The Tree of Brass and Lead

Image taken from Openclipart.

What I am going to write today is inspired by the discourse about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but does not directly connect to it. If you are looking for treatment on this topic in particular, I might direct you to the AP News Wire category on it, though I’ve also found some fascinating smaller statements about it – including a meta-commentary on the way that this topic is treated in gaming journalism (the apparent civil war in IGN has especially attracted my attention, though apparently a similar one happened at Game Informer. Both retracted their articles on it due to outside pressure). In any case, if you are interested in helping, you can send money to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, the United Nations Relief Workers’ Agency, Doctors Without Borders, Jewish Voice For Peace, and the Friends of Al-Aqsa.

Given the blitz of information up above, it should be clear that – as I mentioned – this is associated but distinct. I don’t want what I’m going to write on to distract from the very real violence happening, but it isn’t my absolute focus – merely the starting point for speculation.

The trajectory is like this: Israel is the last-established Settler-Colonialist project. It is also the last such project I see being feasible. Fundamentally, it is the same kind of state as America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; other states have had Settler-Colonialist phases – such as the Japanese annexation of Hokkaido, the settlement of Taiwan, and basically anywhere you see (nation)-ification or -cization – Russification, Sinocization, Romanization. This refers to the replacement of an indigenous culture with a colonialist one. Sometimes, this is accompanied with political policies that lead to demographic shifts.

The Herd Quitter by C.M. Russell, a depiction of western life, which was an important and emblematic stage of American Settler-Colonialism.

That’s a fancy way of saying that they lead to the replacement of one population by another. This is often used as a talking point by fascists – the “great replacement” or “white genocide” theory – because their perceptions are calibrated to the world as it is – one that often kills non-white people at a disproportionate rate, meaning that removing the pressures that kill non-white people look like ethnic cleansing to them, because they’re idiots who live in bizarro world and their opinions can be dismissed for the moment.

Of course, “replacement of one population by another” is, itself, a fancy way of saying “killing people and taking their stuff.”

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a piece on Exterminism. This piece was an extension of the “a thing is what it does” logic that we’ve used here to a treatment of our society’s (non-)response to climate change. Namely, speculating that the attitude being taken by those who hold political power is that any disaster will not simply hit after they’ve passed, but suggesting that they are insulated by the massive population of non-elite individuals who will ablate away before the crisis gets bad enough to hit them. It’s connected to the logic of the “lifeboat morality” that ecofascist darling Garret Hardin – he of the Tragedy of the Commons – evangelized for years.

The Tesla Cybertruck (pictured above, published by u/Kruzat to wikimedia commons and used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license) an ugly, violent vehicle that communicates a brutal worldview.

The term, however, comes largely from Peter Frase’s book Four Futures, where is it the logical extension of “business as usual” (the book presents four futures that differ from one another on two axes – scarcity and hierarchy. We live in a world with both, Exterminism is the future with both.) In this future, the wealthy elite are insulated from the impoverished by a thin shell of a middle class made up of security professionals: it’s the future for which the Tesla cybertruck was designed. An ugly, violent future that denies any sort of commonality between people. Read it as a world-as-inverted-concentration-camp.

Settler-Colonialism is not going to be able to continue forever. It will reach a crisis point much as capitalism often does. At that time, unless it is actually, intentionally killed, it will not vanish from the Earth – it will go through a phase-change. That phase-change is what I want to describe.

I say this because capitalism and settler-colonialism are bound up in the same general project, which I have partially described in my treatment of what I call the “Horizon of Extraction”. It moves resources from a periphery to the center, leaving behind an empty husk. The resources being moved change, but the logic doesn’t. It proceeds through violence – whether explicit or implicit. This is hardly a new idea: it has long been noted that Capitalism needs a frontier. It needs some stretch of waste land or (supposed) terra nullis to function.

I think, poetically, as this being like a tree of brass and lead, violently pulling what it wants from the soil, and siphoning everything up to the highest branches, where it blossoms and grows a gilded fruit.

In No Logo (Reviewed here), Naomi Klein described how western corporations – though “northern” might be a more accurate term – divest themselves of manufacturing, and contract out to other producers, creating the illusion that the corporation produces what they produce magically, from the ether. This is part of the project of becoming ethereal and abstracted: the physical infrastructure is hidden, but the extraction continues.

That’s because, in the imperial core, the cost of extracting further resources has risen to the point where it’s no longer profitable to do so. Thus, the Horizon of Extraction shifted from the physical to the social and conceptual. The labor extracted here is no longer that of the physical worker – the person making the commodity or extracting it from the natural world – but from those who conceive of new commodities or use their social skill to extract currency from others.

When a Horizon of Extraction can no longer produce profit, it is tossed aside, and the apparatus moves to the next Horizon. You can see this with the proliferation of strange financial instruments in the Imperial Core, things that are financially-equivalent to highly radioactive or black magic when explained (Supply-Chain Financing seems to be the big one right now.)

