Inherent Sleep

All tides recede, but change what they pass over.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Modernism, liberalism and morality, or the dual morality.

Note: this is a general attempt to get some of my own thoughts on paper, but they remain quite disorganised. I expect as I actually do re-reading, critique and expand my own understanding that this will become a more coherent post, but this servers as kind of a reminder to myself and way to help describe my own though process.

I think a major mistake that is made when attempting to analyze liberalism is to look at it in a vacuum, particularly without the lens of modernism attached to it. There are several linked ideas here, so I’m going to try to write them all out.

When trying to either critique or promote liberalism, one must define what liberalism is.

The problem with this is that liberalism is a very large ideology that is contextualised by time period, country and thinkers. There is no one single version of liberalism.

Every variation of liberalism acts as a mix-and-match of some of it’s component parts, and therefore the exact variation being critiqued has to be defined. A common theme in the analysis of liberalism is therefore trying to look at it in isolation, and distilling it to a single mode of social and economic relations.

This critique fails, because you inevitably end up arguing against a strawman. Component and complementary ideologies are necessary for the ideology to make sense.

I think one of the inherent problems within the critique is the age of some of the most important scholars, and how changes in thinking have moved liberal positions.

I would argue that from early liberalism the most important thinkers were Locke, Mill and Rousseau. The major shared component here is that they are mostly children of enlightenment thinking.

Within Locke, you can see the idea of rules (in this case, informed by ‘natural rights’) as the foundation of society, but not the end point of personal morality. Personal morality is left to the church, the state is left to be neutral and a simple executor of inherent social rules.

The surety of thought here is typical of enlightenment thinkers.  Thinkers, Kant in particular, inform liberal thoughts on *personal morality* (which is defined as separate from government morality) during this period and this is important for later, but in general early liberalism requires the surety of thought that there is an inherent design of society.

Some branches of liberalism almost stop here. Libertarians sometimes take their cues directly from this era, and molds this thinking into a separate branch of thought.

Many critiques of liberalism also approach from this position.

Liberalism is distilled in many critiques to the idea of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!”

From this several linked ideas follow.

We don’t judge who you sleep with, who you marry or who you interact with, as that is your private choice.

We don’t make laws about what you do with your money, because     private property is protected.

We must give everyone equal, inviolable rules before anything else     because those laws inform our morality.

It’s the foundation of modern democracy, including your right to vote, to not be tortured, and to receive due process in a trial.

The only people who are immoral are not selfish or cruel people, but people who break the rules.

This ignores a very important par of thought in the era, which is the interplay of church, religion and government. The government here is a vessel to enforce natural, god given laws which are the absolute of morality. An immoral person is not someone who violates the rules of the government, but instead violates the written rules of god, as defined by a chosen church. While you can create an irreligious version of liberalism based from this (something interrelated to contractualism, I would imagine) but mainline ‘enlightenment liberal theory’ does not utilise the government as the sole (or even the main) moral standard.

Kantian personal morality also intertwines with this style of thought where the morality of an action varies based on the duty. In this way, personal duty is given to follow the greater social rules, because just as every man has general personal duties, within greater society each man has a duty to god to uphold the rules of the state (which are given by god).

There is then debate on this point. If every man has a duty to god, should the state enforce that duty, or should it simply enforce the most basic rules possible that can be agreed on by a wider society? These two opinions would help inform liberal debate for centuries after, with different branches looking to different rules (but the rule based structure mostly unchanged.)

Within the Anglophone world, Mills (and partly by extension, Bentham, but Mills was always more wildly influential) is by far the most important other thinker in liberalism, I would argue. Mills is important because it is here, I think, you start to see the transition of the idea on the role of government. Mills (in addition to other things) promoted utilitarianism, the idea that an action is moral if it helps the most people. External to debate within utilitarian theory, the important part of the ideology is that it is the start of modernism and modernist political thought within liberalism.

Modernism represents a rejection of the unmeasurable. Society, Economics, Nature and even Morality can all be measured though observation, experimentation, new knowledge and technology within a modernist worldview. Utilitarianism, in particular the Bentham variant, represents a bridge between enlightenment and modernist thought. In order for utilitarianism to be a functioning, self contained unit you must be able to measure the harm and good of an action. In this way, morality is ‘now’ a measurable component.

How then does this interface with the previous understanding of morality? Within the liberal framework, (and a modernist rejection of organised religion) utilitarianism simply directly replaces religion. Kantian morality is not abandoned, but instead is modified as such that because we wish to improve the world (and that improvement can be measured) everyone has a duty to the utilitarian cause, but at the same time is not required to abandon the ideas of local morality or duty. One might say that this system of dual morality is incoherent, where every action is measurable, and you might be morally correct (through duty) in taking a morally incorrect (though utilitarianism) action.  

They might also be at least partially right.

The expression of utilitarianism and its relationship to religion is also a highly complex one, with major regional variance, one with enough material to easily write a book on, but in short one can say that utilitarianism. The church, once the ‘single’ detemir of morality, is now replaced by a mix of church, scientists, philosophers and the state itself, when it acts as a collective voice on morality.

When interfaced with “mixed republicanism” (and the early elements of humanism) the lack of a single moral authority becomes a problem. Democracy is chosen as the answer in the eyes of many liberals, where the general opinion of the voting public decides what the state should view as moral, external to the state itself, and freedom of religion and the much discussed ‘neutrality of the state’ then has to appear.

This interrelation of religion, Kantian morality and utilitarianism becomes more complex when concepts like the real inability to measure the final result of an action come into play. One kind of morality looks at the duty of a person, or what they know when they took an action, but the other is based on utilitarianism, or the result of the action. There are of course other moral frameworks that can fill this roll, and different liberal thinkers have proposed different ones.

The law of the state, this core component of liberalism, then is not based on any one single moral framework. The example of the crimes of attempted murder and murder are a good example, where neither final result nor intent are the single determinants of a crime. There is thus a dual morality, that must be judged holistically though democracy (a jury) and a systematic authority (a judge).

The nature of the liberal system is then such that elements can be removed, expanded on and changed while still retaining the same structural liberal core, but strangely because of slow evolution might contain almost none of the elements that existed within the original idea of liberalism. I would currently posit that just about the only unmovable core of liberalism is that there is a state enforcing the rules of an external morality through a system.

Liberalism can be constructed without republicanism (beyond simply early thinkers, Latin American liberal dictatorships like under Diaz existed). It can be built without utilitarianism, without religion (indeed, the distinction of freedom from religion is made in some liberal countries like France, and different incantations have taken it to different places). It can exist without Kantian thought or the more recent Rawlsian ideas (pure utilitarian liberalism is but one example of liberal utilitarianism). It seems to thrive without natural rights (many modern liberal branches reject natural rights), can reject the more modern ‘human rights’ (consider all of the liberal slave-holding nations of the past for just a single example). In fact, Liberalism seems to be able to function without the belief in the expansion of either economic or social freedom.

The state enforcing an externally derived set of rights based on an external morality while acting as a centralised actor is then just about the only consistent element. In “Anarcho-capitalism” this is removed, along with some libertarian variants but it is just about the only single factor that causes a distinct separation from liberalism. Other groups that interact and intersect with liberalism sometimes change this, but as far as I can tell none are considered liberalism by adherents or critics (excluding the ‘everyone I don’t like is liberal group’).

This comes back then to the thrust of my argument, that liberalism is a name for a group of linked moral theories placed inside a consistent structure of the state. Not all theories that possess a state and external morality are therefore liberalism, because liberalism can additionally be defined by adherence to thinkers who have built within the liberal tradition of a particular place. The definition of liberalism must then be contextualised to who is being critiqued, as a mass critique of liberalism and all of its principles must inherently be contrarian and contradictory, because there are contradictions and debates within liberalism itself.

The dual morality common within liberalism is another deep component to the ideology, one of the role of the state and the role of the moral voice. I think it may be even worth arguing that even if not in all cases, the dual morality of liberal systems is a component that defines them as liberalism, because the very structure of liberalism encourages it. Even in a system with natural rights and a biblical morality, it may be both moral (through the system of morality) and immoral (through the system of natural right) to take a particular action if there is a mismatch. The logical idea must then be that the government must follow the first system and the individual must follow the second.

I would posit that it is partially this relationship that fuels the liberal general dislike of social regulations, the belief that even with a moral government with moral laws sometimes it might be moral to break the law, and therefore punishments based solely off that concept are dangerous, but at the same time liberals may wish to add social regulations in order to make their personal morality and the government morality better align, for example protections for violence against children or restrictions on some types of substance use/abuse.

Any critique without dealing with the chosen liberal moral philosophy, the chosen way to implement it (for example, the ‘reasonable man’ test) and the functional reasons for that implementation (for the same example, the fact that resources for constant votes and jury trials are impossible to distribute, and the reasonable man test is judged as a reasonably functional alternative).

[inherentsleep-blog]

Brazilian Banking and Crisis in the First Republic

     The history of banking within Brazil and the history of the first Republic of Brazil are deeply intertwined. It can be said that the history of banking during the first Republic is a story of crisis, first speculative, then self inflicted, then a function of the international trade system Brazil found itself within. In the early years of the Republic, large scale collapses and crashes characterised both the Brazilian banking sector and the wider economy of Brazil. All of this culminated in an attempted national economic policy in 1905 that proved to be a bitter failure for Brazil in general, but signaled a change in the relationship between banking and the Republic. Effective, small scale interventions by the Brazilian government became massive intervention in the Brazilian banking industry. The banking industry then became the tool of intervention for the government across the Brazilian economy. Rather then being a laissez-faire and generally weak government, the Republic was a highly interventionist and reasonably effective institution crippled by structural economic problems, an inability to deal with a large disenfranchised population, slow industrialisation and poor management of public finances.

In the years before the first Republic, Brazilian banking was still in its naissance. The first true Brazilian bank, the Banco do Brasil, was founded in 1808 by John VI of Portugal. It was also bankrupted for the first time when 1821 when John returned to Portugal with his assets.[1] Brazilian banks would suffer reasonably frequent bankruptcies, with the national Banco do Brasil having to be reorganised due to bankruptcy (and halting the issuing of debt by the Brazilian government) three more times before 1905, at one point becoming the Banco da Republica.[2] Through the early independence period, banking and national economics as a whole developed slowly.  Major change would start to appear with the arrival of international lenders, able to provide credit for the massive infrastructure projects that dominated the later part of the century. The British ‘Companies Act of 1858-62’ allowed the incorporation of banks in the UK and started the push of British banking corporations into South America.[3] Brazil was no exception to this expansion, and British banks arrived, willing to act as the first real international financiers of the region. First with the establishment of the London and Brazilian Bank in 1862 then the English Bank of Rio de Janerio in 1863, British banking arrived in Brazil.[4] This expansion brought the knowledge of global banking methods to Brazil, and kickstarted the growth of local Brazilian banks.[5]

Brazilian demographics had seen major demographic shifts in the period leading up to the 1888 revolution and the abolition of slavery. In 1818, free and freed people represented only 41% of the Brazilian population, but by 1874 that number had grown to 84%.[6] This new, free population gave hope for major Brazilian growth, but Brazil failed to meet international and national expectations. This was partly do to the fact that Brazil functioned mostly as a group of weakly connected autonomous regions, with a hierarchical system of separate oligarchies dominating regular life, and little interconnectivity through the nation.[7] By the late 1880s, it was clear that the relationship was about to change. Within the 1870s, German banks had attempted entrance to Brazil, but had largely failed.[8] In 1887 however, Germans were able to make a deal with local elites and the Brasilianische Bank Fur Deutschland got a foothold.[9]

The arrival of the Republic and full emancipation to Brazil prompted a massive speculative boom from 1888 – 1890.[10] The era featured rampant monetary and banking expansion, which eventually lead to an equally spectacular collapse in 1891-92 known as Encilhamento.[11] Brazilian expectations collapsed, and the hope for a Brazilian miracle evaporated for much of a decade.  Part of the reason for this was that a major portion of the Brazilian population did not turn to productive industrial jobs or farm estates, but instead was forced into subsistence farming and low skill labour on relatively small farms and plantations.[12] During these years, the strict Brazilian social hierarchy helped prevent a large-scale transition from slave style labour to an urban role for the poorest parts of the Brazilian population.  

Brazil thus never made the expected turn into an industrial powerhouse like it was hoped, but massive growth in the consumption of Brazilian agricultural products from other newly industrial economies provided an option for Brazilian expansion. Brazilian exports became the new hope of Brazil, even during the crisis years,[13] and international creditors expanded into Brazil with an eye to the export business, with the London and River Plate Bank in 1891 targeting loans to Brazilian exporters. [14] Brazil, with a weak ability to service its own debt (as Brazilian banks had gone under, including the national bank, during the crisis), languished outside of the export industry for the rest of the 1890s while the government consolidated national power.[15]

By 1898, the national government of Brazil had reorganised itself. From 1888 to 1898 it had been acting to support the export industry, the core of the two most politically powerful regions, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais.[16] Competition for government power was fierce, and this competition among the Brazilian political and industrial class drove major changes in the way that someone could acquire capital or enter the political elite, with informal networks becoming far less important.[17] Government interventions on the small scale had been reasonably effective and were competitively perused, with the oligarch class spending huge amounts of money on political influence to attract these interventions. [18] In late 1898, burdened by high national debt, a crippled national bank and calls from international investors, the Republican government decided to implement a national fiscal policy to try and reform their country.[19]

In 1898 the government adopted a new metalist policy, and then in 1900 increased the gold tariff. The policy was a disaster, with 17 banks going bankrupt and the Banco da Republica do Brasil itself having to suspend payments to avoid bankruptcy.[20]  A capital crunch, where companies were no longer able to acquire needed loans immediately followed, unemployment rose, and export income fell by 20% annually from 1901 to 1904[21] A fall like this was crippling not only to the Brazilian economy, but to the Brazilian government. The government, while effective when it could act, was chronically underfunded and made between one and two thirds of its income from trade tariffs.[22] The government was forced to reorganise the banking system with a range of reforms in 1905-1906, including reforming the Banco do Brasil and depositing the government funds there to stabilize it. The Banco do Brasil was still not a true national bank however, lacking major features of the national banks such as being a lender of last resort.[23]

After the 1905-06 reorganisation, Brazil was able to renegotiate its position in international trade, and modernise its banking system. Its banking system became a dominated by narrowly defined and undiversified organisations with short-term commercial focus.[24] Unlike the large, international corporate banks that were emerging in this era, Brasil became beholden to more local and regional institutions as the consolidations of the last decade was forced back. On the more positive side, the widely varying number of players in the Brazilian national economy meant that even more then before, Brazil became a place where entrepreneurship and financial  investment could be obtained through the stock and bond markets, and not through personal connections.[25] This shift, which had started before 1905 but was driven forward by the crash, helped build income mobility and allowed the population significantly more options for advancement, especially compared other Latin American countries like Mexico.[26]

The interlinked control of the government and ownership of the most powerful industries in Brazil by the southern states of Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais compounded to create a nation where only a portion of the country was joining the industrial revolution. Outside the urban work centers of the south, a notable portion of the population, especially former slaves, had been forced into subsistence agriculture as a survival strategy.[27] The industrialists of the south instead turned to immigration to attract the workers to fuel their boom, and 4.2 million people migrated to Brazil between 1881 and 1942, which made at minimum 15% of the yearly population increases.[28] From 1880 to 1920, the vast majority of these immigrants moved to these three southern states, another measure of their dominance. Government interventions and infrastructure projects became more concentrated in these states as their economy grew, increasing their dominance in a constant cycle of intervention and growth.

