Is Trump the Unwitting Historical Agent of Cosmolocal Accelerationism ?
* Article: Is Trump the unwitting historical agent of Cosmolocal Accelerationism ? Can we turn tragedy into opportunity ? Michel Bauwens Apr 07, 2025
URL = https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/is-trump-the-unwitting-historical
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Part One: The meaning of Liberation Day
Michel Bauwens:
The Russian revolutionary leader Lenin is often quoted saying:
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
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While what he actually said was:
“Sometimes ten years pass without a single day worth remembering, and then come days in which ten years are embodied." ("Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920)
It may be important to recall the situation in which he thought this: when he was going back to Russia, in a train protected by the German Reich, he was not just a minority in the Bolshevik Party, which was opposed to taking power, while the then really existing worker’s councils, openly stated they did not have the capacity to run the country (See the book, Lenin in the Train, for these details). And yet we know he eventually took power, and changed the course of human history. He was of course not the first one, we can think of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon as similar willful figures which appeared at the right time in history to make a difference.
It’s too early to say whether Trump is made from the same cloth and destined to be such a world changer, but definitely, the tariff proclamations of Liberation Day come close in their import.
What we witnessed was the definite burial of neoliberal globalization, and a world based on the free flows of trade, paradoxically the very world order which the American supremacy after the victory of WWII had inaugurated. Trump’s attempt seems to follow from the rationale that tariffs will make importing products to the American market so expensive, that it will motivate many industrialists to resettle in the U.S. Seeing the country like a transactional entity, based on the capacity to express coercive power, his policies make sense. The continuation of the neoliberal order was untenable, and this is a last ditch attempt to rejig the position of the U.S. as a strong, if not the strongest nation-state, in a post-neoliberal and post-imperial order. While its failure is likely, it will nevertheless do an enormous amount of damage to many other countries in the world, who will now have to choose between adapting to U.S. demands, or joining the alternative attempt of a globalized trade based on the BRICS alliance. The success of that alternative is equally uncertain.
It might be useful to see this disruption in the very long term, and for this, I draw on the ideas of Michael Hudson, for example as expressed in The Destiny of Civilization.
When the post-axial civilizational form emerged (i.e. after the establishment of the ‘higher religions’ which attempted to regulate the brute power of dominant conquerors), it was originally based on a ‘harmony’ model of social relations, in which non-military orders, such as the Mandarins in China, or the Church in medieval Europe, kept both the merchants and the warriors in check, for example through regular debt cancellations (Jubilees and Clean Slate legislations). This system was dominant on the eastern Eurasian side of the mega-continent. But Classical Greece marked the exception: the rentier-based property class, i.e. the oligarchy, took control of the state, but was swiftly met with a counter-revolution, which created the democratic Polis, and later, in its Roman form, the Tribunate, and finally in its medieval form of the many assemblies and associations which marked European medieval life, up to the parliamentary forms of democracy marking the advent of industrial modernity. This has marked the western side of Eurasia: antagonism and conflict, moderated by social compromise; oligarchy moderated by democracy, and the absence of a higher order arbitrage, such as an Emperor with a ‘Mandate from Heaven’. European kings always had to deal with the Estates and their assemblies.
To this day, we see a revival of this great polarity, with the Russia-Chinese stress on neo-sovereignism and the post-Westphalian ‘civilization state’ model, the leading axis of the BRICS alliance. In this model, the state comes back as the arbitrage mechanism for maintaining social harmony. In the West, the Davos model dreamed of a global system of multi-stakeholder governed domains, led by finance, with weakened nation-states and domesticated NGOs creating a ‘rule-based order’. Note the total absence of popular sovereignty in that latter model.
And the disappearance of popular power is of course exactly what has led to the national-populist challenge in the heart of the Western countries, both in the US and Europe, as the new model first stagnated and undermined the living standards of the working class, which stagnated since the 1970s, and now joined by the declining middle classes, whose descent has accelerated since the COVID years. We have reached the stage, in which the old neoliberal elite can only maintain power by reneging on democratic rights and tightly controlling speech online. If they stay democratic, they lose power to the populists, it’s that simple. We should also note that there is a natural ‘sympathy’ between neo-sovereignism of the Russia-China and BRICS type, and the national-populist desire to restore the older and stronger versions of the nation-state.
There are many reasons to doubt that both these alternative socio-political and economic paradigms can deliver on their promises. For the American people, the longer-term promise of re-industrialization will be challenged by the shorter-term reality of accelerating higher prices. Remember, if the welfare state paradigm of sharing productivity gains with the national working class was overturned more or less successfully by the conservative and neoliberal counter-revolutions of the 1980s (Thatcher and Reagan), it is essentially because the de-industrialization was compensated by cheap products through cheap labor in the Global South, and cheap services by importing that same labor through mass immigration. The stagnation of wages was compensated in part through debt and the credit economy, and in the other part through this great cheapening of consumption. It is also doubtful that the American rentier class will play ball and invest in re-industrialization. So there are very big chances that internally, the working and middle classes in the US will be impoverished further, leading to deep social unrest and dislocation. While the global trade wars and retaliation, and military risk, are to be taken into account as further agents of chaos.
So we should expect a period of great swings, great political, economic, and social risk, not to speak of the continuation and intensification of the ongoing culture wars.
Now, how is this related to Cosmo-Localism ?
To briefly recall, I will explain more in Part II, Cosmo-Localism proposes a relocalization of material production, so a move away from a lot of world trade, coupled with a global cooperation through ‘organized networks with commons’, i.e. ‘everything that is heavy is local, everything that is light is global and shared’.
Indeed, what was the greatest weakness and difficulty for envisioning that transformation ? Basically the cheapness of most industrial and consumption goods. Now mind you that the cosmo-local form of localization was never merely based on the romantic idea of ‘back to the land’, but rather to a high-tech synthesis of distributed manufacturing and global digital commons of knowledge, cooperation protocols, and distributed trans-local capital flows. Nevertheless, it was one of the difficulties to see how this model could replace cheap imported goods, at least in the short term.
But what if most of these goods become more expensive? Furthermore, in a context of global demographic implosion, where labor may become equally expensive!
(I leave open the question of how automation and AI will affect these trends, but I do not believe in full automation. I believe in the need for a lot of labor in the future, especially in the context of aging populations and the need for regenerative healing of the damage to the planet.)
That, my friends, is why I believe that Trump might indeed be an ‘accelerationist’ for the cosmo-local opportunities.
The very disruption that he responds to and intensifies, and the unlikely realization of these goals, are strengthening the need for cosmo-local alternatives.
Yes, the BRICS alliance and its state-centric para-global trade is an alternative to Trump’s protectionism, but it has its own difficulties, and so in a context of disruption of global trade, it will force a lot of local populations to rethink where their basic survival goods come from. It is from this logic that I believe the pressure for a cosmo-local transformation will increase and accelerate in the coming two decades.
Bear in mind that synergies between cosmo-localism and state-centric developmental strategies are altogether possible, and I have developed a theorization of this synergy through our work on the Partner-State model and Public-Commons cooperation models.
So what do we mean with Cosmo-Localism? I.e. in more detail.
This is our longish part two. It’s a formal explanation of the logic of the Cosmo-Local alternative, interpreted as the possibility of a alternative way to organize human civilization at this particular stage of the history of civilization.
Part Two: Explaining the logic of the Cosmo-Local alternative
For this second part, see the text: