Un monde sans démocratie? Néolibéralisme, paradis fiscaux et quête du pouvoir - QUINN SLOBODIAN

But in fact the most successful places have been these micro territories that practice forms of non-democratic capitalism that can then be emulated and

copypasted in different places from Singapore to Brazil and and outwards and onwards. So that was one of the

onwards. So that was one of the solutions to the problem of mass democracy and how it might run up against the imperatives of capitalist accumulation is you go underneath the

skin of the nation and you create zones.

Yeah. Hello, Quinn.

Hi.

Well, thanks for offering me some of your precious time and attention because we're on uh January 12 today and uh a lot is going on in the world right now.

A lot of seismic waves as I like to call them and we are here basically to try to make sense uh to make sense of it all.

And uh and I know I'm sure you are of great help to do just that. So I I believe you see a few things clearer than most of the people. So can you just

simple question can you please briefly introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about the what you do where you are etc. Sure. My name is Quinn Sabodian. I teach

Sure. My name is Quinn Sabodian. I teach

international history at Boston University in a school of global studies.

And I began my career writing about German history mostly and the history of social movements especially race and um the spectre of the third world and the

global south in German politics after the second world war. But then I kind of pulled the lens back and I've been writing for the last 10 years or so

about histories of global order and political thought. I just finished a

political thought. I just finished a trilogy of books about neoliberal thought. First one was called

thought. First one was called Globalists. Second one was called

Globalists. Second one was called Crackup Capitalism and the third one was called HX Bastards and I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk a bit about those.

Most recently, I've just completed a book called Muskism that tries to take seriously the political economy of Elon Musk. And let's see, three of those

Musk. And let's see, three of those books either have been or will be translated into French. So, they are available to the French reader as well.

Yeah. And the latest one is uh is being released in in a couple of months, right?

Muskism will be out sometime next year in French, but in English, yeah, I mean, actually in in German it comes out already next month and then in the UK and America in March and April.

Yeah, German market is probably more dynamic, I guess.

Well, they they realize they need to get out ahead of they need to get out ahead of the English translation or else everyone just buys it in English.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, maybe. Okay. We don't

have that problem in in France for now.

More of a captured market there.

Yeah. Um, so I mean before we get into the concepts or even current events because we're going to go through that.

I'd like to understand your lenses. You

know, how you think this is the a typical question that I ask to all my to all my guests. You know, what are your lenses when you look at the world?

What are you paying attention to first?

you know what kind of structures in dynamics or do you instinctively look for well in German history there's this tradition called uh conceptual history

uh where people try to understand the past through the big categories and concepts that have been used so you try to understand when did we start thinking about the world in terms of classes or when did we start thinking about the

globe in terms of continents or hemispheres and I think I was really um indoctrinated ated by that in my time as a historian. So when I look at these

a historian. So when I look at these flash points of geopolitics or flare-ups of you know violence at home or abroad often that's the first question I ask is

you know what kind of categories are being deployed here? How are the actors conceptualizing their own action? What's

their thought world? And is that new?

Does it have a history? Is it the return of something older? So that's often the way I think I sort of tiptoe through this stuff is to say, you know, what is

the mental furniture that is um inside of the the rooms of the minds of the actors in in in play.

So the the ideas the world of ideas basically and concepts and what Yeah, that's right. I mean I think that any

that's right. I mean I think that any given situation can be explained by many perspectives. is you know there's either

perspectives. is you know there's either a direct material angle, there's a direct sort of ideological angle, but something that's helpful for me is to think about categories where the two

meet. So how does for example an idea of

meet. So how does for example an idea of a world economy become materialized through things like infrastructure, stock markets, communication, grids. So

that the way that ideas become real and material and uh frameworks for orientation I think is something that's important for me. And actually another important inspiration is is a a French

philosopher Michelle Fuko who worked this way as well. Not simply an abstract world of ideas but an idea of ideas kind of made flash and made material.

Okay. Well, I mean, let's start by history then is uh and that's also the angle that you use in in your books uh telling stories and telling uh telling

us about history and um and anyway I think I do believe that we need to understand where we come from you know and where where current dynamics you know are are rooted

what is the fundamental tension around power that you've been trying to make sense um to make sense of across across your books you and see that this is a

core element of all your books.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that it tracks through the work I've been doing that stretches from around the time of the collapse of the Hopsburg

Empire at the end of the first world war until you know the day before yesterday is that at any given time I think there are insurgent social movements, there are

entrenched capitalist classes and then there are a lot of what you could think of as ideological entrepreneurs kind of trying to organize the class energy. and

the class power towards a kind of more stable paradigm or a more stable equilibrium.

And the interesting thing about looking at such a long period of time, especially when you pull the lens back to include, you know, um informal actors and new actors like the new countries of

the decolonizing world is you see that everything was at play, everything was open. So across the 20th century and

open. So across the 20th century and into the 21st there was no um inevitable march towards let's say a world of globalization and smooth

uh trade and smooth financial transaction any more than there was an inevitable march towards a world of anarchy and completely dissolved states with competing you know pirates and

tribes scattered across the world. There

was a competition between these and often it came down to who was able to marshall a set of kind of organizing principles and a set of organizing

institutions that could rein in the incoate forces of you know human creativity and human uh blood lust and human energy at any given time. And

there are, as we, as it turns out, these kind of punctuated moments across a period like the 20th century where there's more openness, more volatility,

more possibilities for new kind of insurgent ideas to become dominant. And

I think the goal of the historian is to sort of keep the antenna out for those moments to go back and say where could things have gone differently? And

similarly you know what moments matter what is surface froth and what is a kind of a moment of genuine uh challenge.

So basically yeah we we we can read the story history as a as a tension between different forces trying to grasp uh

territories trying to grasp power but is there a tension that you see that is specific to modern capitalism and um and

does it connect to much older forms of polit political order like empires and what were new what was new with the 20th

century uh form of capitalism.

Sure. Well, I mean, I think one of the downsides of the dominance recently of the narration of the whole modern period

as one of a history of capitalism um as seen in works like um the recent 1400page book by the Harvard historian

Sven Beckert, which will probably be translated into French soon, although he himself is keenly aware of the of the fact that there were always competing political ical economic

systems even when capitalism won. Um

sometimes I think using capitalism as the dominant frame helps us to kind of suppress or repress all of the histories that didn't come to pass. So thinking

about the 20th century not as an era of capitalism but as an era of many possible political economic models or

outcomes is I think a more fruitful approach. So in the 20th century we

approach. So in the 20th century we didn't know that capitalism was going to win. Even people who were cheerleaders

win. Even people who were cheerleaders of capitalism like Joseph Shumpet or the Austrian economist as late as the 1950s was writing books in which he said

basically capitalism is doomed. Um in

fact the very concentrations of power in the form of the modern corporation and the modern firm the bringing in of the masses into a world of mass consumerism

and mass democracy is going to make the march towards socialism inevitable. you

know, sort of regrettably he had to concede that when everybody has a vote, when everybody has a stake in the production process and an ability to voice even workplace power, eventually

they're going to say, "Hey, why is all the profit going to the owners and the managers? Why shouldn't this be

managers? Why shouldn't this be democratized?" And that wouldn't

democratized?" And that wouldn't necessarily happen through a revolution.

It could happen simply through representation of workers on boards, expansion of workers pensions as parts of of firms um portfolios and over time

you would get a kind of peaceful transition towards a non-c capitalist political economic form. Obviously that

didn't come to pass and I think if anything one of the guiding questions for me in the last decade or so of my work is why it didn't. So why is it

actually that capitalism became the common horizon for political economic imagination when it was anything but determined in advance? So I think you

know the the conditions that we now think of as having made global capitalism um both possible and sometimes almost

inevitable include the idea of competing markets globally such that one offer in one part of the world could undercut an

offer in the other. So you have this constant arbitrage possible whereby someone doesn't have to buy from this person because someone else could set up a factory one continent away and make it

cheaper or set up the creation of a certain product or or crop one country away and make it cheaper thus producing a kind of a race to the bottom. But

those things um also I think global communication networks um oversight over kind of a planetary system of production

and consumption were always thought of by socialists anyway as as similarly as conditions for something like a world planning apparatus or um

the elimination in fact of the profit model or the price mechanism. So I think that a lot of the

the violence and fervor in politics in the last 2530 years has actually been

about uh people in waves realizing that in fact globalization doesn't only point in one direction. And a lot of the um

the violence of the counter reactions has been against efforts to create global political economy otherwise. So

think about the pink tide of the early 20th century in Latin America. You had a series of socialist governments um doing

things like nationalizing energy production doing very wild things like giving legal rights to forests and rivers and mountains, bringing indigenous people into the

political process like they never had been before.

