The Memory Bank

The family took a trip to Normandy based on Caen, home to William the Conqueror (formerly known as the Bastard) and the Memorial to World War II. We went to Bayeux for the tapestry and visited the beaches of the Normandy landings in June 1944. We were exposed to a bombardment of images and sounds, all of them evoking the war. The weather was freezing, the sky blue and the winter sun cast a pale light on the landscape. We took in the buildings and the fine regional cuisine: there is nowhere like France for reliable pleasures of that sort.

The weekend had a considerable impact on me and not just the car crash (to which I will return). I spent my first year in a Manchester bomb shelter and it took a long time for the devastation to be cleared up after the war. I am a keen historian too. So it’s not as if this stuff is new to me. Even so, the vivid immediacy of it all made a deep impression, forcing me to reflect again on what that war means for us today. The symmetry of two historic invasions 900 years apart, in the same places and from opposite directions, set off a sort of poetry of association.

What struck me first were the logistics of the Norman invasion and the D-day landings. William had to build all those boats, load them with men, horses, food and wine, erect a temporary fortress on the beach. He had already mastered the art of building castles from which to dominate the surrounding countryside. His castle at Caen, built to consolidate his position as Duke of Normandy, is much more impressive than any that I have seen in Britain. The military effectiveness of the Norman heavy cavalry has been much remarked upon. But the Bayeux tapestry museum exhibit points to another technology of control, writing, which William put to effective use in England, sending out monks trained in Norman scriptoria to compile the land registry of the Domesday book.

The genius of the American generals, Marshall, Eisenhower and the rest, was likewise logistical. The Germans defending France were subjected to a mobilization of people, machines and material that the world had never seen before. Less obvious is the fact that, by fighting this global war on several fronts at once, the Americans invented bureaucratic technologies that we have lived off ever since — systems theory, the internet and econometrics.

Each event — the Battle of Hastings and D-Day — deserves to stand alone in history for its political consequences. Yet they were both part of a global war. William’s invasion (the Normans were Vikings who had matched feudal cavalry to seamanship) was timed to coincide with an attack on Northeast England by the King of Norway, while other Normans were busy conquering Sicily. Within two decades of capturing England, the Normans were setting up colonies across the Mediterranean and banging on the gates of Jerusalem. William’s first task after being crowned in London was to secure the Irish Sea routes between the Baltic and the Mediterranean, access to which had been interrupted since the Arab conquest and by Danish expansion in the North Sea. In nationalist perspective, the whole point of Hastings was to replace the Saxon nobles and bishops with a Norman ruling class. But there were wider stakes at play and these have been largely forgotten or ignored.

The Caen Memorial has a place for the Eastern front of the Second World War. We learn that of the 50 million people who died in that war (compared with 8 million in 1914-18), 20 million were Russians. After being gripped by a video of the Battle of Britain, I sat with my young daughter alone at a screening of the Siege of Leningrad (almost three years!) and the Battle of Stalingrad. I don’t know what she made of it all. Sometimes she was frightened. Mostly she wanted to know if the good guys won. It was pretty overwhelming, the extraordinary mobilization of citizen armies and the shared devastation suffered by civilian populations. It is not hard to imagine why these people, when the war was over, built the nearest thing we have seen to functioning social democracy and set about creating an anti-colonial world order.

I have been living in France for a dozen years now. One lasting impression is how much more alive twentieth century history is here than in Britain, where a sort of post-imperial amnesia seems to have set in, and the United States, which was founded on an escape from history. I couldn’t help reflect on the tremendous power of that American mid-century expansion into the world, a tidal movement that may be ebbing now; and on the lack of domestic damage suffered by Americans for whom Pearl Harbour and the World Trade Center were so exceptional. I want the whole world to come to Caen and see what actually happened in that war.

All of this took place against the backdrop of the economic catastrophe we are living through today. Just as the fall of the Berlin wall opened up the history of the twentieth century, returning us to 1917 and beyond, the financial crisis of 2008 (fast becoming the general economic collapse of 2009) has brought the Thirties back to life. For some time now, I have felt that the analogy with the Great Depression is misleading. The Reagan/Thatcher credit boom was like the three decades of financial imperialism before the First World War and that would place us now around 1913-14 on the brink of another world war. There is something sterile about this kind of comparison, however, and that seemed doubly so after my visit to Normandy.

The history of 1914-45 cannot be repeated today. There will never again be huge citizen armies slugging it out for control of national territories, while cities are bombed into submission. The technologies of twentieth century warfare were pioneered by the British at the turn of the century in response to Irish, Boer and Indian resistance to Empire (concentration camps, hit squads, disinformation campaigns); the Bulgarians invented civilian bombing in the Balkan wars of 1912-13. The horrors to come will be of a different sort, building on social technologies that have been discovered more recently. As Marx said, you can’t steal from a nation of bankers in the same way as from a nation of shepherds. The same goes for war. Maybe next time Europe will be less central to the action.

Oh yes, the crash. Within twenty minutes of collecting a rental car at Caen railway station, I was lost in the suburbs, the sun was low in my eyes and I was faced with a maze of roads and tramlines. While I was figuring out what to do (but moving), I missed a light and was slammed into by something the size of a train. The car was trapped on the kerb and neither the tram nor I could move. None of us was hurt. The rescue operation took three hours and involved a plethora of firemen, police, tramway officials and breakdown men. Everyone was very good about it. I was caught between feeling desperately unlucky (this particular tram came every ten minutes, why in the second that I crossed that line?) and also very lucky (we were untouched and I escaped more bureaucratic inconvenience than seemed likely at one time). You could say that the event cast an air of gloom over the excursion, timed as it was to coincide with Sophie’s birthday.

Maybe the crash softened me up to be more receptive to the Caen and Bayeux museums than I would otherwise have been. I don’t know. It was a memorable weekend for sure.

John C Turmel is a professional gambler, perennial candidate in Canadian elections and a ‘banking engineer’ with a longstanding interest in currency issues. Visit his website. He recently got hold of an article I wrote in 2002 comparing the Argentinian peso and the euro: A tale of two currencies, Anthropology Today, 18. 1: 20-22. The result is a reading and commentary in two parts posted on YouTube, lasting ten minutes each. These may be of more interest to me than to the casual watcher, but I post them here for the combination of media (vlog and reading), as well as for their content.

Part 1

Part 2

AA: Why so long since the last time?

KH: I was in Montreal for a conference last week, landed in time for the coldest temperature in years. But the snow and the ice on the trees were pretty. Since I got back, it seems that the political climate is warming up in France. The Greeks have a responsive audience here. Everyone says there will be a big fight with Sarkozy in the spring. In the meantime, people have seized on his attempt to remove commercial ads from the public television stations. It’s funny really, the left combining for the right of public TV to sell advertising; but they see it rightly as Sarkozy paying off his chums in the private channels and weakening the revenue base of the public alternative. The whole mechanism of the decision has been exposed to view and the pretense of due procedure gets more ridiculous by the day.

AA: You mean people are going to take to the streets like the Greeks?

KH: Well, one scenario is that the railway men will strike and this will provoke a general strike, with or against the railway men. A passenger in Lyon tried to strangle a SNCF employee last night. Tempers are short. The universities are a powder keg, they have been messed about so much. The professors in some places have refused to hand in marks to the administration, while giving them to the students. Obviously they want the students out on the streets. I think the government knows this; certainly they have shown signs of caving in recently. We probably have the Greek to thank for that.

AA: It’s curious that the markets are bidding up the euro these days. It can’t be that they underestimate the weakness of the European economy. The Germans are going their own way, trading insults with the English. Not much solidarity there. Maybe they feel they gain by maximizing the volatility in exchange rates. This month it’s taking down the pound, after new year it will be the euro. Or are they really stupid enough to see nothing but the figures flashing before their eyes in a given moment?

KH: I always thought that the best way would be to keep a hard euro and let each country float its own politically managed currency. But to reverse Maastricht in that way would take so many deliberations that individual countries will seek their own solutions before it happens, like introducing exchange rate controls. I guess it would also destroy the illusion that Europe could achieve political union through adopting a single currency.

AA: How are you getting on as an international currency dealer?

KH: You’re joking, but I’ve been watching my small portfolio of currencies very closely. I got as much as I could out of sterling, ran down my euro holdings and parked it all in yen and dollars at the beginning of November. The pound has held steady against these in the last two weeks, but it lost 8 centimes against the euro in that time. Already the strong dollar and yen is showing up as reduced exports; and of course there is no knowing what the Fed’s latest monetary policy will do for the exchange rate.

AA: There are only two routes out of such a large credit bubble: hyperinflation and war. It looks like the USA is ready for either or both. Now that the Fed has taken interest rates down to near zero, the only tool it has left is to print money. And I guess you have noticed the warmongering noises over Pakistan. Brown goes out there to say that 75% of the domestic terror threats originate in Pakistan. Do they have no shame? 75%! Where do you get a figure like that from? It’s no different from saying how many minutes it would take Saddam to land a dirty bomb on London. You say that the European elites are worried about people taking to the streets. How many options do they have other than war? Well, hyperinflation would grab people’s attention too. I hope you have your wheelbarrow handy.

KH: I don’t, but I do have a billion Zimbabwean dollar note. But a case can still be made that deflation is the problem, not inflation. I would have thought you might recognize that now that OPEC has cut back on production and the oil price immediately fell! One thing for sure is that the Bank of England is deliberately running down the pound. They announced this week that they would not commit any Treasury funds to its defence. Between the Scylla and Charydis of inflation and deflation…

AA: We’ll see what happens to the dollar oil price. The chattering classes are talking about an early British election. Brown is morally and politically bankrupt and all the Tories can think of is to ape Angela Merkel as Thatcher’s true reincarnation, the angel of tight money. I tell you, the whole lot deserve to be flushed down the sewer. I would leave London, but my kids are doing well at school here.

KH: Same with me in Paris. The women who teach in the public primary schools here are the best on earth. My kid can’t get enough of it. The obvious route for Britain and France is to market their education systems, but the politicians think nuclear submarines and aerospace are more important. They see education as a threat to themselves and they are right to. If it isn’t that, it’s the immigration threat. Just when Asians are switching to British higher education because of the high dollar and euro, the authorities have introduced even more stringent financial controls over foreign students. We may not harass them so much at airports, like the Americans, but we make the bureaucracy a lot harder.

