Interregnum, Part 1: Collapse
There will be no revolution. Capitalism is collapsing of its own accord — spinning out of control at a pace few of us expected or even imagined. The arguable advantage of collapse over revolution is that you stand better odds of avoiding guillotines and gulags. The inarguable disadvantage is that, with no revolution and no vanguard, there’s no idea or plan for where to go next.
We are entering what prominent German economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck termed an extended interregnum, in his still-prescient 2014 work How Will Capitalism End?. An interregnum in which governing structures have failed, but “no masterplan of a better society” exists to take their place. “…what remains of a social order hinges on the motivation of individuals to cooperate with other individuals on ad hoc basis…”
What Collapse?
Many don’t accept the starting premise, i.e. that collapse is in progress. They see robust US GDP growth and the ability of extended cross-border trading systems to (so far) keep food and other consumer goods (mostly) available amid pandemic, wars, and severe, unpredictable weather as signs that capitalism can and will adapt — as it has done many times before. As signs that the transition from fossil fuel energy to high-tech, non-carbon-emitting energy sources is manageable.
The view of many — or perhaps it’s more a hope — is that all we have to do is tweak neoliberalism a bit. Accept that the rules-based order tilted slightly too far in favor of corporate and financial institutions over consumers and workers. Tilt it back the other way, and return to plain old liberalism instead of overwrought neoliberalism. Everything will be fine.
I don’t think so. I don’t think John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, much less Richard Nixon, or Robert Schuman, or Deng Xiao Ping had the answer to what ails the world now, in all that ailment’s ugly multiplicity. I think we’re in a period in which international institutions and national governments are unable to formulate coherent policy, much less provide good implementation.
The determined gutting and discrediting of government by neoliberals bear part of the blame. So do wars and internal contradictions within capitalism, notably including the absurd presumption of infinite growth in a finite world.
Whatever the causes, the US-led global economic order of decades-past has shattered. Suggestions from US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan last year for “renewing” it, with US leadership still miraculously intact, are somewhere between unrealistic and ridiculous. That brand of unilateralism won’t be renewed or restored even though, again, there’s nothing around to replace it. Multipolarity is a description of the absence of a global order, not the presence of anything in particular.
The old order was bad enough that having nothing in its place may be an improvement. However, multipolarity depends on individual nations and peoples cooperating on an ad hoc basis to avoid mayhem, to paraphrase Streeck. Hopefully it will work. But with the potential for famine, mass migration, and other catastrophe that goes with climate change, the absence of a global order will at best be unnerving.
This Collapse
A recent, relatively bland AP wire service report on a high-level, biennial gathering in Abu Dhabi of the World Trade Organization (WTO) says much about the unruliness of the US-led, so-called rules-based order: “The WTO delayed its closing ceremony in Abu Dhabi by over a day as the 166-nation bloc struggled to reach consensus on fishing, agriculture and other [important] issues. The only agreement of note came on extending a pause on taxes on digital media such as movies and video games.”
In other words, the only thing the world’s governments have agreed on in the trade arena in the last two years is to hold off on taxing the games and movies that governments presumably hope will keep people from noticing what’s going on in the real world.
On the food front — where the WTO failed to find consensus — farmers from India to Spain via Poland are out on the streets in force complaining that food is too cheap to cover costs, even though many impoverished town and city dwellers can barely afford to eat. The ever-expanding amounts of fertilizers and pesticides needed to keep agribusiness going are killing fish in the ocean — as well as bugs and birds in the sky and more than a few people on land.
No use turning to “the private sector.” The agribusiness company that started it all, Monsanto (now part of Bayer AG), is barely solvent and under pressure to split off its biotech division (Monsanto) with its burdens of multi-billion-dollar cancer-related US lawsuits and an absence of new pesticides that both kill weeds at home and avoid killing the neighbors’ crops. More than a few analysts think a stand-alone Monsanto could not survive.
Of course, pesticides aren’t the only thing killing fish. So is over-fishing, plastic waste of epic proportions, rivers alternately drying up and flooding, and the rapidly changing temperature patterns in the ocean. But the world’s many nations can’t reach consensus on those problems either. They can’t even reach consensus on the need to quit insisting on reaching a full consensus before acting.
Did I mention forever wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and other spots we no longer hear about? Or the UN Security Council being largely inoperative, since somebody vetoes almost everything? Or Israelis rampaging through Gaza without constraint while babies starve? Or the Houthis from Yemen largely closing the Suez Canal in protest at Israeli actions in Gaza and making the US and its naval allies look idiotic? Or the Panama Canal becoming semi-inoperable as water levels fall in a lake that feeds it?
National Level
Just as globalization is splintering at a world level, so US federal governance is splintering, with states and local governments sometimes picking up the pieces, sometimes not.
The US government no longer passes budgets on time and may one of these days quit passing them at all. Social Security pensions, medical insurance for the elderly, poor, and disabled, and other “entitlements” go on, to the meager degree they exist. The military and its contractors will doubtless go on in the extravagant way they exist. And the rest can go permanently onto “extension” time, with old spending levels rolled over and over and over.
Who in the US will protect the environment or the climate if the government doesn’t? Could anyone tell the difference? The federal government has adopted several new regulations on CO2 or other pollutants from power plants, but failed to fully implement any of them, since Barack Obama was president. New rules are always challenged in court, and cases are rarely resolved before an opposing administration comes it with a whole new set of never-to-be-implemented regulations.
If the US transitions its electricity from fossil fuels to renewables it will be thanks to a combination of state regulations and the “marketplace,” i.e. the fact that solar and wind are generally cheaper. The feds won’t do it. The one thing Washington does seem able to do effectively in this area is to periodically block solar- and battery-related imports from China, stopping the transition in its tracks.
The EU isn’t having much more success grappling with the big problems of the day. It sometimes stands up to pressure from Washington to follow the US lead in freezing cheap, effective, and ready-to-use Chinese clean energy; and it sometimes caves in. It, too, is failing to keep up with its own ambitious decarbonization targets, or to halt the post-Ukraine War erosion of its manufacturing base.
China itself is doing better on the climate front, but struggling with the Big Squeeze Washington is placing on the once smoothly functioning trading system from which it benefited greatly as measured by GDP. Beijing is also having trouble coping with the enormous pile of debt and carbon-heavy steel and concrete it dumped on its own housing sector in earlier years in the hallowed name of economic growth. Can’t blame Washington for that one.
Global South governments, too, are struggling to navigate impassible debt mountains and contain the pollution left from decades of colonial-style resource extraction.
It might seem that elections or coups or something would turn up new governments that could do a better job. But at this point, the populist right is the main alternative on offer in much of the world, and it is effective mainly as a disruptor. It has little coherent governing ideology or strategy beyond keeping out immigrants– which will be increasingly difficult without effective climate action.
What’s Left Is Local
What this descent into disorder implies is that, increasingly, individuals will have to look out for themselves as best they can, on their own or in small communities, in a world of uncertainty and indeterminacy. Doubtless not for everything. Some things from afar will remain available, and people will learn to make and repair more things close to home. But the direction is set.
What does that direction hold in store? Streeck opines that in the absence of effective higher-level governance, the motivation individuals have to cooperate is “fear and greed and … elementary interests in individual survival.” That Hobbesian view is widespread.
But are our prospects in a world that is “ungovernable” at a macro level necessarily so negative? Might some, maybe even many, of us cooperate with others driven by hope and compassion and by elementary interests in community survival, rather than by greed and individual survival?
It’s a hope and expectation that I hope to explore soon in another Interregnum.
