Review of Grace Blakely's Corona Crash

Overall, a superb little book. So short at least 3 or 4 big toilet sessions would be enough to read it whole. The best chapter by far is the first, which, specifically in the context of the UK, shows, in clear terms, how fucked we are. A decade of ruinous and crippling austerity, which saw productivity completely plateaued (always 10% less than countries like France), growth go to near nothing levels (in Matthew Lawrence's IPPR report a couple of years back it was noted to be practically minus 1) and abysmally levels of wage stagnation (real wages in the UK collapsed over the past 10 years, only Greece had a worse result. Yes, you read that right Greece). Coupled with that internal wealth inequality has increased, regional inequality has exploded (Northern Ireland remains the poorest community in Britain), health standards have fallen (life expectancy has actually gone down, certain malnutrition diseases have cropped back up again in kids) the health service is in a state of semi-perpetual freefall (every Winter spells its collapse, in 2018 fiscal year over 88% of people who attended an emergency hospital department were dealt with within 4 hours, the lowest since date point collections began. It was nearly 100% in 2004), homelessness had doubled since 2010, 1 in 3 kids are going hungry, and according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty, in a devastating report in 2018, 4 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials.

This has meant a near collapse of anything like a sustainably healthy economy. People have had to be reliant on more and more cheap private credit to possibly sustain anything like a healthy consumer spending levels, and the result has been the emergence of mass Japanification, companies with gigantic debts living in the state of zombification, and the ordinary workers having suffered a catastrophic living standards crisis, essentially producing a Lost Decade. That was before the pandemic, and now all those factors have been exacerbated by about a thousand percent. Coupled with the near universal (somewhat offset in America) response to 2008 to decimate public health services, meaning that the NHS in particular was acutely vulnerable to collapse, only offset by dumping the elderly into the care homes where they were allowed to die by the thousands). In the UK pandemic response infrastructures were gradually peeled more and more away as part of health budget cuts, and the global neoliberal assault on the basic systems of administrative bureaucracies capable of operating on a national level has caused chaos in our response - unlike in East Asia, notably still with large, reasonably generous social states and a strong national infrastructure for dealing with diseases (see this on Taiwan for example, but its the same for pretty much all over Asia (China, of course, is a totally different story), with America being a particular calamity on almost all fronts. The west's global economy was in a terrible place to deal with anything like this from the start. 

In Britain, the high streets are now in freefall (the tale of two companies, one of Amazon's stock market bonanzas and the high-street retailer Arcadia's complete collapse being a perfect illustration of the dynamics of global capitalism right now), millions have had to be put on furlough scheme to avoid the Armageddon of mass unemployment (the UK's benefit system, unique amongst the rich nations for its lack of a contributory welfare system, with benefits set at a level that reflects previous earnings and the amount they had paid in, has barely made people scrape by, and thousands of self-employed people fell through the cracks). What we have seen too, as Blakely notes, is a massive strengthening of the tech monopolies, as the crisis has seen them ride out the virus waves through mass online shopping, becoming even more gigantically rich than they ever were. Britain is set to suffer the worst out of the OECD nations (Britain in the second quarter of 2020, the UK’s GDP fell by 20%, or around $143 billion, as opposed to economically and most importantly epidemiologically sane countries like South Korea, where managing the virus has meant only a 3% decline), a damming showcase of what a truly wretched and worthless nation this is. Britain has become a morally bankrupt jumped up tax haven and garbage hole, an entire island nation afloat on a solid layer of property owning parasites leeching onto their assets with dear life and collectively wrecking the politics of everyone else due to their introverted spiteful middle class greed; an economy seemingly entirely run on speculative finance, arms sales, the (now collapsing) service sector, and vast volumes of rentier parasitism, with a good bit of crony corruption thrown in (the utter debacle of the handling of the Track and Trace system being perhaps the ultimate expression of neoliberalism's total failings, a system created, as noted by the Independent SAGE, with a group board containing:

"...no director of public health, no data scientist, GP or nurse, no social or behavioural scientist, community mobilisation expert, virologist, local politician or NHS logistician." 

