Exit strategies

Abstract

This paper approaches Quinn Slobodian’s work as a working guide to contemporary capitalist strategies of exit and containment. It asks what challenges this poses to anti-state critique from the left and what lessons might be learned.

In my response to Crack-up Capitalism, I would like to focus on a question that I believe is implicit in Quinn Slobodian’s two most recent books – that of strategy. In broad terms we could say that Slobodian is concerned with capitalist strategies of exit in the face of democratic expansion. As civil rights, feminist, and anti-colonial movements increased their pressure on the Keynesian state to democratize wealth and power in the 1960s and 70s, capitalist elites responded by withdrawing from the Keynesian consensus itself. Their choice of exit strategy took two distinct forms, explored in Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism respectively (Slobodian, 2018). Whereas Globalists looks at the efforts of business and financial elites to break out of and fly over the regulatory limits of the nation state from on high, Crack-up Capitalism focuses on similar efforts to elude these same constraints from below.

Slobodian frames the second book as a partial corrective to the first. Alongside the celebrated globalizing impulse of the 1990s, he reminds us, we can also discern a panoply of secessionist movements seeking to exit the social, fiscal, and legal constraints of the democratic nation-state. The organizing metaphor of Globalists was that of “encasement”: for all their paeons to market freedom, Slobodian argued, what advocates of global markets were really trying to do was protect the economy from government interference. In Crack-Up Capitalism, Slobodian prefers the metaphor of “perforation.” Yet it seems to me that the obvious geographical contrast between a world imagined as global and the hyper-fragmentation of the zone belies a deeper strategic commonality. The advocate of the special economic zone and global free trade is often one and the same person. In both cases, 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.

Exit is a form of crisis response: sometimes a pre-emptive, sometimes a restorationist strike against the threat of revolution or simply the wider distribution of wealth and voice promised by a fully-fledged Keynesian social democracy. Slobodian’s work focuses on the neoliberal and libertarian style of capitalist crisis response that has shaped our recent history. Yet I think he would agree that Keynesianism also can be understood as a kind of crisis response, albeit in a very different style. Keynesianism describes the strategy by which the state seeks to contain the threat of class (and race and gender) struggle by underwriting a growing share of social risks and mediating the core antagonism between labor and capital. Neoliberalism is the strategy by which the state abdicates these same responsibilities when they cease to be useful to capital. Keynesianism, as a form of capitalist statism, is defined by the centripetal strategy of absorption and containment. The neoliberal state, by contrast, is defined by the centrifugal spirit of secession. The neoliberal state is one that attempts as far as possible to offload its obligations vis-à-vis citizens. Instead of policing the freedom of capital, it actively aids and abets private efforts to elude its sphere of jurisdiction. And even as it abandons ordinary citizens to the contingencies of uninsured risk, it progressively assumes the role of risk-bearer of last resort for private capital. As Slobodian reminds us in his concluding reflections, even the most radical of libertarians is ultimately interested in recapturing rather than abolishing the state.

In his forensic attention to the geographical and legal methods of capitalist strategy, Slobodian provides us with an unparalleled map of the contemporary field of power – a kind of military field manual for would-be counter-strategists. What lessons might be drawn from here? Slobodian’s work has the merit of highlighting how profoundly the terrain of struggle has shifted and how easy it is to be captured by the seductions of anachronism. In framing capitalist method as an always historically informed response to challenges from the left, it also relativizes the latter’s strategic choices. What might have made perfect sense as a response to the Keynesian social state may be hopelessly weak as a response to the neoliberal anti-social state or the even more radical anti-statism of the libertarian right. Today we might ask ourselves: Is anarchism destined to play the game of unwitting collaborator when capitalism itself is renouncing its historically assumed social obligations? And is a resurgent socialism always going to be the midwife to Keynesianism, a statist dampener on more revolutionary desires?

One of my favorite episodes in Crack-Up Capitalism is the story of the London Docklands redevelopment of the 1980s, because it so clearly brings this strategic battle to the fore. Slobodian reminds us that before Thatcher turned the Docklands into a showcase enterprise zone, the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone had its own vision of urban renewal and proposed its own plan for reviving the area without expelling residents or cutting taxes on capital. As Slobodian (2023: 48–49) notes,

we often think of the 1980s in terms of the struggle between the state and the market. But this doesn’t capture the dynamic at all. Thatcher’s government and the GLC were both part of “the state.” Where they differed was in their conception of what the state was for. The urban New Left had their share of skepticism about the benevolent role of government; sometimes they referred to what they were doing as “in and against the state.” But what matters is where decisions are being made—and in whose interests they are being made.