AA: There is no point in trying to discover the rationality of it all. The western ruling classes are going down and they know it. But, before they do, they are going to put out the lights for the rest of us.

A lecture with discussion given in the School of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban in November 2009.

Machines, money and people in the formation of a global society. A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths, University of London on 23rd October 2007.

Part 1

The rest of the lecture can be found here:

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

A lecture in five parts given at Goldsmiths College, London on November 26th.

Part 1

The rest of the lecture can be found here:

• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5

AA: I told you Obama is a hawk. Look at his security team. No wonder the left can’t figure out what is happening. That’s why they are calling him an Uncle Tom.

KH: Well, I can see that some could be worried that this is a recycling of the same old Washington elite. Who speaks for the little people in this lot? I guess the answer is Obama himself. He does keep stressing that they are there to do the job he was elected for. He means to change things alright.

AA: Are you telling me he is a revolutionary?

KH: There have been four phases of the American revolution, if not four revolutions: Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Obama. Obama thinks he is Lincoln on a world-scale, not just for the US. That means the modern equivalent of the civil war, a lot of bodies. His ’security team’ reflects what he learnt from LBJ about pissing from inside and outside the tent. The criticism he is getting from the left reminds me of a hot argument I had with an American student after seeing Forrest Gump together. I liked it, she thought it was dissing everything she believed in. Obama really intends to get beyond the culture wars of the 60s that spawned his mother…and him.

AA: So he’s not a liberal in the standard American sense, despite his voting record as ‘the most liberal’ senator…

KH: I doubt if most American liberals are interested in much beyond what is between their own ears. I was in LA mid-September. The Hollywood liberals were in a panic about how ‘they’ (the Republicans and ’small town Americans’) were going to steal the prize from them again. I said it was going to be a landslide because I don’t share their class prejudice. The same people are now banging on about how Obama has lost the plot and betrayed them. If he had listened to them instead of sticking to his strategy, he would have lost. They don’t understand about governing from the centre right in order to implement a progressive agenda.

AA: Whatever. The war in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Kashmir is getting a lot hotter after the Mumbai massacre. It’s not quite “the gunshot heard around the world”, but I wonder if the next world war will be traced to this event. You can see the sides lining up already. Obama will go with India, abandoning Pakistan, but to whom? China and Russia? The Chinese are already feeling the economic pinch big time. The Japanese are worried that they may be the target of a nationalist distraction. But the Chinese can’t stay out of a Himalayas conflict, given their commitment to holding on to Tibet. So how about the US (with Britain as bag-carrier), a few Europeans, India and Japan as an Alliance for Democracy against the revived threat of the two Evil Empires and Muslim terror (that is, all of us, especially the Saudis who bankroll this stuff)?

KH: It’s hard to know about the Europeans. I see that they are going cool on getting Ukraine into NATO, forcing the Ukrainians to cosy up to the Russians again. One minute they are talking about reducing energy dependence on Russia, the next they are trying to make a deal. Putin doesn’t have a lot of room for manoeuvre with low commodity prices and an antiquated army. It’s fun to watch the oligarchs feeling the pinch. Abramovich is cutting costs at Chelsea, the poor dears. The world is turning upside down so quickly. I find it interesting how the different European countries are reverting to national type in this crisis. Angela Merkel refuses to have anything to do with the ‘financial stimulus’ packages being promoted in the US, France and Britain, preferring to stick with thrift and the traditional virtue of belt-tightening. The British Tories the same. The battle lines are hardening between what Krugman calls the advocates for ‘fiscal expansion’ and the ‘deficit hawks’. The line goes right down the middle of Europe.

AA: Time for another Orwell. Do you remember the lineup in 1984? Three power blocs: Eurasia (the Soviet Union and Europe), Eastasia (China and Japan) and Oceania (the Americas, Britain, Southern Africa and Australasia) fighting over a quadrilateral stretching from the Mediterranean and West-Central Africa through the Middle East to South Asia?

KH: Yes. It would be interesting to update that sketch. The main difference would be the weakening of Greater Europe and the rise of India. But then it has always been hard for the West to treat India seriously. I suppose British propaganda made them out to be pathetic, not to mention the original home of inequality. I have been watching the shift of power from Britain back to India for some time. The leadership of the Commonwealth, for instance. But the most glaring example is cricket, the Victorian symbol of how to reconcile democracy with empire. Suddenly the Indians are calling the shots worldwide. And what could be more pathetic than the England team running home for safety after losing all their games? Whether they go back again for the remaining test matches seems to be a matter of personal choice for each cricketer. Thomas Arnold’s team spirit it certainly ain’t.

AA: Remind me to look up ‘cricket’ in Wikipedia some time. I’m more concerned about them blaming us for financing the jihadists.

KH: Well, don’t you? OK, we’ll leave it for now. Another cup of tea?

KH: You’re looking glummer than usual. What is it? Oil in the $50s?

AA: No, we can hardly expect anything else with the world economy heading for the next Great Deflation, if it isn’t already there. I just spent a week in Riyadh. You know, the world looks different from there — four or five hours flying time from London, Moscow, Nairobi and Mumbai. America seems almost as far away as Australia. It feels like the centre of the world, now that the North Atlantic is losing its grip over the rest of us.

KH: So that makes you sad?

AA: No, not in itself. It’s just that I can’t see the transfer of power eastwards being peaceful. The Americans have launched their new Africa military command from the Sahara to the Horn and Bush has turned Somalia into an inferno. The pirates hijacked a Saudi tanker and the Indian navy is steaming in, the Europeans want to send gunships to keep the Suez/Aden route open… They just blew up a village in order to claim the scalp of a terrorist born in Birmingham. Pakistan is a mess, the Taliban control Peshawar. And we are not even talking about the sixty nukes yet; but I did read Global Trends 2025,  put out by the ‘National Intelligence Council’. It has headlines like “The potential for conflict will increase owing partly to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East”; and we know where that is, Afghanistan/Pakistan, a place that just happens to have Russia, India and China as neighbours, not to mention the Islamic world. Langley is zeroing in on Obama’s top priority and the rest of us had better take cover.

KH: It’s funny you should say that, because I just posted my latest essay, where I reflect on Polanyi’s relevance as a prophet for these times. I got to thinking about the parallels between the last three decades and the similar period of financial capitalism that ended in 1914. By now everyone is drawing the parallel with the Great Depression of the 30s, but what if the end of the prewar boom in 1913 is a better analogy? That would mean a replay of the ‘Second thirty years war’ of 1914-45, the worst time ever, until the world picked itself up and tried serious improvement after 1945.

AA: That’s not a bad idea. When Roosevelt came in, the US economy was down on its knees to a level that is impossible to imagine now. But it wouldn’t take much to spark another military conflagration these days. The fact is that Obama wants it. He knows that the US has to get actively engaged at the crossroads of Asia and that the Gulf will be a sideshow. Oil is so twentieth century. All those lefties (including his own campaign team) complaining about Hillary becoming Secretary of State don’t get it. He’s a hawk. I wouldn’t be surprised if he reintroduces the draft very soon. He’ll have to call its something else, of course, maybe international community service…

KH: Pity that ‘The Peace Corps’ is already taken. Do you know that story about William James having a recurrent dream of the end of the world that he couldn’t remember when he woke up? So he put a pencil and paper on the bedside table for the next time and wrote something down before falling asleep again. In the morning, it read “The Smell of Gasoline”. But I think you are wrong about Obama. The guys who write to nettime are obsessed with the notion that he’s just raring to go, can’t wait to bomb women and children in Third World villages. But that is because they don’t want to abandon the anti-American politics of a lifetime. I am more inclined to the line I heard from a Swiss friend last weekend: “People everywhere can’t help but be affected by Obama’s election”. The world has changed and Obama would be crazy to spend all that good will by invading Pakistan.

AA: Well, when he does launch his imperialist war, he won’t have to watch his back in the black ghettos this time round. I am sure the Pentagon is grateful to know that Michelle and the girls are insurance against inner city riots the next time the poor get hauled off to war.

KH: You’re just bitter because he’s serious about green economics and wants to make the US independent of Gulf oil.

AA: Not at all. We are just rentier capitalists now. We know that the black stuff will get a good price whenever we suck it up. Our main priority is to invest the money we already have. I care more about Obama making the wrong call on the financial bailout than about whether he can force GM to build green cars. I am talking about the fact that, when the balloon goes up, it will be in my region and good Muslims will die — the old, women and children. God knows what the Israelis will use the opportunity of a general war for… It means that the military will be in the driving seat again and us commercial types will just have to watch. Have you not seen all the articles reminding us that FDR didn’t sort out the Great Depression? It took the second world war to do that.

Mauss, Polanyi and the breakdown of the neoliberal world economy

Anthropology in the financial crisis

Everybody knows that we are living through a hinge moment in world history, the financial crisis of 2008. The collapse of the credit boom has already had dramatic social consequences: the default and nationalization of banks, dramatic losses of personal savings and mortgage foreclosures on a massive scale. Where it will all end is anyone’s guess. Apart from these tangible effects, the present crisis also concerns ideas about the economy. Free market economics has gained an unparalleled dominance within the academy and society more generally in the last three decades. Economists, armed with impenetrable mathematical arguments, encouraged politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown to claim ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) to their market fundamentalism. They preached an eternally benevolent spiral, ‘beyond boom and bust’, guaranteed by radically reducing the role of the state and politics in distribution – the question of who gets what in the world. The collapse of this pretence has been as sudden as the paper fortunes built on it. All too often a distinction is drawn between the world of finance and the ‘real economy’, as if borrowing money for holidays against rising house prices and the theft of public assets by corporate predators were not real. I argue for a perspective that treats money as an integral part of society rather than as something semi-detached from it.

The period since the 1980s, sometimes referred to as ‘neo-liberal globalization’, has seen two apparently contradictory trends. On the one hand, for the first time significant numbers of anthropologists have studied capitalism in its central workings; on the other, the majority have become more insular and introverted, offering fragmented narratives within a narrow framework of time and space, while leaving to others questions of where the world is heading and why. The breakdown of the economists’ intellectual hegemony represents a chance for us to link our engagement with people’s lives to anthropology’s original mission to understand humanity as a whole. We have perhaps been intimidated into adopting a more blinkered posture than is warranted by our own intellectual traditions. Bruce Kapferer has recently argued that, at its best, anthropology rests on ‘the subversion of dominance’ through an emphasis on the whole, ethnographic practice and skeptical Reason. I agree. The scale of current events reminds us that the rupture between ethnography and history that launched the modern discipline needs to be mended. Then perhaps we will build more effective bridges between the everyday circumstances that we each know well and the larger unknowns that threaten to undermine us all, thereby helping to make emergent world society more meaningful.

