell us stuff, sure, why not—till a war starts at which point our entire economy will seize up. But the Huawei and chip sanctions taught them that relying on US goods was a knife at their throat, and Chinese companies have spent the six years doing everything they can to reduce and end that vulnerability.

(I’m running my annual fundraiser. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating. Your donations really do keep this place running.)

Concluding Remarks

None of this was particularly necessary, but we made a series of decisions which lead here. We constantly aggravated Russia. They wanted to be Western, to join NATO and maybe even the EU eventually, but we treated them as enemies. With them as allies, China would be in a far weaker position.

We deliberately sent China our industry, thinking it didn’t matter where it was and that we (or rather our elites) would make more money that way.

We abused the payments system and dollar privilege thru incessant sanctions warfare, then made a grab for Russia overseas reserves. Everyone’s scared.

Where we still had technological superiority, we tried to use it as an economic weapon. That has backfired badly, but everyone worries it will be used against them.

No one except a few core allies trusts the US (and they shouldn’t, either). No one except the Anglosphere, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Europeans enjoyed the era of US or, for that matter, Western supremacy, and they’ll be happy to see it go.

As the saying goes, you see the same people on the way down as you did on your way up. We brutalized a lot of people over the last five centuries. Don’t be surprised if they get a few kicks in on our way down.

The Rise & Fall Of Higher Education & The Medieval Universities Crisis

By

On September 20, 2024

Comments

This is based mainly on “Crises and Decline in Credential Systems”, found in Sociology Since Midcentury, Randall Collins, 1981.

We’re currently in the late-middle stage of a higher education crisis in the West. This isn’t a worldwide crisis: the Chinese system is still in its expansion phase, but it’s very real here. Recently I was talking to a friend in Norway, who noted that most young people want a trades education and to avoid university.

I’ve noticed when discussing this that most people are resistant to the idea that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. We have this weird idea that before the modern era, there weren’t large post-secondary education sectors: that degrees and credentials from schooling are something new. This isn’t even slightly true: heck, if we had the data I’m sure we could find something similar in Ancient Egypt, and for sure the massive university systems of Buddhist India went thru more than one cycle. This before we even get to China, a civilization which was based on a credential system for something like two millennia.

But neither is it new in the West.

Schools produced standard culture (and standardized people, as far as that goes.) Culture allows the creation of longstanding institutions: not just the universities themselves, but bureaucracies of various forms, including corporate bureaucracies. It’s not an accident that companies demand degrees, especially for managers.

This culture creation is used in political competition. Think the medieval church vs. various kings, or the kings v.s their feudal lords, or Confucian scholar officials v.s hereditary nobility. In the modern world consider what happened when university trained, mostly Ivy league, degree holders took over the media, or the effect of MBAs taking over from engineers in companies. Boeing is a good example of the consequences, but so is the entire shipping of industry out of the US, and the enablement of China.

Education is one of the sinews of political conflict.

Universities (or credential systems in general) go thru four phases. All four don’t always happen, sometimes the cycle is stopped before it reaches its end.

Expansion. Lots of new students pour in. More institutions are created. Formal requirements for professions are credentialized thru the institutions. In the Medieval era this was civil law, canon law, medicine and theology. In the modern era it includes much more, but of particular note are engineers. During this period having a degree means an almost complete certainty of getting a job. Think of the 50s: a BA was all you needed to vault into management.

Cultural Production Outstrips Positions. An end to the easy early period. You have to compete for positions, there aren’t enough. Credential inflation starts: what once required a B.A. now requires an M.A. The amount of time for higher degrees gets longer and so on. (Back in the early 90s a friend taking a PhD in psychology told me that a PhD alone was no longer enough. Ten years earlier, it had been.) The price of getting an education increases, and in this and the third stage, it tends to skew more and more to the wealthy.

This, I note, has obviously happened in our society. Back in the sixties, education was practically free, now it requires a loan students may not pay off for decades, or ever.

All the positions are filled. (We are here.) There isn’t just a lot of competition, the degrees are increasingly worthless unless you also have clout from something other than education because the positions are filled. The number of people who live off the productive system but don’t contribute to it goes up.

This goes in phases: right now BAs get you nothing but a chance to apply and be rejected, and BA enlistment is falling, but STEM still offers a decent chance. (This won’t remain true in the West for much longer.) During this period alternate culture production really gets fired up: intellectuals who can’t get positions produce books, pamphlets, blogs, podcasts and so on. They attack academia and seek forms of legitimacy other than credentials.

Finally, collapse. The state stops enforcing monopolies, university enrollment drops and many institutions fail entirely. Other forms of cultural production become dominant.

The Medieval University Cycle

The rise really gets going in the 1100s, though some institutions are created earlier. By the 1200s they are accredited by the Church of the Holy Roman Emperor. This makes the credentials valid throughout Christendom, which no other higher credentials are. At this time both the papacy and various kings and principalities are expanding their administration, and there are tons of positions. As with the Confucian scholars in the early days, these administrators are used to expand central authority: feudalism begins its decline. In addition the monopoly of law, medicine and theology works against feudal nobles.

