The next 25 years

Razib Khan has an interesting and well-written piece peering into the future: "The end of America as the world as we know it", a free teaser for his "Premium Posts" where he's seeking to monetize his stuff. Good luck!

Anyway, here are some highlights. Bold shows my emphasis.

"The American elites have always been defined by wealth, but there also remained an element of patriotism and pride in the nation-state. The idea that we are a light unto the nations with our example of robust democratic republicanism. The rise of global capital means that many of the economic oligarchs have weak attachments to specific nations. They are citizens of an archipelago of super-cities inhabited by the financial elite. They involve themselves with the politics of multiple nations but fundamentally are not of any nation in anything more than a bureaucratic sense. Rupert Murdoch is a case in point."

There has been a recurrent sense that the high-bourgeoisie has been 'unpatriotic' since the dawn of 'Monopoly Capitalism' back at the start of the twentieth century. Plenty of observers noted the pro-German appeasement policies of the British elites in the nineteen thirties.

Globalisation has massively amplified the social weight of this class fraction - no-one ever took the concept or vision of a 'borderless world' seriously before; they do now.

"To use Peter Turchin’s framework, the West is a society with declining social cohesion and riven by elite factions due to overproduction in the administrative classes. The “post-World War II consensus” was boring, but it also presented a vision of emulation. A robust middle-class was supported by an economy which was productive and had a use for semi-skilled labor. We are entering a period where old certitudes are fading away. Economic and cultural.

But they are not being replaced by a new system or a new ideology in the West. The neoliberal framework is better than its rivals, but its cold and rational operations are always going to result in only a cult following. The resurgence of classical socialism among young Westerners and the appeal of political Islam elsewhere indicate a genuine lack of new ideas. While “Communist” China turns back toward its own traditions, in India Rightist movements are creating a new understanding of their society that rejects the Nehruvian project that descends from British Fabian socialism."

Good insights here.The masses increasingly perceive neoliberal ideology as pedalled by the mainstream media and public intellectuals as an alien narrative that they don't sign up for. It's also full of bare-faced affronts to the truth of course which irritate the engaged mind.

Yet what is the alternative? All the old ideas of resistance are being dusted off, but none seems to cohere with new realities.

"The end of the unipolar age will affect the ideological tribes differently. The cosmopolitan and broadly liberal upper middle and upper classes will welcome a post-national and global age, but some elements will not acclimate itself well to the reality that this age is not dominated by particular and contingent Anglo-liberal values. That is because of this class’ adherence to a form of economic determinism, where modern technological productive societies go hand and hand with liberalism. History ends, and it ends in their way. Despite the fact that organized “liberal” parties are generally a “Third Force” to the parties of the Left and the Right where they have any power at all (arguably in the United States this “liberalism” was the ascendant ideology in both the Republican and Democratic parties for the 20th century).

We are aware of how the populist Right will react. The call will go out to roll back the clock to the decades after World War II when white Christian America was self-confident and a superpower unparalleled. To a time when the USA could dictate terms and shape the course of the world through its own singular fiat. Its very will. The problem with this vision is American power was always conditioned on exogenous circumstances. The rise of Communism and state and regulatory socialism crippled the long-term trajectory of many nations. World War II reduced the European nation-states and Japan to client states. None of these contingent events can be replicated.

Parts of the cultural Left aim to create a more egalitarian world by deconstructing and tearing down the edifice of the hierarchical Western order that arose over the past few centuries. But this is like organisms adapted toward a niche that no longer exists. The world of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, no longer exists. Inverting the moral message of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-supremacy will continue in the 2020s, but substantively it is a message grounded in the realities of the 1920s. Like the Indian elites’ anger and resentment toward British imperialism, the intersectional critical race theory that is common in the United States is a reflex and toolkit designed for a fundamentally different world. Why continue to muster the armies of the West after the death of Sauron? For glory and position within the administrative state, and the few sinecures available to culture producers.

Finally, the banner of the old Red Flag is now rising once again, like a phoenix from the ashes. Instead of a redistributive economy in a market context, some of these radicals want to reconceptualize economic relations in a Marxist sense. Seize the means of production. They will tell us that “this time it will be different.” I am skeptical that most people will buy into this message. Like the attempt to mobilized racial and sexual minorities against white males, a classical Left economic policy was always optimized for the industrial economy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A message it is, but for a time long gone.

I come bringing news of the death of our old gods. Not news of the birth of the new."

Oh dear, Razib unerringly puts his fingers here on the central weakness of the Marxist left. In my view the analysis of capitalism as a mode of production is as smart and compelling as ever (I am currently being re-impressed by Duncan Foley's "Understanding Capital") but the Marxist judgement of the faults of capitalism is as faddy and derivative, as theatrical and formulaic as ever, while the conceptualisation of transition is so implausible and under-theorised that it resembles the transcendental crisis we see in fundamental physics.  

No-one knows anything.