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.

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Diagnostic of the Future

Peter Gelderloos

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 more on that later.

Netanyahu’s Likud party is the leader of a new coalition that includes Hungary under Orban, governing since 2010, Poland, firmly right-wing since 2015, and the new far-right coalition that governs Austria since late 2017.

This political alliance concludes one of the most sterile debates of the 20th century, the one regarding Zionism, in which its many Jewish critics (such as Arendt, Chomsky, and Finkelstein) were delegitimized with that contrived caricature, “the self-hating Jew.” Now that the defenders of Zionism no longer seek to justify their racist project in democratic terms, it is also becoming clear that it is the Israeli Right, not the Jewish Left, that has a politically expedient tolerance for anti-Semitism. Orban has not only made anti-Semitic comments about George Soros, he and his base regularly honor the Nazi collaborators that used to rule Hungary; Poland’s right-wing government recently made Holocaust denial obligatory, criminalizing any mention of the fact of Poland’s complicity with the Holocaust; and Austrian Chancellor Kurz’s junior coalition partner is the neo-fascist Freedom Party, which has toned down their anti-Semitic rhetoric without changing their underlying views.

It makes short-term strategic sense for Israel to attempt to destabilize the European Union and the so-called international community at large, because many within both alliances regard Israel as a pariah for its flagrant violations of international accords. By breaking that consensus, Israel opens up more opportunities to build bilateral alliances and reintegrate into global geopolitics. On another level, however, this strategy surely runs counter to their most basic interests. By driving out the entirety of the Israeli left in what has become a major diaspora, the right deprives the Israeli state of the possibility of a future democratic rejuvenation when things get bad, as they inevitably will. By showing no regard for Palestinian life, they make it increasingly unrealistic that they could expect any mercy from their neighbors the moment US military aid—not only to Israel but also to Saudi Arabia and Egypt—no longer affords an effective shield.

A clear-headed Israeli ruling class would have made concessions, pretended to respect the international order, and adapted its intrinsic white supremacy the way the US ruling class reformulated its own intrinsic white supremacy in the 1960s and ’70s to restore its tarnished legitimacy. As mentioned before, the reactionary right frequently fails to prioritize a lucid understanding of its own long-term interests over the turbid ideologies with which they justify the inequalities and unstable contradictions they impose.

The Nazis effectively committed suicide by thinking they could restore Germany as a colonial power through military expansion, not only against Britain and its allies but also against the USSR. And the xenophobic right today has weakened the US and Europe economically in leaps and bounds. The cutting-edge economy requires global intellectual recruitment, and therefore relatively open immigration regimes, which is why Silicon Valley firms have been vociferously pro-immigrant and anti-Trump. Merkel’s decision to welcome Syrian refugees was immediately preceded by an announcement from the largest association of Germany employers that the national economy faced a shortfall of millions of skilled laborers. Merkel never made any move to rescue Syria’s lower classes from the refugee camps in Turkey where they rotted; her entire program was to regulate the entry of the college-educated, middle-class Syrians who could afford the several thousand euro journey into the EU.

The far right has absolutely no answer for this brain crunch, which currently threatens the strong advantage that Europe and North America have in the high tech sector over China as the emerging dominant world economic power. Through nationalist trade wars and populistic maneuvers like Brexit, they are actually hurting their home economies. By sowing dissension in what had been robust centers of neoliberal consensus—NAFTA and the EU—they are damaging the very confidence to which investors systematically peg economic growth.

Reactionaries are products of their times. They are responding to an unraveling democratic consensus—in some ways anticipating it and in other ways hastening it—and proposing new syntheses. As reactionaries, they are willing to go to great lengths to shock the system in order to restore the elitist values they champion; often, the shocks that they provide galvanize a failing world system to promote a new organizational plan in order to exit the period of systemic chaos, when most actors still have not accepted that the old regime is obsolete. The problem for reactionaries is that the new organizational plan is rarely modeled on the synthesis they propose.

In other words, the rise of the ethno-state model will undoubtedly play a role in destabilizing the neoliberal consensus and threaten the existing configurations of power, but the probability of it representing the new organizational model for the future is small.

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, 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.

Dallas police officers attached a bomb to a robot of this kind to kill a person in 2016.

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.

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