And this basically freaked out a lot of the global capitalist class um both domestically and abroad. And you had a counterreaction. And now we are in

counterreaction. And now we are in another one of those waves where efforts to create more just and equitable forms

of political economy are reacted to by um excessive force often backed up by um by the authorities abroad. In this case, the United States acting as the

guarantor for more violent forms of right-wing capitalism in places like Argentina and Chile. Um well c can you go through the key um cycles I mean uh

recently you know to understand this kind of fight or this tension between the states and especially democracies and uh and what what were liberal

democracies and all the experiments of different forms and um the private sector and the and the capital you know trying to be free

trying to be profitable trying to get rid of all type of barriers. What what

are the phases and what is this tension that again like the other day you know Peter uh mentioned um between between democracy and and and business.

Mhm. Yeah. Yeah, I mean even just keeping the frame on the United States for a minute, I think that the constant

bombardment of sensationalistic news and events from dayto-day on the kind of reality TV model that is so

cherished by our current president here can help us ignore real deep and serious

um conflicts and and cracks in actually the capitalist class about how the economy should be governed. So take the

most recent administration before Trump 2.0, the Biden administration.

Yeah.

That now is seen in retrospect by people in the United States as a kind of a weak and maybe even failed administration

colored extremely by the way that it ended. So Biden's decline into sility

ended. So Biden's decline into sility really by the end of his term um has created a retrospective feeling

that the man was incompetent basically from the beginning and for people on the left surrender to Israeli foreign policy in

every one of its demands and the abandonment of international law um in the regulation of the suppression of of of the Palestinians and Gaza has led to

a kind of unwillingness to even take seriously what had happened for four years under the Biden presidency.

But if you go back to 2021 at the beginning of that presidency, you will find a very different tone and a very different mood because in fact the

people who came in as the economic adviserss for Biden were much more left-wing than the average Democratic policy makers. They were actually more

policy makers. They were actually more like people from the Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren camp than they were from someone like the um you know Pete

Buddha judge or Amy Clolobashar camp which were the other kind of centrists competing for the presidential nomination. And what they wanted to do

nomination. And what they wanted to do was basically do a green new deal. um

they wanted to take the mandate that had been given to them in the wake of 2020 and figure out how to realign the American manufacturing base

for a few very important things. An

energy transition away from fossil fuels towards electrification.

A re-industrialization of the American economy. not building

fossil fuel driven cars anymore, but building solar panels, building windmills, building electric vehicles, building electric buses. And they wanted to bring back something more like a

European style care economy with more workers rights, more attention to things like daycare prices and affordability

for what they imagined as this new uh green working class. It was a really really enormous and wellthought through

vision actually of how capitalism should look different should look more like social democracy should look uh nothing like the fossil fuel dependent model

that had dominated the 20th century. So

it was a grandiose plan. Whether or not it was actually ever workable is a question for another day. But what was striking right away is that it ran into

basically the buzzsaw of Democratic opposition. So it was doubters within

opposition. So it was doubters within the Democratic party who put the brakes on this transformative project who vetoed key parts of it. Namely, you

know, you have these two names, Joe Mansion and Kristen Cinema, very specific politicians who prevented the passage of bills that would have allowed for a more full version of this

transformative green industrial policy agenda from being driven through. What

you got instead was very watered down.

By the time that Biden was leaving office, there wasn't time for, you know, the big semiconductor plants to be completed, the big solar uh panel factories to be completed. So, people

just had a sense of half-finish projects. They associated postcoid

projects. They associated postcoid inflation somehow with biodnomics and it now looked like a kind of

a a halfway failed intervention. And yet

the difference between I think the difference between what was being attempted there and what is being done now under the current administration is actually enormous. Right? It's not

actually enormous. Right? It's not

trivial actually. And so for I think opinion creators and opinion makers, molders, those of us in the who speak in

the public um what's interesting is to try to watch these key figures in the capitalist class and ask how they are making their decisions. So why do the

asset managers at Black Rockck or State Street who are managing huge huge huge pension funds for example huge investment funds agree with the green

industrial policy one day and then two years later decide that everything about you know environmental goals is um

disposable and go run right back into oil and drilling. Why do the monster figures of Silicon Valley feel comfortable supporting Democrats one day

and then change their stripes and become ever more reactionary the next? Are

these um political processes that are independent of underlying material incentives or are they just the reflection of um a constant seat for

accumulation and profitability? I think

that is, you know, a kind of life and death question actually in the United States right now is whether or not um the people in power are open to

persuasion or will simply always follow the bottom line regardless.

But you you see that through through history, right? And this is what you

history, right? And this is what you describe so well, you know, starting with the Australian empire empire, you know, which was already

trying to uh to combinate a strong state with an open market.

You see that through colonialism. you

see that tension, you know, after the the second world war and uh and then with the emergence of um of neoliber

liber liberalism, you know, with the with the key figures with Reagan and and Thatcher, what is how would you describe that?

What is common through that through that history? And uh and getting back to my

history? And uh and getting back to my my question, you know, what are the key notes? What are the key facts that

notes? What are the key facts that people need to understand to understand where we are now? And we didn't we didn't talk about neoliber liberalism which is not capitalism but which is a

way of think a way of thinking a way of being trying to be distent from too many rules from a from a strong state. Can

you explain that dynamic that defines you know basically the the last 40 years especially?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I'll answer the question about neoliberalism first because it is something I've thought a lot about and I think it is often poorly understood to be honest. So, it's poorly

understood because it's used in different and sometimes contradictory ways by academics even by certainly activists and in the kind of public

sphere. So, I think there's basically

sphere. So, I think there's basically four ways that neoliberalism is used.

one is as a kind of a period of time. So

people will say we are in the neoliberal era um or we have left the neoliberal era and there there's some debate about

when it began. Is it at the beginning of the Reagan and Thatcher moment? Is it

already with the departure from the gold standard that led to a world of floating exchange rates? Is it actually later

exchange rates? Is it actually later with the creation of things like the World Trade Organization in the 1990s?

And then conversely, when does it end?

Is it over now? Did it end in 2016? Did

it end in 2020, etc. The other way it gets used is to describe a set of policy proposals. So a

kind of laundry list of of of uh measures privatization deregulation liberalization such that you can look at

one country another and say it's more or less neoliberal. So you say oh Holland

less neoliberal. So you say oh Holland is more neoliberal than Holland because X Y and Z.

A third way it gets used I think is more generally as a kind of form of subjectivity or self-standing. So people

will sort of if they spend a lot of time promoting their own brand or identity online or um you know in their interactions with other people to build

up a sort of entrepreneurial uh identity then they might think of themselves as acting in a neoliberal way. So people

might say, "Wow, everything is so neoliberal now." You know, all of the

neoliberal now." You know, all of the stars are constantly selling their self-image and we now are emulating them in everyday life. Part of prediction markets, betting markets, everything is

filtered through marketization as it's sometimes described.

The fourth way though is to describe it as a kind of intellectual movement. So

there are people who have described themselves as neoliberals, it's not common, but as I describe in my books and others have as well, the term itself

comes out of a very specific moment which was 1938 in Paris and the gathering of liberals

in the European sense. So free market believing uh antisocialists who believe that in the 1930s they were basically faced by two threats. They had

socialists and communists on the left and they had fascists and authoritarians on the right. And they felt like those who believed in free markets and even

individual freedoms were in a minority in a time of you know the popular front on the one hand and then the Nazis and the communists elsewhere. So they wanted

to sort of keep the flame of liberalism, but they realized that in a era of mass democracy, you couldn't just have a small so-called night watchman state

anymore with a few regulations and just protecting contract and protecting the border being for the military, but you needed to have a more proactive state to

protect free markets. So that basic contradiction was already built in. you

actually needed strong state and free market. Not uh a small state, but one

market. Not uh a small state, but one who whose very intention was to make sure that there were more markets and to make sure that laws were designed in a way to have certain outcomes and not

others. So outcomes that protected

others. So outcomes that protected private property, outcomes that protected um free market exchange. So in

the 1930s they come together, called themselves neoliberals, they kind of stopped calling themselves that. But

after the second world war they reform in something called the Mont Pellerin society after the place where they met in Switzerland for the first time and they

act as a kind of ideological advising class and people like Friedrich Hayek, people like Milton Freriedman, people like Gary Becker, Ludvig Von Mises all

all you know gather and discuss ideas in these meetings and it goes up to the present such that the so-called project 2025 document that was

much discussed in the United States created by the heritage foundation uh think tank here in the US is a kind of direct descendant of these these

neoliberal intellectuals who continue to ask what conditions are necessary to protect capitalism um under its common threat a constant threat by mass

democracy so that's the way that I think about what neoliberalism is. And if you think about it that way, what you discover is that it changes a lot over time because

the enemies of neoliberalism change a lot over time. So in the 19 and this is then to get to your question of like where are certain key rupture points.