Money is not simply issued by governments or even by the banks: a dispersed global network of financial institutions and actors of various kinds have lately joined the process of its creation in the form of a plethora of credit instruments whose global circulation (commonly known as ‘the markets’) now vastly exceeds — or at least it did until recently — the use of money to finance international trade. For all the proliferation of issuers, this still leaves the bulk of humanity discriminated against, since access to the massive flows of global capital is limited to the few. Until recently, this question of distributive justice, indeed the politics of inequality as a whole, could be treated as secondary to the imperative of leaving ‘the markets’ free to bring about an irreversible increase in global prosperity. The current financial crisis affects rich countries first, but it has more general effects, through its consequences for investment and monetary creation in the rest of the world. Already the ‘emerging markets’ of Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia are threatened with catastrophe for making their vulnerable economies depend on the house of cards that was global finance. Who wins and who loses in all this remains to be determined. It is not certain, for example, that the world’s poor will suffer most, since they have less to lose than the principal beneficiaries of the boom. But it is certain that the question of distribution will once again come to the forefront of political debate. Marx argued that, by subsuming distribution under the mechanics of exchange, liberal economists sought to disguise class exploitation as a logic of market equilibrium. The era of ‘neo-liberalism’ achieved a similar effect. Now it is obvious that market exchange has profound consequences for distribution that are far from benign and require drastic political intervention.

It seems that, along with the bankruptcy of some banks and even countries, the delegation of the power to channel credit to the private bureaucracies of contemporary finance has already lost its air of inevitability and indeed its former legitimacy. The institutions of investment banking, financial markets and professional self-regulation, with their supposedly indispensable and insuperable expertise, are now challenged on their own terms, and by the same politicians and journalists who, only a few months ago, defended them as the best or, occasionally, the least bad of all worlds. The new role of states in the crisis breaks as well with neoliberal insistence on the need to limit their influence on the distribution of money. At the same time, the global character of the crisis exposes the financial limits of each nation-state. Thus attempts by European states to act independently only show up the political weakness of their economic institutions. The US Federal Reserve has had to co-ordinate with other central banks in order to ease the access of banks to credit around the world. These phenomena reverse the economic orthodoxy concerning resource distribution that sought for three decades to release corporations from public constraints on accumulation. The challenge is both political and intellectual, in that we need to devise new global institutions and to think about them in fresh ways. After decades when inequality was justified as a necessary by-product of economic growth, the popping of the credit bubble that fostered this illusion means that the issue of distribution is certain to return to centre stage.

It is no coincidence that economic anthropology was last a powerful force in the 1970s, when the world economy was plunged into depression by the energy crisis, and has been marginalized by neo-liberal hegemony ever since. Now, if ever, is the time for anthropologists to renew an engagement with political economy that went into abeyance then. The prize at stake for our discipline as a whole is much larger than the revival of one of its parts. Anthropology’s highest mission is to start from where people are and go with them wherever they take you. That means engaging with their visions of the world, perhaps to catch a glimpse of the world humanity is making together. What better time to follow this imperative than when the model the world has been compelled to live by for three decades is in such disarray?

The making of world society

According to writers as varied as John Locke and Karl Marx, ours is an age of money, a transitional phase in the history of humanity. Seen in this light, capitalism’s historical mission is to bring cheap commodities to the masses and break down the insularity of traditional communities before being replaced by a more just society. It matters where we are in this process, but the answers given differ widely. When a third of humanity works in the fields with their hands and a similar number has never made a phone call in their lives, I would say that capitalism still has quite a way to go. My focus here is on the part played by money in the formation of world society at a time when the risks of the process have just been brutally exposed. I prefer to call this ‘the new human universal’ rather than the normal term, ‘globalization’, even though we now face the urgent question of whether world society faces another period of disintegration comparable to 1914-45 before the task of rebuilding it can again be undertaken with the seriousness that it was after 1945.

Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. The task of building a global civil society for the twenty-first century, perhaps even a federal world government, is an urgent one. Money, instead of being denigrated for its exploitive power, should be recognized for its redemptive qualities, particularly as a mediator between persons and society. Money — and the markets it sustains – is itself a human universal, with the potential to be emancipated from the social engines of inequality that it currently serves.

A lot hinges on where in the long process of human evolution we imagine the world is today. The Victorians believed that they stood at the pinnacle of civilization. I think of us as being like the first digging-stick operators, primitives stumbling into the invention of agriculture. In the late 90s, I asked what it is about us that future generations will be interested in and settled on the rapid advances then being made in forming a single interactive network linking all humanity. This has two striking features: first, the network is a highly unequal market of buyers and sellers fuelled by a money circuit that has become progressively detached from production and politics; and second, it is driven by a digital revolution whose symbol is the internet, the network of networks. So my research over the last decade has been concerned with how the forms of money and exchange are changing in the context of this communications revolution.

My case for a recent speed-up of global integration rests on three developments of the last two decades: 1. the collapse of the Soviet Union, opening up the world to transnational capitalism and neoliberal economic policies; 2. the entry of China’s and India’s two billion people, a third of humanity, into the world market as powers in their own right; and 3. the abbreviation of time and distance brought about by the communications revolution and the population’s restless mobility. The corollary of this revolution is a counter-revolution — the reassertion of state power since September 11th and the imperialist war for oil in the Middle East, to which we may now add the strong possibility of a descent via another deflation to world war. Certainly we have regressed significantly from the hopes for equality released by the Second World War and the anti-colonial revolution that followed it. On the other hand, growing awareness of the risks for the future of life on this planet entailed in current levels and forms of economic activity might encourage more people to take globalization seriously. The ecological (‘green’) paradigm — manifested as concern for global warming and for total food, water and energy supplies – is powerful enough to replace market fundamentalism as the natural religion of this emergent world society.

The rise and fall of national capitalism

In order to understand the potential of our moment in history, we need to reflect on competing visions of the development of capitalism in the twentieth century and before. There is no more fruitful place to begin such reflection than Karl Polanyi’s masterpiece, The Great Transformation, published in 1944 and largely gestated in England during the 1930s. It opens with a highly selective account of the making of world society in the nineteenth century, a society that Polanyi not unreasonably considered to be lying in ruins as he wrote. Money was a central feature of all four pillars of this civilization. Polanyi identified the interest that had sustained a century of peace in Europe with what he insisted on calling haute finance,

“an institution sui generis, peculiar to the last third of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth century, [which] functioned as the main link between the political and economic organization of the world in this period.”

The international gold standard “was merely an attempt to extend the domestic market system to the international field”; the balance-of-power system was a superstructure built on its foundation; and the gold standard’s fall “was the proximate cause of the catastrophe”. The self-regulating market was “the fount and matrix of the system”; it had “produced unheard-of material welfare”, but it was utopian in its pursuit of an autonomous circuit of commodities and money. The liberal state, in the name of market freedom, forced all other interests in society to submit to the freedom of capital, another word for money.

Later in the book, Polanyi listed money as one of the three “fictitious commodities”. Labour, land and money are essential to the industrial system; they must therefore be bought and sold, but they were definitely not produced for sale. Labour is human activity that is part of life itself; land is another word for nature; and “actual money is merely a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking or state finance”. Here Polanyi comes close to suggesting that a free market in money entails buying and selling society itself. Money and markets for him have their origin in the effort to extend society beyond its local core. Polanyi believed that money, like the sovereign states to which it was closely related, was often introduced from outside; and this was what made the institutional attempt to separate economy from politics and naturalise the market as something internal to society so subversive.

Polanyi distinguished between “token” and “commodity” forms of money. “Token money” was designed to facilitate domestic trade, “commodity money” foreign trade; but the two systems often came into conflict. Thus the gold standard sometimes exerted downward pressure on domestic prices, causing deflation that could only be alleviated by central banks expanding the money supply in various ways. The tension between the internal and external dimensions of economy often led to serious disorganization of business. Another way of putting this contradiction is to oppose the liberal definition of money as just a “medium of exchange” to one as a “means of payment”. Here Polanyi echoes Knapp, Keynes and others who wished to draw attention to the political possibilities for state manipulation of “purchasing power”. (I should mention in parenthesis that Polanyi’s opposition between token and commodity money was the main source for my own analysis of the interdependence of the two sides of the coin over twenty years ago).

The final collapse of the international gold standard was thus one consequence of the ruinous attempt to delink commodity and token forms of money. In a trenchant discussion of the economic crisis of the 1930s that has echoes of the world economy today, Polanyi highlighted the separation of the money system from trade. As restrictions on trade grew, money became more free:

“Short-term money moved at an hour’s notice from any point of the globe to another; the modalities of international payments between governments and between private corporations or individuals were uniformly regulated….In contrast to men and goods, money was free from all hampering measures and continued to develop its capacity to transact business at any distance at any time. The more difficult it became to shift actual objects, the easier it became to transmit claims to them….The rapidly growing elasticity and catholicity of the international monetary mechanism was compensating, in a way, for the ever-contracting channels of world trade….Social dislocation was avoided with the help of credit movements; economic imbalance was righted by financial means.”

But of course, in the end, political means of settling the imbalance outweighed market solutions and war was the result. I am sure that the present crisis will lead to a sharp reversal of the trend to cheapen transport costs and a more pronounced regionalization of the world economy than hitherto. I recently saw a stark aerial image of Hong Kong harbour with ships lined up as far as the eye can see. They were going nowhere because there were no bills of credit for their cargoes.

The 1940s did indeed see a world revolution; but its immediate outcome was not foreseen by Polanyi. Even so interest in his work has never been greater than now and this may be related to his prophetic value in the present crisis of world economy. Since the last three decades have seen a replay of the “self-regulating market” scenario and the beginning of its demise, Polanyi’s vision offers one perspective on the political and economic origins of our own times. But other visions are possible and for my own we need first to retrace our steps to the great transformation of the mid-nineteenth century.

