Here’s the passthrough link to get you over the Project Syndicate paywall, to my review of four great new books on what ails capitalism—or what might have already killed it off—followed by my lede, just to whet your appetite for the apocalypse the authors describe with varying degrees of wonder, anger, and fear.
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https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/capitalism-turning-feudal-or-fatuous-by-james-livingston-2024-02?h=Pgzz3OAGxITyC2Mu2wVmEKoyJRmjpl0qwMU%2bllHk3EA%3d&
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NEW YORK – What isn’t ending nowadays? What isn’t on the verge of extinction? The list of exemptions is short, and we – human beings – aren’t on it.
Neither are bees, butterflies, childhood, civility, coastlines, coral reefs, democracy, elephants, facts, families, frogs, gender, glaciers, God, the humanities, love, morality, middle classes, minibars, national borders, objectivity, party systems, patriarchy, religion, science, whiteness, work, and much more. According to activists, journalists, and writers of every political persuasion, all of it is endangered.
And now, if we are to believe Quinn Slobodian, Clara E. Mattei, McKenzie Wark, and Yanis Varoufakis, capitalism, too, is past its expiration date. Once upon a time, as the saying goes, it was easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. No longer.
Karl Marx liked to say that the effect of an external shock on any organism depends as much on the condition of the organism as it does on the nature of the shock. These authors agree in the sense that they regard the economic crisis of 2008-09 and the pandemic of 2020-21 as blows to a market society that was already staggering – hollowed out by the “financialization” or “dematerialization” of assets and the concurrent development of algorithmic means of predicting, even producing, consumer behavior, and shaping, even controlling, markets. And perhaps, they suggest, intellectual decadence – the gross deficiencies of logic, evidence, sympathy, and taste inscribed in the complacencies of monetarism, neoliberalism, populism, and/or free-market radicalism – had fueled ideological decomposition, making the justification of capitalism more difficult for anyone inclined or employed to do so.
This last possibility is the one explored by Quinn Slobodian in Crack-Up Capitalism, which reads like the peer-reviewed publication of a newly-minted anthropology PhD who has witnessed the sanguinary ceremonies of a lost tribe on a dark continent and returned, barely alive, to tell the tale. One wants to get a look at his field notes, where, by the light of a kerosene lantern, he had expressed his raw wonder and horror when he stumbled upon these gruesome rituals.
Here, the continent is Hong Kong (before China ended its autonomy), scaled as a global archipelago of de-politicized, tax-free “zones” which, per Milton Friedman’s original design, are miniature nation-states that function as pastures for free-range capitalists to roam. The tribe is the imagined community known as “tech bros”: boyish, boorish men united by their belief that they would have survived Lord of the Flies. And the ceremonies and rituals include those conducted by shamans like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, whose every utterance is an incantation meant to stir lesser beings into bloodthirsty action.