The government of Brazil during the first Republic, especially after 1905, became a major player in the banking industry. In 1905, 46% of banking within brazil was dominated by international banks but as the country recovered from the collapse, this changed. By 1907, only 29% was internationally controlled.[29] This rise was partly due to the small, private banks but it was even more to do with the government either subsiding those small banks or directly using the Banco do Brasil. The Banco do Brasil was the favored tool for government interventions, and more and more private banks became government subsidised entities. By 1930, 30% of Brazilian banking was private domestic banks, 20% was international banks, 22% was controlled by state-subsidised institutions and 28% was controlled by the Banco do Brasil itself.[30]

Characterisations of the government as particularly liberal or loose at the reigns are shown to be false through this analysis. By 1930, half of all banking was government controlled or subsidised. From 1906 to 1930, the Banco do Brasil saw total growth of 6743%[31] and the slow consolidation of banks into the 1920s was driven by government subsidies and other interventions.[32] Both the banking and export sectors saw major growth through the Republic, and government was an active and major part of the Brazilian economic identity during the era.

The export boom in within Brazil never managed to compete with the growth displayed by industrial nations during the period. While the growth of the period has been characterised as simply unequal, in reality the raw GDP growth numbers of allowed Brazil to fall behind other nations. In 1880, the Brazilian economy was about 22% of the size of the British economy per capita, and about 38% of the German when measured in real GDP.  In the following decades, every ten years that gap would widen and by 1910 Brazil was only 17% of the British per capita economy, and 23% of the German.[33] In the southern states, per capita real income grew at an average annual rate of 2.5% for 33 years, from 1898 to 1930.[34] Outside this region, real income declined at an average rate of 0.3% annually.[35] The total wage growth of 1.4 percent annually was not enough to activate the large population of the rural poor within the country, and also wasn’t enough to allow brazil to create a large middle class, like many of the emergent global powers, like Brittan or Germany. Incidents like the loss of almost half of it’s exports between 1901 and 1904 during the metalist crash doubtless did not help this, but even during the growth years Brazil was losing ground.  

The first world war brought another economic crisis to Brazil, with mass disruption of its markets and the change in the global flow of goods and capital.[36] This crisis forced a movement away from the gold standard in order to maintain a measure of trade, but the crisis forced Brazil to start thinking seriously about how it would develop domestic markets for goods and domestic industrial capacity.[37] Within the government, a major debate developed about the desirability of industrialization, and where it should fit as a goal for the country. When it was first raised, the debate was won firmly by the camp against industrialisation and diversification. The powerful export industrialists of the south saw little benefit to be gained from the rapid and government driven industrialisation that was desired by a faction of the public, particularly in the north. The banking sector, which was dominated by small banks with narrow focus also failed to drive the desired industrialisation.[38] Support for industrialisation lagged all the way into the 1920s, when global economic booms and great amounts of available foreign capital kickstarted industrial growth in Brazil. [39]

Neither the government nor the banks were idle in the period leading up to this. The state continued to be a highly interventionalist actor, and continued to be effective on the small scale it operated with.[40] Small banks grew and consolidated, and support for industrialisation grew as the private industry became more able to tolerate the risk and financial burden associated. [41] International tolerance for the Brazilian unwillingness to spend government money to help with these internationally backed projects faded quickly, and pressure was applied in the early 1920s[42] The government, however, remained largely unwilling to launch wide reaching industrialisation projects.

The reasoning for not expanding the scale of the mostly effective government interventions was simple. The government did not have enough money, and as it took a large portion of it’s revenues from international trade, it was exceptionally vulnerable to international crashes.[43] The problem was well known, debated, and understood, but proved far harder to fix. Several schemes had been attempted from applying single taxes in exchange for interventions within a region,[44] to simply spending itself into debt.[45] Financing Brazilian government debt after these attempts was a major British industry within south America for years.[46] In 1924, Brazil attempted to introduce an income tax, but by 1930 it provided less then 3% of government expenditures.[47] The Republican government, for all that it was effective when it did intervene, was utterly unable to manage its expenditures compared to its income, and expenditures exceeded revenues for 30 of the 41 years of the first Republic.[48] States were better about finacial management, and managed to remain mostly solvent, perhaps due to a lack of international creditors willing to allow them to go into debt.[49] The government was rarely even able to grow the real GDP faster then the debt, which would have reduced the comparative load. From 1889 to 1930, the federal government was forced to spend between 16 and 53% of yearly revenue on repaying debt and interest, usually averaging around 22%. In 1900, 1916, 1917 and 1920 the government was forced to spend more then 35% of all income on this servicing, the latter years due to international credit crunches related to the first world war.[50]

Active changes to banking policy during the latter years of the Republic were few, even as the international banking environment changed. While Brazilian domestic banks, backed by the weight of the government slowly pushed foreign banks out, the establishment of proper national banks, new banking regulations and innovations in finacial theory were all changing the world of international banking.[51] Particularly in America, the way banks were running changed, but this change did not come to Brazil. Still, efforts were made to adapt to new international circumstances and when the café-com-leite alliance finally broke in 1929, new banking regulations were quickly put in place.[52]

Banking and the government of Brazil during the first Republic were deeply intertwined. Crisis and collapses within Brazil characterise the changes of the era, and the economic boom of Brazil was limited to a very small portion of the country. The massive population of slaves freed in 1888 and the fifty years preceding that in many ways never joined the Brazilian economy, remaining subsistence farmers that used the barter more then they touched the controlled economy of the nation. The first Republic of Brazil, rather then being an inattentive laissez-faire oligarchy, was a highly interventionist government plagued by poor long term finacial management and was deeply intertwined with both the failures and successes of the Brazilian economy.

              Bibliography

Briones, I., and A. Villela. "European bank penetration during the first wave of globalisation: Lessons from Brazil and Chile, 1878-1913." European Review of Economic History 10, no. 3 (2006): 329-59.

Cameron, Rondo, and V. I. Bovykin. International banking, 1870-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Hebe Maria Mattos De Castro. "Beyond Masters and Slaves: Subsistence Agriculture as a Survival Strategy in Brazil during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century." The Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 3 (1988): 461-89.

Musacchio, Alado, and Read, Ian. "Bankers, Industrialists, and Their Cliques: Elite Networks in Mexico and Brazil during Early Industrialization." Enterprise & Society 8, no. 4 (2007): 842-80. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23700772

Topik, Steven. "State Enterprise in a Liberal Regime: The Banco Do Brasil, 1905-1930." Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 22, no. 4 (1980): 401-22.

Triner, Gail D. Banking and economic development: Brazil, 1889-1930. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2007.

Triner, Gail D. "Banks, Regions, and Nation in Brazil, 1889-1930." Latin American Perspectives 26, no. 1 (1999): 129-50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2634041.

[1] Steven Topik, "State Enterprise in a Liberal Regime: The Banco Do Brasil, 1905-1930," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 22, no. 4 (1980), 412

[2] Gail D. Triner, Banking and economic development: Brazil, 1889-1930 (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2007), 47.

[3] I. Briones and A. Villela, "European bank penetration during the first wave of globalisation: Lessons from Brazil and Chile, 1878-1913," European Review of Economic History 10, no. 3 (2006), 333.

[4] Ibid, 334.

[5] Triner, Banking and economic development, 17.

[6] Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, “Beyond Masters and Slaves: Subsistence Agriculture as a Survival Strategy in Brazil during the second half of the Nineteenth Century”, The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Aug. 1988), 461.

[7] Gail D. Triner, “Banks, Regions and Nation in Brazil, 1889-1930”, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 26, no. 1 Creating Markets in Latin America 1750-1998 (Jan. 1999), 129.

[8] Briones and Villenla, European bank penetration, 334.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Triner, Banking and economic development, 12.

[11] Triner, Banking and economic development, 13.

[12] Mattos De Castro, Beyond Masters and Slaves, 462.

[13] Triner, Banking and economic development, 16.

[14] Briones and Villenla, European bank penetration, 337.

[15] Triner, Banking and economic development, 40.

[16] Triner, Banking and economic development, 18

[17] Aldo Musacchio and Ian Read, "Bankers, Industrialists, and Their Cliques: Elite Networks in Mexico and Brazil during Early Industrialization.", Enterprise & Society, Vol. 8, no. 4 (2007), 842.

[18] Triner, Banking and economic development, 19

[19] Rondo Cameron and V. I. Bovykin, International banking, 1870-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 362.  

[20] Ibid.

[21] Cameron and Bovykin, International Banking 1870-1914, 362.

[22] Triner, Banking and economic development, 31.

[23] Cameron and Bovykin, International Banking 1870-1914, 363.

[24] Triner, Banking and economic development, 25.

[25] Musacchio and Read, Bankers, Industrialists, and their Cliques, 844.

[26] Musacchio and Read, Bankers, Industrialists, and their Cliques, 845.

[27] Mattos De Castro, Beyond Masters and Slaves, 462.

[28] Triner, Banking and economic development, 21.

[29] Triner, Banking and economic development, 210.

[30] Ibid.

[31] Triner, Banking and economic development, 208.

[32] Triner, Banking and economic development, 174.

[33] Briones and Villenla, European bank penetration, 7.

[34] Triner, Banking and economic development, 21.

[35] Triner, Banking and economic development, 22.

[36] Triner, Banking and economic development, 23.

[37] Triner, Banking and economic development, 23.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Triner, Banking and economic development, 24-25.

[40] Triner, Banks, Regions and Nation in Brazil, 129

[41] Triner, Banking and economic development, 24.

[42] Triner, Banking and economic development, 55.

[43] Triner, Banking and economic development, 31.

[44] Triner, Banking and economic development, 117.

[45] Cameron and Bovykin, International Banking 1870-1914, 353.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Triner, Banking and economic development, 31.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Triner, Banking and economic development, 219.

[50] Triner, Banking and economic development, 218-219.

[51] Cameron and Bovykin, International Banking 1870-1914, 247.

[52] Triner, Banking and economic development, 93.

[inherentsleep-blog]

There is no map!

While making maps of territory in the pre-Napoleonic can be sort of silly, in attempting to put modern borders on states that didn’t use them, maps are a pretty important part of our understanding on how the world both is and was.

So, with that in mind, in attempting to look at Canadian history before confederacy, I’ve run into a problem. There are very few good maps, and what maps there are end up a) hyper-local, b) don’t actually mention all the people that live there c) are just bad maps, or d) some combination of the above. What I wanted was a ‘real’ map of North America, with cities, population basins and territories (which actually includes not just European powers or just native powers or something) around the time of the Great Peace of Montreal (1701). It doesn’t exist. More then that, nothing even close to it exists that I can find.

(source http://www.emersonkent.com/map_archive/north_america_1700.htm) This is about as close as I could find, but if you want to talk about something being a ‘problematic representation’, this is it right here. The names of native language groups or alliances are on the map over a general area, but have no actual land claim. Cities, populations and other major representations (like why do they have Jamestown but not Wlliamsburg??)

>https://native-land.ca/ this dude right here is making an effort. Good effort dude, but it’s still not at all what we want. I’m starting to think it might be about as close as we can get on the native side at the moment. There are tonnes of languages area maps (in Canadian history textbooks especially), like the one here, but they don’t really help that much. For one thing, they don’t show the actual native nations and locations, but they also don’t show Europeans, who did actually live in the region during this time.

With a friend helping, I tracked down some particular ones that help.

This one shows both European and Native (mostly Mohawk I’m pretty sure) around the time of the American revolution. This is helpful, though knowing stuff like how big the cities in question are would be really nice, but this is close. Below, I give another example of an OK map, though it’s... not great looking, the wrong date and doesn’t give any sort of border. It is something, though

Now for some other attempts. A history textbook, I’m pretty sure, gives us this map. It’s sort of like what we want, but is missing the actual euro-native mix.

and this is a map of a war around the same date, which seems helpful. It, for whatever reason though, doesn’t show most of the settlements.

I could continue, but I think you get the idea. European control of a large part of North America was either fictitious, very loose trade networks made of interlinking native alliances and relationships or actively contested. Maps of the time period should represent this, but also show European claims and presence.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Accounting for Actors, the United Fruit Company and Socialism and Man

 This is the reflection article I had to do with the Guevara document, and link it to a modern document. It could totally be more coherent if it was more focused, but I just though I would post what I was working on. This article presents a short analysis of two documents looking at the Caribbean and Central America during the twentieth century. Accounting for Taste: Export Bananas, Mass Markets and Panama Disease by John Soluri is an environmental and economic history of the rise of banana production in the Americas, and a critique of other literature in that field.  Socialism and man in Cuba by Che Guevara is a primary source document about several related topics surrounding the rise of socialism in Cuba and the vision of the future presented by the Cuban revolutionaries. This analysis argues that just as the functionalist model of behavior fails to encompass the rise of the banana trade, it also fails to describe the Cuban revolutionary movement. It further asserts that just as Soluri argues that previous analysis had erroneously stripped actors of agency at the expense of invisible forces, Guevara makes the same mistakes in his writing.

 Accounting for Taste describes the rise of the banana industry in general, but particularly the United Fruit Company from multiple perspectives through the years 1890 to 1960. In recording the history of the United Fruit Company, he discusses the effects of value, taste and aesthetics that led to the mass adoption of the Gros Michael banana. He discusses first how domestic production was concentrated into a few vertical producers of the goods. Discussion of Panama disease is a core part of the article, particularly how it was interrelated to a fall in biodiversity and its economic effects on banana production. Soluri covers the slow adoption of the Chiquita banana and the factors surrounding it. He then briefly discusses the latter stages of the United Fruit Company, including the rise in competition within the market and the pivot by the company in an attempt to market their bananas as a differentiated ‘high quality’ product. He does not, however, link these decisions to the traditional monopoly structure of firms.

Soluri gives an account of the history of the Gros Michael banana. He describes how its seedless nature, large size, high bunch count and ability to be shipped all joined to help make it the dominant banana of the Americas[1]. He then describes how those same qualities, with its distinctive aesthetics and entrenched market position kept it in production even after Panama disease swept through the plantations. The absurd conditions that the plants had to be grown under, with abandoned fields[2] and massive tracts of empty land waiting for crop failure[3], were a statement to the profitability of the fruit, but also the failure to find an alternative. The heavy capital flooding and recovery of field was even more so. Functionalist explanations for the longevity of the banana are not able to fully explain the long-term success of the fruit.

           The economic history presented of United Fruit Company and its transition to a vertical structure also gives a clear picture of the goals of the company, and presents a near textbook example of the business model. It is somewhat surprising that Soluri gave so little analysis of the business model of the company, considering how much time he devoted to the environmental history and his comments about the agency of the actors surrounding Panama disease, and their response to it. [4] Considering the massive profits,[5] income and market share[6] of the United Fruit Company, as well as the omnipresence of their marketing within the banana market[7], it seems clear that the United Fruit Company was able to hold at least a partial monopoly. When this is understood, the fact that United Fruit limited production with its massive tracts of unused land makes significantly more sense, as flooding the market would have led to a loss in profit. Instead, they focused the market on quality in an effort to limit the competing supply of fruits and create an artificial shortage of the highest quality bananas, filling the rest of the demand with lower quality fruits. Then, when they lost their production monopoly, they attempted to use marketing to differentiate themselves and re-create a monopoly on ‘luxury bananas’. The anti-competitive tactics they used fall directly in line with this explanation, and it falls squarely into traditional monopoly analysis.

Socialism and man is an ideologically dense and wandering text as Guevara jumps from one topic and concept to another, something Guevara himself notes in his conclusion.[8] Due to this structure, commenting on every single point Guevara speaks on is impossible, and one must take all of his statements as his true opinions (as the scope of this article would otherwise be massive). Within this uncritical reading, some of the topics discussed include: his view of individualism within socialism; a discussion of social duty as a ‘societal function’; the pursuit of morality as a nation; and freedom versus realism within socialist states. He also discusses Castro as a voice of the people, the failure of capitalist social movements, Marxists theory as compared to Marxists-Leninist, the goal of society being education and the “original sin” of artists and intellectuals. He finishes with a warning against dogmatism, and a rallying cry to help create the humans of the 21st century, though he admits to not quite knowing what that would look like.

