I have been saying this for years now. Whatever your stance toward multimillionaires / billionaires, for some reason every time criticism of "the rich" comes up, people whose finances deal in the hundreds of thousands reliably dive on the grenade. Meanwhile the truly obscenely wealthy stay silent, probably unaware the conversation is even happening.
But, critically, people in the bottom tax brackets will satisfy themselves devouring those "hundred thousandaires" while the truly obscenely wealthy retreat to their compounds, helicopters, yachts, and islands.
”What did they live on?” said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking. ”They lived on treacle,” said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two. ”They couldn&#…
A certain american heterodox intellectual by the name of John Michael Greer very recently put out a piece on his blog by the title of The Negative-Sum Economy. The piece is not too long, and well worth a read, so I won’t summarize it in detail here. Rather, I’d like to offer a sort of addendum to the main thrust of Michael Greer’s argument, and more specifically the fantastically important historical observation that economic growth (or at least, economic growth as we know it today) is actually the exception rather than the rule up until the latter part of the second millenium. Given that something tolerably close to human beings have existed for about a quarter of a million years, and that we’ve practiced sedentary agriculture for over ten thousand years, four or five hundred years of sustained growth is actually a fairly short moment in historical time.
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Whether people are ”really” getting poorer, or the pie is ”really” shrinking in some abstract, platonic sense, is however fairly irrelevant to the point that needs to be made here. Honest people can use today’s statistics to show either one to be true, depending on what they choose to look at. However, the way our politics now work is in fact increasingly in line with how politics play out in a negative-sum economy, and without understanding this, one cannot really get a good grasp of why today’s political, social, and *ideological* conflicts behave the way they do. To wit: if you live in a zero-sum world, like the romans did, you can either expand or remain in social and economic stasis. To not expand is risky, because it can lead to you being gobbled up by the neighboring empire without your scruples, but if you somehow avoid that, nothing in particular really happens. You go on as you’ve always gone on, for as long as you’re able, which can be quite a long time.
In a negative-sum world, however, the imperative to conquer is not one of choice, but of stark necessity. You need to dispossess others, you need to extract their wealth, because not doing so means losing your own way of life. For such a society, belligerence is not a choice, and peace is never an option for very long. To illustrate this dynamic in a modern context, we ought to leave the world of history and theory behind for a second and talk briefly about… video game development. Specifically, about the fate of an old and very emblematic studio by the name of Blizzard Entertainment.
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Had the story stopped here, it might make for a boring and utterly played-out morality tale about the evils of corporate capitalism. In point of fact, however, the decay of Blizzard as a studio only brings us to the start of the real story: rather than go gently into that good night filled with defunct but once-beloved game developers, Blizzard is currently being torn apart by a civil war. This civil war raging inside the studio was in fact recently launched by its own employees, and then assisted by the media as well as the state of California itself. And this process has a lot more to say about the state of our politics than one might assume at first glance.
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Put another way, Blizzard is being asked – at the point of a loaded gun – to subsidize the employment and career advancement of certain classes of employees, at the direct expense of other employees. Harassment, insofar as it is a problem, is to be solved through the creation of new alternate HR structures, with the people employed therein having wages paid by Activision-Blizzard, but who will then have some sort of semi-independent existence as a cadre of office commissars who exist to serve the revolutionary tenets of Equity and Inclusion, rather than something as pedestrian as the company’s bottom line.
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In reality, however, the civil war inside Blizzard is probably not very ideological at all. Or, putting it differently: behind what is likely genuinely held idealistic commitments, the actual demands being levied against the corporation all have an incredibly obvious, cynical material bent to them. Activision-Blizzard has committed many great sins, and now the only way they can atone is to hire – on a permanent basis – more and more people to serve as commissars, while also reserving the well-paying non-ideological jobs for certain protected classes. Beyond all the flowery language, beyond all the philosophical and ideological commitments, this is nothing more than a fairly run of the mill protection racket. Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense, or we will make life difficult for you.
