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Title: Diagnostic of the Future
Author: Peter Gelderloos
Date: 2018, November
Language: en
Topics: democracy, crimethinc., the state
Source: Retrieved on November 7th, 2018 from https://crimethinc.com/2018/11/05/diagnostic-of-the-future-between-the-crisis-of-democracy-and-the-crisis-of-capitalism-a-forecast
Notes: In this in-depth analysis, Peter Gelderloos explores the technological and geopolitical changes that movements for liberation will face over the next several decades. How will those who hold power today attempt to weather the economic and political crises ahead? Will artificial intelligence and bioeconomics save capitalism? What’s more dangerous—governments refusing to address climate change, or the technocratic solutions they will propose? Will we see the rise of fascism, or the regeneration of democracy? If we study the challenges that capitalism and the state will confront, we can prepare to make the most of them to put forward another way of life.

Peter Gelderloos

Diagnostic of the Future

It is no secret that both democracy and capitalism are in crisis. For

more than half a century, state planners and their pundits only had to

justify democracy as “better than (state) communism.” For the 1990s and

most of the ’00s, they didn’t have to offer any justification at all.

Democracy was the only possibility imaginable, the teleological destiny

of all humankind.

Today, that is no longer the case. On the world stage, democratic

institutions of interstate cooperation are in shambles, and the

emergence of new alliances and new postures suggests that an alternative

is beginning to coalesce. At the level of specific nation-states, the

central ground that allowed for a broad social consensus for many

decades has all but eroded. There are growing movements on the right to

reformulate the social contract—and, at the farthest fringes, to do away

with democracy entirely—while the left is preparing a groundswell to

renew democracy and smooth out its contradictions by renewing the dream

of universal inclusion and equality. Both of these movements suggest

that democracy as it currently exists cannot continue.

Meanwhile, the global financial crisis of 2008 has not been resolved,

but simply staved off through the massive privatization of public

resources and the creation of new, even larger financial bubbles to

temporarily absorb excess capital. Capitalism desperately needs a new

territory to which to expand. Whatever strategy capitalists adopt will

need to offer an exponential growth in profitable investment

opportunities and a solution to the mass unemployment that could afflict

more than half the global labor force as Artificial Intelligence and

robotization renders them redundant.

These two crises are intimately connected. Capitalists will support the

governmental models that protect their interests, whereas only the State

can open new territories for capital accumulation and quell the

resistance that always arises. Pulling at the seams exposed in this

interstice, we can begin to conduct a diagnostic of the future that

those in power are busily assembling in an attempt to bury the divergent

and emancipatory possibilities that lay before us. If we do nothing,

this Machine we are fighting will correct its malfunctions. If we

analyze those malfunctions and the solutions being proposed, we can act

more intelligently. Crisis offers us an opportunity for a revolution

that could abolish the State and capitalism, but only if we understand

how domination is evolving and set out to block its advance, rather than

paving the way for new forms of domination as so many revolutionaries

have done in the past.

To accomplish this, we will examine the architecture of the current

world system and pinpoint what exactly in this world system is failing.

The diagnostic will tease out what capitalism needs to get out of the

present crisis and what proposals offer it the most promising horizon,

focusing on the possibility of a bioeconomic expansion. In parallel, we

will analyze the crisis of democracy, both at the level of the

nation-state and the level of interstate, global cooperation, comparing

the prospects of fascist, progressive democratic, hybrid, and

technocratic solutions to restore social peace and satisfy the needs of

capitalists. Within this discussion, we will look at climate change,

understanding it as a linchpin that conditions the governmental and

economic crises and also suggests—or even requires—a synthesis in the

responses to those two crises. Finally, we will address what all this

means for us and our possibilities for action.

The Ethno-State

On July 20, 2018, with the signing of the “Jewish nation-state” law,

Israel became the first explicit ethno-state. Likud’s actions, and the

reactionary coalition they represent, throw into sharp relief the

ongoing crisis of democracy.

An ethno-state is a recent reformulation of the sovereign nation-state,

that fundamental element of the liberal world order from the 1648 Treaty

of Westphalia until today. Ethnos and nation have the same meaning—the

former from a Greek root, the latter from a Latin root—so the difference

is contextual. From 1648 to 1789, the nation-state evolved into its

presently understood form as an institutional complex that purports to

give political expression to a nation via the mechanism of

representation, as modulated by the Enlightenment worldview and values

of legal equality and universal rights.

A reactionary departure from this now dusty model, the ethno-state is a

revision of the Enlightenment worldview based on 21st century

understandings of the old political terms. In the 17th century, none of

the Western nations existed as such; they were still carving themselves

out of myriad linguistic and cultural expressions and inventing the

social institutions that could assemble the cultural gravity needed to

force disparate peoples into a common interclass identity. The most

stable proto-nation at the time, the British, was still a hierarchical

alliance of several nations. The creators of the nation-state (or

interstate) system, those we would anachronistically refer to as the

Dutch, were known as the United Provinces or the Low Countries, and what

unity they had was based more on shared opposition to the imperial power

of Hapsburg Spain than to shared national identity. They did not have a

shared language or a shared religion.

Originally, Westphalian sovereignty was a system of segregation and

minority rights: strong borders were drawn between political entities,

ending the patchwork feudal system in which most land was inalienable

and had multiple owners and users. Since feudal rulers had possessions

in multiple countries, no country was subject to a uniform political

hierarchy. Westphalia cemented such hierarchies, culminating in a

supreme ruler in each land, and establishing the religion of the rulers

as the religion of the land. However, members of religious minorities

still had the right to practice in private as long as they were

Catholics, Lutherans, or Calvinists (as only the United Provinces

practiced a religious tolerance broad enough to include Anabaptists and

Jews). In its inchoate phase, this system used religious identity to

perform the segregating function the nation would later play.

As there was yet no science of the nation, the different strategies of

nation-building that arose over the next two centuries were initially

considered equally valid: the melting pot of the United States, the

Enlightenment colonialism of France, the scientific essentialism with

which the leading thinkers of academia and government across the Western

world attempted to fix ethnicity as a biological reality.

The 21st century reactionary malcontents of the liberal world order

appeal to an outdated scientific essentialism to contest the postmodern

and transhumanist evolutions of the nation concept. These more adaptable

ideological devices pair the increasing global integration of capitalism

with a philosophical integration of humankind. The postmodernists

unclothed the brute mechanisms of nation-building to portray an

alienated sameness that putatively cuts across continents, while the

transhumanists adapt liberal values to a cult of the bio-machine, in

which the supposed differences between human communities become

irrational and an updated, progressive version of Western culture is

proposed as the new universal.

Opposing these psycho-economic innovations, the reactionary proponents

of the ethno-state use one fundamental pillar of modernity against

another, conjuring up a notion of nationality that is simultaneously

19th and 21st century, reviving the white supremacist elements that were

always present in Enlightenment thinking, and jettisoning what had been

the integrally interconnected element of democratic equality.

In other words, today’s ethno-state isn’t just a reformulation of the

classic nation-state: the ethno-state emerges from out the other side of

democracy, attempting a break with the old Enlightenment synthesis. Yet,

at the same time, the new formulation demands the ethno-state fulfill

the ancient putative purpose of the nation-state: to take care of a

people and give them political expression. The proponents of the

ethno-state judge this task to be more important than what for centuries

had been seen as inseparable, concomitant functions within Western

thinking: the guarantee of equal rights and democratic participation.

If we look at it clearly, we see that the ethno-state is a reactionary

response to a crisis of democracy and the nation-state that is, if not

general, certainly global. Noting the first clue that could enable us to

identify broader patterns, let us recall that it was the

para-institutional left of the alter-globalization movement that first

sounded the crisis of the nation-state and called on the State—as it

still pathetically calls—to fulfill its duty and take care of its

people.

The Israeli state has revealed its willingness to break with democratic

equality in order to construct a new synthesis by legislating non-equal

rights—explicitly denying Arabs, Muslims, and other non-Jews the right

to self-determination or the right to land and housing, and specifically

striking even a symbolic commitment to democracy from the language of

the new law.

The World System

The period between World War I and World War II represented an

interregnum during which the UK fought to retain its dominance in an

expiring world system, while Germany and the US vied for the role of

architect of a new world system (after the USSR quickly abandoned its

meager attempts at a global transformation). As Giovanni Arrighi argues,

the 1929 crash marked the terminal crisis of the British system. Since

World War II, the US has engineered and led a world system of economic

accumulation and interstate cooperation. The ostensible champion of

decolonization, itself a nation of former colonies that won their

independence, the US won the participation of practically the entire

world population in its system by creating the UN and giving all the new

nation-states a seat at the table. Through the Bretton Woods

Institutions—the International Monetary Fund and later the

GATT-cum-WTO—the US improved on the earlier British system and

intensified global participation in the capitalist regime by creating a

fair set of rules based on the ideology of free trade. The rules were

fair insofar as they were supposed to be the same for everyone, in

contrast to the earlier colonial system that was explicitly based on

supremacy and military might—the sort of naked practices that had been

necessary to brutally force the world’s population into a capitalist

economy. And the rules were attractive to the dominant players because

they removed the obstacles to capital accumulating more capital, so

those who had the most would profit the most. Within this diabolical

arrangement, the US maintained military superiority—the one element no

one talked about equalizing—through the North Atlantic Treaty

Organization.

It might have been an ironclad structure, but power is first and

foremost a belief system, and the power of stupidity is such that

nothing in the world is foolproof. We should never expect the State to

be above the effects of stupidity; on multiple levels, the State is the

institutionalization of human stupidity. Real wisdom never needed a

State.

With such exceptional power, the US ruling class felt that they were

above their own rules. It was the US, and especially its reactionaries,

that sabotaged the UN, the WTO, and NATO. Of the three, the hamstringing

of the UN was the most cooperative venture, involving Democrats and

Republicans in near equal measure, though the Democrats did a better job

of making the UN feel appreciated even as they prevented it from

carrying out its mission in Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, South

Africa, and above all, Israel.

It is fitting that the new synthesis that could sound the death knell

for the US world system should find its first manifestation in Israel,

its most costly ally and inopportune beneficiary. More than any other

bloody client state, it was Israel’s aggressive use of US support that

turned the UN into a paper tiger incapable of addressing the most

flagrant injustices in the world. Nor was this a necessary price to pay

in order to achieve Machiavellian geopolitical interests in the Middle

East. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arabic states have proven more

reliable allies, with more natural resources, than tiny, belligerent,

destabilizing Israel. It is possible that this disastrous alliance is

less the result of strategic thinking than of white supremacist and

Christian thinking—the identification of the US political class with a

Judeo-Christian culture. Israeli white supremacy is much more developed

than Saudi white supremacy. Not through any fault of the Saudis, who

don’t hold back in abusing and exploiting their own racialized

underclasses, but because, a thousand years after the Crusades,

Westerners still view Arabs and Muslims as a threat.

Granted, with more military aid per capita than any other country in the

world (and the highest military expenditures per square kilometer),

Israel has been highly useful to NATO as a military laboratory

developing techniques not only for interstate warfare but also

intra-state warfare of the kind most relevant to the likes of the US,

the UK, and France: gated communities defending themselves against

racialized ghettos. But other countries could have also served that role

in a way that didn’t destabilize a geopolitical hotspot.

World systems always fluctuate and eventually come to an end. The

patterns of these changes are useful areas of study. Up until now,

successive world systems have shown an alternation between expansion and

intensification. The Dutch-led cycle of accumulation represented an

intensification of modes of colonial exploitation. That exploitation had

already been spread throughout the Indian Ocean and as far as South

America by the Portuguese and the Castillian-Genovese partnership, but

the Dutch perfected the scorched earth engineering of new economies and

new societies.

The British-led cycle of accumulation represented a geographical

expansion that saw colonialism (still using what were largely Dutch

economic and political models) absorb every last corner of the globe.

And the US-led cycle of accumulation represented an intensification of

capitalist and interstate relations that had obtained under the previous

cycle, as colonies liberated themselves, politically, in order to

participate more fully in Western capitalism and global democratic

structures.

The accelerating pace of these changes suggests that we are due for a

new cycle of accumulation. Arrighi hypothesized that the 1973 petroleum

crisis was the signal crisis of the US cycle, signaling the switch from

industrial to financial expansion and thus the inflating of a massive

bubble, which should make the 2008 recession the terminal crisis. The

apparent end of US hegemony, which future historians may date to 2018

unless 2020 brings extreme changes, suggests we may already be in the

interregnum. Signs of this include Palestine’s declaration, after the US

embassy move to Jerusalem, that there was no place for the US in future

peace negotiations; declarations that the EU is prepared to make do

without close cooperation from the US; the expanding role of China in

geopolitics through the Belt and Road Initiative; the launching of the

Transpacific Partnership—the largest free trade area in the

world—without the US; and finally the diplomatic end run that North

Korea performed around the US, through bilateral negotiations with South

Korea and China, and then negotiations with the US in which the latter

had no leverage, effectively destroying the most effective international

consensus and embargo on the North that the US had ever orchestrated.

Democracy, as the ideology underpinning the US-led world system, is in

crisis because US hegemony is in crisis, and it is also in crisis

because it is failing to deliver the political expression that will

suffice to keep world populations integrated into a single economic and

interstate system, from Greece to Hungary to Myanmar.

The reactionary coalition that was created by Netanyahu—not by

Trump—does not represent the only way forward from liberal democracy.

But the fact that an important state, followed by a growing body of

others, is breaking apart an old and hallowed synthesis—turning the

nation-state against universal equality—is incontrovertible evidence

that the world system that has governed us up until now is falling

apart.

The Reactionary Right

As political labels, left and right refer originally to the left and

right benches of the Estates General at the beginning of the French

Revolution, with different political tendencies clustering together in

different rows. Properly speaking, anarchists have never belonged to the

left, unless we count those shameful moments when a part of the movement

joined the Bolsheviks in Russia or the Republican government in Spain.

Rather than exemplars of effective anarchist action, these were mediocre

opportunists and possibilists who were unable to temper the

authoritarian tendencies of their erstwhile allies nor even to save

their own sorry hides.

Nonetheless, anarchists have always participated in revolutionary

movements and been staunch enemies to reactionary movements, and as such

we have often found a great deal of affinity with the base—not in the

leadership—of the left-wing organizations. The very first anarchists to

take that name were those enragés of the French Revolution who were too

irresponsible to join the Jacobins and Girondins in their power

politics, sordid alliances, stifling bureaucracies, and massacres of the

peasants on behalf of the bourgeoisie.

In this historical framing, the right is certainly the most repugnant

arm of government, but not necessarily the most dangerous for the people

at the bottom. In the case of the French Revolution, yes, the peasants

were starving under the monarchy, but they were massacred by the

Jacobins, and eventually stripped of the commons forever by various

brands of progressive liberals.

Of all the tendencies of power, the reactionary right has been the least

perspicacious in anticipating the changing winds of fortune. Every

progressive change in the organization of global capitalism and the

interstate system has taken much more from the Left than from the Right,

but this does not mean the right is irrelevant. It is not forward

thinking, it can even be described as the part of the ruling class that

doesn’t have any good ideas, but the conflicts that the right has pushed

past the social boiling point time and again generally shape, if

negatively, the regime to come. The future has rarely belonged to the

Napoleons and the Hitlers, but they have left their bloody mark,

decimating the underclasses and the social struggles of their times. And

when the left has been most successful at engineering new, more

effective regimes of domination and exploitation, it has been by

co-opting the survival responses of the underclasses and smothering the

most radical elements in progressive alliances that seemed to be

necessary at the time to ensure survival in the face of right-wing

assaults.