Y in the 1930s the main threat might have been the socialists or the fascists. In

the 1950s, the fascists are bas are basically defeated. And the new threats are now

defeated. And the new threats are now the Keynesians and the social democrats who are slowly preaching this kind of uh gradual

socialization that they fear, the neoliberals fear is going to lead in the end on what Fried Hayek famously called a road to surfom.

In the 1960s, the era of decolonization, the fear is socialist forces from the global south taking over the United Nations and normalizing uh a move away

from competition up until the 1990s. And

this is the subject of the HX Bastards book that um will be out yeah in in in winter or or early next year in French.

By the 1990s, the fear is something different by neoliberals. They're

starting to get worried about environmentalism.

They're worried about feminism. They're

worried about anti-racism.

They're worried about immigrant rights.

They're worried about rights for disability, the disabled. All of these now seem like the primary enemies of the market because

women's rights organizations come in and say we need quotas. We need equal representation on corporate boards. uh

environmental groups come in and say we need to be testing these products constantly, keep the emission standards up.

Yeah.

Yeah. All of this is slowing down as they see it, you know, the speed of competition that is necessary to reach maximum efficiency in the capitalist system. So what happens then? If you're

system. So what happens then? If you're

a neoliberal, you say my primary interest is I I want economic freedom. I

want the efficiency of the system. The

main people who are getting in the way are these feminists, these anti-racists, these uh people who are pushing gay rights, disabled rights. So, who else hates these people? Well, these people on the far right hate these people for

different reasons. Maybe they hate

different reasons. Maybe they hate immigrants because they feel that they're diluting the purity of the race or changing the demographics and so on.

And so, they create alliances.

And so, this is a situation where if you follow the ideas, things that seem strange suddenly seem not so strange.

Um, so why would someone who cares mostly about economic freedom suddenly be teaming up with someone who's, you know, uh, someone who wants to bring back the old South or thinks that Martin Luther King was a gay communist. Well,

because they had a common enemy. They

both fear that these leftists now in the guise of green instead of red are the Well, we going to back to that um to

what's happening right now. Uh I want to stay a little bit with uh with what with what happened and what you can help what you can help us decode.

Mhm.

Basically it's interesting because you talk about the fear that they have you know but when I when I hear you it's the fear of being limited in doing business in and also in accumulate in

accumulating you know capital. They talk

a lot about the fear of uh losing freedom. But what this is what I

freedom. But what this is what I understand is the this idea is that I can be as powerful and as as rich as I can. Right. This is this is the main

can. Right. This is this is the main fear. Correct.

fear. Correct.

Mhm.

Or is there something else that is more profound than that than that?

Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that if you take either kind of um an understanding of capitalism from

the kind of Marxist tradition or you take it from the tradition of liberalism in both cases I think you would see that there's a kind of imperative for the

business person or for the capitalists that is driven exactly as you say towards sort of accumulation in which is uh by nature opposed to obstacles to

that accumulation. The the whole

that accumulation. The the whole argument for something like the welfare state or even workers rights is that um

by conceding some power in the end the capitalist actually gains more. Right? I

mean this is the this is the argument for Ford fordism. Why um arguably someone like Henry Ford was willing to give rights to the workers because by

doing so you get labor peace, you get consistent production processes in the factory and then you get consumers for your automobiles because then they themselves

get bought and and and absorbed into the system as consenting actors instead of coerced actors. So I think that is

coerced actors. So I think that is otherwise described as a process of creating hegemony that is domination with consent not domination without

consent and that I think is always we don't need to remain only in the capitalist era but that is always the kind of the goal of a

system of government or power is to figure out how to manufacture and secure legitimacy with the governed population in a way that doesn't disrupt the

existing hierarchies of power.

Yeah. And and so there is this constant battle with um with with the states and with the government in place to to try to maintain that certain level of

freedom. I want to go through that to

freedom. I want to go through that to understand how the system actually works. At what point does governing

works. At what point does governing capitalism become less about winning democratic battles and more about designing constraints that keep certain

decisions out of democratic reach? You

know this is and and there are two main things that you uh that you talk about.

one is the the creation of uh special economic zones and the other one is kind of the rules that exist international rules that exist above the above the

national laws. Maybe you can start with

national laws. Maybe you can start with the with the first one um because I I find it very very interesting in your in your capitalism.

Can can you tell us about and I think it's it's not well understood by most people the the fact that uh we think that there is this international economy

that exists but we forget about all the little holes that are in the system. Can

you tell us about these zones when when they started the ID etc. So yeah, I think that's one of the

reasons why it's useful to think about democracy as a foundational challenge to the smooth functioning of capitalism and

the primary enemy really of what we call what we can call neoliberalism because when given votes, when given democratic

voice, um populations often come to decisions that might be adverse to the desires and the bottom lines of the people who own the means of production,

who own the factories and so on.

the popularity of communist parties even in places like post-war France um suggests that if you have a genuine

competition between a battle of ideas that plays out inside the democratic space then you have a pretty serious and

constant threat of a kind of axe over your head should this or that election go the wrong way right I mean this is also the story of Latin America where

capitalists there feel like they live under a constant threat of the next election swinging to the left and then they face expropriation. They feel the

need to flee the country etc. sell off their goods at at at fire sale prices or be um expropriate or nationalized by the government. So that's not a a a simply

government. So that's not a a a simply imaginary fear on the part of capitalists in the 20th century. It's

become much less common now, you know, partially for reasons we're about to talk about. But across the 20th century,

talk about. But across the 20th century, it wasn't that rare actually for people who own mines, for people who own factories to suddenly be told the laws just changed. You don't own that

just changed. You don't own that anymore. It's now the property of the

anymore. It's now the property of the government. It's the property of the

government. It's the property of the people.

One of the ways to think about neoliberalism is how to create a world where things like that can't happen ever again. how you can stop um the power of

again. how you can stop um the power of democracy from overrunning the power of private property and as I described it in the in the in

two books is it basically takes two approaches and they differ by the scale at which they happen. One of them is about going underneath the envelope of

the democratic nation. The other is about going over top of it. the one that goes underneath can be captured well by this history of what you alluded to

which is really the history of special economic zones broadly described. So

what are these things and where did they start? They start out in the 1950s

start? They start out in the 1950s and60s as little islands often surrounded by barbed wires

um in places like Puerto Rico and places like Taiwan, in places like the Philippines where American companies usually are doing part of their

manufacturing overseas under conditions that are outside of the threat of worker action. outside the threat of often

action. outside the threat of often legal oversight and can be done basically much much cheaper and much much more frictionlessly than they would

be done if they were inside of the country. So they're um little islands of

country. So they're um little islands of capitalist utopias basically and they are made possible by new changes by the 1960s of things like containers ships

that can much more cheaply move manufactured goods and products around the world without major cost. Watching

these things, these small economic zones became kind of an inspiration for neoliberal thinkers and policy makers in the 1970s

especially. Why the 1970s? Because that

especially. Why the 1970s? Because that

was a decade of great worker agitation.

It was a decade of a lot of strikes, a lot of wildcat strikes even, you know, unauthorized non union organized strikes and a a sense of uh resurgent national

self-determination and searches for autonomy, especially in the decolonizing world. So in the 1970s, it's not well remembered, but there was something that was called the new

international economic order that was passed by a majority in the United Nations, which called for basically um a more just and equal world economic

arrangement, which would require vast transfers of wealth from the global north to the global south and recognition of the rights of new nations

and poor nations to a priority over the resources within their own borders. So

something also called the permanent sovereignty over natural resources was part of that push and it was uh basically a major threat

you know full alarm bells ringing for global capitalists everywhere like oh no here comes the long feared you know

universal front against capital ownership in the north as it was globalizing at the time. So what do you do? I mean, one one thing you do is you

do? I mean, one one thing you do is you push back against it, but the other thing you do is you find ways to avoid it and escape the oversight of newly deolonizing nations.

