Punching holes in history

Abstract

This article introduces an exchange forum on Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023). The book centres the ‘zone’ in a story about the fragmentation of global space, in which the zone works by ‘punching holes in the territory of the nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and no democratic oversight’. Crack-Up Capitalism not only builds on the arguments made by Slobodian in Globalists: The End of Empire the Birth of Neoliberalism, but it also asks to re-evaluate broadly accepted historical narratives about globalisation since the early 1990s.

I live beside a port in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. Every day, I watch huge ships come in carrying hundreds, perhaps thousands, of shipping containers. I use images of these shipping containers as examples in a lecture on borders that I give to first-year students. As yawning, blank faces stare back at me, I tell the students that these ships and their containers both symbolise and enact the spatiotemporal logic of globalised capital. They allow a variety of goods to cross borders, facilitating the circulation patterns essential to capital accumulation, but their symbolic function is equally as important, because they show that capital can reach each corner of the earth. These containers, I suggest, prove Marx was right when he argued in volume 1 of Capital that the laws of capitalist production will eventually lead to the ‘entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalist regime’ (Marx, 1990: 929). I then juxtapose these container ships with images of refugee camps and migrant detention centres, where shipping containers are used to imprison refugees and migrants. I suggest that while shipping containers might tell us something about the global dynamics of circulation, they also embody another important aspect of contemporary capitalism – immobility. The capacity of goods to cross borders and the incapacity of some people, usually mediated by class, race, gender and nationality, to cross those same borders are two sides of the same global coin.

But, as is often the case in introductory courses, I am obscuring part of the story in favour of a neater and more digestible version of the world. What I don’t tell the students is that shipping containers are also about logistics, which gives us a much more complicated vision of contemporary capitalism in which fragmentation and striation are as essential to circulation and accumulation as the paradox of mobility and immobility. In their influential book Border as Method, Or, The Multiplication of Labor, Mezzadra and Nelson (2013) argue that ‘The aim [of logistics] is not to eliminate differences but to work across them to build passages and connections in an ever more fragmented world. Gaps, discrepancies, conflicts, and encounters as well as borders are understood not as obstacles but as parameters from which efficiencies can be produced’ (p. 206). In their later book, The Politics of Operations, Mezzadra and Nelson (2019) build on their preliminary analysis of logistics and contend that ‘Logistics. . .made the organization of global space more complicated and differentiated. Geographical entities such as special economic zones and logistics hubs sprang up to attract investment and organize the business of global production’ (p. 149). Logistics, to put it another way, sees borders as means to create new borders, borders within borders, worlds within worlds, all with novel and innovative ways to manage production, exploit and disperse labour power and enhance the circulation and accumulation of capital.

Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism tells us much more about this latter world, the one that I keep hidden from students. It isn’t a book about logistics, but it is one about the fragmented organisation of global space in which processes like logistics operate and proliferate. And, entertainingly, it is about the sometimes madcap, sometimes sinister figures that imagine and occasionally bring about such fractured global space. Slobodian (2023) identifies the ‘zone’ as the primary method of fragmentation, defined broadly as ‘an enclave carved out of a nation and freed from ordinary forms of regulation’ (p. 2). These zones might be anything from inconspicuous and downtrodden warehouses in the industrial zones of cities to glitzy city-states brimming with gleaming high-rise buildings and shops that house all the world’s leading luxury brands. Perforation, Slobodian (2023) contends, is the technique that sustains these disparate locations, which works ‘by punching holes in the territory of the nation-state, creating zones of exception with different laws and no democratic oversight’ (p. 3). Zones point towards, therefore, the interlinked economic and political ends of perforation: money can be made, but political power can also be wrestled away from state apparatuses.

Perhaps, then, rather than the container ship, it is another ship that regularly passes by our house that tells us as much, or more, about the world we inhabit today: the cruise ship. During the summer, at least one but usually two cruise ships dock at the port each day, often towering above the topography of the small coastal village suburb where I live. When cruise ships arrive, the village population temporarily triples, even quadruples in size. At times it feels like a zombie apocalypse, as tourists meander around the village, dead-eyed and wondering why they find themselves in this sleepy place with not much going on (not unlike the students in my lecture above). Things are sold; things are bought. The tourists return to their ship, which sails away in the evening, blaring its horn as a means of thank you or, perhaps, conquest.

