Notes on exhaustionism,the latest moment of the global organic crisis

Abstract

This essay seeks to build on the concept of exterminism developed by E. P. Thompson in his 1980 New Left Review essay ‘Notes on exterminism, the last state of civilization’. Thompson’s polemical focus on weapons systems in his analysis was the product of a particular moment in history; one where the most precipitous threat to human security was the Cold War. The concept of exhaustionism developed in this piece describes the governance ideologies and frameworks found within advanced capitalist state/societal complexes in response to the present ‘organic crisis’ of post-Cold War global capitalism; one accelerated by the 2008 financial crisis and Covid-19 pandemic. The exhaustionism of political leadership within the contemporary world order has contributed to widely held assumptions that the collapse of civilisation and the planet is either occurring or imminent. Moreover, it is also implied that it is too late for a novel or fundamental transformation in governing ideology, global governance and political economy to reverse the current predicament. This exhaustionism in many ways mirrors the absurdity and cynicism of the Cold War military technicians and nuclear regimes described by Thompson’s concept of exterminism, but with notable differences related to the host of actors involved, temporal horizon, and emphasis on class, imperialism and supremacism.

Introduction

In 1980, British socialist, historian and activist E. P. Thompson authored ‘Notes on exterminism, the last stage of civilization’, a dark and poetic political essay on the absurdity of the Cold War nuclear arms race, as well as the conceptual limitations of twentieth-century Marxist theories of imperialism as a path to understand and describe this phenomenon. ¹ This article will critically reflect on the concept of exterminism and its relevance to the crisis of the twenty-first century. While many of the traditional elements of exterminism persist, various aspects of its political praxis and conceptualisation of world politics were context specific to the Cold War; and as such must be adjusted and refurbished to reflect on the contours of the current epoch. The depth and human toll of the coronavirus crisis has been accelerated by the same neoliberal ideology and governance model that has contributed to various interconnected crises within the contemporary world order. This deep multifaceted crisis is linked to the global capitalist mode of development and the military supremacism of the US/EU/NATO, and has paved the way for an impasse, or an ‘interregnum’, ‘where the old is dying, but the new cannot [yet] be born’ and in which ‘a variety of morbid symptoms appear’. ²

Despite the omnipresent notions of civilisational decay due to Covid-19; climate change; steep economic decline (the result of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ and AI), as well as increasingly violent political polarisations, elite and non-elite social forces are acting under the presumption that their class location, human security, lifestyles, and regime of accumulation will – must – be preservable, even in the midst of occurring or imminent societal decline and collapse engulfing the masses. Neoliberal politicians and intellectuals have framed both the fallout from the 2008 global financial crisis and the failed response to the coronavirus pandemic as exogenous shocks to an otherwise stable capitalist world order. This essay develops the concept of exhaustionism to describe and warn against the dangers of the current moment of exhaustion in political ideology and vision for global governance and world order. It describes a dangerous stagnation in political imagination for sustainable and human global governance, despite what can be described as an omnipresent organic crisis.

The most pressing threats to human civilisation today cannot be isolated only to an analysis of weapons systems and their accompanying social forces as they were by Thompson forty years ago. Much like the perverse logic of accumulating nuclear weapons systems in an age of geopolitical hostility, the ideology and social forces of exhaustionism (elite and otherwise) cannot imagine a world order of sustainable planetary governance outside the neoliberal model, or notions of ethnic/civilisational supremacism. It is in this context that – much like exterminism – exhaustionism threatens the future of human civilisation.

Exterminism and the Cold War

‘Notes on exterminism’ was a testament to the particular socio-political anxieties which shaped Thompson’s peace and anti-nuclear activism during the Cold War. For Thompson, the single most imminent crisis facing world order during this period relates to what he called the ‘The Thing’, i.e., self-generating atomic weapons systems, which, he argued, were more products of ‘bureaucratic inertia and ideology than the market’. For Thompson, issues related to political economy were wholly separate from the specific civilisational threat of the snowballing growth of exterminist weapons systems that characterised the Cold War nuclear arms race.

What is exterminism?

The term ‘exterminism’ is most broadly defined as the irrational death drive of a state-societal complex, where the continued accumulation and proliferation of weapons systems with the capacity to exterminate entire civilisations would ensure their future use. Thompson notes:

Exterminism designates these characteristics of a society . . . which thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes . . . but this will not happen accidentally (even if the final trigger is ‘accidental’) but as the direct consequence of prior acts of policy, of the accumulation and perfection of the means of extermination, and of the structuring of whole societies so that these are directed towards that end. ³

Exterminism describes the ideology and pathological addiction which led to expanding these atomic arsenals, as well as research and development into advancing their murderous capacity – activities which made their deployment increasingly likely. Thompson assumed this pathology was upheld by a particular reactionary cross-class ‘common sense’ within the state-societal complexes of each nuclear goliath that allowed these exterminist weapons systems to snowball uncontrollably without anyone noticing how or why.

The concept of exterminism for Thompson assumes a deeply flawed, but still functioning, state-societal complex, where the vast majority of those outside the levers of the state-military establishment are left in a state of anxious waiting, as the tendencies/contradictions of accumulating nuclear weapons systems inevitably mount. The ‘end times’ event in Thompson’s exterminist scenario was one which had not yet begun, but rather, was an event that became increasingly likely as the governments of each Cold War goliath continued their unconscious and path-dependent course of paranoid defence procurement.

Why exterminism?

Thompson’s description of exterminism was deeply critical of the actors in the national security states of nuclear powers, and the potential for their absurd calculations to destroy human civilisation in a flippant manner similar to the scenario described in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. However, these actors were not the singular motivating factor behind Thompson’s concept of exterminism – Thompson also sought to challenge the applicability of rigid or orthodox Marxist theories of imperialism to explain the unique factors contributing to the Cold War nuclear crisis. Thompson argued that a society which produced the uniquely destructive weapons systems of the nuclear arms race must be analysed outside of the economistic/structural categories of Marxist theory.

The ‘last stage of civilisation’ of Thompson’s title alludes to twentieth-century Marxist theorisations of imperialism produced by Vladimir Lenin and (often less notably) Nikolai Bukharin, who argued that the contradictions of capitalism, and the ‘logics’ or ‘tendencies’ of a world system in a late stage of finance capitalism, propel powerful states towards inter-imperial rivalry, enhanced class exploitation, and the pursuit for raw materials both in the core and periphery – understood by orthodox Marxist-Leninists to be the ‘last stage of capitalism’. ⁴ In contrast, Thompson argued that theories of imperialism failed to provide the conceptual tools necessary to understand the particularities of Cold War ideology. He claimed that the ‘exterminist’ weapons systems produced in the mid twentieth-century by the parochial military-security states of each superpower were not class discriminatory, nor did the weapons systems they produce obey a rational logic or teleological account of the sort produced by Marxist theories of capitalist imperialism.

Thompson believed that the civilisational death drive of an extremist society was a ‘human issue’, not a class one. Political theorisations about ideology, socioeconomic systems and pre-existing class structures are understood by Thompson as separate from the calculations of military technicians driven by an entirely separate set of exterminist motivations. The absurdity of the nuclear arms race was that it did not follow rational patterns or categories found in the frameworks used by social scientists in decades or generations prior. Fred Halliday notes that central to Thompson’s exterminism was the notion that the Cold War is ‘about itself’. ⁵

Thompson postulates a world order where exterminism is driven by the political military-industrial complex, and where, through decades of propaganda and indoctrination, cross-class meta-ideological solidarities had been forged in the population, serving as the basis of consent for nuclear militarisation. During the Cold War, a distinct dichotomous and Manichean cleavage was so deeply ingrained within the ideological superstructure of both the Soviet and Western camps that their military-industrial complexes were allowed to grow exponentially, even as they were being elevated beyond the realm of ‘ordinary politics’. He notes: ‘Today’s hair-trigger military technology annihilates the very moment of “politics”. One exterminist system confronts another, and the act will follow the logic of advantage within the parameters of exterminism.’ ⁶

Responding to exterminism

The concept of exterminism was developed to invoke an urgent political response by progressive social forces, to create the broadest possible popular alliance opposed to these weapons systems. Thompson’s politics and anti-exterminist peace activism in response to the Cold War in more contemporary terms might be described as Left populist and internationalist. Thompson assumed exterminism was upheld by the hegemony of a reactionary cross-class ideology within the state-societal complexes both of the Western and Eastern blocs. For Thompson it was then imaginable that an anti-exterminist politics could (or must) be formed out of another cross-class counter-hegemonic movement, or a broad internationalist intersectional alliance of moderate and progressive social forces – including churches, labour, dissidents – which would respond to the exterminist threat. Thompson argued this broad collective internationalist front required the Left to shed its ‘revolutionary posturing or rhetoric’ regarding class and form a collective bloc from which ‘[a] new space for politics will open up’. ⁷

Exterminism beyond the Cold War

Many aspects of exterminism as described by Thompson permeate the twenty-first century. The major military powers have continued and accelerated the processes that increase the likelihood of eventual nuclear destruction, even since the fall of the Soviet Union, as the US and the Russian Federation have remained hostile adversaries over the last two decades – leading some to proclaim an equally dangerous ‘new Cold War’. ⁸ The proliferation of nuclear arms has led to various smaller Cold Wars arising between nuclear states such as India and Pakistan, Iran and Israel/Saudi Arabia, South Korea and North Korea, and as current geopolitical tensions and proxy wars (Syria, Ukraine, Taiwan) increasingly prod already tepid relations between great power rivals.

In the wake of the Cold War’s ‘peace by terror’, ⁹ a series of smaller ethno-nationalist uprisings, proxy/civil wars and regional socioeconomic crises occurred, often exacerbated by interventions driven by supremacist notions of Western unipolarity, absent a Soviet hegemonic rival. The threats to human security in this new world order (as well as its ever-shifting frontiers) were catastrophic and imminent – but not solely defined by nuclear weapons systems. In the 1990s, the alliances and bipartite geopolitical configurations of the Cold War devolved into more complex and overlapping constellations of actors (both old and new) including irridentist nationalist movements and religious fundamentalist groups; corrupt and oligarchic political elites; multinational corporations, as well as opportunistic transnational terror and crime syndicates which profit from instability. Moreover, the rise and advancement of chemical and biological weapons created novel horrors for civilian populations in the post-Cold War era. Unlike the nuclear warhead, such weapons narrowly target biological life while sparing infrastructural damage.