A reasonable portion of Socialism and man is dedicated to refuting the claim that the socialist revolutionary period removes individuality at the expense of the state. Guevara fails to do that, and also manages to reinforce the opposing point with later statements. He describes the fact that Fidel is the named and known personal leader of the revolution[9]. This does not, as he seems to think, describe individualism within his nation, but instead describes a personalisation of politics. He then describes that Fidel understands and can speak to all problems of the Cuban people due to his personal charisma[10], dismissing dissent out of hand. In order to continue the revolution, he is describing, Guevara then goes on to suggest the construction of revolutionary institutions.[11] These very institutions have had traditionally been effective partly for their role in depersonalization of politics, especially within Latin America.

           Through the text, Guevara often both ascribes dissent and resistance he doesn’t like to invisible systems,[12][13][14] and turns to vanguardism[15][16] to describe why all problems are not actually problems at all. This same turn to vanguardism, however, makes any true functionalist explanation of the revolution impossible, as the revolutionaries are in pursuit of intangibles.[17] Also within the text, Guevara within the same few paragraphs laments that he cannot see solutions to certain problems as he is not an artist[18] and the fact that there are no artist revolutionaries[19] while immediately afterwards lambasting them in general without a hint of irony.[20] While he attempts to address this by claiming they are worth less for not being revolutionaries[21] and therefor must be instead educated from the ground up as both artists and revolutionaries, that doesn’t address the possible existence of someone being both a revolutionary and an artist other than his total dismissal of them, nor the lack of them in his movement.

Guevara, within his analysis, makes the very mistake Soluri criticizes previous works in his field of making. In his conclusion, Soluri argues that agency has been stripped from people by ascribing many of the results of their actions to forces of nature, in this case the “the ravages of a disease”[22]. His evidence is strong, suggesting that instead of the being an ‘act of god’, the banana corporations continually and dangerously exposed themselves to risk factors through selection to a single crop and destruction of biodiversity. Guevara ascribes any dissidence to inhuman enemies of the revolution or inevitable results of his ideological models, curbing agency (other than a static choice to ‘join the revolution) in the name of these invisible ideological models, usually capitalism. Those who flee his country after revolution, for example, are characterised as “completely housebroken”[23] instead of any other reasonable motive. Guevara speaks in-depth about how pressures both within capitalism force behaviors, and how that systematic pressure can be used to create his new educated and moral population.[24] This analysis strips actors of agency, instead giving that agency only to systems and revolutionaries. Further, by turning opposition into a purely systematic problem but is allies into heroic individuals struggling against a system, he both dehumanises opponents, delegitimizes anyone disagreeing and grants his followers a ‘savior motive’ as the vanguard of America.[25]

           Accounting for Taste: Export Bananas, Mass Markets and Panama Disease and Socialism and man in Cuba represent very different texts written in very different eras. Because of this, more than being comparative pieces Accounting for Taste functions as additional analysis and Socialism and man in Cuba acts as a supporting document when comparing the two. Soluri arguments on functionalism and agency are valuable commentary that can be additionally applied to the Guevara document.

   [1] John Soluri, “Accounting for Taste: Export Bananas, Mass Markets, and Panama Disease”, Environmental History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp 389

[2] (Soluri 2002), pp 395

[3] (Soluri 2002), pp 394

[4] (Soluri 2002), pp 403

[5] (Soluri 2002), pp 391

[6] (Soluri 2002), pp 397

[7] (Soluri 2002), pp 392

[8] Che Guevara, “Socialism and man in Cuba”, trans. Brian Baggins, section Danger of dogmatism

[9] (Guevara 1965) section Introduction

[10] (Guevara 1965) section Participation of the masses

[11] (Guevara 1965) section Conscious process of self-education

[12] (Guevara 1965) section New status of work, Invisible laws of capitalism, The individual and socialism

[15] (Guevara 1965) section Role of the individual

[16] (Guevara 1965) section Love of living humanity

[17] (Guevara 1965) section Love of living humanity

[18] (Guevara 1965) section New impulse for artistic experimentation

[19] (Guevara 1965) section New impulse for artistic experimentation

[20] (Guevara 1965) section New Revolutionary generation

[21] (Guevara 1965) section New Revolutionary generation

[22] (Soluri 2002), pp 403

[23] (Guevara 1965) section New impulse for artistic experimentation

[24] (Guevara 1965) section Conscious process of self-education

[25] (Guevara 1965) section Role of the individual

[inherentsleep-blog]

Commentary on ‘Socialism and man in Cuba’ p1

START (note - this is VERY old, from when I was in HS. It’s here only to preserve it)

Guevara starts this by going right into the defence of socialist states.

“A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokespeople, in the ideological struggle against socialism, is that socialism, or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the abolition of the individual for the sake of the state. I will not try to refute this argument solely on theoretical grounds but rather to establish the facts as they exist in Cuba and then add comments of a general nature.”

I don’t think, after reading all of this, that Guevara actually understand the criticism that’s being leveled against transitional socialist states. In fact, he doesn’t seem to actually understand what individualism is, or what is meant by ‘a society is forced to give up individualism’. To start, very basically, having named and personally powerful leadership within a government is not individualism.

“We put our trust in him — individual, specific, with a first and last name — and the triumph or failure of the mission entrusted to him depended on that individual's capacity for action.” While he is correct that this is collective action based on an individual’s capacity for action (henceforth agency) this is not what a society refers to as individualism. If it was, cults of personality with high ranking army figures gaining their own cults would be considered the most individualist of societies. While dictatorships can be individualistic, they are plainly not inherently so.

What is described is instead the personalisation of politics, wherein powerful people protected by networks of support, personal charisma, force and wealth are the leaders of society and control greater portions of it, contrasted do depersonalised politics where institutions run the country, and in a final stage no single person holds leadership, but instead the bureaucracy rules. A democratic version of this could have people simply voting for a given ‘party’ or ‘action platform’.

Depersonalisation of politics was an important movement through the 19th and 20th centuries, and it allows more stable government as the institutions hold far longer-term networks of patronage without the personal dominance or connection.

Guevara continues in the same vein.

“Every one of the combatants of the Sierra Maestra who reached an upper rank in the revolutionary forces has a record of outstanding deeds to his or her credit.”

Right, and that’s lovely, but that’s actually describing a mediocratic society, where competent actors who do good things are promoted. Perhaps you’re describing an ideal military society. It still isn’t individualism, or an individualist society. Mediocracy is not an inherent requirement of individualism.

Whatever, the defence just seems weird. While he didn’t have Wikipedia or Google to help him confirm in 1959, anarchist and liberal concepts of individualism were very well established by this time, and his lack of understanding of them seems just strange. It’s ok not to be an individualist, Marxist-Leninist isn’t traditionally an individualist movement and I would say that any movement that builds itself on collective action probably is less individualist then one that doesn’t.  Moving on.

FIRST HEROIC STAGE

“This was the first heroic period, and in which combatants competed for the heaviest responsibilities, for the greatest dangers, with no other satisfaction than fulfilling a duty.” You know, that sounds a lot like bullshit. A claim that something is done just for the fulfillment of a duty, especially something not routine, very dangerous and requiring a massive time investment instantly sets off alarms in my head. There can be altruistic reasons, there can be selfish reasons, there can be reasons that are both but to claim it’s for duty is… yea.

“In the attitude of our fighters could be glimpsed the man and woman of the future.”

Lying to themselves? Because like… I really don’t think it’s a real attitude.

“Finding the method to perpetuate this heroic attitude in daily life is, from the ideological standpoint, one of our fundamental tasks.”

Right, and I’m back to thinking there is a particular problem in that the utopian ideal of man doesn’t actually exist.

“In the history of the Cuban Revolution there now appeared a character, well defined in its features, which would systematically reappear: the mass. This multifaceted being is not, as is claimed, the sum of elements of the same type (reduced, moreover, to that same type by the ruling system), which acts like a flock of sheep.”

Right, and you’re back to talking about collectivism, because you’re doing the whole in-group/out-group thing where even actors taking individual actions, if done for a group goal instead of a personal goal are back to being not individualists again. That isn’t to say that collective gain can’t be the same as personal gain, but it’s about the reasoning to the action.

Wait, I think I see what he’s thinking. He’s thinking that a bunch of people all doing something on their own (their duty) towards a collective goal is individualist. I suppose that could be true, so long as membership of the mass isn’t dictated by that very collective action. If membership to the group is based on doing group activities, you’re not longer looking at individualists because inherently at some point group gain and personal gain are going to come into conflict.  

“It is true that it follows its leaders, basically Fidel Castro, without hesitation. But the degree to which he won this trust results precisely from having interpreted the full meaning of the people's desires and aspirations, and from the sincere struggle to fulfill the promises he made.”

…right then. You are very much not individualist, and either don’t know what the word means or are just spewing bull, but I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt.

I think, however, something is missing from this.

There is no mention of dissent, anywhere. What if two members of the mass want something different, or have different “desires and aspirations”? It is, of course, ignored.

PARTICIPATION OF THE MASSES

“…it [the mass] was hardened in the battles against various groups of bandits armed by the CIA;…”

That’s some high level Latin America right there, your political opponents are both CIA tools AND bandits? He’s probably right about CIA armed though, I just found the full accusations funny.

“Nevertheless, the state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, one notes a decline in collective enthusiasm due to the effect of a quantitative diminution in each of the elements that make up the mass.”

Wait, has he redefined individualism to mean having moral now? No one expresses dissent, they just work at what they don’t want to do less hard. I can’t see any way for this to backfire, especially with small or compounding mistakes. But we know Cuba never made those, right?

“Clearly this mechanism is not enough to ensure a succession of sensible measures.”

Great, he understands that suppression of debate and conflicting opinions means that you can end up missing small problems, particularly when you only react by critical mass of outrage (which is expressed only by lack of enthusiasm, as Guevara is implying.)

“In this Fidel is a master. His own special way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory.”

You’re right back to ignoring dissenting opinions. This isn’t to say you should listen to them every time, but most better systems, like you describe you need, understand that the ‘will of the people’ can be split or contradictory or whatever else. More then ignoring it, Guevara is just literally pretending it doesn’t exist. Maybe he’s just going a little deep on rhetoric.

“Some phenomena of this kind can be seen under capitalism, when politicians appear capable of mobilizing popular opinion. But when these are not genuine social movements — if they were, it would not be entirely correct to call them capitalist — they live only so long as the individual who inspires them, or until the harshness of capitalist society puts an end to the people's illusions.”

…literally what? There are all kinds of social movement in society in general. Some are, as suggested, broken up, but there are many that are successful or make changes of a kind you don’t seem to care about. Does he just define social movement exceptionally narrowly? Even then, many reform based social movements stuck under capitalism. Or does he not consider literacy and print culture a social movement, does he not consider religion, does he not consider things like veganism?

It’s also somewhat funny in hindsight, as Marxist-Leninism prove to be one of the less durable ideological movements.

I have to be done for now, and Holy Christ I’m like 1/6th of the way done.

[inherentsleep-blog]

A small rant about a random post P2

General warning: this is still BM. I really hate have a general dislike for just about everything about post-scarcity in speculative political though and science fiction.

Once again, this is not a reply for the same reason as the other part.

The ‘seven reasons’ post I mentioned in the last part of this prompted this post too, but it’s been on my mind for a while. In particular, one of the reasons it’s ‘important’ according to the author is

“Individuality still matters. In a post-scarcity society, ingenuity and self-expression are not sacrificed on the altar of survival…”

The fundamental lynchpin of politics, economics and humanity in general is based off a simple concept: resources are scarce. It’s the economics problem, it’s the bane of utopians everywhere and it’s the concept that informs the human condition.

Post-scarcity exists as a speculative concept where that very axiom is rejected.

That’s an interesting concept.

The problem is that post-scarcity as it’s traditionally represented in just about all conceptions doesn’t actually do that.

Originally, I wanted to make a pithy comment about ‘if you asked 10 economists what is the most important resource, what do you think they would say’ but I quickly realised that 10 economists probably couldn’t agree on the colour of blue.

My point, regardless of that digression, was that human labour is the most important single resource within an economy. Human time, labour and opportunity cost make up the human facet of the economy, and the fundamental equation that you do not have unlimited time, unlimited effort and can only do one thing at once is unchanged by the conception of human scarcity. Human resources, in just about any post-scarcity society, remain scarce.

A real post scarcity piece of speculative fiction would involve some really strange stuff, where time moves at a chosen variable speed, effort is unlimited, and experiences are not singular.  None of that exists in most ‘post-scarcity’ conceptions. To be frank, I think most post-scarcity is just devoid of real deep though about a society totally based on human labour would run (especially one with near-unlimited human mobility) and instead tries to just remove all mediums of exchange and just put social norms in place of market norms in some weird utopian conception of a sharing economy. Most conceptions of the ideology are anti-capitalist in one way or another. That’s why I’m sort of surprised that an economy based on humanity with the addition of unlimited materialism (because that’s what most ‘post-scarcity societies’ within science fiction are) is then end of human imagination and advancement. You can ask any two year old: sometimes, just because there are a functionally unlimited amount of Lego, that doesn’t really matter. Because he wants that one. Maybe I should just write a post-scarcity criticism where everyone is represented by toddlers in a vast daycare run by impossible powers (AIs or the teachers, it’s really your choice.)

This is probably long enough for a ‘short rant’ and so I’m going to split my thoughts on individuality in a true human economy into it’s own post.

[inherentsleep-blog]

A small rant about a random post P1

General warning: this is going to be BM. When I was poking around a few tags yesterday I saw a post that sort of got my sarcastic ire up. This isn’t a response because it’s kind of dickish and therefor I feel no need to tag the original author, let negativity stay in it’s little corner. I’m making this post because I was thinking about it and I’m trying to put everything I think about ‘on paper’ right now to improve my writing skill.  The post was  ‘7 reasons why solarpunk is the most important speculative fiction movement in the last 20 years’ My first though was ‘that’s a strong assessment’  My second was ‘no, you’re probably right actually, what speculative fiction movements started in the last twenty years?’  It’s sort of a strange award to request, because speculative fiction isn’t that large a genre, and movements within it aren’t *that* common. Really, I wasn’t sure what sub-genres it was even in the running against. 

So I did a little bit of googling, and off the top of my head I’m pretty sure It’s in the running against Dieselpunk and Nanopunk. While fun, I think most dieselpunk fans can agree it’s not really an *important* sci-fi movement. I thought that pitch for Solarpunk was pretty terrible, but we can still open up the little award letter. If you’re talking about sci-fi movements at all, I think I would have to disagree. You’re running against the arrival of the Chinese hard-scifi scene in force, the expansion of the biopunk movement (and the important inter-connectivity with things like Crispr) and the slow rise of the African sci-fi scene (west African, mostly out of Nigeria in particular) , all of which help build and imagine a less western world (which our world is very much going to be.) None of these are new movements however, and started before the last 20 years. If you had made that statement about the last 30 years there would be a lot more debate, but sci-fi movements really haven't impressed in this new millennia, no matter what matrix fans would tell you. So fine solarpunk, I present you the ‘Fuck Kathleen Ann Goonan Award for most important new sci-fi movement from 1997 - 2017′ I’m hope you’re happy you animals. 

[inherentsleep-blog]

On vertical integration in the past and future.

The first question I should probably answer is ‘what is vertical integration?’ Vertical integration is when a company takes over all levels of the supply chain and production for a product. It’s not a new concept by any means. In the history of corporations, older examples like the VOC (Dutch East India company), United Fruit Company and even the nominally non-profit (and utterly evil) Association Internationale Africaine are all examples of this in the largest possible form of action. It started even with Italian merchant companies in the 1200s, and it’s an idea older then capitalism as a real institution. It is also, as can be seen by the kind of notoriety of these places, a very scary concept.

These are just some of the most high-profile examples, usually for the fact that their ‘vertical supply chains’ or otherwise corporate run nations can be quite terrible. They are corporate states, where a single corporation becomes a monopoly on a region of land. These companies in particular are imperialistic, not just in the ‘doing bad things’ use of the word, but in the sense that the home or headquarters of the company is not based within the company territory that makes up the de-facto state. Sometimes, like with the United Fruit Company, locals are left in power under a puppet government. Other times, like with the ‘Congo Free State’, a lax overarching and non-corporate government is put in place as a political tool but the government is run by the company and sometimes the company takes and administers lands in the name of a home country (like with the VOC and the Netherlands.)