And you look at Hong Kong, this is enter Hong Kong. So, the book Crackup Capitalism, which was called Capitalism of the Apocalypse, much more

dramatically in in in French um begins and ends in Hong Kong because Hong Kong in the late 1970s was a strange place.

It was still a colony in a time when most colonies had been, you know, experienced wars of independence or

transitions into self-determination.

It was uh extremely small and yet by relative standards extremely wealthy. So

this rocky island in Southeast Asia had become a global center for financial transactions, for manufacturing, for trade. And one of the ways it had been

trade. And one of the ways it had been able to do that was by suppressing democracy altogether. So there was no

democracy altogether. So there was no one person one vote model in Hong Kong.

There was no prospect of introducing it.

It was run more like a corporation. The

financial secretary was more important than the governor of the island.

and the associated territories and for people like Milton Friedman and neoliberals it was very inspiring. So

late 1970s they really start to say how can we make many Hong Kongs globally in

a time of decolonization and growing leftist sentiment in the global south.

Well, we can do it through the model of these special economic zones. And we can start doing it not in far-flung places

like Puerto Rico or uh the the Maldes or um Taiwan, but right in the middle of New York City, right in the middle of London

and you know, right in the middle of the industrial heartland itself.

So they start creating um these things urban enterprise zones, free ports in British cities in American cities and

these become places where the normal laws of democratic oversight are suspended.

Um in China interestingly yeah absolutely I mean the place where it actually works is China. Um the place where it doesn't really work is London

and the United States. If you are following uh the British um economic policy, you'll see that this is all they they have still is the idea of creating

free ports and most recently they've been called AI growth zones and to date they don't amount to very much. So the

place where the special economic zone actually did work was a couple of places that are very notable to mention briefly. One is China. Absolutely.

briefly. One is China. Absolutely.

Shenzhen, right next to Hong Kong, becomes a place that is literally fenced off and treated almost as a different country inside of China. At first, you have to, you know, cross a border to

enter it. Once you enter it, the rules

enter it. Once you enter it, the rules were totally different. You had free wage labor, you had free property ownership, you had free foreign investment, and that led to an enormous

economic boom. And what China did was

economic boom. And what China did was then control the process across the territory of China by opening up these small little areas that money could rush into while labor could rush into, lose

all of their social protections once they enter, but then have the possibility of making a great deal of money once they did. That was the kind

of slow perforations model that allowed China to become really the liberalized u mo behemoth that it is that it is today.

Another place just worth briefly mentioning is the United Arab Emirates.

So Dubai in particular also very adept at using this model of non-democratic capitalism designing laws

bespoke so they fit the needs of uh you know manufacturers they fit the need of broadcasters they fit the need of universities abroad. The Louv of

course has a outpost in um Abu Dhabi. Why? Because they made an art zone for it. So we think about sometimes the big history of the 20th

century is a move from a world of nation of empires to nations and slowly uh intensifying expanding democracy. But in

fact the most successful places have been these micro territories that practice forms of non-democratic capitalism that can then be emulated and

copypasted in different places from Singapore to Brazil and and outwards and onwards. So that was one of the

onwards. So that was one of the solutions to the problem of mass democracy and how it might run up against the imperatives of capitalist accumulation is you go underneath the

skin of the nation and you create zones.

Yeah. How many how many zones are there?

Like five 5,000 something like that.

There's well over 5,000. Yeah. And they

they come in all sort of forms and shapes. Some of them are as large as the

shapes. Some of them are as large as the almost the entire Russian Arctic is a is a special economic zone. But then others are as small as a warehouse or um you know landing strip. And of course they

have been very successful economically and uh because no rights for workers because you import immigrants with no rights because u you know many many

reasons it's like the ideal place you know when you want to make money quickly without any uh any barriers and it's uh and it's becoming I guess a model for a lot of thinkers today and we we'll go

back to that but there is the other ways that you were mentioning of going u which is going above Right.

Can you talk through that?

Right.

So that um if if the one story about going below the skin of the nation is about the story of zones, the one going above is

the history of um what I call international economic law as encasement. So we think of or we are

encasement. So we think of or we are often hear the period of the last 50 years as a time of markets being

liberated or markets set free into a global space. But that I think is a very

global space. But that I think is a very bad metaphor because it gives us a false impression of globalization as a process

of undoing regulations and laws so that money is and goods are simply free to move about um as as they like. It's not

true at all. Actually, the last 50 years has been a time of tens of thousands of new regulations and agreements saying exactly how you're allowed to move money and goods around

the world and exactly the rights that capital has when it does so. So, if it gets, you know, expropriated or taken away at the one end of the the the

investment cycle, then you have a bunch of rules and laws saying you can sue in this third party court. Here are your rights. here are are the obligations of

rights. here are are the obligations of the host country and so on. So we need to first think of the period of globalization as one of a proliferation

of new forms of law and regulation not one of liberation and deregulation.

That being said, much of the flow of the creation of legal instruments above the nation, often through either

multilateral or bilateral treaties that nations then sign and thus give away part of their sovereignty in exchange for certain kinds of access and safety

for their own investments. have been

designed to privilege the rights of those with mobile capital and mobile f finance over the rights of the the residents who often have less of those

things. So the principle of

things. So the principle of international economic law that has been made harder and harder over the last um 70 years since the end of the second

world war has been to increase the right of corporations over the rights of states and the rights of private um mobile capital over the rights of

citizens really. So now in many cases um

citizens really. So now in many cases um a company that has invested in a country has in many ways more rights and more

legal standing than a citizen of that country because to give concrete examples if a um mining company it builds a mine

in a country and then the country has a new government that says we don't want to have that kind of um extractive industry anymore. the mining company can

industry anymore. the mining company can literally sue the country in third party courts or bring a suit to the World

Trade Organization or to uh NAFTA in the in North America and make the country compensate them for lost profits. So

this was a way of um constraining democracy and putting uh hard limits on what democratic governments could actually achieve. Right? If you can only

actually achieve. Right? If you can only achieve up to a point in which you start to make life uncomfortable for capitalists and if you go beyond that then you'll be taken to a world court then it's not really full

self-determination. It's not really full

self-determination. It's not really full sovereignty and that is something that has been uncomfortable for people across different parts of the political

spectrum for some time now. Right? The

World Trade Organization was only created in 1995 and already in 1999 here in uh the United States there was huge protests in Seattle against a

ministerial conference and since then it's basically been uh hobbled. It has

not completed a successful trading round and now in fact already the WTO is uh impotent. it does not have enough judges

impotent. it does not have enough judges to um fill its appel appeal board. So if

a country doesn't like a judgment of the WTO, they simply appeal it and then nothing happens at all. The current

administration is very antagonistic to this kind of international economic law, refuses to be bound by its uh parameters itself.

And as a result of that, um, without American support, that version of global international economic law that sits over over tops of nations is now simply

being used as another form of unilateralism for the United States and it's not really available for um less powerful nations. Well, the you've got

powerful nations. Well, the you've got uh you can mention briefly also the the the the EU, you know, as a project to uh

to to to build rules for the market, you know, above the above the the nation states.

Yeah.

Yeah. The European Union is a is a great example of what I was saying before, which is that any given political economic model is somehow the artifact

of struggles between competing ideas of what institutions should guard and oversee people's lives and people's actions. So since its creation in the

actions. So since its creation in the 1950s and I described this in globalists there have been different ideas of what the European then community later unions

should be and one of them was certainly one that was defined by the so-called four freedoms in which you basically are have competition in a in a single market but of course as we know there were

other visions uh from the common agricultural policy to things like the harmonization of working conditions to the kind of solidarity transfers that

um so what Europe should be has always kind of been up in the air but certainly once we get to the 2000s there is the increasing

dominance of an idea of taking power out of the hands of elected governments and certainly out of uh citizens when they make the wrong vote during a referendum

for example and putting it into the hands of you know indeed unelected had appointed commissioners in places like Brussels often with a primary goal of

accelerating moves towards uh market efficiency and undercutting fact national uh decision-m. So the

interesting thing to me, especially as a historian of this stuff, is the way something like competition law and the commission for competition, which was a

very neoliberal sort of stronghold for decades, was really built to stop countries from supporting their own national champions or doing state aid.

has now in recent years been turned into a kind of green industrial policy uh shop and competition now is not understood in terms of creating a common

market internally as much as making sure that Europe can compete with um other major economic actors abroad. So that's

a good example I think even there where nowadays the thing that are being done in the name of competition law would be scandalous actually to neoliberals of an earlier era.

