Chapter 7: The Dialectic, History, and Climate Change: Part IV

The capacity to produce vast wealth is what leads to vast wealth inequality. This capacity lies in fertile, well-watered, temperate lands capable of reliably growing all manner of crops, as well as in a river system that facilitates intranational and international trade. This last bit is crucial to the well-being of a bourgeois state, and therefore to any state in this period. The more a nation's geography forces it to rely on the sea for food, trade, and defense, the more successful will be the bourgeois state it spawns. The preeminent bourgeois state in any era has always been the state that controlled oceanic trade: Carthage, then Rome, then much later Venice, then Ottoman Turkey, then Portugal, then Holland, then Britain, and finally after the Lend-Lease Act sold Britain's overseas military infrastructure for help against Hitler, America.

This prospect for wealth inequality was always present in the settled wet, but military conquest by the desert dries inevitably gives the settled wet the military know-how necessary to convert that vast wealth inequality into imperialism. If the first empires were backwater nomads living on the edge pantsing soft settled lands for their lunch money, these bourgeois empires refined such murder, theft, and slavery into not only an art, but a science to be carried out to maximum efficiency. These liberal empires were more terrifying than the Mongols - Genghis Khan may have watched entire cities burn, but he did it himself and lived with that grim knowledge, and knew the true price of the empire he welded. But these liberal empires were headed up by soft, refined gentlemen at great remove from the killing done in the name of their bank accounts, from the poor wretches whose homes Crassus let burn down to the baskets of severed hands King Leopold ordered from the Congo. Even nazbol savagery is tempered by the ounce of humanity of having to do the killing yourself, but a liberal can unleash a fascist on the weakest and go to bed believing he just helped civilize the world. Liberal bougies can order dead villages in the Third World the way you or I might order dead poultry in the supermarket. It is atrocity for the crassest of reasons; our very word "crass" even comes from the aforementioned Crassus. But such refined bougie savagery was now possible from the settled wets, so it was now inevitable.

Just like slavery nonetheless advanced material progress by being expended on necessary things like roads and bridges, the bourgeoisie are advancing world progress. Capitalism has, if nothing else, connected the world, introduced virtually everyone to at least one of a handful of trade languages, and advanced technology and prosperity to the point where a socialist revolution is now possible. It did this through the gradual need by its leaders to abandon some of the more vicious practices of capitalism in order to keep governing. But the basic capitalist system Lenin described in The State and Revolution could have fundamentally described ancient Athens, medieval China, or Renaissance India, if you leave aside the degree of personal freedom exercised by the working class and instead reflect on the basic structure of society.

By having a geography of rivers, mountains, and peninsulas that encouraged splintering defensible kingdoms at war with one another, Europe was bound to employ whatever military technology it obtained to its fullest potential. When the Mongols introduced gunpowder, the Europeans refined its use to a science. Because of this and another Mongol introduction (the Black Death), European societies had more warfare, more casualties, and fewer workers than ever. So European societies, especially in the west, had to appeal to workers within their borders with higher wages, and so were more further advanced down the public relations concessions of capitalism than most.

Of capitalist societies in Eurasia, only some East Asian societies also banned slavery and serfdom of their own volition. This is for good reason: only China has had emperors for as long as Rome has. The longer a nation has been in the thrall of the bourgeoisie, the nicer they have to pretend to be, to keep down the aspirations of the proletariat with minor concessions and half-measures, repeated down the millennia. This was the process most advanced in Europe that Marx mistakenly universalized, but that process being so advanced there let a Marx arise to criticize the notion in the first place at all.

(For that matter, the longer a country has been bougie, the better the food, because the rich have surely spent those extra centuries talking to the manager. But it holds true somehow. Italian and French cuisine has been world famous since the Roman Empire, but my ancestral Britain is full of petty bourgeois arrivistes and it shows. It almost feels like nobody's invaded since 1066 because they can't stand the food. Imperialism helped Britain steal, among other things, better recipes from other countries. The French colonial legacy was somehow even worse than Britain's, but their gastronomic one was much nicer. Banh mi sandwiches are probably the nicest thing that happened when Vietnam was ruled by France for a century.)

There are two large island nation-states off of the landmass that industrialized first. They both developed thoroughly bourgeois liberal economies with constitutional monarchies and parliamentary democracies, and amassed vast colonial empires. The one that did better was closer to the major powers of Europe, but the same bourgeois mercantile interests that came with being island nations pushed both Britain and Japan in the same basic institutional directions.

Continue reading Part V