Some companies are less total in their efforts to manage their supply chain, and don’t really seek political control. The reasoning is simple: bribes, administration and infrastructure (among other tools of control) are expensive.

Why then might a company choose to ‘go vertical?’

It is the only way to fully implement total control, total quality standards and manage resources in places that otherwise would not be able to host a company of that style. When done wrong, it tends to be a total failure, as many colonial companies ended up where the expensive. Why do it then?

Because when you do it right, it’s very, very profitable.

From small examples like mining and mill towns that built fortunes during the industrial age and on past the gilded age, there is profit in both monopoly and vertical growth. Even back to the largest company of all time (The VOC) you can see the potential benefits, with companies of a large enough size and power able to bring forth military support. The United Fruit Company and their Great White Fleet grew profits by six times over in seven years (1913 to 1920) and helped build the very term ‘banana republic’ when they became a true vertical company. Coups, underhanded negotiations and bulling tactics are all valid ground for a company too large to stop.

The disadvantage is that more specialised companies may be better at some aspects of production when compared to a vertical company. The advantage lies in control and quality, and therefor is naturally more beneficial when a monopoly can be maintained.

What about companies who operate in their own country? One famous case, that of Standard Oil, was hit with the anti-trust push of the gilded age. Company towns, built for shipping and mining and milling have long histories within North America of being dangerous organisations for their workers.

Some are seen as beneficial, especially the ones that built and developed infrastructure or education, but by-and-large they are not particularly beneficial for the state they intertwine with.

What happened to them then?

In the modern era, tax laws and competitive markets have seen a general decline in the vertical companies, with monopoly and anti-trust laws lurking in the background to dissuade new expansion. Both the economic and social conditions are generally resistant to their formation.

Yet we still imagine them. Why?

What of futuristic and imagined corporate states and powers? We impose things that we imagine and things from our history into our fiction, and corporate states are no different. In Sci-fi, space-based ‘mega corps’ are a mainstay, with corporate towns and cities re-imagined as entire corporate planets and systems (as space sci-fi often does, lacking the scope to present meaningful differences from world to world, but instead treating planets as cities in a new age of discovery and sail.)

Space, science fiction and the interrelation as (often unintended) commentary on the ages of colonisation, sail, empire and both the Victorian and guilded age interrelated our history and an imagined future based on our experience. Corporations, corporate nations and vertical companies operating in places without the ability to control them all are apart of that.

Closer to our modern world, different kinds of dystopian fiction imagine a world ruled by corporations, with impossible power and strength. Genres of fiction born at the dawn of the information age, most notably cyberpunk, imagine different kinds of corporate futures, some vertical and some simply with massive power.

What then, amid a need for great villains and the un-nuanced world of storytelling and the literary nature of the excesses of science fiction, might a true future ‘corporate state’ look like?

I think you have to go to the only true vertical company left, one that still runs its own towns, influences government and tries to monopolise its trade with impunity.

Saudi-Aramco is the largest company in the world. It is held privately, partly by the actual Saudi government and partly by the Saudi crown. It is probably the last true vertical corporation that exists today, and operates mostly within its own country under the control of its government, which enables it a local monopoly.

It also understands that oil cannot sustain it forever. The company is planning a small (five percent, perhaps) IPO. It may offer up to ten percent.

This is still, at minimum, a 170 billion dollar offering. For a company from a country with a general GDP of about 650 billion, that’s stunningly massive.

The company is also growing in power. The reforms within the country, the push to modernize business and attract trade, and most of all the Saudi 2030 plan all have the hallmarks of the company, and its growing influence. It is a personal estimation that by 2040 Saudi Arabia will be being run behind the scenes by the company at the behest of the royal family. Direct power will be replaced with indirect power as the company diversifies and tries to build itself into a larger company. Saudi Arabia, strangely, might very well be the first cyberpunk style ‘mega corp’ of the next era. With the power of traditionalist and draconian laws to crush opposition and a monopoly on economic might, it will be unrivaled within its nation. It already does much of the construction, why not the education and administration too? While costly, the ownership of the company and that of the country are one in the same, and the company profits are used to fund those things through taxes and then re-distributed.

Who will one day have more power, the owner of Aramco or the king?

Why couldn’t they be the same man.

When the country and the company come up against one another, why not support the beast that lets you profit more deeply? It has all happened before.

There are other ways, partly by the same model, that another company might grow in much the same style. As smaller nations in Africa and Asia really strike the development curb and start to protect themselves from the diseases ravaging their country (perhaps reliant on western medical advancement, but something that I imagine happening nonetheless, a company wishing to create a new ‘banana republic’ with a new kind of good that can benefit from African conditions, be it vast, cheep labour, good climate or weak regulations and a willingness to protect its own may very well emerge.

I think it more likely then not that such a company will show up in the next eighty years. Both international ability to enforce regulations and anti-trust laws are growing more and more toothless as western governments fail to adapt to new technological changes fast enough. Vertical integration, monopolies and a new gilded age, one where information is the new oil (and oil is the old oil, for a while longer at least) are something I can’t help but imagine in the future. Like all things, this is nuanced and not so clear cut as I might make it sound, but I think it’s something to consider.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Essay on Malacca, introduction to the capture of Malacca.

In 1509, two years before the conquest of Malacca, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira recorded his observations on his arrival in the city-state in a letter titled On the deeds & discoveries & conquests made by the Portuguese in the seas and Eastern Lands. Two years later, the city was conquered by the Portuguese. These provide a view of the city at the end of its golden age, just before its fall. This letter, along with examination of a variety of secondary sources including essays, monographs and articles about the city build an image of the cultural and economic makeup of Malacca at the start of the 16th century. This examination will look at the geography, national identity, religious makeup, economic core and geopolitical basics that helped define the city-state before conquest. Then Malacca after conquest under rule of the Portuguese will be examined. The Suma Oriental: Which goes from the Red Sea to China, written by the first Portuguese ambassador to China Tome Pires, during his years in Malacca shortly following conquest will be the primary document used. It, supported by a similar variety of secondary sources will show the changes caused by first conquest and true contact. The examination will look at changes brought by Portuguese faith, trade practices and being a part of the greater Portuguese empire. It will be shown that Malacca was a multi-faith trade sultanate, founded and built around commerce, which projected power and protected itself from larger nations through trade, faith, and political maneuvering. It will be further demonstrated that the changes caused by contact and conquest destroyed the mercantile, imperial identity of the city, and was replaced with a highly autonomous, multi-ethnic and multi-faith identity of many nations built around the emerging concept of the Malay people.

In 1508-1509, a Portuguese expedition was sent to make port in Malacca, with stops farther west throughout the Indian Ocean. The Captain, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, wrote letters with his observations of the expedition, and his general rendition of events. Malacca would fall in 1511, meaning these letters, particularly the part concerning his arrival in the city, are just about the last available description of the free Malacca sultanate as it had been.  

Malacca was founded by the last King of the Kingdom of Singapura, after being sacked by larger nations fearing it’s growing power.[i] It was built in a perfect place for trade, as the chosen location was on a major trade route, and it is described that “…the general monsoons die down forty or fifty leagues before the City of Malacca, which is situated half-way along the Straits, but nevertheless the currents and land-winds from both countries suffice for reaching port.”[1] Currents and winds meant Malacca served as a natural stopping point and destination for Indian Ocean, southeast Asian and Chinese traders. The same source, an article by P. E. Josselin De Jong, describes that, “[The] wind and current do always serve them to carry the ships to Malacca.”[2] The Portuguese on arrival describe the geography of the city itself, saying “The town of Malacca is situated almost in the middle of the straits at a latitude of two degrees north. It extends one league along the coast, and has a river which flows from inland and cuts it into two parts…” [3]A major central river flowing from inland allows even more trade to flow, taking goods from the inner peninsula to the city. This geography meant that Malacca was a natural commercial hub built for maritime trade.

With its natural geographic advantages to jumpstart and strengthen it, Malacca built itself as a trading empire. Unlike other regional contemporaries, Malacca was not a decentralised kingdom that took power from its large territory and many cities. Characterized both in contrast to contemporaries and successors by J. Norman Parmer, “The Malacca Sultanate was, however, a city-state with a sea port economy. Political power was centralized, and the Sultan was autocratic” [4] This wealth and central power allowed the city to grab territory for itself, eventually controlling the Malay peninsula including the former site of Singapura. The Portuguese description supports this, by saying that “…the town has an appearance of such majesty by reason of it’s size, the number of ships which are anchored in the harbour, and the extent of the movement of people by sea and by land, that in the opinion of the men of the Portuguese fleet it is greater than what that had heard of it and in it they saw more wealth then there was in India” [5] That massive wealth was supported by a great population of traders from countries all around the greater local region. In addition, the city used the Islamic faith to draw traders and merchants from the entire Islamic commercial sphere. Through this network, it extended its economic reach as far as places like Alexandria. These advantages all served to build a powerful trade empire without the need for the large local population base than was required by its contemporaries.

The national identity of Malacca was not a pre-existing ethnic identity that also applied to the city. Instead, through works produced in the city primarily sponsored by the Sultan, the city created its own national identity, culture, formalized writing and more. There was no one ethnically distinct people within the city, before or after founding. The region surrounding the city was a mix of different peoples, cultures and languages that made up the Malay peninsula. Malacca drew people from many of these groups, from the whole peninsula and beyond into the new city. Combined with the huge mass of foreign traders that resided in the city, as in all similar cities in the region J. M. Guillick described that “…there was a lack of cultural homogeneity in the subject class” [6]. The identity of the city, therefore, had to be formed around other factors. The emergent nation was based on a blend of a great number of differing cultural practices, some local, some Islamic and some imported from other regions. Distinct art, writing and traditions were all started in the city throughout it’s lifespan. Malacca was also strongly centralised, with a great amount of power resting in the city, and a great amount of the cities’ power resting with the Sultan.  The Portuguese observed that “Although all the houses are made of wood, with the exception of the mosque and a few buildings belonging to the Sultan…”[7] Central control was strong enough that the only person in the city with actual stone buildings was the Sultan, and his long-time allies of the Islamic faith. This is important because it means the power in the city was concentrated around the rulership instead of with lower nobility, allowing a single identity to emerge from the many groups. Despite the massive wealth of all the traders in the city and the local nobility, only the Sultan had the power for stone construction.[ii] This combination of centralised power, great wealth, no single pre-existing ethnic identity and a unique culture allowed the development of a distinct national identity within the city in a relatively short amount of time.

Religion in Malacca was another important component to the city. While the city was said by both it’s rulers and explorers like the Portuguese to be Muslim, the actual situation was more complex. The local and regional religion at the founding of the city was a syncretic combination of Hinduism, Buddhism and Animism. Malacca was founded as a shift was occurring, and in the words of Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, “Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist kingdoms that had prevailed in the western parts of the region for more then a millennium were being replaced by polities based … in the archipelago on Islamic doctrines of statehood.” [8] This shift was represented in the religions of the city itself. There was a mix of local faith, Islam, different Buddhist doctrines and Hinduism that were all represented. Conversion in Malacca among the ruling classes to Islam started with the Sultan. This was partly an economic choice to welcome Islamic trade to the city. This meant that Islamic traders, missionaries and scholars were naturally linked to the Sultan. The nobility followed, but “To speak of conversion is perhaps to imply too much. For a considerable part of the Malay nobility this was more a matter of reconciling themselves with the inevitable” describes C.H. Wake [9]. Islam had been spreading in the region for a great many years, and the city embraced it for its offered economic benefits foremost. This adoption of faith, however, did not imply that the lower classes within the city converted. Many of the locals continued to worship as they had since the founding of the city. This meant that Malacca for much of its existence had to deal with being a multi-faith polity. The mix in the city was compounded by the fact that no great efforts from any of the Sultans was made towards conversion. The attitude towards faith that would come to characterize the city allowed a great number of religions to be present and trading, if sometimes taxed at a higher rate under the Islamic jizya taxes. Lopes remarked on that attitude when they came to the city, (unknowingly) noting both Sunni and Shia traders from the Arab world, as well as “…Bengalis, Penguans, Siamese, Chinese, Luzons, Lui-Kius and others who frequented Malacca for trade.” [10] Just about every faith in the monsoon region of Asia at the time could be found in some form in the city, and this helped build the city it’s great riches.

Malacca, despite it’s great wealth and variety of trade partners, was a city under threat. While the city did fight both land and naval wars against it’s more powerful large neighbors, more often than not the survival of the city was built on politics. At different times, the city acted as a tributary of both Ming China, and Ayutthaya in Siam, and on more than one occasion, both at the same time. It played politics for alliances with local Muslim kingdoms as far away as Bengal. Locally, it was alternatively hostile and cooperative with nearby nations in a constant shift of policy, though rarely having to go to war. Because of this, alliances were not long term arrangements with shifts every few years. This policy allowed the city a degree on constant growth. The downside of this policy is that it left Malacca with few long-term friends for when larger nations began to eye the city. Throughout southeast Asia, Malacca looked to project and extend its soft power. Interestingly, it managed to project this power throughout the region with a very small military. As it’s described by M.J Pintado, “Malacca was too insignificant a city to have a navy to antagonize enemies even as Sri Vijaya had antagonized the Chulas and Majaphit. Yet imperialism on a small scale had payed off well.” [11] The city used politics, trade and faith as weapons for influence over the region. While willing to submit in the short term, Malacca would look to benefit from more powerful nations, such as the hegemony of early Ming China, and then throw them off as it suited them. Muslim missionaries proved to be little threat to stability for the city itself, and in fact proved to be some of the Sultans strongest supporters within the city. After conversion, Malacca used them as a weapon against other local kingdoms and to build alliances farther east. Projecting power into even the spice isles, Pintado describes that “Muslim missionaries sailing from its harbour hastened the decay of Majapahit and carried Islam and trade as far as Banda and the Moluccas.” [12] The Malaccan soft power doctrine was used in almost all cases, including against it’s largest enemies. A combination of altering war, antagonization and submission in name to Ayutthaya, while pushing for and helping along the decline of Majaphit were mainstays of Malaccan action. Even the arrival of Portugal, prior to the capture of the city, was not unprecedented to the Sultanate. The Chinese treasure fleets had stopped in the city as well, presenting a distant power projecting might into the city through naval force. Internally the city was drawn between different factions and powers of merchants which played a major part in whom the city favored. This allowed nations to support their traders in the city to gain major influence with the Malaccan government. This approach, however, allowed foreign rivalries to be imposed in the city. At the Portuguese arrival, a conflict is described in the opinion of the city between Arab world traders and non-Arab. “To their discredit those people [Muslim Traders] had frightened the gentiles by telling them about the Portuguese customs and commerce…”[iii] [13]. This extension of other rivalries like the Arab – Portuguese conflict into the city drove several painful conflicts for the city, including its invasion and occupation by the Portuguese a scant two years later.

The Portuguese expedition and its letter about the affair presented the last real look at the city before conquest. Malacca was a state different from its contemporaries for its pure trade economy, it’s slightly odd foreign policy of mostly soft power and its multi-ethnic and multi-religious construction. Rather than being the nation of a distinct ethnic people, Malacca was a city that created its own identity, one that had lasting impact on the region.  The Malaccan identity was a trading nation with a multi-faith composition under Islamic governance. These qualities, however, would make it an attractive target for the western nations arriving in the region, and the Portuguese conquered the city less than ten years after their initial arrival. The Portuguese governance, it’s greater empire which Malacca was now a part of, and the echo of the true arrival of European empire would leave deep changes in the city itself.

