Autocracy Defeats Neoliberalism

I guess it’s oddly appropriate to find myself two hours into the limbo of the jury duty room at San Francisco’s Hall of (In)justice. The clerks have ordered us to remain here several times while apologizing that the courts just aren’t ready for us. Pretty normal I suppose but more vivid evidence of the decaying civic institutions that will now creak and groan and probably crumble as a formal and popularly elected autocracy takes hold. (At the end of the day they let me go due to scheduling conflicts with the trial length.)

I didn’t vote for Harris or Trump and haven’t voted for a president since Jimmy Carter in 1976! I just don’t believe in the whole model and it feels hypocritical to pretend otherwise. My voting fits best under the rubric of “harm reduction” but I understand why so many people rejected Harris and the Democrats, especially the corporatist version they presented in this campaign (much the same as the failed 2016 Clinton campaign). Really they should be ashamed to have embraced the fuckin’ Cheneys the way they did! Dick Cheney’s endorsement should have been loudly rejected. The dude’s a war criminal and profiteer and an all around horrible human being. His daughter is not much better, albeit her hands are a bit less dirty. Still.

Neoliberalism is dead this time! Liberal democracy might be too. Trump did promise his Christian supporters that if they’d just show up and elect him that they’d never have to vote again. A lot of us have glibly assumed that the system needs the empty ritual of regular elections as a way to prove its popular support and legitimacy. Maybe, maybe not! Maybe “legitimacy” has morphed and will now be achieved by delivering the right balance of (a little) bread and (a lot of) circuses to the hungry masses. And one thing we can be sure of—Trump and his acolytes are enthusiastically planning vast Theaters of Cruelty to feed their followers’ desire for punishment, for pain infliction, for degradation, and above all, putting women and blacks “in their place.”

American culture—whether Hollywood gore-fests, or the multi-billion dollar video game industry (dominated by Pentagon-friendly products to support the “volunteer” military), or the brutal UFC ring fights, or the absurd “pro wrestling” circuit, or every Sunday NFL football, or any of a number of other attention-absorbing, money-making horrors—saturates society with endless violence. The rampant gun violence, daily TV news where “if it bleeds it leads,” and the distorted portrayal of a non-existent crime epidemic all contribute to the lonely, fearful isolation that traps ever more Americans.

Much has been made of the breakdown of a shared reality. If it’s true that door-to-door canvassing couldn’t dent the world views of people getting all their news on social media or from Fox, then indeed a mass delusional psychosis has gripped millions. Truth-telling is not an effective antidote to this unprecedented system of propaganda and mind control. Those of us who remain outside of their control are a shrinking minority—and many dissenters may face criminalization and state violence in the months and years to come. It’s a bleak picture, to be sure.

Taking bleak despair to a whole other level is Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo.” Writing now on Substack he posted his “Endgame” on November 9 (I rearranged the order of these paragraphs):

Despite being, country by country, on the brink of civil war, Western and supremacist peoples are united in the common undertaking of genocide and in the common enterprise of enforced birthing. For a long time we fooled ourselves by listening to fairy tales of a fantastic multitude ready to fight against a fantastic Empire: we didn’t have the intellectual courage to recognize social impotence, and the exhaustion of the psychic energy without which social movements are flashes in the pan.

The triumph of a man who represents in one go the racism of the Ku Klux Klan, mafia criminal profiteering, macho violence and financial absolutism is the best observation point from which to finally look retrospectively at the twentieth century, and to some extent, imagine the lines of evolution of the twenty-first. The Trump-triumph is the final proof that the workers’ movement has made a colossal mistake since the end of the nineteenth century, accepting the terrain of politics as the terrain for emancipation. Both revolutionary Bolshevism and social democratic reformism have accepted the terrain that the bourgeoisie had prepared, and on that terrain they lost all battles up to the point of being definitively erased from the panorama of social evolution. Was there another ground for social autonomy, other than political power? Of course there was: it was daily life, collective existence, which spontaneously tends to desert economic and political totalitarianism.

Workers today are isolated, psychically fragile, incapable of organization and solidarity, because the political Left exchanged autonomy for democracy, and democracy was a fake and a trap. Government based on elections could be a good idea if two conditions were met: the first is the free formation of opinion and will. The second is the effectiveness of political will in determining the lines of development of the economy and therefore of society. Both conditions have never existed in the history of the twentieth century.

Since working on Processed World back in the 1980s, I always thought the abdication of “organized labor” to the agenda(s) of capital was at the heart of the problem. I didn’t think about it in the same terms that Bifo describes above, as a rejection of the whole field of bourgeois democracy as a trap, but I think he’s right. Similar to John Holloway’s rejection of the very category of “worker” as the starting point for revolt, it’s our fundamental humanity that is the basis for our desires and ability to radically transform how we live, and to redesign how we produce life together. Because however dismayed or depressed this election might make anyone feel, the dire reality of climate chaos—spreading droughts and desertification, runaway storms and floods, collapsing agricultural production and destruction of fresh water resources—is a lot worse than the question of which person is fiddling while the planet burns.

I could probably find interesting insights in dozens of postmortems but I will only reference two more for now. Anyone who has been around left politics in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past decade or more, essentially the post-Occupy period, knows how weirdly judgmental and accusatory a lot of the culture became. No one purveys “cancel culture” like the Trumpists, but it’s undeniable that identity-politics and attempts to purify all expressions of “bad language” did a lot to undermine what still remained of Left culture. Instead of a broad assortment of people working for a common good, showing up in solidarity for each other, we found ever narrower groups devolving into self-righteous and intolerant sects. If you weren’t already obviously a member based on identity or ideology, you were suspect and mistrusted. I never felt personally attacked or excluded but I also tended to avoid joining groups run by other people. It’s hard to gauge how many people might have joined a more welcoming Left popular culture if one had existed these past years. But since the Left, already in long-term demise, largely died out in the 2010s, we’ll never know.

Lee Fang tries to offer a more thoughtful explanation of why so many young men voted for Trump:

Imagine an 18-year-old voter filling out his ballot for the first time. Looking back over his childhood and adolescence, this young man would feel his cohort are far from oppressors. Instead, they are drowning in problems. He would have reached adolescence as the #MeToo movement took hold globally. The legitimate castigation of high-profile sexual abusers would rapidly devolve into widespread call-out culture, in which boys and young men were suspected of perpetuating the patriarchy and rape culture. The ordinary clumsiness of youthful love and teenage romantic inquiry was transformed overnight into behaviors that were liable for disciplinary action from school administrators.

The start of high school coincided with liberal bureaucrats locking schools down during the pandemic. Left with no other choices, the youth languished at home with online classes and virtual socializing that amounted to little more than doom scrolling. Last year, a study found that two-thirds of young men believed “no one really knows me” and one in three young men had spent no time with anyone outside their household in the prior week. Surveys show that the number of young men who say they lack a single close friend has soared fivefold since 1990.

And new vices seem to prey particularly among this crowd. The recent legalization of marijuana and online sports betting in many states has fueled a skyrocketing rate of young men addicted to high potency pot and app-based gambling. Other more traditional compulsive habits, such as video games and pornography, similarly afflict young men far more than women. Wasted time and lost savings, compounded by a profoundly lonely existence, can also give way to deaths of despair. The young male suicide is now 3.8 times that of young women, according to recent statistics. In some communities, the magnetic pull of nihilistic violence and gang crime has a particular allure.

I can’t give anyone a pass for voting for Trump. Whatever understandable discontent and rage they may feel, to endorse a feeble-minded grifter with a career of fraud and sexual abuse who openly espouses misogyny and racist tropes at every opportunity, is simply inconceivable to me (I admit that for many these are apparently features not bugs). Fang’s points are well taken, but how that leads anyone to actually vote for someone like Trump, with all we know, is beyond comprehension. Obviously it’s not just the asshole Trump, but the vicious bullies and small-minded bigots who surround him, the xenophobes and Klansmen, the Christian nationalists and the anti-feminist suburban women, who now will control the levers of government—that is the real consequence of this “burn it down” vote for a nihilist return to a past that never existed.

After the Bernie Sanders campaign emerged in 2016 and galvanized a broad range of people to support a social democratic agenda, the Democratic Party owners closed ranks and vanquished that threat. They did it again in 2020, led that time by Obama pushing most of the candidates out of the race and uniting them behind Biden. Biden did let Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporters take key positions in the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission to enact the beginnings of an anti-monopoly political shift, but it looks like that won’t survive the Musk entry into Trump’s inner circle. But what has been obvious for a long time is that people like Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Obama and the rest hate what they perceive as “The Left” much more than they fear and oppose the hard right. Like wimpy centrists throughout the 20th century, they’d much prefer to languish as a loyal opposition to right-wing authoritarians than make an alliance with anything approaching socialism, let alone something further to the left. Popular movements from below are always framed as a threat to social order, and our recent uprising around police violence, which in the middle of 2020 seemed to be changing the discourse, has now fully succumbed to a vicious reaction, wholly supported by the Cheney-hugging Kamala Harris and her supporters.

Ryan Grim posted a piece by Krystal Ball called “Bernie Would Have Won” which follows a similar line of thinking. She points out that Harris spent more time campaigning with Liz Cheney than with the United Autoworkers charismatic rank-and-file leader Shawn Fain (not to mention her distancing from AOC and the Squad, refusing to allow a Palestinian legislator a few minutes on stage at the Democratic National Convention, etc.).

The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. The neoliberal ideology, which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton, embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton, after all, ran [on] Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality.

Ball also underscores the fueling of divisiveness by the Clinton establishment during the 2016 takedown of Sanders’ presidential bid:

Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone… When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them, now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going for Trump… with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America.

So US voters voted for autocracy, for the bizarre American version of Italy’s Berlusconi, but of course with much more power in the world than the Italian buffoon ever had. But it’s not just in the United States that the neoliberal era has closed. In Germany the Alternative for Deutschland has been steadily gaining and some predict they may take power in the not distant future as the centrist status quo disintegrates. Similarly in France, where Le Pen’s ultra-right nationalism was the majority in a recent first-round election, only to lose to an unworkable electoral alliance spanning Macron’s corporatism to a version of far-left “communism.” In the UK, the post-Brexit Conservatives fell apart but the recently elected Labor government shows no signs of being capable of moving beyond a warmed-over neoliberalism.

I think the Chinese model is winning. That model is not anything like the communism that afflicts the nightmares of old Cold Warriors. It’s a model that consists of crony capitalism run by a one-party state, with a vast surveillance apparatus to control dissent and popular opinion using the most up-to-date techniques. The Republican trifecta, with the blatantly politicized backing of the Supreme Court and many lower courts, puts them on a path to consolidate one-party power if they play their cards right. With Musk openly entering the government (albeit in what might become a short-term ceremonial role), JD Vance’s close relationship with Peter Thiel (founder of the spook tech company Palantir among other things) and the vast surveillance capitalist technology sector means that they will be integrating more and more the panopticon capacities of private business into the political operations of the State. Simultaneously the over-investment into Large Language Models and the vast expansion of data centers (with their insane power and water needs) means that the tech sector will depend heavily on the Pentagon to ride to their rescue. Hence the tilt by all the big tech companies in the recent past towards defense contracting, from AI drones to roboticized infantry and beyond. The logical trajectory of these processes is a one-party militarized state exercising great efforts to control its domestic population through surveillance, censorship, and incarceration.

But that shit don’t work! The likelihood of catastrophic military failures, similar to what has been happening since Vietnam and reinforced in Afghanistan and Iraq, looms large. How long can Big Brother convince us that the war against Oceania or EastAsia is going great? And then the enemy will suddenly shift and the old opponent will be an ally… sound familiar?