If the Future is a Machine for bending unknown outcomes in the interests

of those who dominate a society, this interplay between Right and Left

has long been one of its principal engines.

A historical analysis makes it clear that changes to models of

government and exploitation do not occur in one country alone, but

rather always in response to dynamics that have been global for

centuries now.

The same is true of a new iteration of the reactionary right that across

the center of the expiring world system—the anachronistic West—has found

common ground in articulating the ethno-state program. Those who follow

trends in neo-fascism have traced the international reach of this idea,

but they have seldom enunciated the prime role occupied by the Israeli

Right, an omission that is no longer tenable since the new law of July

20. The blind spot regarding Israel was ideologically inscribed, given

the weight the German Left—influenced by the pro-Israel anti-Deutsch

ideology—has had in the articulation of contemporary anti-fascism. But

Prospecting the Future

The Future is also a discursive machine, building the narrative that

draws coherence out of a chaos of conflicting events, reframing all,

highlighting some, and misdirecting away from others. As a largely

political strategy, this machine mobilizes immense state energies to

produce desired outcomes, but the fluid horizon of what is

techno-socially possible constitutes a primary limitation. At the moment

of clarity in which the new narrative is discovered, there is a

political identification of a certain development as a strategic

breakthrough. At this moment, the enterprise accelerates to the pitch of

a shared campaign, uniting planners and capitalists in a race forward.

But before that moment, in the inchoate phase, tech companies and

research agencies cast about the darkened frontiers like a slime mold,

feeling out untapped possibilities that register as “profitable.” The

leitmotif of this phase is the admired intuition of the venture

capitalist. Investment in an uncertain future that has not yet been

subjected to scientific control must be hazarded blindly, like a

gambler’s wagers, rather than evaluated systematically, as in the

calculations of the casino owner.

In this situation, vastly different ideas of profit are subjected to the

same, stupefying metric. A casino is burning. Putting down the chips for

another round of poker might be more profitable than putting out the

fire. The capitalist class is exhibiting just this same range of

behaviors on the cusp of the end of the current cycle of accumulation.

Practically all the US capitalists besides the steel companies are

getting hurt by the tariff war, but they took home hundreds of millions

in tax cuts and they are salivating over the possibilities opened by the

repeal of environmental regulations. Silicon Valley capitalists

recognized that Trump’s anti-immigration policies were a bad business

strategy, but their protests have died down. After all, governments

don’t just restrict or enable access to markets, as liberal philosophy

holds. They also create markets. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and

Accenture have been dipping their fingers into lucrative ICE and

Pentagon contracts, supplying the profitable border regime. Trump’s

program is a clear lesson that capitalists don’t simply dictate

government agendas. The State is needed to tame social terrain for

economic expansion, but states also command so many resources that they

can get capitalists to invest in areas that contradict their long- and

mid-range interests.

Capitalists don’t know the future. Polling their predictions can be

useful, but at best it gets us into the heads of people who are experts

at turning a profit but blinded by their ideology to such an extent that

they fail to see the contradictory nature of capitalism.

On the whole, what we can see from their behavior is an increase in

systemic instability.

The US is still home to the largest or second largest market in the

world, depending on how you measure it; however, the typical US investor

now keeps 40% or even 50% of their portfolio in foreign stocks, between

two and four times the rate in the 1980s. In 2017 alone, the total

amount of US money invested overseas grew by 7.6% ($427 billion), mostly

going to Europe, including $63 billion of investment in Swiss

corporations (plus $168 billion, not counted as investment, deposited in

Swiss bank accounts), with even more going to Ireland. Foreign direct

investment in the US took a nosedive in 2017, dropping 36%.

The ultra-rich are also investing in luxury doomsday bunkers, paying

hundreds of millions of dollars for refurbished military facilities or

missile silos in Europe and North America, equipped to support life for

a year or more with autonomous air, water, and power systems, in

addition to swimming pools, bowling allies, and cinemas. Sales of

high-end bunkers by one major company went up 700% from 2015 to 2016,

and continued to rise after the presidential elections.

To add to the bad news, experts in Artificial Intelligence, including

many of the very people who profit off AI development, are warning that

within ten to twenty years, AI could cause massive unemployment as

robots and computer programs replace manufacturing, clerical,

managerial, retail, and delivery jobs. Of the 50 largest job categories

in the US, only 27 are not significantly threatened with replacement by

AI. Of the top 15, only three are not threatened: nurses, waiters, and

personal care aids. Retail salesperson, which sits in the number one

spot, with 4,602,500 employed in 2016, is projected to decline

considerably as online sales continue to grow. At the physical stores

that will remain due to widely held preferences for purchasing certain

products in person, retail staff will persist even after they are no

longer technologically necessary, as their primary purpose is to provide

a human touch to encourage sales, unlike cashiers (the number two

position at three and a half million) who will continue to be replaced

by machines.

In fact, most of the job categories that will not be replaced by

machines are protected not by technological limits but by cultural

limits. Our society would have to undergo a huge shift in values to

permit lawyers (no. 44) or elementary school teachers (no. 22) to be

replaced by robots. Take the example of waiters, the fastest growing job

category. At no point in history has the job been technologically

necessary. But having a person whose job is to wait, to be on call to

carry your food from the kitchen to your table, creates an experience

that people with means have long been willing to pay for.

Though the worst effects of AI and robotization have yet to be felt

(outside of manufacturing, telecommunications, and postal services),

underemployment is already high, with more and more people struggling to

make ends meet. The rates of actual unemployment in the US are said to

be historically low, but that is largely because growing numbers of

people without jobs are no longer being counted as part of the

workforce.

US credit card debt has reached $1 trillion and interest rates are only

rising, significantly faster than wages, in fact. This is largely

because Trump’s major tax giveaway forced the Fed to raise rates to

prevent runaway inflation. The proportion of debt service payments to

disposable income per household has recently returned to the high levels

seen just before the 2008 Great Recession; in simple language, people

have to spend a larger share of their money paying off their debts.

Meanwhile, the economic stimulus provided by Trump’s tax cuts is

expected to run out by 2020. Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister has also

warned that by 2020, increasing demand for oil will outstrip falling

supplies unless there is a major influx of investments to tap new

supplies. And oil prices have already been going up, which tends to

increase the prices of all other consumer goods.

Speaking of oil, the industry has largely decided that a

carbon-emissions tax is acceptable. Even some Republicans have proposed

such a tax. Businesses would have to pay $24 per ton for the right to

emit CO2, and that sum of money would go as a payout to poorer

households and to upgrade transportation infrastructure. The catch in

this proposal is that the government would loosen emissions regulations,

so companies could basically do whatever they want to the atmosphere as

long as they pay for it, and they would be shielded from the kind of

civil responsibility that has been brought down on the tobacco industry

and even on Monsanto. All this indicates that energy companies want

incentives to develop alternative energies, they expect oil prices to

keep rising, and they fear a backlash will force them to pay damages.

Corporate debt is at a new high. The value of corporate bonds

outstanding rose from 16% of US GDP in 2007 to 25% in 2017. There is

even more corporate borrowing going on in emerging markets, and more

risky loans. As long as interest rates are low, most corporations will

be able to continue this practice, but if interest rates go up, as they

are expected to in order to keep inflation in check, this could cause a

cascade of defaults—the popping of the bubble—especially if it coincides

with the slowdown in the global economy expected to begin between 2020

and 2022. Interest rates go up as business goes down: companies can’t

pay all their debts, or take out new loans to pay off the old ones.

This is not just a US problem. Though Indian and especially Chinese

economic growth have been astronomic, China is slowing down and

beginning to show signs that it might face a stock market crash, and

India is running into the kind of currency problems that could soon put

a stop to its growth.

By its very nature, capitalism creates bubbles and sets itself

repeatedly on the course of financial collapse. However, these collapses

can be very difficult to predict. One of the best retrospective models

to date providing a long view of these cycles of accumulation, worked

out by world systems theorist Giovanni Arrighi, is already lagging in

its predictions. Arrighi charted an exponential acceleration in the

frequency of past crises: as capitalism grows exponentially, capital

accumulates and collapses more and more rapidly. However, for his model

to maintain its geometric accuracy, the 2008 Great Recession should have

been the terminal crisis of the American cycle of accumulation. Although

according to some measures, that recession has just been staved off and

not fully surpassed, the apparent recovery still breaks the pattern of

past transitions from one cycle to another.

Part of this can be explained by capitalism’s growing intelligence and

institutional complexity, namely, in the growing role of state planning

in the economy and increasingly robust and constant state economic

interventions. This refutes neo-Marxists who seize any opportunity to

announce the obsolescence of the State, no matter how many times they

are shown to be wrong.

FDR’s New Deal, a major investment of government money into public works

in order to generate jobs, enabled the US to exit the Great Depression

ahead of its European contemporaries, positioning it to be the economic

savior of war-torn Europe and Asia and hence the architect of the next

cycle of accumulation. Massive government spending as a constant

economic stimulus has been a hallmark of the American system, tied to

the Federal Reserve and a global network of central banks and monetary

institutions that keep inflation within acceptable boundaries and bail

out private banks or smaller governments that fail.

Paradoxically, this entire regime of economic stability is based on

debt. To keep capitalism from falling apart, the US and a great many

other states systematically spend far more money than they actually

have. The US deficit—the amount it spends every year beyond its actual

earnings—is now more than $1 trillion, and total debt is now $21

trillion, larger than the GDP (the total production of the US economy).

The government will pay hundreds of billions of dollars in interest to

its creditors this year.

However, the system is not as volatile as it seems. From a capitalist

point of view, it’s quite well organized (although, in contradiction to

free market ideology, entirely dependent on the State). About a third of

the debt is owed to other governmental agencies, primarily Social

Security. This practice of a government borrowing from itself stabilizes

a huge chunk of the debt by keeping it out of the hands of private

creditors who might cash in bonds or stop making loans. It also gives

those capitalists an assurance: if the US defaults on its debt, it can

choose to first default on the debt owed to its own ordinary citizens,

so the ones who suffer are old retirees, not investors. This is similar

to what went down in Puerto Rico recently.

About a quarter of the debt is held by mutual funds, banks, insurance

companies, and other private investors, and over a third is held by

foreign governments, primarily China and Japan. Both the private and the

foreign state investors buy US government debt because it’s considered a

sure bet. Anyone with a lot of cash on hand probably wants to put a

significant portion of that cash into a safe investment that will

continuously bring modest but sure-fire interest payments. But that

actually speaks very little to the mathematics of this wager. No one can

explain how the US would ever be able to pay off its debt without

massively devaluing its currency and thus destroying the global economy.

And the more the debt grows, the more the interest grows, until the

point when the interest payments due exceed the capacity of the US

budget to pay them.

Basically, the favorable rating of US debt only means that within the

current global economic system, investors cannot imagine the US not

being able to pay interest on its debts. But the only way to avoid a

default is if investors and foreign governments keep lending the US

increasing amounts of money forever. And both China and Japan (the two

largest lenders) have slowed down in their purchase of US debt, whereas

Russia recently dumped its relatively minor share of US debt wholesale.

Capitalist crisis is often connected to warfare, as nation-states fight

for control of the global system. Warfare is also useful to capitalism

because it destroys a huge amount of excess value, wiping the slate

clean for new investments. This is basically a way of saving capitalism

from itself. The economic system is constantly generating an

exponentially growing quantity of capital, until it has more than it can

invest. This abundance—and it is not a human abundance, but a purely

mathematical abundance, as people are still starving even in these

Golden Ages—threatens to destroy the cumulative value of all capital. So

a part of it is destroyed through warfare, those who bet on the losing

side are removed from play, and the others continue the game.

However, since World War II, there has been no direct warfare between

major powers, in large part because of the principle of Mutual Assured

Destruction introduced by nuclear weaponry. The technological progress

of warfare has outstripped its usefulness as a political tool, except at

the scale of smaller proxy wars.

In a debt-based economy, though, it is possible to destroy a tremendous

amount of excess value without warfare. Wiping the US debt clean would

hurt the Japanese and Chinese governments and hence their economies, it

would wreck many a bank and mutual fund, and it would leave most of the

US working class without health care or retirement benefits.

In that case, barring revolution, a robust economy capable of a high

degree of industrial production and liquid capital for the necessary

investments and loans would pick up the pieces, starting a new cycle of

accumulation. The European Union or China might be in such a position.

The former, because its policy of no-deficit spending gives it a measure

of protection and might set it apart as a model of responsible economics

should the US model collapse catastrophically; the latter because of its

greater governmental ability to adjust the entire economy in a

technocratic way, and its massive industrial capabilities.

Depending on how great the political chaos of the collapse and on their

ability to project military force, the new global leaders would either

repair and rebuild whatever institutional elements of the present system

they found most useful to their strategic plans, such as the WTO or the

UN, or—if the conflicts had grown into definitive ruptures with the old

architecture—they would need to amass the political influence to bring

enough players to the table to build a new complex of global

institutions.

There’s one problem here. For capitalism to continue, the new cycle of

accumulation following the next collapse will have to be exponentially

greater than the one that came before it. That seems to be one of the

least variable features of the historical model in play. By its very

nature, the amount of capital to be invested is always growing. This

explains the historical variation between periods of geographical

expansion, when new territories are brought in contact with capitalism

through a basic relationship best characterized as primitive

accumulation under some kind of colonial control, and periods of

intensification, when the inhabitants of the zones colonized in the

prior period are more fully integrated and reproduced as capitalist

subjects, not just engaging in forced labor to produce raw materials for

faraway markets and buying up a small portion of excess production from

the metropolis, but living, breathing, and eating capitalism, becoming

capitalists and wage workers in their own right.

The “American century” saw the intensification of the capitalist

relationship within the entirety of territory brought under the control

of capital during the British cycle, which was basically the whole

world. There is no other terrestrial geography for a future cycle of

accumulation to expand to. Sure, the Indian economy is still growing,

and Chinese state capitalists are going through Africa, Oceania, and the

Caribbean, engaging in the kind of predatory lending to acquire

infrastructure that the World Bank pioneered in the 1970s and ’80s,

while Google and a couple other companies are making tepid inroads into

Africa to encourage a functional high-tech economy there. But these

so-called underdeveloped populations are smaller, not larger, than the

populations of North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia,

where capitalist development is reaching a saturation point. To simplify

grossly, the next terrain for capitalist expansion would have to be

larger to accommodate another cycle.

This conundrum is what led to the prediction in “A Wager on the Future”

and “Extraterrestrial Exploitation” that the next territory for

capitalist expansion was offplanet, on the moon, the asteroid belt, and

eventually, Mars. Many of the smartest capitalists today are engaging in

serious investment and design to make that possible. But we can thank

our lucky stars here on Earth that over the last two years, they have

not been making advancements fast enough to save capitalism from its

impending collapse.