The1860s saw a transport and communications revolution (steamships, continental railways and the telegraph) that decisively opened up the world economy. At the same time a series of political revolutions gave the leading powers of the coming century the institutional means of organizing industrial capitalism. These were the American civil war, the culmination of Italy’s Risorgimento, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the formation of the Anglo-Indian super-state, Britain’s second reform act and Japan’s Meiji Restoration. German unification at the end of the decade spilled over into the 1870s through the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris commune and the formation of the French Third Republic. Karl Marx published Capital in the same decade and the First International was formed in 1864. The concentration of so many epochal events in such a short time would indicate a degree of integration of world society even then. But in the 1870s, international trade accounted for no more than 1% of GNP in most countries; and the most reliable indicator of Britain’s annual economic performance was still the weather at harvest-time.

Capitalism has always rested on an unequal contract between owners of large amounts of money and those who make and buy their products. This contract depends on an effective threat of punishment if workers withhold their labour or buyers fail to pay up. The owners cannot make that threat alone: they need the support of governments, laws, prisons, police, even armies. By the mid-nineteenth century, it became clear that the machine revolution was pulling unprecedented numbers of people into the cities, where they added a wholly new dimension to traditional problems of crowd control. The political revolutions of the 1860s were based on a new and explicit alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class to form states capable of managing industrial workforces and of taming the criminal gangs that had taken over large swathes of the main cities. Germany and Japan provided the clearest examples of such an alliance which took a specific form in each country.

Before long, governments provided new legal conditions for the operations of large corporations, ushering in mass production and consumption through a bureaucratic revolution. The implicit author of this new synthesis was Hegel who argued in The Philosophy of Right that states, run by university-trained bureaucrats, should regulate capitalist markets with a view to containing their extreme consequences, while allowing their material benefits to accrue to the people as a whole. I call this “national capitalism”, the attempt to control money, markets and accumulation by means of central bureaucracies. The national system became general after the First World War and was the dominant social form of twentieth-century civilization. Its apogee or “golden age” (Hobsbawm) was the period 1948-1973. This was a time of strong states and economic expansion when the idea of ‘development’ (poor nations growing richer with the help of the already rich) replaced colonial empire for most ‘Third World’ countries. When, shortly before his downfall, Richard Nixon announced that “We are all Keynesians now”, he was reflecting a universal belief that governments had a responsibility to manage national capitalism in the interests of all citizens.

The 1970s were a watershed. United States expenditure on its losing war in Vietnam generated huge imbalances in the world’s money flows, leading to a breakdown of the fixed parity exchange-rate system devised at Bretton Woods during the war. America’s departure from the gold standard in 1971 triggered a free-for-all in world currency markets, leading in 1975 to the invention of money market futures in Chicago to stabilize export prices for Midwestern farmers. At the same time, the world economy was plunged into depression in 1973 by the formation of OPEC and a hefty rise in the price of oil. ‘Stagflation’ (high unemployment and inflation) increased, opening the way for conservatives such as Reagan and Thatcher to revive the strategy of giving economic priority to ‘the market’ rather than ‘the state’. The economic conditions of three decades ago and the policies devised then find their denouement today.

In 1975, all but a minute proportion of the money exchanged internationally paid for goods and services purchased abroad. Thirty years later, this function in turn accounted for only a small fraction of global money transfers, the vast bulk being devoted to exchanging money for money in another form. This rising tide of money, sometimes known as ‘the markets’, represents the apotheosis of financial capitalism, with the actual production and sale of commodities and political management of currencies and trade virtually abandoned in favour of an autonomous global circuit of capital. The conditions Polanyi described for the decades leading up to the First World War have been closely replicated in the last quarter-century. As the smoke rises from the rubble of neoliberalism’s demise, we should revisit the story of national capitalism’s rise and fall; and Polanyi’s account of that earlier cycle has lost none of its fascination for us.

Money, much as Durkheim argued for religion, is the principal means for us all to bridge the gap between everyday personal experience and a society whose wider reaches are impersonal. Money is often portrayed as a lifeless object separated from persons, whereas it is a creation of human beings, imbued with the collective spirit of the living and the dead. Money, as a token of society, must be impersonal in order to connect individuals to the universe of relations to which they belong. But people make everything personal, including their relations with society. This two-sided relationship is universal, but its incidence is highly variable. Money in capitalist societies stands for alienation, detachment, impersonal society, the outside; its origins lie beyond our control (the market). Relations marked by the absence of money are the model of personal integration and free association, of what we take to be familiar, the inside (home). This institutional dualism, forcing individuals to divide themselves between production outside and consumption at home every day, asks too much of us. People want to integrate division, to make some meaningful connection between their own subjectivity and society as an object. It helps that money, as well as being the means of separating public and domestic life, was always the main bridge between the two. That is why money must be central to any attempt to humanize society. It is both the principal source of our vulnerability in society and the main practical symbol allowing each of us to make an impersonal world meaningful.

The reality of markets is not just universal abstraction, but this mutual determination of the abstract and the concrete. If you have some money, there is almost no limit to what you can do with it, but, as soon as you buy something, the act of payment lends concrete finality to your choice. Money’s significance thus lies in the synthesis it promotes of impersonal abstraction and personal meaning, objectification and subjectivity, analytical reason and synthetic narrative. Its social power comes from the fluency of its mediation between infinite potential and finite determination. To turn our backs on markets and money in the name of collective as opposed to individual interests reproduces by negation the bourgeois separation of self and society. It is not enough, as most sociologists and anthropologists of money do, to emphasize the controls that people already impose on money and exchange as part of their personal practice. That is the everyday world as most of us know it. We also need ways of reaching the parts of the macro-economy that we don’t know, if we wish to avert the ruin they could bring down on us all. Perhaps this was what Simmel had in mind when he said that money is the concrete symbol of our human potential to make universal society.

The two great means of communication are language and money. Anthropologists have paid much attention to the first, which divides us more than it brings us together, but not to money whose potential for universal communication is more reliable, in addition to its well-advertised ability to symbolize and even generate differences between us. We cannot afford to neglect money’s potential for universal connection, choosing rather to demonize it as the source of our vulnerability to those who have a lot more of it. It is high time for us to return to a more inclusive philosophical tradition of anthropology, building on Kant’s example, but also on the neo-Kantianism of Durkheim, Mauss and Simmel in the early twentieth century . I have been driven to this conclusion by studying money as the most tangible manifestation of the new human universal that is our shared occupation of the planet.

Mauss and Polanyi

Do anthropologists have something to say about all this? It would help if we could bring the distributive consequences of finance down to a concrete level. Our readers might then be able to engage with money not as a superhuman force with devastating effects, but as the outcome of ideas and institutions that can and should be changed by human action. Kula objects have magical power for those who exchange them, but anthropologists have shown their social logic and instrumentality. We have always invented concepts to describe and explain social processes quite different from those familiar at home. The current crisis presents us with a compelling reason to do so again, this time in a global context. When others may be losing their heads, there are rich precedents in the anthropological literature for where to start.

We can do no better than to renew our engagement with the writings of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi. The ideas of these foundational writers in economic anthropology have been sliced and diced – like mortgage debt – to serve different purposes over the years, but their perspectives on political economy can help us to make sense of the current situation and to recommend a path forward beyond market fundamentalism. Mauss’s reflections on money and exchange in The Gift have often been misunderstood. Probably his essay’s title and later academic discourse have obscured his concern there to use unconventional money forms to illuminate some potentially dangerous aspects of money forms based on capitalist corporations and the welfare state. Mauss was a cooperative socialist in the British tradition of the Rochdale Pioneers, Keir Hardie and the Webbs. He was a tremendous Anglophile and spent the war on the front line as a translator for British and Australian troops. He also kept a close eye on the cooperative movement in Switzerland and Germany. He lost part of his inheritance financing a cooperative bakery in Paris. But his metier was as a political journalist. His political writings were published together in 1997 and they run to 700 pages, about two-thirds of them written in 1920-25, the period when he wrote The Gift. He was anti-capitalist, but not anti-market. He was pleased that his uncle’s idea of an organic division of labour was extended to international economy after the war. He also tried his hand at financial journalism, notably in the context of the exchange rate crisis of 1922 when he wrote that “Economic revolutions are always monetary”, a pregnant comment whose implications I would like to apply to our present circumstances.

In analyzing practices such as the kula ring or potlatch, Mauss pointed to how monetary means were a crucial constituent of the social order. The social distinctions allocating rights to engage in different exchange institutions organized the monetary media and were organized by them in turn. Malinowski showed that not everyone had the right to engage in the kula ring; and this had particular implications for social rules and hierarchies. The imagined ‘force’ of the monetary ‘objects’ also defined the multiple but limited possibilities of the participants. If the ‘gift’ implied disinterest, it was in fact a site of sometimes violent power struggles. These helped to define, reproduce or transform the social order and even the boundaries of particular groups. Mauss observed, on the basis of these reflections, that in contemporary capitalism the wealthy classes acted increasingly as if they did not belong to a social order that made redistributive obligation a condition of their hierarchical privilege. Their amnesia when it came to the ‘gift’ was not just a function of power, but of an accumulation of power that considered itself to be socially unbounded. As a result, heightened strife put the social order itself at risk.

Although Polanyi’s analysis of how markets became disembedded from the rest of society, in The great transformation and after, is often thought of as a general critique of market relations, like Mauss he considered markets and money to be fundamental elements of any social order. He too contended that the classes who benefited from markets, particularly high finance in the decades before the First World War, neglected the interests of the rest of the population, with devastating consequences for society. The distribution of resources, according to him, should not be left to the search for profit in market relations, but needed also to acknowledge solidarity between all members of society. Like Mauss, Polanyi was concerned with the ideas that defined money, the rules of its use and the social distinctions that made its circulation possible and legitimate. Above all, he identified the historical dialectic or ‘double movement’ whereby the drive of capitalists to escape from social constraints met the countervailing power of classes and institutions (such as those adhering to the welfare state) acting in society’s self-defense. Polanyi analyzed the specific effects of shifts in the distribution of resources, showing how this was the object of violent power struggles culminating in untold human misery and the protracted death of a civilization. Anthropologists following him would thus explore how the social struggles over money are understood by the participants, and with what consequences for distribution itself. This would offer a critique of the pretense that economics is not social or political; beyond that, it would constitute a research programme.

The two authors could be said to be complementary. Mauss reminds us that monetary relations may be understood by analysing how the objects of exchange and the social roles of the participants are defined. This process is not restricted to the political utopias of liberalism. As much as the kula was a particular way to understand political economy in the Western Pacific, the ‘rationality’ of homo economicus is just another version of this, not simply a human universal to be accepted without reflection. Polanyi drew attention to how economic institutions organize and are in turn organized by a plurality of distribution mechanisms that, in the modern world, affect the lives of millions of people who participate in them, without being granted any measure of control. This led him to highlight the inequality created by these institutions, as they swing between the poles of market and state, of society’s external and internal relations. In the current crisis, the immediate reaction is to turn to a variety of government institutions with Keynesian redistribution in mind, flipping the coin from tails to heads as it were, instead of insisting that states and the markets have to work together in less one-sided ways than before. To this end, Polanyi’s call for a return to social solidarity, drawing especially on the voluntary reciprocity of associations, reminds us that people in general must be mobilized to contribute their energies to the renewal of society. It is not enough to rely on impersonal states and markets.

Polanyi and Mauss made sure that their more abstract understandings of political economy were grounded in the everyday lives of concrete people, thereby lending to field research the power of general ideas. I have already noted a significant stream of recent research on aspects of capitalism, but anthropologists have largely left the global effects of an unequal distribution of money, the class conflict between rich and poor everywhere, to other branches of the academic division of labour, especially to economists of whatever political persuasion. There are rich precedents for the anthropological study of distribution in particular contexts, but we still tend to privilege the rural inhabitants of the former colonial empires and settle for cultural representations of isolated social fragments.

The missing link between the everyday and the world at large can be found in the work of Polanyi and Mauss. An unblinking focus on distribution at every level from the global to the local reveals how the social consequences of political economy and the way it is understood by those who make it are one and the same social process. The current crisis renders this insight particularly visible, since it challenges contemporary financial ideas, while its tangible distributive effects are felt and feared throughout the world. We are clearly witnessing a power struggle of potentially awesome consequences. Each new political response to the latest economic calamity evokes the spectre of the Great Depression and its bloody aftermath. The mask of neo-liberal ideology has been ripped from the politics of world economy.

Money in the making of world society

What light do Mauss and Polanyi throw on the part played by markets and money in the making of world society? Mauss held that the attempt to create a free market for private contracts is utopian and just as unrealizable as its antithesis, a collective based solely on altruism. Human institutions everywhere are founded on the unity of individual and society, freedom and obligation, self-interest and concern for others. The pure types of selfish and generous economic action obscure the complex interplay between our individuality and belonging in subtle ways to others. He was highly critical of the Bolsheviks’ destruction of confidence in the expanded sense of sociability that sustained the market economy. In his view, markets and money were human universals whose principal function was the extension of society beyond the local sphere, even if they did not always take the impersonal form we are familiar with. This was why, in a long footnote to The Gift, he disputed Malinowski’s assertion that kula valuables could not be considered to be money. Mauss advocated an ‘economic movement from below’, in the form of syndicalism, co-operation and mutual insurance. The true significance for him of finding elements of the archaic gift in contemporary capitalism was to refute the revolutionary eschatology of both right and left. Most of the possibilities for a human economy already co-exist in our world; so the task is to build new combinations with a different emphasis, not to repudiate a caricature of the market in the name of a radical alternative. Here Mauss follows Hegel — rather than Aristotle or Marx — in seeking the integration of institutional possibilities that have been variously dominant in history rather than representing them as mutually exclusive historical stages.

Mauss was interested in how we make society where it didn’t exist before. Hence we offer gifts on first dates or on diplomatic missions to foreign powers. How do we push the limits of society outwards? For him money and markets were intrinsic to this process. Hence giving personalized valuables could be considered to be an exchange of money objects if we operate with a broader definition than one based on impersonal currencies and focus rather on the function of their transfer, the extension of society beyond the local level. This helps to explain his claim that “economic revolutions are always monetary”, meaning that they push us into unknown reaches of society and require new money forms and practices to bridge the gap. The combination of neoliberal globalization and the digital revolution has led to a rapid expansion of money, markets and telecommunications, all reinforcing each other in a process that has extended society beyond its national form, making it much more unequal and unstable in the process.

All economic possibilities coexist now, including those that have been variously dominant in history. Our task is to build economic solidarity through new institutional combinations and with a new emphasis. This is a concept that animates much progressive intervention in Brazil and France, as well as a new collection produced by the US Social Forum. It means combining the equal reciprocity of freely self-organized groups with the redistributive powers of the state. It is, however, no longer obvious, as it was for Mauss, Polanyi and Keynes, where the public levers of democratic power are to be located, since the global explosion of money, markets and telecommunications over the last three decades has severely exposed the limitations of national frameworks of economic management. We are clearly witnessing the start of another long swing in the balance between state and market. Before long, a genuine revival of Keynesian redistributive politics seems to be inevitable. But the imbalances of the money system are now global, as the financial rescue operation recently performed on failing American banks by the ‘sovereign funds’ of some Asian and Middle Eastern governments shows. Society is already taking the form of large regional trading blocs like the EU, NAFTA, ASEAN and Mercosul; and the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank, IMF, WTO) promote no interest beyond that of western capital. The strength of any push to reform global institutions will depend on the severity of the current economic crisis. A return to the national solutions of the 1930s is bound to fail.

Conclusions: Polanyi’s prophecy then and now

So what are the lessons to be drawn from comparing our situation with the one Polanyi depicted before? He explained the world crisis then as the outcome of a previous round of what many today would call “globalization”. There are substantial parallels between the last three decades and a similar period before 1914. In both cases, market forces were unleashed within national societies, leading to rapid capital accumulation and an intensification of economic inequality. Finance capital led the internationalization of economic relations and people migrated in large numbers all over the world. Money seemed to be the dominant social force in human affairs; and this could be attributed to its greater freedom of movement as the boundaries of society were extended outwards, then by colonial empire, now by the digital revolution and transnational corporations. The main difference is that the late nineteenth century saw the centralization of politics and production in a bureaucratic revolution, while a century later these same bureaucracies were being dismantled by neoliberal globalization. Moreover, the immediate winner of ‘the second thirty years war’ (1914-1945) was a strengthened national capitalism whose synthesis of state and market was hardly anticipated by Polanyi.

It is odd that Polanyi appears sometimes to reduce the structures of national capitalism to an apolitical ’self-regulating market’. For his analysis of money, markets and the liberal state was intensely political, as was his preference for social planning over the market. His war-time polemic, reproducing something of his opponents’ abstractions, was more a critique of liberal economics than a realistic account of actually existing capitalism. This would explain the lingering confusion over whether he thought a ‘disembedded’ market was possible or just a figment of liberal ideology, ‘market fundamentalism’. Similarly, one could argue either that neoliberalism did effectively disembed the market economy or that its claim to have done so was a mystification of the fact that markets were still embedded in largely invisible political processes. In either case, the postwar turn to ‘embedded liberalism’ (Harvey) or social democracy — what I have called the apogee of national capitalism — is only weakly illuminated by The Great Transformation.

I have made much here of Mauss’s idea that the principal function of money and markets is to extend society beyond its present limits. Thus Malinowski’s ethnography of the kula ring could be taken as a metaphor for the world economy of his day, with island economies that were not self-sufficient being drawn into trade with each other by means of personalized exchange of valuables between local leaders. These canoe expeditions were dangerous and magical because their crews were temporarily outside the realm of normal society. This always happens when society’s frontiers are pushed rapidly outwards, as they have time and time again in the last two centuries and long before that. The period of ‘neoliberal financialization’ could be compared with previous episodes in the history of global capitalism, such as the dash to build continental railroads, the gold strikes in California, Alaska and South Africa or the wild rubber boom of the mid- to late nineteenth century. There are many analogous episodes to be found in the mercantilist economies that emerged during the period 1500-1800, notoriously the ‘South Sea bubble’ and the ‘Tulips craze’. Similarly, the last three decades saw a rapid extension of society’s frontiers after the postwar convergence of state and market in national capitalism reached its limit in the 1970s. The quick wealth and cowboy entrepreneurship we have just witnessed was made possible by the absence of regulation in a period of global economic expansion. The end of the bubble marks an opportunity to consider how world markets might now be organized in the general interest.

It is easy enough to harp on the irrational excess and sheer inequality of the neoliberal era — the heedless speculation, corporate skullduggery, outrageous looting of public assets, not-so-creative destruction of nature and society. But there are lasting institutional effects, just as there were to previous booms which generated transport and communication systems; a mildly inflationary gold standard; new industrial uses for rubber; stock markets and colonial empires. I have suggested here that the extension of society to a more inclusive level has positive features; and, before we demonize money and markets, we should try to turn them to institutional ends that benefit us all. The world economy is more integrated than it was even two decades ago; we need new principles of political association with which to put in place more effective regulatory frameworks. Fragmentation would be a disaster. Clearly the political questions facing humanity today concern distributive justice. The long period of Western dominance of the world economy is coming to an end. New actors on the world stage will have their say about who gets what. An escalation of war and general fractiousness is quite likely. Under these circumstances, a focus on the socially redemptive qualities of money and markets might be quite salutary. In this constructive sense, I depart from Polanyi’s conclusions; but I fear that his time as a prophet is yet to come.

KH: Where have you been? I wanted to talk about Obama’s victory.

AA: India, Brazil and South Africa. You’ve heard of IBSA? We are looking to invest in South-South economic co-operation. I’ll tell you about it some time. So why are you so keen on a US election post-mortem?

KH: Well, I wanted to tell you that I won my bet. In the summer I put a thousand pounds with a London bookmaker at 5-1 on an Obama win by more than 150 electoral votes. It ended up with me wanting one of the last three states to declare — North Carolina, Indiana and Missouri. He won two of them and I was well clear.

AA: Why were you so sure he would win by a landslide?

KH: First, I think any Democrat would have beaten the Republicans big after eight years of Bush. The mid-term elections of 2006 showed that the tide had turned. It’s a simple matter of jobs, housing, the war, health, education, the greedy and uncaring rich. Unlike many American liberals, I actually believe in the good sense of most Americans. Then I appreciated the power of Obama’s machine for getting out the vote, the first really to take advantage of the internet; and his political team hardly put a foot wrong. I have been studying American politics for half a century now and I knew that the narrow Bush wins of 2000 and 2004 were exceptional. The electoral college system exaggerates differences in the popular vote: thus Obama won by a bit more than 5% of the vote, rather less than his lead in the tracking polls, but his electoral college margin is almost 200.

