[September sat down with Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up
Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without
Democracy, to discuss the history of neoliberal and libertarian ideas,
the war in Ukraine and the state of the left-wing movement]
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HAS POST-NEOLIBERAL ORDER ALREADY ARRIVED? A CONVERSATION WITH QUINN
SLOBODIAN  
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September Collective
September 10, 2023
September
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_ September sat down with Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up
Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without
Democracy, to discuss the history of neoliberal and libertarian ideas,
the war in Ukraine and the state of the left-wing movement _

,

 

S: WHEN _GLOBALISTS _WAS PUBLISHED IT SEEMED LIKE THE NEOLIBERAL
ORDER WAS STILL UNSHAKABLE. EVEN AFTER SUCH A SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGE AS
THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS AND PERSISTENT CRITICISM FROM BOTH LEFT
AND RIGHT, IT LOOKED VERY RESILIENT; LIKE IT COULD SUSTAIN THESE
CHALLENGES. HOWEVER, NOW THIS STATUS QUO SEEMS TO BE COMING TO AN END.
GOVERNMENTS ARE PUTTING MORE AND MORE EMPHASIS ON DELINKING AND
GENERALLY TAKE A MORE PROACTIVE APPROACH TOWARD MARKETS. IN YOUR VIEW,
DOES THIS SIGNIFY THE END OF THE NEOLIBERAL ERA? AND IF SO, WHAT WILL
COME AFTER IT?

QS: _Globalists_ came out in 2018, but I had mostly completed it in
early 2016, even before the Brexit vote and Trump's election. My son
was born around that time so my life was put on hold for a year and
the book ended up being published a little later. But what you're
saying is even truer than it might’ve been by the publication date.
The neoliberal global consensus was very much intact when I finished
writing the book and it didn't look like there were any strong
challenges to it. The EU was on board with the idea of building ever
stronger supranational organizations that locked in a particular
economic future and made others impossible. In the Democratic Party,
Hillary Clinton looked like an even more conservative candidate than
Obama had been. So, as I finished, I thought I was writing a history
of the present. But then, in between finishing and the book being
published, three ruptures in the political climate happened — with
Brexit, with Trump, and Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly strong
challenge in the Democratic Party. It turned out that I had actually
written the history of the near past.

The question of whether that meant that neoliberalism was dead or not
is one that I've been asked many times over the last few years and my
answer has changed over time. We can see two phases. The first one was
the phase of Trump and Brexit. We can think of this as a
pseudo-rupture. Certain issues around shared continental governance
— in the case of the UK--and free trade--in the case of the US--were
turned upside down but the mainstream logic of economic organization
remained pretty continuous. Trump himself was more of a continuity
figure than a figure of rupture in that the main engine of financial
capitalism was not just left undisturbed, but given more freedom. The
only real legislative success Trump had was the big tax cut package,
which had been a very standard Republican free market demand for
decades. So when people asked me whether neoliberalism was dead in
2017 and 2018 I tended to say 'no'. There were some surface changes,
especially on immigration. But the rhetoric often was louder than the
real difference between the Obama years and Trump years. It seemed
there had been a break in the language people use to talk about
political economy, but nothing substantial in practice yet. But when
Biden was elected in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic something
very unexpected happened: he did not restore the _status quo
ante _from before Trump when it came to economic organization.
Instead, there was an acceleration of the trade war and an embrace of
economic nationalism that would have been unthinkable for a Democrat
five years earlier. The combination of Trump’s rhetorical opening
with the practical rupture of fighting the pandemic made possible what
I think can fairly be labeled a post-neoliberal paradigm. I don't
think it was inevitable — it happened because there were smart
well-organized policy people who managed to get close to Biden early
and hand him large legislative packages like _Build Back Better_. The
original legislative proposal was three or four times larger than what
eventually made it through in the form of the _Inflation Reduction
Act_, but these policy people were self-consciously deploying the
playbook of the neoliberals: in a time of crisis, you need to have a
plan ready to hand to the people in power because they don't know what
to do. And there were post-neoliberal left liberals — in the
American sense — who were in the position to do so. And now the EU
is playing catch-up with the US, while China, which had set the pace
in terms of state intervention is now figuring out how to negotiate
the new arrangement. Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Singapore were also
places that showed that a strong guiding hand of the state in the
economy can be effective. The emergence of sovereign wealth funds in
the last 25 years--which happened alongside the rise of what Benjamin
Braun and Brett Christophers have called asset manager capitalism in
the West-- has changed the mind of elites in the US. We've moved into
an era where nobody automatically gives lip service to the idea that
economic globalization is a natural force and policymakers have no
choice but to adapt to it. It's almost the opposite: the new go-to
language is ‘We don't believe in the free market as an autonomous
principle, we do our best for our people, for our nations, and so
on’.