SpaceX’s reusable rockets and drone recovery system provide one of the

most important pieces for a potential extraterrestrial cycle of

accumulation—cheap access to space—but none of the next pieces have come

into place yet. Those would include a luxury passenger service into

orbital space and eventually to the moon, which would never constitute a

major industry in its own right but would help inject cash flows at a

critical stage in the development of longer-distance capabilities, as

well as selling the mega-rich on the desirability of space in order to

win more financing. The second, more important piece is asteroid and

lunar mining. Japan and NASA are currently in the process of landing

robotic probes on asteroids to carry out the chemical analysis that will

facilitate future prospecting, among other things, but those probes

aren’t due back until 2020 and 2023, respectively, and there are still

other missing steps before commercial mining could begin. Without those

other pieces, cheaper rockets only contribute to the profitability of a

fully geocentric economic activity, the launching of ever more

satellites.

There is, however, another possible direction for capitalist expansion.

As Richard Feynman said presciently in 1959, “there’s plenty of room at

the bottom.”

Bioeconomic Expansion

The seven billion human beings on the planet is a small flock if every

life form and every form of life can be plugged into capitalism. There’s

no reason a new productive expansion of capitalism has to be geographic,

since capitalism works in a space of flows, managing relations, and not

in a space of places, managing square kilometers.

A bioeconomic expansion would constitute the invasion of capitalism into

the processes through which life itself is produced and reproduced. The

precedents for this activity are important, for they represent the first

incursions, but they have not yet been developed to the point that they

could ignite a new cycle of accumulation. Such precedents include, in

the production of organic life, genetic engineering, and in the

reproduction of human life, social network technologies. The former have

allowed a few companies to make a lot of money, but they have not been

terribly effective, and still fall far short of their potential to

change our relationship with food production, disease, and other areas

of intervention. The latter have produced mass stupefaction and

exponentially improved techniques of social control, but they are still

measured in the advertising dollars they generate for the sale of real

commodities, a quaternary sector rather than an economy in its own

right.

A bioeconomic expansion would involve profiting on the planetary

processes that, once plugged into a capitalist logic, could be analyzed

as “reproductive”; the biological processes that are constantly

exploited through primitive accumulation but have still not submitted to

a capitalist architecture; the organic chemical processes that

constitute the constant unfolding of life; and the social processes

grouped under the heading of “free time” that until now have only been

clumsily exploited by consumerism. The rudimentary beginnings of profit

models targeting the first three can be found in carbon trading,

fertility treatments, and gene therapy, respectively.

Over the next two decades, these sectors might expand in the following

ways:

The deployment of orbital reflectors or other devices to decrease and

then fine-tune the amount of solar radiation that reaches the planet.

Together with an increase in carbon capture technologies, this could

enable the business-oriented mechanical control of the climate, not as a

biosphere within which the economy takes place, but as yet another realm

of economic considerations.

The use of cloning to prevent the extinction of economically useful

species. Together with a total inventory of biodiversity regulated by AI

that can deploy drones and genetically coded nanobots capable of

identifying and destroying members of target species, this could

theoretically allow for total rational control of all ecosystems, with

the parameters and objectives set by whatever consortium of companies

and governments own the technology and oversee the procedures.

The assemblage of made-to-order nanomaterials and the use of genetically

modified animal/factories to produce complex organic compounds. This

would do away with the concept of “natural resources” by turning prime

materials into an industrial product unbound by natural limits.

The development of nanomedicine and gene therapy to further wrest human

life away from the vagaries of death and disease, which negatively

impact human productivity. Death especially is a problem, as it allows

people to escape domination permanently.

A shift away from open field monoculture to a decentralized total

control model of agriculture based in greenhouse production and

hydroponics, in which food production takes place in an engineered

environment that is totally controlled according to light, heat,

atmosphere, water, and nutrients, breaking with Green Revolution

agriculture that attempted to carry out food production by industrially

modifying the natural environment. Decentralized agriculture would be

more energy efficient, reducing dependence on long-distance

transportation and heavy machinery, and it would temporarily allow for

an increase in employment and investment as agricultural land—40% of the

planet’s surface—is redesigned and also potentially reintegrated with

urban space.

The capitalization of social processes can progress through the

expansion of therapeutic, leisure, sexo-affective, recreational, and

entertainment economies and the algorithmic surveillance and

organization of those economies. This would entail the total conquest

and abolition of that partial victory won through centuries of labor

struggles, “free time.”

Once upon a time, capitalists were only able to appreciate the

productive value of their underlings, whom they viewed either as slaves

or machinery, depending on how progressive they were. The resistance of

those exploited classes failed to abolish this relationship, but it did

succeed in winning some breathing room. The achievement of higher wages

was above all the attaining of “free time.” Workers didn’t want higher

wages for the same 12- or 14-hour days; they left that for the

professional classes, like lawyers and doctors, whose sense of

self-worth derives entirely from their value to the market. They wanted

to be able to meet their needs more easily in order to retain a part of

their lives for their own enjoyment. The opposition between life and

labor could not be more clear.

Capitalism can brook no autonomy, no liberated space, but neither could

it overcome the resistance of the exploited. For a century, its

strategic engagement with free time was to produce alternative

commercial activities to capitalize on the choices people made while not

at work. Free time was still free, but if capitalists and state planners

could impoverish the imagination and the social landscape to the point

that people were more likely to choose consumer activities over

non-monetary forms of play and relaxation, they would remain tied into

capitalist relations in a way that created artificial demands, thus

sustaining new productive sectors.

Public greens and commons were paved over, party politics and state

repression led to the wane of workers’ centers, sidewalks and plazas

were absorbed as restaurant terraces, the sofa in front of the radio or

television replaced the front stoop or the chairs and benches placed

directly in the street, communal spaces of sewing and washing were

replaced by machines, sports were professionalized and commercialized,

bars replaced drinking in the woods or in the parks, walks in the

mountains gave way to specialized sports dependent on the acquisition of

expensive gear, plastic and later electronic monstrosities eclipsed the

simple, imaginative, and physically engaging wooden toys that uncles

would carve for their nephews and nieces and the mere sticks that

children would pick up off the ground and turn into a million different

things depending on their imagined and self-defined needs.

Capitalist incursions into free time necessitated advertising, which

took the form of an increasingly aggressive, ubiquitous call for

attention, a distraction from the non-monetized possibilities within the

terrain of free time, subject to diminishing returns as advertising’s

targets became increasingly hostile, cynical, sophisticated, saturated,

or self-absorbed. The decreasing effectiveness of advertising reveals

that free time still provided people a choice, and though capitalists

overwhelmingly won that competition against unmediated nature,

imagination, and sociability (here my automatic dictionary jumps in with

a squiggly red line to tell me that “unmediated” is not a word)—and the

consumer economy has been immensely profitable and only becomes more so

as time goes on—the effectiveness of advertising notwithstanding, those

in power prefer that we do not get any kind of meaningful choice at all.

So be it: in the new economy there is no more distinction between labor

time and free time or even producer time and consumer time; rather, all

lived time is absorbed into a unified capitalist logic leading to a

qualitative advance in the production of subjectivities. Since the

advent of the cell phone, workers are always on call, but the social

technologies that have been inaugurated more recently or wait just over

the horizon mean that the entirety of our lived time is subject to

surveillance, commercialization, and exploitation. Whereas before,

information on consumers could be sold to advertisers who could make

money convincing people to buy material products, with the entire

economic chain dependent on the sale of a manufactured good at the end

of the day, we have seen a qualitative leap in which data has become a

resource with intrinsic value (think bitcoin), and in order to retain

our status as social beings, we have to turn all our processes of

sociability over to the digital apparatuses that mine our activity to

produce data.

Before, you could still be a sociable human if you played soccer in the

park, invited people over for a barbecue, or went camping in the woods

rather than buying tickets to the game, meeting at a bar, or going

bungee jumping. Today, you are a social pariah as well as unemployable

if you have no smartphone, no Facebook or Instagram, no GPS, and don’t

use whatever that stupid app is that enables you to invite people to

events.

There is no longer the possibility of spending free time in the woods as

a non-commercial activity when your movements there are tracked on GPS,

allowing the relevant entities to attach a value to natural parks or

scheme about how to fill that commercial space.

Nixon took us off the gold standard to allow financial expansion to

proceed unchecked. To regain stability, capitalism may well anchor

economic value in data—in one form of bit economy or another.

The social economy will need to grow considerably if it is to enable a

new cycle of capitalist accumulation, and though getting internet access

and smartphones to a global majority is certainly a necessary

precondition, that in itself won’t be enough to constitute an industrial

expansion. Remember that the US economic expansion of the postwar era

was based largely on everyone getting a car, and everyone in the middle

class a house in the suburbs. In comparison to houses and cars, phones

are rather cheap pieces of equipment to constitute the backbone of an

industrial expansion, given that each cycle needs to be exponentially

greater than the industrial and financial expansion in the cycle that

preceded it.

Room for growth in the social economy will have to include a further

integration of surveillance of people’s vital activity and exploitation

of their productive potential, so that surveillance is not limited to

spotting criminal behavior or identifying which products to advertise,

but constantly captures all activity within an economic logic, thus

inviting people to express themselves or contribute their creativity to

the adornment of virtual and social spaces—allowing everyone to be an

influencer in some way. It would also include the ascension of

crowdsourcing to a dominant productive model, taking advantage of total

connectivity to treat the population as a permanently available labor

pool ready to dedicate itself to solving some problem or another, often

without any pay in return. There would also be an exponential growth of

therapeutic, leisure, sexo-affective, recreational, gastronomic, travel,

medical, design, and entertainment economies into a merged

quality-of-life economy capable of generating the hundreds of millions

of employment profiles that will replace the ones AI and robotization

will make obsolete in manufacturing, telecommunications, retail, design

and architecture, janitorial and hygiene work, and eventually

transportation and delivery, clerical, accounting, and secretarial

sectors, supervisory and management positions across sectors,

construction, surveillance, and security.

The quality-of-life sector would make up for the misery and alienation

of capitalist life through a totally engineered sociability. Everyone

would be in some kind of therapy, and the upper-middle-class and higher

would have emotional and physical therapists, personal trainers, and

dietary consultants; they would eat out far more often than cook at

home, and their lives would largely revolve around leisure activities.

The precarious would work not only in restaurants and sales but also in

an expanding sex-work industry distinguished from other forms of

employment by increasingly blurry borders, or else as yoga instructors,

guides for extreme sports and adventure tourism, or assistants or filler

characters for commercialized LARPing, paintball, and similar games.

Designers and programmers would make up a large and highly remunerated

segment of the working class, lower only than executives and

capitalists, and followed in turn by professionals like lawyers,

doctors, technocrats, and professors, then cops, then nurses and other

therapists with a wide range of responsibilities and pay grades, then

precarious but well paid “creatives,” then the remaining blue collar

professions like carpenters and repair workers who deal in situations

too variable for AI to handle, then teachers, and then the bulk of the

precarious in the quality-of-life economy.

What about Mars?

Incidentally, the technological sectors—planetary, biological, chemical,

and social—that would need to advance to open up the territory for

another industrial expansion are the same sectors that would need to

advance to enable a subsequent extraterrestrial expansion of capitalism

and the effective colonization of outer space. A major feature of these

technologies, in contrast with the chief techniques of production and

accumulation that characterize the cycle that is now ending, is their

decentralization. Likewise, the colonization of Mars, to take one

example, would require small-scale, decentralized technology. They can’t

fly over large industrial compounds; the mission would only be feasible

with nanobots, 3D printers, and self-replicating machinery.

Made-to-order nanomaterials would be crucial for constructions able to

withstand extreme environments, and cloning combined with greenhouse

agriculture in totally contained, controlled environments would be

necessary to jumpstart food production and biosphere production. What’s

more, effective terraforming would be unthinkable if the State did not

already have experience with effective climate control here on Earth.

As for the social technologies, they might well be the linchpin.

Decentralized technology, such as would be necessary in extraterrestrial

colonization, can aid political decentralization. Any capitalist

ventures, scientific associations, and state agencies that one day

collaborate to colonize Mars or another celestial body will undoubtedly

address, along with a thousand other matters of technique, the question

of how to keep control of the colonies. Exerting military and

bureaucratic leverage on a population that is located one or several

months of travel time away is no easy feat. Five hundred years ago,

European colonizers accomplished this through the social technologies of

Christianity and whiteness, though not without a few major mutinies and

defections.

Again, it makes more sense to analyze the situation through the optic of

social control than the optic of capital accumulation. Capitalism has

long favored far more inefficient, centralized techniques of industrial

production because the State lacked the techniques to maintain control

over a diffuse production. Rather than the mere organizing committee of

Capital, the State supersedes and encompasses Capital, for territory

effectively disciplined by the State is the only territory in which

capitalism can function. Thus, the diffuse control enabled by new social

technologies (that internet of things in which we are the primary

things) is a vital component of extraterrestrial colonization.

The Necessity of Climate Change

The recent tremors in the Turkish economy, which almost sent the EU

tanking, make it clear that what economic growth is still taking place

today continues to be based on an unsustainable financial accumulation.

European banks have nowhere in Europe to invest all their earnings, so

they fund a huge wave of construction in Turkey, while Turkish companies

grow by borrowing dollars, taking advantage of the low interest rate. In

the short-term, free money. But as the US interest rate climbs, the

value of the Turkish lira plummets, and since the local economy had

never demanded the construction boom in the first place, it didn’t have

the means to pay back all the loans. Stocks in all of Europe’s major

banks dropped. It could have been the beginning of the big crash. But

Qatar stepped in with a $15 billion loan for Turkey, again showing the

importance of politics: one of Trump’s first diplomatic moves in the

region had been to buddy up to Saudi Arabia and give full support to the

Kingdom’s ostracism of Qatar. Then Trump got in a spat with Turkey and

tried to sink its economy, so Qatar stepped in to save it, for the time

being. Merkel, also recently shafted by the US, tried to normalize

relations with Turkey when she had been one of its primary critics.

There are similar construction bubbles in Brazil, in China, in

Singapore. The next crisis could start anywhere, but it will almost

certainly spread everywhere.

If a bioeconomic expansion is the most viable way for capitalism to

avoid its contradictions and continue its mad rampage, what political

strategies would enable that expansion to take place? Some of the

technological changes described above are already happening, but many

key elements require such a drastic change that strategic state planning

on a global scale would be necessary. This is not a good omen for

capitalism, since the global institutions for interstate cooperation are

in shambles, thanks in large part to extreme-right figures from

Netanyahu to Putin to Trump.

In the end, the War on Terror failed to rally the world powers to create

a new era of global cooperation. Because it borrowed too much of the

zero-sum Orientalism of the Cold War, it only led to the erosion of the

global political structures that maintained US hegemony.

Currently, the only viable platform from which to launch a new project

of interstate cooperation capable of deploying and managing the changes

that a bioeconomic expansion of capitalism would require can be found in

the response to climate change. Climate change provides a narrative of

unified global interests. Any political power that acts in the name of

addressing climate change can act in the name of all humanity: this

offers the possibility to establish a hegemonic project, the same way

that the narrative of democracy and human rights undergirded a hegemonic

project after the horrors of World War II. Political structures for

interstate coordination and global intervention would be justified as

holistic measures necessary to save the entire biosphere, and they could

also have a justifiably technocratic character, given that the media

have successfully framed climate change as a scientific rather than

economic or spiritual issue.

The major weakness of the US system was that the UN, as the safeguard of

human and state rights, could do little more than protest, whereas the

IMF and WTO, sanctioned to carry out technocratic interventions to

safeguard the economic order, had a clearly mercenary character, pitting

capitalism against human rights when under liberal democracy, the two

were supposed to find their synthesis. Under a regime driven by the

exigencies of responding to climate change, robust technocratic

interventions and the safeguarding of common interests would find their

perfect synthesis. As long as climate change is treated as a purely

scientific issue, any responses will have to be compatible with the

preexisting social relations, funding sources, and regulatory mechanisms

through which they are to be carried out. In other words, a technocratic

approach to climate change would not threaten capitalism.

