Tooze, uh, thank you so much. I'm just going to make a brief intervention on this technology here, which has reset itself, and maybe I can get to full—I may need somebody to help me get the computer going here because I currently can't drive the PowerPoint. Is there somebody who can sort that out for me? Thank you very much for these very, very kind introductions. It's a real delight to be here, an honor indeed, and a great pleasure. I can't get out of the screen to the—sorry about this. You helped us earlier, can you get us out of the frozen state that we're in? So sorry about this. I wanted to start by—okay, brilliant, wonderful, I think we're going. I wanted to start by thanking the New School for this very kind invitation, the President for being here, for these wonderfully kind introductions from the colleagues. I look forward very much to the conversation to follow. I also wanted to thank my New School buddies, without whom thinking about crisis in New York would be much less interesting and invigorating than it is: Tash Leonard and Clara Mattei, who unfortunately can't be with us this evening, but at whose seminar at City College a few months ago—maybe a month ago—some of the ideas for this evening's talk began to germinate.
I do think about this stuff all the time, in a kind of regurgitative, ruminative way. And so at an occasion like this, on the one hand, it's an occasion to pull things together and to synthesize, but this evening what I really also want to do, as you'll see this talk has two parts, is actually to think a little bit—doing some thinking out loud—actually precisely about this relationship with Marxism that you allude to, and where my effort to theorize the current moment actually sits in relation to that. So let me start with the bit which is relatively elegant and straightforward, and then we'll get to the bit which is a little hairier halfway through. One way of thinking about my topic is historically, and this is the way I'm going to go about it. It's broadly speaking the track that I followed in a long piece in the LRB a couple of weeks ago, and it's to think about a kind of temporal disjuncture between the moment that we're in and the way in which power—this is us—power has attempted to frame it. The moment that wherein I have been trying to conceive in recent years in terms of polycrisis—this is not a term that I invented—it's a term that was coined into widespread use by the probable intellectual inspiration of Jean-Claude Juncker, who was President of the European Commission, and was looking, 10 years ago, for a way of pulling together the experience of crisis that Europe was suffering.
That focused on the Eurozone crisis from 2010 to 2015, the refugee crisis that spilled over from the Middle East, the first wave of the Ukraine disaster, populism in 2016, and then the prequel to our current emergency with the election of Trump in the fall of 2016. And to do this, to find a kind of encompassing term to describe this hailstorm, this perfect storm of events that were shaking Europe, he drew on a concept that was handed down through the French intellectual tradition—I don't think anyone else had paid any attention to it—that was coined by Edgar Morin, a sort of unconventional French leftist thinker, one of those people—there's plenty of seats at the front here if you'd like to come and sit down—that are kind of unique in the French environment. A man that was partly part of the French communist tradition, that had been a résistant, still very much on the scene and commenting very powerfully on the situation in Gaza at this current moment. But what Juncker wanted to pick up from him was this idea of polycrisis, an effort to theorize the convergence of environmental, geopolitical, and economic stresses in the current moment. And it served the purpose of pulling things together, it served the purpose of sounding an alarm, and it served the purpose of not sounding like the European Commission, that adopted a kind of latter-day Marxism because it didn't fit within that mold. And that term has sort of snowballed—I contributed to it a little bit by pushing in various venues—but it sort of became, or became at least for a while, a kind of point of convergence between a variety, a strange assortment, or perhaps a familiar and predictable assortment of thinkers: Martin Wolf on the one hand, Larry Summers on the other.
Who had one of those lunches that the FT orchestrated, and to my bewilderment they talked about me and the polycrisis concept that I had launched. This was truly, on the one hand, a flattering moment, and on the other hand, there ain't nobody here but us chickens. Where are the adults in the room? At this point I am used to theorizing and writing about Larry Summers. I'm not used to being invoked by Larry Summers as providing him with the foundational concept that he's using. This is a disorientating moment. There is a constituency of polycrisis thinkers that think it's science. There is a systems theory school out there that does maps like this. I did one too, in a kind of winking way. I called it Aeon Bild. I was invoking a kind of German aesthetic statement. There is an American Institute that has mapped this and would like to quantify these different relationships. Personally, I understand where they're coming from, and I think there might even be a case for trying to do this, but for me the concept's principal function is to mark what my extraordinary colleague Michael Geyer, formerly of Chicago University—if you know your German history, one of the great, the hidden king really of modern historiography in Germany—he said: Adam, no, what you're really marking with this is a knowledge crisis. The point of invoking this term is to point to the fact that we don't have causal relationships and clean quantifications. We want to hold open the space for trying to describe and think about this. And that is the function of the term.
But you know, look at it, and basically it's the first 10 pages of any newspaper anyone's been reading in this room in recent years. And so reasonable people, when they attempt to govern big powerful modern states—and one can't say anything else about the Biden team other than that they were in a very conventional sense reasonable—attempt to manage precisely these kind of issues. They didn't ever quite invoke the polycrisis term, but you may remember—it's kind of comforting to think back to 2021 at this moment—that Biden in his inaugural referred to three great challenges for the United States—four actually. One was racial justice, the second was the crisis of American democracy, the third was China, and the fourth was the climate crisis. And that weird heterogeneous list, like the boogeyman of American democracy, Black Lives Matter, China, and climate, has for me all of the hallmarks of polycrisis about it. That's exactly what the polycrisis is supposed to signify. It has no aesthetic, conceptual, in otherwise, to me, obvious unity.
