On Athens and Empire

I think I accidentally made myself a Marxist.

Okay, that's actually a bit misleading. I was already a Marxist and (hold on to your hat, conservatives) so is everyone else. You see, Marxism is mostly a method of historical analysis based on resource distribution. It basically states that the interactions of people and societies are based primarily on wealth and identifies population based on their access to resources. It's pretty much population ecology with humans and is more Darwinian that Social Darwinism is, because it understands that the behavior of species is more complicated than "might makes right" aristocracy. Even the most staunch conservative is a Marxist if they use the term "class" to describe an economy. But like I said, calling myself a Marxist is a bit misleading.

What I actually meant is that I think Capitalism is fundamentally flawed.

Don't get me wrong, large scale Communism basically was a failure. It was horrendously inefficient, totalitarian and overall fairly shit. But Capitalism isn't much better. It's horrible at fair resource distribution, imperialistic, conversely totalitarian and overall also pretty shit. But, because the US won the Cold War, the great war of ideologies, we assumed that Capitalism fundamentally worked. Of course, this assumption does not necessarily have to be true. The Cold War left the US an empty shell of what it was before: an avaricious, hollowed out shell of a Military-Industrial complex stricken pseudo-empire. It was like knife fight: the looser dies on the street, the winner dies in the ambulance.

When I read the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, I was actually very much intrigued by how Athens paralleled the US, and how they decayed over the course of constant war. The Peloponnesian War for Athens and the World Wars and the Cold War for the US only reinforced the sense of entitlement to everyone's resources. Quoth Athens in the Melian Debate "For of the Gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will," and likewise the famed spokesman for Neo-Liberalism, Gordon Gekko: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A." 

Now, I know I am making a bold claim about Imperialism in the US. After all, empires need emperors, right? They have flags and conquest and stuff. I am not the sort to employ ad hominem, and so I will explain my reasoning. Capitalism cannot work in a closed system because it requires growth, and it is a law of nature that things decay in a closed system. I'll give you an example: a bank distributes $100 to five people, and because it's a dick (and to keep the math simple) it charges 20% interest, which means each of the 5 people need to give back $1 interest in addition to the $20 loan. Now each person converts $5 into goods (production) and they sell it to each other for $15 apiece, each person making a handy $10 profit. The bank, pleased at these excellent returns, calls in the loans. To its dismay, the 5 people can only cough up $15, not the expected $21, and so the bank forecloses on the $5 goods. The bank liquefies its assets and has $100 while the five people are penniless. No one has any profit, because the bank expected $105 worth of returns in a closed system of $100. You can't create something out of nothing. There are further complications when you remember that entropy will take a cut of anything you produce and so $1 of the $5 goods cannot be liquefied. This means that the bank gave out $100 worth of loans expecting a $105 worth of returns, but actually only got $95. The bank played against the House and forgot the most important rule: the House always wins.

Still you insist America can't be an empire, because we have a parchment with scribbles on it saying we aren't. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what empire consists of. Empire is the creation of an open economic system from a closed one through colonial resource extraction. In the colonies, it is assumed that there is no demand for the resources in the area in which they are extracted (for Athens: no demand for tributary wealth by the Delian colleagues, Rome: no demand for arable land or loot by Barbarians, Vikings: no demand for land and treasure by the Christians, Spain: no demand for labor by Amerindians, Britain: no demand for mineral wealth by Africans, America: no demand for petrochemicals by pretty much everyone who has it). Of course, it is not just America who benefits from empire. Its satraps too, also known as NATO, benefit from this imperialism by giving tribute of their economies and metadata. America actually stands out among these empires that it has found an effective way to pilfer its own citizens too, presuming that there is no demand for privacy on their part and thus collecting all information to use as it pleases.

Of course, in this day and age, Empire is delusional. Like the bank above, we're trying to play against the House, and as we globalize even more we are learning that it is indeed a small world after all. If you're feeling claustrophobic right now, good. At this point there are only three directions to grow: reducing the House's cut by increasing efficiency through science and technology (it's working but not fast enough), expand into frontier (places that actually have zero demand), which we're doing but again, it's not going to cut it, and lastly stick our heads in the tar sands and continue to create artificial growth through imperialism, which is what we are insisting on. I can't blame them, honestly. This is how civilization has been working for the past 8,000 years, and it's just now reaching its limiting factors.

Or, perhaps it is time to put away Capitalism for now. After all, I'm sure humans have found good options for closed system economies before, right? 

Yeah, no. Fuck that.

Sincere Regards
Michael Coffey