But capitalists themselves are incapable of building the platform up to

achieve the kind of systemic change they need. Investment in renewable

energy fell by 7% in 2017. The volatility of the market will never

produce the resources necessary for a phase shift in energy

technologies. Liberal capitalism would leave us festering—or rather,

boiling—in a fossil fuel economy. A rapid shift to a climate change

economy will not be possible without most major governments introducing

huge policy shifts and legally mandating investment in alternative

energies and environmental protection measures as a significant part of

their total budgets, on par with health care or military spending.

Capitalism faces a great need for strategic change, for a governmental

mandate capable of redirecting social resources on a coordinated,

massive scale. This is where the question of different governmental

models becomes extremely important, as certain types of government are

better suited to make such a shift than others, and some political

tendencies are well positioned to seize the platform of climate change,

whereas others are incapable.

Fascism, Historically

Up until now, in mentioning the likes of Netanyahu or Trump I have

spoken of the reactionary or far right. There are those who favor

emotive hyperbole to historical clarity, and classify the entirety of

this reactionary movement as “fascist.” If I dispute this terminology,

it’s not because I enjoy semantic squabbles, but because sometimes,

words matter. In this case, theoretical precision is especially

important, because there is a longstanding tension between dictatorial

and democratic modes of state power.

In the dictatorial mode, one portion of the ruling class uses military

means to impose their strategic proposals on the rest of the ruling

class and on society at large. They do this by relying on a strong

military apparatus or by mobilizing a part of the lower classes against

a perceived internal enemy—usually, they do both. They may take this

course because they feel that the power structures they rely on are

being threatened in a way that the rest of the ruling class does not

appreciate, or because of a cultural conflict that leads them to see the

rest of the ruling class as enemies rather than as peers, or because

they do not have the necessary control over the lower classes to

generate a social consensus.

In the democratic mode, the ruling class debate strategic proposals and

try to win voluntary participation in their strategy, and thus a kind of

consensus, from as much of society as possible. While they may engage in

bitter fights against their rivals, they do not deny rivals the right to

exist, nor do they attempt to destroy the mechanisms that enable debate

and participatory decision-making. At various points in history, ruling

classes have recognized the advantages of the democratic mode. It

enables them to recuperate revolutionary movements and co-opt popular

values so that they not only protect themselves from their own

underclasses but enlist those underclasses to help manage the processes

of exploitation. It enables them to carry out intelligent and periodic

readjustments to ruling strategies, making the state apparatus

continuously stronger and more scientific. And it creates a positive-sum

game that prioritizes the mutual enrichment of all the property-owning

members of society instead of negative-sum infighting.

States historically toggle between dictatorial and democratic modes,

depending on circumstances; however, states are only able to make the

change at the drop of a hat if they have not built up a huge

psycho-social complex training people to identify with their dictator or

with their democracy. Usually, the stronger a state, the stronger the

ideological scaffolding that accompanies and justifies the dictatorial

or democratic mode; and therefore, the more stable the mode, the greater

the crisis it would take to force a change in mode.

Making a clear distinction between these two modes is important because

of how the experience of being governed changes from one mode to the

other.

Fascism is a specific political movement that arose in the 1920s in

Italy, inspiring similar political movements that took power in a dozen

other countries, each a variation on the original model. This model

never had time to homogenize itself because fascism was defeated by the

democratic and the socialist states, the former of which went on to

engineer the new world system.

Some anarchists in the past, like Voline, used a broader definition of

fascism in order to criticize the Soviet Union. They did so because

fascism was the dominant evil of the day, and because it was politically

expedient to use the label more widely. Nonetheless, they did not have

to engage in outright intellectual dishonesty in order to broaden this

label, the way the Communist Party did by describing the German

Socialists as “social-fascists” in order to justify their own

collaboration with the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. This is because

there were organic relations between left and right authoritarianism at

the time. The Italian fascists led by Mussolini largely came out of the

Socialist Party and improved upon the socialist tactic of mobilizing an

obedient mass movement to conquer state power, and the Nazi police state

directly modeled itself on its Soviet counterpart, not to mention the

affinity visible in the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact or the effective

conspiracy between the KPD and the Nazis to sabotage German democracy.

The broader definition used by Voline and a few contemporaries still

enjoyed a basic precision because it distinguished between dictatorial

and democratic modes of power. Voline was no lover of democracy, but he

knew that it was important to make a basic distinction between such

different modes. Thus, the justification for defining the USSR as

“fascist” was its suppression of free speech, free press, and

elections—in a word, its constitution as a dictatorship.

Today’s social critics for whom Trump and May represent “fascism” make

no such distinction. On the whole, they also refuse to define fascism.

Instead, they sometimes argue that since certain historians have been

even more strict in their definition—disputing whether the Nazis or

Falangists also qualify as fascists—they are justified in going to the

opposite extreme and being lax in their definition to the point of

making no distinction between fascist and democratic modes of white

supremacy. Additionally, they present dire warnings that fascism could

return in completely different historical circumstances because there

were people in the 1930s who didn’t believe it could happen (both of

these non-arguments are from “Yes, Trump Does Represent Fascism”). Or

they offer elements of a definition that could be applied to practically

any state, citing characteristics like “selective populism, nationalism,

racism, traditionalism, the deployment of Newspeak and disregard for

reasoned debate”—never mind that these are all “features shared by every

single form of far-right politics (and in fact, Newspeak is originally a

feature of Stalinism)” as I pointed out in an earlier critique.

Or they manufacture the appearance of double standards or common-sense

arguments, like McKenzie Wark: “It’s curious that the political

categories of liberal, conservative and so forth are treated as

trans-historical, but you are not supposed to use the category of

fascism outside of a specific historical context… But maybe we should

treat it not as the exception but the norm. What needs explaining is not

fascism but its absence.”

This rhetorical conundrum is easy to answer. Liberalism is a fundamental

plank of modernity. We still live in the economic and political system

created by liberalism, therefore the terminology of liberalism is still

relevant, still historical. Applying “liberal” and “conservative” to the

Middle Ages or early Han China, that would be “trans-historical.”

On the contrary, fascism lost. It never created a world system, and the

conditions it arose in response to no longer pertain. There have been

dozens of variants to authoritarian politics and white supremacist

ideology, most of them mutually opposed or inconsistent. To justify

enlisting “fascism” as a catch-all category, someone would need to make

a positive argument as to why that gives us theoretical tools we

wouldn’t otherwise have. As far as I can see, that argument hasn’t yet

been made. It seems that the reason people talk about fascism as an

impending present danger is because it sounds scary and it makes them

sound important. You don’t get the same reaction talking about “an

increasingly brutal democracy” even though democratic governments are

responsible for a large share of the bloodiest genocides in world

history (including the annihilation or decimation of hundreds of

indigenous nations by democratic settler states including the US,

Australia, Canada, Chile, and Argentina; mass murder carried out by

democratic powers like the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in

India, Congo, Indonesia, Algeria, Vietnam, and other colonies; and

genocides carried out by post-colonial democracies like Colombia and

Myanmar). Most people don’t know that, because so much weight is given

to the misdeeds of dictatorial regimes . Democracy’s crimes are covered

up. Anarchists should know better, but an increasing number have been

choosing political expediency over intellectual honesty and the hard

task of sharing the truths no one else wants to touch.

Criticizing this theoretical sloppiness is important because our

analysis of history is vitally important. Historical amnesia is one of

the greatest recurring impediments to revolutionary movements.

Here’s a working definition of fascism from an earlier article:

“Fascism is not just any extreme right-wing position. It is a complex

phenomenon that mobilizes a popular movement under the hierarchical

direction of a political party and cultivates parallel loyalty

structures in the police and military, to conquer power either through

democratic or military means; subsequently abolishes electoral

procedures to guarantee a single party continuity; creates a new social

contract with the domestic working class, on the one hand ushering in a

higher standard of living than what could be achieved under liberal

capitalism and on the other hand protecting the capitalists with a new

social peace; and eliminates the internal enemies whom it had blamed for

the destabilization of the prior regime.”

The abolition of a free electoral system is key. With free elections, no

dictatorship; without dictatorship, no fascism. Multi-party fascism with

a free capitalist press is a meaningless contradiction that strips

language of any precision or usefulness in favor of amped-up demagoguery

not unlike the style preferred by populists of all stripes, from Trump

to actual fascists.

The presence of a hierarchically organized paramilitary force is also

key to break the democratic system of checks and balances and to back up

the autocratic creation of a new legality during the transition period.

In historical fascism, such blackshirts or stormtroopers were vital in

the very first years, only to be weakened or even suppressed after a new

fascist legality had been sufficiently instituted.

Ami du Radical warns of “blackshirt organizations in every state,” but

this is an exaggeration. The Alt-Right in the US is murderous; denying

them a platform and kicking them off the streets has absolutely been the

right thing to do. But these rag-tag groups of internet warriors and

basement trolls are peanuts next to the historical blackshirts or the

KKK during Reconstruction. They have no unified leadership, no extensive

military structure,[1] no discipline, and a relatively small body count.

The aforementioned paramilitaries were engaged in open civil warfare.

The death tolls were in the thousands and tens of thousands. It is

important to recognize this, because it is one thing for anarchists to

be able to defeat a scattered, marginalized Alt-Right. It would be quite

another thing to go up against an actual blackshirt organization.

The different organizational style is also extremely important. If there

were an actual hierarchically organized paramilitary organization

following a political party with a fascist (anti-democratic) program,

that would speak volumes to the weakness of the government and the

anxieties of the capitalist class willing to permit such a violation of

their own norms. Those conditions simply do not exist now, and anyone

who fails to recognize that is tilting at windmills. Secondly, the

actual organizational pattern of the extreme right in the US is fully

consistent with the diffuse mode of paramilitary violence that exists

under democratic governments. Confusing one with the other gives a pass

to democratic white supremacy, and constitutes a major strategic error.

There has been an actual neo-fascist party in recent years, with a

fascist program aimed at seizing power, and building up a paramilitary

force with non-democratic loyalties in the police and military. Golden

Dawn, in Greece. Remember what happened to them? They were certainly

weakened by anarchist direct actions, but it was the democratic

government of Greece that shut them down, from one day to the next,

after they exceeded their mandate by killing artists and attacking

journalists rather than just killing immigrants and injuring anarchists.

Before and after the prosecutions targeting their leadership, Golden

Dawn has used similar rhetoric to the AfD in Germany and other far right

parties. The key differences were their paramilitary structure, their

continued embrace of Nazi aesthetics even after they came into the media

spotlight, and their continued projection of a putschist strategy united

around a Führer-figure. Far right parties use the media spotlight to

make nationalism and xenophobia palatable. The AfD, for example,

celebrated how the Christian Democrats have been adopting

immigration-related elements of their platform. Golden Dawn, on the

other hand, broadcasts its dictatorial intentions. This is something

that in the US, only the most extreme sectors of the far right will do,

whereas any group that wants to court the Republican Party or wealthy

donors downplays Nazi aesthetics and focuses on getting specific

political programs adopted within the democratic system. As for

paramilitary forces, under a democracy, these should be handled by

intelligence agencies, rather than working directly for a political

party. While this distinction is sometimes being blurred in specific

instances under the Trump administration, with implications that are

both frightening and dangerous, we still can’t speak of anything close

to a unified fascist movement with paramilitaries under the direct

control of a major political party.

Since the triumph of the democratic capitalist powers at the end of

World War II, fascism has been tamed and put on a leash as a pet

monster, locked up within the democratic toolbox. Fascists in the Global

North are used to push acceptable discourse to the right, to attack and

intimidate the socially marginalized, to manufacture tension or

political crises—but they are never let off the leash. Fascists who act

like there is no leash end up in court, like the leaders of Golden Dawn

and the surviving members of a German neo-Nazi cell who had close

contacts with the German intelligence services but ended up killing a

cop after what I imagine was viewed by their handlers as a successful

run murdering immigrants.

In the Global South, the equation is a little different, primarily

because the democratic world system has always permitted dictatorships

in post-colonial societies. This was in fact the norm throughout the

Cold War, during which democratic government was a mark of privilege and

advancement rather than a universal guarantee. Dictatorship is

particularly compatible with economies based primarily on resource

extraction such as mining, petroleum, agriculture, and forestry. When

capitalism takes the form of naked plunder, there isn’t much need to

cultivate the values of citizenship. Democratization tends to accompany

greater and more complex investment as well as local cycles of

accumulation—though if democracy fails to establish social peace,

dictatorship can reappear quickly. Still, since World War II, most

dictatorships have not positioned themselves as opponents of the

democratic world order but rather as its allies. Following cues from the

US, they took up the crusade against Communism without situating

themselves as the heirs of fascism. Incidentally, this was the exact

same ideological middle ground that liberal democracy occupied in the

1930s and ’40s.

Alexander Reid Ross’s Against the Fascist Creep is one of the most

extensive attempts to map fascism historically and theoretically. The

book charts the evolution of the philosophies and the thinkers who would

eventually go on to form fascist movements in Italy and elsewhere. The

research is extensive and interesting, but the framing suffers from a

mistake that makes the work all but useless from a theoretical

perspective: it takes fascism seriously as a philosophical movement.

Neither Mussolini, nor Hitler, nor Franco, nor Codreanu, nor any of the

other fascist leaders were coherent thinkers. They were effective

populists, which means they mixed and matched any pattern of claims,

philosophies, and worldviews that would motivate their base. This is why

fascists were simultaneously Christian, pagan, and atheist; bohemian and

aesthetic; capitalist and socialist; scientistic and mystical;

rationalist and irrationalist. This pseudo-intellectual aspect has been

a fundamental characteristic of the extreme right throughout the 20th

century and up to the present day. It’s one more reason why it makes no

sense to engage with them on the level of reasoned debate, because they

will say anything that provokes the kind of reaction they want to

provoke.

It’s silly to trace fascism back to Nietzsche and Sorel unless one has

an axe to grind. On a structural and organizational level, fascism

borrowed immensely from the left, particularly from syndicalism and the

socialist and communist parties. Yet the philosophical genealogists of

fascism always attempt to tie it to the more marginalized elements of

anti-capitalist movements; nihilists, naturalists, and individualists

are common whipping boys. This is not particularly useful for

understanding fascism; rather, it is a mechanism by which leftists clean

house and further marginalize their more radical critics.

A useful historical analysis of fascism would be largely economic,

posing the question: at what point do capitalists begin to support

fascist movements? The moment when Germany’s industrial and military

establishment decided to support the Nazis was beyond any doubt a

watershed in the evolution of a small group of violent wingnuts into a

huge party capable of taking over the country. Military and capitalist

support also played a decisive role in changing Nazi ideology and toning

down many of the more esoteric, anti-establishment beliefs that Ross

spent so much time researching.

Without the economic support of capitalists, there is no fascism.