If this dynamic was somehow limited to Blizzard, or to the video game industry as such, that would be one thing. But it is not; these sorts of woke employee rebellions are simply the leading edge of a widespread economic dynamic where wealth ”creation” by conquest and dispossession has become the American norm.
There are today so many examples of this that it would be impossible to go through them all. But consider for a second the massive expansion of the ”gig economy”, which is often cynically hailed as the result of some sort of breakthrough in information technology. In reality it is anything but; to take the ”ride-share” company of Uber as an example, it is merely a taxi company with a phone app, in a world where nearly every taxi company in the developed world has a similar phone app. The real ”innovation” of Uber lies in simply defining its taxi drivers as contractors rather than employees, shuffling over a lot of costs onto the drivers that other taxi companies have to pay for out of their own pockets. Uber as a company has certainly made a few individuals at the top incredibly rich, but this is through directly making other people poor, rather than the ”power of innovation” or some such nonsense.
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In a negative-sum economy, you either grow at the expense of other people, or you die. Given the increasingly decrepit American bureaucracy and imperial war machine, and its longstanding policy of destroying its own manufacturing base, the actual chances of the US being able to turn the business end of the imperial wealth pump outwards – toward the working poor in various hapless foreign countries – becomes slimmer by the day. Whether ordinary americans would experience a better living standard if the US was strong enough to really extract the wealth it needed from the rest of the world in a time of shrinking pies is probably pretty doubtful, but what ordinary americans think or need is not a factor anyone with power today considers important. It is the needs of the american elite and their servile layer of credentialed managers, bureaucrats and experts that really matter, and to protect them, the only real option left on the table – especially after the disaster in Afghanistan and the rapidly accelerating loss of faith in American power – is to embark on a war of conquest and dispossession against other americans. The empire, now increasingly failing abroad, has to come home.
As a result, any casual observer of American politics today can not only see the incredible levels of polarization currently rippling through all layers of society, but also the alarming growth of openly eliminationist rhetoric against ”red tribe” americans. The stated reason for hating this slice of the country barely matters, even to the hate-mongers themselves; first, ”red tribe” americans are evil and dangerous and need to be eliminated because they think Covid-19 is real and so wear masks in public places (which is obviously merely a case of them sublimating their racist animus towards chinese people), a year later they are evil and dangerous and should be eliminated for their crime of not wearing masks.
None of this is about covid, or January 6th, or the Steele dossier, or the philosophical conflict between the disciples of Burke and the followers of Rosseau. Having failed in its imperial wars abroad, the US elite and professional classes today prepare themselves mentally and politically for their next big struggle, and their increasingly bellicose rhetoric is part and parcel to formulating a workable casus belli against the hated masses of american kulaks, people who have grown too fat and lazy and undeserving of the increasingly meager wealth they can still lay claim to. For the temerity of working for higher wages than illegal immigrants, or demanding political power through their votes, they will have to be destroyed in order to save the people that really matter.
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The upshot of history not repeating itself is that in the US, far more people can – and probably will – become ”kulaks” in the days ahead than were ever tarred with that label in the USSR. To wit: if you are a truck driver, you are a potential kulak, because your dispossession could possibly lead to cheaper prices for the professional elite, who live their lives as consumers, not producers, of physical goods. If you are a college educated white male, you are definitely a kulak, because your dispossession means that the job you would have had can go to someone else. If you own a video equipment store, you are also certainly a kulak, because as a member of the ”petty bourgeoisie”, you do not have the kinds of profit margins that would make it possible for you to hire diversity consultants. If people buy their video equipment from Amazon or Walmart, that is more wealth freed from the hands of the inefficient and put in the hands of people who know how to give urban professionals a slice of the take.
We can go on. If you are a parent protesting Critical Race Theory at the local school board, you are in fact also a kulak, because you simply fail to understand that this entire industry is a jobs program for your social and economic betters, a jobs program that you and your kids are simply supposed to shut up and keep underwriting. Moreover, the fact that you’d try to use outmoded, inefficient methods of local democracy to make your voice heard is in itself a grave sin, as those institutions sap political power from credentialed elites in a particular area in favor of people who simply happen to live there.