Okay. Interesting. And can can you talk also about the depth depth in general as a as discipline you know because that's another recurring mechanism you know in

on on your work that's coming back you know how does depth function as a form of uh political discipline you know over states well in the I mean I think you can look

at this either within nations and then between nations but within nations in the United States it's um

extraordinary how many of the things that might be expected from the government or from a kind of welfare state are internalized to the

responsibility of families themselves.

So sometimes people call this a kind of privatized Keynesianism so that you know you can't um expect to get a higher

education paid for by the government. So

instead you need to burden yourself and then your parents need to burden themselves with debt to pay for something like your education which then

puts a kind of burden on the outcome of that education for something that has the best return on investment. So it has a kind of disciplining um effect on

anyone who enters college or university which is most people in the United States to make sure that they are guided by a more like economistic logic you know don't waste your money make sure

you can pay back your debts and in the United States strikingly you can't default on your student loans so

any any government any corporation or any sort of entity that someone like Donald Trump has been part of across his uh checkered business career has been

able to profit from very generous forms of corporate bankruptcy in the United States. United States it's considered

States. United States it's considered actually fine to go bankrupt because you can then you know fail and fail again as they say and and you're allowed to write off things and very generous tax

policies so that you can move on to the next venture. If you're a student who's

next venture. If you're a student who's gone to university and taken on debt and are unable to pay it back, you don't have that option. Okay?

So, you're permanently scarred by it.

So, that's one example I think internally where um debt sort of guides people's life choices. between nations.

Yeah clearly the moment of the 1970s is again important because there was a brief moment where debt markets were open to

poorer countries and they rushed into them. But then with interest rates

them. But then with interest rates flying up in the 1980s, there was a a vice grip put on two countries where the IMF then came in as the kind of debt

collector and told countries to restructure their economies in ways that would pay back their debts and suddenly the kind of blue sky dreams of postcolonial independence were reigned

in very seriously and that's where we remain today.

Okay. Well, um I mean we've been talking about mechanisms designed to stabilize capitalism by insulating insulating part

of it from from democracies. But in your more recent work, it feels like something, you know, changes like the project really no longer aims only at

stability. There there's something else.

stability. There there's something else.

And this is inex bastards. You argue

that neoliberalism doesn't simply persist after the cold war. It really

changes. is it mutates.

C can you can you explain what changes in its uh under underlying you know logic and uh what stops working in the earlier neoliberal strategy that

provoked it.

Yeah. I mean it's a very interesting moment in fact because you would think that once capitalism

prevails after the end of the cold war and communism as a world force is basically extinct with some very isolated exceptions. Cuba, North Korea,

isolated exceptions. Cuba, North Korea, China nominally still communist but really not at all in practice. You would

think this would lead to a period of kind of calm really or like you know convergence around a common political

economic worldview and at least a kind of a period of um relative equilibrium.

What's so striking about the people that I write about in H Highex Bastards is how paranoid they were and how

unwilling they were to live with um an era of apparent economic peace.

I've already mentioned the way that immediately after the cold war some neoliberal and conservative intellectuals became very concerned about what they saw as the new enemies.

So the the new um the new uh actors who were coming along and were trying to disrupt the smooth functioning of the system with their

special interest demands, their identity based demands whether on race, gender or you know disability um gender

orientation terms. Um, more interestingly for me is the fear of people like Charles Murray that I

describe in the book, which is not so much a fear of these spoilers at the party who might come and uh demand too much in ways that make things difficult

for everyone, but he really starts worrying about what happens if they actually succeed. So what happens if the

actually succeed. So what happens if the welfare state as it exists and in fact it does exist in the United States right people I think especially Europeans

underestimate how important things like social security are actually how important things like Medicare and Medicaid there is state provided health insurance for good chunks of this

country people who are too poor to pay for it themselves people who are old etc veterans especially um someone like Charles Murray asks, you know, what happens if this stuff

actually does go away, right? What

happens if the welfare state is actually defeated?

Um, what will become of all of these people who have become dependent on its survival infrastructures now for decades

since at least the 1960s?

Uh, are they going to simply die off?

Are they going to be angry? Are they

going to form kind of, you know, vigilante armies demanding their welfare back? Like there's really genuine

back? Like there's really genuine questions that people were asking in the 1990s. What happens if we win? What

1990s. What happens if we win? What

happens if the hardcore neoliberals actually win? Um, and that question is

actually win? Um, and that question is one of the things that leads them to make some of these curious alliances that I already alluded to. So basically

they think all right if the connective tissue of the federal state is get is going to get thinner and thinner and maybe if we succeed we'll actually wipe out most of the agencies of the federal

government the department of education department of energy these kind of things health and human services everything will go back to the states and then maybe even they go back to a

lower level to counties and communities we are going to have to think about a kind of more fortified military ized world in which um there is a kind of a

zero sum competition between the American population even amongst itself and this will require um forms of group

identity that create solidarity that are not only national. So just being an American will not be enough anymore. you

will need to be a certain kind like so this is the roots of things that called Christian nationalism especially the idea of uh a decentralized form of

political organization in this country and this may involve forms of affiliation based yes on religion but

also on race also on regional identity and this is uh a vision of a kind of postmodern

I would say capitalism because it's not about a dream of growth within the space of the nation which has dominated the modern period in the 20th century anyway

but something that's subnational and something that might actually not be able to guarantee the same kind of growth that it did before.

Is it is it what you call the the hard solutions like hard borders, hard money, hardwired human differences?

Yeah, exactly. So,

so if you think that, you know, the poison is already too deep inside the veins, so to speak, of the American system for it to survive much longer, then you need to have radical solutions.

And one is, yeah, you seal yourself off um through hard border policy. The other

is you start to um you break with the idea of someone like Martin Luther King Jr., right? That you know the content of

Jr., right? That you know the content of a person is in their character, not in their skin color. And you say, "No, it is their skin color. No, it is the things that are kind of inherent to

their DNA at birth." And then you start to say, "We don't trust uh fiat currency even or just like the dollar itself. It

needs to be harder. It needs to be gold or if you're a kind of crypto person, it needs to be, you know, Bitcoin or Ethereum or something else." So this um

paranoia at the moment of apparent success is I think part of the essential mood music these days in the capitalist

class in the United States which we need to kind of understand to know what is happening here because otherwise it's quite confusing right I mean it it's not

clear that America is best served by making such radical actions at this moment if it has just the medium-term uh well-being of its economy and its

population in mind. There seems to be a lot of apparent self harm that's happening to global institutional arrangements, um

ways of managing risk inside of the country, ways of stewarding resources.

There seem to be a lot of emergency bells being pulled all at once in a way that is confusing I think unless you sort of get inside of the psyche of um some of these people since the end of

the Cold War.

Yeah, we can do that, you know, because it's not just about maintaining free market and capitalism and making money.

As you said, there's something more profound that that's influencing it and that's related to the the mind of these people. you mentioned, you know, like

people. you mentioned, you know, like the fact that increasingly inequality gets framed as natural, scientific or inevitable, you know, rather than uh

something that is uh political. C can

you can you explain to me how this is how much this is important to understand uh what's going on currently um and what

is led by people like Curtis Yarvin or or even Elon Musk now um yeah just to understand their framework

yeah I mean it is quite fascinating I think especially if you look at this from a historical perspective because take the moment right after the end of the second world war. You know, the

United States is responsible for like 50% of world manufacturing production at that point. Arguably, there's never been

that point. Arguably, there's never been a moment in world history, except for maybe back to the Roman Empire where one power was this disproportionately

um strong u military terms, economic terms, financial terms. Amazing moment of unipolar power and hegemony.

Um what does America do? Well, they

create a set of institutional arrangements that make sense to complement their overwhelming power.

Right? It actually

was wise and also sensible to not immediately annex the entire world, even though probably they could have at that moment if they wanted to, but instead to

say, "No, we create a global form of global governance over top of that through the United Nations system, through the Breton Woods system as it was called of the IMF and the World Bank

that will help rearrange world affairs in ways that are most profitable for us.