Anarchists should be paying more attention to what key capitalists are

saying about how to respond to the ongoing crisis and less time on

Alt-Right message boards. This is a question of priorities, not a

criticism of the latter activity. The Alt-Right had practically no

capitalist support besides the Mercer family, mid-range capitalists at

best, and when the split went down between Trump and Bannon, they

clearly chose Trump (highlighting that there are real discrepancies

between democratic white supremacy and fascist white supremacy, as I

previously argued, and as the author of “Yes!” disputed by describing

Trump and Bannon as “bosom buddies” eight months before their falling

out). There are practically no capitalists on a world scale who are

looking towards some kind of fascism to solve their problems. And we

would know if they were. In the 1930s, Ford, Dupont, and other leading

capitalists openly expressed their admiration for Mussolini and publicly

organized groups intended to mirror the blackshirts. Some of them also

made contacts with the military to discuss a possible coup.

All the evidence today suggests that capitalists appreciate Trump for

the short-term tax break he has given them, fear his trade wars and

disapprove of most of his mid-range strategies (or what pass for

strategies in the Trump camp), and breathe a sigh of relief whenever he

puts distance between himself and the far right. Capitalists will deal

with Trump as long as he has his little hands on the levers. They don’t

care about Bannon. In Europe, investors have trembled at each victory of

the far right, from Brexit to the appointment of Salvini in Italy.

The stronger the capitalist, the weaker the commitment to one political

vision or another. Capitalists are famous for profiting under completely

different kinds of government. They’ll make short-term profit off a

government that is committing political suicide, and long-term profit

off a government enacting a more intelligent strategy. What they will

not do is sabotage a world system that grants them stability, encourage

suicidal strategies in countries they depend on, or embark on political

crusades that sacrifice profit, increase instability, and put up

obstacles to global finance and trade.

Curiously, in the 1930s, the economics were often broadly similar

between democratic and fascist New Deals, both of them centering on

ambitious government programs to boost employment. This shows how,

regardless of political policy, capitalists tend to face the same needs

simultaneously on a global scale, and that they can achieve the same

broad economic program with a variety of political models. The

triumphant democrats convinced international capitalists to invest in

American deficit spending, whereas the fascists disastrously tried to go

to war with everyone to steal the resources they would need to fund

similarly heavy spending. This was clearly a negative-sum game, and it

worked out poorly for those who bet too heavily on German fortunes.

German capitalists, however, were blocked from colonial markets by the

English and French triumph in World War I, so they had little choice.

How many people who cry “fascism!” today have asked themselves if the

situation today is analogous? The answer is easy: it’s not. Nor is there

an economic need for warfare between major powers as there was in the

1930s. The Mutual Assured Destruction of nuclear war removes the

economic benefits that conventional warfare provides, continuing Cold

War politics mean that military spending is constantly at wartime

levels, and the multiple ongoing wars left over from the War on Terror

provide all the needed stimulus for military production.

Democratic White Supremacy

People need to get it out of their heads that democracy is a good thing.

Real democracy does not preclude slavery. Real democracy means

capitalism. Real democracy means patriarchy and militarism. Democracy

has always involved these things. There is no accurate history of

democracy that can furnish us an example to the contrary.

We have seen, tragically, how dangerous fascists in the street can be.

But US history is full of reminders of how white supremacists can

support democracy instead of fascism in order to get away with murder on

a much more systematic scale. Similar in some ways to the Tea Party

movement, the KKK was born in part to protect American democracy—white

supremacist since its origins—from changes that were undesirable to

wealthy whites. They mobilized to keep black people from voting, to keep

black people from communalizing land seized from plantation owners (and

in this they were aided by the Union army), and to attack white

politicians attempting to change the historical Southern class

relationship. They tried to influence elections via a variety of means

(including terrorism in the case of the Klan and media in the case of

the Tea Party), but they also legitimized the electoral system, rather

than planning to seize control and abolish it.

Going back to the earliest states, all forms of government are based on

a combination of inclusive and exclusive mechanisms. Democracy preaches

universal rights and therefore inclusion, but it also permits the state

to determine who is a citizen and therefore who obtains full rights. It

prescribes certain modes of being human and practices genocide and

colonization against those who practice other ways of being human.

Democratic governments have never conceded human rights to societies

that do not accept property ownership or compulsory labor (wage or

slave). Conservatives tend to be more exclusive and progressives to be

more inclusive, but both have been responsible for wars of extermination

against forms of life that do not uphold white supremacist, patriarchal

Enlightenment values regarding what it means to be human.

This is why the diffuse model for white supremacy in US history, so

different from fascism’s centralized model, is so crucial. Roxanne

Dunbar-Ortiz writes about a similar pattern when describing America’s

“way of war,” based on total warfare and extermination carried out by

volunteer militias of settler rangers. This is not a case of racist

brutality that has to be organized by a vanguard party; rather, it is a

shared expectation placed on all white people. As such, it transcends

parties and flourishes in a democratic system.

The crisis of whiteness that Trump effectively tapped into stems from a

deeply rooted fear that the historic paramilitary role of whites is

becoming obsolete. This is a visceral insecurity that whites’

longstanding role as protagonists has faded. In US history, that role

has always been in support of American democracy, violently attacking

the enemies of the nation but also defining what it means to be human

and to deserve rights. This form of white supremacy even exists within

the left of the Democratic Party, as a presumed right to define

acceptable resistance by being the protagonists of other people’s

struggles, whether as the bestowers of freedom (and capitalist property

relations) in the Civil War and Reconstruction, or as “white allies” in

the Civil Rights movement and to the present day.

Whiteness was developed precisely for colonial situations in which

capitalism required decentralized economic activity and was limited in

its ability to centralize political control: in other words, the settler

state. Not only is a decentralized, democratic white supremacy more

effective in a settler state, a dictatorial or fascistic iteration of

white supremacy in such circumstances is highly dangerous to state

power. Fascism requires the suppression of privileged elements of

society who do not toe the party line. In a settler state, that would

force progressive members of the settler caste (whites) into alliances

of self-defense with lower ranked elements of the colonial or

neocolonial workforce (people of color), threatening the very power

dynamic that gives the state life. Consider how in countries occupied by

the Nazis, progressive professionals and wealthy families entered into

alliances with Jews and working-class anti-capitalists to fight the

regime, temporarily moderating their anti-Semitism and classism. In

fact, the partisan movement was so broad and powerful as to be able to

defeat the Nazis militarily in several regions, and to constantly thwart

them throughout much of the rest of Europe.

In their inception, settler states tend to exercise a decentralized

white supremacy because the entire point is to get all people who are

classified as white to reproduce it voluntarily. As they mature, settler

states prefer a democratic organization to allow progressives and

conservatives to each enact white supremacy in their own ways. It is

probably no coincidence that what was perhaps the largest iteration of

fascism in a settler state, Peronism in Argentina, permitted both right-

and left-wing variants and did not emphasize racial purity as heavily as

all other fascist movements, thus allowing Argentinian white supremacy

to be reproduced in a diffuse way, not subject to the centralization of

the new state model.

Certainly, a large part of the extreme right in the US are neo-fascists

by any measure. They want to transform the US into a white ethno-state

and a dictatorship. And traditionally democratic factions of the extreme

right have not hesitated to work in coalitions with these neo-fascists.

This represents the ideological incoherence characteristic of the

extreme right, an exasperation with the Republican party and the

democratic institutions that used to uphold a more visibly white

supremacist order, and in at least some cases, the willingness of

centrist elements to make use of extreme elements in the street, though

they understand the extreme elements have little chance of victory and

plan to abandon them when the alliance is no longer convenient. In other

words, elements of the far right that don’t actually seek to overthrow

the US government and set up a dictatorship are either confused about

the ideological differences between themselves and other elements,

excited by the new energy and media attention the fascist elements

bring, as well as their rupturist discourse, or else they simply see the

convenience of getting more forces together in the streets and having

organizations to the right of them push the bounds of acceptable

politics so their own positions will seem more moderate.

It is possible that the historically democratic extreme right in the US

could become majority fascist in the long term, though this would

further distance it from the institutions it aims to influence. There

is, however, the view that capitalists will suddenly change their

politics when an economic crisis occurs. Ami du Radical claims that

fascism historically is a response to economic crisis. This is

erroneous.[2]

The prototypes and first expressions of organized fascism in Italy and

Germany were responses to political crises that preceded the major

economic crises: the Biennio Rosso and factory occupations in Italy, and

the various communes or workers’ republics smashed by the Freikorps in

Germany. (Of course, high unemployment arrived with the end of World War

I, but it was the explicitly revolutionary situation that motivated the

blackshirts and the Freikorps to action). Fascist movements were already

well developed, and already in control in Italy, when the economic

collapse of 1929 occurred. England, France, and the US suffered the same

economic crisis but did not veer into fascism; in fact, two of them

moved left, because both the nature of the political crises they faced ,

and the local long-term strategies of political control were different.

Capitalists in countries with hemmed in geopolitical prospects began

supporting fascist movements in response to a political crisis, whereas

the economic measures they supported were broadly similar to those of

democratic states.

In the present case, the new iterations of what some are sloppily

calling fascism also significantly preceded the economic crisis of 2008.

The crucible for the reactionary right in the US was the declaration of

the “Culture Wars” in the 1970s. Above all, this was a call for

investment in a right-wing ideological renaissance. After the

progressive changes of Civil Rights and the Great Society, the right

wing was structurally powerful but culturally moribund, represented by

such embarrassing cavemen as the John Birch Society and the KKK. Rather

than pointing out a strategic direction—they had none, and the

visionless Nixon and unabashedly Machiavellian Kissinger illustrate

their bankruptcy—they identified a strategic weakness and got to work

building their own media, cultural networks, think tanks, and other

structures that would help formulate an ideology around which to build a

new political consensus. Evidently, they even had the support of a good

many Leninists turned neocons who were turned off by the identity

politics of the New Left and understood the techniques for reaching out

to the white working class (in the UK, there’s a similar trend of former

Trots turned far-right, pro-business talking heads). Their great labor

was not directed at increasing US geopolitical power or improving the

efficient management of capitalism, but rather based on intellectual

dishonesty, prejudice, and fear-mongering. Their priority was to rescue

certain elitist values that they identified with American history and

power, rather than making a lucid, strategic distinction between

interests and values—a common error on the right. But the tropes they

formulated were quickly exported and became an increasingly

international ideology.

The Culture Wars succeeded for a time in driving debate to the right,

but the anti-globalization, feminist, and anti-racist movements

ultimately managed to slaughter all the right’s sacred cows, even as the

left succeeded in institutionalizing those movements and limiting their

subversive power. In the end, the Culture Wars left entrenched,

intractable minorities in the US and some European and Latin American

countries, all but incapable of political dialogue and intelligent

governance strategies. They contribute to the crisis of democracy, but

they do not point a way out.

Some argue that neo-fascists need not overthrow the government if they

can create a one-party system within a democratic government.

Netanyahu’s Israel, Erdogan’s Turkey, and Orban’s Hungary provide a

potential model here, though describing a Jewish government as the

architect of a new brand of fascism is a risky maneuver for people not

entirely sure about their word choice. It is hard to find other examples

of democratic right-wing governments that have held onto power for just

eight or nine years—not an unusual time for a party to stay in power in

a multi-party system—so even with this meager list of examples, it’s

unclear whether the idea of a one-party system within democracy isn’t

just an exaggeration. The fact that some claim the one-party system has

already arrived in the US due to the Republicans’ temporary majority

shows how they have turned panic and impatience into analytical values.

It also shows tolerance for a fundamentally democratic value system. By

warning of the dangers of falling into a one-party system, they

implicitly identify the victory of the second party, the Democrats, as

banishing the threat, a victory for antifascism. This lays the

groundwork for a democratic revival.

But let’s take the threat at face value: the advantage of such a model

is that the extreme right need not overthrow the government or provoke a

destabilizing rupture. In other words, centralizing all the institutions

and manufacturing a permanent majority is probably easier today than

launching some kind of coup. The disadvantage is that a one-party system

misses out on nearly all the advantages of democratic government, such

as the recuperation of dissent, strategic course correction, and the

institutionalization of political change and renewal. Netanyahu,

Erdogan, and Orban have all manufactured fairly stable majorities, which

they have bolstered through the recent “nation-state” law, the

constitutional referendum, and the restriction on NGOs, respectively.

But none of these states provides a model that is easily exportable to

major countries, neither are they proving to be economically effective

models. Netanyahu’s policies have led to the large-scale exodus of

progressive Jews, creating the kind of cultural straitjacket that is not

usually associated with economic growth and innovation. The construction

of his majority comes at the cost of Israel’s future, a calculation that

was only possible in an enclave state that sees geopolitics in primarily

military terms. A similar situation pertains in Turkey, where civil war

is a defining aspect of domestic politics; Erdogan’s iron-fisted

construction of a majority has played a significant role in the

destruction of the Turkish economy, alienating the country from multiple

possible trading partners including the EU. As for Hungary, where Orban

has constructed his majority on the backs of a famously xenophobic rural

population, the entrenched right has only limited relevance on the

European scale, certainly as an example of the difficulties of cultural

integration, possibly as an argument for greater technocratic

authoritarianism, but not as a model to follow. From the perspective of

EU administrators and European capitalists, Hungary is a troublesome

loser state not in a position to give advice to anyone.

As for the US and the UK, there is no solid right-wing majority, and

little possibility that the policies of Trump and May mark a permanent

change in the political and economic direction of these two countries.

But if the proclaimers of a fascist threat are convinced that we’re on

the path to a one-party system, let’s call it a bet. They will most

likely be proven wrong as soon as 2020, but for their dire warnings to

have any substance, we’d need to see this new style of politics stay at

the helm for at least three terms, with effective centralization between

the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary, and increasing

right-wing control over the media. The alarmists will be proven right if

Trump can hand off power to a successor in 2024, or if he is able to

abolish the constitutional term limit and win a third term. That’s

probably not going to happen: the present swing to the right will be

followed by a swing to the left, in the endless, stupefying pendulum of

democracy.

Democratic Renewal

In terms of longevity, the most successful fascist country was Franco’s

Spain. Lasting from 1936 to 1976, it outlived its more belligerent

co-religionists by decades, primarily because it could kowtow to a

democratic world system—in fact, Franco received covert aid from Britain

from the very first moments of the coup. The story of the Spanish

transition to democracy is of the utmost importance to anarchists, not

only because it took place in the midst of one of the largest wildcat

strike movements in world history, but because it was the fascists

themselves who initiated the Transition, understanding that under a

democratic capitalist government, they could profit more and create a

more stable, powerful governing structure. More so than US and Soviet

victories in World War II, this episode illustrates the conclusive

subordination of fascism to democracy. When fascists themselves realize

that they can achieve their goals better under the auspices of their old

nemesis, democracy, fascism as a governing model ceases to be

relevant.[3]

The Transition is also a case study in how fear of or unified opposition

to the ostensible exceptionality of fascism has systematically been used

by the ruling class to strengthen capitalism. In Spain, the democratic

renewal of the 1970s and ’80s succeeded in institutionalizing or

repressing very powerful anti-capitalist movements. By dropping their

Falangist regalia and joining liberals, socialists, and communists under

the aegis of democracy, the fascists of Spain were able to create the

conditions for capitalism to grow more steadily.

Similar factors were at work in the conclusions of the military

dictatorships of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and most recently,

Myanmar.[4]

An anti-fascist democratic renewal is just a variation on the

(counter)revolutionary model that democratic movements have used since

the beginning of modernity:

appeal to the lower classes against a common enemy (initially, the

aristocracy and the Church);

build on ambiguous shared principles like rights and equality that

seem to be better than the values of the old system;

leave out the values of the lowest classes such as defense of the

commons and non-representational self-organization, on the grounds that

these are anti-modern or would “alienate” the bourgeoisie who are in

fact leading the entire coalition;

use the lower classes as cannon fodder and their more radical elements

as a bogeyman to scare moderates among the current power-holders in

order to chase them to the negotiating table;

at the negotiating table, include representatives of the formal

institutional structures—those that are able to produce representatives

and a disciplined, obedient membership—while excluding the radicals and

the masses.

Throughout the liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries,

throughout the anticolonial struggles of the 20th century, this same

model has been used time and time again to defuse radical movements that

threatened to destroy the entire capitalist and interstate order, in

order to institutionalize a part of the rebels and repress the others,

enable capitalists and scientific managers to wrest control of

government away from more archaic power-holders, and create a state that

was more robust, more in control of its populations, and able to

engineer the circumstances for capitalist accumulation. We have been

defeated by this same model so many times, we should get an outline of

it tattooed on our foreheads so we see it whenever we look in the

mirror.

The signs are abundant that most of the US elite—especially the most

intelligent sectors—are gearing up for a major democratic renewal, using

fear of Trumpian authoritarianism as a mobilizing tactic.

Before Trump, US democracy was already facing a crisis, as were multiple

other liberal democracies across the world. In the United States, the

crisis struck right to the heart of the country’s fundamental basis as a

settler state. Huge crowds were forcibly rejecting the right of the

police to murder racialized people, and the right of extraction

companies connected to the government to exploit or contaminate native

land. The experiences of black and indigenous people were at the

forefront in both of these struggles, yet at the same time racial

narratives were not effectively used to divide people and prevent

cross-racial solidarity,though progressives connected to NGOs, churches,

and the Democratic Party certainly tried.

With the election of Trump and the temporary rise of the extreme right,

the narrative has shifted drastically. The police are no longer in the

spotlight, and though they have not done a good job playing the role of

neutral peacekeepers preventing skirmishes between Nazis and Antifa, the

critics they now face emphasize that they should be playing that role,

whereas in the days of Ferguson, the principle demand was that they

should just up and die.

The new narrative portrays a corrupt, right-wing government with

unsavory ties to extreme-right groups—a government that badgers the

press, colludes with arch-enemy Russia, goes easy on dictators, and

attacks free trade.

This narrative is ideal for the Democratic Party. The obvious solution

is to favor more rigorous legal oversight of campaign financing and

lobbying, celebrate the media, encourage an independent judiciary,

protect NATO, NAFTA, the European Union and “our” other alliances,

condone greater censorship on Twitter, Facebook, and similar platforms,

and buckle down for a new Cold War against Russia. It is no coincidence

that after an inspiring and subversive albeit brief spate of airport

occupations at the very beginning of Trump’s term, the major

protagonists of the anti-Trump resistance have been judges, the FBI, the

CIA, leaders like Trudeau, Merkel, and Macron, “honorable” politicians

like McCain, Hollywood stars, and centrist media such as CNN and the New

York Times.

The new social conflict brings together a broad left to fight a

dangerous right in a way that does not question any fundamental aspect

of the state. On the contrary, the new terrain is shaped in such a way

as to funnel our efforts towards the renewal of the state.

This is not to say that the only critical position is on the sidelines.

Quite the contrary. The recent toppling of the Silent Sam monument in

Chapel Hill is one of several examples of people acting bravely and

intelligently in difficult circumstances to simultaneously defeat the

white supremacist right and also subvert the pacification of the

institutional left. The counterpoint is that the specter of Trump and

the far right make it even easier to form relationships of solidarity

with more people, and to spread practices of self-defense and direct

action, in many more situations than the anti-police rebellions that

were spreading before Trump.

The problem is, these new alliances are much more vulnerable to being

taken over or neutralized by identity politicians, the authoritarian

left, and party activists.

It doesn’t make it any easier when many anarchists and anti-fascists

adopt essentially Popular Front politics and do the discursive work of

Democrats. In this vein, we have Ami du Radical warning of a “corrupt

judicial system,” they and others advocating “human rights,” and

Portland anti-fascists demanding that the police receive better

training.

Whenever we participate in broadly leftist spaces, such discourses

abound. It comes with the territory, and insofar as those discourses are

beyond our control, the only question for us is how to effectively

respond to them, pointing out their flaws without being bossy or

unfeeling. But when we reproduce those discourses in order to fit in, or

because we have become so scared of the right that we begin to support

the projects of the left, we are digging our own graves. It is vital to

articulate specifically anarchist positions with regard to social

conflict rather than flocking to lowest-common-denominator stances,

precisely because those stances are formulated to favor the interests of

social control—in the long run, those stances do not negate white

supremacy.

Warnings of approaching tyranny and fascism abound in the center left.

What does it mean when a good part of the content on an anarchist

website is redundant to positions published on CNN and in the New York

Times? Examples include Jeffrey Sachs writing for CNN about how we are

going down the path to tyranny, or the recent bestsellers, On Tyranny,

by Timothy Snyder, Malcolm Nance’s The Plot to Destroy Democracy, and

Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning. Leading corporations are also

pitching in, like Microsoft with its new “Defending Democracy” program.

There is a common perception of Democrats as political bunglers, and

they didn’t get that reputation for nothing. Yet they have far more

influence in the streets than we might like to admit, especially

vis-a-vis anarchists. In 2008, the Democratic Party proved that it could

manage a large, grassroots street movement that temporarily silenced

more critical efforts and funneled a massive amount of activist efforts

into an election campaign. The Women’s Marches showed they have not

forgotten how to turn popular anxieties into electoral base-building.

The March for Our Lives saw them creating a movement in a much shorter

time frame, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of high school kids who

will be of voting age in 2020.

And at their most cynical, the Democrats used the movement against child

separation to show that they could coopt a movement with potentially

radical implications and use it to protect the very border regime it had

started out opposing. The protests against the breaking up of immigrant

families and the imprisonment of the children of undocumented parents

were organized in part by NGOs that receive government money to

administer immigrant detention centers. The result was that locking up

families together was presented as a victory, the hatred of borders was

replaced with a hatred of ICE and Trump (remember that ICE can be

replaced by other agencies), and everyone forgot that immigrant children

were also locked up under Obama. In fact, courts had to force the Obama

administration to stop indefinitely locking up families of asylum

seekers—together—in “widespread deplorable conditions” in order to deter

other asylum seekers, basically a sort of light terrorism designed to

prevent access to what under the democratic order is supposed to be a

basic human right. And while the Obama administration only

“occasionally” separated children from their parents at the border,

every one of the more than 2.5 million people Obama deported left

children or other loved ones behind.

Borders separate families. That’s what they do. And those who support

borders—which is to say, those who support states and elections and all

the other things that go along with them—can either dehumanize

immigrants, or they can celebrate humane ways of imprisoning them and

breaking up their families.

In the run-up to the November 2018 elections, we will all be told we are

monsters if we do not vote to support more humane borders, more humane

police killings, more humane wars, and the standard neoliberal trade

agreements and political alliances. This process will be stepped up

several scales of magnitude for the 2020 election campaign, which starts

this November 7. The Democratic Party will be spending millions of

dollars to take over or silence the broad left coalitions built up over

the last two years of anti-fascist and pro-immigrant organizing. People

who maintain critical positions will be called criminals, racists,

whatever it takes. The NGO activists who share spaces with us have

learned our language and they know how to neutralize us almost as well

as the FBI neutralized Panthers in the 1960s and ’70s.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of young and not-so-young Americans will pin

their hopes on a progressive rebirth. Young immigrant girls will dream

of studying to be lawyers and judges in the “courts of the conqueror,”

to borrow a phrase from that historic chief justice, John Marshall. High

school radicals will style themselves socialists and go so far as to

advocate expanded government health care programs and free university

tuitions. They will all, without saying so, conspire to make America

great again.

To achieve this renewal, the Democratic Party will have to broker some

kind of workable consensus between its centrist and progressive

branches. The progressives who won primaries will have to show they can

win seats in November 2018; barring that and a major improvement on the

grassroots machine that failed to win Bernie Sanders the nomination in

2016, the 2020 candidate will represent the centrist faction. In 2016,

the Democratic primaries were basically a referendum on who was best

connected to the party machine, rather than who had a better chance of

beating the Republicans. If Democrats are equally stupid, and don’t

prioritize criteria related to the ability to win, they might lose two

unlosable elections in a row. If they wise up, they’ll nominate someone

charismatic who is capable of making significant nods to the progressive

agendas that will motivate an activist base. This is especially crucial

if we look at two factors: the strong left-wing tilt of younger age

groups, and the even stronger decline in young voter turnout. By

favoring visionless centrist candidates that discourage progressive

voters, Democrats are committing political suicide, using a pro-center

arithmetic that no longer applies to the current social reality.

The Democrats will get some extra help, maybe even making them

stupidity-proof the way Trump wisely made himself controversy-proof, if

the economy starts to tank before November 2020. They will have to work

hard to not win in 2020, and if they do, they will immediately embark on

an aggressive turnaround of US policy. An end to tariffs, closer

relations with the EU, a return to the too-little too-late Paris

Agreement, a stand against Russian influence in the Middle East, a thaw

with Iran, a less belligerent policy of China-containment, and

hypocritical attempts to broadcast an inspiring and coherent proselytism

of democracy. On the home front, if congressional majorities allow, they

will seek a healthcare reform—either shoring up Obamacare or

implementing something that actually makes sense—and large-scale

legalization of immigrants coupled with a further strengthening of the

border and deportation machinery.

Above all, they will sell a dream of an inclusive patriotism, a vision

that mainstream media outlets are already trying to peddle. We are

reminded here of the SYRIZA government in Greece, the most progressive

in all of Europe that, aside from instituting the harshest austerity

measures, also won the distinction of being even more militarist than

their conservative predecessors.

Over time, Democratic constituencies are likely to continue shifting in

favor of the progressive faction, who may field a progressive candidate

by 2028. Of course, if the economic collapse is as bad as it has the

potential to be, all their policies will revolve around and be

constrained by it and the concomitant geopolitical turmoil.

Meanwhile, Trump’s phantom infra-majority will continue to wane. The age

groups he won start at 65, so more of them will be dying off every year,

and unless progressives suddenly start losing the Culture War, they

won’t be rapidly replenished. For some time, though, they will fatally

divide Republican constituencies, forcing that party into the balancing

act of having to appease two polarized factions, neither of which will

be terribly motivated to support the other in elections (especially now

that the motivator of the Supreme Court majority no longer applies).

If somehow the Republicans win in 2020, either they rein back in (e.g.,

replacing an impeached Trump with Pence), or they will cement their

destruction of US political hegemony and economic dominance. Trump’s

program, such as it is, is not “revanchist” as some hyperbolic

antifascists have claimed; rather than trying to recover America’s

dominant place in the world it is in fact destroying it. In an

economically depressed, geopolitically has-been US in the alternate

future in which Trumpist Republicans keep winning, we might imagine the

conditions for more fascist movements, but what would all the supremely

powerful US capitalists be doing in all the intervening years as they

watch their fortunes willfully flushed down the drains? They would be

doing everything they could to prevent it, as they already have started

doing, with many of the most important US corporations repeatedly

speaking out against Trump policies. Again, this contradicts the

simplistic anti-fascist assertion that economic recession equals more

fascism. It’s much more complicated than that: sometimes, economic

crises push capitalists to support more democracy, not less, as happened

in Spain in the 1970s and as is happening today.

The question for anarchists, then, faced with a resurgent right and the

even greater possibility of a triumphant left, is: what are the

positions that cut to the heart of the problem, no matter who is in

power, while also speaking to the specific details of how power is

trampling people down?

It is not that hard to conceive of a way to oppose state power and

racist violence that leaves us ready, primed, and on our feet no matter

who wins in November, and many anarchists are doing just that. As

anarchists, we will always fight against borders, against racism,

against police, against misogyny and transphobia, and thus we will

always be on the frontlines against any right-wing resurgence. But are

not borders, police, the continuation of colonial institutions, and the

regulation of gender and families also a fundamental part of the

progressive project?

The principal hypocrisy of progressives can often be found in their

tacit support for repression, that unbroken chain that connects the most

vicious fascist with the most humanistic lefty. That’s why it makes

sense for anarchists to highlight the prisoners’ strike and to bring the

question of solidarity with detainees from anti-pipeline struggles and

prisoners from anti-police uprisings into the heart of any coalition

with the left. If they want to protect the environment, will they

support Marius Mason and Joseph Dibee? If they think building ever more

oil and gas pipelines at this advanced stage of global warming is

unconscionable, will they stand with Water Protectors? If they loathe

police racism, will they support the people still locked up after

uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, Oakland and elsewhere, primarily black

people fighting back on the frontlines against police violence?

Such an emphasis will separate Democratic Party operatives from sincere

activists in the environmental, immigrant solidarity, and Black Lives

Matter movements. It will also challenge the illusion that new

politicians will solve these problems, and spread support for the

tactics of direct action and collective self-defense.

Democratic or Technocratic Socialism

Nothing lasts forever, and though democratic strategies of governance

and exploitation might be the greatest present danger today, that

doesn’t mean the same will be true tomorrow. Democracy as a governmental

practice incapable of realizing its ideals is in crisis domestically in

the US and many other countries, but democracy as a structure for

interstate cooperation and capital accumulation is also facing a crisis

at the global level.

Due to its domestic crisis, democracy is failing to capture the

aspirations of its subjects. The kinds of equality it guarantees are

mostly either irrelevant or pernicious, and the benefits decrease the

further down the social ladder you go. Democratic government has failed

to deliver just societies and failed to cover up the widening gap

between the haves and the have-nots. It has ended up as another

aristocratic system, no better than the ones it replaced.

This means that democracy is losing its innovative ability to recuperate

resistance. But until roughly 2008, neoliberal elites barely cared about

resistance. They thought that they had so defeated and buried

revolutionary potentials that they had no need to pretend, no need to

toss the crowd any peanuts. As the 1990s and 2000s dragged on, they

became increasingly blatant in their crusade to concentrate wealth in

fewer and fewer hands while despoiling the environment and marginalizing

ever larger portions of the population. Now that they have revealed

their true face, it will take some time for people to forget before they

can use their siren song again, and this lack of trust in public

institutions comes at a bad time for the once hegemonic NATO countries

and their allies.

This underscores why it is so frustratingly myopic when radicals help to

restore the seductive value of democracy by talking about what “real

democracy” should look like: it’s like the story of the engineer in the

French Revolution whose life was spared at the last moment when the

guillotine jammed—until he looked up and said, “I think I see your

problem.”

If the global crisis of the democratic order culminates before the

seductive value of democracy is renewed, it will be that much harder for

them to prevent revolutionary movements from growing into real threats.

This second crisis revolves around the ongoing breakdown of interstate

political mechanisms that are decreasingly able to mediate conflicts,

and the impending economic collapse that threatens to close the buffet

at which most of the world’s states have been engorging themselves,

willing to cooperate because they all have opportunities for economic

growth.