This new paradigm comes with significant dangers. People like myself
who have been critical of neoliberalism for years might have been
unprepared for the hazards of what could follow. The geopolitical
risks created now, especially between the US and China, are
frightening. It is possible that right-wing actors in the United
States will use the end of the neoliberal consensus to drive through
war-mongering aggressive policies that could be worse for everyone. Of
course, I don't need to tell you that Putin's behavior and the
invasion of Ukraine have already deepened the sense of a fractured
world economy where states are not cooperating in some version of a
game with agreed-upon rules but are in more ruthless zero-sum conflict
with one another.

S: YOUR ASSESSMENT IS INTERESTING, IT REMINDS ME OF PUTIN FRAMING IT
LIKE A ‘BROKEN PROMISE’ GIVEN TO HIM AND TO RUSSIA IN GENERAL. IN
SEVERAL OF HIS RECENT SPEECHES, HE SAID THAT RUSSIA’S LEADERSHIP WAS
UNDER THE IMPRESSION THAT THEY WERE NOW OF THE SAME BREED AS OTHER
CAPITALIST COUNTRIES, PLAYING BY THEIR RULES. BUT THEN THEY SAW
DEVELOPED CAPITALIST COUNTRIES ABANDONING THESE VERY RULES. AND
RUSSIA’S CURRENT ACTIONS ARE ‘JUST’ A COUNTER-MOVE TO THAT.

QS: He is not totally wrong in that case. There's a very good book
that came out recently called _The Triumph of Broken Promises_ about
the neoliberal era. One of the things that the author, historian Fritz
Bartel, is saying is that from Thatcher to Solidarity in Poland there
had been a range of politicians saying ‘You can't expect things to
be as good as they used to be, things are going to get worse’. The
way that Washington and Wall Street acted in the Soviet transition was
very destructive. It helped to set the stage for the rhetoric that
Putin uses now. But interestingly, the invasion has also given a kind
of stress test to the idea of global economic interdependence. If you
go back and read the headlines when the war broke out and there was
the declaration of unilateral sanctions, the assumption was that
Russia would immediately fall into shambles. Its economy would
collapse within months if not weeks, we were told. Yet that didn't
happen--partially because the rest of the world beyond the United
States bloc isn't that invested in the conflict. They don't really
care enough to stop trading with Russia. But it also revealed that
America was not as powerful as it was thought to be. It turned out
that the power of the dollar and the power of American infrastructure
go a long way, but can't determine everything that happens in the
world economy. This was a wake-up call for people who still believed
that we lived in a totally interdependent and interconnected
clockwork-style global economy where removing one cog would make
everything collapse. It turns out that it actually is possible to
realign supply chains and the markets they're tapping into even when
the US wields the extreme economic weapon of sanctions.

S: USING THE METAPHOR YOU YOURSELF USED, IT’S LIKE A NETWORK, RIGHT?
IT'S NOT ONLY CONNECTED THROUGH ONE CENTER BUT THERE ARE MYRIAD
CONNECTIONS THROUGH MULTIPLE JUNCTIONS. SO IT TURNED OUT THAT
EVERYTHING WAS EVEN MORE INTERCONNECTED THAN EXPECTED AND THIS IS WHY
THE RUSSIAN STATE AT LEAST FOR NOW IS ABLE TO SUSTAIN THE SANCTIONS
PRESSURE.

QS: It's one of the unexamined fallacies of the recent
post-neoliberal talk about resilience as something that you get if you
decrease global connections. The idea is that if you want to have more
supply chain resilience, you take production back from other countries
into your own country. But globalization champions would say the
opposite. They would use examples like the one you just used and argue
that, in fact, you're more resilient if you draw on multiple markets.
If one gets chopped off you shift to the other one. You actually
become less resilient if you try to shrink down to one national
economy. So there's some mythmaking happening now which may reveal
itself to be wrong. It’s important for critics not to allow lazy
thinking to substitute for bad thinking.