The processes of neoliberal state restructuring and the integration of post-Soviet/non-aligned states into the US-centred global capitalist system were supported ideologically in public discourse through triumphant universalist notions of a (neo)liberal ‘End of history’, ¹⁰ as well as by a set of actors and social forces actively disruptive of any democratic opposition to the new global Western hegemony. Such processes of integration into the (neo)liberal international order occur in conjunction with the subordination of democratic politics to the authority of a financialised, fiscally hawkish and pro-austerity regime of governance labelled by Wolfgang Streeck as the ‘consolidation state’. ¹¹ This turn has deepened existing threats to human security and the biosphere, including poverty and inequality; endless wars and refugees; rising crime and corruption, and the acceleration of carbon-induced climate change. In conjunction, such threats can be regarded as a ‘global organic crisis’, ¹² linked to the structures of the capitalist world economy; the hegemony of the transnational capitalist class; the contours of a hyper-individualised global market-driven culture, and managed through the supremacy of the US and EU states over the international system. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of the very same scientists and mathematicians who had helped create the exterminist weapons systems of the Cold War found a new home on Wall Street, using their intellectual capabilities to forge new socially destructive systems in the realm of computational finance.

Exhaustionism, global organic crisis – and the ‘end of history’

This section will develop the concept of exhaustionism to describe the meta-ideology that underpins the patterns of global governance currently threatening planetary life and human civilisation. It seeks to borrow from Thompson’s concept of exterminism its dedication to anti-imperialism, support for internationalism, and opposition to theoretical orthodoxy. Exhaustionism can be distinguished from exterminism in two key respects:

• 1) In contrast to the original concept of exterminism, which narrowly focuses on the absurd calculations of state-actors, the novelty of ‘the bomb’, and the dangling threat of a catastrophic nuclear war, the concept of exhaustionism notes that the contemporary crisis also includes classed and slow-moving non-nuclear threats to human security (disease, war, famine, economic recession, societal collapse) and the biosphere. It is perpetuated by the absurd ideology of hegemonic state-societal structures and classes within the world order.

• 2) In contrast to the Cold War nuclear arms race, the organic crisis of the current period does not present itself only as a totalising and universal mortal threat, or as the ‘great leveller’ of nuclear war – which also threatened the elite beneficiaries of contemporary capitalism. Rather, exhaustionism underscores how the organic crisis of the twenty-first-century world order and its tributary dangers or ‘risks’ to human security are increasingly connected to relative material prosperity, class, and proximity to empire. Exhaustionism describes normalised notions in the media, popular culture, academia and even in formal political messaging that the world is already in the midst of an irreversible civilisational collapse.

Resolving this crisis will require alternatives to the exhaustionist political ideologies that characterise contemporary global governance; it will demand the formation of a new progressive and democratic vision for planetary governance, geared towards human rights, economic justice, and ecological sustainability. ¹³ Exhaustionism can be understood as a refurbishing of Thompson’s concept of exterminism to describe the contemporary moment in global governance.

What is exhaustionism?

To locate the understanding of exhaustionism, and what underlies my use of this concept, it is necessary to look more fully at what is meant by the ‘global organic crisis’ that has given rise to it. This term, ‘global organic crisis’, is used by a relatively small body of Gramsci-inspired International Relations scholars who reject philosophical and ontological state-centrism and analyse the ideological, material and transnational class dimensions of global governance, and how they shape the contours of hegemony/supremacy, ecology, and social transformation. Antonio Gramsci used organic crisis to describe the comprehensive and multifaceted breakdown of a society, including cultural, political, economic, ideological components, with contradictions potentially resulting in the refurbishing or transformation of a particular hegemonic configuration (dominant class and historic bloc). For Gramsci, ‘organic’ is meant to imply that which is not immediate, conjunctural or short term – but rather to describe phenomena which are slow-moving, structural, long term. ¹⁴ Here, it is linked to the matrix of slow(er) moving, interconnected and classed threats in this accelerated period of globalisation – impacting individual, societal, cultural, political and economic outcomes worldwide.

Global organic crisis, then, contains the components described by Gramsci’s original concept, while adding more modern elements such as the degradation of the biosphere as well as ongoing threats to global public health and social reproduction. The concept of ‘global organic crisis’ is wedded to a praxis of progressive and counter-hegemonic social transformation that seeks to address the harmful processes of capitalist global political economy and empire – specifically the culture of market civilisation, authoritarian neoliberal governance, and US/Western supremacism over the international system. ¹⁵

Since the end of the Cold War, over three decades of neoliberal governance ¹⁶ have laid the groundwork for multiple unresolved crises in the world order, including the 2008 global financial crisis; the European sovereign debt crisis; mass migration linked to poverty and war (often western-led interventions); increased prevalence of racism, xenophobia, sexism and homophobia across various aspects of society; increased global inequality; ongoing destruction of the biosphere; ongoing geopolitical tensions; invasive/panoptic surveillance and draconian policing; far-right and Islamic fundamentalist-inspired terrorism, and, more recently, the Covid-19 epidemic. While the concept of ‘global organic crisis’ is one which emerges out of critical Left scholarship, acknowledgement of a global crisis has become a truism within mainstream political discourse.

