Tag: Technology

  • In Brief: The West Can’t Stop Its Collapse

    In Brief: The West Can’t Stop Its Collapse

    Last year, Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan published an article in Al-Jazeera chalking American belligerence toward China up to two factors: an increase in Chinese wages eroding the profitability of foreign investment and the rise of native Chinese industry threatening western monopolies over advanced digital technology, energy generation, automobile manufacturing, biotechnology and robotics. Since western-dominated global capitalism has shown an uncanny ability to offshore capital and relocate investment in low-wage countries, it is undoubtedly China’s threat to monopoly capitalism that has western governments especially concerned.

    The ability to export capital and extract profits from the cheap labour and resources in the Global South has been an extremely lucrative racket for the advanced imperial core countries. $152 trillion was transferred from the developing world to advanced capitalist countries between 1960 and 2021.

    This racket has worked for centuries, ever since Columbus landed on Caribbean shores. It has evolved from outright theft of land and gold, into more sophisticated neocolonial arrangements which harness sweatshop labour and mine resources for sophisticated products stamped with western corporate logos and sold the world over.

    The result has been a river of profits pouring into Europe and the United States, soaking elephantine financial industries and buoying astronomical stock market valuations. But that river only flows so long as the aggregate of advanced technology, patents, licences, designs and money-capital remains steadfast with western corporate headquarters.

    China’s entry onto the stage of high value production does not simply add a new player to the game—it threatens to flip over the board. America is staring down hundreds of billions of dollars worth of potentially stranded assets invested in the AI sector alone.

    China’s Marxian approach to economics has led them to force-feed their supply chain with an abundance of rare earths and critical minerals, renewable energy, steel, electric vehicles and batteries, artificial intelligence platforms, drones, pharmaceutical products and high speed trains. In a bid to transform quantity into quality, China is converting the lucrative monopoly industries of the past into at-cost utilities for the present. And they are squeezing western corporations out of the global market in the process.

    This context is the key to understanding the posture of NATO countries as they pursue rearmament in unison: Trump is demanding a 50% hike to an already-bloated trillion dollar military budget, Canada has signed $100 billion contract for submarines, the UK will dispense an extra £63 billion, Germany has approved a 33% rise in weapons spending, France has committed $500 billion more to its military by 2030—it goes on and on like this. With Russia pinned down by the quagmire of Ukraine, it beggars belief that these trillions of additional dollars are being earmarked to counter threats from Moscow. Western leaders hold their citizenry in contempt when making this claim.

    If human society was governed by anything but the ruling class interests that Karl Marx described, the dawning reality of a new global economy would have spurred a movement toward cooperation, integration with the Belt and Road Initiative and major political and economic reforms adjusting to the new landscape. After all, the people of the West could benefit from low-cost advanced technology, public banks, renewable energy and rational economic planning at the highest levels. But the momentum behind centuries of imperial accumulation does not dissipate like the heat of lightning when the clouds break.

    So long as warfare and financial speculation lines the pockets of the powers-that-be, ungodly sums will continue to be extracted from the working class and put into the service of a western oligarchy determined to break China’s back. Only then can swarms of cheap labour return to East Asia and US corporate monopolies be assured.

    The problems with all of this are legion. What worked yesterday is not always destined to work tomorrow and we are fast approaching a night when tomorrow does not come. Western morality was buried under rubble alongside the bodies of Gaza’s children and the illusion of military supremacy was sunk to bottom of the Persian Gulf. If Iran is the canary in the coal mine, it is clear that all of these billions dumped into offensive weaponry will not yield the surplus required for imperial capitalism to maintain itself.1 In a dialectical reversal for the ages, the quest for self-preservation puts western capitalism on the express path to terminal crisis. 

    China has been described as the factory of the world and it would be prudent to now call it the world’s laboratory and power plant as well. Never mind that going to war with such a formidable power would obviously be unwinnable and catastrophic—it well could happen given the incredibly low calibre of people running the Occidental show. When it comes to protecting their property, history demonstrates that the oligarchy is always willing to fight to the last working class man. As David Harvey pointed out in The Limits of Capital:

    Capitalism is stabilized through the defence budget, albeit in ways that rob society of more humane and socially worthwhile programmes. But the present theory suggests a rather more sinister and terrifying interpretation of military expenditures: not only must weapons be bought and paid for out of surpluses of capital and labour, but they must also be put to use.2

    The collapse of the western economy necessarily entails an enormous loss of property on the most rarefied rungs of capital ownership—and this is the good news. If we’re lucky it will happen before an apocalyptic war can commence. Marx wrote that “the violent destruction of capital as a condition of its self-preservation is the most striking form in which advice is given it to be gone and to give room to a higher state of social production.”3 The collapse will not be where the fight for our future ends. It will be where it begins.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014): 40, David Harvey recounts other modes of production that have disappeared by failure to generate surplus. ↩︎

    2. David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (Verso, 2018): 445. ↩︎

    3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993): 749-50. ↩︎
  • In Brief: The Curse of Interesting Times

    In Brief: The Curse of Interesting Times

    Nearly everyone has heard the ancient Chinese curse meant to hex foes: “May you live in interesting times.” It is notable for its irony; on the surface, “interesting times” sounds alluring and non-threatening. But what constitutes an age of historical interest is never a mundane era of calm. What makes history interesting is the wars, the plagues, the conquests and the chaos that rupture stability and leave scars for future generations. The saying emphasizes that nobody wants to live through these times, even if they enjoy reading about them.