Tome Pires was a Portuguese apothecary who arrived in Asia in 1511. Through his competence and his merits (and the nature of the Portuguese in Asia at the time), he became the first Portuguese Ambassador to China. Before that appointment, however, he spent two and a half years (through the year 1513 is the main date we have), in Malacca. During his say studying primarily Asian drugs, he wrote a major history text about the region known as the Suma Oriental. The second section of this text concerns Malacca after the Portuguese conquest. By its nature as a contemporary history text, it provides a window into the thoughts of the Portuguese about the city and region.

"Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice"[14], wrote Tome Pires. The trade of Malacca, especially to the Portuguese, represented more than just absurd profits at low risk[iv]; it represented control of trade through Europe. The Portuguese believed that control of the trade flow of Asia through their conquest of Malacca would allow them to strangle trade in the Arab world. This strangling, to the Portuguese, had the twofold advantage of damaging trade for their enemies, Venice and the Muslim sultanates. The Portuguese, looking to put in place the start of a mercantile system, imposed a tax of 20 percent on goods in Malacca[15] which rising power Johor, a rival state to Malacca, did not impose. With the absurd profits earned by trade ventures, the new tax affected but did not destroy trade.  It did, however, deeply damage its mercantile identity. No longer a city of free traders under a hegemony, Malaccan identity was became far more reliant on the writing, art, and other cultural artifacts developed under the Sultanate. As Johor became the city of the many Malay villages and began to develop as Malay, the identity of Malacca remained mixed. The Portuguese observed this, and noted the lack of ethnic unity in the city, especially during war. Pires records "...the natives did not back the king of Malacca; because in, trading-lands, where the people are of different nations, these cannot love their king as do natives without admixture of other nations."[16] The Portuguese assumed that mixed loyalties were a natural part of a trading city, and that they could rule the city like the Sultan had, as outsiders.            The near existential problem for Southeast Asian trade the Portuguese created was not just high tariffs in a single city. M. C. Ricklefs, an Indonesian historian writes “[The Portuguese] had fundamentally disrupted the organisation of the Asian trade system.”[17] This disruption was caused by the destruction of hegemony in the region, which had secured diverse trade into a single port. Ricklefs expands “There was no longer a central port where the wealth of Asia could be exchanged; there was no longer a Malay state to police the Straits of Malacca and make them safe for commercial traffic. Instead, there was a dispersal of the trading community to several ports, and bitter warfare in the Straits." Bitter warfare often manifested as state-sponsored pirate attacks among the powers of the region, but in no way precluded military action. This collapse in centralised trade in Southeast Asia was compounded by the Portuguese insistence on pirating Arab vessels, primarily in the Indian Ocean, and a state of near constant hostilities between the Portuguese and Aceh within the straits. This warfare meant that no nation, despite ambitions, would be the ‘heir of Malacca’. The conditions that had allowed the Sultanate to thrive, the traditional organisation of trade in Southeast Asia, had been lost.

Faith was a core component of the Portuguese conflicts and strategy within Asia. The Portuguese strongly believed in their own religious and cultural superiority over the native Muslim rulers. The Portuguese viewed that Islam in the region was doomed to fail and that as Christians they were inherently better rulers. "And since it is known how profitable Malacca is in temporal affairs, how much the more is it in spiritual [affairs], as Mohammed is cornered and cannot go farther, and flees as much as he can.”[18] Pires wrote, not long after the conquest of Malacca. The Portuguese failed to understand the vital role of Muslim merchants as a trading go-between from Alexandria to China. The Catholic Portuguese would also never bow to the power of the Dynasties of China as the previous ruler of the city had, seeing them as heretics. Despite this, the Portuguese were confident that there would be no true long-term disruption. Pire continued “… let people favour one side, while merchandise favours our faith; and the truth is that Mohammed will be destroyed, and destroyed he cannot help but be."[19] To them, the failure of the Muslim order in Asia, and the ascendance of Portuguese Malacca as the foremost trading port in the world was just a matter of time. "Malacca cannot help but return to what it was, and [become] even more prosperous, because it will have our merchandise; and they are much better pleased to trade with us than with the Malays, because we show them greater truth and justice."[20] Pires, and the Portuguese themselves saw Portugal as the preeminent global trade power and inherently better trade partners for their faith.

What the Portuguese failed to realise is that, despite its spectacular natural geography, Malacca was not at all the inevitable ruler of the region. Soon, competition from Johor and Aceh was fighting the Portuguese for southeast Asian trade. On the rise of Aceh, one of its new rivals, Ingrid S. Mitrasing, a Malaysian historian writes "The relocation of Muslim trade networks from the conquered port of Malacca to Sumatra's eastern ports was the impetus for Aceh's economic rise, laying the foundations for its becoming one of Asia's greatest maritime powers of that time."[21] Malacca lost a major component of its trade and prominence as Aceh took over as the Muslim trade center of southeast Asia. Within Malacca itself, the institution of Portuguese Christianity failed to gain prominence the way Islam had, and the concept of Islam as a centralising force within the city was simply lost instead of being replaced. Christianity even outside the city itself only gained any prominence later in Portuguese rule, and more as the work of several dedicated holy men than any true Portuguese effort. The Portuguese failed to seek and maintain the ties of faith and trade that the Malacca Sultanate had with used to build its power base. For Malacca, the nature of Islam as a symbol of status and connection beyond the city faded, with Islam simply becoming another part in the multi-faith city.

The Portuguese administration in Asia had deep-rooted problems from its very start. Optimistic about the state of their empire, Pires identifies flaws already present in the Portuguese system, but proposed solutions. He writes "Great affairs cannot be managed with few people. Malacca should be well supplied with people, sending some and bringing back others. It should be provided with excellent officials, expert traders, lovers of peace, ...for Malacca has no white-haired official."[22] The aid and administrative competence, sorely needed, never materialised in the city. Portuguese administration in the region was instead moved to Goa, on the west side of India, and Malacca seemed almost an afterthought to officials in Portugal. Resources from the homeland were few, especially capable men and leaders. Armando Cortesao, historian, remarks that "Castanheda[v] informs us that ‘the King of Portugal did not send any ambassador [from Portugal], because, thinking that the King of China was near, he ordered Femao Peres to send there one of his captains, or whoever he might choose....'[23] This failure to supply the Asian empire from the homeland represented a pattern of a lack of resources provided to the Portuguese administration in the region. In 1581, when the crown of Portugal was combined into the Iberian Union, the resources provided were lessened even more. The administration of the Portuguese Asian territories became a study in making do. The lone Christian power in the region, starved for resources and surrounded by hostile nations[vi], Malacca was forced to act as an autonomous entity to preserve its own interests, rather than those of the Portuguese empire. Internal rebellions[vii], and a vanishing technological advantage[24] provided more problems to the Portuguese, but two main factors allowed them to rule the city for 130 years despite their many problems.  

Seamanship and geopolitics were the tools of survival for Portuguese Malacca. "...it is difficult to conceptualize the region before this century, because the boundaries of many states kept shifting and because many of the actors, ... were operating in areas beyond the borders of today's Republic"[25] Dennis Duncanson, historian, remarks. The period of Portuguese Malacca existed in a time and place where states and nations in constant flux and conflict. International relations and realpolitik dominated the region, with powers like Johor sometimes fighting and sometimes helping the Portuguese (and in one notable case, saving the Portuguese from a Chinese fleet). “Inter-state relations were at all times an important ingredient of political activity in Southeast Asia”[26] records S. Arasaratnam, a historian of Southeast Asia. The Portuguese empire in Malacca and other Asian possessions was highly autonomous and ruled by a local Bendahara who functionally ran much of the city and surrounding communities. International relations, in theory to be administered by the king in Portugal or Spain, were far to volatile and active to be run from a distance that took a full year for a round trip. The colonial government, on the far side of India, was often still too far away to run the city. Corruption[viii], confused commands and decisions made with strained resources were mainstays in the Portuguese administration; luckily much of the city ran itself. This culture of autonomy became a powerful part of Malaccan identity. Portuguese married into local families, and much of the colonial government was run by mixed children of locals and Portuguese for lack of lack local manpower. This mixed nature extended into trade, where “ships were seen in the Indonesian archipelago which had part Portuguese and part Indonesian crews, or which were owned by Indonesians and chartered by Portuguese.”[27] Malacca under the Portuguese, like the Sultanate before it, remained reliant on food sources external to itself and was forced to procure food for locals. The Portuguese Asian empire, starved for money and manpower, was reliant on this mixed society. To even call Malacca under the Portuguese ‘Portuguese in nature’ is a mistake. The city-state of Malacca simply accepted both Portuguese and mixed Portuguese as new nations within the wider city, and they had notably Malaccan flavor as a society.[28] The shifting nature of local politics, the able Portuguese and Portuguese/Malaccan naval power and the natural geographic advantages of the empire allowed it to survive long past what would be expected considering its resources and administration.

Conquest, not first contact, was the change that redefined Malacca. In the wake of the conquest, the city that was once the Sultanate of Malacca declined sharply in importance and was never again the kind of power it was after its founding. In the wake of conquest, Malacca lost its nature as a centralised, hyper mercantile nation who ruled the seas. Its identity as a multi-religious, multi-ethnic nation of autonomous peoples who shared a Malay culture was partly strengthened partly formed in the long wake of the capture.

 [1] P.E De Josslin De Jong and H. L. A. Van Wijk, “The Malacca Sultanate”, Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 1 No. 2 (Sep., 1960): 22.

 [2] Ibid

[3] Manuel Murias, “On the deeds & discoveries & conquests made by the Portuguese in the seas and Eastern Lands – Diogo Lopes de Sequeira” in Portuguese Documents on Malacca Vol. I, 1509 - 1511, Edited and Translated by M.J Pintado, (Kuala Lumpur: National Archives of Malaysia, 1993), 43.

[4] J. Norman Parmer, review of Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya, by J. M. Guillick, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 19, No. 1 (Nov., 1959): 91.

[5] Murias, “On the deeds & discoveries & conquests made by the Portuguese in the seas and Eastern Lands – Diogo Lopes de Sequeira”, 43.

[6] J. M. Guillick, Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya: Revised Edition (London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: The Athlone Press, 1988), 44.

[7] Murias, “On the deeds & discoveries & conquests made by the Portuguese in the seas and Eastern Lands – Diogo Lopes de Sequeira”, 43.

 [8] Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley “The Historical Context,” in Melaka: the transformation of a Malay capital c. 1400-1980 Volume One, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1983), 3.

[9] C.H. Wake “Melaka in the Fifteenth century: Malay Historical Traditions and the Politics of Islamization in Melaka: the transformation of a Malay capital c. 1400-1980 Volume One, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley (Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1983), 140.

 [10] Murias, “On the deeds & discoveries & conquests made by the Portuguese in the seas and Eastern Lands – Diogo Lopes de Sequeira”, 43.

[11] M.J Pintado, Introduction to Portuguese Documents on Malacca Vol. I 1509 - 1511, Edited and Translated by M.J Pintado, (Kuala Lumpur: National Archives of Malaysia, 1993), 4.

 [12] Pintado, Introduction to Portuguese Documents on Malacca Vol. I 1509 – 1511, 5.

[13] Murias, “On the deeds & discoveries & conquests made by the Portuguese in the seas and Eastern Lands – Diogo Lopes de Sequeira”, 43.

 [14] Tome Pires and Francisco Rodriges, The Suma Oriental: an Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China Vol II (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1944), Edited and Translated by Armando Cortesao, accessed March 2 2017, http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/library/, 287.

 [15] (Pires and Rodrigues 1944), 284.

[16] (Pires and Rodrigues 1944), 286.

[17] M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 Third Edition, (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 27.

[18] (Pires and Rodrigues 1944), 286.

[19] (Pires and Rodrigues 1944), 286.

[20] (Pires and Rodrigues 1944), 283.

[21] Ingrid s. Mitrasing, "Negotiating a New Order in the Straits of Malacca (1500–1700)," KEMANUSIAAN Vol. 21, No. 2, (2014): 56.

[22] (Pires and Rodrigues 1944), 285.

[23] Armando Cortesao , Introduction to The Suma Oriental: an Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China Vol I, by Tome Pires and Francisco Rodriges (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1944), xxvii.

[24] (M. C. Ricklefs 2001), 27.

[25] Dennis Duncanson, review of Melaka: The Transformation Of A Malay Capital C. 1400-1980 By Kernial Singh Sandhu; Paul Wheatley, The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland No. 1 (1985): 121

[26] S. Arasaratnam, Intoduction, in International Trade and Politics in Southeast Asia 1500-1800 ed. S. Arasaratnam (Singapore, Cambridge University Press, 1969), 391

[27] (M. C. Ricklefs 2001), 28.

[28] Ingrid s. Mitrasing, "Negotiating a New Order in the Straits of Malacca (1500–1700)," KEMANUSIAAN Vol. 21, No. 2, (2014): 61

[i] It’s recorded that the nations of Ayutthaya and Majaphit destroyed Singapura, and thusly the successor state of Malacca had those two states as it’s foremost enemies.

 [ii] Stone buildings provide a level of safety and permeance over wooden buildings, but more then that were a function of status. Both stone and (probably Islamic) architects would have had to be imported to the city to build the structures at great expense, as all local construction was with wood.  

 [iii] While the Portuguese were rather convinced it was the Muslim traders that disliked them, this is not quite true. Gentiles, who are presented as the neutral traders, is used to refer to non-Christian and non-Muslim peoples of the region. The Portuguese consider the Muslim kingdom of Bengal, among others, to be gentiles. However, another Indian Muslim kingdom Gujarat and the Shia Persians are listed in the same general group of Muslims. The Portuguese, as one might expect from such a short time in the region, make numerous mistakes like this (or simply apply the name Muslim to nations they do not like.)

 [iv] Profits varied by expedition destination, but for ever 100 ‘dollars’ put in the expedition would return between 140 for a short, pretty local voyage to 300 or more from a Chinese venture

 [v] This being Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, a Portuguese historian from the mid 1500s, though no further information is provided by the source.

 [vi] While Islam was a traditional enemy from the first Portuguese arrival, China became very hostile to the Portuguese later in their reign, and fought against them, both moving their main trade to Johor and launching an attempted invasion of Malacca.

 [vii] The Malaccans did not simply accept Portuguese rule, with several coup attempts and more then one rebellion in the first few years of rule.

 [viii] It’s noted that Malaccan leadership often traded in Johor for personal benefit, to get around the Portuguese tariffs, going against the monopoly the Portuguese were attempting to create.

       Bibliography

Arasaratnam, S. “Intoduction”, in International Trade and Politics in Southeast Asia 1500-1800. ed. S. Arasaratnam, 391-395. Singapore, Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Cortesao, Armando. Introduction to The Suma Oriental: an Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China Vol I, by Tome Pires and Francisco Rodriges. London: The Hakluyt Society, 1944.

De Jong, P.E De Josslin and Van Wijk, H. L. A. “The Malacca Sultanate.” Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. 1 No. 2 (Sep., 1960): 20-29.

Duncanson, Dennis. Review of Melaka: the transformation of a Malay capital C. 1400-1980 By Kernial Singh Sandhu; Paul Wheatley. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 1 (1985): 119-123.

Guillick, J. M. Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya: Revised Edition. London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1988.

Mitrasing, Ingrid s. "Negotiating a New Order in the Straits of Malacca (1500–1700)," KEMANUSIAAN, Vol. 21 No. 2 (2014): 55-77.

Murias, Manuel. “On the deeds & discoveries & conquests made by the Portuguese in the seas and Eastern Lands – Diogo Lopes de Sequeira” in Portuguese Documents on Malacca Vol. I, 1509 - 1511, Edited and Translated by M.J Pintado, 38-52. Kuala Lumpur: National Archives of Malaysia, 1993.

Parmer, J. Norman. Review of Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya, by J. M. Guillick. The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol 19, No. 1 (Nov., 1959): 91-92.

Pintado, M.J. Introduction to Portuguese Documents on Malacca Vol. I 1509 - 1511, Edited and Translated by M.J Pintado. Kuala Lumpur: National Archives of Malaysia, 1993.