Decades before the Covid pandemic, a series of crises were already unravelling. That such notions of an interconnected, civilisational crisis of global proportions have permeated the consciousness of neoliberal politicians, global elites, and intellectual communities is indicative that these notions are not, in and of themselves, radical. The mainstreaming of civilisational collapse and decline is evident within modern political discourse, popular culture and academia – where conservative and critical scholars often share the notion of a deep precipitous crisis threatening various aspects of the world order, including hegemonic/geopolitical stability, the global economy, and the biosphere. But the life-worlds of the poor, subaltern, and those peripheral to systems of power were in a state of mortal crisis long before the events of 2020. The rise of neoliberal globalisation and US geopolitical supremacy has normalised a set of circumstances where the world’s most precarious populations are subject to the sharpest market disciplines, perpetually victimised by foreign invasions, and left dependent on the preservation of an ever-shrinking and decaying natural environment – whose resources are exploited by multinational corporations centred within advanced capitalist states. It is noted by Oxfam that over 40 per cent of the global population (and rising since the Covid crisis) live hand-to-mouth on less than 5.50 USD a day. In 2018, The World Inequality Report co-authored by Thomas Piketty showed that between 1980 and 2016, the poorest 50 per cent of the global population captured twelve cents for every dollar of global income growth, while the top 1 per cent captured twenty-seven cents for every dollar. ¹⁷ The Covid-19 pandemic and the social and public health crisis it has produced have only made such trends more explicit.

I use the concept of exhaustionism, then, to describe the current moment of ideological enervation which emerged out of this context of a crisis in the twenty-first-century world order. It is linked to the matrix of slow(er) moving, interconnected and classed threats that have been accelerated during the period of globalisation; impacting individual, societal, cultural, political and economic outcomes on a global scale – and contributing to a situation as dystopian as the post-exterminist world order described by Thompson. Exhaustionism as a popular meta-ideology within advanced capitalist state-societal complexes recategorises the present crisis into a series of disconnected or irreversible real and metaphysical ‘risks’ which are to be survived and/or strategised. ¹⁸ Such framing often obscures the variable of class location as it relates to survival in the twenty-first century. It also serves to co-opt, pacify and obstruct those communitarian or democratic social forces seeking to create structural alternatives to the current paradigm.

Why exhaustionism?

The impacts of global organic crisis occur at much longer temporal intervals or, in the terminology of twentieth-century French historian Fernand Braudel, the ‘historical time’ of the longue durée. ¹⁹ A governance/social programme of exhaustionism circumvents the need to address the global crisis and its long-term impacts – specifically those related to the deleterious transformations in the health and life-worlds of both individuals and the biosphere. The forces contributing to human insecurity and threatening civilisation are, then, not confined to the hair-trigger absurdist calculations of nuclear technicians and state elites, but, rather, include a multitude of actors and social forces contributing to a variety of slow(er) moving threats to planetary existence. Thompson’s political proposals in response to exterminism were designed to resolve the unique crisis of the Cold War; exhaustionism requires solutions tailored to remedy the unique circumstances of the current global crisis.

The Cold War’s ‘fear of the bomb’ invoked a degree of quasi-religious millennialism, where no civilisation would be spared by the mutually assured destruction of atomic warfare. Exhaustionism describes our current moment in global governance; and asks whether civilisational collapse is any less tragic, imminent or absurd if it comes through non-weapons-based threats, at much slower temporal intervals, affecting first the poor and those at the edges of empire, and lacks the simplicity, the momentary drama, of a finger pressing a big red button?

On 30 March 2020, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world faced the most challenging crisis since the second world war. Rather than acting as a potential great equaliser (compare Thompson’s description of total nuclear war), epidemics and plagues have a long historical record as classed phenomenona. Braudel described the inequalities of isolation from pandemics and the elite’s insulation from the social and biological impacts of epidemics during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. Much as now, the wealthy flooded to their country homes and enclaves in the suburbs or ‘exurbs’, while the poor, due to lack of resources, were forced into more densely populated spaces. The ability to self-isolate is a class privilege. ²⁰

The global poor and most marginalised and unprotected segments of labour are likely to be the first drafted into this social experiment of neoliberal pandemic management. Many of the ‘essential workers’ are inadequately compensated for their exposure, ill-protected by their employers, and will be the first casualties of an exhaustionist logic applied to contemporary pandemic governance. Often relegated by socioeconomic circumstances to confined living-spaces and multigenerational homes, the poor have faced the highest infection and mortality rates. The proclamations from US conservative/right-wing politicians, commentators and journalists in the wake of the global corona virus, advocating ‘America must get back to work’ or ‘the cure cannot be worse than the disease’, often argued that the risk to workers and public health must be balanced with the interests of private enterprise and capital accumulation. Braudel recalls the elite response during the pandemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth century:

At the first sign of the disease, the rich whenever possible took hurried flight to their country houses; no one thought of anything but himself: ‘the plague making us cruel, as doggs, one to another’ noted Samuel Pepys in August 1665. And Montaigne tells how he wandered in search of a roof when the epidemic reached his estate, ‘serving six months miserably as a guide’ to his ‘distracted family, frightening their friends and themselves and causing horror wherever they tried to settle’. The poor remained alone, penned up in the contaminated town where the State fed them, isolated them, blockaded them and kept them under observation . . . One bourgeois from Toulouse placidly wrote in 156I: ‘the aforesaid contagious disease only attacks poor people . . . let God in his mercy be satisfied with that . . . The rich protect themselves against it.’ J.-P. Sartre was right when he wrote, ‘The plague only exaggerates the relationship between the classes: it strikes at the poor and spares the rich.’ In Savoy, when an epidemic was over, rich people, before returning to their carefully disinfected houses, would install a poor woman inside for a few weeks, as a sort of guinea pig, to test at risk of her life whether the danger had really departed. ²¹

