crack-up capitalism: market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy (quinn slobodian)

Sometimes you read a book and it helps everything click into place. Which is part of the point of reading, to understand the world. Over the past twenty years or so, it has felt as though the political spectrum has been infiltrated and all those things which, as a child of the sixties, were held dear, have been undermined. Free health care; public transport; freedom of speech; that nebulous construct known as democracy, in whose name so many wars have been fought. The very idea of the state has been put into the crosshairs. On the one hand, this might be seen as a reaction to the failure of the Soviet Union and the respective Communist endeavours. On the other hand, the rise of China, which continues to declare itself a communist state puts that narrative in question. So where did these maverick insurgents come from? And how have they managed to shape the world?

Slobodian's book goes a long way to explaining this. Perhaps it is light on the philosophical origins, but it’s revelatory in its description of the intellectual/ political movements of the past forty years. In eleven succinct chapters he traces the dreams, realised and unrealised, of those on the edge of the capitalist spectrum, starting with Milton Friedman’s enthusiasm for Hong Kong and then leading the reader through a maze which includes the usual suspects of Singapore, London and Dubai, but also takes in the unusual suspects of Honduras, Somalia, Lichtenstein. Slobodian shows how the crack-brained schemes of new zones and nations, free of old laws, gradually obtained a foothold in the psyche of the right wing political classes. As a Brit, more than anything the book shows how the radical dreams of the Brexiteers were suckled by the Hayekian visions of previously extremist think tanks. As a neighbour of Argentina, one can trace a clear line to the anarcho-capitalist worldview of Javier Milei.

Crack-Up Capitalism perhaps wisely refrains from taking too subjective a stance on the movements and initiatives it describes. A sly authorial undertone is present, but kept in check, questioning what happens to the workers and the losers in a world without rights or democratic means to alter their conditions. Because the world of crack-up capitalism has a neo-fascist slant: it is a world where the strong flourish and the weak are condemned, where the narco’s wealth has far more value than the working man or woman’s sweat and tears. It is also a world of fantasists. Slobodian makes it clear that a stateless world is an anarcho-fantasy. What this fantasy succeeds in doing, however, is open up the resources of the state like an open cast mine, for those with the engineering capital to plunder at will. The fantasists create the bedrock for the pragmatists to flourish. The result is Brexit Britain, Milei Argentina, Israel… This is how we got to where we are now.