We will have problems. The Soviet Union most notably, but economically the Soviet Union was never a real competitor to the United States. Militarily there

was the problem of the bomb certainly.

But other than that, um there was a kind of rationality, I think, to the way that America helped engineer the world to its

own benefit. At that point, I think that

own benefit. At that point, I think that the panic that we're seeing now is uh a real lack of consensus

about what form global institutions would best serve America's current predicament because America is no longer the America it was

in 1945.

partially because of its policy decisions, it helped cultivate economic competitors that were very serious and

very and and very credible um rivals to it in many sectors. Right? Japan,

Germany began to create consumer goods, automobiles, electronics, steel in ways that now America had to fight with. By

allow opening up China, welcoming it into the world economic system as they did in the 1990s and 2000s, they created a more serious rival than they have ever

had actually in the 20 21st century. And

now they don't know really what to do.

They don't know how they should um arrange the world system in a way that's most advantageous to them. And when they try to through unilateral action, for example, the use of sanctions, which is

very important and I think under discussed form of American statecraft in the last 20 years, it doesn't always have the effects that they want. Right?

They tried to isolate Russia from the world system after the invasion of Ukraine. It kind of didn't work, right?

Ukraine. It kind of didn't work, right?

Russia found economic partners. it

prepared had prepared for this in advance. So they're like, "Okay, well

advance. So they're like, "Okay, well that is gone out of our arsenal kind of.

What's next?" And eventually you end up in the situation we're in now, which is well, some kind of a withdrawal to a regional hemispheric hegemony.

Uh, as with the new rebooted Monroe Doctrine, maybe that is actually the best that America can hope for. and and

it's no longer able to play the role of global hegeimon that it was because the material foundation for that no longer exists. So there is I mean it it's

exists. So there is I mean it it's getting uh wrapped into so many other motivations that it's hard to kind of see uh

rationality at the heart of this. But I

think what we're witnessing is this kind of panicky scramble for a kind of a mandate in a in a moment of postuni polarity.

What's interesting also is that we you explained these um these ideas of uh breaking up with the with the constraints of the state.

Mhm. Now it seems that the strategy has changed and that there some people realized that it was easier to take over a state than to try to build a new one or to escape it. And this is what I

believe we're seeing in the in in the US and we can talk about China also if it's if it's relevant because it's a very different way of of doing it.

Um but I want to talk about this, you know, because there's a lot going on obviously and since Trump came back, uh it's m it's m materialized very quickly.

Mhm. Um what's when you look at Trump you know and Trumpism through these lenses you know what kind of political experiment do you see you know is this

breaking away from neoliberalism or building something else or is it one of its possible outcomes you know how do you analyze the situation yeah well I think my thinking has

changed as events have changed so in the first Trump administration um I didn't find it that hard to see this to see it as a kind of a mutated

form of neoliberalism. So even trade policy which was breaking with the multilateralism of the WTO and of and of

NAFTA superficially um was still about global competition and competitiveness. So I think you

and competitiveness. So I think you could see tariff policy in the first Trump administration as a kind of a version of what Ronald Reagan had done.

You know, got tough with the Japanese, made them open up their market to more American products, limited the number of Japanese cars that could be imported, but ultimately towards a goal of

American entry into foreign markets and more and more competitiveness abroad. Um

the idea at the time which was pretty common to hear from 2016 to 2020 that we were seeing kind of delobalization or

decoupling or dellinking seemed uh not borne out by facts to me. It seemed like volume of trade was going up. China's

goods were actually increasing in number in the United States. So that was um a bit of a a misunderstanding I think at that moment. And then domestically it

that moment. And then domestically it looked like quite orthodox neoliberal policy, right? Tax cuts for the wealthy,

policy, right? Tax cuts for the wealthy, um opening up of federal lands for exploratory drilling. Um cutting back on

exploratory drilling. Um cutting back on um funding for things that had social justice goals.

This time around, um there is still part of that, right? The big beautiful bill was noticeable mostly for its tax cuts for the very wealthy and for corporations. So we still have that

corporations. So we still have that element that is consistent that I think we can still say is a long-standing neoliberal style demand. But we have now

I think advanced further towards something more like what was previously called dellinking decoupling. So the

extent of um export controls, the extent of the tariffing of specific products

seems to now for one faction of the um administration express a desire to create something like a more self-contained

manufacturing unit that we call the United States. And

it's really the United States that especially for matters of military equipment. Now there is the

military equipment. Now there is the demand that sort of every last thing be built in this country or under direct control of the the nation which is very

inconsistent with any version of neoliberal thought that I've ever researched because at at at the most basic level um neoliberals believe in

the need for an international division of labor and the principle of comparative advantage which has been argued for for almost 200 years, which is that some parts of the world do some

things better than others. And it makes sense to have a free exchange, monetized exchange between them to take advantage of that diversity. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. So, if you're if you're post Ricardo, which someone like Peter Navaro, um, one of the top trade adviserss for Trump is, I literally saw him give a

talk at Harvard Kennedy School called Ricardo is dead. um then you are probably not uh operating under neoliberal rationality anymore.

Okay. and you are working with a new kind of geoeconomic framework um that has been called neo mercantalist

for example that um massively downplays the idea of efficiency gains through um finding diverse partners and massively

uh elevates the importance of national security as the most important trump card.

So but but we there are other elements to that. You can argue whether it's

to that. You can argue whether it's still the same framework when it comes to defending neoliberalism. You can also some people talk about the return of empires

or even colonialism, you know, in a way or some people talk about the idea that um it's all about taking,

you know, taking all the money, taking all the all what's left when it comes to uh um to public, you know, to to what the state owns and

and making it private. And you've got interestingly you've got examples because like NAZA is almost you know non-existent when it comes to uh to space now when you have SpaceX which is

a private company that is now launching all the the people and the satellites into the space for the US you have so it looks like a little bit of a looting

some of of of what's left from the space I understand you know what's the what's the ide what's the ideology Sorry, my muscles are not used that much in

English. But what's the ideology behind

English. But what's the ideology behind that that uh that can really help us understanding that chaos? Sometimes we

say it's Trump is all about being unpredictable, but actually he does a lot of what he says. You see my point? And you've got a

says. You see my point? And you've got a lot of literature to understand who's what the people behind him think. So

what's what's the project here when it comes to power and uh and and inequality of uh Yeah.

Yeah. I mean I think one of the reasons why I find terms like looting or plunder

unsatisfying as explanations is that I mean that's not really how capitalism works, right? It's not really that

works, right? It's not really that there's like a pile of gold coins and you grab them, right? I mean, capitalism works through

right? I mean, capitalism works through ongoing revenue streams, and the the real profit is to be made not by a one-time

um capture, but especially because the very act of doing that would then devalue whatever it is you captured. So

I think that there is at least two different ways I think of and and can I just add add one one element of the question is that

do you think there is an element of of all that which is actually related to making America you know great again or is it just for a a certain category of

people? Mhm.

people? Mhm.

Well, so I think that it's tempting to think about empire as like a a unified category also that can kind of

have explanatory force. But you know as historians of empire were constantly remind us you know empire itself was very diverse and there were forms of

kind of developmentalist empire versus forms of more like plunder style empire versus highly exploitative versus less exploitative attempting to educate parts

of the population and so on. So even

that alone, right, I mean, if you look at the way that America is proposing its relationship with Venezuela

um at the present moment, you know, Monday, January 12th, is um you know, it's not a direct annexation.

It's not even a direct daily oversight the way that they did in Iraq under the provisional government, but it's a kind of armslength

um uh pressure against the current government to ensure that it acts in accordance to America's wishes. But in

that case, even to understand the motivations requires going beyond the material ones, right? Because as people have been quick to point out, there

actually isn't that much material gain to have access to Venezuela's oil that um profits many people inside of the

American uh economic base. It actually

undercuts American oil producers. Um it

requires high levels of investment on the part of American oil companies that they're not interested.

Yeah. Exxon CEO said is uh is not buying it right?

Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's a major project. They have other things going on

project. They have other things going on and it's not actually in their best interest to increase the global supply of oil anyway. That would simply bring the price down, which is, you know, not

really in their interest. Um, so these things are are are are complicated and I think that moving away from that individual case, I

would say there seem to be two economic strategies at play most prominently right now in the administration.

one is a kind of short-termist um plunder-like strategy associated

mostly with Trump's inner circle and maybe specifically with his family that um whether these are kind of memecoin

sales or often other crypto related or gold related gambits by um his sons

or access to new contracts for the Trump uh brand globally. There's a way to

leverage, you know, political influence into short-term economic gains through basically leveraging the value of the name into

sure immediate profits. So that's something

immediate profits. So that's something that's definitely happening, but that's pretty minor, right? In the big scheme of things, the big one is what's

happening with big tech and Silicon Valley's alliance with the administration, which is really a one-way bet on

artificial intelligence becoming the globally defining technology of the next decade, many

decades, century, millennium, you you name it. and fair. You know, the surface

name it. and fair. You know, the surface level dramatics of the day-to-day um activities of the government can really distract us from that because that is

really the big economic structural story, right? Which is um securing of

story, right? Which is um securing of enormous investments promised anyway

into a very very rapid buildout of capacity for data centers. the energy

supplies behind that from nuclear to liquid natural gas to conventional oil.

um the buyin of overseas partners, especially from the Gulf, to try to reach escape velocity for what they think of as, you know, artificial general intelligence based on this kind

of scaling proposition that all that needs to happen is we need to have enough models operating at enough of a scale and then something kind of magical

will click at which point we can ride that advantage to restore that very edge of American economic hijgemony. that had

been lost. And that is um the big story I would say econ political economic terms of this administration.

And it's an ongoing wager. We don't know how it will turn out yet. And it's

already created some pinhole cracks in an otherwise pretty strong front about economic isolation even and decoupling.

Because as we know um the administration has offered to sell even the top end Nvidia AI chips to China in exchange for

the government itself taking a pretty good chunk of the profits directly as state revenue. So these I mean if you

state revenue. So these I mean if you want to find infractions of neoliberal rationality you know you you can't find much more

serious ones than that right the US investment in new extractive sectors taking shares in private companies taking parts of the profits

taking part of intel as into the portfolio of the government itself these are all more like forms of state capitalism than neoliberalism

can Can you say a few words about mascism, you know, and why what he illustrates, what he impersonates?

Sure. So, yeah, my co-author and I were interested in exploring muskism for a lot of the reasons that we've just been talking about here, which is that any

kind of mode of accumulation also requires a kind of mode of social regulation to go along with it. Right?

It's very hard to actually just compel people to contribute their labor to your form of business activity without giving them

something in return and without at least proposing some kind of a bargain that makes it seem like there is a mutual dependency. And the Fordism that we

dependency. And the Fordism that we alluded to earlier is a great example of that, right? um Ford gives more work

that, right? um Ford gives more work rights to workers in ex and lets them take part in the rising profitability of the company in ways that then helps to

reinforce both labor piece within the factory and then also produces the worker as a consumer. So fortism is this mass consumption plus mass production

model which then expands out to include aspects of the welfare state all of which works on aggregate to make you know the countries of the post-war world

more and more wealthy for a few decades right 40s to 60s you see rise in standard of living rise in average wages

rise in GDP across the western world Musk has been compared afford a lot and but often superficially, right? He makes

cars. He expresses um you know far-right sentiment. He biased forms of media and

sentiment. He biased forms of media and not the Dearborn Independent but x.com.

Um but we wanted to take it further and say, well, is there something like Fordism being proposed by Musk? And if

so, what would it look like? Right? I

mean, what would a muskist system look like? He hasn't been very effective at

like? He hasn't been very effective at selling it um to the broad group of people yet, but very successful at selling it to an investor class, even you know, to pension managers and stuff.

They believe in his vision, which is really striking because Tesla sales are going down. Um there's

no real prospect that he can make these robots that he says he can he can make.

Um and yet you can't go to Mars and yet um there's something there. So that was our question was like how was he able to surf the waves of political economic

change in the early 21st century so effectively to play both sides, right?

to be both an American economic nationalist and helping the Chinese with their forms of boosting their electric industry and the Europeans even in their move towards electrification.

um while also engaging in an ever more inflammatory form of agitation that one would think

should be very polarizing and yet seems to continue expanding his empire of companies and his net worth. His net

worth grew by almost half in the last year in the year when supposedly he was bungling his job in the White House and you know getting everyone angry on his social media platform and yet he's getting richer and richer all the time.

So what is going on? How can we explain this apparent contradiction that was the question that led us into the book?

Okay. Well, a few words on um how do you see energy limits, you know, ecological stress, uh resources, uh resources constraints,

you know, playing into this in in the coming years because it looks like it's for some people it's disappeared. It

doesn't exist anymore. You know, all these all these problems. Yeah. How do you see this in that

Yeah. How do you see this in that framework?

Yeah, I mean it is really extraordinary, right? I mean, talking about how quickly

right? I mean, talking about how quickly narratives in the public can change from one day to the next, um, it wasn't very long ago that every world leader agreed

that climate change was the most pressing issue and that everything needed to be aligned towards addressing that and to accelerating energy

transition. and now it just off the

transition. and now it just off the agenda and and even for sort of public intellectuals and things like that. I

mean it almost doesn't come up. Um

so the so the the colonization of the space of discourse by uh ever more accelerationist radical move both politically and economically

by on the one hand the far right on the other hand kind of Silicon Valley people has helped to displace altogether um the what I think justified and reasonable discussion of um climate change that had

preceded it. Mhm. Mhm.

preceded it. Mhm. Mhm.

But that doesn't mean it's gone away, of course. Right. So um the extreme

course. Right. So um the extreme weather, the strains on the existing grids, the move by more uh level-headed

actors like China in particular in very rapidly moving towards electrification certainly the automobile industry and elsewhere only means that as I think you

know Europe and North America bicker about the latest manufactured controversy and crisis this then

China will simply be moving rapidly towards a world that's more resilient and more um sustainable in an era after

fossil fuel viability and in uh a time of increasing uh climate effects. So I

think it's psychologically explainable why we are where we are. I

think that it's very frightening and and and can produce a sense of impotence and even despair to actually look the problem of climate full in the face,

especially when it affects not necessarily one's own lifespan, but perhaps the lifespan of one's children or grandchildren. It's very challenging

or grandchildren. It's very challenging in just in terms of cognitive psychology to overcome all of those limits and actually take action. And there was a moment I would say five years ago or so

where it was amazingly was happening regardless and now d all of those barriers have returned. So it's not surprising that

returned. So it's not surprising that this short termism locks back in. Um and

whatever ability we have to reopen that space I think is very important. But

it's hard when there's when there's um you know things hurtling at you that seem to be requiring maneuvering um in split seconds and it's hard to think of

even a decade in the future. Well, and

what kinds of uh counter forces do you see today uh emerging and and if if any you know that could push back toward

um democratic control, collective coordination um either that's you are in the US so that's still interesting to see what's happening there and that we

don't understand but also on the global scene you know other models um talked very little about China, which is trying something a little bit different. Uh

Europe, I don't know. Where where do you where where do you look?

Mhm. Well, I think that it's important to realize that that the kind of amassing of

of social movements and policy makers and thinkers that helped to produce the kind of breakthroughs I was just discussing here, like the idea of like a

possibility of a green new deal around 2020 or the kind of upsurge of interest in doing like even the net zero dream which was seen as not strong

enough 5 years ago is now basically not not even not even discussed at all. Um

those haven't really gone anywhere per se, right? They're still there. So the

se, right? They're still there. So the

you know the figure of someone in the United States like a Bernie Sanders for example, right? The guy has been saying the same

right? The guy has been saying the same thing for 25 years. He's not he's still here. And what has he done? Why has he

here. And what has he done? Why has he been successful in that period in certain ways? Well,

because he's stayed on message, right?

He's said we we actually don't have to subscribe to the false separation of so-called like cultural and identity based issues and then material and

economic issues. Actually, you can do

economic issues. Actually, you can do both of them at the same time. you can,

you know, believe in racial equality and believe in, you know, the possibility of an America that

is changes over time and welcomes in new cultures and races and and transforms. And you can also care about how people get food on the table at the end of the week and how people can have less

procarity or risk in their lives.

There's perfectly sensible to combine these things. And one of the successes

these things. And one of the successes of the right-wing in this country in the last 5 years has been to pretend like those are two separate things. And

there's something called wokeism that cares about, you know, the rights of minorities. And then there's like

minorities. And then there's like sensible economic issues.