Internally it doesn’t work either. High tech surveillance, market and mind manipulation only goes so far. Finally the human capacity for autonomy and resistance (and boredom) will defeat efforts of clumsy authoritarians who don’t understand social complexity and think they, like a stern father, can make society conform through repression and punishment. That shit don’t work!

But we can’t say where successful resistance will emerge, how many times it will be beaten down before it finally wins, and what vision of life will excite enough people to overthrow the rule of the palpably insane? And lest you doubt the labeling of these people as insane, let’s go down a different path for the rest of this post and talk about the new book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, just published by Verso.

I previously read several of Malm’s books: The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World; How to Blow up a Pipeline; White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism. So I’m familiar with his excellent work (there are many more titles to get to). I ordered Overshoot within a few days of its recent publication and I read it immediately. Like the collection White Skin Black Fuel, I found it hard to put it down. Malm and Carton offer here a clear analysis of the empty charade of climate negotiations going back years. I was in Copenhagen in 2009, now fifteen long years ago. The Obama administration torpedoed any meaningful outcome there, and then just days after the 2015 Paris climate summit, much ballyhooed for getting the US and China and others to sign on to (meaningless) voluntary agreements, Obama dutifully followed his “all of the above” approach to energy and climate by signing the law that repealed the 40-year ban on exporting oil from the United States.

‘I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world’, said Barack Obama from the White House on 14 December 2015… Four days later, on the Friday, he put his signature to a bill that repealed the forty-year-old ban on exporting crude oil from the US. Sixteen oil companies had banded together to lobby for the reform… indeed by 2022, this country—not shipping off a single barrel before the day the Paris Agreement was finalized—had become the third largest oil exporter in the world. (p. 88-89)

 

I have to admit that though I’m aware that virtually no progress has been made on reducing carbon emissions, I didn’t fully grasp how insane the owners of capital are at this moment:

…in 2022, there were 119 oil pipelines under development—planned, under construction, nearing completion—with a total length of some 350,000 km, enough to encircle the globe at the equator more than eight times. Not one more gas pipeline could be added: but in 2022, there were 477 in progress, with a combined length girdling this planet twenty-four times. Over 300 liquefied gas terminals were in the works. Not one more coal mine or plant could burden the Earth, but underway were 432 new mines and 485 new plants. These fossil fuel installations were in preparation already before the scale of the bonanza of 2022 became clear—expanded reproduction is the modus operandi—and with all the capital accumulated in that year, even more were spawned. (p. 13) … They were completely, infernally, demoniacally out of control: the classes ruling the planet seemed bent on burning it as fast as physically possible, and nothing—nothing—had yet reined them in to even the most minimal degree. (p. 21)

The authors write about the ideology of “overshoot,” a tacit and increasingly vocalized position that says we have to keep burning fossil fuels at an ever increasing pace, and it’s really ok because though we’ll radically overshoot the internationally agreed-upon target of holding global warming to 1.5°C, or 2.0°C, or now even 3.0°C, it’ll get solved later when “technology” appears to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Billions of dollars already spent on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) pilot projects have proven fruitless. The authors plan to take up geoengineering and various techno-fixes in a later volume, but for now, it’s self-evident that there is no better solution than simply to stop burning fossil fuels and leave the oil in the soil. But that crashes directly into the capitalist system, a system bent on expanding “value” at (literally) all costs.

BP would quit solar and wind for a second time, because they made the smallest profits of all kinds of energy in its portfolio—or, as the chief of the ‘gas and low carbon’ department further clarified, ‘we will not grow renewables for the sake of growing wind and solar.’ What, then, set the priorities? ‘We’re going to be driven by value,’ explained Looney. ‘That’s what we’re going to be driven by. And if we see value, we’ll do it. And if we don’t, we won’t.’ (p. 198) … Between February 2020 and February 2023, ExxonMobil registered a ‘total return’ of about 110 percent, Chevron made more than 80, Total almost 60, Shell almost 40, and BP ‘only’ slightly more than 20. (p. 203) … Peak oil theory would predict that prices of the latter would shoot up to the point of utter unaffordability; but as we have seen, it gravely underestimated the prowess of the productive forces, which rather unlocked fresh riches of hydrocarbons, at the cost of increased mobilization of fixed capital. Hence a gently rising curve, not a crazy spike. These empirically observable tendencies for fossil fuels obeyed the law of value. Labor was the center around which their exchange value revolved. (p. 205)

