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
1. 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."
2. Philip Cunliffe:
“For those interested in intellectual genealogy, it is a fascinating family tree.”
"The concern of Slobodian’s subsequent work has been to undercut the notion that national populists are truly anti-globalists. He wants to do this by showing that much of what we call the populist right is itself a mutant strain of neoliberalism. His first effort in this vein was Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy. This 2023 book was about how the right, far from defending the nation-state against the market, had sought to chisel it away by honeycombing it with special economic zones, tax havens, free ports and secessionist city-states. Slobodian has now gone further in his new book, which tries to untangle the roots of radical right parties such as Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), tracing them back to a bizarre and restive intellectual subculture made up of people who sell Krugerrands, print samizdat investor newsletters, and conduct creepy investigations into the racial basis for IQ.
For those interested in intellectual genealogy, it is a fascinating family tree, with Slobodian tracing many obscure and shriveled branches of it. But there is nothing in this family tree that explains the popular and electoral appeal of today’s populist right. However right-populists may be winning, it is not by buying off voters with Krugerrands or by telling them that they are too cognitively challenged to be trusted with power (they leave that argument to the left). However many populist parties may have roots in neoliberalism, that soil is not nourishing their growth.
The neoliberal populist right that is the subject of Hayek’s Bastards , in Slobodian’s telling, is best thought of by way of analogy to the prudent portfolio investor seeking refuge from market turmoil in safe assets: bonds over stocks. Except the turmoil in question is not just a choppy stock market, but the world itself—a world drowning in debt, held hostage to the whims of voters dependent on over-generous welfare checks, nations flooded by mass migration, confronting violent racial unrest in inner cities, and supranational cabals seeking to build world government from above.
The safe assets in question are not US treasuries, but rather what Slobodian terms the three “hards”—hard money, hard borders, and hardwired human nature. Gold offers a hedge against central banks manipulating fiat money; hard borders help preserve the national stock of human capital against dilution by low-IQ migrants; human nature presents the genetic basis for market freedoms and stable social order. Slobodian notes how the renewed mania for IQ thrives in a world of “standardized outcomes, rankings, benchmarks and indicators,” how it “naturalizes and hardens existing hierarchies … with the elegance of a single number—IQ as a biologized credit score.”
Yet reading the book in the backwash of Trump’s new tariffs, it is difficult to fit the frame to the picture before us. Slobodian identifies the writer Richard Hanania in his book as one of the exponents of the sinister new racial science of IQ. Yet in recent weeks, Hanania has been raging on X against Trump’s tariffs as further evidence of the cognitive mediocrity of the president and his backers—the pursuit of central planning, as he sees it, by people with even lower IQ than the old socialists. At another point, Slobodian digs into the early issues of libertarian former congressman Ron Paul’s Survival Report to uncover the basis of today’s new right—but sure enough, Paul has also come out as hostile to Trump’s trade agenda. In other words, rather than fulfilling the dreams of a longstanding nationalist-libertarian coalition, the current trade war seems to be straining the ostensible alliance between neoliberals and national populists.
Perhaps it is unfair to read Slobodian through the prism of Trump’s latest trade war, given that the book was written before it got underway. Yet even discounting the tariffs, Slobodian’s method—tracing newsletters, attendees at meetings of the Mont Pelerin Society, and obscure websites to show that through his economic advisor Larry Kudlow, Trump is connected to alt-right leader Richard Spencer (remember him?)—falls flat. After all, Spencer himself voted for the Democratic candidate Joe Biden in 2020, and like Hanania, he has since become a vociferous critic of the MAGA right to which he once belonged.
Slobodian employs a number of neologisms to drive home his point that today’s nationalist populism is an extension of yesterday’s neoliberalism: “ethno-economy” (to correspond to the more familiar ethno-state and ethno-nationalism); “Volk capital”; “auripatriotism” (the political feeling for currency backed by precious metal). But he fails to demonstrate that the victories of the populist right owe much to the intellectual cunning of the cranks whose careers are explored in Hayek’s Bastards. For instance, Trump’s frequent boasting about his IQ, presented in the book as evidence of populist leaders’ support for a racialist revival, seems a slender basis on which to accuse him of being the figurehead for a sinister eugenic politics of an elite new “neurocaste.” In fact, Trump has largely succeeded by drawing on ordinary citizens’ intuitions and wielding them against the obliviousness of those Hanania likes to call “elite human capital.”
Herein lies the problem with Slobodian’s contention that there is a “new fusionism” at the root of the populist right, in which arguments for market freedom are melded not with religious conservatism, as during the Cold War, but with evolutionary psychology, genomics, and biological anthropology. The old fusionism was not merely an intellectual meld but a potent electoral alliance between a neoconservative intelligentsia and a vast evangelical voting bloc. However deep neoliberals may reach into human evolution to formulate their arguments for racial supremacy today, it is difficult to see that such arguments have any corresponding electoral depth. On the contrary, Trump returned to power in 2024 by incorporating large numbers of Latino voters into the MAGA coalition—the same demographic that has been historically despised by “new fusionists” concerned with preserving the white racial basis of US human capital."
(https://www.compactmag.com/article/anti-globalism-against-itself/?)