The many and growing problems of the US-engineered global system have

indeed led many state and market planners to talk about tweaking the

current democratic system. Different proposals for solving democracy’s

domestic crisis include shifts to more deliberative or participatory

democracy, to digital or e-democracy, as a way to recover mass civic

participation; to re-link socio-economic with political equality; and to

check the accumulative power of the elite. This current has decidedly

little leverage on political institutions and policy makers. Once

advocated by the widely read but poorly connected idealists of political

science, it has since migrated to the street, and it is now mostly

articulated by people in the tech sector who think their new gadgets can

revolutionize government—uncritically assuming that the bad outcomes of

government have been the results of technological limitations—and by

progressive parties in Europe and Latin America, mostly with influence

at the municipal level.

Most politically connected researchers and think tanks take the opposite

approach: mass civic participation is an unrealistic or undesirable

goal, with many even blaming the plebs for democracy’s downward spiral.

One counter-proposal doubles down on representative democracy and solves

the crisis through consultation with “mini-publics” that replace mass

civic participation, no longer a realistic goal according to proponents,

as an institutional check on elite power. Others speak of the need for

more professionalism and structurally improved intermediaries (political

parties and interest groups), a sort of hybrid between democracy and

more professionalized representational politics. But because the first

crisis is every bit as much about perception as about outcomes, it is

unlikely that stuffed shirt researchers with an ingrained distrust of

the public will know how to solve it, regardless of the quality of their

data.

However, there is no reason these two currents cannot be combined: more

popular referendums and digital polls at the municipal scale; more

professionalization, technocratic evaluations, and structural

improvement of political parties at the country-wide scale. The former

would improve public confidence and feelings of empowerment, the latter

would decrease incompetence and prevent sudden disastrous populist

shifts in policy. The greatest obstacle to such strategic changes is the

political culture, the institutional inertia of a complex system that

has already been in place for many decades. Look at the practical

impossibility of going beyond a two-party system in the US, and consider

that in most countries, any change to the structure of political parties

and other intermediaries, beyond mere campaign finance reform (already

implemented in many democracies), would require hard-to-achieve

constitutional reforms.

As for the second crisis, there seems to be much less debate. Western

financial journals evince a near complete consensus on the need to

reject economic nationalism and restore “the rules-governed multilateral

trading order that the US itself created.” The only voices in favor of

economic nationalism are those of some ecologists with little political

clout; the leftovers of left Peronist anti-globalism in Latin America,

long eclipsed by endogenous currents of neoliberalism following the cues

of Lula and company; and some reactionary politicians in the Global

North who understand nothing about economics and only came to power

because they were first in line to apply advances in data analytics that

more centrist politicians, sure of their victories, hadn’t turned to

yet.[5] The corporate elite uniformly see economic nationalism as a

risk—a bad thing—and are currently hosting a conversation on how

“multinational corporations have to overcome the protectionist

sentiments among consumers and government regulators and reinvent their

corporate social responsibility models.”

There is just one important exception to this consensus, and actually

the only real alternative being proposed to the current democratic

order: technocracy, which is sometimes identified with a form of

economic nationalism unrelated to that proposed by the likes of Bannon.

The Chinese state is the chief model and proponent of such a system,

though there have also been frank discussions of such a model in the

West. The European Union constitutes a hybrid between a technocratic and

democratic model, though it cannot advocate such hybridization, because

to acknowledge a gap between democracy and technocracy would contradict

the EU’s fundamental identity.

A technocratic system leaves policy decisions to appointed experts who

climb the ranks, ostensibly based on performance; appointments are

carried out by the institution itself, as in a university, not by

consultation with the public. Most leading members of the Chinese

Communist Party, for example, are engineers and other scientists.

However, it would be naïve to ignore that they are first and foremost

politicians. They simply have to respond to internal power dynamics

rather than focusing on performing for the general public.

In the United States, the all-important Federal Reserve runs

technocratically, although it is subordinated to democratic leadership.

The technocratic elements of the European Union, such as the European

Central Bank, enjoy far more policy-making power, and are often able to

dictate terms to the democratic governments of member states. However,

the EU has been careful to take advantage of the old liberal distinction

between politics and economics: by relegating technocracy to a

putatively economic sphere, the EU maintains its obligatory commitment

to democracy.

One of the chief weaknesses of Western democracy that a technocratic

system can shore up is the tendency towards sudden, irrational policy

shifts that correspond to a populist attempt to seize power. Someone

like Trump can make a claim based on misinformation that nonetheless

resonates with the lived experiences of a part of the electorate—for

example, NAFTA did hurt a great many people, but the reasons that it

did, and the effects of his proposed alternative, are quite different

than what Trump claimed. In government, the sine qua non for

implementing one’s program is to gain control over the instruments of

power. Under a democratic system, winning control over those instruments

is dependent on successfully appealing to a majority of the electorate

through the elitist filters of the corporate media and campaign finance.

For a long time, parties achieved this by distinguishing between popular

and professional discourses. In other words, they regularly lied to the

masses about what they were going to actually do, contributing year

after year to the crisis of democracy. Populists like Trump signaled

that they would break with this pattern by breaking all the other rules

of respectable politics. The problem (from the perspective of the State)

is that such a strategy is effective at winning a vote but not effective

at pursuing the interests of the institutions of government.

Technocratic systems solve this problem by removing the irrelevant

feedback loop of the electorate, basing access to power directly on the

performance of the strategies that will amplify power. In doing so,

technocrats also theoretically protect themselves from the risk of bad

leaders. Stupid, charismatic leaders are a hallmark of democracy, but

the danger they present to the system is neutralized by the intelligent,

uncharismatic advisers who keep them on a tight leash. George W. Bush

and Ronald Reagan were perfect, functioning examples of this model. In

breaking the leash, Trump demonstrated that it is not a strong

structural feature of democratic government, and thus a potential weak

point.

Another advantage of technocratic systems is their ability to centralize

interests. In any democratic system, there are many competing interests

that make consensus difficult; this can lead to entrenched, polarized,

partisan politics. During the Golden Age of democracy, there was elite

consensus on the fundamental strategies of governance. Now we are

increasingly seeing a divergence of elite interests and the

incompatibility of different governing strategies. A technocratic system

uses the massive power of the state not to create a terrain in which

capitalists can prosper, but to strategically order the operations of

capital in a convergent trajectory. In recent years, the Chinese state

has been arresting, imprisoning, and disappearing billionaires it

accuses of corruption, which means acting outside the Party’s control

over the market, engaging in alternate or autonomous market planning.

On the geopolitical stage, the Chinese technocratic model has a certain

advantage. Country after country and company after company have bowed to

Beijing’s demands and stopped recognizing Taiwan as an independent

country. Not only is China a major economy, it has a greater ability to

leverage access to that economy for political purposes, combining

greater centralization with a streamlined strategic approach that

repudiates the division of politics and economics.

However, there is a great deal of myth around technocratic governance.

You can’t have a purely “scientific” government because “objective

interests” is a contradiction in terms. Bare empiricism cannot recognize

something as subjective as interests; this is why scientific bodies have

to fabricate discreet ideologies masquerading as neutral presentations

of fact, since there is no human activity, and certainly no coordinated

research and development, without interests. Yet governments are nothing

without interests. They are, at their most rudimentary, the

concentration of a great deal of resources, power, and capacity for

violence with the purpose of fulfilling the interests of a specific

group of people. The relationship becomes more complex as governments

become more complex, with different types of people developing different

interests with regard to the government and with institutions producing

subjectivities and therefore molding people’s perceptions of their

interests, but the centrality of interests remains, as does the fact

that hierarchical power blinds people to everything outside of a very

narrow reality, and such insensitivity combined with such great power is

a sure recipe for unprecedented stupidity.

One example of this is the Three Gorges Dam, perhaps the greatest

construction feat of the 20th Century, and certainly a symbol of the

Communist Party’s ability to carry out strategic planning that

sacrifices local interests for a perceived greater good. But the dam has

caused so many demographic, environmental, and geological problems that

they may outweigh the benefits in energy production. The major

motivation for building the dam was probably hubris—the state basking in

its technocratic power—more than a measured estimation that the dam

would be worth it.

Power politics may also play a role in China’s lending crisis. Smaller

businesses have a hard time securing loans from China’s established

banking system, which has traditionally favored state-owned companies

and large or politically connected firms, so these businesses turned to

newer peer-to-peer lending platforms, many of which were shut down by

the government or otherwise collapsed, causing a huge loss of savings.

The problem takes on additional dimensions when one considers how

important new businesses have been in the US economy in the past couple

decades: think Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook. Arguably, it is only

these companies that allow the US to maintain its top spot in the world

economy. And while tech start-ups like Didi and Alibaba have been

important to Chinese economic growth, and have also succeeded in

climbing the ranks to receive vital state support, they have not yet

demonstrated the capacity for cutting-edge innovation that would be

required of a global leader. Perhaps they can be more accurately

perceived as copies of established Western firms that were able to

receive financing only after their Western analogues had demonstrated

the importance of such companies. If this is accurate, it doesn’t bode

well for the ability of Chinese state-capitalism to create a climate

that will favor more cutting-edge innovation than Western capitalist

states.

The European Union is also experiencing problems due to technocratic

management. Aside from the temporary rebellions caused by the

heavy-handedness of the Central Bank, the EU’s number one existential

threat right now can be traced to the Dublin Regulation, an early EU

agreement, subject to little scrutiny at the time of its signing, that

stipulates that migrants can be deported back to the first EU country

they entered. The core EU states (Germany, UK, France, Benelux)

habitually bully the poorer states, protecting their key industries

while dictating which industries poorer members have to expand or

abandon. And while the Mediterranean countries were able to tolerate

being turned into debt colonies and tourist hellholes, they have not

been so tolerant of the immigration policy, which also gives leaders a

scapegoat for the first two problems. The EU’s immigration policy is an

obvious dumping on Greece, Italy, and Spain, and to a lesser extent

Poland and other border states. These are the countries that can least

afford a greater burden to their social services, as Germany siphons off

better educated immigrants and shunts the poorer ones back to the border

states. This policy has been the major cause of all the right-wing

threats to the EU’s integrity. Though it is the product of technocratic

planners, it reflects the same arrogance that accompanies all power

politics.

There is also the question of resistance. The Chinese government is

making the bet that it has the technological and military power to quash

all resistance movements, permanently. If it is wrong, it risks total

political collapse and revolution. Democratic governments enjoy a

greater flexibility, because they can deflect dissident movements

towards seeking reform, which rejuvenates the system, rather than

forcing them to shut up or blow up. European democratic institutions

have proven that this pressure-valve mechanism still works, with

progressive parties forestalling the growth of revolutionary movements

in Greece, Spain, and France. Then there is the problem of continuity.

By concentrating so much power in the person of Xi Jinping, the Chinese

state sets itself up for the age-old problem of succession; how to

eventually hand off power to an equally capable leader.

So the technocratic model is not clearly superior. Even if it were,

Western powers would have a hard time accepting it in more than hybrid

form. This comes down to white supremacy and its centrality to the

Western paradigm. Democracy plays a fundamental role in white

supremacist mythology and the implicit claims of white progressives to

superiority. Basing the mythical roots of democracy in ancient Greece,

whites can think of themselves as the founders of civilization and thus

apt tutors to the rest of the world’s societies. Orientalist paranoias

are based on the association of Eastern civilizations with autocracy and

despotism. The Western sense of self-worth collapses without that

opposition.

In fact, the Chinese state makes plenty of claims to democracy, justice,

equality, and the common good, every bit as valid as the claims made by

Western states. But these claims are validated within a paradigm that is

different from the one Western elites use to justify their own

imperfections. Chinese democracy draws in roughly equal parts from

Leninism and a Confucian science of statecraft. In this model, the CP

consults minority parties and interest groups before drafting a

consensus position deemed to be in the general interest. This conception

doesn’t translate well into a Western liberal paradigm. Western ruling

classes cannot be convinced by such a model; they feel threatened by the

prospect of Chinese dominance, even as they believe in their own

hypocrisy.

The competition between NATO and China is increasingly taking on these

cultural overtones. But as geopolitical conflicts between the US,

Russia, and China continue to erode existing interstate institutions,

the current spats might come to represent a greater shift towards a

confrontation between different models of governance on a world scale.

The aforementioned trend, in which multiple countries have changed their

diplomatic relations from Taiwan to China, has a significance that

extends beyond the fate of the island formerly known as Formosa. Many of

the countries that have fallen in line with Beijing’s demands are small

Caribbean and Central American countries historically anchored to the

US. The fact that they are backing away from US ally Taiwan also

symbolizes a certain cooling of their relationship with the US itself.

In the emerging system, they have alternatives, and these alternatives

erode US dominance, not just in Central America but also in a number of

geopolitical hotspots. As Turkey’s Erdogan said in response to the usual

attempts by the US to strong-arm foreign policy, “Before it is too late,

Washington must give up the misguided notion that our relationship can

be asymmetrical and come to terms with the fact that Turkey has

alternatives.”

Saudi Arabia has shown the same awareness of a new geopolitical

situation by expelling Canada’s ambassador and suspending trade deals

after a routine human rights criticism, the typical hypocritical rebuke

Western countries have always doled out before carrying on with

business-as-usual. The Saudi crown’s murder of dissident journalist

Khashoggi and the response of Western governments also show that the

rules are being rewritten. Some players are trying to change their

prerogatives, while others are pushing back. The role that the Turkish

state is playing, astutely milking the controversy for its own benefit,

illustrates how everything is up for grabs in this situation: every

alliance and every country can improve its standing, or lose it.

China’s vociferous criticisms of Swedish racism, after the relatively

minor humiliation of a small group of Chinese tourists, are likewise

significant. The criticism is valid, but its actual content is

irrelevant insofar as the Chinese state could have been making similar

criticisms of far more serious attacks against Chinese travelers and

immigrants across the West for well over a hundred years. What has

changed is that a state from the global South is now challenging the

West’s moral high ground, striking at the very heart of self-satisfied

Scandinavia, and it is pairing that critique with an economic threat:

the Chinese state combined its rebuke with a warning advising its

citizens against tourism in Sweden, and there have also been campaigns

for the boycott of Swedish products.

If the Chinese state were to become the architect of a new global cycle

of accumulation, it would need a system for governing interstate

relations compatible with its technocratic model for the state

regulation of domestic capitalism. All indications suggest it would seek

global stability by explicitly putting state rights over any other kind.

This would mean that if Turkey wanted to bulldoze all of Bakur, if Saudi

Arabia wanted to virtually enslave its domestic workers, if China wanted

to imprison a million Uighurs in concentration camps, that would be

their prerogative, and no one else’s business. This is a potentially

effective strategy for creating more goodwill and unimpeded economic

cooperation between states, with organized military might as the basis

for right. It also does not shock us that such a philosophy comes out of

the Communist Party, which long ago embraced the Jacobin idea that ends

justify means.

The CIA has been intervening in public discourse to warn the world that

China wants to replace the US as global superpower. To make this seem

like a bad thing, they have to suggest that the world is better off as a

US protectorate than as a Chinese protectorate. According to one agent,

“I too am optimistic that in the battle for norms and rules and

standards of behavior, that the liberal national order is stronger than

the repressive standards that the Chinese promulgate. I’m confident

others won’t want to subscribe to that.”

Transparently, the US needs to convince the world that the democratic

model can provide a better interstate system. But despite more than a

century of Western propaganda, this is a hard sell. Not only are

populists like Trump willfully flaunting the weaknesses of the

democratic system and undermining Western alliances at their most

critical moment since 1940—even at its strongest, democracy has

delivered disappointing results. The US is famous for systemic racism

and injustice. With every Brixton and Tottenham, the UK shows it’s in

the same shape, and the growing wave of far-right movements throughout

Europe shows that liberal democracies from Sweden to Italy were never

less racist than the US, as they liked to believe. The moment that

people of color gained visibility in these societies, supposedly

enlightened citizens ran into the arms of xenophobic, far-right parties.

