[p2p-research] Prospect Magazine: After Capitalism

[Andy Robinson]

The Chinese political model is very close to fascism (nominally Stalinist
but pretty much contentless in that regard) - bear in mind the
state-controlled media, world's biggest firewall, one-party state, vicious
policing of dissent, bans on opponents and minorities (Falun Gong, Tibet,
Xinjiang, Tiananmen Square), "biopolitical" practices such as organ
harvesting, literally massive use of the death penalty after unfair trials,
everyday control such as street wardens, etc.  Worryingly, David Harvey
argues that China's success has led to the corrosion of liberal democracy in
America, Britain, Europe etc - once capitalists realise they don't need
liberal democracy, they dispense with it.  The summit "red zone" model is
partly developed from Chinese practices (keeping protests out of view of
leaders - a practice demanded by the Chinese during state visits) and so are
some of the neo-totalitarian practices elsewhere (e.g. Britain now has
Chinese-style police wardens).  This said, China's regime is also suffering
from the impact of technologies which make censorship difficult - they've
had to liberalise both their protest control model and their media
censorship model recently, and are facing a wave of protests and unrest each
year - given the lack of formal channels, protests in China nearly always
turn into mass revolt with police routed and official buildings/vehicles
torched or trashed, and with tools like proxies in widespread use, the
regime is finding it impossible to suppress public knowledge of events (in
contrast to Tiananmen, which I gather from word of mouth is still not public
knowledge in China).

I also suspect the Chinese economic / development model is short-lived -
it's a rehashing of the Korean-Taiwanese-Indonesian-Malaysian-Singaporean
models, cheap sweatshop production for export, which went into crisis in
these other countries and is vulnerable to undercutting the moment standards
of living or currency values start to rise.  The (relative) stability of the
regime is mainly based on its economic (relative) success, and will collapse
the moment some of the longer-term effects of its development trajectory
manifest themselves - notably massive urbanisation due to land grabs, mass
unemployment and shortages - all of which have been deferred by slowing the
process of dispossession of the peasantry (and by other means such as
population "control"), but which are manifest in most of the instances of
revolt (often in rural areas and focused on land grabs, pollution,
corruption, brutality and mistreatment).

The Finnish model would seem to be rather different - a niche model based on
high-value-added skilled production and rents on resource extraction - and
while I'd be delighted to see the rest of Europe become more like Finland, I
wonder if this isn't a continuation of the German and Japanese economic
model of the 80s and early 90s.  For a long time this model was posited as
the main alternative to neoliberal capitalism because Germany and Japan were
outshining America and Britain, but it disappeared from the discourse on
economic models when both countries went into crisis in the 90s (Germany
largely because of reunification, Japan along with Korea etc, because of
punishment of East Asia by neoliberal stock-marketeers).  Germany, Japan,
Korea, even Denmark and Sweden have since moved towards more neoliberal
models, though none of them are anywhere near as neoliberal as Britain or
America.

I think something akin to fascism (at least to the "normalised" kind of
fascism or Stalinism which existed, say, in Spain or Czechoslovakia in the
70s), which I term neo-totalitarianism, is coming into existence, indeed
already exists, in Britain, and possibly also America, Australia etc, and is
sadly rather expansive at the moment (countries like Holland, Greece,
France, Denmark are moving in the same direction albeit from further away to
begin with).  I think it's similar to totalitarianism because of the
micro-regulation of everyday life, the impossibility of "legal and tolerated
opposition" beyond a very limited sphere (dissent automatically renders one
a "dissident" and at risk), the promotion of a near-monolithic public
discourse, the unshackling of various state agencies to operate with
impunity and without effective limits, the rejection of limits to state
power in relation to various professions and groups (lawyers, journalists,
academics, doctors, etc), the creation of agencies of political and
microsocial policing/control, extremely harsh surveillance and punishment
practices, requirements to adopt a model of the subject (neoliberal
"employable" citizen) as a condition of social inclusion, and the systematic
denial of liberal and democratic values (albeit disguised as affirmation of
these values - one might speak of de jure democracy alongside de facto
totalitarianism).  There are only three ways in which Britain today differs
from classical totalitarianisms of this kind: it still has a nominally
multi-party system, it still has a nominally free press, and it still has
some judicial limits in terms of human rights.  I suspect these are all due
to insertion in the EU system and especially the ECHR, and further, that
only the third is really disruptive at all - the main parties are now really
sub-factions of a ruling party (similar to the electoral factions in Iran),
and the media is so successfully integrated that direct media control is not
needed, being replaced by subtle media control (it is the case that minor
parties and media are periodically persecuted and even shut down, as with
al-Muhajiroun, the Indymedia server raids etc; street activities of small
parties have been viciously attacked, so small parties and media have mainly
survived via the Internet - which of course, is notoriously hard to
control).  Neo-totalitarianism does practice very effective media control in
terms of how the regime's frame infiltrates and spreads to the population
through the media - acceptance of categories such as extremism, security
concerns, a constant terrorist threat, various feared Others, "preachers of
hate", "Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe" and tropes of this
kind...  through the way repression is used by the media as proof of a
problem needing repression (3000 under-fives excluded for offences such as
"threatening behaviour" and "sexual misconduct" is universally taken as
proof of growing indiscipline rather than ridiculous repressiveness)...
granted they cannot control the Internet or samizdat media, but nor could
the classical totalitarianisms control the media of their day - nearly
everyone in Nazi Germany listened to BBC World Service radio broadcasts for
instance.

