Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
* Book: Crack-Up Capitalism. Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracyk. Quinn Slobodian. Macmillan,
URL = https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250753892/crackupcapitalism
Description
"In a revelatory dispatch from the frontier of capitalist extremism, an acclaimed historian of ideas shows how free marketeers are realizing their ultimate goal: an end to nation-states and the constraints of democracy.
Look at a map of the world and you’ll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether.
Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians—from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel—around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.
A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future."
Review
William Davies:
"Anti-democratic and authoritarian cities and regional experiments of the past 45 years – from Singapore to Somalia, from Liechtenstein to Honduras – are scrutinised less for how they function economically, and more for how they fuel the imaginations of reactionaries and market fundamentalists. This is a history of contemporary ideas – specifically those that seek to protect capitalism from the interferences of democratic politics – that is interwoven with a geography of the various territories on which those ideas descended.
Slobodian’s story begins in and often returns to Hong Kong, which offered an inspirational policy model to figures such as Milton Friedman in the 1970s. This was partly on account of its exceptional levels of economic growth over the previous years, but more importantly, its unique constitutional underpinning. As a remnant of 19th-century British imperialism, it possessed all of the legal and infrastructural conditions for markets to thrive, but little of the democratic baggage that western capitalism had accumulated during the 20th century. As such, Hong Kong was exemplary of a distinctive territorial unit of which Crack-Up Capitalism offers an intellectual history: the economic “zone”.
Such zones come in various legal and political forms. In Slobodian’s metaphor, they “perforate” the conventional economic and political tapestry of nation states, with the declared aims of attracting investment and unleashing enterprise. This is typically achieved via a combination of tax incentives, deregulation and major imbalances between the rights of capital and those of labour. The suspension of political liberties is also a frequent part of the armoury. Canary Wharf is a comparatively innocent example of a pro-market zone in action; Dubai, a more threatening one. The idea of “freeports”, backed by Rishi Sunak as chancellor, is another manifestation of the zone as a policy ideal.
The book also explores the more outlandish, utopian visions. A radical strand of libertarianism, focused increasingly on the possibilities afforded by the internet and inspired by the likes of Murray Rothbard and William Rees-Mogg, took off in the 21st-century United States. Men (and they are all men) such as Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Balaji Srinivasan and Friedman’s son, David, provide Slobodian with a litany of exotic and bizarre details. We find David Friedman maintaining the fictional persona of a medieval duke who eats only with his right hand. Here’s Srinivasan, hoping to move entire political communities into the digital cloud.
Some schemes remain at the level of science fiction. Others, such as the economist Paul Romer’s vision of neo-colonial “charter cities” (zones in the global south that are governed by technocrats in the global north for purposes of economic development), have been put into practice. One thing that ties them all together is an antipathy towards the liberal, democratic nation state, which in some cases tips into fanaticism.Another is a belief that corporations offer important lessons for politics. If entrepreneurs can create and run giant businesses, why shouldn’t the same be possible for polities? Admiration for the corporate form meshes with a zany cult of feudalism, producing the ambition to abandon the nation state in favour of thousands of city-states, colonial trade routes and private armies.
At times, the flurries of biographical, intellectual and historical anecdote accelerate to blizzards, and the sheer volume of material can become overwhelming. I occasionally wished for less showing and more telling, as the underlying thesis is a genuinely perspective-altering one. For instance, Slobodian casts the post-cold war moment in a new and surprising light. The liberal triumphalism of the 1990s led to excessive focus on how power was shifting upwards, to multilateral institutions, trade blocs such as the EU, and the “global economy” itself (Slobodian’s 2018 Globalists details the history of this ideal). But the book shows that the triumph of the free market didn’t represent the death of national sovereignty, so much as its shattering into smaller, less accountable, potentially more oppressive pieces."