History rhymes, as once again the poor and working classes within the most advanced capitalist states will serve as the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ during the current pandemic, continuing to occupy crowded living-spaces or high-risk workspaces, while much of the wealthy and middle classes continue to work and eat from the safety and comfort of home with the help of Zoom, Amazon, Uber and other Silicon Valley apps – a situation which Naomi Klein has labelled the ‘screen New Deal’. ²² The underlying logic behind a society which promotes such classist strategies of public health in the wake of a catastrophic pandemic is a clear example of exhaustionism – where, rather than constructing a sustainable alternative, the neoliberal logic of private accumulation calculates acceptable mortality rates for business to continue as usual during the accelerating crisis. Contemporary threats to human security and the patterns of global governance which manage such threats are fundamentally classed and reflect the ‘common sense’ dictates of neoliberal governance. One hears echoes of Braudel in novelist Arundhati Roy’s essay in the Financial Times, ‘The pandemic is a portal’, during the early days of the Covid crisis in India in 2020:

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens – their migrant workers – like so much unwanted accrual . . . The Covid Crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place. ²³

Modern capitalist elites have only innovated and developed new and increasingly technologically sophisticated means to insulate themselves from current organic crisis, means which dwarf the relatively modest basement bunkers of the Cold War. Many segments of the contemporary global elite imagine a future where multiple threats such as nuclear war, ecological collapse, or civil unrest can be circumvented and managed with the proper resources – resources available to only a miniscule segment of the global population. The luxurious neo-apocalyptic futures envisioned and strategised by contemporary global capitalist elites as well as select aligned social forces (segments of the professional managerial class and state elites) are already occurring. They aim to reproduce production/consumption patterns complementary to the stability of Western upper-class lifestyles in the wake of a series of mass death-inducing crises, both local and global; some slow moving (ecological collapse, inequality), others more immediate (war, financial crash, pandemics). Some transnational capitalist elites, such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, have even began modelling highly exclusive extraterrestrial alternatives to human civilisation on an infected and dying earth.

This ideology has permeated non-elite classes in the form of survivalist culture; a reactionary and anti-collectivist political praxis which has been adopted by many within the far Right. This social reality reflects a situation where no major political force believes it possible or advantageous to reverse or challenge the economic domination and geopolitical supremacy of the most powerful capitalist states or their concomitant transnational institutions and major multinational corporations – despite the precipitous impacts on the planet and the world’s majority poorest populations.

Responding to exhaustionism and the optimism of the will

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to normality, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

– Arundhati Roy ²⁴

The current organic crisis has accelerated as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic; contributing to a circumstance where the threats to human security can be regarded as serious in scope as those of the Cold War paradigm. Much like Thompson’s exterminism, exhaustionism requires a robust internationalist response. However, unlike the Cold War crisis which inspired exterminism, exhaustionism is connected to the classed nature of the current global organic crisis and the ‘doomsday machine’ of neoliberal globalisation and US/EU supremacism. This has contributed to a moment in which popular intellectual discourse amongst the privileged, hegemonic classes and nations has been one of either apathy towards the present crisis or refusal to resolve the predicament through systemic alternatives. For these they perceive as negatively impacting their relative position over the majority of the world’s population. Such notions have contributed to the vast inequalities in public health during the pandemic, where early on a ‘nationalist pandemic approach’ and protection of pharmaceutical property rights has contributed to what some have described as a ‘vaccine apartheid’ that carves lines across class as well as between developed and underdeveloped nation states.

Thompson’s political prescription for the Left in response to the crisis of Cold War exterminism was to forge a big-tent and inclusive Left anti-nuclear movement. The prioritisation of atomic weapons systems for Thompson meant relegating the issue of class as secondary within that moment. In contrast, the situation in which contemporary exhaustionism occurs requires a framework which regards class dynamics as well as the pervasive neoliberal and supremacist assumptions within Western state-societal complexes as the central components contributing to the reproduction of the present global organic crisis of the world order.

Speaking to the World Economic Forum in 2020, historian/futurist Yuval Noah Hariri made a statement that captures Gramsci’s ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’. Pleading with the masters of the galaxy assembled at Davos, Hariri stated:

The global order is now like a house that everybody inhabits and nobody repairs. It can hold on for a few more years, but if we continue like this, it will collapse – and we will find ourselves back in the jungle of omnipresent war. Of course, even if we disappear, it will not be the end of the world. Something will survive us. Perhaps the rats will eventually take over and rebuild civilization. Perhaps, then, the rats will learn from our mistakes. ²⁵

For Hariri, it was important to address the World Economic Forum, acknowledging that the current crisis in the world order is related to the dominant ideology of the ruling classes. Stephen Gill has labelled this elite ideology ‘imperial common sense’, a doctrine that assumes the

maintenance of structures and practices of global inequality that permit the USA and its principal allies to consume the lion’s share of global resources in ways that are often violent, unjust and unsustainable and associated with the intensified exploitation of human beings and nature. ²⁶

The pervasiveness of this imperial common sense within contemporary Western political discourse is the subject of the next section.