S: IN OTHER INTERVIEWS, YOU SAID THAT _CRACK-UP CAPITALISM_ IS SORT
OF A SEQUEL TO _GLOBALISTS_. BUT WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
THOSE TWO WORLDS, OF NEOLIBERALS FROM _GLOBALISTS_ AND OF
LIBERTARIANS FROM_ CRACK-UP CAPITALISM_? DO THE ZONES THAT THE LATTER
ARE CREATING EXIST INSIDE THIS GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL WORLD OR IS THE
LIBERTARIAN ZONE A SUCCESSOR TO THE NEOLIBERAL ORDER?

QS: It’s a great question. What I was trying to say is that inside
the neoliberal intellectual movement itself, there was a desire to
focus on scaling up. From the era of the League of Nations to the
1970s or even the 1990s, there was a belief that the best solution to
the problems of global capitalism was to encase independent
nation-states inside the institutions capable of ensuring that there'd
be free trade and free capital mobility. But from the 1970s doubts
began spreading amongst neoliberal intellectuals about whether this
was going to work. There were several reasons for that. First, there
was the fear that socialists were using supranational institutions as
a Trojan horse and were intent on seizing the UN, the EU, and even the
WTO to direct them to their own ends. The feeling among neoliberals
was something like ‘We don't really trust nation-states because they
always tend towards democracy and socialism and we don't trust
international organizations because they tend to be captured by those
same nations that are themselves captured by electorates; so we need
to figure out ways to do economic activity adjacent to and outside of
either of those.’ What I describe in the new book is the sequence in
which zones became of interest as a solution to this conundrum. Hong
Kong acted as a paradigm case. Its status as a colony meant it didn't
have democracy and it had the ability to operate more like a company
offshore than a nation-state. This became a way of scaling down rather
than up.

The other way of answering the question is that for those zones to
work you still need a larger supranational framework to ensure free
movement over borders, the ability to do things like sue companies if
they fail to comply, and countries if they fail to live up to their
promises. A good example of that is Honduras which I talk about in the
book. They created this small zone, almost extra-territorial, off the
coast of the north side of the country. It looks like a classic case
of opting out altogether of the world map. But when the laws changed
and there was a threat of being booted out, they immediately filed a
huge claim with the Central America Free Trade Agreement through
third-party arbitration. And now they are suddenly going from being
secessionists to arch-globalists again, appealing to the top level of
international economic law. So the dynamic I track is less about
shifting from the supra-national to a sub-national. Rather, these are
two ways of avoiding the nation. You are tactically moving between
scales that are either above or below, and there's a symbiosis between
spaces that opt out of nations or act outside of nations and the
stratum that is above or beyond the reach of national governments.

S: ANOTHER THING THAT I THINK IS QUITE SIMILAR
IN _GLOBALISTS_ AND _CRACK-UP CAPITALISM _IS THAT THEY PAINT
MARGINAL AND DEFENSIVE MOVEMENTS, AT LEAST THIS IS WHAT THEY INITIALLY
ARE OR HOW THEY PRESENT THEMSELVES. BUT THEN THEY END UP ON THE
OFFENSIVE AND TRANSFORM THE WORLD IN A MAJOR WAY. IT'S ALMOST A
CLASSIC UNDERDOG STORY. WHAT MADE THEM SO SUCCESSFUL? WHY WERE THEY
ABLE TO MOVE THE GOALPOSTS SO EFFECTIVELY?

QS: Mainly because the people that they were catering to were the
people with the most wealth and the most influence. If you try to
produce a global galaxy of real underdogs and the wretched of the
earth and the people who have ideas that run counter to the ideas of
the commodification of life, you will most likely just end up with a
bunch of people in prison. There are famous examples of this starting
from the Paris Commune as a vision of self-organized worker-run cities
across Europe that could be connected to each other inside of larger
territories. There's plenty of talk about autonomous zones from parts
of rural France and rural England to Chiapas in the 1990s —
left-anarchist attempts to opt out and secede. People have written
well about those. But the people I write about are the ones who have
the money and the resources and they're looking for ways to evade
projects of redistribution mostly managed through the tax-collecting
fiscal state. The tax haven is the ultimate example of just booking
your profits offshore but there are also special economic zones or
export processing zones. Countries are blackmailed into producing
spaces where they have fewer laws and less taxation to bring in
foreign investment for building factories and doing projects of
extraction or manufacturing. One of the interesting things that I try
to track in my book is how this very strange idea of declaring part of
state territory extraterritorial becomes the only way you get
investment from abroad. If you are Rwanda or Ghana or even Nigeria and
you expect to get foreign investors without producing a special
economic zone — forget it. Now it's the nonnegotiable price of
admission.