Pires, Tome, and Francisco Rodrigues. 1944. The Suma Oriental: an Account of the East, from the Red Sea to China Vol II. Edited and Translated by Armando Cortesao. London: The Hakluyt Society. Accessed March 2, 2017. http://www.sabrizain.org/malaya/library/.

Ricklefs, M. C. A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 Third Edition. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001.

Sandhu, Kernial Singh and Wheatley, Paul. “The Historical Context,” in Melaka: the transformation of a Malay capital c. 1400-1980 Volume One, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, 3-69. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1983.

Wake, C.H. “Melaka in the Fifteenth century: Malay Historical Traditions and the Politics of Islamization in Melaka: the transformation of a Malay capital c. 1400-1980 Volume One, ed. Kernial Singh Sandhu and Paul Wheatley, 128-161. Kuala Lumpur, Oxford University Press, 1983.

[inherentsleep-blog]

A very sad economist.

Original source is https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/five-years-later-free-tra_b_8588360.html. Ian Fletcher is an economist attempting to make serious academic arguments against the application of trade to every problem, or overuse of free trade as both a policy tool and a tool of economic analysis. He’s also a man who’s drinking salt and bourbon and depression. "People just don’t feel they have an obligation to think." He laments in the piece. "Frankly, I now suspect the same is true in a lot of other areas of economics. Famous economists like Paul Krugman pull their hair out on a regular basis over how people just casually toss off assertions like “Tax cuts cause sufficient economic growth to pay for themselves” and “The Fed is debasing the currency by expanding the money supply” without paying the slightest heed to what actual theoretical and empirical evidence says about such questions. Krugman seems to think it’s a dastardly Republican plot. I strongly suspect it’s something much more depressing: simply the norm." He continues. "Now here’s the shocking question: does this all mean that technically substantial economics is simply a waste of time, because nobody pays it any attention? This includes seriously powerful people in Congress etc, who have said some of the most ignorant things. (Paul Ryan, I’m looking at you.) I hate to say it, but I honestly don’t know. It’s entirely possible that it is. " He finishes. Personally, I think that many of the math-based models are really quite terrible, though not as terrible as the non-math based models. If your model doesn’t actually involve being tested against real world data, it’s probably a bad model. A whole lot of economics papers make a model to explain something, but don’t do sufficient testing based on available data to prove it. I don’t really have any useful commentary to add to this. Rather, it’s a piece of evidence pointing out how fringe technocratic thinking actually is: actual technocrats are almost totally ignored to the point that they are publicly questioning if expertise actually matters at all in politics and if their whole lives are irrelevant.  While irrelevancy isn’t actually a reason not to do something and it doesn't really make a a waste of time, I can only say that I think economics (and academia in general) have a major communication problem. No wait, I can also say I’m probably a bad person because of how much I laughed at the blatant decent into cynicism and depression displayed in here. Come talk to a historian, Fletcher. We know your pain.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Was the Civil War ‘treason’ and was it about slavery.

When you're talking about massive actions as treason, I think you have to look and allowable actions within a nation. While things like the Whiskey Rebellion might walk the line Arron Burr proved that treason requires a pretty strict amount of evidence, and not just what the president wants (even if the man in question is planning to invade Mexico and set up a monarchy, the Civil war is something pretty different.Treason doesn't mean inherently bad after all (though I might argue that the confederate positions were about as close to inherently bad as you can get in a binary debate), but I think the civil war was pretty clearly treason on the part of the confederate leadership. Their thoughts and intentions are very well recorded. Hamilton talked about being able to withdraw from the union right at founding. "a reservation of a right to withdraw […] was inconsistent with the Constitution, and was no ratification." He said. (https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-05-02-0012-0099 source). What he was saying was that the Constitution would not have been ratified with a ‘leave clause’. Madison in a letter (http://www.constitution.org/jm/17880720_hamilton.txt) expressed similar feelings, and Washington shared the opinion, saying "In all our deliberations on this subject [the perpetuity of the government] we kept constantly in our view that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union, in which is involved our prosperity, felicity, safety, perhaps our national existence". While an anti-federalist argument is that the states should be able to freely leave the union, as Madison noted, the anti-federalists were never able to ratify that opinion and states would not have been accepted if they insisted on the right to be able to leave.  "This idea of reserving right to withdraw was started at Richmd. & considered as a conditional ratification which was itself considered as worse than a rejection."

there was no point an ability to leave.

After the 1819 Missouri Crisis, southern politicians started swinging their political power around and pushing against the union. Secession was eventually brought up in a more serious fashion after years of union compromises to southern interests eroded federal power enough that it seemed like a reasonable option. The response to this 30 years of pushing by southern business interests, the founding and election of the republican party (an anti-slavery party). Southerners were terrified that their economic and political free reign was going to come to an end, even if absolute abolition was a very minority position. The slave states had HUGE disproportional political power thanks to the 3/5th compromise, but with the loss (and the upcoming future losses, as forced by demographics) mad them realize that things were going to get uncomfortable for them. The Nullification Crisis, and the fear in the Carolinas of northern economic pressure on their slave empire was then worded as an encroachment on 'state rights'. As the free states started to throw up resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, the south however did not support that. In fact, they used every tool they could to try and force the northern states back into line with the federal government. When they were unable to force the issue (due to a loss in power at the federal level with the rise of the republicans) , the talk turned to threats of succession. For over a decade, with things like the Georgia Platform in 1850, compromise was attempted, but the refusal of the northern states to send members of it's population into slavery came to a head with Jeff Davis's resolution that "sooner or later [that refusal would] lead the States injured by such breach of the compact to exercise their judgement as to the proper mode and measure of redress"

In other words, the southern states were threatening succession not over their own 'states rights' but because the free states were acting on their own, and it was hurting southern economic power.  When Lincoln, the republican was elected, South Carolina acted instantly to leave the union after both holding the election and refusing to list Lincoln on their ballots. You might then say 'It could not have been about slavery, because no one actually proposed emancipation, and they were just acting on their rights, but they neither had the right, the mandate nor the moral grounding to act to secede. This is only true in the national sense, it was still very much a slave-holding issue.

As a very old Madison put it, "[Secession at will] answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged," (full source http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch3s14.html). The southern generals and politicians were traitors who were acting in bad faith to attempt to preserve a system rigged in their favor because other states wished to exercise their right to have no part in slaving.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Research on Brazilian Economic history.

Brazil seems to really suck at capital in general, and seems strangely behind the times in just about every banking innovation. Even within Portugal, Even if you contrast them just to rivals, they were really, really late to the banking game. The first Brazilian banks were not founded until 1808 and in Portugal not until 1821, but the only bank in Brazil was bankrupted twice and went into crisis once, first in 1821 where independence managed to bankrupt it when John VI returned to Portugal with a notable portion of the bank's assets, went into crisis in  1891 under the weight of the Encilhamento during the old republic and then again went bankrupt in 1898 when the government's monetary policy changed to be strictly metallist. By 1900, a million pound loan had to be granted to the central bank by the congress and banks had taken to operating with a 100% reserve ratio. With the massive credit crunch that followed, Brazil lost 20% of it's coffee exports from 1901 to 1904 (which was a huge portion of both it's exports and government income in tariffs).

this is pretty simplified (the distinction over bankruptcy and crisis always is), but the whole affair was dumb. Brazil also had no lender of last resort until 1944.

To contrast to it's rivals, the dutch partly financed the sugar wars (1621 - 1640s) with Portugal and occupied Brazil with the help of it's new shiny Amsterdamsche Wisselbank which had been established in 1609 and developed an international payment system which was used to hire internationals to help the fighting. England founded the Bank of England in 1694 to help finance the 9 years war and provide loans in North American expansion, and while France didn't have an actual national bank until around 1800, they used their colonial companies like banks starting in 1684 but especially in the early 1700s (which blew up in their face rather spectacularly). America, the comparison case, launched the Bank of North America in 1781 to finance the revolutionary war, but removed it's powers for a while (but still had a running and advanced banking system by 1800, despite changing central banks a few times) in the colonial powers, actual modern federal banks started showing up with the American Federal Reserve in 1913 and followed in every other former colonial nation until Canada and New Zealand, which had used British banks, formed their own in 1934. Except Brazil, under the Vagras rule, which didn't reform it's banking until it sort of caught up in 1944, but was actually just using the state-run Bank of Brazil to do the same job which lasted until the American-backed coup in 1964 where it actually established a real central bank. They didn't actual reform it again until the 90s and have hardly changed it since then, and now have the world's highest reserve ratio by a large margin.

LIKE A REAL LARGE MARGIN, 10 times that of Chile and 25% more then the closest other country, which is Lebanon (who is literally next to states in civil war and a moderately frequent target on bombs aimed at financial institutions the whole 1890 - 1910 in Brazil is a document on how to fuck up a massive export boom

it was suggested to me that it was due to the land owning elites and "manoralism" "If most wealth is generated by old money that is extensive rather than intensive there is no need for capital investment."

but this really fails to understand the power of cash-crop exports and infrastructure, so I'm more unsure then anything else.

[inherentsleep-blog]

QER Project preview: Chapter N1.

A woman with a fake name was sipping espresso in a run-down café.

To call it run-down was a disservice to it’s builders and caretakers, it had been both built and maintained with care and effort. It had also been hit by a car bomb from some ways down the street, a couple years past, and no one in this part of town had the money for a full rebuild.

He decided to walk in, the street badly pot marked and never repaired but for the walk and bike path. It was hot for a January day, almost 30 in the sun, but there was never that much change in a coastal city like this. Even on the sea wall or lowlands, the temperature didn’t vary much but for the breeze off the ocean.

His guide followed behind him, low heels marking her footsteps and silent as she usually was. She hadn’t asked who they were going to see, he had simply mentioned that he had a friend nearby. So soon out of surgery, they had both judged he could probably use a companion, and she had grabbed her purse, sunglasses and pistol and followed him.

He was a company man now, hired on as a ‘technology reporter’. Treatments like he had received were not so available to outsiders, and apparently, he had been judged as a competent asset, if one needing a handler. It was sort of funny in his opinion. He was someone considered ‘dangerous’ enough to be denied entrance to several countries if he used his real identity. It was a joke, had rarely ever hurt someone, and never thrown a punch in anger in his memory.

The café had made the decision to look new and edgy by using building rubble sanded down as chairs. Ultramodern, with waitresses in bright shirts and jeans, and an menu in four languages. None of them were the ‘local’. It was probably a hot stop for internationals looking for lunch, only a five-minute bike from the local tram stop, maybe fifteen minuets in total from the nearby legal offices if one was lucky. The atmosphere of ‘advancement meets lost world’ (as the menu popup proudly proclaimed) probably appealed to the type of internationals that would come to city like this.

With the usual option of sliding into a chair removed by the decor, he simply strolled up and greeted to the woman in French, lounging against the wall next to her table. The language was common enough to be regular here, and thus not stand out, but not common enough for most people to understand what he said. It was also helpful that the woman also spoke the language.

“Marianne, strange to see you in a place like this.”  He opened, tone slightly questioning.

“Strange to see you alive in a place like this.” She returned, finishing her drink as her Parisian accent bled through.

“I’m a company man now, an official employee of De Jong – Koroma.” He responded, a wry smile on his face.

The woman he called Marianne raised an eyebrow, looking at the local he had brought in beside him in silent question.

He took out his phone and ordered a coffee, black as he could find, and grabbed one of the questionably comfortable seats. Standing was becoming awkward and he wasn’t about to receive an offer to sit as far as he could tell. It was a power play, probably, to force him to come to her. His guide took a seat as well, no expression on her face. Her phone flashed for a moment, and he saw her order and rate the place out of the corner of his eye.

Undoubtedly, she was using the corporate app for it.

Loyal woman, she was. The Koroma restaurant app was a piece of junk.

“This is Maria De Jong, my guide and camera woman. We’re technology reporters, you see, and we also do international reporting and coverage.” He told the dark-haired woman across from him. You could have melted butter in his mouth, and there was only an ounce of mischief in his eyes.

Marianne went to down her drink again, only to find it gone. She rolled her eyes at her action, then turned to her new companions.

“Right then,” She said with a snap of her fingers, “What’s the offer? You mentioned a job in the Dee Em. I know you need legal help, and translation I’m guessing.” She drew out the slang for direct message until it sounded ridiculous. He ignored it.

“Right you are, and there aren’t that many French polyglots with legal experience around here.” He started his pitch with a touch of flattery. While probably true, a French polyglot with ‘legal experience’ wasn’t precisely what he needed anyway.

“There might be more then you’re expecting Lee, but not many that wouldn’t shoot you, no. What’s the offer?” His contact fired back.

“470 US, plus company benefits.” The man responded.

“Has anything you ever published made half that?” She asked in response.

“No.” Maria broke in to respond. “The company will be paying the salary directly.”

“This sounds like it’s going to be risking my hide. I would want more for that, way more.” She countered.

He just looked back at her.

“One point four mill.” She responded, without hesitation.

Lee scoffed. “You have a linguistics degree with a minor in language and worked in law offices, no matter how many languages you speak the only time you’ve seen that much money was in your university parking lot.”

She scowled back at him.

“The company would be willing to give you a flat 500 if you pay for your own flights.” Maria offered.

“…When would we leave?” Marianne questioned.

It was a fast fold, and more negotiation might have taken her salary higher. He wondered for a moment if he was missing something, but it was probably the most money the woman had ever been offered. He had avoided lowballing her to help sooth the anger when one of their ‘reporting trips’ inevitably went south.

“Two and a half weeks, I’m not allowed to fly yet. I was in surgery.” He informed her.

“I know.” The girl responded.

A waitress arrived with their drinks, smiled at them, and walked off.

They sat in silence for a few moments.

“I sort of like Freetown, you know? It feels more honest the most places, but people are still friendly.” Marianne broke the silence to say.

“We need your real name to sign the contract.” Lee told her.

She sighed.

“Fine, I will join you.” The dark-haired woman sulked for a moment, her accent making the words sound a touch huskier then normal. It was absolutely something she had practiced. Sharp makeup and smooth features emphasised the expression.

“Right then, Maria, could you order a couple bikes?” Lee asked the local. Freetown had a thriving bike exchange service, and they could just move quickly back to the trains. Unlike most other African cities, biking wasn’t risking your life, it was just the best way to get around that wasn’t the tram. Partly owed to massive tax on foreign cars, gas prices and the state of roads, Freetown had very few cars and almost none in a place with roads as broken as the ones outside the café. De Jong – Koroma payed for the bike paths, like most developed infrastructure in the city.

The hover boats, over the swampy region between the core city and the airport, were just about the only old-style transport left in the area. Though the bike-sharing services were only nominally owned by the company, they wanted them around badly. It was part of the corporate vision of a truly modern city.

He had watched a lot of corporate promo videos while he was laid up the past couple weeks, reading had still made his head hurt. He got a sick sort of amusement from them.

“Already done.” She responded, drawing him back out of his moment of contemplation.

The woman he knew as Marianne was reviewing the contract on her phone, and made a few decisive taps. He couldn’t help but note she was still using the insecure fingerprint lock, but remained quiet.

He would fix that later, it wouldn’t do to get robbed blind the first time she stepped into… a lot of places, really.

She looked up at him, removed her sunglasses and nodded, her blue eyes cool and striking.

Her eyeshadow was perfect enough that it couldn’t have been done by a human. That was an interesting detail.  

“Cosette Champlain.” She greeted him. He expected that was fake too, but she might have the papers to back it up. People like her, like him, lose a name every once in a while, and most governments still had bad protection of birth registries. Some fake data profiles, a backdated birth certificate and a few fake records were enough to create a ‘person’. Government would never look twice, swamped by data collection as they are.

“James Lee.” He responded, his accent suddenly Irish. “I even have the papers to prove it.”

She laughed. Union citizenship was still a valuable commodity when traveling, and she caught his implication.  

Maria sat forward. “I have our first job.”

