How Men Fight and Lose the Battle

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.  

William Morris, A Dream of John Ball, 1886

The global economic system is not a conspiracy. There are conspirators, and monopolists, cartels and oligarchs, and even cabals. But these are accidental contributors to a system that needs no more to explain it than the mechanical forces of capitalism. Its complexity is beyond the individual mind to design. It's beyond any private club, even beyond a world economic forum. All these are agents of markets that have evolved for centuries.

But the global economic system is not just a result. It is an expression of the unified fate of humanity, its aspiration for a world that overcomes the system that created it but that cannot carry it forward. The war in Ukraine would appear to contradict this.

Not for the strategists of empire, however. They have prepared for a world that is cracked into clashing blocs. This is where they have invested their surplus. For the general staff in Moscow the crack is drawn by fortune, their resources determined by opportunity, and the narrative is what works on their audience. Where the empire of the party once claimed the world, the new people have more classical designs for their matching orders.

They have been persuaded by success elsewhere that the waging of war, if the objectives are precise and limited, can produce political victory. They have watched the west overreach and stumble and convinced themselves that imperial practicality will bless their weaponry. So where have they failed?

Industrial warfare has been a trap for well over a century. Whether a great power is overwhelming a weaker one or two are fighting to a stalemate, modern military operations have proven useless politically while demonstrating an unbelievable capacity for destruction. In the early industrial era this did sometimes alleviate excesses of fixed capital. In our time it may give an assist to the profits of the weapons sector but its economic returns have diminished, are all but gone.

What has the Russian army achieved in Ukraine? Without a doubt its most significant result has been the impetus of the Ukrainian population to the west, fleeing in actuality and politically. In exchange they have gained territory in an era when territory has lost much of its significance. They have drawn the wrong conclusions from recent history.

The political furor over the unraveling of the American campaign in Afghanistan should have demonstrated to them, by its remarkable brevity, just how not unexpected and how unexceptional a retreat it was. The limitations of empire should be known to everyone by now. They have no workaround, and will constrict even tighter as our world simultaneously draws down on its resources and pays out for the damages already in the pipeline.

We are told that Moscow has prepared itself to be sanctioned and we are told their preparations have fallen grievously short. This crack in the world used to be called the Iron Curtain. It was built by the empire of the party to exclude the empire of capital and it failed. Given that a lesser war is criminal insanity and a great war is inconceivable, sanctions are both inevitable and an admission by powers whose own history is brimful of criminal insanity and who continue to invest treasure in the inconceivable that the failure of military ambitions unfolding before us is a lesson that needs to be applied globally.