And this is where all the hopeful enthusiasm pumped out by the likes of Bill McKibben or other cheerleaders for a market transition to renewable energy fail to understand how the system actually works. Oil barons are fixated on expanding value through the exploitation of surplus value, which requires human labor and commodities at the heart of the process. This is as true today as it was in 1820. BP (laughingly rebranded as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ back in the 2010s) has invested heavily in wind and solar at two different times in its corporate history, only to retreat each time and return to the real source of grand profit: oil and gas.

No first-order commodity will ever leave this [solar or wind] farm, as from an oil field. The puniest cells and the largest concentrated solar power parks are alike in this regard: fixed capital but no surplus value. As for the second source of super-profits in fossil fuels, there is no equivalent either. An unusually bounteous field does not allow the owner to carve out an exception to any average labour time. It just means even more of the free stuff. Last but not least, because the flow cannot be commodified, it cannot be traded, and so it cannot have any world market, and so it will not be vulnerable to geopolitical disruptions the way oil and gas in particular are. (p. 213) … As 1.5°C was in the wind—and shortly behind it, 1.7°C . . .—the demon that held the world in its grip was value in general and self-expanding value in particular. This was the force that piled up assets that must not be stranded and produced ever more value that must not be destroyed, like the pharaoh made pyramids arise in Egypt. It ran the world out of control. (p. 218)

Reading all this is infuriating to be sure. But I appreciate the clarity they bring to this discussion, so often obscured by statistics about the expansion of solar and wind power generation, the fall in price to below that of fossil fuels, etc. Markets don’t work automatically on price, that’s one clear lesson of the historical record as documented in Malm’s and others’ work. Now that we’ve entered the post-neoliberal era, the paralyzing logic that said we have to leave technical and economic decisions to the machinations of the “market,” has been laid bare. Unfortunately, we’re now in the grips of a kleptocracy, one who is committed to self-enrichment and crony capitalism, employing the rhetoric of markets to obscure the raw power they are exercising.

Bifo thinks there’s no way out, and he might be right:

Now that climate deniers hold the government of the number one polluting nation, it’s going to be impossible to reverse climate collapse: the three-degree increase in temperature is an irreversible trend, and the consequences are promptly unfolding. Much of the planet tends to become uninhabitable, great migrations follow fueling fears, violence and extermination.

The disgusting scapegoating of immigrants and people being uprooted from their homes by violence and climate catastrophes is being used to distract us from the basic task at hand. Any sort of civilizational survival requires a rapid transition to a new way of making life. To do this we have to take their fucking money! And it’s not really money that matters, it’s the power that flows from controlling it in this world. Because what’s really at stake is that we have to radically alter what we do all day, how we interact with what’s left of the natural world, and how we take care of each other as we suffer the (now) inevitable “natural disasters” to come. Malm and Carton again:

The ethical and practical approach to the problem of stranded assets, in other words, is mercilessly confrontational—you have created this mess, you carry the losses—and aim at unredeemed destruction of capital. It shades into expropriation, or the practice of depriving proprietors of their property without redress. (p. 241)

Another book I read over the summer was The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple (Bloomsbury: 2019). When I pause to wonder how the hell we’ve gotten to this rotten state, I generally turn to history, and this book was a welcome contribution to my understanding of the longer flow of events. I’ll leave with an extended quote from the introduction of this very long and detailed account of how the British managed to take over India:

In many ways the East India Company was a model of commercial efficiency: one hundred years into its history, it had only thirty-five permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history… We still talk about the British conquering India, but that phrase disguises a more sinister reality. It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator—Clive. India’s transition to colonialism took place under a for-profit corporation, which existed entirely for the purpose of enriching its investors.

Plus ça change!