[p2p-research] Abundance Destroys Profit [was: Tick, tock, tick, tock… BING]

[Andy Robinson]

A few questions.

1)  America is losing global hegemony.  How will the loss of global hegemony
affect the position of the US executive and the US as a monolithic entity?

2)  The current trend internationally is away from mega-states and towards
either nifty small states or big confederal arrangements like the EU.  The
US was a major beneficiary of the previous period, when the global situation
favoured "superpowers".  Today, networks of all kinds favour the local - for
instance, Silicon Valley has its own economic networks distinct from America
as a whole.  Will localising networks create pressures towards fragmentation
of massive states?

Admittedly if we just look at American politics in isolation - and take for
granted what is taken for granted in general - and look within living memory
rather than longue duree - it seems America is centralising and will remain
highly centralised, and that either a collapse or a renegotiation of power
will occur.

On the other hand, as I've argued elsewhere, I think states are centralising
their power, concentrating power in executives, and behaving in increasingly
authoritarian ways precisely BECAUSE they are losing their connection to and
power over the real sources of power.  They are shit-scared of networks.

If we compare a few cases.

China is a massive state but has moved towards increasingly localised
economic models.  China has also conceded extensive autonomy - basically
internal independence over everything except foreign policy - to former
territories which it has reacquired, i.e. Hong Kong and Macao (it would
doubtless do the same if it acquired Taiwan).  It has also established
regions specialising in particular economies, and Special Economic Zones
where usual rules don't apply.  We also don't know what will happen if and
when China undergoes extensive social instability.  China is building up
crises waiting to happen in relation to rural dispossession and the growth
of an unemployed population.  Eventually China will have a major crisis or
revolution.  When it does, Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Guangxi Chuang,
possibly Manchuria and the new regions may break away or else renegotiate
their inclusion in China.

India also allows extensive autonomy to local states over internal
policies.  A lot of the most interesting stuff in India happens at a state
level.  Just yesterday, we saw this in the case of Telangana.  Indian
economic growth is very uneven and localised.  While India doesn't look like
breaking up (its difficulties in the Northeast and Kashmir notwithstanding),
it also seems to be moving towards more (not less) leeway to states.  India
also has a number of regimes of decentralised power in terms of
multiculturalism - different legal codes for religious groups, special
status for adivasis and dalits and so on.

The EU is not looking like becoming a super-state any time soon.  Europe
could be becoming something like an even more decentralised version of India
or China.  Certain things like free movement (most but not all the time),
free trade and labour mobility have been established, which take advantage
of economic flows.  But national differences remain very pertinent.  I'm not
sure anyone really wants a European superstate except maybe a few
bureaucrats at the centre.  There aren't even major moves towards foreign
policy centralisation.  It seems very unlikely today, with the big split
over the Iraq war.  So, the EU will be a regional economic power with labour
and trade mobility, but with each region locally governed, and have its own
foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

The Soviet Union HAS broken up.  It broke up partly because it lost the
advantage of scale in the global economy, leading to its defeat in the Cold
War.  Not only this, but the Russian Federation has itself moved towards
decentralisation.  A lot of regions (Kalmykia, Tatarstan, Ingushetia,
Bashkortostan) are de facto internally independent, allowed to exist as
independent fiefdoms based on supporting the power-holders at the centre in
"national" elections.  Also, the Russian East is moving away from European
Russia economically.  Russia could easily either break up again, or have to
turn into something like the EU.  People were saying the CIS would become a
second EU when it was formed, but this was undermined by conflict between
Russia and the newly independent countries (an effect of decades of
colonialism methinks - the same problem which saw off the British
Commonwealth earlier).

So, it seems the powers of states are being disaggregated and diffused both
upwards and downwards.

Upwards in terms of the establishment of large blocs in which certain
general rules are applied and certain traditional powers of states are
suspended.

Downwards in terms of increasingly localised economies, and the
proliferation of local and partial sets of laws and regulations.

How does the future of America look in this long-term and comparative
perspective?

America started out as a federation of local states with similar attributes
to the EU or India today, centralised massively as a result of superpower
status arising from massive geopolitical and economic advantages in a
particular period, and is now facing a period where these advantages no
longer matter so much.  Today America has two major advantages which persist
as leftovers from the previous period: military forces which are
overwhelmingly larger and better-resourced than anyone else, and advantages
derived from the hegemonic position of the dollar in the world economy (the
reason America is able to get away with effectively rent extracting from the
world by deficit financing and revaluing).  Both of these advantages are
leftovers - the dollar is the world currency because it was formerly the
strongest (not because it is now the strongest), and the military was built
up because of America's economic strength.  Presumably the flows of
resources coming through these two advantages - both, crucially, advantages
held by the *federal* government - are the reason the government can buy off
the states and maintain resource flows which keep the states dependent.

We have every reason to believe these advantages are in their last stage.
(The attempt to turn military advantages into persistent tribute-extraction
have faltered in Iraq).  What will happen when they fail?

>From the other cases I wouldn't necessarily expect America to fragment into
different nation-states, because elsewhere the advantages of transnational
regional entities are being recognised.  However, I would expect wealthier
regions to seek more control over their own resources, poorer
anti-cosmopolitan regions to seek to break out of the cultural hegemony of
cosmopolitan regions, and regions with high levels of poverty arising from
industrial collapse to move internally towards welfarist policies of a kind
the centre would not tolerate.  The result may well be that economic policy
is decentralised, but within a region retaining a single currency, and that
cultural and legislative regimes are similarly returned to the state level
(there are substantial pressures towards this from the liberal left, the
libertarian right, and the conservative right - there are areas seeking
actively to opt out of the drug war, even a few which have opted out of the
war on terror, while on the right a lot of the pressure is against social
liberalisation coming from the metropolitan areas).

I could even imagine a scenario in which peacekeepers from a newly
democratic China invade independent Arizona to end a civil war between
Confederate militias and black nationalists, while seeking to stop
fundamentalist Texas from obtaining nuclear weapons!  Though I think it's
more likely that there will just be a redistribution of powers between the
levels.
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