As the Blizzard example illustrates, not even being the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company insulates you from being a kulak. In fact, you probably are a kulak, until you prove otherwise by ”doing your part”, subsidizing this elite strata of American society and protecting them from the consequences of economic decline. Far from being some principled opponent to this war against middle America, the top strata of the American business world is likely to join in on it; those companies that don’t will increasingly find themselves under siege from the nexus of NGOs, government, and corporate power that has matured over the last few decades. When Blackrock and the NASDAQ Stock Exchange team up to strong-arm private companies to fall in line with the new progressive mandates, the potted ideologues of the legacy Right can only provide them with moral and rhetorical cover; indeed, their very own survival and class position hinges upon the bribes they are paid in exchange for loyally putting lipstick on all manner of increasingly rancid pigs.
Whether all of this can potentially lead to real civil disorder and possibly even actual civil war is an interesting question. If one believes that the average American is incredibly stupid, lazy, immoral, rotten and feckless, so uniquely cowardly and without honor (indeed, this position of absolute loathing and hatred toward the American people is a position many self-described american nationalists fall into) – then the answer is probably something along the lines of ”lol, no, because people are just too fat and stupid!!”. If one however believes that Americans are in fact fairly average human beings – neither history’s chosen villains, nor unique paragons of virtue – the answer is more open. The coming war against the american kulak likely cannot be avoided, no matter what anyone does or does not do today, because it is not a war over ideology or culture, but a war of survival for the elites. They have no choice but to do what they do.
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Thus, perhaps I should simply end this essay by leaving the reader to ponder a very basic question: do you see any of those incredibly skilled politicians and gifted statesmen anywhere around you today?
When he entered the dug-out, bringing with him the evening light, he was met by the smell of poverty, by miserable food, miserable clothes and miserable bedding, by a warm, suffocating dampness that was filled with smoke.
Then his father emerged from the darkness. The expression on his thin face, in his handsome eyes, was indescribable.
He flung his thin arms around his son’s neck. There was such pain in this plea for help, such trust, that Yershov could find only one response: he burst into tears.
Soon afterwards they visited three graves. Yershov’s mother had died during the first winter, his elder sister Anyuta during the second winter, and Marusya during the third.
Here, in this world of camps, the cemeteries and villages merged together. The same moss grew on the walls of wooden huts, on the sides of dug-outs, on the grave-mounds and on the tussocks in the bogs. Yershov’s mother and sisters would remain for ever beneath this sky – through dry winter frosts, through wet autumns when the soil of the cemetery swells as the dark bog encroaches.
Father and son stood there in silence, side by side. Then the father glanced up at his son and spread his hands helplessly as though to say: ‘May I be pardoned by both the living and the dead. I failed to save the people I loved.’
That night his father told his story. He spoke calmly and quietly. What he described could only be spoken about quietly; it could never be conveyed by tears or screams.
On a small box covered with newspaper stood some food and a half-litre of vodka Yershov had brought as a present. The old man talked while his son sat beside him and listened. He talked about hunger, about people from the village who’d died, about old women who had gone mad, about children whose bodies had grown lighter than a chicken or a balalaika.
He described their fifty-day journey, in winter, in a cattle-wagon with a leaking roof; day after day, the dead had travelled on alongside the living. They had continued the journey on foot, the women carrying their children in their arms. Yershov’s mother had been delirious with fever. They had been taken to the middle of the forest where there wasn’t a single hut or dug-out; in the depths of winter they had begun a new life, building camp-fires, making beds out of spruce-branches, melting snow in saucepans, burying their dead . . .
‘The will of Stalin,’ he said without the least trace of anger or resentment. He spoke as simple people speak about a force of destiny, a force that knows no weakness or hesitation.