Every major pope from 1159 to 1303 held a degree in law from a university. One of the signs of the end of the reign of the medieval scholastics is when other ways of training come to the fore. In England in the 1400s, for example, lawyers no longer learn and OxBridge, but in London in what amounts to an apprenticeship system. By the 1500s OxBridge no longer teaches physicians, this moves to the Royal College of physicians and soon after the monopoly of clergy on medicine is ended.

The height of the system is significant: two thousand to four thousand students were enrolled at Oxford and Cambridge, for example. This is 4x as many, proportionally, as were enrolled in Elizabethan England and as a proportion of the population the medieval height wasn’t surpassed until after 1900. At this height at least five percent of the male population attended university and it could have been as high as 10%.

The medieval system, note, goes into decline fifty years before the black death: so it wasn’t caused by declining population.

As the medieval system goes into decline, the humanists rise. They work outside of universities often as publishers or authors and rely on noble patronage. They mock the old academics as rigid, fusty and out of date.

But the decline isn’t good for ordinary people: as mentioned in our own case, education becomes less and less available unless you have money and stops being a major way for people to rise. This was very much true in the medieval university decline: at the beginning many poor individuals could attend, but as time went on this became much less true.

Signposts of Decline

  • smaller institutions folding. (The closure of many of the small liberal arts colleges in our time, for example.)
  • a fall in the number of students.
  • decline in number of institutions.
  • loss of monopolies over credentials.
  • widespread attacks on what is taught and how it is taught. (We see a great deal of this now, and it has progressed to politicians passing laws.)
  • Increase in the cost of education, with poorer students being cut out.
  • Cheap degrees which are mere formalities: degree mils and so on.

Note that phases three and four also can feed into political instability. In recent years Peter Turchin has popularized this, and many think he created the idea but it’s long been discussed as important in revolutions such as the French and Russian ones. People who are highly educated but didn’t get the positions they wanted are vastly destabilizing: they feel betrayed and they have the tools to fight ideologically and often the understanding of how to administer movements and other organizations.

Raise someone’s expectations, train them, then let them rot in poverty and you’ve made yourself a potential enemy.

These cycles are dead common. Collins identifies a number, just in the West:

  • The Medieval cycle – starts in the 1100s, peaks in the 1200s, over in most places by the 1400s.
  • English cycle from 1500-1860
  • Spain from 1500-1850
  • France 1500-1850
  • Germany 1500-1850
  • US 1700-1880

The various national ones, though they start at about the same time, other than in America, are separate and have different patterns of rise and decline. Not all of them go all the way: the American universities never go thru phase four, for example.

Education Systems Rise and Fall like all else in human society. What is happening now in our system is very similar to what has happened before and if we want to understand what will happen to our system, the best way to know is to see what happened before. It will never be a one-to-one match: the details will differ, but the pattern will hold.

The obvious thing to do for those who want to slow the fall and end it before collapse is to figure out what sort of training they can produce which isn’t in oversupply. For individuals the question is where the new form of cultural production is and how to legitimize it and reap the benefits of that legitimization. One might wonder if the rise of podcasting intellectuals who use their celebrity to sell their books is a fad, or a sign of something greater, for example. I may return to that in the future.

In the meantime: it’s all happened before.

My writing happens because readers donate or subscribe. If you value that writing, and you can afford to, please support it.

Dollar Hegemony Decline Watch

By

On September 17, 2024

Comments

So, nice little chart here:

Seems… bad. At least for America and Europe.

Let’s lay this out:

  1. Most of what you want to buy you can buy from China, you don’t need to get it from the West, so why use dollars?
  2. China almost never uses sanctions or seizes foreign currency. The US often does. US dollars are risky, the right to use them can and is often taken away, and so often are the dollars themselves.

So why use the dollar, except that it’s still easier in some cases?

What happens when it’s no longer easier? The BRICS are spending a lot of time on an international banking system which bypasses the West and it’s allies (Japan and South Korea, basically). As that system becomes easier to use, why use the Western system or the dollar? It only exposes you to risk.

This is similar to what happened after the Huawei sanctions. Chinese firms saw the damage that was done to Huawei (they’ve roared back, but it was touch and go for a couple years.) The cry in Chinese business was “delete America.” If you bought anything important from the US you needed to find another source outside of the West, which for manufactured goods usually meant domestically, and for resources meant Africa, South America and Russia.

For a long time the way the banking system was set up you had to use the dollar, but more and more you don’t. And for a long time some key providers, like oil producers, would only take dollars, but now they’ll take Yuan.

So, again, why use the dollar when there is a safer alternative which can be used to buy or sell almost anything you want?

My writing happens because readers donate or subscribe. If you value that writing, and you can afford to, please support it.

Page 2 of 19

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén