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[preliminary note: I listened to Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy as an audiobook; as such, I don’t have long pull-quotes and I don’t have page references for the few short quotations I include. these notes are in the form of my real-time responses to the book as I moved through it.]
now I’m listening to an unequivocally anticapitalist book (Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism), and it’s good, except that in its critique of “zones” (special economic zones of various kinds) and the neoliberal and libertarian project of disassembling state authority and states themselves into smaller non-state entities it kind of ends up implying that actually the nation-state form is good and that states/government systems should/must be large and highly centralized, which is…not a good conclusion.
first of all, almost every nation-state currently in existence is the product of imperial and colonial violence, the repression (often violent) of internal difference, and/or the violent imposition of arbitrary borders between closely interconnected communities (the exceptions are, ironically, basically limited to the European microstates, which are mainly leftovers that managed to remain outside the processes by which other European nation-states consolidated themselves). we should — at the very least — absolutely want to see the demise of the nation-state as such and its total restructuring into entities that are actually responsive to the communities that comprise current states. I suspect it’s likely that this process, if it were to truly break with the “nation-state” and the “nation”, would involve a complete reimagination of what “the state” actually is in ways that would be unrecognizable as states as we currently understand them.
second of all, it’s deeply disingenuous to implicitly equate all “secession movements” with the violent institution of the Bantustans in apartheid South Africa. that shouldn’t even need to be said, but here we are. so much for national liberation!
[aside: sorry but neoliberals and libertarians defending the Bantustans (e.g.) weren’t “useful idiots” for the apartheid government, they were simply making absolutely clear that when they say “freedom” they mean exclusively unfettered capitalism “free” from restraint or regulation. meaningful human freedom enters into the equation only insofar as they consistently and explicitly regard it as an obstacle to the kinds of “freedom” they want. stop accepting their language at face value!]
third of all, it should be immediately obvious that the problem with the political program of “crack-up capitalists” — variously neoliberals, libertarians, and anarcho-capitalists — isn’t “secession” in and of itself, but rather the fact that they want to secede specifically and explicitly in order to a) vastly expand human misery around the world through unfettered capitalism; b) violently impose a white supremacist fantasy of total racial segregation and, through the unfettered capitalism, absolute white economic and political dominance over non-white people; and c) ideally recreate aristocracies of “elites” who are “worthy” to rule over these new polities.
there’s useful analysis of the influence and political project of these “market radicals” in this book, but it’s coupled with this wildly idealist valuation of the (large) nation-state as an inherent good. it rests on the unargued and unproven premise that a world of smaller polities could only ever resemble these market radicals’ political visions and would be a “return” to “the Middle Ages” (clearly invoked in order to provoke automatic disgust/disdain). that’s a bad take!
like I really feel like it should be left politics 101 to recognize that the nation-state is bad!
In the 1990s, the UN granted seats to tiny nations long excluded: Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, and Liechtenstein.
(from Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy)
there are other issues with his historiography of the ’90s as a moment of political fragmentation (in particular, it’s very weird to use the fall of the Berlin Wall as an inciting incident given that the result of that was the unification of two countries in spite of the desires of many of one of those countries’s citizens), but to use the accession of the European microstates to the UN as a sign of political fragmentation is particularly silly because the reason Liechtenstein didn’t join the UN until 1990 is because they never previously applied for UN membership.
if anything the ’80s and ’90s involved a significant regularization of Liechtenstein’s political status by integrating the country more substantially into the international political system — the introduction of women’s suffrage (in fucking 1984; terrible country), the full separation of its foreign policy from Switzerland and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with a bunch of countries, and joining a number of international organizations, most notably the UN and the EEA.
there are actual reasons to talk about Liechtenstein during this period, namely the fact that Hans-Adam II is personally involved with the “market radicals” Slobodian is analyzing and has been a theorist of libertarianism. but this is deeply silly, especially insofar as it frames the microstates as themselves a sign of political fragmentation when they are, rather, markers of the incomplete and contested history of the development of the nation-state form. (also, fun fact, San Marino had the first democratically elected notionally-communist government in the world, from 1945 to 1957; it collapsed due to ideological divides following the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, although I have to imagine Western economic pressure played a part in shaping those divides even if it wasn’t the immediate cause.)