The popularity of cruise ships is coeval with the explosion of the world of zones. Since the early 1980s, the global cruise ship industry has steadily grown at roughly seven per cent per year, initially in North America, then spreading to Europe, Asia, and Oceania from the early 1990s (Criggins, 2014). For many, cruise ships are a symbol of globalisation – they confirm the story we have told ourselves about ‘interconnection’ and the ‘flat world’ since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Slobodian, quite rightly, questions the neatness of this story – a story that is clearly falling apart at the seams as we write. He argues that ‘Globalization has both centripetal and centrifugal force. It binds us together while it tears us apart’ (Slobodian, 2023: 7). In many ways, this dual feature of globalisation undergirded Slobodian’s (2018) previous book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, in which he drew on an intellectual history of the Geneva school of neoliberalism to illustrate how the free-market world order required not the untamed unleashing of capitalist endeavours but the encasement of such endeavours within legal, institutional, and state frameworks that protected markets from democratic interventions. Slobodian showed that alongside the smooth space of circulation runs the striated space of containment, and both play a central role in the world since 1989. Or to put it another way, Globalists helps explain how shipping containers can be used both to move things across borders and to stop some people from moving across the same borders. This dual function is part of one and the same process.

From inside the zone looking outward, we see another story about globalisation. Cruise ships carry this story in their built environment and social structure. The ships and the paying customers who reside in them can move between places and nation-states with ease. And yet the cruise ships that enter the port near my home usually display the flags of the Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Panama or other tax havens. They are, in other words, attached to a fixed patch of territory that has perforated globalised space by creating favourable conditions for capital. It is no wonder that, as Slobodian (2023) notes, cruise ships are ‘a common point of reference’ for the anarcho-capitalists that populate his book, because these ‘floating resorts are microcosms of racialised hierarchy, picking and choosing from the world’s laws to keep the workforce as disempowered as possible’ (p. 236). As the customers on the top decks of the ship inhabit a quasi-borderless world, the workers, particularly those below deck and/or undertaking the reproductive labour that sustains the social world of the ship, are encased within a border, even if the actual border is far away from the ship’s current location. The flag on the front of the ship is no mere symbol – it lays the foundations for the socio-economic world that plays out inside the ship. The flag allows the cruise ship to move around the world – it constitutes its legal basis to enter a nation-state’s waters – and it enables the cruise ship company to use the laws of the nation-state represented on the flag to set its prices and divide its labour force.

Crack-Up Capitalism thus pushes us to re-think the broadly accepted historical narrative since the fall of the Berlin Wall – it punches holes in this history. Slobodian (2023) identifies the 1990s as ‘an underrated period of political ferment and a crucible of national and post-national imagination’ (p. 7). He argues that the story ‘must be flipped’ so that we can come to understand not only the forms of global integration that occurred in this decade and beyond, but also the ‘fracturing’ of the global order than ran alongside and, at times, in direct conflict with this integration. The zone is Slobodian’s protagonist in this flipped historical narrative and, fortunately for the reader, the zone spins a good yarn.

* * *

This book forum emerges out of a virtual roundtable on Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism held at the University of Otago in June 2023, where Melinda Cooper, Miranda Johnson and Jessica Whyte each responded to the book, with Slobodian replying to their contributions. In the roundtable discussion, Slobodian noted the stylistic and methodological differences between Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism. Despite the success of Globalists both within and outside academic circles – taken up by disparate readerships, from intellectual historians and left-wing organisers to doyens of the von Mises Institute and neoliberal think-tanks – Slobodian argued that it was essentially ‘a long conversation with [him]self’. ¹ Crack-Up Capitalism, however, is a trade book and thus he had to centre the ‘modal reader’ – think, the airport book buyer – over the academic one. Within this framework, Slobodian suggested that the book had three underlying aims. The first was to take the vast array of, and often dense and jargonistic, literature on the zone or perhaps more broadly ‘the built environment as it exists below the nation’, and make it more accessible to the general reader. The second was a self-critique of Globalists, which ‘kept banging on about how neoliberals all believe in the state’ but left unrecognised the ‘proper libertarians who do want to do away with the state’. And the final aim was to intervene in ‘stories that we’ve been telling about the recent past’, the same historical stories that we tell our students about the 20th century. He reminded us, as he does in the book (Slobodian, 2023: 64), that while Francis Fukuyama is most well-known for his ‘end of history’ thesis, first articulated in 1989, he also presented an alternative to the onwards march of liberal democracy in the form of ‘Asian soft authoritarianism’. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Crack-up Capitalism begins in Hong Kong, with Singapore and Dubai also playing prominent roles, because Slobodian was ‘trying to give us a version of contemporary history in which Asia plays. . .the central role’. Where many histories of neoliberalism as a political project often begin in Pinochet’s Chile, Slobodian suggested that ‘places like Singapore and Dubai [are] arguably sort of prototypes, or archetypes of political economic organization whose stars. . .burn a lot more brightly than Pinochet’s Chile in the contemporary market’. At the very least, an alternative story of the world order emerges from this vantage point.