The rest of the table looked at her, all business.

“We received a tip that a Moscow-based company in Dushanbe is using Chinese corporate money and Iranian scientist to try and jump their embryonic tech, against treaty. We’re going to go investigate it, and there are some local rebels willing to help smuggle us in and out.” Maria informed him.

A story like that would spook the Americans, he reflected. It would be a great story. Best of all, it didn’t even have to be particularly true. Stories that had evidence and played to preconceived biases were the ones that could really catch fire.

Tajikistan had been a geopolitical hotspot for the past ten years, with mineral and water resources contested between Russia, China and India. With a few western corporations thrown in for good measure, it was a flashpoint. Civil War had not even managed to stop the growth and foreign interests.

“Right then, I will brush up on my Tajik.” Cosette responded, with an eye roll.

“I will handle Uzbek then?” Maria offered.

“It was a joke. I don’t speak Tajik, who the hell does. I do have Russian though.” Cosette answered.

“It will have to be good enough.” Maria answered, looking troubled for a moment. Probably trying to figure where to get a trustworthy translator.

Cosette wasn’t joking, Tajik wasn’t a particularly common language.

Lee was silent for a moment.

“I have a plan.” He told the other two, looking up from his coffee.

“I hate those.” Cosette answered.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Writing project: QER introduction.

I’m doing an original writing project right, thought I should intro it. - It's a written project with three main arcs, one of which I'm working through right now. It's a speculative fiction/cyberpunk/psychological book where a active narrative is mixed with political and current events articles from in the universe. - it's core is set in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 2041 with jaunts through the 'developing world' of that universe

-The first is in 2041, then 2042 then 2043, where shifting political events bring major changes to the universe. All are aimed about 50k words .    - 2041 arc is based on reporting, social media and the development of a new world

   - 2042 arc is based on political crisis driven by climate change in the third world

   - 2043 is based on the begins of the larger space industry and the industrial espionage that comes with it

- The main characters are James Lee, or 'KingLee' a western born hacker, anarchist and traveler who thinks he's a lot more like bond then he actually is, Cosette Champlain or 'Marianne', a French/American con-woman, translator and hacker and Maria De Jong or 'LadyKWR', an early patient of engineering and member of the 'family' of De Jong – Koroma, an African biomedical corporation.

-The first arc starts after Lee is forced to go to De Jong - Koroma for medical help, famous after causing some major political leaks in the west but identity mostly hidden. He is taken on as a 'tech reporter' to publish major damaging evidence about rival companies and nations and placed with Maria as his handler. They hire Cosette, and the first arc is about their first 'mission' which takes place through Freetown -  Qurghonteppa, Tajikistan (where they go to expose a rival Chinese company) - Malacca City, Malaysia (where they go to finish the mission and hide out) and then back 'home'.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Liberalism and Rationality, 1

A short additional defense of freedom. Now that two rounds of edits have more then doubled the post in length, the title is somewhat tongue in cheek.  Nevertheless, this is a post about an additional benefit to multiple government systems (in this case looking at it applied to democracy)  that doesn’t really get enough talk, while dipping into (like most political posts must) my greater thoughts. Advocates and critics of democracy have debated for centuries about the various benefits and problems democratic rule. One feature of functioning democracies that I think is overlooked is the natural benefit of occasional shifts in policy as new parties are elected.

One of the stranger parts of modern economic theory is that while it’s known that as an individual people do behave rationally, there is some relatively strong evidence that they behave in ways approximating ‘rationally’ in larger groups like the markets. The idea of perfectly rational markets at this point I think has been fairly well debunked for a variety of reasons, with examples like the sudden spike of the CUBA stock (which is pretty well unrelated to the country Cuba) at the loosening of trade restrictions on the country serving as good demonstrations. How can this be, you might ask? The simple answer is that firstly, humans are not rational in the economic sense, but they are maximizers. This means they will attempt to do things in the way that best allows them to achieve their goals. Second, in large numbers those individual goals that people peruse start to look very ‘rational’. Thirdly, and most importantly, humans can learn from the observed mistakes of others.

The best way to discover if something is a good idea is not, in fact, to test it. If you have low ability to absorb risk, the best way to test something is to let someone else test it, and observe the result because this allows you to test more then one thing, or have more then one repeat of the test.  The risk of testing things yourself and the fact that humans are maximizers mean that when someone finds a system that works, or in many cases is personally profitable, they like to stick to it. An unfortunate part of this is that along with systems that provide actual innovations, some of the most profitable systems are the ones that exploit social rules and laws, and many of the most profitable do both. When someone (be it an individual or a company) finds a loophole to exploit as apart of their system, they will both use it, and importantly, test it for other people. If the first person to use it is not punished, the larger community will begin to adopt it, and after a generational turnover (so about 20 years, in my estimation) a loophole will propagate through the entire community.

This is the disadvantage of freedom, the same way that it is the advantage. People are able to attempt new things, and as some work and some fail, natural adaptation makes the greater community become more efficient in the given environment. Without that freedom though, it becomes far more difficult for people to behave in rational ways, because the constant test cases appear less often. Even if eighty percent of tests fail, the greater community will still grow more efficient, and faster then a system that just attempts to make singular good choices with less information. Because bad choices are an inevitable part of being human, a collection of smaller bad choices that do less damage are preferred to a longer one that may do catastrophic damage. This is the very source of the idea that a freer market is a more efficient market, because a freer market has more information and tests to work with. The much misinterpreted ‘invisible hand’ is a series of a lot of small failure and successes that add up into greater information.

The benefit of a democratic system that goes undiscussed is the idea that peaceful rule changes will invalidate at least some of the holes in the system, while not destroying actual innovation or capital. Even if a government party makes decisions that are non-optimal, if they are ‘good enough’ to not crash the system and shed the fat they fulfill a hidden objective. The natural aversion in most democracies to corruption also acts as one of many tools to helps to cut that fat (thought very clearly does not do it on its own). People are also able to recognize in many cases when a loophole is being exploited, if not what loophole it is. As far as I can see, anger over this exploitation of systems means that very few systems last very long after propagation really starts, a twenty-year generational shift usually being about the limit people are willing to bear. This natural anger and dislike of other people’s corruption and cheating means that democracies are able to get rid of at least a portion of the broken systems that plague complex human societies.

A system doesn’t have to be perfect to serve a purpose, and it better not need to because no system is perfect. This is partly because humans are maximizers, and if you give them long enough just about any static system will end up broken.

The boat has sails

Part of a response that I received (more then once) to this was well summed up by the idea that the democratic elections I was talking about “…just [take] funding, or manpower, or legislative processing time and directing it towards what that specific party wants the country to be like – it’s never going to work long-term…”. I think this feeling is echoed by a whole group of people. I would counter that was is being described is a revolution. Elections of course to take a level of financial commitment and time, but in most cases, this should be a mostly nominal amount of the funding and manpower of the country. I am not arguing for total direct democracy, but instead that these very changes that are being talked about both cost far less then a revolution, civil war or even a mass crackdown. More relevant though is the fact that they help dislodge a portion of the corruption both in the economic system and in the political system (the former being far more important for this example.) The gains from dislodging that corruption, which I have argued is at a certain level inherent to economic systems and will grow in a static system more then otherwise, provide a major boon to the country that doesn’t get talked about.

To talk with metaphors, the response described that “…compare the nation to more like a boat, and the party members and the government are the oarsmen. Each time they swap over to another party, the oarsmen try to paddle in the other direction. This means that the net displacement of the boat is going to be close to 0.” This seems like a compelling point, until one realises that with or without those oarsmen, technology is still advancing, quality of life is still growing in most places, GDP and productivity still see rises, the list goes on. A large and particularly competent government isn’t needed for growth, though a non-obstructive one is helpful. I would say that the wrong type of boat is being described altogether. The boat is moving along at a fair pace, and the part of the crew working the sails (as I made a point before) work those sails more effectively when they can make many small adjustments. Meanwhile, the ‘government’ side of things is a collection of drunk, rowdy sailors who are attempting to steer the boat. To use an example from Belgium, the central government was unable sit at all for several years following the financial crisis due to a hung parliament. The country preformed better then the average eurozone member, if not the best. The changing in course of the boat, to run this metaphor into the rocks, may slow it down or give it a rougher ride but barring someone destroying parts of the boat or totally obstructing the travel of the ship, the ship doesn’t have to sail perfectly straight to keep sailing.

[inherentsleep-blog]

Why Distributism, and why not?

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the state, and the present capitalist system, in which the state is run by the big businesses.” – G. K. Chesterton

Distributism is an economic ideology that attempts to answer the serious fundamental problems with capitalism, particularly industrial era capitalism, while also not embracing the various issues with socialism.  It’s an interesting concept, and it’s something of a response to English liberalism, combining several ideas from that school with the social teachings of Catholicism into a hybrid ideology. It was first ‘popular’ in around the turn of the last century, and slightly after with 1910s What’s Wrong with the World coming at it’s height. A hundred years later, it has seen a something of a resurgence, with the internet functioning to connect several distributist communities and introduce new people to the ideology.

This essay is not an attempt to dismiss the ideology, rather it is an attempt to look at my basic problems with some of the more common ideas within the ideology. I hope that it will explain the reasons on why I don’t consider myself a distributist despite strong interest in the ideology.

“The problem with capitalism is too few capitalists, not too many.” – G. K. Chesterton

The general concept of distributism is a simple twofold concept: spread the means of production in a market system onto a so that every person can create their own products, and then have that growth drive success to local communities, in a major attempt to rebuild atomized social networks and strengthen local bonds. It also has a major social component which it seems as goals linked to the greater economics. It sees itself as a practical, realistic ideology based around local realities.

Most major distributists have been essayists, who broadly argue in favour of this concept and state that it ought to be executed, rather then lay down specific blueprints to be followed (if you disregard ideas like anti-trust laws, which are linked but not necessarily a core part of a distributist execution.)

For the people on the libertarian left that don’t reject markets entirely, it’s a compelling argument. The best parts of capitalism, but with an ethical base that focuses on the restoration of community bonds and natural restrictions on government powers. It sounds interesting, so what are the problems? If you agree with its goals, why is distributism not the answer? In short, distributism doesn’t actually do what it says it will. There’s no one distributist bible or manifesto, but the books and essays I’m choosing to examine are the 3 Papal Encyclicals, Chesterton’s ‘What’s Wrong with the World’, ‘The Outline of Sanity’, ‘Utopia of Usurers’, the major essay The Restoration of Property from Belloc, and differing theories from C. H. Douglass and Dorothy Day. I’m also going to be using looking at modern distributist interpretations of these works.

When it comes to modern distributism, there seem to be two main contemporary schools of thought. The first, presented most clearly in Jobs of Our Own by Race Mathews, is exemplified by the Mondragon corporation, and is a kind of hybrid shareholder mix. The second school of thought seeks to be more radical, relying on guilds as a way of providing a totally different alternative to global capitalism. I’m going to be addressing the second kind here, but the first is worth addressing as well.

“The means of production constitute two parts of this equation, namely land (facilities) and tools used to produce goods and deliver services.” Ownership of property is a core discussion of any basic economic system, and distributism is no different. What is ownership then? Belloc defines ownership as “the right to utilize, and direct utilization of, an item, particularly in production of economic goods or services.” This is an eloquent definition, but misses an important element: ‘the right to utilize, without payment and without conditions.’ I don’t think that anyone who has rented an apartment has thought that just because they have the right to use the apartment therefore means that they have ownership of it.

In Britain, the distributist slogan was ‘Three acres and a cow’, and was used as a summary by Chesterton. It also highlights a core problem in distributism. How do you allow the use of advanced production methods while still having ‘democratic’ ownership? Renting these tools to use, even under a form of self employment, doesn’t actually count. A modern factory farm that sees a profit of a couple million dollars a year requires a minimum of 12000 acres, and for larger farm three or four times that. ‘Three acres’ is a non-starter to farms like that, but the major point is this: the concept of productive property is an intensely fuzzy one, and it often operates on a scale much larger then a single person. How then, should a distributist organise the hierarchy of production?

This challenge is one that distributist theory has asked since its inception. Some modern proposals for different hybrid systems seem interesting and have promise. However, an ‘old school’ distributist proposal that has regained popularity in the last few years is that of guilds. Whenever any form of hybrid model involving distributism is suggested, I have found, a distributist attempts to point out all the inherent problems of capitalism, and puts forth the idea of guilds. I wish to argue that after consideration, guilds are simply a fairly terrible idea.

“My own reading of the evidence is that a common theme underlies guilds’ activities: guilds tended to do what was best for guild members.” – Ogilvie

Guilds are not a new institution, by any means. Most proponents of a guild system seem to want a more modern take on the older guild system. So, what does this mean? A guild system generally works like this: an organisation is formed at a local level to try and produce a single product, good or service where members of the guild share some level of resources, train and induct new members. They generally have some form of common ownership or method to acquire the tools to work, a concept of internal apprenticeship, and have a majority of the members ‘run the business’ which, to give a modern comparison, functions more like a restaurant chain where different members run different stores, with the number of stores is usually based around how many members it takes to make a particular product (and the demand, of course).

Proponents of guilds like to point out the positive economic effects that they had in some areas in the past. This ignores a massive amount of information we have on how organisations like guilds function. Guilds, like almost any organisation, will attempt to do what it thinks is best for its members. More then that, it will attempt to do what is best for its most powerful and influential members. This fact becomes a problem because once a guild is in place, it has an advantage of capital in a limited market and therefore becomes extremely hard to dislodge. The guild can then, as they did in the past, act to protect and enrich their members at the expense of consumers and non-members. One needs only to look at the various problems people had with public sector unions or other similar organisations to get an idea of what that could look like in a wider market. When someone can co-operate and take higher profits, if they can simply co-opt anything that could force them to compete, they will naturally attempt to act in their own interest and make the highest profit possible.

One may point out that a guild is not actually a monopoly but instead is an oligopoly, and oligopolies naturally like to collapse into competition. The reason why this isn’t the case can be found in game theory. In a relatively closed market with the same main participants, especially among co-workers and other guild members, people are no longer playing a ‘prison game’, where the rational decision is to betray the other participants, but are instead playing an ‘extended prison game’, where the rational choice is to co-operate and if betrayed, respond in kind. This means that while there would be occasional outliers (as people don’t behave rationally at all times, and there are other factors as to why they might not co-operate) and occasional price wars (as people find what actually is the rational choice through observation and testing) the oligopoly will trend back towards an exploitative monopoly style of pricing.

The natural problems of guilds get worse. Guilds are not only a collection of members, but an organisation onto its own, and will naturally attempt to protect itself. Because guilds are local to an area, a large guild will wield a proportionally larger amount of local political power. Like how corporations must naturally have the goal of maximising profits (in the short and/or long term) guilds must naturally have the goal to protect and enrich its members, since that’s the reason the entity exists in the first place. A guild cannot, by nature, diversify, so new technological innovations, that would force some of its members into frictional unemployment, would naturally be combated with the political and economic power of the guild. Innovation and technology cannot be delayed forever, but a guild can certainly attempt to delay the adoption or use of a new technology for as long as it can. The nature of an economy composed almost completely of actors who don’t want to see innovation in their field is therefore one that will struggle to both innovate and act in its best interest in the long run. As the individual actors only see the general benefit of a larger economy when things are innovated, and may see a loss of economic and political status within that economy, the cost vs benefits of allowing and funding innovation is discouraging to said individual actors. This forces a guild economy to be sluggish and resistant to change by nature.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely. – Pournelle

Guilds also have a natural problem for new members, namely the buying in and buying out problem. This problem is that guilds, by nature, have major issues with people both entering and exiting the guild. Guilds the world over have had different methods to enter the guild, but these guilds have often relied on the law to enforce their right to do business as a monopoly. To enter a guild, someone must either make a financial contribution equal to what the other members have contributed to the guild, eventually receive equal status after being an apprentice (and receive tools and training in return for years of service to the guild), or be allowed to enter the guild as a normal member without making the same contributions as normal members. These solutions (and several less popular ones, which I won’t go into detail here) have serious problems, which are inherent to them. Buying in requires a large reserve of capital, and would often place a less experienced member as if they were of equal experience and status as senior members. Apprentice training means that the senior members of the guild make decisions about the future of the guild without the influence of the youngest members, meaning choices that give the most benefit to the senior members will naturally first considered. It also means that rapid expansion of any kind to meet a rise in demand is very difficult, as rapid introduction of new members both dilutes the power of the current members and creates problems in both the training and power structure of the guild. Entering as a normal member with no buy-in means the guild is functionally damaged by new members, and if this is attempted to be diluted by a government program it simply functions as a way for the guild to exploit the greater public.