AA: So what are you going to do with the money?

KH: Go on a holiday with my family, maybe Spain, I’ve never been there and I always fancied Andalusia. But it’s never been about the money for me. I started betting on the horses when I was 12 years old and I financed my time at university that way. Now I think that it was all training to be a seer, an oracle, a prophet. I love second-guessing the future. In fact, I’ve been playing at writing a novel for years. It’s called “Futures”, a pastiche of the western novel — I call it a science fiction murder mystery, featuring elements of Cervantes, Goethe’s Faust, Mann’s ‘Magic Mountain’, Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’ and Star Trek. Don’t ask me to summarize the plot… I’ve never been happier than during this economic catastrophe because it allows me to be a prophet. I have always been interested in Karl Polanyi’s ‘The Great Transformation’ as a work of prophecy that failed, since he didn’t foresee the postwar economic revival under US leadership. I’m giving a talk at a Montreal conference on Polanyi this December. I came up with the title long ago — “Economic revolutions are always monetary (Mauss). Karl Polanyi and the breakdown of the neoliberal world economy”. People write to me asking how I knew. But I’ve been waiting for this crash since 2004. The similarities with the 30s and what led up to it are so strong that Polanyi could be in for a big revival and I want to be part of that. I (almost) share a birthday with John the Baptist. I fancy being a warm-up act for the big-time politician. Maybe there was something of that in my bet on Obama.

AA: Well, the only crystal ball-gazing I was doing on election night was figuring out how to offload a bunch of sterling that came up when I found a buyer for a property in London’s West End. I put it all immediately into dollars and yen. I made 11% on the yen in ten days and 7.5% on the dollars. We are in for a rough ride on the currency exchange markets, especially now that the G-20 failed to come up with anything substantial to stabilize exchange rates. It’s funny how the media identify the Bretton Woods institutions with Keynes, when the IMF and World Bank were not his idea.

KH: Have you been following the political row about George Osborne talking down the pound?

AA: Yes, I can’t believe it. I read three articles yesterday and today. First Will Hutton says we have to join the euro since it’s the only viable reserve currency with the dollar and the UK is a ’small country’ (like Iceland or Ireland). Then Anatole Kaletsky says the opposite and, when sterling gained a cent early today, they all piled in to say that Osborne is useless.

KH: For what it’s worth, I think Kaletsky is right. When I came to live in Paris over a decade ago, I wanted very much for Britain to join the euro, if only to minimize exchange transaction costs, but also because the idea of European union was attractive then. But when Blair and Brown stayed out, for whatever reason, it eventually dawned on me that they had stumbled onto a better alternative. No-one in Britain, especially businesses or tourists, has any problem using euros; but the continuing existence of sterling gives them two currencies to manipulate rather than just one. Maastricht was a huge mistake, insisting on countries replacing their national currency with the euro. They should have followed the route once advocated by the Tories, a hard ecu run by a European Central Bank along the lines of the Bundesbank and politically managed currencies floating alongside it to find their own level.

AA: Yes, Brown would be crazy to join the euro now and get mired in the political collapse of the European Union. While I was visiting the South, we talked a lot about which parts of the world are most vulnerable at this time and the Indians and the Brazilians all picked Europe for the big fall. The South Africans, black and white, are different. They still haven’t weaned themselves from the old idea that they are an offshoot of western imperialism with closer connection to the North Atlantic than to anywhere nearer home.

KH: What do you mean, Europe is for the jump?

AA: Look at them all. They are worried sick about their precious little national sovereignty. They are growing old and they hate the young foreigners who come to do the work that pays for their pensions. They have depended on American muscle for so long, they have forgotten how to fight. They can’t fix a constitution to organize their economic union. They are going down, no question about it. I doubt if the euro will survive much longer. They will never agree on a common strategy. The only good thing about recent events is that the strong dollar has saved Europe from an overvalued exchange rate.

KH: So it looks as if sterling could make a comeback quite soon, if the euro becomes shaky and British exports can take advantage of the 30% devaluation. I read today that Asian students are already signing up in droves for British universities because of the relative price when compared with the US. We shouldn’t forget that services are still the fastest-growing sector of the world economy.

AA: So I guess Europe could get some benefit for tourism if they join the raise to the bottom of the currency charts.

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The period since 1945 saw a revolution in world society which, by the 1990s, had turned into widespread popular emancipation from the repressive state controls installed during the Cold War. The world was becoming more connected and more unequal at the same time, but people in general enjoyed more freedom than ever before. Since the millennium, an attempt has been made, led by but not restricted to the United States, to screw the lid back on. The battle cry of this counter-revolution is the war against terrorism, its theme-song, security, security and yet again security. Freedoms that came to be taken for granted after the war against fascism are now being lost. The left is disoriented and impotent. Who is the enemy and what is to be done? The fragments below reflect the confusion of our era, but they do point to a possible political strategy. They were written in two places at different times, in Europe and in America.

Part One Paris, December 2001

September 11th and after

We are connected at last, humanity that is. World society is a reality. It has come home to roost in America. The reduction of the World Trade Centre to rubble marked this in the most vivid way possible. The world is one. Boom. That unity is violent. Boom. The sudden shock of recognition that America is in the world, not apart from it. The curious thing about the first decade after the Cold War is that, even as America took over the world, Americans, who come from all over the world, became more insular, more separated from it than before. John Locke once wrote, ‘In the beginning all the world was America’, meaning in a state of nature. Well, now all of our world is America again, but this time it reflects the age of money and unequal property that succeeded the state of nature in Locke’s scheme. The task of establishing civil government, successor to the age of money, awaits us.

After the catastrophe, a time for rationality. But reason works better backwards than forwards. Rationalization of the past is more effective than attempts to project a rational future. Today’s terrorism has a specific origin in the covert operations of the US government under Reagan during the 80s. Following the defeat in Vietnam, the Americans fought the Cold War through Third World proxies trained to use terror as a means of subduing civilian populations: in ex-Portuguese Africa, Unita and Renamo (supported by the outlaw South African regime); in Central America, the Contras; in Afghanistan, the Mujaheddin and, as we all now know, Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the IMF opened up the rest to the predations of corporate capital and to the drain of debt interest. When the Berlin Wall fell, Bush the Elder orchestrated the Gulf War for domestic consumption by television and then everything went quiet for a decade. The interventions in former Yugoslavia were minor policing operations in comparison. The Clinton years, in retrospect, now seem like a belle époque. Wall Street contrived the biggest boom in economic history, the internet connected us in a single network and the last checks on American military power evaporated. The bobos of Manhattan turned inwards to enjoy life at the centre of the world, while the rest of America was absorbed in itself. The cracks in all this were already beginning to show — principally as a collapse of internet stocks and then of the telecoms boom — when Hollywood’s perennial images of spectacular destruction were enacted for real on September 11th.

So now we have an unlimited war on terrorism, waged against the same Islamic fundamentalism that the CIA once encouraged in the Mujaheddin. This Republican regime relishes the opportunity to range worldwide without consultation and without even paying lip service to international law. After 1945, the USA decided to build up Western Europe and Japan as its junior partners in a new project of collective empire. The rules of this collective were set by the American reaction to Suez: the appearance of joint decision-making and participation, but only one active policeman allowed. This was supposed to be different from the European imperialism whose replacement by nation-states was supervised by Woodrow Wilson at Versailles. It is celebrated as such by Hardt and Negri in their bestseller, Empire. It was established practice as recently as Kosovo. Yet now American columnists boast of their country’s freedom to act as it likes, a freedom prepared for by countless international treaties left unsigned. At home, Bush the Younger’s appeals to ‘the nation’ have produced a stampede to conform; anti-terrorist legislation and judicial practice promise to overthrow hard-won civil liberties; and Americans try to come to terms with estrangement from a world that resents their careless wealth and unfettered power. In the name of anti-terrorism, the satellite governments introduce their own versions of internal repression; border controls and surveillance in general are stepped up; and, while only the British have volunteered to be the Yankee imperial bag-carrier, no-one else has mustered serious criticism of the Americans’ conduct of the Afghan war.

The immediate aftermath of September 11th thus looks like a regression. For some time now, it has seemed that the old corporate bureaucracies were in retreat, when faced with the rise of a global network society. Even the capitalist corporations have gone through a frenzy of downsizing and outsourcing during the last decade in a drive to take on a more flexible network form. State capitalism, the attempt to manage accumulation and markets through national bureaucracies, has been eroded by a tide of electronic money flowing across borders with virtual impunity, while the ability of corporations to dictate terms to national governments is growing every year. Criminal markets for drugs, arms and bootleg copies of everything dominate trade in much of the world. Now we have seen a band of terrorists, employing the techniques of informal economy and network society, produce the most dramatic public theatre in memory. And how does the Bush regime respond? With B 52s bombing a country into a stone-age to which it had already returned. If the fall of the Berlin Wall was a universal symbol of the people’s triumph over bureaucratic power, this is the counter-revolution, contrived by a ruling elite threatened for a decade by increased freedom of social connection and reduced popular fear of central power. What is new is the unilateral assumption of this function by the American government. We might call it ’state capitalism in one country’. But the rest of the world’s unpopular regimes know that it shores up their own powers of rule, even if they are not being given a token role in the action.

It is convenient for the rulers of our unipolar world to focus attention on cultural politics abstracted from history — on the struggle between good and evil, liberal enlightenment and religious bigotry, ‘the American way’ and a recalcitrant Islam. Our task should be to expose the social contradictions that this ideology conceals. For this is a capitalist world and capitalism is not standing still while the media hang breathlessly on every minor development in Afghanistan. What democratic forces are emerging to confront a corporate capitalism whose hegemony has never been more universal than now? This question entails another. How might we break up the idea of a monolithic America, that rhetoric of national unity on which Bush depends for popular support, in order to identify the forces within American society ready to oppose their own government and corporations? This means refusing to equate the US ruling elite with the American people and their instinct for democracy. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism leaves out of the global struggle against neo-liberal capitalism many of the elements that are best placed to play an effective part. We must distinguish between the American state and the American people, even if today in an atmosphere of perceived national crisis many Americans are reluctant to do so. Against Bush’s version of America as lawless world bully and institutional expression of corporate capitalism, there is another living tradition representing America as a self-sufficient federalist democracy, with weak central government, offering a home for the world’s oppressed peoples.