What was going to give it unity was the second key big term of my title—of my rather ominous title—which is the aspiration to American leadership. What was going to unify this was that America was going to be at the head of the table of global powers. Imagine the G20 or the G7 or any other form—not the UN as we know to our horror today, not the UN—any other body of states. The United States was going to be, as it were, the leading power, and it was going to provide competent, intelligent, charismatic maybe even leadership on these issues. And I think in retrospect one of the really fascinating things, again from the historian's point of view, about the Biden Administration is on the one hand their genuine, I think, realization of a full range of 21st-century problems, and on the other hand their commitment to legacies of American leadership which are fully resonant of the 20th century.
Different layers of Democratic Party politics—I mean, this image here, we have the neoliberal phase represented by Larry Summers, the post-neoliberal phase represented by Jake Sullivan, and the pre-neoliberal phase represented by the President himself. And as we all know, the President, I think, was overshadowed by a further shadow, which is the pre-pre-pre-neoliberal, which is FDR and the New Deal. There was this quadruple stack of the history of the Democratic Party that was sandwiched together in the Biden project that was going to be brought to bear and was going to be summoned. These were the good ghosts of American leadership—whether it's the New Deal or whether it's the Marshall Plan, whether it's the Bretton Woods institutions, whether it's Lend-Lease—all of these moments of the 1940s were to be summoned up. There's another school of economic advising that invokes Kennedy and the moonshot moment. All of this was to be packaged together. Significantly, not the '90s. So the odd person out here is Summers, who is shuffled aside. Why not the '90s? A, because that was a unipolar moment and that isn't America's problem right now, and B, because that is of course the era of neoliberalism, which we are trying to move past and which in retrospect is seen as a huge part of the problem.
And so the ambition, I think, of the Biden team was to reshuffle the pack within the history of American leadership, within their own party's history. And the self-consciousness of this was extreme. If you read people like Jake Sullivan in Foreign Affairs announcing the third era of American power, that was immediately narrated into a historical account. And if you've had the occasion to just meet with somebody like Jake Sullivan, he literally spends quite a lot of time deciding whether he feels closer spiritually to the younger George Kennan or the older George Kennan. This for him is actually a matter of quite serious concern. Now, I'm doing this tongue in cheek, but we all know that the agony of this Administration is there was so much more going on. And the real energy of the Administration—the world we have lost, the world we lost before our eyes—came out of not simply the general election of 2020, but it came out of the midterm elections of 2018. And it carried through into the first phase of the Administration, the ambition for something much grander, the ambition a genuinely large-scale transformative project, trillions of dollars, an agenda-set, transformation that also recognized not simply utopian ambition but rather you could say a kind of de-realization of what actually the experience of work—not industrial labor, service labor—those were going to be reconfigured around the idea of a care economy that was going to be recognized as larger than manufacturing already, and was going to be the basis of a—I think it's almost, well, maybe it's a softer vision, but in some senses I feel that's a cliché, actually. It's a broader, more realistic vision of social transformation that was going to be carried forward on an explicitly feminist platform, with the energies of the New Deal and with trillions of dollars behind it.
And it wasn't simply a national agenda either. It was a global agenda. With, if one does justice to the Biden Administration, they fully recognized the global scale of the problems. They wanted to move at two different levels. At the Glasgow COP in 2021, they announced the Partnerships for Just Energy Transition—the PJETs—which were really the flagship agenda for the transformation of emerging markets, starting with South Africa. And the other move, when they realized the limits of what they were going to be able to do in Congress, was to leverage the Bretton Woods institutions for large-scale lending, which would allow you to do globally significant lending without actually having to ask Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars. And that workaround, I think, is as it were the telltale move in the Biden Administration, because there is the recognition of the 21st-century problems and the scale—the full recognition, the ambition—which is sort of centered in a 20th-century vision of American power and its shape, and the realities of the reconfigured American political scene of the 21st century, with wafer-thin majorities which leave you dependent on the Democratic Party's coalition and its right wing. And so for all their legislative achievement, rather than us talking about the triumphant kind of programs which are being announced here, the signature image of the Biden Administration's policy, I think, is the Swiss Army knife: compact, elegant, clever, and tiny. Multi-purpose, working around the edges, able to combine different functions—an industrial policy in the Inflation Reduction Act which manages to be simultaneously green, industrial, and anti-China, and bottomless mimosas for every energy interest in the United States, fossil or green. And all of it packaged as the Inflation Reduction Act, that you smuggle past, that says it's only worth 380 billion according to the CBO, but everyone knows, wink wink nudge nudge, that actually we're aiming for a trillion plus. This, I think, is the character of extraordinarily intelligent—many of the people in this room, I'm sure, will know many of the people that were involved in the crafting of these pieces of legislation, and they really were these highly, highly successful and complicated compromise strategies. And this, I think, is on the one hand credit to them, of course, but also a sort of sign of the times. It is a recognition of the scale—the ambition comes from another era, the reality is 21st-century, and you end up with a Swiss Army knife, which is wonderful, except if that's really all you're left with. A Swiss Army knife is a useful household tool, but if you're stuck in the woods and you're facing a grizzly bear, you better hope you have a larger piece of equipment. And that, I think, is the kind of irony of this situation.
I came up with the somewhat ominous title for this talk before we knew the outcome of the election, and I would have given the talk under that title even if they'd won, and I would have given the talk under that title even if they'd won—not because of domestic policy, but because of foreign policy. And we have to talk about foreign policy as a key part of the fraying of American hegemony in recent years. I don't think there's any question—again, this is almost a matter of personnel within the Biden Administration—that the central focus of the administration was on what they understood to be the world's historic challenge, the rise of China. And this is Jake Sullivan's domain. I don't think there's any argument that he is the powerhouse intellectual and policy maker of this Administration. And I think it's also reasonable to argue that everything else was broadly speaking subordinated to this. I find extremely unpersuasive the argument, often from the left but not only from there, that the Biden Administration was looking to pick a fight with Russia. I think the evidence is quite to the contrary. In 2021, they're actually looking to stabilize relations with Russia—not because they like Putin or want to make nice or are appeasement-orientated or don't see the opportunities—but because they want to focus on China. I think the same is true for the Middle East. I think their one dearest hope originally was that they would be able to get through their period of administration without having to face a Middle East crisis.
But first in 2022 with the Russian invasion, and then the staggering, truly staggering surprise of Ukrainian resistance, and then with October 7th and the staggering and, I think, surprising escalation of Israeli violence in the process of the reshaping of the Middle East that Israel is now engaged in, the Biden Administration moved, I think, from the back foot in those other arenas to the front foot. And my diagnosis is that at that point they basically realized that there was a historic wager on the table and the question was whether you take it or not. This is always America's dilemma—they're not a medium-sized European power, they don't have the luxury of not being at the party. You're either there as an active player or as somebody who's retarding. And in 2022 and then in 2023, I think it's at this point undeniable and hard to escape from the conclusion that they basically decided to up the ante in both confrontations. Why would you do that? I think the most obvious interpretation is that they ultimately believe that through these processes of backing the escalation of violence in both conflicts, ultimately they will be able to reshape the world configuration in a way which is more congenial to the United States' interest and therefore position themselves better for the ultimate struggle against China. But it's an incredibly high-risk strategy. It's a high-risk strategy which they deliberately engaged in, and I think historians of the new Cold War to come will pick over the moments in 2022, 2023 when it became clear that war was now on the agenda in a way that it had not been since—war, not a war of America's choice, that is, but a war forced on the United States from the outside to a very considerable extent—was on the agenda in the way it had not been since the Cold War.
I think it cannot be reiterated often enough that in the early spring of 2023, Washington was sliding, whether it liked it or not, towards a war scare—a full-blown war scare with China—and they pulled back from it. They ultimately, I think, have found themselves involved in a controlled demolition of the 1990s order in a much more aggressive and comprehensive way than we saw from the Trump Administration. Before it was touched on in various ways by them, but has accumulated now into a really radical undertaking. So this Administration, which on the home front, in a sense, was operating with limited means against very large-scale objectives—hence the Swiss Army knife metaphor—at the international level has become a much more proactive, much more proactive actor. But the whole thing—and this is where we have to come back to brass tacks—was of course ultimately a political project. The Biden project was born out of the shock of defeat in 2016, and the effort—in the form, for instance, of Jake Sullivan's Carnegie project on the foreign policy for an American middle class—was to tie the elements back together. And it genuinely was in that sense a hegemonic project, in the sense that it tried to find a set of economic and social and political projects for the United States that would create a domestic foundation for the exercise of global power. And the diagnosis was that without one you couldn't do the other, and you had to do both together.
And whilst on the foreign policy front they moved hard onto the front foot, what we of course ultimately know now is that the domestic political project failed. And the reality that we are now in, and the future that we now look forward to, is shaped by this rather dramatic map. All of us have been reading the news the whole time about this ever since it happened, so I'm going to be brief about a couple of points which seem worth making. The first is that though the consequences of this election are dramatic and though the outcome is clear, the election per se was not a dramatic event. The swing is tiny, and by historical standards tiny, and it's a tiny shift within a political system that is finely balanced, and its defining feature is precisely the absence of large-scale majorities. This compares rather starkly with the rest of the world. There were a lot of elections held in advanced economies last year—this is the Financial Times compilation of their results—and you see that in every single one of the advanced economies which held an election last year, the incumbents suffered losses. And the red dot tells you that the losses suffered by the Biden team were in fact, by comparison with virtually every other advanced economy, minor. So not only was this by American standards a small swing, but globally speaking it's even more striking for how small the swing is. We have English friends here, British politics was convulsed, French politics was convulsed, Japanese politics were convulsed, even the Mexican ruling party lost in this election. The Biden team lost less than practically anyone else. So this in itself is a sort of important corrective, I think, to alarmism on the American side or interpretations of events in the United States as some sort of epic shift.
And the third thing to say is that the trends that we see are not new, they're not peculiar to Trump, and they confirm long-running developments in US politics, which are a realignment of US politics along lines principally not of race, but of class as measured by education. And what we see over a period of decades is an increasing inversion of the old New Deal formula in which the blue-collar working class was centered on the Democratic Party, and a rearrangement of the electorate in which large slices of the working class, of all races, cluster around the Republican Party—particularly men—and the college-educated electorate clusters ever more clearly around the Democratic Party, whether it's comfortable or not to admit it. But broadly speaking, the professional managerial middle class—us, in other words—and our values and our politics center increasingly on one of the two contending parties, and the other one makes hay with that fact. The more closely we grip it, the more closely we define it, the more easy it is for them to play off two very large and important constituencies against that: on the one hand, the large part of the American population which doesn't have the benefit of a college education, and on the other hand what you might call the American gentry or the American petty bourgeois—the relatively affluent, prosperous but not professional middle class—which Trump mobilizes so well.
In political terms, this is a shock, no doubt. Whether it amounts to a radical shift in terms of policy, I'm strongly convinced that it does not, and I think we will see at the international level at least a very, very dramatic measure of continuity. And in part that's because, though we're not going to get Trump and Co to sit down and study a polycrisis diagram with us—that's not their cup of tea—they themselves have a diagnosis of polycrisis. They just call it something very dramatic, which is 'American Carnage.' It's in fact the Republicans that coined this and created this sense, or first for the first time in 2016, created a politics of modern America which is centered on the idea of a comprehensive national crisis. This was a very vivid moment, some of you in the room may remember it. It struck me first looking at Obama's reaction to Trump's convention speech in the summer of 2016, and Obama has this totally blasé, as you'd expect, cool response, which is: 'Well, when I woke up this morning I didn't see the America that Donald Trump was describing the night before. I saw people taking their kids to soccer practice. I saw people going about their lives trying to fix their problems. I don't understand where this other vision comes from.' Six to 12 months later, his own party was very much also picking over the wreckage of what they also came to understand as a comprehensive crisis, but of course in two very different terms.
Whereas the Democrats, I think, are able to map it in a way that is very reminiscent of the one that we would draw if we were drawing a polycrisis map. For the Republican, it's a national crisis. It's a crisis essentially organized around three axes: the threat to some sort of national homogeneity from migration, the threat to the United States' global power from China, and the internal subversion due to the professional middle class, which are the target of their ire. But when we actually come to policy, it's incredibly difficult to tell one camp from the other. On the left-hand side, a Brookings Center project graphic on industrial policy in the United States and the transfer of IP from China to the US. On the right-hand side, the cover of the Biden Administration's premiering innovative national defense industrial strategy. The rhetoric of industrialism, of national labor, of industrial militarism, is extraordinarily common across the two camps. And we can talk about it in Q&A afterwards, but I think we're going to see a very high degree of continuity between the two administrations. It seems to me, in fact, in retrospect the Biden Administration will be seen as part of a dialectical sequence, which is Trump-Biden-Trump, in terms of the development of industrial policy, tariffs, technology policy, defense policy. And this has really quite serious implications, because not only did the Biden people borrow Trump policies, but we will also see Biden Administration policies developed and elaborated by the Trump team to follow. But the first time around, the deep state was liberal—and it was liberal in the Larry Summers sense of liberal. It was a deep state shaped by nostalgic memories of the 1990s, GW all the way that far back. The deep state which the Trump team inherits this time around is of a very, very different nature. It's a deep state which has been engaged in complex strategies, what's called economic statecraft, strategies of national assertion and national economic strategy, which would really have been quite difficult to imagine in the Clinton and Obama eras. So there is a kind of cumulative logic here which is quite important.
So this is the first part of my talk this evening. It's this kind of a story—it's a story which centers on a tense relationship between global polycrisis symptoms, which I'm labeling as 21st-century, visions of American power which are 20th-century in their historical layering and their conception, and the constraints of the 21st-century political balance which limit what the Biden Administration was actually able to do. And out of this comes a sense of crisis—the reality of the failure to implement policies that you would like, that reflects the inability to reconcile these three imperatives. It would be almost easier—and for some sense, for the Republicans it is easier—to simply deny the climate crisis in the face of the fact that it's very difficult to do green energy policy in the United States, than it was for the Biden Administration, which fully acknowledges the scale of the climate crisis but isn't really able to do anything more than the Inflation Reduction Act, and at the same time is in the business of promoting the development of oil and gas on an unprecedented and gigantic scale. There are two different modes in which this crisis articulates itself, in other words. I think the Republicans may have a similar issue with migration—for them it's the centerpiece of their national crisis, they will attempt to implement measures to actually constrain it, and will, I think, quite likely find themselves unable to actually deliver on anything like the kind of scale that their constituency would like. One may hope indeed that they are frustrated in this way.
But the more I have thought about this, and the more I have, along with so many other people, elaborated this story about the polycrisis that we're going through, the more I've begun to worry that in a sense it's too consoling. Believe it or not, the theme of the rest of today's talk is that what I've just said is actually kind of consoling. What I worry about is that this vision of global power and its problems, in a sense, is still too organized around the hegemonic pole of the two terms that I'm employing in this lecture. It's too much about the problem of whether or not you can organize what the 20th century promised, which is hegemony, and it's not 21st-century enough, it's not poly enough. It doesn't focus hard enough on the problem that is pointed to by that term in my opening description, argument, setup. Okay, so this is where the going gets a little complicated, and I hope you follow me along and shoot me down and tell me where I'm thinking things right. I see Nancy Fraser at the back there and she and I started arguing about this some weeks ago, so I'm really looking for it. I hope, Nancy, what I'm about to say at least makes clearer where I'm coming from, then we can be clear about our differences. So clearly the notion of hegemony comes to us from the Marxist tradition, and it's associated above all, of course, with the great Italian Marxist and cultural and political analyst and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci, who in his Prison Notebooks outlined an unprecedentedly elaborate and sophisticated analysis of the underlying tensions of a capitalist system under stress, under development, as Italy was from the 19th century onwards, and the efforts to organize and stabilize rule. And his question was: why isn't this more violent all of the time? And his answer is that it's not more violent all of the time because of a set of apparatuses and ideas—legitimating ideas—which are spanned on top.
Obviously this isn't from the notebooks, he didn't write in English, and it isn't mine either. I just found it online and thought it was so perfect that I'm bringing it along. I thank you for whoever did this. It's the perfect illustration of the sort of textbook Gramscian vision of the stabilization of a hegemony that I needed for tonight's talk, and I am profoundly grateful to whoever did this on the back of whatever notes they were writing. One element of that, then, is the question about how you do this, and you could read the first part of the lecture I've given this evening as a sketch map of how the Biden team in particular imagined they would do this. And the first part of my talk today was about the mismatch between the scale of the demands and the resources they could mobilize. What is itching me, and what is leaving me, you know, restless, and what I want to spend the rest of today talking about, is the underlying premise of the construction here. In other words, that there is a problem, and that problem consists in fundamentally the tensions within the capitalist mode of production and this fundamental problem of inequality and the capital-driven and profit-driven accumulation process, and that it's from here that we will best understand the world and we will best understand the current tension and the current moment that we're in. That's the problem that I want to gnaw on. And this isn't a dismissive critique—it's perfectly obvious that this be hugely illuminating in various ways. My worry is that it doesn't allow us to access the full range of things we should be afraid of. That's what I'm trying to get at.
This is not to diminish that problem. What I'm worried about is that because it's such a familiar problem, so dear to many of us in many ways, it pulls us in and it serves as a weird kind of comfort object, because it's the bad old problem that we're familiar with. What do I mean by this? Well, if you start from here, there are two different ways I would suggest—and this is very crude, back-of-the-envelope, I'm continuing in the spirit of this pub theory discussion, we're working on beer mats here—there are two different ways of reading the Trump-Biden-Trump sequence. One is to say, as crazy as this roller coaster has been, it's broadly speaking actually the form that hegemony currently takes. Nothing to see here, let's walk on by. It's just America doing its thing. Of course it's messy and kind of louche and crazy, but it's just America doing its thing. And if you wanted one piece of evidence for that, you just need to turn on Bloomberg News any given morning and look at the S&P 500, and there's your answer. Doesn't appear to be anything wrong here. This sequence Trump-Biden-Trump, from the point of view of American capital accumulation—ah, what's not to like? You know, if you've got a 401(k)—some people in this room may—we all secretly know that we're not doing badly, right? If you just invested in an ETF, it's not hurting right now. So there's that logic, and it's a brute-force logic, but it's a powerful logic.
And if you wanted a far, far more sophisticated version of this, you'd go to my dear friend Daniela Gabor. You can see in lots of different forums—this is her on YouTube pitching us on the Wall Street consensus. Because Daniela's strong thesis is, for all of the turmoil in politics, deep down if you look at the hard and complex workings—and no one does this better than her—of how global capitalism is functioning right now, it's like diving, you know, you just dive like a meter below the surface of the ocean and it's super quiet down there and it just hums. And there can be storms above, but if you just look at what BlackRock's doing or anything like that, it's just humming along there. There's nothing to see here at all. Now, that's the polite version, and it's very compelling because she's an incredibly compelling analyst of the technicalities, of course. It does leave us with the Trump phenomenon, though. I mean, it does just leave us with the freak show. So what are we going to do with that? Well, actually, on the way back from the airport the other day I was listening to another fabulous podcast on YouTube, and you know I was in a highbrow mood, so I had Robert Pippin on from Chicago, who is, you know, America's leading Hegelian thinker, and they had this amazing conversation about Heidegger and Hegel, and then at the end they said: 'Okay, you're a person who thinks about actuality—what about Trump?' And I couldn't believe it, I literally had to stop the car—and Pippin said: 'Yeah, you're totally right, the central problem is—and you tell me because you're the Marxist, this is the Crisis and Critique podcast—you tell me why the capitalist system right now needs buffoons. You tell me, because that's the question.' And I think the strong implication is that deep down most of us sort of have a theory, if you're going to go down this line—and I don't think it's a bad line, because we shouldn't underestimate the crassness of American capitalism when it comes to its relationship to democracy—that there is a kind of functional imperative to the buffoonery. There's a functional imperative about gathering, if you like, the truths. So this is one—obviously I'm caricaturing this somewhat—but this is one interpretive line. If you set the problem up of how you organize hegemony in the United States today, it's actually working just fine.