The success of Zoran Omdani in in New York City shows that there actually is a political space for people who combine those discussions and say this is a city

of immigrants. Um it's defined by that

of immigrants. Um it's defined by that we are all part of one human family, right? Previously uncontroversial

right? Previously uncontroversial statements like that. Um, and it's an affordability issue above all and we need to figure out how to make rents

payable for people in this city slashcountry. So, I actually think the

slashcountry. So, I actually think the more outlandish the rightwing gets in this country, the

more the lane expands for um just common sense progressivism. Um and

sense progressivism. Um and in some ways, you know, we are in a moment of the cycle here that's we are in the middle of something that

arguably might be coming, you know, in the next years to France, Germany. I

think that that this confrontation with the far right in power almost needs to happen before there can be a far right out of

power. Like I think that the I mean I

power. Like I think that the I mean I don't think it needs I think that perhaps like this is this is a a pattern that we might have to confront that that

what they are never going to lose their strength until they have to actually govern and then fail at governing um and the population is able to kind of

reorient themselves in the midst of that.

Yeah. Yeah. because they will always be they always always have the possibility to say you've never tried us. Yeah.

Right. So I mean that's I I at the same time would say you know do everything in your power to prevent that from happening.

Sure. Sure. For sure.

But um the the the historian in me sort of wonders if that isn't a cycle that is going to have to play out.

And going back to a little bit to democracies, I'm I'm wondering, you know, listening to you, what's the way for u for nation

states and and democracies in particular to maintain a certain level of power, even economic power when you see the fragmentation of the world, when you see all the special zones, when you see all

the Dubai and the Singapore, you know, it's a it's like it's look like it looks like the game is uh is rigged in in in a sense.

Mhm. Yeah. Well, I mean, it always has been for sure.

Yeah.

Um I mean I I think that's the the challenge is to be a realist because I actually do subscribe more to the kind of school of

of realism than idealism. I don't think that international law, for example, has any more power than the power that states

give it at any given moment. But I think we can still express a kind of faith in the in the

positive outcomes that can proceed from the entertainment of the fantasy of something like international law for example. Um,

example. Um, and what of one of the things that's been very disorienting I think about the

last couple of years is how we flipped almost 100% from a previous mode that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s

where we reflexively in Europe and North America, G7 countries and so on would speak about a kind of world community

and international interests and the international community in a kind of pious self-righteous way that would suppress realities of conflicts and ine

inequality, right? They would be and

inequality, right? They would be and then the role of the leftist critic would be to say, "Come on, this is not true. Look at all of the conflict. Look

true. Look at all of the conflict. Look

at all the inequality. Don't act like there's one international community.

There isn't." And so on. Now it's

reversed where the leading power in the world is just saying all it is is conflict. Inequality is good and it's

conflict. Inequality is good and it's natural. And now we I think on the left

natural. And now we I think on the left or me on the left anyway is in the position of saying like well no there is internationalism beneath it. Right. Like

there is an international community. We

are now forced to try to restore the very thing that had been the role of critique to previously unveil.

Yeah. Um, and that's just it's a reorientation, right? Um,

reorientation, right? Um, and it's I think it's hard to recover something like globalism when you know if you've been on the left critiquing

that for 25 years. Um, and yet I think we might be in a position where that kind of a move is necessary. sort of

what you're saying really is like how to rediscover forms of international uh affiliation and organization that one can defend uh

when that very idea is being called into question. And I think that as so often a

question. And I think that as so often a place to look is Latin America because Latin America is a place that has been dealing with this problem for almost 200

years which is you know you have a crowded continent with many individual self-determining entities that are trying to live with each other and

they're trying to find like a common ground on which to do that and they don't have the luxury of imagining you know that they are a continent as in the case of the United States or really

Russia or China, but you you you forced to live with your your neighbors without dissolving into a single, you know, Latin American community and the

European Union model.

So, some kind of managed uh internationalism like that is certainly the project of the coming decade, I think. and and um it's kind of an

think. and and um it's kind of an exciting project in some way if you if you look at it as something that um allows us to think a fresh about what

kind of intergovernmental bonds are defendable that would not be primarily designed to keep the hedgeimon in power or to make

life easier for private investors and corporations but could be based on something probably starts with stop fearing everything right. Psychologically there

everything right. Psychologically there is a big challenging.

Yeah.

Um couple of questions to to last short ones.

Why does all this mean for a simple citizen you know that is listening to us uh trying to stay lucid informed and uh engaged today? You know what's the

engaged today? You know what's the takeaway?

Well, I mean I think a lot of these questions are not just high-minded abstractions, right? I mean the cost of

abstractions, right? I mean the cost of groceries, um the possibility of the deportation of yourself or your

children's classmates or their children's classmates parents are these are everyday matters and certainly in the United States now um whether one

will be able to trust the savings you have in in the bank whether you'll be able to um retire

Um, these are all really practical questions that I think hang on the question of how the world order will be designed in the next 10 years. Um, I

think it will be hard for the kind of prosperity and certainly consumer diversity that Europeans and North Americans have come to expect to be

maintained if the current pace of like chaotic action continues, right? It's it's

really not a sustainable level of disruptive um behavior. Mhm.

Um, so that for me is is is uh a reality

that came home to people very much during the pandemic, right? I

mean, this the the way that seemingly abstract global things can suddenly become part of your everyday life can determine happens, right?

happens, right?

happens and like when it happens, it really happens. Um, and so I I would I I do think that something very interesting happened with COVID, which

is in the midst of it, we were all spending all day long saying like everything's changed. This is like the

everything's changed. This is like the we've entered a new epoch. And when it kind of didn't change that much, we all then spun to the opposite side and said, well, I guess nothing changed. But I

think actually the answer is somewhere in between which is like something very significant changed which is the global community showed its capacity to mobilize almost overnight towards a

single goal which was stopping the spread of the virus and a lot of people are still processing that I think I think in in they're processing it in

sometimes opposite ways. people are

processing it by saying, well, that gives me a sense of optimism that at least the humanity can act as one body if it needs to. And the other people are like, oh my god, you know, I could be constrained in all of my liberties

tomorrow if the authorities decide it's necessary. And I think that um has

necessary. And I think that um has helped to fuel a lot of the heightened um politics of the last five years, right? It's not just the polarizing and

right? It's not just the polarizing and accelerating qualities of social media platforms, which is certainly part of it, but it's also the very real life like global shutdown that happened over

a virus which then since has been um memory holds to a kind of collective amnesia in which there has been no kind of post-mortem on

the measures that were taken and what were justified and what weren't. It's just

simply been like, yeah, we're not going to discuss it.

So, so depending on how you remember that period, you know, your pol your political sympathies and sentiments might be directed in very different ways. So, when the next thing like that

ways. So, when the next thing like that happens, it won't be for the first time.

And I think it will activate more quickly um either people's instinctive trust or their instinctive distrust.

And that's one thing I'm worried about.

your favorite two books.

Favorite two books? Wow. Um well, I guess one of them that really set me thinking about a lot of this question that it came out in high bastards is

called sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson.

And it's not my favorite in the sense that I like reading it, but it crystallizes something I think that I've been thinking about a lot, which is

basically the extent to which humans are simply another kind of animal. So is it helpful to kind of desenter humans into

their status as um instinct driven uh reproduction driven um population units rather than you know something endowed

with some god-given form of rationality.

And I think the that's very much something that's at stake right now. I think that it would be very important for the left and even

centrists to be able to acknowledge more those forms of human nature that come out of our animal capacity without that leading directly to forms of exclusion

and um right-wing um yep kind of fear-mongering.

The second book is I would say I mean I mentioned Michelle Fuko earlier so I'll just come back to him. I think that Discipline and Punish was a book that

kind of changed my life in college because it showed I think this cycle that I've been trying to capture ever since in my in my work whereby certain

ideas that thinkers have could correspond with certain problems of government with certain forms of population growth and and accumulation and then turn into things that are

rendered natural and almost impossible to question. Um, and I think that if

to question. Um, and I think that if there's any function for intellectuals in society, it's this attempt to kind of dnaturalize

what is taken as common sense in an attempt to kind of inaugurate in whatever small way a new, you know, more humane form of common sense to follow.

That's it. Thanks a lot, Queen. Thanks

for your insights.

Yeah, very nice to meet you.

Thanks,