Slobodian is referring to the pamphlet In and against the State (London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1979/1980/2021), first published in 1979, in which members of the New Left grappled with the strategic challenges of late Keynesianism. The pamphlet gave voice to a libertarian leftism or anarcho-communism that rejected the Leninist model of seizure of the state by the party vanguard, but which could not be described as straightforwardly anarchist either. After all, many of the distinctly new social movements that made up the New Left had emerged from within the spaces created by the Keynesian social state – the public school, public housing, the publicly funded university and public sector unions – even as they sought to push these institutions beyond their limits (Forrester, 2023; Wheeler, 1979/1980/2021). At a time when both Labour and the Tories were calling for cuts to the British welfare state, libertarian leftists were seeking to channel state money to more democratic ends, unmooring the social wage from the normative family form and welfare discipline.

Ironically this model found its fullest expression in the Thatcherite 1980s, when the labor left took control of the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone and proceeded to reinvent the way in which local government services were run and distributed. We “had seized power in order to give power away,” recalls John McDonnell (McDonnell and Wheeler, 2021: 138), the GLC’s former chair of finance, who more recently served as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer for Jeremy Corbyn. To this end, the GLC brought tenants unions, squatters, feminists, and rank-and-file unionists into council chambers and gave them space to redefine the scope and purpose of social services from within. The premise of the GLC’s municipal socialism was fiscal abundance – a fact that was perhaps not fully appreciated or theorized by the authors of In and Against the State. In a recent interview, John McDonnell speaks of the surprisingly warm relationship he had with the City of London during his time at the GLC. He could “borrow whatever and whenever,” had full “control over business rights” and local taxes, and presided over a permanent capital fund (McDonnell and Wheeler, 2021: 148). The GLC was that rarest of social experiments – an example of social libertarianism combined with fiscal abundance.

The experiment was brought to an abrupt end in 1986 when Thatcher abolished the Greater City of London and imposed new revenue collection limits on local government, in what can only be described as a tax revolt from above. But the episode is important in clarifying exactly what the capitalist strategy of secession was all about. This was not a battle against Keynesianism as such but against a vision of social libertarianism that was itself struggling in and against the Keynesian state. However briefly, 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 Greater City of London experiment took place in a temporal interregnum. In the midst of the Thatcherist assault on government spending, it survived as a reminder of the revolutionary possibilities of the New Left. Today we find ourselves in a similar interregnum, although the challenges we face are very different. The secessionist strategies described by Slobodian have defined the last 40 years of neoliberal statecraft, manifest on the one hand as a withdrawal of the state from the task of social provision and on the other as a dismantling of the tax burdens on private capital. At the same time, as Slobodian’s work has also shown, the imperialist ambitions of China and Russia have forced a return to trade protectionist and state-led industrial policies not seen in a very long time. The dangers of recuperation and accommodation remain as real as ever. Anarchism alone cannot challenge a state that already demands community self-sufficiency and mutual aid, although it can be very powerful when its counter-institutions are deployed offensively to force personal risks and obligations back onto the state ledger. Socialist advocates of a Green New Deal, on the other hand, are already faced with the challenge of how to avoid recuperation by a form of industrial or military Keynesianism.

In a world where “undemocratic capitalism” has become the “winning brand,” the combined fight against capitalist exploitation and state authoritarianism should in principle have created all the formal conditions for a renewed international left (Slobodian, 2023: 232). Yet in much of the western world at least, we encounter a pervasive sense of strategic blockage; an acknowledgment that 10 years or so of tactical skirmishes have failed to enduringly shift the political game (Bevins, 2023).

What have we missed that our interventions fail to find traction? A master cartographer of power, Slobodian is our best guide to understanding the spatial and legal intricacies of capitalist method in our times – hence an invaluable resource for understanding the weaknesses and strengths of the left. Crack-Up Capitalism is a nose-dive into the craziest and most creative experiments in libertarian exit. Yet it is also uncommonly enabling as a prompt to counter-strategic thinking – hopefully even more creative, and a respite from endless critique.