S: WHILE WE ARE ON THIS SUBJECT, WHAT ARE THE BROADER IMPLICATIONS OF
THIS LIBERTARIAN SECESSION PROJECT FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION AND
ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLES? IT SEEMS LIKE, TAKEN
TOGETHER, _GLOBALISTS _AND _CRACK-UP CAPITALISM_ PAINT A PRETTY
GRIM PICTURE — THESE FORMING NATION-STATES ARE ALWAYS BETWEEN THE
SCYLLA OF NEOLIBERAL INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS FORCING AUSTERITY ON
THEM AND CHARYBDIS OF CARVING THEIR COUNTRY UP INTO A MYRIAD OF
SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONES TO ATTRACT INVESTMENT — WITH NO CLEAR WAY
OUT.

QS: One is almost tempted to say Cuba figured it out. In some ways,
you can declare it a success story despite them having a very low
standard of living with a lot of basic amenities hard to come by. But
they have managed to produce a level of self-sufficiency inside of an
interdependent world economy that avoids giving away too much of their
sovereignty in the ways that other countries have. Another example is
Jamaica which specifically chose not to be a tax haven. They could
have and they decided not to despite all kinds of pressure they
continue to live under due to capitalist investment, specifically in
manufacturing and small-level agricultural production. Another example
is Barbados which not only has recently left the Commonwealth but
their leader Mia Mottley has become a spokesperson for the leading
role of small island nations in climate change as moral leaders, but
also the ones producing small-scale welfare states and doing
redistribution.

An optimist could say that in the idea of common ownership and
different forms of accountability, there is a space to appeal right
now to economic global elites' sense of justice. And sometimes — if
they can see profitability in it — they will opt for socially just
forms of investment over just the bottom line. But it's still the old
problem of how you use moral persuasion on people who are generally
not open to being morally persuaded. So I'm not that optimistic
especially because the drying up of global investment and global
credit is hitting these nations the hardest. I think there's no option
except to hope that regional and domestic left-wing waves like the
recent quasi-pink tide in Latin America can produce new settlements
where, for example, indigenous peoples’ land rights get written into
national projects.

S: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE UKRAINE CASE? THERE IS A GREAT AMOUNT
OF HELP THEY RECEIVE AND SOME OF IT EVEN COMES AS GRANTS BUT MOST OF
IT BRINGS MORE DEBT AND UNFAVORABLE CONDITIONS IMPOSED BY
SUPRANATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. OF COURSE, IT HELPS, FOR NOW, TO FIGHT
AGAINST THE RUSSIAN INVASION, BUT THE QUESTION IS WHAT COMES NEXT. IT
SEEMS LIKE THE POLITICAL CLIMATE THAT EXISTS NOW LEAVES VERY LITTLE
SPACE FOR THE IMAGINATION OF ALTERNATIVE OPTIONS FOR BUILDING BACK
FROM ALL THE CATASTROPHES THAT WERE IMPOSED ON UKRAINE BY RUSSIA.

QS: If you look at historical examples, I've just read a very
interesting dissertation, where the Jubilee movement around the early
2000s is analyzed. The idea of the movement was to forgive the debt of
the poorest nations. The author has a very interesting observation
about it being a huge victory, on the one hand, because that had never
happened before. Creditors had never just forgiven the debt, they'd
always got it through the IMF or whatever. On the other hand, the
price of the jubilee was that the countries then had to be exposed to
much more structural adjustment and oversight. Indeed, it came with
even more intervention: countries had to balance their budgets, had to
cut social programs, and so on. This two-sidedness is unfortunately
the best-case scenario. Because the worst-case scenario of the
post-war recovery would be Ukraine returning to the economic model
they had before the war. The one that was largely based on kleptocracy
and bending over backward to foreign investment. I can see how the
cutthroat investors would want all these privileges that special
economic zones provide.