It's also a crudely reductive version of reality, and it doesn't allow much autonomy to politics. And those of you who like Gramsci will know that this isn't in the spirit of Gramsci at all, because Gramsci would look at this situation and he would start with everyone's favorite quote in the current moment, which is the passage on interregnum. And what Gramsci would say is: no, no, no, no—it's a fool's game to go chasing after the way in which buffoonery is in the interests of capital right now. Just allow that we're in a moment in which hegemony is broken. And if we're in a moment in which hegemony is broken, and the old is not yet dead, and the new cannot yet be born, and therefore we're surrounded by morbid symptoms—well, take your pick. The world is full of morbid symptoms. And I think it's not for nothing that this has become one of the touchstone quotes of the last 10-plus years. You see it all over the place, all sorts of people quoting it. My most surreal is Macron visiting Lebanon shortly after the massive explosion, and you can almost see the self-satisfied smirk— in fact, you can see the self-satisfied smirk on his face as he looks at the Lebanese, whose political class is absent, and he says: 'I think we have ourselves a Gramscian crisis here.' Thanks very much, mate—that's really Lebanon's problem right now, that's really what we need to hear. But you can see the stakes. What we're saying is not that history is continuous, but that there's been a movement in the force such that we are now witnessing a grand struggle, birth struggle, the agony of birth, between on the one hand a dying old order and the birth of a new. And then let battle ensue, because then we're going to have an amazing argument about who's new and who's old and who's morbid and who's not morbid and how on Earth we accelerate this process so we get to the other side. It's an incredibly powerful and dramatic explanation of our current moment, and it's for very good reason compelling lots of people all over the place. But I'm still worried about it. What I'm worried about is why none of us are focusing on the truly bizarre imagery that's being invoked here. I mean, think about this—it's so familiar to us, all of us live with this quote, but we're basically saying that history is a womb. That historical time is like the agony of birth—in other words, it has a necessity which leads either to birth or death, and that's kind of a finality. And furthermore, we can confidently define what's morbid and what's not. Now, it's a dramatic image, but if you told me that I would be able to define history as a process which has a natural logic to it that I knew was on a clock and where I could confidently say what was good and what was bad—like, hell, I'll take that. That's a philosophy of history I like. That is a deeply reassuring understanding of the world. It comes along as a big drama, but this is, you know, no more exciting than a soccer game—at some level we know it's got to end, somebody's got to win, somebody's better than the others. It's in fact, I think, an incredibly reassuring image in its own way. It's not quite as neat as the one that says, well, actually he's a buffoon but deep down it's the logic of capitalism—it's not quite there—but it's nevertheless really quite limiting our uncertainty. And so that's my basic point about these two.
Very rich framings of our current moment, starting from the assumption that our problem is the problem of capitalism defined in relation to a capitalist structure. You have one option, which is: nothing to see here, it's all good, it just looks crazy but it's actually just fulfilling the logic. Or we're in a space that's open, but as far as we're going to cling to our basic sketch, we know that can't be forever, so at some point it's going to close and then all this crazy will be over. One is a crazy that's only apparently crazy and the meaning comes from the underlying structure, or it is crazy but it's not forever and so it'll pass and then we'll have natural things and good births and babies will be born the right way and everything will be good and presumably women will go on to have more and more babies or some other natalist kind of view of history. That's how this is going to go down.
It's too stable a framework, that's my point. It's too stable, it's too reassuring, it gives us far too much confidence and I don't think it's adequate to the situation that we're in. I'm not really thinking here obviously about the American election primarily. I'm thinking about the global disorder that we're trying to come to terms with. Can such a solidly founded framework do justice to the spiraling, destabilization that it seems reasonable to think that we're actually living through right now? If I'm wrong then maybe that model will work quite well, but I think we should open ourselves to the possibility that things are becoming really quite unhinged. I'm just going to quote my friend and colleague Mark Blyth, who described the climate breakdown like this: it's a nonlinear outcome generator with wicked convexities. In plain English: there's no mean, there's no average, there's no return to normal, it's oneway traffic into the unknown. And I don't think you get that out of our sketch model of the Gramscian hegemony problem.
Where should we go instead? This is where I want to try to priv an answer to Nancy, where I found myself. I could argue I've spent my entire scholarly life, back to my first book which is too technical to generally get mentioned in introductions like this, which is on the history of economic statistics, wrestling with this question of what it is that we can expect the economy, the productive system, the mode of production ultimately to do for us in terms of explanation, and how far we actually need to explain how it's a thing at all. I find myself today or this evening, when I was thinking about this lecture, going back to some of the brilliant work of feminist economic anthropologists. This is an extraordinary pseudonym, it's two women writing under a pseudonym of Gibson-Graham, who in the late '90s and early 2000s began to elaborate an anthropologically informed critique of what they call capitalocentric social theory.
It comes out of a feminist psychoanalysis as well, derived in part from feminist psychoanalytic critiques of the phallus as the organizing idea of critical psychoanalysis. Their idea is that capital is serving the role essentially of phallus as a kind of magical attractor of all thought. This is a deep and complicated idea. I'm going to take a couple of efforts to approach so we can come back to it in discussion. One place to start is this remarkable rewriting of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's terms, which I'll just read out: the aim of the game here is to represent societies and economies as non-hegemonic formations. What if we were to depict social existence at loose ends with itself? This strikes me as a really fabulous phrase, at loose ends with itself, rather than producing self-representations in which everything is part of the same complex and therefore ultimately means the same thing.
In Althusser's terms this would be an expressive totality. What we're trying to do is get away from expressive totalities. What might be the advantages of representing a rich and prolific disarray? For those of you who know the Althusserian stuff, this entire book is about trying to take seriously overdetermination in Althusser's terms and showing in a series of utterly brilliant essays the vain efforts of seriously minded people to realize the Althusserian project and then finding themselves crashing back down into unities which have far too much unity about them.
Let me give you another example of Gibson-Graham's brilliance in a very different discursive setting, or rather it's Sedgwick's again. I recently encountered Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's description of what she calls the Christmas effect. To Sedgwick's mind, what's so depressing about Christmas is the way that all the institutions of society come together and speak with one voice. The Christian churches, of course, commerce, advertising, social events, domestic activities, they all end up lined up so neatly once a year, and the monolith so created is a thing one can come to view with unhappy eyes. Sedgwick goes on to explore this in relation to sexuality and gender, and what Gibson-Graham say is we have a Christmas problem in social theory, and the Father Christmas of social theory is capitalism. Or rather, capitalism is Christmas and capital is Father Christmas. And if you permit these terms, what I see the polycrisis diagram as being is an intervention against the Christmas effect of capitalocentric social theorizing. It's an effort to move us past that strange attractor of capitalism as the ultimate source of meaning for everything that's happening in the current moment.
Another way of going at this, and it's crucial to add the underlying intent here. Gibson-Graham's purpose is to expand our understanding of the economic system and break the grip of the capitalocentric account, so as to provide an answer to the famous Fredric Jameson dilemma that it is easier for us now to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Their wager is that if you break the grip of capitalism on our imagination, then you might actually be able to imagine the possibility of things beyond capitalism, which would allow you to level up this quote. That is the optimistic way of employing their kind of critique. My intention is rather to say that the underlying assumption of the robust continuity of capitalism is one of the things which distracts us from thinking of all of the different ways in which the world might end. The problem here is that this quote assumes that there's at least one thing that we can't imagine ending, and that's capitalism.
I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about potential ends of capitalism. What I want to get at is the possibility that our underlying robust view of what capitalism is as our key reference point means that we are blinding ourselves to a whole variety of threats which don't clearly subsume within the implied relationship between the stability of capitalism and the end of the world which the Jameson quote sets up. Let me try and make this more concrete. I'm going to use a two-by-two, I can't help myself. In the first half of the second part of the lecture, I gave you social theories of hegemony, and we then had a version where political agency was high and that was then interpreted in terms of an interregnum, and then we had a version in which agency was low and essentially we were reading buffoons of hegemony. Now the question for the final part of the lecture is: what if we loosen the assumption of the solidity of our social theory? What I'm going to argue is that we end up with a view of hyper-agency on the one hand, which could be either utopian or utterly terrifying but certainly beyond anything that the former formulation allows us to imagine, and on the other hand an absolutely unadulterated meaninglessness because there's no social structure that's going to come along and save us from our buffoonery.
To make the first point, let's go back to the famous Gramsci quote and take away all the similes. Let's not assume that history is a womb. Let's not assume that historical change is like the clicking of the birth pangs. And let's not assume that we have the capacity to distinguish between the morbid and the non-morbid. Let's keep the agony, the screaming, the blood, let's keep all of that, but let's remove the clarity of knowing this is a birth process with a certain outcome. We either the baby's going to be okay or it's not. Where would we end up? Well, might end up on Mars. It seems to me that the Elon Musk vision of transformation is essentially an unfettered, unconstrained vision of hyper-agency, and that's part of what we don't get as nice centrist liberals. We don't understand how appealing that is because it's incredibly intoxicatingly appealing.
Another way in which the world might end, which really doesn't have very much to do with the fate of capitalism, is the imminent prospect of tripolar nuclear confrontation, which has come into view in the last five years and is now the dominating concern of American nuclear strategists. The conclusion of this is that to achieve effective deterrence against both the Russians and the Chinese right now, what America needs to do is loosen its concentration on counterforce nuclear targeting, that means we only target their nuclear weapons, and instead move to counter-value targeting, which is if they kill one of our cities, we kill one of theirs. Why would we do that? Because otherwise if we have to match both China and Russia's nuclear arsenal, we're going to build so many that that will terrify them and then they'll arms race us even harder. Whether we are conscious of it or not, that is a world that we are rapidly moving towards.
And then there's an image like this. You may be familiar with the geography. That's an aerial view of Gaza. That's an aerial view of Gaza after what comes now. To me this is one way of making sense of the inability to give a rational answer to the question of what comes next, because that is thinking within the constraints of an interregnum where there's some disaster now and then we come out the other side and then things will be better. The violence that we've seen unleashed in the Middle East is a kind of hyper-agency. It's a vain promise, it doesn't lead anywhere, it's totally toxic and destructive, but I think it's part of the extraordinary drama of the current moment. This is one possibility that we need to think more about than we do when we begin within a framing that's centered on the capitalist hegemony problem.
Let's go the other way. What if buffoons are simply buffoons? What if power is absurd and there really is no redeeming systemic logic? You might think, well what on earth is he talking about? I just really think we need to bring ourselves back to this moment. We need to bring ourselves back to the moment in which the contest between the two men vying for control of the most powerful state in the world boiled down to casting aspersions on each other's golf game. Two elderly gentlemen, they really did this. We need to stop forgetting that they did this. This is the reality of our current moment and I don't think we should be looking for some deep systemic rational. I think we should just acknowledge that large parts of the American political elite are deeply invested in their golf games. It was true of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson did three things: League of Nations, golf, and daily prayer, and it held his particular personality together. There's a fatuousness that we have to begin to not just flick past.