Exhaustionism and the current moment

The notion of a deep and interconnected planetary crisis is one which has transcended any particular ideology and has become a part of the collective zeitgeist of the twenty-first century. Rising inequality linked to the 2008 global economic crisis, continued degradation of the biosphere, endless wars, as well as the global public health crisis of Covid-19 have aided in the proliferation of such assumptions. Within the transatlantic historic bloc (US, EU, UK) sometimes referred to as the liberal international order, one can identify three broad ideologies/governance strategies in response to the current global organic crisis. Such governance strategies and social philosophies do not contain a positive transformative vision, but rather represent the exhaustion of global governance ideology at the present moment.

The Great (neoliberal) Reset

During November 2020 French President Emmanuel Macron gave an extended interview to Le Grand Continent magazine where he lamented:

We are at a time in the history of humanity when we have rarely seen such an accumulation of short-term crises, such as the pandemic and terrorism, and profound, transformative transitions, which are changing international life and even having anthropological impacts: I am referring to climate change, as well as the technological transition that is changing the way we look at the world, as we have seen again recently, which is completely shaking up the relationship between the inside, the outside and our representations of the world. ²⁷

Macron goes on to mention inequality, fundamentalism, illiberalism and rise of the radical Right as components of this global crisis. After identifying this deep, systemic and multifaceted crisis, he invokes a heroic Bonapartist vision for a new Europe built on the values of liberal democracy, universalism, sovereignty and multilateralism. Alluding to Gramsci’s ‘interregnum’, Macron tweeted on 8 August 2020:

In all crises, an old world disappears, a new one appears. This crisis can be an opportunity. Our goal with the recovery plan: that France, Europe, play their full part in inventing the world afterwards.

Capitalising on this opportunity, however, Macron’s brand of moderate or ‘centrist’ governance has adopted draconian security laws in response to both the rise of radical Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and the social unrest produced from protests for economic and racial justice, including the Yellow Vests and Black Lives Matter.

Macron is not alone in his heroic vision for a neoliberal redux in the post-pandemic world order; rather it is representative of a larger strategy shared by other centrist Western politicians such as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden. Both have signed up to The Great Reset, a crisis response programme enunciated at the 2020 Global Economic Forum, initially advanced by Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and Prince Charles of the UK. ²⁸ The Great Reset acknowledges a multifaceted crisis within the world order, with its various components linked to political economy, public health, environment, geopolitics/security, etc. It seeks to prepare society for the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ where automation and artificial intelligence will become a more prominent force over human labour within the economy. ²⁹ The Great Reset also seeks to address the crisis of climate change by proposing a variety of complex solutions which involve public-private partnerships with corporations and governments dedicated to ‘green capitalism’. Rather than seeking to replace, transform, or fundamentally reform the global political economy, The Great Reset seeks to ‘build back better’ the current structures of neoliberal governance and the institutions of private ownership through the promotion of a ‘responsible capitalism’. In this template, the private sector continues to plays a central role, but with a ‘stakeholder’ (rather than shareholder) model/ethos of responsible or socially conscious corporatism, ‘woke’ to the issues of climate change and racial equity. ³⁰ The stakeholder model has existed for decades within the lexicon of neoliberal social theory and business/corporate ethics, and represents little more than an attempt to rebrand neoliberal governance and reobtain consent for elite hegemony in the midst of diminishing public support for, and resentment towards, corporatist centrist governance.

Lack of public support for supposedly noble elite liberal initiatives such as The Great Reset is often framed as the product of misinformation or conspiracy theory, rooted in either far-right extremism or foreign meddling. Liberal scholars such as Francis Fukuyama have diagnosed declining social trust in the institutions of liberal democracy as the root cause of the present political crises at both the domestic and international level. For Fukuyama and other ‘neoliberal cosmopolitan’ ³¹ scholars who occupy the ‘extreme centre’ ³² flank of mainstream liberal political discourse, the rise of populist or ‘illiberal democratic’ ³³ tendencies on both Left and Right are a product of misinformation or misplaced trust. Mainstream liberal scholarship and commentary on the present crisis often glosses over the processes and contradictions of global capitalist political economy and Western supremacy. Instead, it emphasises the rise of internet communication and social media alongside the rapidly changing demographic and cultural composition of liberal societies (consequent on immigration and globalisation), while lamenting the decline of America’s assertive leadership over the world order. And, for good measure, it also bemoans the rise of illiberal leaders abroad, primarily Vladimir Putin in Russia. The negative impacts of the capitalist global political economy and US supremacy are often relegated as the product or externality of political corruption/failure flowing downstream from the causal factors of the current crisis: a declining ‘faith’ or ‘trust’ in political institutions due to macro-technological shifts in communication technologies, executive malfeasance and state institutional/bureaucratic mismanagement, or nefarious foreign leaders of ill-intent. The structural issues of contemporary neoliberal global governance are then framed as a technocratic issue, where only a more robust, dedicated and heroic philosophic defence of the ideological pillars and institutions of the US-centric liberal international order will rescue humanity.