The fight is on to save the commons of human society, culture and ecology from the encroachments of corporate private property. This is no longer principally a question of conserving the earth’s natural resources, although it is definitely that too, nor of the deterioration of public services left to the mercies of privatized agencies. The information age has raised the significance of intangible commodities. Increasingly we buy and sell ideas; and their reproduction is made infinitely easier by digital technologies. Accordingly, the large corporations have launched a campaign to assert their exclusive ownership of what until recently might reasonably have been considered shared culture to which all have free and equal access. Across the board, separate battles are being fought, without any real sense of the common cause that they embody. The napsterization of popular music, harbinger of peer-to-peer exchange between individual computers, is one such battle pitting the feudal barons of the music business against our common right to transmit songs as we wish. The world of visual images, of film, television and video, is likewise a site of struggle sharpened by fast-breaking technologies affecting their distribution and use. In numerous subtle and not-so-subtle ways, our ability to draw freely on a common heritage of language, literature and law is being undermined by the aggressive assertion of copyright. People who never knew they shared a common infrastructure of culture are now being forced to acknowledge it by aggressive policies of corporate privatization. And these policies are being promoted at the international level by the same American government whose armed forces now seem free to run amok in the world.

In the case of the internet, what began as a free communications network for a scientific minority is now the contested domain of giant corporations and governments. The open source software movement, setting Linux and an army of hackers against Microsoft’s monopoly, has opened up fissures within corporate capitalism itself. The shift to manufacture of food varieties has introduced a similar struggle to agriculture, amplified by a revival of ‘organic’ farming in the context of growing public concern about genetic modification. The pharmaceutical companies try to ward off the threat posed to their lucrative monopolies by cheap generics aimed at the Third World populations who need them most. The buzzword is ‘intellectual property rights’, slogan of a corporate capitalism determined to impose antiquated ‘command and control’ methods on world markets whose constitutive governments have been cowed into passivity. The largest demonstrations against the neo-liberal world order, from Seattle to Genoa, have been mobilized to a significant degree by the need to oppose this particular version of global private property. The events of September 11th have temporarily diminished this movement, especially in North America, just as they have added to the powers of coercion at the disposal of governments everywhere. In this sense, the global movement for greater democracy and less inequality has suffered a reverse.

A large proportion of the activists resisting the corporate takeover of world society belong to the western middle classes. This is so whether we are talking about the internet, software, cultural products, food, drugs, pollution, arms control or the exploitation of cheap labour. Europeans make their own distinctive contribution, but many of these movements have their source in America. The Free Software Foundation is American. The American courts tried Microsoft. Napster was an American invention. American farmers are fighting rents imposed on food varieties by corporate monopolists. American consumers resist being made the guinea pigs of drugs companies. Of course, these activities can be and are represented by corporations, their lawyers and political stooges as ‘unAmerican’. But they are an expression of what is best in America, its democracy.

It is a widely shared and justified belief that the age of money, whose culmination we are witnessing today, is not in the interest of most human beings, that the American government and giant corporations (half of them American, a third European) are indifferent to that common interest of humanity. The rest of the world needs Americans to join them in the struggle for decent human standards in social life. They bring tremendous resources of technology, education and economic power to that struggle, but above all they bring their country’s liberal political traditions. It would be a pity if the effect of September 11th was to obscure that possibility of global democratic solidarity, leaving the world stage to Texas oilmen and Muslim fanatics, with their mutual conspiracy to divide and rule.

Part Two Chicago, April-May 2003

Mesopotamia’s burning

An article circulated among my academic colleagues, “The Needless Destruction of Iraq’s (and our own) Cultural Heritage”. It was written by a Director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and it protests the looting of the Baghdad museum, while US soldiers looked on with indifference. It was meant for the New York Times op-ed page and was rejected. I can see why it was rejected. Perhaps there were more ambivalent versions available — certainly two others were published . A little irony would not have gone amiss and the author doesn’t seem to recognize that his professional interest might undermine his advocacy. And Mesopotamia was the cradle of all Eurasian civilizations, not just “ours”.

I had been mulling over the irony of bombing Baghdad in the name of democracy long before the war broke out. I don’t believe that the battle to displace agrarian civilization (a.k.a. the old regime) has yet been won. The Phoenicians, the Athenians and the Carthaginians did their best to establish a commercial civilization in the ancient Mediterranean for the best part of a thousand years and it was the Romans who won in the end, making the place safe for military landowners for another millennium and a half. So if America is exasperated with the Old World of its own origins, what better symbolic way of speeding up the transition to democracy than smashing up Mesopotamia? Except that, in doing so, Bush and Co reveal their own addiction to warfare as a technique of control, just like the old regime.

State capitalism is essentially backward looking. The belle époque of Clinton’s dotcom bubble now seems like the dream that it was and America has since turned to “state capitalism in one country” (only one world policeman allowed). It will be the ruin of us all if not checked. Arundhati Roy said recently that the only institution on earth more powerful than the American government is American civil society and I think she is right. We have to explode the ideology of freedom that links them — free markets, free democracy, free to get run over by a tank, free to bury the past.

So when I heard of the cultural catastrophe last week, I immediately wondered if the looters and the lumpen crusaders had a common goal. I haven’t read many interviews with looters. It is assumed that they are just a greedy, undisciplined rabble let loose by Saddam’s fall. Lately there have been whispers of organised crime hiding behind the general turmoil, in which case Saddam’s totalitarian regime was not wholly effective, unless this is state-sponsored crime as in post-Soviet Russia. Saddam’s hangers-on didn’t run away or get to be buried in the rubble as so many remnants of DNA — they stayed to get rich by stealing their country’s heritage under cover of a mob they conjured up themselves. No doubt President Assad is already lining himself up to fence the stuff to American billionaires for their private collections. The sack of Baghdad sees the loot going back to America, in a privatised way similar to but not quite the same as how the British Museum was filled.

But I digress. Could there have been another motive for the looting, one that has resonance with America’s historic mission to erase the old regime from the world, by bombing and occupying its source? Maybe the looters, like generations of American immigrants, born again and otherwise, just wanted to wipe out their past. Not just Saddam, but the whole sorry history, including colonialism, back to Sumer for crissake. What good did it ever do them, this revered past? Better to make a new start. This fits with Rumsfeld and his merry men, doesn’t it? A new beginning, at least for Bechtel. A born again Christian ideology of remaking the world from scratch. The ironic contrast with the priority given to safeguarding oil is made by everyone. But oil is the future, not the past — and it’s running out. You say that these relics are priceless? Nonsense, cultural heritage is a creative capitalist industry these days. If it depended on a fixed stock of artefacts, where would the expansion be then? Schumpeter called it creative destruction…Just think of how Europe and Japan bounced back after all that real estate got wiped out. The archaeologists haven’t got the point. And in any case, Baghdad had already been razed to the ground by the Mongols, so it was really no more of an antique than Los Angeles.

Another angle. Most capitalist fortunes originated in theft. How can we disparage the spirit of enterprise in this instance? It’s like when the Serbs asked the western powers, How can you blame us for establishing our nation with the techniques you used at your own neighbours’ expense? This is what I find compromising about the American cultural heritage experts who wanted to work with the Pentagon, gave them long lists of sites “not to destroy” while they went about killing and maiming the Iraqi people, for whom no such lists were drawn up. And now they are outraged that their livelihood has been disrupted. What were they doing in bed with the Pentagon in the first place? Didn’t they think that an American army on the rampage would be as callous and brutal as any other, when it came down to it? Did they imagine that these ill-educated blacks, Latinos and poor white trash would have anything on their minds beyond self-preservation and the need to rest? Did they buy the rhetoric of surgical strikes, of invasion without collateral damage? Just what is it about clay figurines from 5,000 years ago that makes them exempt from the holocaust? It exposes the hypocrisy of our educational systems that this aberration against humanity could be seen as being susceptible to careful cultural management. All it would have taken was a tank or two, a few shots in the air… And quite a few dead people, more like.

The article in question starts by asking American readers to imagine a crowd looting the Smithsonian while the police stand idly by. This provoked a thought experiment, which follows. It is 1941. The Churchill government has escaped to Canada. The victorious German army enters London. Derelict buildings are everywhere, some of them still burning. Small arms fire can be heard in all directions. Snipers have a clear line on the advancing soldiers. Public services, including the police, have evaporated. They encounter a mob in the process of pillaging the British museum. Frenzied looters can be seen pushing wheelbarrows stacked with medieval tapestries and Greek statuettes. What are you supposed to do? Tell them to take the stuff back, so that it can await shipping to Berlin? Shoot them for getting to the loot before the Nazis? But isn’t it the case that if the perfidious British want to destroy their own monarchical cultural heritage, it aids the reconstruction of their polity by the Germans? In any case, the Germans are too tired to react and have their hands full with the snipers. Perhaps an intrepid BBC reporter, at least one who can imagine collaborating with the new regime, interviews a few looters. Why are they stealing stuff from the BM? The answer is that they want to steal anything they can. They have lost everything. Why shouldn’t they grab what they can? People are looting anything that comes to hand — the hospitals, the hotels, the ministries, Selfridges, anything. It’s just that these icons of cultural heritage are more shocking to the educated class than mattresses thrown out of the windows of the Savoy.

Maybe all of this is simply unbelievable. The British are much too well-behaved to become this kind of undisciplined mob, aren’t they? Or are they? What does it say about the nature of Iraqi society that this should be the outcome of its demise? What is the comparative evidence of how people have behaved elsewhere under conditions of abrupt regime change, invasion or war? Isn’t the outrage of the orientalists an expression of a belief that somehow the American empire ought to be different, perhaps as nuanced in its techniques of control as its British predecessor? Most damning of all, a marine is reported (by Robert Fisk, who else?) as phoning in, ‘Yeah, some guy says some biblical library’s going up…’. The shame of it, that our soldiers should have a weak command of the language. The Europeans will be crowing over this example of ugly Americanism for years. Maybe US marine jokes will temporarily displace Bush jokes from the internet charts.

Irony isn’t enough. But how do you talk to these self-important academic representatives of American or ‘western’ civilization? I tried yesterday with an archaeology graduate student. He beat a hasty retreat up the stairs. In any case he had an important matter to expose to public view, another urgent plank of the campaign to oppose the infidels who run the White House.