What would be good is to follow the lead of wartime Europe in the
1940s, which means that the time to plan for the post-war is now, not
just in the sense of military strategy, but also the vision of the
good life that should follow the conflict. It’s really interesting
that things like the Beveridge plan and the British welfare state or
the Bretton Woods system were conceived of during the war, not after
it. So if the post-neoliberal turn is for real then it will be
interesting to see post-neoliberal visions for post-war Ukraine. But
it's not much of a conversation, at least in the Western media. I
can't really remember reading much about the blueprint for a more
socially just and democratically accountable Ukraine.

S: RIGHT, IT SEEMS LIKE THE TURN AWAY FROM NEOLIBERALISM THAT WE ARE
SPEAKING ABOUT IS NOW MOSTLY HAPPENING IN THE DEVELOPED ECONOMIES.
MAYBE THE LIKES OF MEXICO OR BRAZIL ARE ALSO STARTING TO DO THIS, BUT
FOR THE COUNTRIES THAT ARE — JUST LIKE UKRAINE — REALLY DEPENDENT
ON OTHER NATIONS’ INVOLVEMENT IN THEIR ECONOMY THIS NEW APPROACH IS
NOT REALLY IN THE CARDS YET. MAYBE IT WILL COME TO THEM LATER BUT FOR
NOW, IT SEEMS, THEY ARE STILL FORCED TO STAY IN THE OLD PARADIGM AND
PLAY BY THE OLD RULES.

QS: Potentially it’s even worse than that. There are left-governed
countries, but the frame now for Ukraine, for example when it comes to
EU membership, it's being discussed in the West Balkans-style. That's
one of the ways in which the EU is an iron cage for political and
economic imagination. Because if you set up a vision of the future
that way — ‘Will you be allowed in the European club?’ — you
trigger the stereotypical imaginations of everyone who lives in
Northern Europe; the likes of Holland and Germany immediately begin to
worry about the costs and transfers and the problems of securing the
outer border. It stalls out the utopian thinking that is actually
necessary, turning the best possible future into a budget line for the
European Central Bank or for Brussels. Maybe the real constraint right
now in conversations and in the press in Germany or the US is that
every time the vision of Ukraine after the war comes up, all people
see are financial burdens rather than something that could be dynamic
and even inspiring.

S: THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF CONTEMPORARY LEFT-WING ECONOMISTS AND
HISTORIANS WHO ARE TRYING TO ENGAGE WITH GLOBAL HISTORY OR GLOBAL
ECONOMICS (WITH SOME NOTABLE EXCEPTIONS LIKE SIMON CLARKE) OFTEN TREAT
POST-SOVIET COUNTRIES AND MAYBE EVEN THE WHOLE FORMER EASTERN BLOC
REGION LIKE A BLACK HOLE WHICH EVERYONE TRIES TO STEP AND SPEAK
AROUND. WHY IS THAT SO, IN YOUR OPINION? EVEN IF WE TAKE _CRACK-UP
CAPITALISM_, THESE COUNTRIES ARE MENTIONED ALONGSIDE THE MAIN EXAMPLES
BUT NEVER ARE AT THE CENTER OF ATTENTION.

QS: It's a good question. Partly, when people are writing the history
of neoliberalism sometimes they're trying to create a timeline that is
not the same as the geopolitical timeline of the Cold War. So there's
an attempt to create a different series of important events: Pinochet
becomes important, Thatcher becomes important rather than just Great
Power conflict and standoff. So maybe there's an overcompensation for
that sometimes, and then the countries that had been central in the
Cold War become irrelevant somehow. In my book, for example, there was
indeed an attempt to put developments in East Asia more centrally. But
this comes out of a reaction to the very West-centric narrative in
public schools, universities, and popular memory in the United States,
where if you write about the 20th century, you talk about the Second
World War, the Cold War, globalization, and then 2016. The fact that
there were Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and then China steadily rising
is almost never mentioned. China’s rise to dominance has caught
Americans by such surprise partially because they weren't told about
this in their textbooks.