Even the German far left has begun adopting openly anti-immigrant

positions.

In the Global South, where Western powers have long preached democracy

as a panacea even as they continue to support military dictatorships,

the results of democracy have been disappointing. Across South America,

democratic governance has only made manifest the underlying social

polarization caused by capitalism and neo-colonialism, and brought back

the levels of instability that required military dictatorships in the

first place.[6] In Myanmar, long the cause célèbre of democrats and

pacifists, their Nobel Prize-winning State Counselor wasn’t in power for

more than a year before her government started carrying out genocide

against the Rohingya and persecuting dissident journalists. But what

democracy hasn’t ever carried out a little genocide, amiright?

Elsewhere, the moral superiority Western media and government

institutions have been trying to build up against the perceived Chinese

threat has been equally hollow. In response to growing economic

competition in Africa, long reserved as Europe’s “backyard,” article

after article has appeared bemoaning China’s practice of predatory

lending, unloading cheap loans for largely unnecessary infrastructure on

poor countries in Africa and the rest of the Global South, and then

appropriating their entire public sector, their resources, and their

future earnings when they can’t pay back the debts.

The New York Times describes Chinese debt bondage in Malaysia and lauds

the local government for supposedly standing up to the practice. They go

so far as to speak of “a new version of colonialism.” There’s nothing

inaccurate about this: there has only been one century out of the last

twenty (1839-1949) when China wasn’t an active colonial or imperial

power with its own brand of ethnic superiority. Colonialism has taken

many forms in addition to the particular race paradigm that evolved in

the Triangular Trade of the Atlantic. A truly global anti-colonial

practice cannot be limited to a Eurocentric understanding of race or a

simplistic opposition that places all whites on one side and all people

of color homogeneously on the other.

What is in fact inaccurate about the hand-wringing of the New York Times

is that this “new version of colonialism” was developed by the United

States in the decades immediately after World War II. Anyone familiar

with the critiques of the anti- and alter-globalization movement knows

that it was the Bretton Woods institutions created in the US that

pioneered the practice of debt bondage and appropriation of public

infrastructure. The corporate media is apparently hoping everyone has

forgotten about those critiques by now.

If this too-late, too-hollow concern is the best that the proponents of

Western democracy can whip up, the contest is lost already. It would

take a major overhaul to rescue the current institutions of interstate

cooperation and create the possibility for another American Century, or

at least a US-European one. It would mean turning the UN into an

organization that had to be taken seriously, an organization that could

isolate countries that did not respect the common legal framework. To

accomplish this, the US would have to end its role as the principal

saboteur of the UN and make unmistakable gestures like ending military

aid to Israel.

State planners would only take such drastic steps if they came to

believe that an impartial respect for human rights would be essential

for business and greater international cooperation. And in the 21st

century, a meaningful respect for human rights would have to take

ecological considerations into account, albeit from an anthropocentric

perspective. This means nothing short of an intensive state intervention

into economic processes to curtail the chasing of short-term interests

and take on the humanitarian management of climate and all other

geobiological systems. And since such an intervention would be

inseparable from the question of technology, and therefore AI, state

planners would have to ease democracy’s contradiction between political

equality and economic inequality by introducing socialism in the form of

universal basic income. All within the next decade or two.

In other words, Western governments would need to undergo a drastic

paradigm shift in order to be able to continue shaping the world system.

The challenge is probably too great for them. The few visionary

progressives who can see what needs to be done are chained, by the very

logic of democracy, to the dead weight of the center. It does not help

things that China has taken over from Europe as the undisputed world

leader in the production of solar cells and other renewable energies.

(75% of solar panels worldwide are either made in China or by Chinese

companies in industrial neo-colonies in Southeast Asia; this is thanks

to an aggressive government campaign pushing state-owned banks to

invest.) Meanwhile, the US is headed for another oil glut, opening

untapped deposits in the Permian Basin in Texas, described as being even

larger than Saudi Arabia’s oilfields.

In other words, we can almost write the eulogy for the US-engineered

global system. But what comes next isn’t clear. China itself is headed

to economic disaster. Its stock market is shaking, and the country has

massive debt, especially its major companies. China avoided the

recession of 2008 with a huge artificial stimulus campaign. Now Party

leaders are pushing for a clampdown on riskier lending, but this is

leading to a scarcity of credit that is causing economic growth to slow.

Take the example of Australia, celebrated because the country hasn’t had

a technical recession in 27 years: this has also been in part because of

major government spending. But households are slipping more and more

into debt and therefore spending less, therefore causing a slowdown in

domestic spending, and Australia’s main trade partner is China, where

the weakening of the yuan will also hurt the ability of Chinese

consumers to buy imported goods such as those coming from Australia.

With the economic slowdowns in Turkey and Brazil, where over-investment

bubbles are also ready to pop, China is the last strong player standing.

If it falls, the economic crash will probably be global, and probably

much worse than 2008. All the contradictions of capitalism are

converging right now.

To prop up the economy, China is following a similar path to the US:

cutting taxes, spending more on infrastructure, and changing the rules

so that commercial lenders can put out a greater amount of money in

loans in comparison to their actual deposits.

The possibility that China might become the architect of a new global

system is not based on economic growth or military power. It doesn’t

have to win a war against the US, so long as it has military autonomy in

its own corner of the world; all previous global architects won

defensive wars against the earlier global leader decades before

ascending to the role themselves, and China already did this in the

Korean War. Rather, it would have to make itself the center for the

organization of global capitalism.

The critical question might be, what country most effectively pulls

itself out of the economic crisis and opens new directions and new

strategies for the expansion of capitalism? And secondly, what will

those strategies be?

And the Anarchists?

One of the few certain things is that no one alive today has witnessed

such a level of global uncertainty. A broken system may continue

puttering along for another two or even three decades, wreaking havoc. A

progressive rebirth might rescue that system through democratic

socialism, eco-engineering, and transhumanism. A coalition of other

states might inaugurate a more technocratic order of great states on the

basis of institutions and social contracts yet to be articulated.

None of these possibilities, of course, contain the horizon of freedom,

well-being, and the healing of the planet. All of them suppose the

survival of the State. I have not spoken of anarchists in the preceding

considerations because we are losing our ability to manifest as a social

force in the changing circumstances. We have not succeeded in resisting

technological convenience, overcoming the various addictions capitalism

instills in us, abandoning the puritan habits that pass for politics,

spreading revolutionary imaginaries, or communalizing daily life. Our

ability to riot was enough to change the social discourse and open a few

new possibilities for social movements over the last two decades. If the

system does not repair itself quickly, however, our combative skills may

become insufficient and invisible beside the far greater conflicts that

will emerge. The skill that may be most important, and that seems to be

most lacking, is the capacity to turn survival into a communal concern.

Sadly, most people seem to be falling out the other side of

individualism into the most extreme forms of alienation.

All of this can change, of course. In the meantime, it makes more sense

to speak of what life might be like for us in the coming years of

systemic disorder. We still have the ability to spread new ideas at the

social scale, to play the role of society’s conscience. Capitalism has

little legitimacy left; we must drive the final nails in its coffin

before it develops a new narrative to justify its insatiable expansion.

To be able to do so, we have to develop an acute awareness of the escape

routes still open for those who would preserve and renew capitalism, and

undermine them before they can be reinforced and turned into

load-bearing elements of the next global narrative structure. Mere

critiques of poverty, inequality, and ecocide are not enough. Divorced

from an anarchist strategy, each of these lines of protest will only

help to lubricate the tracks of a specific line of escape from the

present contradictions into a capitalist future.

Once neoliberalism expires and a significant quantity of global value is

destroyed by cascading debt defaults or warfare, something like

universal basic income will likely become an attractive strategy for

reintegration. It could reintegrate the poor and marginalized, provide a

new pool for government-backed lending, and offer a solution to

AI-exacerbated mass unemployment. What’s more, versions of UBI are

perfectly compatible with both a progressive, regenerative politics, and

a right-wing, xenophobic politics that would attach such benefits to

citizenship. UBI instead of welfare can be justified with both the

rhetoric of social justice and the rhetoric of curtailing government

bureaucracy. Such bipartisanship increases the possibilities for a new

consensus politics. Corporate proponents of UBI—and these are on the

rise—can make use of anti-capitalist critiques of poverty and inequality

to urge governments to invest in the very forms of social financing and

engineering that will ease the problems caused by those same

corporations and maintain a viable consumer base that will continue to

buy their products.

Critiques of inequality can be most easily answered with promises of

greater participation: the aforementioned democratic renewal. As far as

critiques of inequality relate to gender, race, and other axes of

oppression tied to many of the social conflicts that undermine

democratic peace, equality feminism and equality anti-racism have

already triumphed. The former has modified dominant conceptions of

gender, reinforcing binaries but empowering people to understand gender

as yet another consumer choice of self-expression. They are on the way

to fully integrating all identities within a patriarchal, white

supremacist mode. By nominally rejecting the exercises of paramilitary

power that have historically been necessary to maintain social

hierarchies (e.g., rape, lynchings), they can finally share out the

behaviors and privileges previously reserved for heterosexual white men.

In practice, equality means that everyone gets to act like the normative

white male, once that normative subject is demobilized and its

paramilitary functions are reabsorbed by professional bodies like the

police, the medical establishment, advertising agencies, and so on.

Such a practice of equality neutralizes the threat that feminist and

anti-colonial movements have posed to capitalism and the State. The only

way out of this is to relate non-normative bodies with practices that

are inherently subversive, rather than with identity labels that can be

recuperated (essentialism). We don’t criticize the State because there

are not enough women leading it, but because it has always been

patriarchal; not because its leaders are racists, but because the State

itself is a colonial imposition, and colonialism will be alive in one

form or another until the State is abolished. Such a view requires

putting more emphasis on historical continuities of oppression rather

than tokenistic indicators of oppression in the present moment.

As far as critiques of ecocide are concerned, capitalism very much needs

to start taking care of the environment. Clearly, we must focus on

contesting what that means rather than focusing on the reactionaries who

still don’t agree with some version of this sentiment. Capitalist

concerns for the environment will necessarily involve managing and

engineering nature. Anti-capitalist concern for the environment is

meaningless unless it is ecocentric and anti-colonial.

What is being done to the planet is an atrocity. Those responsible

should be stripped of all social power and made to answer for the

hundreds of millions of deaths and extinctions they have caused; above

all, they cannot be trusted with solving the problem they are profiting

from. The root of the problem is not fossil fuel, but the longstanding

idea that the planet—indeed, the entire universe—exists for human

consumption. Unless we can achieve a paradigm shift and foreground the

idea that our purpose is to help take care of the earth and be a

respectful part of a community of life, there is no hope for saving wild

nature, liberating humanity, or ending capitalism.

Technology sits at the crossroads of all of the escape routes from

ecological crisis that lay open before capitalism. Technology is not a

list of inventions. Rather, it is the reproduction of human society as

seen through a technical lens: the how of social reproduction.

Everything about how humans relate to the rest of the planet and how we

structure our internal relations is modulated by our technology. Rather

than wading into the typically idiotic framing of the debate—techmology,

good or whack?—we have to focus on how technology as it exists in global

society functions as an all-or-nothing juggernaut. The one debate

regarding technology that we cannot lose, and that is left out of the

dominant framing, addresses the authoritarian nature of technology as it

exists today. It is presented as a consumer choice, but each new

advancement becomes obligatory within a matter of years. We are forced

to adopt it or become totally excluded. Each new advancement rewrites

social relations, progressively robbing us of control over our lives and

giving control to the governments that surveil us and the corporations

that exploit us. This loss of control is directly related to the

destruction of the environment.

We are increasingly being sold a transhumanist narrative in which nature

and the body are presented as limitations to be overcome. This is the

same old Enlightenment ideology that anarchists have fallen for time and

again, and it rests upon a hatred of the natural world and an implicit

belief in (Western) human supremacy and unfettered entitlement. It is

also being increasingly used to make the capitalist future enticing and

attractive, at a time when one of the primary threats to capitalism is

that many people do not see things improving. If anarchists cannot

recover our imagination, if we cannot talk about the possibility of a

joyful existence, not only in fleeting moments of negation but also in

the kind of society we could create, in how we could relate to one

another and to the planet, then I don’t believe we have any chance of

changing what happens next.

The system is entering a period of chaos. Social pillars long thought to

be stable are trembling. Those who own and govern this world are looking

for ways to hold onto power, or to use the crisis to get an edge on

their opponents. The structures they have long built up are on a

collision course and they cannot agree what correction to make, but

they’ll be damned if they let us off this suicidal ride. They may offer

us jobs, organic food, and trips to the moon; they may terrorize us into

submission.

It is a frightening moment and the stakes are high. Those in power are

not in control. They don’t know what’s going to happen next, their

interests are diverging, and they haven’t agreed on a clear plan.

Nonetheless, they’ll throw everything they’ve got into holding onto

power. Meanwhile, their failings are on display for everyone to see, and

uncertainty is in the air. It is a moment that requires qualitatively

more from us: communal practices of solidarity that can scale up from

affinity groups to neighborhoods to society as a whole; visions of what

we could do if we were in control of our own lives, and plans for how to

get there; and practices of self-defense and sabotage that can enable us

to stay on our feet and prevent those in power from getting away with

murder again and again.

This is a tall order. By all rights, we shouldn’t even be on the stage

anymore. Capitalism has invaded every corner of our lives, turning us

against ourselves. The power of the State has grown exponentially and

they have defeated us so many times before. Nonetheless, their system is

failing once again. On both the left and the right, they will look for

solutions. They will try to recruit us or silence us, unite us or divide

us—but no matter what, they want to make sure that what happens next

isn’t up to us.

This is the Future, a machine busy producing a new version of the same

old domination in order to bury all the unmapped possibilities suggested

by the system’s decay. We can destroy that Future and regain our lives,

beginning the long task of turning the present wasteland into a

garden—or we can succumb to it.

[1] In case anyone is inclined to cite the pseudo-military structure of

some militia groups, they should first compare it to the extensive chain

of command that connected historical fascist movements to the actual

military or a fascist political party.

[2] It is also an embarrassing argument to make for someone who claims

fascism is making a resurgence, given that two of the major models for

anti-democratic authoritarian states today—Israel and Turkey—made the

shift during periods of economic growth. Even, ahem, Trump, was elected

amidst a backdrop of economic growth, but it seems that at least some

anti-fascists fell for the implicitly white supremacist media fable that

increasingly impoverished “working class whites” were behind the Trump

victory.

[3] The legend goes that Eisenhower asked Franco what structure he had

put in place to make sure that Spain wouldn’t descend again into chaos,

to which Franco replied, “the middle class.”

[4] Though this strays from the topic at hand, we have to applaud

Myanmar as another triumph for nonviolence. I wonder if Gene Sharp is

going to visit Rohingya?

[5] Data analytics used by companies connected to reactionary mega-donor

Robert Mercer were instrumental in both Trump’s victory and the Brexit

referendum win, both of which had been rejected by traditional media,

opinion campaigns, and predictive metrics.

[6] This is a sore point that liberals desperately try to avoid: from a

statist point of view, most dictatorships were in fact necessary.