political economy – Cyclonograph II

Image: HighGreat, Lighting the Dawn of Victory (drone celebration of the reopening of Wuhan)

By now the Chinese, by now the barbaric Aras too,
would have passed beneath our yoke …
Rome, if you have such love
of evil, wait until you have forced all the globe
to submit to Latin laws—then turn your hand
against yourself!

—Lucan, Pharsalia I.17–23

To describe the order of the world emerging from the pandemic, Dino Ge Zhang has offered the phrase Sino-no-futurism. My own decomposition of this intriguing term runs as follows.

0 (Futurism): Mass politics is demobilised in quarantine, but thought is not. The idea that catastrophe overwhelms all philosophy, that all thought must fall silent in the face of unfolding disaster, is as attractive as it is wrong. Catastrophe functions as the best and ultimate proof of thought: it is “precisely that which impels us to further assert ourselves within the world” (Moynihan). Beneath its burning shadow decrepit forms evaporate into mist. When it brings a system of thought to failure it is not because the world stopped making sense—it is because the intellectual universe never made sense to begin with.

In different states this impulse is now manifest politically in a new futurism, a futurism of necessity that has already realised tremendous political and economic innovations: the introduction of universal basic income, fantastical new financial devices, coordination of entire sectors of the economy by the state. With striking contempt for the past, governments have struck through the certitudes of neoliberalism and instituted a new dominion of biopolitical emergency before which everything else has bowed its head. Systemically this is a defensive action, not the beginning of a postcapitalist order: yet it represents a qualitative shift in the functioning of capitalism unlike anything seen since the first entry of China into the world-market half a century ago, and perhaps since the Great Depression.

1 (Sino): The West is at last confronted by the nightmare of seeing the image of its future reflected in a mirror it has made alien. COVID-19 has struck a tremendous vengeance for the techno-orientalist fabrication of China as a distant authoritarian society in the future with vast resources at its disposal. Sinofuturity has been pushed to the point of parody as Chinese people witness events they have already lived through unfolding with perfect predictability in the West. Perhaps this is not surprising: nightmares have an unfortunate inclination to become real.

All the more nightmarish for Westerners, China’s empire of data-flows has come to serve an eminently positive function—so de Seta. Politically, this does not so much discredit the “illiberalism” of China’s hydraulic information control as articulate what, in fact, contemporary illiberalism means. Illiberalism is, simply, what the suppression of a virus demands—on this, the sad anxiety over Chinese political methods is entirely justified.

A cyclone of feverish emotion is gathering around this revenant-image even as mass politics itself lapses into impossibility. Polling suggests an absolute majority of Americans want reparations from China; higher numbers still want it to be punished one way or the other. In the academic world it is easy enough to understand the fury of those who had made it their business to market the West to Asians and have suddenly found themselves divested of authority. Yet denial and sickened worry have emerged even among the very people who once embraced the prospect of a world no longer wholly dominated by their culture, or who looked to China itself as a potential model.

Not like this!—the realisation that the game of political speculation has ended and reality has come to take its debt: more than anything else, this reaction demonstrates that a true cultural rupture is taking place.

From China itself an opposite reaction has sprung. Newly justified nationalist disdain for the West’s failures and anger over its accusations have joined for the moment, in many quarters, with fresh confidence in the Party’s exclusive ability to tame the turbulence. The clash between these American and Chinese impulses has increasingly distorted the pandemic into total information war—but the stake is not yet the world; it is the definition of China itself, control of the image at the centre of the maelstrom, and, with it, the pretence to incarnate the destiny of the world.

2 (No): In contrast to its Communist predeceased, however, it is not the declared business of the Chinese government to bring about a future utopia. There is quite enough future already—just as there is quite enough history.