Far-right civilisationism and the acceleration of morbidity

The global far Right has also produced a global governance framework in response to the contemporary crisis in the world order. The West’s ‘containment’ and ‘rollback’ strategies during the Cold War, as well as the various disciplinary experiments and cultural revolutions supported by the Soviet Union, were dialectically intertwined. However unevenly matched, the actions of each superpower were largely believed by their respective populations to be the praxis of their competing universalist visions for world order (communism vs capitalism; totalitarianism vs free world), with each vying for the position of global hegemon. ³⁴ But a novel form of anti-universalist global politics has today emerged (or re-emerged). This anti-universalist politics is a realist reaction to what is often described by scholars and commentators across the ideological spectrum as an international system in which the US is no longer hegemonic; where the West, and the world order more generally, are in a state of terminal decline. The far Right has instrumentalised this perception of Western decline to challenge the cosmopolitanism or ‘globalism’ of the current liberal international order with a novel grand strategy or ‘hegemonic project’ for global governance, which I have previously labelled ‘far-right civilisationism’. ³⁵ This vision for the twenty-first century world order is one of supremacism, transactionalism, hardened borders (around civilisations, nation states, and private property), social illiberalism, misogynistic hyper-masculinity, rugged individualism, anti-communism, vigilante violence, realpolitik, and an international relations theory based on assumptions of anti-universalist/anti-humanist realism and cultural/civilisational essentialism. Samuel Huntington’s claim that the ‘velvet curtain of culture has replaced the iron curtain of ideology’ ³⁶ became increasingly attractive to a Western audience trying to decipher the crisis of the post-Cold War period, especially following the attacks of 9/11.

Rather than proposing any fundamental alternative to existing capitalist social relations, the far Right’s response to the present crisis mirrors the self-help, hyper-individualism, state-scepticism, classism, and nativism that have been the ideological pillars of so-called ‘conservative’ governments in North America and Western Europe for decades. Many of the ‘left-behinds’ of neoliberal globalisation have become increasingly drawn towards – or, through misinformation campaigns, pushed towards – a reactionary and chauvinistic politics which, in Gramscian terms, represents a ‘morbid symptom’ born out of profound crisis. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism has conjured dangerous forms of social alienation, anxiety and nihilism which have been deeply transformative of the psychology and worldview of impacted populations. ³⁷ Donald Sassoon notes how this is increasingly evident when one looks at the morbid philosophies of the modern militia movement in the US, as well as the wave of lone-mass shooters over the last decade. ³⁸ A combination of these two related phenomena is found in the extremist movement the Boogaloo Boys, a group which carried out armed political demonstrations as well as lone-wolf shootings across the US during 2020. While hybridising a slew of online-based ideologies and cultures, at core the Boogaloo Boys are the militant wing of the libertarian guns rights movement, willing to engage in political violence – but ideologically eclectic and absent any universalist image beyond accelerationism, survivalism and a libertarian/anarchist rejection of state authority and regulation. Leath Sottile of the New York Times reported in August 2020: ‘[L]ike militias, they’re arming up for the future. But there’s a key difference. With militias, ‘there’s always that imminent war coming, there’s always that invasion by One World forces’, he says. ‘It never happened, but it was always going to happen. Whereas with the Boogaloo stuff, there is a piece of that that is like, “We want to make that happen.”‘ ³⁹

The governance model which emerges from the ideology of far-right civilisationism, then, assumes there is a deep crisis and proposes a variety of radical prescriptions, including: 1) authoritarian statism; 2) exit from or suspicion of international/global institutions, norms, regulations, laws supported by liberal and centrist political establishment structures; 3) consumption as an inalienable right (especially of fossil fuels); 4) promotion of neoliberal self-help and hyper-individualised strategies of survivalism and personal security; 5) support for state-violence, militarism, jingoism, and select forms of vigilantism/para-state violence directed at progressive/democratic social forces, minority groups, or refugees/stateless persons; and 6) a form of messianic religious millennialism, where a major event will lead to fundamental transformation in the world order. In recent years the far-right conspiracy theory and movement Q-Anon has warned of ‘the coming storm’ where Trump will heroically emancipate the US population (and the world) from a satanic globalist communist paedophile cult with a leadership structure spanning (but not limited to) the institutions of the UN, EU, US Democratic Party, Ivy League university system, climate change movement, and the entertainment industry.

The rise of far-right civilisationism has the potential to forge a novel global governance framework for Western capitalist states. Trump, Brexit, and the rise of far-right social forces in Europe represent increasing dissatisfaction with the supposedly ‘globalist’ designs for the international system envisioned by The Great Reset and its proponents. The forms of internationalism championed by centrist and liberal party structures are often framed as a ‘communist’ or ‘globalist’ plot for world domination. More recently the far Right has described ‘The Great Reset’ as a clandestine agenda for a communist UN global political coup; and it is estimated that millions of followers of Q-Anon subscribe to such notions. This reactionary retreat into ethnic and national identity is then emblematic of the exhaustion of ideology in response to the contemporary crisis – with a political programme designed to accelerate its morbid symptoms rather than address or transform its root causes. However, one should be careful before regarding the rise of the far Right as the antithesis of establishment liberal governance, as Saul and Anievas note:

In moments of crisis, then, the political bases of liberal orders have often relied upon far-right mobilizations to help secure them as far-right ideologies provide an important ideopolitical imaginary to compensate for the intense dislocations and sense of anomie characterizing such conjunctures. In this respect, the structural dynamics of capitalist development generate far-right forces as a kind of coercive ‘reserve army’ that politicians and ruling class forces can draw on in times of crisis but can never fully control. This is not to suggest that far-right actors should be regarded as pawns of ruling class interests, parroting the crude Stalinist thesis on fascism, or that the far-right is functional to reproducing liberal (international) orders. Rather, it is to recognize the political role played by far-right forces in helping thwart revolutionary challenges to liberal-capitalist orders, including the authoritarian and antidemocratic elements within the ‘deep’ state that tend to appear when the social regime of capital is most vulnerable. The far-right can do this by offering an alternative ideological legitimation of capitalist social orderings from that of liberalism. ⁴⁰

