Indeed. The point is now to think those politics, and make their possibilities recognizable.
Here's the key: Economic turmoil amidst global political and military crisis sets the stage for a reorganization of technological society. The political and military crisis results from structural inequalities accumulated over the last forty years. The economic upheaval was brought on by the pandemic, then intensified by the Ukraine war. The reorganization of society has begun, and various bids for its fulfillment are on the table. But recognizing the current state of affairs is crucial, because there's no certainty which bid will triumph, or by which dramatic reversals a few of the early, shot-in-the-dark ideas will unfold into daylight. In particular there is no certainty that the world will avoid an all-out conflict, or that individual national societies will avoid fascist regression.
Most people on this list saw something vaguely similar happen before, in the 1990s when the Internet emerged onto the stock markets and a rapid reorganization of global social relations began. However that period was relatively benign, even utopian. This one is violent and definitive. It's destroying the current order. Before its economic capacities have been spent, the network paradigm of the Nineties is running into every one of the contradictions that its market valuation suppressed for decades. So forget your mantras of disruption. Politics has taken over from Silicon Valley, to become the major driver of change in the twenty-first century.
The global economic context is one of strong but threatened growth under new rules. French economist Cederic Durand is right to trace the new rulesets back back to the massive central-bank recapitalization of private financial institutions after 2008 (1). These unprecedented injections of freshly created money gave the state a degree of control over the economy that had not been available since the 1960s. To be sure, the newfound power remained sterile until 2021, because all the capital created by the central banks was delivered only to the financial sector. The pandemic bailouts broke that pattern. They raised the possibility that state-funded investment in particular industries could be used to reconfigure the international balance of power, jump-start the energy transition, and experiment with direct support for struggling families, classes, economic sectors and regions. Having taken over neoliberal finance and placed it on life-support in the post-2008 period, governments now made bold to direct particular sectors of the economy. In this way the pandemic bailouts betrayed the return of economic management, with even greater tasks awaiting once the virus was under control.
The return of the state is difficult for people to see, so accustomed are we to the reality and ideology of a neoliberal world largely directed by corporate CEOs and even individual financiers. What's more, over the past century the social classes traditionally represented by the left - industrial workers, public servants and racial minorities - have been deeply transformed by education and social mobility, constituting a new urban cognitariat that has reaped the benefits of the net economy, as well as a precariat that has gained broad cultural freedoms and even some wage concessions. This has set up the conditions for a lot of confusion on the left. For example, contemporary anarchy has always shared something fundamental with neoliberalism: namely, the denial of large-scale collective agency through formal organization. Collective agency is massively denied at the exact moment when clearly identifiable actors are in the process of deploying it. This is really a frogs-in-the-boiling-pot scenario, and there is some doubt as to whether people will even realize what's happening before they're already cooked. Intellectuals should get their act together and analyze the present situation, before it's over and a new order sets in.
Here I'll list the larger bids to reshape world order, basically in order of appearance since 2008:
-- The Chinese Belt-and-Road infrastructure program, which is a bid to escape capital overaccumulation, stagnation and popular revolt through a material expansion of the productive network.
-- Russia's Crimea invasion and current Ukraine war: an attempt to create a Eurasian political-economic sphere based on a Moscow-Beijing alliance, with a corresponding reduction of Western monetary, military and commercial power.
-- Orban's consolidation of power in Hungary since 2010: a classically fascist attempt to use religion and nationalism as justifications for interest-group profiteering, with a larger strategic aim of reshaping European liberalism to accommodate both extreme graft and a new repressive apparatus.
-- Brexit: a nationalist/racist bid to escape EU social control mechanisms and (from an elite perspective) reposition the City as a financial corsair that can profit from global financial flows.
-- Trump/Bolsonaro: in both cases the aim is to overcome scientifically imposed limits on extractivism, while using racial scapegoating as a mask for authoritarian control.
-- Biden/Von der Leyen: both the US and the EU are currently attempting a social-democratic response to all the above, aiming to use state investment to constitute a new growth paradigm adapted to the demands of the Anthropocene (Green Capitalism for short). Given the context of the war, the US/EU connection also functions as a security bloc with a sweeping attempt to resuscitate NATO as a bulwark against radical uncertainty.
What's most remarkable to me is how the Belt-and-Road initiative has been modeled on the hegemony-building process of the US after WWII (2). The idea is the same: a vast geographic expansion of fixed extractive and manufacturing capital in an organized alliance system under a protective military umbrella. This expansion includes a powerful maritime component and thereby constitutes a real threat to Western political-economic dominance, even beyond the Eurasian continent. It has pushed the US to abandon the Nineties doctrine of rule by markets, just as the EU has done in the face of the Ukraine war. Instead, the state takes over strategic investments, not only in the military but in all aspects of social development, given the demands of today's whole-of-society wars. These investments are supposed, not to create state-owned industries, but instead to lay the basis for future private-sector developments. The coordinated push for mRNA vaccine production is exactly this kind of program, as is the current US attempt to reshore certain strategic industrial sectors, especially computer chips and associated AI technologies. My sense is that a broad life-science sector is likely to become a key part of the next technopolitical paradigm, both to answer the biomedical needs of wealthy and aging populations, and to engage in the kind of ecotechnics called for by the Anthropocene (3).