By a strange event one of the more prominent pictures that emerged from China’s coronavirus crisis was an image of a Chinese student in hospital reading Fukuyama. Taken at face value, very little in recent events has in fact discredited Fukuyama’s most infamous hypothesis. The irrepressible transformation of all political problems into technical questions has continued apace, and the pandemic itself has only accelerated this process, throwing down before the world a single, awful technical question to overwhelm every political debate.

What has emerged is not, of course, the pleasant liberal world order Fukuyama himself envisaged in the ethereal sunset of the 1990s. The end we are facing is something else—the wholly technicised world, in which mass politics has retreated into irrelevance behind the closed doors of quarantine and hyperregulated biological control. As governments retreat into arcane committees, freed of direct political accountability, information war is waged through Internet phantoms and flickering conspiracies. This is, in some sense, precisely a reflection of the cybernetic world imagined in the 1990s, though a reflection seen through haze and moonlight. We’ve heard enough of “Dark Deleuze”, “Dark Derrida”, and the like: the question at the heart of the present conjuncture may instead be more intractable: how can we defeat Dark Fukuyama? Should we?

My original title for this post was “A World Where Little Changes”. This will seem bold, even bizarre, in our present context of unimaginable economic turbulence and apparent viral-political upheaval—not least, indeed, in the context of the new political futurism I mentioned above. But the measures taken in response to this crisis are likely to repress further change for a long time to come. The advent of UBI, the coordination of the economy, the massive expansion of central bank involvement—all this amounts to a moment of enormous defensive consolidation, and in the midst of a pandemic there is little that people can do to stop it. They can merely plan around it.

As inefficient as planning-by-central-bank is likely to be—and already has been in Japan—the total consolidation of particular capitals will do much to suppress the effects of the classical cycle of capitalist crisis on the commanding heights of high finance.

If this is decay, we are not in any case reliving something like the fall of the Roman Empire. The world is one—so Jiang Shigong has observed—and there is no human power waiting outside, no great untamed expanse from which peoples can wander in. We face the wages of decay as one species, and within this limitless terrestrial horizon a transition of leadership from America to China, for all their profound political and intellectual differences, would represent only a redistribution of power from one potential pole of empire to another, the signing over of the cemetery in which History is buried. (Chinese leaders seem quite aware of this.)

I don’t believe this conjuncture will last forever. The Typhonic pressures of climate change, for one, continue to gather strength, and our seamless imperial circle is unlikely to survive them. This complacent world of endless paper-driven growth, brought into such shameless relief by the stock markets’ sterling performance amidst endless data of economic collapse, is resilient enough on its own terms, and will almost certainly survive this pandemic quite intact on new and yet more powerful synthetic supports. But reality, in the end, insists on itself.

Such a world cannot physically continue forever. If the new futurism of the coronavirus shows anything truly positive, it is that its intractably crumbling heart may well serve as an eventual exterior to the system itself, and here, only here, welling from empire’s intensive local contradictions, there could be interstices from which new forms will proceed, or old forms brought to fulfilment at last.

The diagnosis should then be—no future—for now.

The world is out of joint. Each day brings news of a different sector of the economy buckling under unprecedented pressure; each evening, governments and central banks scramble to plug the holes. With every new financial artifice the economy becomes ever more synthetic. The beast lumbers onwards on bionic limbs.

A fund report recently forwarded to me observes that, while Western markets gyrate upwards and downwards on scales unknown since the Great Depression, investors have taken flight to Chinese equities markets because of their “more policy-driven” character. All of a sudden, capitalists are quite happy to favour planning. And as dollar liquidity evaporates, the renminbi has increasingly borne the currency markets’ load.

The present crisis has had the formal aspect of a world war. Markets have panicked, borders have slammed shut, governments have scrambled to mobilise resources, liberal freedoms have been swept away by the stroke of a pen, and huge swathes of the labour force have been temporarily withdrawn. In some respects, true, the quarantined world is an “anti-wartime economy“: the foremost planning task is to coordinate the shutdown of disparate economic sectors rather than to ensure total mobilisation; the stock of capital is not being destroyed. But in its cultural, political, and administrative implications, the analogy of war is accurate enough.