At the same time, I think the lack of attention to the Soviet bloc and
Eastern Europe is a shame because even if you're just interested in
the history of neoliberalism, post-Soviet space is a great place to
look: there's a really good book, for example, by Hilary Appel and
Mitchell Orenstein _From Triumph to Crisis: Neoliberal Economic
Reform in Postcommunist Countries. _It’s about what they
call _avant-garde neoliberalism. _Especially in the Baltic states;
the things those countries were doing were beyond what the EU or the
IMF recommended — flat tax, all kinds of extreme pro-market
libertarian measures that were considered a bad idea even by hardcore
neoliberals. There's no good reason why that shouldn't be part of a
general narration. Probably the more cynical answer would be that we
write histories to explain the present and to explain the success
stories of the present. And this is why Eastern Europe and Central
Europe became irrelevant to the American imagination and arguably even
to the European imagination at some point. Especially for Germans, it
was almost a return to the 19th-century relationship where this part
of the world was just an economic hinterland. As long as everyone
stays relatively peaceable, keeps sending their workforce, and allows
us to build the back end of our supply chain out there, then why would
you think about it unless there are too many people coming as unwanted
migrants? So it continues to exist in a blind spot. One thing that
Putin has done, sadly, is forcing the US and Western Europe to think
about that part of the world again--although many Americans are
already forgetting about the war.

S: SPEAKING OF WHICH, IT SEEMS THAT PUTIN — OR AT LEAST PEOPLE WHO
ARE IN CHARGE OF THE ECONOMIC POLICIES IN RUSSIA — WOULDN'T BE OUT
OF PLACE IN YOUR BOOK. BECAUSE, AMONG OTHER THINGS — AND I THINK
IT'S NOT COMPLETELY COINCIDENTAL — HE IS THE CREATOR OF THE LARGEST
SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE TO DATE, WHICH OCCUPIES THE ENTIRETY OF THE
RUSSIAN ARCTIC. HIS POWER IS INCREDIBLY CENTRALIZED BUT ALSO
INCREASINGLY FRAGMENTED THROUGH DIFFERENT PRIVATE ENTERPRISES — LIKE
STATE-RUN COMPANIES AND PRIVATE MILITARY CONTRACTORS. DO YOU THINK HE
CAN BE A ‘MODEL’ LEADER FOR THE FRAGMENTED YET INTERCONNECTED
POST-NEOLIBERAL WORLD THAT IS TAKING SHAPE NOW?

QS: There are members of the right-wing libertarian world who do see
Russia as one of the most economically free places in the world
because of its low tax rates. In a way, this is the most important
story for neoliberals and libertarians, everything is secondary to
that. But as far as the direct involvement of the state in the economy
goes, I think most of the doctrinaire neoliberal types would see a
problem. They usually don't think what is called ‘state
capitalism’ is a particularly good thing. That's why they like Hong
Kong. Because there was not such a high level of state ownership but
also a decreased amount of political freedom that made things run more
efficiently. But practically speaking, it’s important to observe
that the world is turning more in the direction of places like Russia,
Saudi Arabia, or China than towards Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, or the
Metaverse.

In that sense, what you're describing is a more accurate view of the
world and it explains why there's almost a tragic end to _Crack-Up
Capitalism_. In the 1990s and early 2000s, these free-market radicals
thought things were going their way. They thought that we were heading
towards a Neal Stephenson-like virtuous competition between endless
fragmentary micro-polities. But that's not what's happening. There is
zonification and there is the multiplication of the zones but there is
also a twist ending. The zones they cherished were not sites of
economic freedom, experimentation, and self-government. They were
contained within the large authoritarian framework of China for the
most part, Russia, and a number of other less democratic states. So
the zone which was supposed to be the vessel for escaping from the
nation-state has just become another tool in the repertoire of
nation-states. The state capitalism you describe in your question is
more like the horizon of the future, while the hypermobile escapism of
the market radicals is going to be subjugated to that state power.

S: SINCE YOU’VE MENTIONED NEAL STEPHENSON. THE LIBERTARIANS WE MEET
ON THE PAGES OF _CRACK-UP CAPITALISM _HAVE A SHARED AFFECTION FOR
HIS FICTION — _THE DIAMOND AGE_ AND BANTUSTANS, THE WHOLE
METAVERSE IDEA... WHAT ATTRACTS THEM TO IT?