Crack-Up Capitalism does a remarkable job in achieving these three goals, especially as it treads the line between theoretical sophistication and readability. It helps that many of the characters that appear in the book would not be out of place in a good literary narrative and that there are many moments of dark humour. (In her contribution to the roundtable, Cooper recalled laughing out loud on a plane while listening to the audiobook version.) Certainly, Crack-Up Capitalism is more accessible than much of the literature in infrastructure studies and related disciplines about subnational spatial organisation. Centring the zone as the primary method of perforation is also a useful thread for readers to carry through the book.

At the same time, however, we might question whether the zone is doing too much heavy lifting as an analytical tool in the narrative, whether the term flattens some of the key distinctions between the kinds of built environments that comprise zones. In her book Out of Stock: The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism, for instance, Orenstein (2019: 10–12) notes that instead of being ‘the master code of late capitalism’, zones ‘require more nuance’. Slobodian’s history focuses on the often glitzy, sometimes chilling, increasingly imaginary zones that excite and motivate cash-rich libertarians, whereas Orenstein’s history of the warehouse as a zone prioritises the ‘mundane: catologs of forklifts and hand trucks, engineering blueprints for sprinklers and refrigeration’. While both approaches tell us something about the subnational infrastructure of capitalism, their contrasting versions of zones suggests that the term has significant descriptive and theoretical latitude. In this respect, if the zone is to become a useful analytical tool for understanding the spatial dynamics of contemporary capitalism, then the relationship between its mundane and exotic forms, and everything in-between, requires further elaboration. Such elaboration is not the goal of Crack-Up Capitalism, but it is one direction in which we can take its valuable insights.

The forum published here encompasses the responses of two of the original discussants in the roundtable – Cooper and Johnson – with the addition of Jamie Peck. A version of Whyte’s contribution to the roundtable has appeared as a review essay in the journal Political Theory. In both her contribution to the roundtable and the review, Whyte adds another feature to Slobodian’s revisionist story about the 1990s – sanctions. ‘On the one hand’, Whyte (2023: 1025) contends, ‘tariff walls came down, and states curtailed their economic roles by removing subsidies and price controls and cutting social spending. On the other, powerful states increasingly wielded their economic might to cut off flows of trade, investment, and finance for geopolitical ends’. Adding sanctions to this story, Whyte insists, allows us to see how zones function to shield the wealthy from the effects of sanctions, leaving everyday civilians to weather the worst effects of such sanctions. In light of recent events, Whyte (2023: 1026) notes: ‘The attempt to isolate Russia [through sanctions] has been undermined by precisely the zones that Slobodian traces in this book, which have provided refuge for Russian capital and a home base for mass smuggling’. Zones, Whyte illustrates, offer another form of exit, not just from democracy but from sanctions, providing even more avenues for capitalism to ‘crack-up’.