    It is also entirely apocryphal. “May you live in interesting times” is neither ancient nor Chinese nor a curse. Rather, it began circulating in British political circles at the turn of the 20th century before going mainstream in the Anglosphere. The insistence on an ancient Chinese origin is meant to convey a certain banality or cyclicity to the extraordinary modern epoch that succeeded the Middle Ages.

    Since Columbus crashed the shores of Hispaniola in 1492 there has been an accelerated rate of change permeating every rung of global society from the royal palace to the peasant village to the hunting camp. Modernity has wiped clean nearly every mode of existence that had previously stood for millennia. 

    Writing near the time and place where the apocryphal Chinese curse first originated, Karl Marx linked modernity’s dizzying pace to the motion of a capitalist economy fed by surplus value: 

    Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.1

    Following Marx’s summation, the curse of interesting times is synonymous with life under the capitalist mode of production. In the present age we have seen our lives revolutionized by smartphones and Ozempic and artificial intelligence and the infinite scroll of social media. Without any new land to discover or national markets to conquer, the economic forces devouring profit have blown open digital universes and pierced the sky with rockets. All this, and there are still those among us who remember a time before the “personal computer” and internet. 

    Marx correctly diagnosed technological revolution and cultural agitation as endemic to capitalism but he undoubtedly underestimated the market’s ability to distract humanity from our sober senses, our real conditions of life, our relationships with others.

    Even with the power to connect billions into direct relations, social media is reduced to a horde of vanity projects. The planetary boundaries for pollution are broken in the heat of smouldering summers. Leading nations have become the geopolitical equivalent of mass shooters. The western economy lives on the edge of a stock market bubble inflating by the day. But should any of this concern you—there’s a pill for that. Interesting times indeed.

    Rosa Luxemburg said: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” Overcoming the curse of interesting times still depends on apprehending its root cause; the suicidal logic of capitalist growth and the corporate suppression of human vitality. The current state of class consciousness is strung-out but the potential to connect, to organize, to educate and to inspire has never been more latent.

    Thanks for reading!


    1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. ↩︎
  • “Primer” and the Impossibility of Time Travel

    “Primer” and the Impossibility of Time Travel

    Whoever cannot seek
    the unforeseen sees nothing
    for the known way
    is an impasse.

    —Heraclitus

    In his Grundrisse, Karl Marx noted the capitalist tendency to “annihilate space by time,” to shrink temporal distance with rail, telegraph and the like.1 Since time and distance are both barriers to capital circulation and the realization of exchange value, the capitalist mode of production has always made time-space compression a top priority of innovation. It is within this economic context that time travel emerged as a cultural fantasy, first popularized by H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895. If shrinking temporal distance is so valuable to the modern world, manipulating the entire space-time continuum would have to be endlessly more powerful.

    The force of time is colossal and its hypothetical manipulation lends well to fantastical storytelling, sometimes verging on the comic disbelief. What makes Shane Carruth’s Primer stand out from other time travelling tales is its realistic presentation. The early 2000s was when the “tech bros” were only just emerging from the garages where they had cooked up personal computers, digital search engines and online retail. Primer captures this suburban zeitgeist with Aaron and Abe, two engineers working on an atomic mass reduction machine in Aaron’s garage. The technical aspects are a bit of a witch’s brew—some electromagnetic plates here, a lead-acid battery there, a dash of argon gas—but they are ultimately successful at reducing the mass of an object. With a twist.

    The pair discover that their mass reduction box creates a time loop between the point when the machine is turned on and the present point in time. Therefore, if the machine was turned on one hour prior to the present, the energy field within the box enables an object to loop back one hour and exit at the point when the box was activated. If the machine was turned on one day or one week prior, the loop then extends that far. There are hard limitations to the time travel that the box offers and also a paradox: any object travelling to the past will exist alongside a double for the amount of time travelled. Although Abe admits there is “no way in which this thing could be considered anywhere remotely close to safe,” curiosity gets the better of the two friends and they enter the box anyway.

    Image: Wikimedia Commons

    Concerning mortality, Marx wrote that “death appears as the harsh victory of the species over the particular individual.” By travelling backward in time, Abe and Aaron appear to have reversed this power; they have gained a victory over the species. They know which stocks will perform in the market, which sports teams win their games, what their doubles will eat for breakfast, when to expect a gunman at a house party. In the words of Aaron: “We know everything, okay? We’re prescient.”

