Reflections on Corruption and Warfare

There are lots of trends in nature that involve something growing, like the flow of water into a lake (when winter transitions into spring), followed by an increase in the level of water in the lake, then an increase in the flow out of the lake, which persists after the influx has subsided until the level of water in the lake goes back down during the later summer.

In human affairs, we see this sort of thing with crime and law enforcement. The general level of crime goes up, after which there is growing demand for the authorities to do something about it, which is followed by an increase in arrests, more police hired, more people being convicted of crimes, perhaps an increase in the severity of sentences, leading to a non-linear increase in the prison population. In the crime wave of 1965-1994, the prison population actually peaked 12 years after the murder rate did.

The balance of power between perpetrators of crime and anti-crime forces is also subject to dramatic swings over time. One probable driver is the reliability of law enforcement versus its capture by organized crime. Yet another is the ability of crime to organize; its ability to launder revenues; its ability to win cooperation from the general public (or the ability of crime syndicate members to defect; see this 2018 paper on the problem faced by defecting members of Japan’s yakuza.) It’s worth noting that crime in the USA is heavily studied, but statistics are notoriously unreliable (the Japanese data on the yakuza membership are oddly precise), and after sixty years worth of obsessive study, remains very poorly understood.

Part of the reason is pretty obvious: most crime is not organized (e.g., the UNODC report for 2017 [PDF] estimates a total of 464,000 intentional homicides, of which one-fifth were attributed to some form of organized crime. The UN distinguishes between intentional homicides and war fatalities, of which there were about 130,000 in 2017.) One could argue that at least some share of war deaths represents state corruption, which is where I want to go next.

WAR & CORRUPTION

Warfare between states, or wars within states, are largely the result of corruption. I don’t want to say “always,” or even “most of the time,” because this would create a temptation to stretch the definition to make the reality fit the rule--in other words, a tautological fallacy.

Corruption can be described as capture of enforcement and control systems (ECS) by interested parties, whether legal or not. Enforcement and control systems can be the sort that exist within the government, business enterprises, or markets; and they can affect any of these three (types of entities) with respect to each of the other three (so, for example, government over itself, government over business enterprise, or government over market).

In the period 1988-2011, there was something of a mania in Western politics for privatization, because it was usually assumed that only processes involving governments could be corrupt. People unfamiliar with corruption were eager to assume that “the market” had infallible countermeasures to capture, and the corruption of business was purely of concern to the affected business: surely, if a major bank was corrupt, it would have no systemic repercussions!

Since then, the study of corruption has gradually began to acknowledge that businesses and markets can indeed be captured by insidiously “interested” parties; less well-acknowledged is the idea that capture of any of these can lead to armed conflict.

Let’s take the War in Ukraine: clearly, this is a story of President Putin strolling to dictatorial power and taking what was, to him, the obvious next logical step, restoring the old Russian Empire. Actually, that’s exactly what happened, but I’m going to go and mess everything up by inserting one of my maxims:

History selects its figures for the crimes it wants committed.

In his novel, War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy outlines his explanation of historical causality (this is an attribute of 19^th century novels I really love: the narrator pauses in the middle to explain a philosophical point, then resumes the story with deadly seriousness). Here is a pretty good summary; this is the crucial point:

According to the conventional account, even though Napoleon did in fact decide to invade, he could also have chosen not to. When we take for granted the view of the background causes being causally determined, this suggestion does not sit well. This is because to believe in both is to believe that the background causes were an inevitable product of the events that came before them, whereas Napoleon’s decision to start the war rested only on his own deliberations.

[...]

Therefore, if we assert that Napoleon’s role was determined only by his own deliberation, then we are saying that the role of every person involved in the lead up to the war was causally-determined except Napoleon’s, and this is absurd.

Leon Sinfield, "Tolstoy, Napoleon and the ‘Great Men’ of History" (May 2020)

In a like manner, Putin was essentially “chosen” because he was willing and able to avail himself of the tools the Russian state afforded him, and if he had not been, his tenure would have been brief. The Russian state, in turn, had these means available because the collapse of the Soviet state had powerfully concentrated the mind of the Russian security apparatus.

CORRUPTION & THE ROOTS OF PUTIN’S RULE

A lot of criticism of the West (particularly President Clinton) alleged that the USA in particular had “forced” the Russians to adopt a crash program of privatization that resulted in a social and moral debacle. One branch of the criticism alleged that the Clinton Administration backed insufficiently pure market reforms, while another rival branch insisted that it was the Thatcherite nature of the reforms that caused the disaster.