Now, to clear up a potential misunderstanding, state-led investment does not disqualify an industrial sector from being an anchor of a future technopolitical paradigm - far from it. In the 1940s the entire world saw how Germany, the US and the USSR rivaled over who could develop key technologies and fit them into a productive apparatus that's larger than the state itself. The rivalry took place, not only in scientific labs, but above all in the planning commissions that brought together the universities, the state, the corporations and the military. The national innovation systems of the WWII period were subsequently analyzed by all the large industrial states and used as models for strategic investment. Then, as if to drive the point home, the US again carried out strategic military investment in microelectronics in the early Eighties ("Star Wars"), even as they transformed the global financial order. Later it became apparent that in so doing, they had laid the foundations of the Internet boom - and also of the Gulf War victory that was the precondition for Nineties-style globalization. After that, capitalist competition short of war revolved essentially around the design of national innovation systems, through investment in places that often had the word "Silicon" in their names. Both Biden and Von der Leyen, but also Xi Jin Ping, are extremely attentive to this history - and they know the challenges of the coming period will not resemble those of the last one. Governing, for them, means incubating the next technopolitical paradigm.
Yet states and their leaders do not act alone. All of these national and regional-bloc level bids to reshape world order have their local constituencies and their local contradictions, which in many cases are the motive forces behind state actions. Thus in the US since 2016 we've seen both the MAGA revolt against the neoliberal establishment, and the George Floyd uprising. The first called for a break with globalization and especially with China; the second called for a fresh expansion of social spending, and more importantly, for a cultural and institutional reckoning with the consequences of colonialism. Neither of these are a detail, because what's at stake throughout the world is a new direction for democratic capitalism. This "system" is, in reality, the contradiction of all contradictions: an oligarchic social order that requires mass buy-in to function. The pandemic bailouts represent an attempt to literally supply the cash for that buy-in (in other words, direct state support for the neoliberal mode of consumption). But the bitter arguments over the rise of inflation and the intensification of state control mean that there is no certainty these bailouts and their future variations will work as intended. Popular pressure, whether progressive or regressive, is a central force in the evolution of democratic capitalism.
In this context, it's easy to imagine that the next "long wave" of capitalism will be a fascist nightmare. The new mode of regulation could easily be dominated by nationalism, and look what that's already done to the UK. Fortified welfare states with racist/classist barriers to entry could easily represent a successful short-term adaptation to the new climate regime, that's a highly likely European future. Science and technology could increasingly center on extraction, disaster response and policing - just check out what's already happening in the Americvas. All of this could come on incrementally, and democratically, without much chance for resistance. Positioning oneself from the outset therefore becomes crucial. Which of the open bids do you support right now? Why? With what outcomes? Or do you envision entirely different scenarios? What kind of world do you hope to see emerge from this crisis?
One may simply wish to see the old order destroyed. Or one may realistically believe that individual choices don't matter. My sense is that most people neither understand how devastating capitalist breakdown and the accompanying wars would be, nor how difficult it would be to just abandon the existing system and improvise new living arrangements within a rapidly degrading environment. Instead, the self-protective drive of society, described in all its ambiguity by Karl Polany (4), has now returned to center stage, constituting an evolutionary force with which it might be possible for progressive groups and individuals to collaborate. Of course we could valuably argue about this - because a significant number of people would really prefer to see the system collapse, or at least that's what they say right now.
My outlook is different. I see real progress happening on climate, exploitation and racial violence, with an urgent need to transform both the national deals and the overall world order. I also see a very ugly possible future in societies that adopt a Hungarian-style fascist solution, as the US is seemingly about to do. Entropy - ie business as usual and endless inconsequential argument - is the real existential threat. To overcome it our societies need to work toward the construction of a new technopolitical paradigm, as the practical basis of a new world order. And to avoid more wars and civil unrest, this future mode of development has to have a kind of democratic buy-in that is no longer predicated simply on mass access to Fordist commodities and neoliberal finance. The Anthropocene represents a whole bundle of challenges that have never been faced before. Ultimately it means that the reproduction cost of Earth's biogeochemical cycles has to be internalized within the contemporary political economy, transforming it into a political ecology.
Can capitalism really do that? In the US under Roosevelt, two brain-trusters named Berle and Means advanced the theory that because corporations are social constructs federating large numbers of people, they cannot exercise ownership rights in the same way as individuals do (5). This opened the door to the creation of the regulatory state. Similar proposals could be made tomorrow, under the pressure of an even greater crisis. The diminishment of private-property rights is a characteristic of social democracy, or indeed, of democratic capitalism. But fascism is also characteristic of democratic capitalism, and so is world war. The most urgent thing is to sketch out practical alternatives to both these future possibilities - and realize them.
I remain curious about everyone else's ideas on this not-so-easy subject.
best, Brian
Notes
1. See Durand's recent contribution to New Left Review's Sidecar:
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/94;
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/169. In addition, if you can handle the French accent, there's a Jacobin podcast with Durand that's really fascinating (I could not believe he was saying "state hate to the economy" - then I realized it was "state aid to the economy"!!!):
https://shows.acast.com/jacobin-radio/episodes/long-reads-cedric-durand-neoliberalism2. Simon Chen and Wilson Chan, "A comparative study of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Marshall plan,"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-018-0077-9.
3. See the relatively good analyses that have been coming out of the Allianz corporation for years, eg "The sixth Kondratieff - long waves of prosperity" (January 2010),
https://www.allianz.com/content/dam/onemarketing/azcom/Allianz_com/migration/media/press/document/other/kondratieff_en.pdf.
4. Karl Polanyi, "The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time" (1944 - try to get the edition with the excellent forward by Fred Block).
5. Adolf Berle and Gardinar Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932). Check out a summary here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modern_Corporation_and_Private_Property.