    Narcissistic Knowing

    The real paradox of Primer is that, in the process of gaining prescience, Abe and Aaron actually see less. They are engineers but what they really needed was philosophy—any dialectician could have told them that “the future is an essential moment in the present” and “whatever happens in the future exists in the present, as potential.”2 They have knowledge of a present only as it was, unaware that, all along, they were busy constructing a new present moment by directly looping it with a future point in time. So, the plot unravels.

    Thomas Granger, one of their potential investors, gains access to the box and his double begins stalking Abe and Aaron in a dishevelled state. Their bodies collapse from fatigue, ears bleeding and shaky hands unable to write. Future versions of themselves show up to attack and detain their past selves, taking the place of their doubles. Aaron becomes mired in an addictive cycle of time travel, eventually fleeing to Europe in order to build an industrial-sized box. The film ends with at least two Abes and three Aarons wreaking havoc on the timeline.

    In psychoanalytic terms Lacan has said: “What is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that you never look at me from the place from which I see you.”3 When future versions of Aaron and Abe invade the past, they see a world in which they are uniquely clairvoyant. But that same world does not submit—it looks at them as the unwelcome intruders that they truly are. This is why they must shroud themselves from it, hole away in hotel rooms and use violence against their doubles. Unable to “seek the unforeseen” they actually “see nothing,” not even themselves.4 Put another way, thinking you know the future is far worse than knowing you do not know it.  

    The misdeeds of Abe and Aaron upon stumbling into time travel bring to the fore the impossibility of the proposition. Who among us wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of a do-over to correct past mistakes? But if this were a real option that people could exercise then the existing chaos of the world, held together in a delicate flux, would rupture into endless permutation. Reality would become blurred by the thousands—millions—of alternate individuals, transported by time-portals laying open like festering wounds.

    Humanity, as a species-being, already has the capacity to pursue a multitude of individual, contradictory aims without reference to any universal concept of human nature. The aggregate disorder of human societies, the unpredictable events and contrary effects of our actions is, ironically, the product of individual efforts to exert control over their slice of the social pie. Primer is a story not unlike Jurassic Park or Westworld: it is the presumption of control that leads to total chaos.

    Exiting the Multiverse

    The futility of prediction is recognized by Epicurus with his concept of clinamen which says that atomic particles will swerve in uncaused motions.5 The associated disorders of time travel go even further than the clinamen: instead of unpredictable motion, time travel causes the unpredictable appearance of matter into the void.

    To leap backward or forward in time posits an existence on a timeline owing solely to the leap itself, ignoring the causal mechanics of existence. It would be something like trying to visit Earth after it is swallowed by the Sun. The past cannot embed a future which leads back to its own alteration, as the alteration would inevitably deny a pathway back to that same future. For this reason comprehending time travel can never be more than an exercise of mind-bending.

    Due to the paradoxes of time travel and the non-linearity necessarily contained in its process, Primer requires multiple viewings in order to digest the plot sequence. But it is a testament to the medium that a $7,000 film can so forcefully wade into the most speculative of scientific subjects.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin, 2005): 530. ↩︎

    2. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003): 121. ↩︎

    3. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (WW Norton, 1998): 103. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (The MIT Press, 1992): 125-6 for a more detailed interpretation of this concept. ↩︎

    4. Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003): 7. ↩︎

    5. Pierre-Marie Morel, “Epicurean atomism” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 76-7. ↩︎
  • Ask the Editor: “Is China For Real?”

    Ask the Editor: “Is China For Real?”

    Dear editor,

    To be honest, I did not pay much attention to China until I learned that a number of my colleagues were using DeepSeek and preferred it to the American ChatGPT. Since then I have become aware of their advanced renewable megaprojects, electric vehicles and 6G technology, the Great Green Wall, their leading high speed rail network and epic skylines and bridges.

    After the recent military parade, a number of people have told me that the advanced equipment on display may not be real, that the West still leads in terms of military power and computer chips. But considering the other ways they have left Western nations behind, I am not so sure. Are they the new superpower? Is China for real?

    Thanks,

    Bruce.

    Dear Bruce,

    You’ve answered half of your own question: if the existing civilian technology and visible infrastructure in China is more advanced than anywhere else, why wouldn’t their military be the most advanced as well? 

    There are obvious safety reasons explaining why live explosives aren’t going to be marched down the centre of Beijing. But given China’s successful track record deploying technology, it is likely that the weapons on display are already operational or will soon be in production. There were many potential customers in the audience, after all. 

    China is definitely for real. The question about superpower status is difficult to answer and I’ll refer you to a previous article about where things currently stand between Chinese and American supremacy. Questions of that sort are often only apparent in hindsight. Ten years from now, we may look back at the 2025 China Victory Day Parade as a decisive turning point in world history.

    The doubters will claim that the power of these weapons is unknowable until they are tested in battle, as if rooting for war. If Xi Jinping has learned any lessons from the great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, let’s hope it was this: “The skillful leader subdues the enemy troops without any fighting.”1 With a U.S. shift away from Asia on the horizon, Xi’s parade may have done the trick.

    In sols,

        Your editor.

    Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co

    Footnotes:


    1. Sun Tzu, “Attack by Stratagem” in The Art of War. ↩︎