In her response, Johnson finds a deep anti- or non-historicist ethos in the anarcho-capitalists in Slobodian’s book, who either deny or appropriate a progressivist historicism that emerged in the aftermath of empire. This progressivist historicism ‘strived to put Indigenous peoples back into history’, whereas for the free-market libertarians, such history, alongside the democratic world its seeks to bring about, mostly gets in the way of capital accumulation. When anarcho-capitalists draw on history – with the example of the Somalian escapades of Michael Von Notten and Spencer Heath MacCallum from Slobodian’s book – they do so in a way that ‘den[ies] Indigenous peoples’ historicity’ by constructing ‘simplistic characterisations of Indigenous people for the purpose of making a self-serving political claim’. But the likes of Von Notten and MacCallum find surprising interlocutors, Johnson observes, in certain domains of contemporary decolonial theory, which likewise ‘reject historicist thinking and aim to de-couple enduring Indigenous life-worlds from the determinations and legacies of colonialism’. Such theorists, like the anarcho-capitalists, also ‘offer an account of centralizing power as largely repressive’, and thus the complicated and entangled material history of colonialism can get in the way of ‘properly Indigenous self-understandings’. For Johnson, this technique is also an ‘exit strategy’ because it is ‘a disavowal of what it is that makes us want to exit in the first place’. This disavowal is of little consequence to the anarcho-capitalist, for history is merely a means to an end, but it really should be the concern of decolonial theorists who want to exit from legacies of colonialism.

If Johnson focuses on the strategies of historicism that inform the anarcho-capitalist imaginary, then Cooper is concerned with the strategy of exit that drives the entire anarcho-capitalist project. Cooper finds commonalities between the encasement metaphor that sustained Globalists and the ‘perforation’ metaphor that undergirds Crack-Up Capitalism. Cooper suggests that ultimately ‘the point is to encase market freedom in an enabling new legal carapace and to elude the surviving regulatory demands of the democratic nation-state. Encasement and exit work hand in hand’. Cooper sees this symbiosis play out in the example of the 1980s London Docklands redevelopment example in Crack-Up Capitalism, where we find a battle between a broader assault on public spending by Thatcher’s government – a form of encasement – and a municipal socialism practiced by the Greater London Council (GLC) led by Ken Livingstone, which Cooper describes as ‘an example of social libertarianism combined with fiscal abundance’. While Thatcher eventually crushed this social experiment by abolishing the Greater City of London, Cooper contends that ‘the GLC experiment showed us what a leftist strategy might look like in the face of a state that had temporarily opened the spending spigot to social welfare while attaching the most punitive and normative conditions to the distribution of benefits’. The lessons we can learn from this episode have resonances for the left today, Cooper insists, even if contemporary leftist strategy is confronted with vastly different circumstances. The question for the contemporary left is what exit strategies will work after ‘forty years of neoliberal statecraft’, especially as capitalism and state authoritarianism become more deeply entangled.

Peck, for his part, locates the methodological underpinnings of Crack-Up Capitalism within existing approaches to the intellectual history of neoliberalism and especially in relation to Slobodian’s Globalists. Peck draws on Ben Jackson’s schema on ideational histories of neoliberalism, which distinguishes between approaches that are ‘outside in’ – where ideas move inwards towards their social and political influences – and ‘inside out’ – which begin in the social world and move outwards towards the ideas that shape that world. Peck argues that Crack-Up Capitalism blends both these approaches. Furthermore, the diverse geographical examples in Slobodian’s book, Peck contends, are responses to a common critique that studies of neoliberalism tend to divide ‘the heartlands of knowledge production in the Global North and receiving grounds in the Global South’, a critique that Slobodian also responds to in his recent edited collection with Dieter Plehwe (Slobodian and Plehwe, 2022). To finish, Peck reflects on the relationship of the zone to the state, which Slobodian elaborates on in his conclusion. While zones certainly punch holes in state space, Peck ‘raises the question of who, exactly, is throwing those punches, in what directions, to what ends’. He suggests that zones are ‘a form of punching down’, a bit like austerity, in that they are ‘a downward projection of state power in the service of regulatory transformation’. And, much in the same way that the case for austerity is a delusion (Krugman, 2015), most zones have relatively little success in their purported aims. Yet as governments repeatedly slash social services they also continue to sanction zoning experiments. As Peck argues, ‘the fact of [zones’] peculiar staying power itself demands explanation’, as they perhaps reflect ‘the narrowness of what is left of the neoliberal mind’.

The diversity of the responses published here testify to the abundant critical avenues opened by Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism. The book also adds another layer to the story Slobodian told in Globalists, and we now have a better sense of the individuals and ideas that have been pushing from within and without to transform the nation-state. In both books, Slobodian punches holes in seemingly airtight narratives about the history of neoliberalism, and in doing so, he provides us with a much more rounded story of the world we now inhabit. What we do with this more rounded story, both theoretically and strategically, is up to us.