In my view, even if we ignored Tolstoy’s analysis, we are still stuck with the problem that the leading influencers in Russia right after 1991 were mainly trying to solve the problem of getting money for the dwindling Russian state. Policy options were intrinsically limited to policies that could be implemented, no minor consideration when the major assets of the Russian state were both (a) unknown because of required repairs, maintenance, and so on, or (b) contested by rival organizations.

The practical problem of privatizing Russian industry was made much worse by the question of who was the valid successor entity: the management in situ or management chosen by the shareholders? The latter makes sense to us, but the privatization scheme (share vouchers available for immediate resale) made this all very confusing. The share vouchers were bought up by financial adventurers with borrowed cash, who then used the vouchers to buy up shares in critical businesses like Norilsk Nickel or Rosneft, then use additional strategies to dispossess other shareholders. It turns out that economists don’t really understand how shareholder rights work, but even if they did, it’s not like it would have made much of a difference once unemployed ex-KGB people were employed to sort it out.

While “Chubais Clan” from St. Petersburg had an urgent need to restore state jurisdiction over the nation’s assets, it also needed to exchange favors to accomplish this. This embroiled it deeper and deeper in a network of ties and obligations developed explicitly by Vladimir Putin. Putin embodied a specific set of promises made to powerful bosses in the energy and mining sectors, which made him an effective enforcer for Boris Yeltsin in the latter’s waning years.

 At the same time, it appears as though a huge proportion of Russian opinion-makers and military figures felt very strongly that the secession of federal units like Ukraine, Georgia*, and Moldova were acts of betrayal by those nationalities.

 It was as if an impoverished family with a noble pedigree had among its children a beautiful girl who decided to marry the scion of the usurper-despot, thereby gaining wealth and safety; her brothers were left behind, abandoned to their fate, unable to marry above their station, undesirable as matches, estranged from their lucky sister. In our society, I think the brothers would garner no sympathy; everywhere else, especially Russia, they would garner a lot.

Ukraine was desirable as a bride to the West because she was detachable, small enough to be transformed like Poland into a rich EU member state. Russians perceived themselves as the sons, who would always bear the family surname and take possession of whomever they married.

POSTSCRIPT: CORRUPTION AS A CONTINUATION OF HEGEMONY BY OTHER MEANS

The term “empire” to describe Washington’s relationship to countries under its influence is intensely pejorative, and a bit inaccurate. Unlike actual empires, in which the core state is a world apart from its neighbors, the Western world is more like Greece during the 5^th century BC, or China during the same historic period: a cluster of interlocked nation-states with a sense of thwarted unity.

Hegemony also appears in the relationship of certain categories of people to each other, although these categories have to be small and cohesive in order to actually have any agency whatever.

Typically, hegemony manifests as a willful control of of policy by interested parties; a clique of aristocratic families, for instance, controls finance or the treasury, and uses this control to perpetuate their wealth and power. This is not possible in a morally transparent society. Worse, if a hegemonic class has lost formal power in the past, and regains it by corruption, it has an ideology of vindictiveness towards the new form of the state.

As you may have noticed, I am working towards the idea that corruption and social/class hegemony are flip sides of the same thing. The duly elected representatives have constitutionally established powers, and no more; when they exceed those powers to enrich themselves, or to assure prolonged incumbency, or (what amounts to the same thing) confer benefits on their supporters and cronies, they inevitably perpetuate not only a particular class in power, but the idea that that particular class deserves its hegemony.

The last concept is controversial: is the hegemonic class really “legitimate” in the eyes of the rest of the public? Or do people only put up with it under duress? My own view is that (a), yes, most people most of the time really do think hegemonic classes are legitimate, and (b) those classes are far smaller in membership than Marxist theory implies, confined to a few extended kinship groups or networks (rather than a “capitalist class”), and also (c), the hegemony consists or accepting/expecting forms of corruption that are normalized, but requires bounds that cannot be transgressed.

The last point is supposed to explain in part the situation we’re in now, in which (say) a reality show celebrity with a large fortune barges into the political system with large amounts of other peoples money and advertises his eagerness to trash basic norms of politics. The idea is that a strong leader can overpower naysayers and legal technicalities to restore the hegemony of other classes (the social, or cultural/moral hegemony of White Christian leaders of a particular type), who, once restored, would have no need to ―or even call attention to―their leadership.

Again, it needs to be stressed, the hegemony is sustained by corruption. There are multiple ways in which corruption is sustained, including the way in which religious leaders are exempted from scrutiny of their claims to higher moral virtue, corporate executives are allowed to use corporate assets to entrench themselves in power, and so on.