If you don't like this moment, this is Anthony Blinken playing Rockin' in the Free World at a karaoke nightclub. Have they read the lyrics? Do they understand what the lyrics describe? A drug-addicted young woman leaving her baby in a dustbin are the lyrics of this song. What are we supposed to pretend, that this is meaningful communication? This song was repeatedly used, it was used both in the Trump rallies of 2020 and in the Harris-Walz rallies of 2024, and it literally describes a young woman leaving her baby in a trash can to go get a drug fix. Don't we have to contemplate the possibility that we are at the end of meaningful history? Don't we have to actually take seriously some of the people who've said that at that point meaningful communication ends and we end with babble? Now I know this is a grand massive theory and this is why I'm not going to linger with this, because to get here you need a stronger theory of history even than the Gramscian, because this is a Hegelian written version of Marxism that takes you to Fukuyama.
So let's go to a more burned out vision of reality. If you want an even more burned out vision of reality, I recommend Chinese social media to you, which I access by way of my partner. Earlier this year one of the great buzzwords of Chinese social media was: so this is garbage time of history. The garbage time of history, it's beyond redemption, it's a dead time. Now I don't need us to settle this. All I do need to persuade you of is that on this axis of nonessentialist poly social theory we have a wider bandwidth of possibility, we have a wider bandwidth of disaster. It stretches further. It doesn't necessarily, I immediately realize, why are you drawing it like that, you could draw it like this. How do we even know what the dimensions are along which this is going to be excessive? Why does it even need to be linear? It could be like this. Once we're in this space, one of the reasons we're afraid of it is that it in fact has this kind of indeterminacy. It doesn't even need to be continuous, it could be like that. It could be a series of shock, shock, shock, shock. We don't know because what are we trying to describe? We're trying to come up with an account of one-way traffic into the unknown.
It doesn't help us necessarily to start with a social theory that gives us an overarching frame which tells us we know, either we're aligned with the hegemonic logic or we're not. What my inspiration, the amazing anthropological writers, stress, and this brings me to the conclusion, is that this isn't easy to actually maintain. I view polycrisis as I said right at the beginning, almost as a kind of daily practice. It's resisting various types of linear logic. Let me end with two examples of the sort of resistance that I think one has to put up and that this kind of idea will often provoke in folks.
The first is: are you really saying that something's changed? Are you claiming that we're in a new system here? Because it kind of sounds as though you're saying there's something new under the sun here. Most of us have a kind of no, that's crazy, that can't, that's a hubristic thing to say, why would you say there's something new? Except we know this. This is global CO2 emissions, and we're all bought in on the science that says that indeed there is something radically new under the sun, utterly unprecedented. Marx did his theorizing down here. Ricardo did his theorizing there. We live at the other end of this, in a world radically transformed. You may have the theory that somehow the basic formal outline of the social logic is the same across this entire span, but you're welcome to that theory, because that seems to me to really be a comfort blanket idea. In the ranks of neoclassical economics, you're postulating some sort of philosophical anthropology that claims a continuity. It doesn't work to me. If you are going to actually engage with the proposition that we are involved in one-way traffic into the unknown, we need to contemplate and be willing to admit the possibility that something radically new is indeed defining our world.
Let me come to the much more immediate and granular. Something radically new did happen. Never before in recorded political history have incumbent governments suffered as comprehensive a wipeout as incumbent governments suffered in the most recent election. Why? What is this thing, this magical force that transformed everything? The short answer, people like Matt Glasser will say it's inflation. That's what everyone experienced. But what caused the inflation? The unspoken defining feature of the American political system today seems almost unspeakable because it's COVID. Goddamn it, we are still in COVID world. We're in the extraordinary situation in which if COVID hadn't happened in 2020, Trump would have been reelected in 2020. The extraordinary thing about Trump is he's the incumbent defeated in 20 who came back in 24 to defeat the incumbents defeated by the post-COVID inflation shock that defined the global economy from 2021-22 onwards.
Our unwillingness to grapple with the ghastly, grubby, humiliating reality that a bloody virus is still dictating our reality right now is up there with climate denial in its significance. And it's consequential because right here, right now, today, at this hour, we are literally in the middle of the most threatening pandemic outbreak that we have seen since COVID, namely the bird flu outbreak. The monster that Mike Davis wrote that brilliant book about in the early 2000s is the one that is happening right now all over the world, taking out wild populations of birds the world over. We have 53 cases of human transmission so far in the United States, and these are the really dangerous ones which are leaping from birds to cows and from there to the people that are after them. There is a young woman in hospital in Canada right now fighting for her life whose scientists say, and I can't believe I'm reading Nature again, but I'm reading bloody Nature again, that young woman is fighting for her life because she has a strain of avian flu which appears to have mutated to make it more likely that it can pass from human to human. And that is the reality that we are in. This is what I mean by these other transversal forces that are cutting across the current moment, because we all know that a really aggressive form of avian flu that was human-to-human transmissible will make COVID look like a cakewalk. And COVID took the global economy down by 20% in a matter of weeks. If we have one that kills young people on a large scale, it's a world-transforming event the likes of which we haven't seen. And there is nothing other than science telling us this is becoming more and more likely. There is a way in which it is almost impossible for us to approach that reality in a calm way, and yet it is the world we're in. Thank you so much for your attention.