The model seems to be spreading, though not from efficiency (it has been
economically disastrous for all the countries which have tried it) - more
because neo-totalitarian regimes act as a focus of attraction for
authoritarians and "deep states" elsewhere, and because they viciously
promote their own regime-type through international institutions.
Ultimately I think it has the same flaws in economic terms as classical
totalitarianism - it can make very systematic, programmed use of the latest
economic forms for awhile, but it is unable to pioneer new models or forms
due to its social closure, and has difficulties adapting to new models or
forms from elsewhere (look at the fear instilled in such regimes by the
Internet for instance), plus it is horribly corrupt (out-of-control
individual power-holders and institutionalised quasi-corporations can
extract resources with impunity), and it is unable to produce effective
commitment, only a kind of grudging conformity out of fear (of the regime or
of its others), which hits its ability to perform in sectors requiring
active worker commitment (I've witnessed first-hand the horrible decline of
British academia and earlier of schooling along these lines, the replacement
of self-motivation with kafkaesque standards and procedures which homogenise
at a very low level the process of intellectual production) - but it will
seek, and is seeking, to prolong a kind of decadent primacy in spite of its
lack of economic vigour, by means of military control, blackmail,
imperialism, etc.  Capitalism relies on addition as well as subtraction of
axioms - it depends on life-flows for its force, even though it also has to
contain and exploit these flows - and neo-totalitarianism cuts off or
decomposes flows to such a degree as to take away the life-force (it grows,
I think, from the statist as much as the capitalist logic).  I also suspect
that, while in the short-term it has drastically decomposed movements of
protest and resistance, in the long-term it will lead to the emergence of
more militant autonomous movements, from a generation growing up with the
regime and fed up of it.  (I say this because early types of similar regimes
can be detected in the emergence of autonomous movements in Italy, Germany,
Japan, Greece, Latin America and eastern Europe in earlier periods -
sometimes inducing liberalisations of these societies).

The model you're discussing, Ryan, sounds to me very similar to the idea of
the "global city" in Sassen (to a lesser degree also the diffuse smoothed
capitalism of Hardt/Negri and William Robinson).  Where I think it differs
is that the "global city" model is actually very exclusionary - a few nodes
become very dense sites of capitalist intersections while most others are
marginalised; so one ends up with a dense web of small local sites drawing
in resources from a massive, geographically proximate periphery.  Since the
periphery gains little from this, and since neoliberalism undermines the old
mechanisms of integration (patronage, buy-offs, developmental nationalism,
etc), the centrifugal forces of the periphery are pulling away from the
global cities, resisting the extraction of resources for use in these core
nodes (think of MEND, Tata Nano, Chiapas, Bougainville, Papua, Manipur, the
piqueteros, Niger's Tuareg, NWFP, etc etc).  Rural China already has a
similar status, and I would not rule out the margins of Europe (semi-core
sites such as Finland) or margins within European countries (such as the
British North) and within America (such as Michigan, Illinois, and the west
and south) developing along the same lines.  I see the space of alternatives
emerging in this periphery through delinking and relinking (transversality),
the assertion or re-emergence of indigenous and ecological forms of life
combined with the creation of new kinds of transversal connection between
otherwise disconnected localities by means of tool-like technologies such as
the Internet.  What I'd hope to see is a kind of network of affinities and
resonances where an attack by the system (the global cities and their
military allies) at any one point produces negative effects throughout the
entire web of delinked and partially delinked sites.  Also hopefully a
reconfiguration of technologies to disempower the core sites (negation of
the advantages of air power is crucial - this is currently the core's one
form of reach into marginal areas).

bw
Andy
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