Andorra didn’t apply until after the 1993 constitutional referendum (which I suspect resulted from a similar process of institutional regularization). I don’t know for sure why San Marino and Monaco also applied in the ’90s, but I would guess it’s similarly connected with local political developments and not a matter of the UN “exclud[ing]” them. lol.
Hans-Adam’s politics are in many ways very bad, but the argument that states are not permanent or transhistorical entities that must never (be allowed to) change their boundaries or political structures is, in and of itself, not the problem with his politics. death to nation-states.
I loved the offhand comparison of Liechtenstein with “countries like Vanuatu or Grenada” as places where you could (until 1960) “buy citizenship” (implicitly: “primitive” or “unreal” countries).
this whole history is like. hmmm, I wonder why a very small polity that had been effectively legally excluded from the post-WWI international system (as he noted!) might have turned to being a tax haven, especially given its close alignment with another notorious tax haven…
perhaps a criticism of tax havens that doesn’t account for the structures of international capitalism and geopolitics in which these countries are situated (the US literally invaded Grenada to stop it from challenging its place in the capitalist system) is not a useful one. the problem isn’t Liechtenstein — or, more abstractly, the size of Liechtenstein — it’s capitalism.
[as a snarky aside,] I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the radical libertarian who named his mansion-micronation “Avalon” probably didn’t name it after a feminist fantasy novel but rather after the mythical location associated with a legendary monarch who’s supposed to return someday to restore a “benevolent” feudal order.
Slobodian just referred [in his conclusion] to “the South Pacific nation of Tahiti”........
this little stupid factual error aside, my final thoughts on this book are that as a historical and political study of the “[special economic] zone” as an institution it is very good. as a critique of the intersections of neoliberalism, libertarianism, and anarcho-capitalism, it would be pretty good, except that its core concept — the idea of the “crack-up” (the division of states into smaller, atomized entities, some down to the level of the individual person) — is built on the assertion (assumed as a first principle but never argued) that smaller polities are inherently vectors for the expansion of capitalist immiseration and, more generally, just bad, possibly morally so.
the problem here is that this argument is based on a bunch of polities that for historical reasons ranging from “it was literally a colony” (Hong Kong) to “it was created by the apartheid state as a tool of violently enforced racial segregation“ (Ciskei) to “it’s an absolute monarchy (that was systematically excluded from the post-WWI international order)” (Liechtenstein) are simply not sound bases for this argument. in fact, apart from the EZLN autonomous regions (which he ignores; also, to be clear, I think the EZLN would contradict his argument), I’m not sure there’s currently anywhere on the planet that would be a good basis for this argument, because the global economic system is capitalist.
in other words, despite a critique of the zone as a tool of capitalism, Slobodian throughout the book misses the forest for the trees: the problem isn’t “political fragmentation” tout court; the problem is that the kinds of political fragmentation he’s analyzing are being theorized and instituted by capitalist theorists, by capitalist polities, and in the interests of capitalism and capitalists. to reject any position opposed to existing states as inherently bad without considering the actual political program of the position in question is — at best — extremely disingenuous.
generously, it’s possible that Slobodian would agree with me on this point and would say that he simply chose to focus on capitalist theorists of fragmentation, but the problem is that his argument is explicitly and repeatedly framed as “fragmentation = bad / maintaining state integrity = good”.
(the one case where he does consider a “secessionist” position as maybe-not-inherently-bad is the Hong Kong democracy protests, but he doesn’t, say, dig into the history of leftist politics in Hong Kong and the tensions between (capitalist) “democracy” in HK, Chinese state capitalism, and local leftism; he just sort of accepts the rhetoric of “democracy” at face value. it’s messy!)
would I recommend the book? it’s interesting and in some ways eye-opening, but only with some HEAVY caveats.