QS: Certain people are just lightning rods for the zeitgeist who are
able to capture the mood perfectly. And this is what Stephenson did. I
think _Snow Crash_ and _Diamond Age_ are incredible books. Very
poorly written, but at a world-building level, they're great. The
interesting thing about these libertarians is that they're big science
fiction readers, so there's a feedback loop. Someone like Stephenson
writes a beautiful description of the state of global capitalism and
then people like Peter Thiel or Jeff Bezos pick up on it. Bezos has
been the employer of Neal Stephenson for years now. Stephenson works
for _Blue Origin, _his space company, doing who knows what. But
there's a way in which those speculative worlds become blueprints for
the things that these billionaires see themselves striving towards.
It’s obvious that the Metaverse itself is from Snow Crash. It’s
almost heavy-handed at this point, the way they try to recycle or
launder their profit-making enterprises through these fantasy concepts
from sci-fi.

In the same way that the _Globalists_ book captured the era of high
neoliberalism right before the global financial crisis, _Crack-Up
Capitalism_ is trying to write the intellectual history of a slightly
overlapping timeline starting from the early 1990s, which took off
with the tech boom and Web 2.0 and hit a wall with the inflation and
the loss of endless pool of liquidity that was keeping all kinds of
crazy ideas flowing. For years, you could get money for just reading a
chapter from _Snow Crash,_ and some venture capitalist would be like
‘Here's your first line of credit, let's go’. But that true
bullshit era of Metaverse visions has come to an end. I think there
will be a soft version of the state subjugating the market, ideally
towards positive ends. But no more dreams of escape, no more dreams of
fragmentation for the time being.

S: IN SOME OF YOUR INTERVIEWS, YOU MENTION THAT ANGER AND FUTILITY
AROUND THE EFFORTS AT INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY DURING THE US-LED
INVASION OF IRAQ IN THE EARLY 2000S SERVED AS AN INSPIRATION FOR YOUR
DISSERTATION ON WEST GERMAN STUDENTS' ENCOUNTER WITH THIRD WORLD
POLITICS. WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THE WORLD’S REACTION TO THE RUSSIAN
INVASION OF UKRAINE?

QS: In some ways, it's the exact opposite. The solidarity with the
Ukrainian people was very strong and very immediate at least in
superficial ways — the hanging of the flags and the attempt to help
people who were fleeing from the war. There was a capacity for
personalizing and humanizing the victims of the conflict which simply
didn't exist at all in the case of Iraq — partially because it was
further away, but partially because of cultural, racial, and religious
differences. There is a sense of a gap between the aggressor nation
and the victim nation, especially if you're in Europe — after all,
Ukraine is just a train drive away.

But you're still left with the problem of solidarity. This is where it
actually does go back to things I wrote about in my first book. In
particular, I wrote about this interesting distinction the New Left
made in Germany between the_ solidarity of sentiment_ and
the _solidarity of interests_. There was this argument, in which
Herbert Marcuse intervened in part. It goes like this: ‘As a young
West German, what connection do you have to a Vietnamese peasant? Yes,
you're both human. But what is it that you consume that is reliant on
the labor of that person on the other side of the world? How can you
construct a chain of causation that leads from your lifestyle to
theirs?’

This was a big project for the New Left: to show the reliance between
these distant populations and to try to construct the solidarity of
interests. So when you fight for the Vietnamese peasant you're not
just fighting on their behalf or in a humanitarian gesture, but you're
also fighting for your own struggle domestically. That conversation
hasn't happened very much. Instead, we've had more of the solidarity
of sentiment, which Marcuse actually advocated for. He said, ‘You
don't need to create this elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of
connections between the Vietnamese peasant and yourself, you can just
say that you're moved by their struggle, you care for that and you'll
bleed for them because they're humans too’. And you can make this
leap of identification and in that leap, you will find new
revolutionary politics. At the time, the horizon of politics was the
revolution, overthrowing the government, and you could arguably have
this shared vision. But what we have now is a solidarity of sentiment
without the dream of revolution. So if you just have the humanitarian
belief of caring for the suffering of others, but no political project
attached to that then it has nowhere to go. The energy exhausts itself
in the gesture and exhausts itself in the flag. Eventually, the
pleasure you get from it fades and the attention fades as well.

I'm sure it's stuff that you spend half your life discussing: how to
politicize these cross-border solidarity movements. I encourage my own
demographic of leftist academics and intellectuals in the US and
Canada to think more about it than they have so far. There has been a
strong initial reaction and very weak follow-up, very little political
strategy is attached to the war in my circles. Most of the energy in
the US is going into Bidenomics and climate transition but the
geopolitical situation is removed to the background.

S: THIS DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE SOLIDARITY OF SENTIMENTS AND
SOLIDARITY OF INTERESTS GOT ME THINKING ABOUT THIS PART OF _BLACK
JACOBINS _WHERE C.L.R. JAMES WRITES HOW DURING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION,
BOTH REVOLUTIONARIES AND ORDINARY PEOPLE NOT ONLY DETESTED ‘THE
ARISTOCRACY OF THE SKIN’ VIVIDLY BUT ALSO WERE SO MOVED BY THE
SUFFERINGS OF THE SLAVES THAT THEY HAD STOPPED DRINKING COFFEE
ALTOGETHER BECAUSE FOR THEM IT WAS ‘DRENCHED WITH THE BLOOD AND
SWEAT OF MEN TURNED INTO BRUTES’. I THINK IT’S A GOOD EXAMPLE OF
HOW CONCRETE THIS CONNECTION BETWEEN THE STRUGGLES IN DIFFERENT PARTS
OF THE WORLD CAN BE WHEN THERE IS ACTUALLY A HORIZON OF RADICAL CHANGE
TO LOOK FORWARD TO.

QS: Yes, there are all kinds of ways I think the global
interconnection that exists now doesn't just have to work in favor of
the wealthy. It can also be flipped and turned into a tissue of
connection. People I really like are working on what they call supply
chain justice. So, instead of just saying ‘We're moving to electric
vehicles in the United States, let’s get everyone a Tesla’ you
question where the lithium is coming from, and what's happening to the
communities in the highlands of Chile where the lithium pools are
located. Politics isn't just ensuring mass consumption domestically,
it's about making sure that all that is happening in a way doesn’t
produce new forms of domination and suffering.

S: MY LAST QUESTION TO SUM UP OUR CONVERSATION WOULD BE ABOUT THE
NEOLIBERAL PROJECT AND LIBERTARIAN SECESSION AS AN ATTEMPT TO DEFEND
THE PROFITS AND PROPERTY FROM POPULAR DEMANDS AND DEMOCRACY AS A WAY
OF BRINGING THESE DEMANDS TO LIFE. WHAT IS SO DANGEROUS IN DEMOCRACY
FOR THE RULING CLASSES AND CAPITALISM IN GENERAL? IS THERE A WAY TO
TURN THE TABLES FOR THE DEMOCRATIC FORCES?

QS: That is something I wanted to go more into in _Crack-Up
Capitalism_, but certain things didn't make it into the book. There is
an interesting reversal in neoliberal intellectual history. At the
beginning of the 20th century, the assumption was that democracies
would always tend towards socialism: if you give people the vote, they
will use it to ask for something. And eventually, there'll be nothing
left to give them.

What some interesting thinkers like Murray Rothbard started to figure
out by the 1980s is that in places like the United States, the average
person is not a socialist waiting to happen but extremely selfish,
property-obsessed, and very unwilling to give anything of their own to
anyone else. And if you can make them realize that you want to keep
the government as far away from their property as possible then you
can use them as shock troops for encasing the economy from democratic
institutions. So, if you can recognize the basic anti-democratic
impulses of the people themselves they could be a useful resource. The
campaigns for Pat Buchanan in the 1990s and then for Trump in the
2010s used that insight. You can mobilize people democratically
towards a goal of reducing the level of redistribution and reducing
the level of state ownership, you can use people to mobilize in the
name of a government that would self-destruct its own power.

That was a very powerful insight of the neoliberals, which isn’t
only about tying the hands of democratic leaders and the demos itself
but using the population to reduce the capacity of the government to
act. In Germany, you have the debt brake, in other countries, you have
flat taxes in the constitution. When you do enough of those things you
don't have to worry about democracy anymore because democracy works
within such a narrow space that it can't actually change very much
economically or in terms of people's lives. This is how neoliberals
stopped worrying and learned to love democracy. If you build this
structure in such a way that it's impervious to most of the changes,
you will always be able to achieve your own goals in the end.

* Quinn Slobodian
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* neo-liberalism
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* Libertarianism
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* Ukraine
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* Solidarity
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