Two meetings

I

I was contacted by a guy in Hyde Park, a software artist unattached to the university, who had read my Mesopotamia piece on a list. He invited me to a public meeting of a Committee against War and Racism. Always glad to seize any chance to make virtual society real, I squeezed all my jobs into the first half of the day and headed South around 4pm. On the way over, I read a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Eliot Weinberger called 9/12. He is a writer from New York and the pamphlet is five essays starting with Bush’s election coup, then the day after September 11th and three other ruminations on that and the Bush regime at later intervals. It made a big impact, not least because the journey from Evanston to Hyde Park was a perfect length to read it. It was a day when my dislocation in the world appeared to be redeemed, if only partially. It is so well written, humane and muscular, and incredibly informative.

For most of my time here, I have affected to be dismissive of the American progressives I have encountered. They seem to be in despair, talking of exile, preoccupied with getting Bush out, insular. When I come with my line about the American opposition that is built into the country’s history, they talk instead of a popular monolith that is brainwashed by the media and look to Europe for resistance — French intransigence, the English press. Weinberger, with his relentless accumulation of detail, the Curse of the Bushes (cowardice) and all that, tipped me over. I realised more concretely than before what these people were talking about; and the tenacious grip I have on my own vision of America as a force for enlightenment and democracy in the world slipped a little.

The meeting in the university church was a bust. I guess the only public culture Americans have is that of a revivalist meeting. Each of six speakers gave their personal testimony — a Palestinian woman missed the plane for her father’s funeral because she was arrested at the airport; an old man told how his prescription drugs for Parkinson’s were unaffordable because money is being diverted from Medicare to war; a Vietnam vet offered some insight into conditions in the army today; a public health professor went on about the damage to people in Iraq and here; there was just one standard leftist rant –alright, but predictable. That wasn’t too bad. It was the discussion that was depressing. Because everyone had their own private agenda and no way of making a conversation out of it. So one girl wanted to know about smallpox vaccination because someone in her family (a soldier?) had been made ill by it; some old guy went into a rambling thing about the UN; two Spartacists stood up and made incredibly insensitive speeches, calling for a Bolshevik revolution (1917 was the only successful anti-war movement in history) and reminding us that Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism — they were shouted down. I couldn’t stand it any more, the impotence of the occasion, found my contact, made my apologies and left.

But the journey wasn’t yet over. I still had to take the Red Line to Howard and on to Evanston. This time I was reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for a class. This is an excerpt from the American edition:

“The title is taken from W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The second coming’ and that for his second novel, No Longer At Ease from TS Eliot’s ‘The journey of the magi’. The choice of titles reflects the author’s awareness of a debilitation that Okonkwo foresees in Things Fall Apart. This comes from the world of Yeats’s cataclysmic vision and how the Irish poet would have appreciated the wild old Nigerian…No Longer at Ease ends not with a matchet swing but a gavel’s tap.” (Evoking Eliot: the world ends not with a bang but a whimper).

I once read a book by Stephen Toulmin called Cosmopolis. At one stage he merges two poems by Donne and Yeats, the latter’s being this one — Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold… He claims that they are in effect the same poem, as revealed by the fairly seamless merger. He goes on to say that both Donne and Yeats were radical conservatives, defined as someone who, disgusted by contemporary society, would renew it in the name of a value taken from the past. I suddenly thought, Hang on! Donne and Yeats are my two favourite poets, so what does that make me? And ever since, I have known that I too am a radical conservative. Witness the fact that I prefer to read old books. And I know what past value I want to revive — the tradition of classical anglophone liberalism from Milton and Locke to Smith and Jefferson. This project has solidified of late and underlies my book proposal for The Human Economy.

All of this was passing through my mind while the Chicago Transit Authority train made halting progress toward Howard (a place chiefly known as the nearest source of booze and sex for the inmates of that dry Methodist town where I now earn my living). And it came to me then, not an original thought, but original to me. That we are living in fascism now. I recall a book of essays about America between the wars, called The Aspirin Age. A major theme was fascism then — Huey Long, Father McLoughlin etc. And I realised what Weinberger’s pamphlet had demonstrated, that the Bush clique were a continuation of that thread, only this time with the corporate state within a state, the Pentagon in tow (fuelled by two-thirds of American taxes), with the most irresponsible American corporations in charge and with fundamentalist Christianity as a vision for fixing the world. I understood more fully why my American friends were depressed. I could still hang on to my own vision of the liberal democratic tradition, but I can also now embrace more fully the vision of the American and European left. America has come under the control of fascists.

II

Not long after, I went to a meeting of the International Socialist Organization in Rogers Park. It was billed as “Karl Marx’s revolutionary ideas”. But I went as part of my fieldwork study of American dissent while I am here. I was invited by a young friend,. John whom I had known in Cambridge and Paris. The speaker was a cross between a Hell’s Angel and a teddy bear, called Adam. He rattled off a prepared speech, mostly based on the Communist Manifesto, gave a potted early bio of Karl Marx and was careful not to strain his audience (”As a young man he was attracted to leftwing circles arguing about the ideas of a German philosopher called Hegel, but I won’t go into that…”). He had one good joke: “He wrote against censorship for the Rheinische Zeitung, but most of what he wrote was censored.”. The speech was OK, nothing special.

We were in a high school doubling as a community centre, with women’s keep fit classes and black caucuses. The room was small and full (good planning). I was impressed by the range of the audience. In Britain a meeting of Trots would be geriatric, male and all white. Here there was a good mix of age, gender, race and class. Then we had a discussion. I had in mind my previous experience in the university church, where all the speakers had only their private agendas and no way of making a conversation, like a revivalist meeting without the holy ghost to keep things communal. This was entirely different. People spoke in an order determined by the chair, a large lady who couldn’t remember Adam’s name, but knew most people in the room. The main speaker waited until the end to get back in. The speeches were relevant and abstract, sometimes relating to each other. Most of all I was impressed by the respect and kindness people showed each other, as well as by that American trick of trying to address the largest number in an uncomplicated way without condescending. It was impressive, like a church meeting of the better sort, sticking to the agenda, but turned outwards to the world not inwards.

I tossed in an anomalous comment early on. There had been talk about bourgeois wealth being diverted to the alleviation of poverty come the revolution, about capitalism being on its last legs, old, past its sell-by-date. So I reminded them that a third of humanity still worked in the fields with their hands and a similar number had never made a telephone call in their life. Who or what was going to bring them into the circuit of shared wealth, if not capitalism? Who would send up the satellites and lay the cables to bring them all in? Well, this got them going in not unexpected ways. Later I made my pitch for nationalism (and behind that racism) as the main obstacle to a socialist revolution capable of addressing the scope of the world capitalist economy. I talked of states, corporations and transnational institutions as the social relations of production that now act as so many fetters on the development of the forces of production. People responded positively to that. The show ended up with what I took as the stalwarts of the group making an upbeat pitch — two young Asian women, a Hispanic man, a Jewish intellectual, a Stalinoid white woman at the back who controlled the purse strings and offered a good but irrelevant piece on musical chairs as a way of indoctrinating children with a dog-eat-dog ethos early. Only one person broke the pattern, a gay black man who did the revivalist thing (”I come from Grand Rapids and it was only when I was a teenager that…”), much to the discomfort of the others.

I came away impressed and uplifted. The art of political conversation is not dead in America. They were a small groupuscule — I learned that they had been thrown out of the SWP in Britain, plus ça change. They are having a potluck on Saturday to raise funds for their big conference here in late June (100 panels… groan!). I might go. They were nice. They said things I hadn’t heard before. Like someone asked what the socialist revolution would look like and how do you persuade people it doesn’t have to be like Stalin’s Russia and one guy said you just get on with your life and join in the fights that mean something to you. They had a highly idealised view of the Third World (peons working for absentee landowners), but they wanted to connect with them and some of them knew in detail what was going on in Bolivia, Argentina etc. It gave me a warm feeling. I enjoyed myself and not even mainly because I had spoken and afterwards bought a book of Trotsky’s speeches, chatted with someone whose mother was French and so on.

Afterwards, John and I went to his apartment and talked for a couple of hours. It was a very stimulating conversation in the course of which I reached what seemed then and now to be my clearest ever conception of our moment in world history, of the relationship between capitalism and revolution. A lot of it had to do with trying to explain the relationship between two things: the shift in the social organization of economy from house to city to nation-state to world society; and the idea that the shift to virtual commodities, especially money instruments, was not necessarily a house of cards about to collapse, but possibly a new stage in the rationalisation of the market. I argued that the main contradiction is between national and global organisation of the economy, that there are two great camps, combining right and left, who adhere to each pole respectively. I rehearsed my line that this opens up the terrain for a classic liberal revolution in which some elements of capitalism combine with popular democratic interests, this time to break up state capitalism. This will lead to new global Keynesian institutions, but not to socialism in the first instance or soon. Capitalism still has a way to go to complete its mission to bring cheap commodities to the masses and to break the grip of the old regime by making the market universal.

In the course of this conversation, I found myself trying to capture in soundbites the glimpses I have had of the high financial capitalist world, mainly through Satya, an Indian mathematician who designs derivatives for Union Banque Swiss. I couldn’t help thinking of the huge UBS trading floor, the multitude of traders locked into their Panopticon on the world, all those screens with moving numbers in lights and televisions showing the weather everywhere, hidden away in an inaccessible place in a huge implacable building on North Wacker with black windows, seeing everything, but seen by no-one. How could this score of Trotskyites in a crummy high school room in a rundown Chicago neighbourhood compete with that? We have to find the points of possible alliance with those sectors of capital for whom the Bush strategy doesn’t work. I recalled a factoid about China’s 40% share of world economic growth last year. It reverberates in my skull. I wonder if I could get into Swiss banking as a fieldworker somehow. I have such a slender grip on this stuff. I have read most of the books on Drexel Burnham Lambert, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers etc in the boom years. But I want to see that floor again, if only from the outside. It has become the symbol of what I am reaching for.

Fascism, then and now

I saw Polanski’s The Pianist only recently on video, while I am spending three months in the USA.. I have been coming here for thirty years and I am a great fan of this mysterious society and its warm people. Lately, I have been disturbed by a discernible shift to autocracy, even brutality in public life at home and abroad. Much of this is justified as the need for security in response to “terrorism”. We all depend on impersonal society, call it law, bureaucracy, the market or whatever. And the quality of face-to-face in