In Shock Doctrine (reviewed here), Klein treated the spread of the Chicago School Ideology from around the world, but also – more specifically – treated Israel/Palestine in the final chapter. The labor being extracted from Israel is that of creating new security apparatuses (before the end of apartheid, this role was filled by South Africa. The two states share more than a little. Israel, critically, has managed to position itself as morally justified until now), while the Palestinians fulfilled the role that immigrant labor did until the end of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the population of Israel drastically increased, and the need to rely upon Palestinian labor disappeared: the profitability of extracting value from them dropped sharply.

The Palestinians thus became – in the eyes of their Israeli occupiers – superfluous population. As we can tell by looking at the treatment of vagrants in the Early Modern and Victorian periods in England, being categorized as a superfluous person is a fairly dangerous position. I would argue that going from necessary and hated – as subjugated populations who are loathed but provide labor are – to unnecessary and hated is just about the only way that one’s situation can get worse.

But, you may point out, I’ve talked a great deal about Israel and Palestine in a piece that’s inspired by them but not specifically about them. When am I changing tracks?

Consider, please, this article from The Guardian, reprinted from Medium, by Douglas Rushkoff, entitled “How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse”. I see a connection here. As an aside: I’m not Rushkoff’s biggest fan, because he seems to be too invested in the logic of the current system, which I see as inherently problematic, but he’s closer to being right than the people he was talking to, so...why not listen a bit?

In this article, he describes being collared by five hedge fund CEOs who wanted to pick his brain about how to survive after “the Event” – a catch-all term for the failure of the current social order for one reason or another.

I think about the show that Mitchell and Webb Look whenever I hear talk of “The Event”.

This dovetails with settler-colonialism because it’s a curious inversion. Instead of establishing a new Horizon of Extraction to bring resources into the core, these high-powered financiers are talking about moving the imperial core. This would allow what is currently the core to be made into a horizon of extraction.

There is a consistent tendency, noted by Marxist and “Marxian” economists to note that the rate of profit always declines. Costs rise, prices go down, and the sliver of profit shrinks below the point that allows it to seem worthwhile to the capitalist. The response is generally to cut out middlemen as much as possible and to drive down cost of labor, which is seen – for some reason – as the most extraneous of these costs. Cue alienation and dissatisfaction.

In the era of free trade, the response was to move factories and resource-extraction operations to different parts of the world with lower costs. This produced a great deal of poverty in the imperial core (for our purposes, America and England.) This led to the elite insulating themselves more and more from the average person. Increasingly, the divide between rich and poor means that they might as well be living in different worlds, much less countries.

So why not cut out the middle man, and move the core-of-the-core someplace where it doesn’t have this dead weight of labor around it? Increasingly, people in the Imperial Core are working as guard labor, whether they are armed guards, or guards for commodities being moved from one place to another (logistics workers) or guards for goods in retail stores (cashiers.) To a large extent, these guards are simply guarding commodities from off-the-clock guards.

When you simplify it like this, the logic becomes clear.

The apparatus of extraction has become too unwieldy, they say, let us retire to New Zealand or Alaska or Mars and then strip the valuable parts from the old one when it’s finished cooling off. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Capitalism must be destroyed before we get off this rock. The same goes for Settler-Colonialism and similar ideologies.

I forget who said it, but one canny internet commentator once observed that “dystopia” meant that the things that are already happening start happening to white people. I am predicting something like Foucault’s boomerang: the violence already happening in the periphery will return home – not just the violence of repression, but the violence of extraction. It shouldn’t be happening in the first place, and it should have never started (but then, whither modernity? Perhaps we would have come up with something better if it hadn’t happened, honestly).

Of course, by this point, I begin turning to some abstract suggestion about what should be done about it. I say “abstract” because the only other option is “incredibly complex” and “outside of my purview as an English teacher.” I am, sadly, merely a trained gadfly, not an expert.

But colonialist violence must end. If you have the power to resist it, even in some small way, then you have a duty to do so. If you cannot protest, then donate. If you can, write letters and put pressure on elected leaders. Whatever you are able to do, do it.

But you also need to watch, and be ready to pounce when the core of the system begins to move. It cannot be allowed to flee, it must be cracked, and the logic that leads these people to gather wealth and take possession of everything they can must be overturned.

In the first Gilded Age, they built libraries and art galleries, they started charitable foundations, because they were afraid of what might happen if they didn’t. Our modern elite don’t have that fear. They think that they can step on our necks and get away with it, fleeing elsewhere.

Which is a shame, really. It would be much easier if they learned the same lesson as their predecessors.

What needs to be understood is this: this fight has been going on for a very long time, and there are chances that it will go on for – well, we don’t have a very long time left. But as long as it can. The system of Imperial Core and Horizon of Extraction – the Tree of Brass and Lead, as I’ve called it – will fight to continue.

We must do what we can to break it.

That is the only thing we can do.

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