It is far too early to claim with confidence that this “war” is bringing about the end of American hegemony, yet a new systemic order is clearly in emergence. The virus, as viruses often do, has only accelerated this process. If there is any past model it bears resemblance to, it is the crisis-dampening managerial capitalism predicted in the early 20th century by such economists as Rudolf Hilferding and Joseph Schumpeter. Their prophecy once seemed discredited: Schumpeter’s prediction that the heightening organisation of capitalism meant that crises were increasingly a thing of the past was made only months before the catastrophe of 1929; Hilferding’s warnings of the advent of a general cartel of magnates that would coordinate the entire productive process have looked quaint to modern seekers of market disruption. But things are changing at a drastic pace.

“The tendencies towards the establishment of a general cartel and towards the formation of a central bank are converging,” Hilferding wrote in 1910, “and from their combination emerges the enormous concentrated power of finance capital, in which all the partial forms of capital are brought together into a totality.” We have certainly lived through an era of financialisation, and the crisis of 2008 already threw economies around the world onto the intermittent life support of quantitative easing. Now—as the present crisis involves central banks ever more deeply and directly in sustaining the real economy, and large corporations such as Amazon assume the functions of economic planners in the face of logistical breakdown—Hilferding’s claim about the reorganisation of capitalism around a general cartel deserves a second look.

Is this simply a temporary compensation for an unprecedented crisis, as Keynesians would suggest? The pandemic itself will certainly pass—perhaps in much shorter order than the more pessimistic predictions have made out. (Perhaps.) But the extraordinary fiscal and financial methods that have been brought to bear are unlikely to disappear. The world before 2008 never quite returned, and there is little reason to expect that the world before 2020 will be different. There will, in many countries, be a prolonged period of resolving the ruination of economies so fragile they have barely withstood a disruption several weeks long. (We should be thankful that there have as yet been no great power wars in the era of globalised just-in-time production.) Beyond that, the task for the immediate future appears less as the return to intensive productive expansion than as the administration of stagnation.

This new dispensation will place immense pressure on what remains of the post–Cold War world order led by the West, in every component—the unbearable pressure of a double bind. Disintegrative forces threaten the cultural presumption of Western supremacy; the political power of the United States to compel various kinds of action around the world; the economic world-empire of the Federal Reserve; even—whisper it—unquestioned American military predominance, depending on the actions of other world powers in the days to come.

At the same time, the pandemic has posed administrative problems resolvable in principle only at the order of the entire human species. Certain socialists have argued that the virus is a consequence of capitalism; that the future order must prevent such outbreaks through harmony with nature. I see things otherwise: any subsequent order that successfully coordinates the world will deal with epidemiological and other natural crises the likes of which have never been seen before. Carl Schmitt once observed that the notion of a world-state is absurd as long as humanity is not at war with an alien force. Such an alien force has arrived. Its successors will follow. The throne of universal empire may be raised above the ruins of universal catastrophe. Whose empire? Doing what? Stagnate? Perhaps. The gates of play-history seem almost closed.

A postscript on China. The continuing economic shock to China should not be underestimated, yet at this stage, whatever its early role in the crisis, China seems better prepared to deal with its global effects than most. This does not appear to me simply as a matter of superior planning. Xi Jinping’s government presents itself as an administration that exists beyond the end of history. Rather than the grand organic development that incompetent observers of contemporary China have perceived to flow from the mythical perpetuity of Confucianism, under Xi the past has been packaged as material to be rearranged. The “Confucian tradition”, like any other, becomes a building block in a great political edifice.

As the past itself appears to retreat into impossibility, it may be this temporal stance, more than any other, that holds the key to the construction of the world order that administers the new era of cartelisation. Whether the productive force and the aesthetic impulse are available to resolve this protracted crisis of human acceleration—is a question for another time. Certainly, even stagnation has its providential role.