Guilds within distributism as an ideology suffer a further, more conceptual problem which I like to call the capitalist problem. Distributism wishes to suggest that the problem is not too may capitalists, but too few. I would suggest that a tradesman that produces a single good within an existing framework, even if working for his own benefit, is not really a capitalist at all. He or she has little investment in the overall success and growth of the economy, and have few incentives to behave ‘rationally’ for the growth of the greater economy. Friedman said, “The overthrow of the medieval guild system was an indispensable early step in the rise of freedom in the Western world.” While many distributists may roll their eyes at Friedman, his point is not just one of social freedom, but also one of economic freedom. The guild system is a major block for people attempting to behave in a way that benefits the greater society, even tangentially. While perhaps the rich and the large corporations within capitalism need to be forced to ‘internalise their externalities’, actors within a guild system have near to no incentive at all to attempt to benefit the greater whole, because they, like a worker with no stake, is not enfranchised to the success of anything but himself and those directly connected to him.

The problems with a guild economic system are many, inherent and varied. Further, I fail to see how a guild system addresses most of the problems that are posed about a capitalist system. None of the problems presented here are insurmountable, but the number of problems ‘requiring surgery’ to fix, which can then lead to more problems of their own, lead me to think that guilds are not a good solution. The question I must pose about guilds is this: what problems do they suggest to fix? They seem to be designed to decrease the power of international corporations, and the supply chain mentality of capitalism, but guilds are, in my eyes, the unholy combination of some of the worst parts of both unions and corporations, in a system designed for political exploitation.

“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.” – Shakespeare

This entire discussion, however, is somewhat moot. Much like most discussions of relatively fringe economic and political ideologies, it ignores the dragon in the room. This is the capitalist problem, the very existence of capitalism as a system. Capitalism exists, and what it is undeniably very, very good at disrupting traditional, sluggish and closed economies, because they are very much ripe for profit at the hands of the capitalists. To be very blunt, I have yet to see any aspect of a guild distributist system, that even if it managed to be implemented, would be able to resist the return and collapse to capitalism for more then a couple of generations. The guild capitalist system is building a system that’s almost as vulnerable as possible to capitalist takeover to the first political or economic collapse.

The alternative proposals of distributists are much more functional, and as I mentioned before, things like anti-trust laws, co-ops and the corporate model put forward by Mondragon all provide new avenues for the ideology. I question why, then, a reasonable number of distributists seem to shun these ideas despite their clear ability to improve the lives of people. I came up with two real answers that question. First, there are several distributists, and left wingers in general, who don’t seem to care much at all for the reality around us and instead want to build disconnected theoretical systems without regard for practical problems (such as, for example, the problem that the existence of capitalism presents). To this I can only ask that people look to real problems, and real solutions instead of ideological platitudes. Second, some feel that disregarding a near revolutionary attempt to modify capitalism goes against the social teachings of distributism.

Distributism is more then just a left wing economic ideology. It contains a major social component, and emphasises things like moral economics and strong community bonds. This social aspect is also what differentiates it from other ideologies in the same ‘political sphere.’ Partly because of this differentiation, the more practical side of distributism, the part with collective corporations and some social compromises can be sidelined in favor of a more ‘pure’ ideological expression of distributist social policy. In some ways, even this more practical side fails to propose usable solutions. With some adjustment and work however, I think this side of the ideology could turn into something useable. Like all things however, it will require compromise and hard work.

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.” – G. K. Chesterton

There is a social world idealised by distributist thinkers, and fundamentally many of the economic institutions are linked attachments to this vision. Like all men will, I find some aspects of the various theories that I disagree with, but others that I find more problematic in a general sense, in the sense that there are internal problems within them that will need to be addressed to at least make a best effort to avoid internal collapse. This is by no means a complete discussion or criticism of distributist social ideas, but more some simple problems that I find most social proposals face.

At the very core of the distributist social policy (I at least will argue) is an idea that comes from catholic social teachings. Subsidiarity, the idea that decisions should be made at the lowest level they can realistically be made at. This very concept is both difficult to implement because it requires balancing a constantly shifting power base wherein government must not be too strong nor too weak. It is however, interesting because it is a very good idea at the core of many western ideologies: the idea that by allowing people to make their own decisions, they are best able to see and address their own needs. More then that, the ability to use the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ or constant testing and adjustment from people making decisions and observing results allows constant improvements in efficiency. The larger problem presented is then how to protect that ideology.

But however extensive and far-reaching the influence of the State on the economy may be, it must never be exerted to the extent of depriving the individual citizen of his freedom of action. It must rather augment his freedom while effectively guaranteeing the protection of his essential personal rights. – Pope John XXIII

A system built on subsidiarity has a basic problem where economies of scale mean that large scale production is often more efficient, and that comparative advantage implies the way that something should be created. The second problem is by far easier to address. As has been said “If Brittan used comparative advantage to decide how to expand, it would still be farming sheep as it’s main industry.” In short, comparative advantage ignores a whole bunch of other aspects of production and society, and letting it dictate policy (China should make us goods because they do it cheaper, for example) has so many internal flaws that its hard to even cover all of them. The efficiency problem is a larger one. When the problem is raised, others are quick to decry the cause of materialism, talk about how we simply do not need all the goods we consume. This entirely misses the point, because the most dangerous part of economies of scale to a society on subsidiarity is the fact that it can apply to social and cultural phenoms. The internet is a very pertinent example: it is more influential and useful for it’s size, because more, better and cheaper information and goods are available. No ‘local internet’ can ever match it for it’s raw capability or production of any sort of culture. Material goods are related to materialism, but the mass production of attractive ideas is harder to deal with.

This is the multinational problem. Many of the most valuable companies on earth right now deal far less with physical goods and far more with social and cultural goods. A major portion of the value provided by smartphones and TVs is not the hardware, it is what they give access to. Multinational in general have for a very long time been better able to produce everything from culture to international polities. To give an example that may be somewhat on the nose, the Catholic church is the original multinational. Its production of ideas, culture and language acted as a unifying element in Europe while society was far more disunited. The Church however is no longer the only ‘kid on the block’ and partially by design, subsidiarity is badly vulnerable to a multinational culture engine. In the same way that the church may fill this role in society, so can Disney and with clearly worse intentions. Churches, for any disagreement with doctrine, are usually societies with the goal of helping people. Encouraging worship of the ‘mouse god’ has no such compunctions.

“To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperament, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work—surrounds them with a sensuous life– and cuts them off from the normal sources of living” – Max Lerner

A concept that seems to be popular to distributist is the ‘society of artisans’ as a solution to replace the ‘much-hated’ mass media. Distributist are almost by nature at least somewhat counter-culture and I think that nature has blinded the community to the reality of how culture and entertainment are produced. The promotion of local culture is something that should be celebrated, but there is no reasonable reality where a society of artisans are able to compete with mass culture, partly because culture is strengthened and improved (or ‘improved’) on by sharing and working with it. A fairly large number of cultural consumers are required to support an artisan of any kind, and just by nature not everyone will enjoy a local culture even when promoted. A society of artisans as a basic concept is an interesting idea that deserves support. A society of artisans as a tool to replace mass culture with local culture is a pipe dream. Local culture can be nurtured and supported, but in many cases, it requires a community to foster it, which is why there have been ‘cultural centers’ for hundreds of years. Hollywood and it’s ‘linked’ culture industries are not some weak, stupid entity that will simply be pushed aside by stronger social bonds. People study their art for years, and Hollywood is the worlds single largest cultural center. An actual (well designed, detailed and adaptable) social plan is required for any real attempt to deal with culture centers to have a chance of succeeding. We do not have one.

In an entirely different direction, the society that distributists imagine is one with great social capital. This social capital will be a driving engine of the distributist society. There have been a good number of studies covering the benefits of high social capital, but there are also a few noted drawbacks. The one that is concerning here is a basic problem when a society trust all its members. In a society where there is a great deal of trust, the society begins to be less able to judge the risk of both economic bubbles, and of social extremism. In a society where this trust is core to the very bonds of society, a dangerous scenario for collapse appears. An asset class or investment begins being overvalued by the community. It becomes tied to things like civic pride, and national adventure, and even as some people realise that heavy investment may be a bad idea, community trust keeps the assets propelled forward. The asset, as it was doomed to, then collapses. Angry and unwilling to blame themselves (as most societies are), a form of political extremism promising to fix the problems they have is presented, and is able to take hold. The distributist society is damaged, and may never recover parts of its former social capital. This is not a random scenario. I would characterise a more common example of this being the Scottish colonial expedition to Darien, which bankrupted the country and eventually lost both Scottish independence to the Articles of Union and damaged the social capital of the country so badly that is has never fully recovered. The rise of fascist states is another example, if a very tired one at this point. A distributist society need some major plans to help deal with this potential, and while it is by no means impossible, I have seen little to no discussion about it. No one wants the collapse of the distributist experiment to the Darien of Mars.

Others welcome the teaching on the “option for the poor,” the duties of government to protect the weak, the warnings against unbridled capitalism, but seem to ignore the centrality of family, the emphasis on economic initiative, and the warnings against the bureaucratic excesses of a “social assistance” state. – National Conference of Catholic Bishops

The problem of social security is one that must be asked about distributist societies. I have seen several good suggestions for what should be in place when we have finished building a distributists society, but the actions of the now there seems to be far fewer good suggestions about. Clearly, different elements of welfare do not function as one would want them too. Modern suggestions of different kinds all show up, but as I first read about them the distributist suggestions seemed strangely lacking. I later realised what was missing: distributist were making a usually implicit assumption that the church would be the main instrument for local charity. This problem doesn’t show up everywhere, but some thinkers seem to ignore both the fact that some places do not have a strong church to fill this role, or the problem (one that can be accepted or ignored, but still a problem) that charity from organisations like a church is highly variable, and that’s dangerous to those most in need. Past however you want to implement further charity, there is an absolute minimum that needs to be maintained, and just ‘remove and replace with a variable system’ may not fill that gap. While a dependency on the ‘servile state’ maybe be very much less then optimal, the solutions presented and embraced by distributism do not seem to yet fill that gap.

In many cases, I don’t really disagree with the stated aims of distributism. Every ideology has inherent problems within, and implementation is a matter of ‘picking your poison’ and doing your best to mitigate the known problems and find solutions to the new ones as they arise. Distributism however, seems to have a fundamental problem wherein those within the ideology both refuse or fail to understand the strengths of the system they are combating, and give desired results instead of proper policy suggestions. This flaw is by no means unique to the ideology, but distributist literature consistently (partially, probably because the authors are influenced by one another) fails to provide an actual account of what should be done, though it enjoys talking both about where we should go and how we got here.

For example, distributists often wish to see a proliferation of “people’s banks” in place of the larger institutions, and enjoy giving examples like their expansion in Lombardy or the attempted programs in eastern Canada. What seems far less common is actual accounts of how to do this. The solution is clearly not easy, in part because one must play a balancing act between what the government must do without giving government too much power to do it and at the same time decrease reliance on the very government required to execute this plan. This type of solution will therefor by nature must be one of compromise and tailored to a local environment, and may lack most to all the elegance normally in distributist writings.

“Somebody said to me, ‘But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.’ That’s a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, ‘Now, let’s write a swimming pool.” – Paul McCartney

I expressed the fact that distributists do not appear to recognise the main strengths of both globalism and capitalism. The strength of ‘global capitalism’ applies in three main places. First, it allows vast concentrations of capital to be applied to places where they will be most ‘efficiently used’ through things like the stock market. Even if unequal or imperfect, the growth driven by capitalism is undeniable, and the material gains offered by the system are tantalising. Second, the rapid exchange of ideas brought by immigration, working together and shared assets which allows improvement. At any time and with a relatively nominal amount of effort, an American can invest or do business in a Japanese company if they feel that new ideas, practices or concepts are better and may learn from that experience. Thirdly, it offers these major systematic gains (of material resources and new, efficient ideas) to the individual as apart of their participation in the system, without strings attached. Gains in the system are unequal, by nature and this allows someone to regardless of problems, traditions or circumstances a chance to fully participate in the system.

A most recent example of this, and why I think the basic proposition of traditional distributism without alteration is doomed to failure happens in Mongolia. Socialist society in the country was never truly able to take hold in the face of nomadic individualism. Global capitalism, on the other hand is rapidly evolving the culture. Capitalist expansion there is mostly unplanned and spontaneous, but material goods and global ideas are changing the culture. Shepherds are using motorcycles instead of horses, and the Bukhanka is becoming the preferred way to travel the steppe. While business was once done entirely with people you at least may have trusted and sealed with a handshake, more and more the nature of capitalism is substituting capital for relationships. Consumerism and the allure of new goods has taken hold in the country, driven partly by mass media and partly by observation of societies with more things. This transformation is able to happen because society doesn’t have to fully change to allow these modifications: if a former horseman wants to buy a motorcycle, he can. Traditional culture of a business by handshake, just like in the west and like promoted by distributism is under slow but inevitable siege by capitalism. I don’t see a distributist policy that can stop this spread.

When talking about protentional solutions that could be embraced, I think you cannot ignore the major catholic component to the philosophy. The very nature is intertwined with Catholicism, as it really is half of the basis for the ideology. This is not an inherent problem, but it is something that must be noted. Major portions of the suggested implementation that to just have holes. These, in reality, are not holes but instead places where a strong catholic church would fit into. The international connection, much of the charity, one of the main uniting forces for the much talk about community trust roles that are left to be filled by the church. If you are not catholic, or more distrust any church having that much social power as they once did, this must present an problem. More, I feel that this gap can be filled to less ‘wholesome’ intentions by different kinds of international organisation, which the ideology is by design quite vulnerable to. This presents another major issue when trying to combat global capitalism, who is defined by it’s powerful international organisations.

“All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.” – G. K. Chesterton

My problem is one both of distributism, but more then that, of distributists. Nearly all distributists live and write about the west, the very heartland of capitalism. For all the rhetoric, western states have a high standard of living, mostly functioning institutions, complex economies and a falling number of Catholics. Distributism was born ‘once upon a time in the west’ and has developed with (at least a form of) western values and ideas. I fear radical distributist are picking just about the hardest battle they could fight, against what is probably the world’s most successful ideology to it’s most fortunate children in its homeland. There are other places in the world however, many places in both Latin America and Africa with many Catholics, vulnerable governments and a population base that has been damaged badly by the different forms of international capitalism. Yet I see almost no work, no ideas on how the ideology could be adapted to both the places that need it most, and the places where it has a chance to be attempted. The ideology is restricted by its nature. To restrict it only to its places of birth is to prevent it from having anything near its best chance to succeed.

Distributism is not a dead ideology by any means. Before a problem can be fixed, it must both be identified, and it must be decided if it is the problem that needs to be fixed at all. To me, the number of problems I see within the ideology, and the only solutions that I can suggest probably would no longer make me a distributist at all. I am not, however, the most brilliant thinker or do I believe I have even a basic portion of the possible answers. For distributism to move forward however, it must recognise where it has failed in the past, and where it is likely to fail in the future. Like most fringe political communities, many distributists have become more attached to the rhetoric and romance in the ideology then the reality of trying to build a distributist state. If distributism is ever going to be more then a collection of very pretty essays, and a footnote of capitalist policy, it needs to change that.