Collapsology and the pessimism of the intellect

Another dire diagnosis of the present moment is found in the cross-disciplinary school of thought, ‘collapsology’, which first emerged in French intellectual circles. It has since found increasing popularity outside France, notably with David Wallace-Wells’ widely received 2017 New York magazine article ‘The uninhabitable earth’ and subsequent book which popularised similar themes within the Anglosphere. ⁴¹ What unites collapsologists is the guiding premise that imminent global societal collapse is an unavoidable and irreversible reality in coming decades. This new ideology has largely been popularised by environmentalist politicians and activists, namely Yves Cochet, Green Party politician and president of The Momentum Institute, a thinktank devoted to the study of societal collapse. In a short essay labelled ‘The next thirty-three years on earth’, Cochet makes a series of predictions:

The 2020–2050 period will be the most transformative period ever known to humanity in such a short amount of time. It can roughly be broken down in three successive stages: the end of the world as we know it (2020–2030), survival (2030–2040) the beginning of the renaissance (rebirth) (2040–2050). It is possible that the world (as we today know it) collapses by 2020, probable that it does so by 2025 and certain by 2030. I make this claim based on numerous scientific publications with respect to the Anthropocene, which is to be understood as a break within the Earth system, characterized by the irrepressible and irreversible overrunning of global geo-bio-physical thresholds. The Earth system behaving like an automaton out of human beings’ control, these breaches cannot be remedied. Moreover, the general faith put in the liberal-consumerist system reinforces this prognostic. This belief is so anthropogenically pervasive that no other alternative beliefs will be able to replace it before the collapse, which will be a consequence of the triple crunch: energy, climate and food. ⁴²

Collapsology is notably sober and lacks the liberal optimism of The Great Reset, and does not attempt to rebrand the global culture of corporate capitalism. While often critical of capitalism and globalisation, the fatalist ontology of collapsology has, however, given a gloss of academic legitimacy to what has long been the elite instinct during various macro societal crises – to enclavise and retreat. That is to say, the underlying implication of such a defeatism is to strategise for survival (to the best of one’s material capacity) in the midst of what is believed to be an inevitable and irreversible set of dire circumstances from which there is no presumed alternative. This is perhaps why such survivalist instincts can be found across various classes and political orientations, ranging from the modest techniques of hobby survivalists to the luxury bunkers and private islands of the global elite. Billionaires such as Richard Branson and Peter Thiel have private islands or international outposts in the event of civilisational collapse. However, other options for less wealthy segments of the capitalist class include Terra Vivos and the Rising S Company, who refurbish military bunkers into luxury homes designed to sustain elite lifestyles and comfort in the event of various crises, including war, unrest, disease, environmental disaster.

A similar fatalist social philosophy is found in the rise of anti-natalist thought in recent years, a philosophic challenge to the ethics of reproducing and creating new human life in the context of a deteriorating planet and world order – as well as the innate suffering linked to existence and the life cycle itself. ⁴³ Such notions also come with the realisation that further exponential global population growth is detrimental to already existing human life and the biosphere. Such critiques can be contrasted with the pro-natalism of religious fundamentalists and the far Right, who instrumentalise classed and racially selective pro-natalist positions in combination with racist/xenophobic fear-mongering about demographics and the growing political power of non-majoritarian ethnic groups within liberal democratic states, due to non-white immigration and birthrates.

While making use of the language of systemic critique often found in left scholarship, scholars affiliated with the subfield of ‘collapsology’ target the multiple interconnected crises of modern industrialised society and human civilisation on the planet, including: the contradictions of global capitalist growth/development; endless wars; novel epidemics and plagues; and the ecological crisis and continued degradation of the biosphere. What collapsology’s critique does not offer is any alternative or solution to global crisis beyond acceptance and fatalistic realism – perhaps due to hesitancy or suspicion regarding the state and political institutions as vehicles for progressive change, or pessimism regarding popular democratic governance as a potential remedy to the crisis.

Conclusion

It is evident that the recognition of a crisis in the world order (even its intersection with capitalism) is not a critique unique to the progressive Left, but rather one that sits comfortably alongside the praxis of heroic liberalism, far-right reaction/acceleration, and pessimistic scientism. Exhaustionism unites naive systemic reproduction, cynical acceleration, and scientific apathy/realism – all of which are vacant a positive global vision for the future of world order. It describes the current moment in contemporary global governance, one which has led large segments of the global population (including both political and capitalist elite classes as well as various non-elite class fractions) to believe that society and the ecosphere are in an irreversible stage of terminal decline, without any alternative or recourse.

The exhaustionism of the contemporary world order contributes to the widely held notion amongst various class fractions – elite and non-elite alike – that it is ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. ⁴⁴ Overcoming this exhaustionism of political vision is central to resolving the present global organic crisis and will require the formation of a new sustainable and democratic planetary governance geared towards human rights, economic justice and anti-imperialism. ⁴⁵ Until such time, exhaustionism is bound to inch the world towards a situation increasingly akin to the one described by Thompson in his imagined scenario of a ‘limited’ nuclear war – a dystopia of plagues, famines, abandoned cities, banditry, strange cults, tribal wars, and fortification for the lucky few.