Essentially, carting out to Johnson's worthless cronies and pals and allowing our entire pandemic response to be run much in the same way as you would a budget hotel. Read the whole report too to find out what we should be doing. ) 

Her analysis in these parts is invaluable, especially in the increasing predominance central banks have had in simply keeping the wretched system afloat (and especially the horrifying fact that tech companies are now acting like banks, heavily financialising themselves - which gives them a level of market power that is genuinely frightening). My only slight quibble is I think she overstates her case. The back cover states, dramatically, that "Free market competitive capitalism is dead". However, in the book, it is noticeable she adds a caveat. In between "free market, competitive capitalism" and "dead", she adds "if it actually existed" (p.33). And the point is that, well, of course it never did. I find that throughout the book there's a desperate kind of tension between proclaiming that this is some new thing birthing out of the shell of neoliberalism, while also pointing out how much like this neoliberalism was already. I just am not convinced a world in which the state spends fortunes prodding, poking, supporting, propping up, supporting private capital has been anything other than the very essence of neoliberalism. Are we not just seeing yet another shift in this mutating virus? One admittedly much more cronyistic and perhaps even nationalistic, but neoliberal, all the same? It seems the left must periodically proclaim some new and amazing form of capitalism in deft-defying narratives and sociological analyses which are sure to blow the old paradigm out of the way ("new spirit" capitalism! Post-production capitalism! Social capitalism! Post-capitalism! Neo-feudal capitalism! "Late stage" capitalism"! Semiocapitalism!) and along with it tramping a brand new supposed social actors ready to take over the void the supposedly dead proletariat ("the multitude! The 99%! The Precariat! The subaltern! The "networked individual!"", each more vague, analytically meaninglessness, intellectually incoherent or strategically absurd than the last, said in ever more grander huffs of breath.) Are we now entering a reverse of this, where instead of constantly proclaiming capitalism's supposed end of "production" or "work" and its new flattening consumer nature, we now talk about how its turned into a kind of form of state-national capital, supposedly more 'rigid' or 'autarchic' than the 'old "free market"' capitalism? I do hope not, it is getting very tiresome. 

Her repeated proclamations at the end, that the massive state spending used to support capitalism from collapsing has exposed the hollowness of neoliberalism's claim to separate the economic from the politics, to me, also rings hollow. 2008 saw gigantic bailouts to the banking system, and many centre-left folks, and some more radical types endlessly proclaimed the death of neoliberalism (although Leo Panich has argued it was more the that the Treasury was privatised than the banks nationalised, and interesting and probably true point). The point, as Richard Seymour pointed out, was that it presumed the neoliberal state was not a big state, when it always was. After all, public spending continued to increase as a share of national economy in most countries that underwent neoliberalism [1]. The point of neoliberalism, as was said openly by Hayek and others at its foundation (as Quinn Slobodian has written about now in expert detail) was precisely to reorient the entirety of the state to the success and purpose of private capital. It was the biggest state agenda by far, obsessed with constructing the whole of society around the continuous needs of private capital through means of state role, implicit or not, violent or not. Britain's system of disastrous procurement, PPPs, outsourcing etc., where state budgets blow up spending money giving contracts to completely dysfunctional outfits totally unfit to run anything (G4S with prisons, the entire railway franchising calamity, Serco running bits of the health service, Carillon's collapse, the list goes on) is not some defect, some "bad" way of doing capitalism to be corrected by the "good" or "correct" kind of neoliberalism, this is the system functioning perfectly well. Neoliberalism had nothing to do with "free markets" - it hates them, it hates their competitive bite. It wants subsidies, bailouts, to endlessly suckle from the teat of the state in every affair, not to mention valuing the simple things like the occasional military coup to open up a country to investment, or a large police force to beat the shit out of the workforce (as happened in Britain during the Miner's Strike). This has always been its core. And indeed, Blakeley seems to acknowledge this (she uses Andrew Gamble's description of Thatcherism as the "strong state, free economy" a great phrase) as what neoliberalism was before, but then how is this different to what it is now? Surely, rather than seeing the death of neoliberalism, we are simply seeing it flex and warp into something different, perhaps worse? 

In fairness, clearly, things are different. In the UK at least, the trend of monopoly capital gaining more and more ground, specifically in cases of companies such as Amazon, and the continued decline of the small and mid-sized firms, is clearly the fact. The economy we can expect to emerge from the rubble will be more brutal, with far more overt unemployment (as opposed to the semi-employment and precarious employment that defined most of the past decade, some 3 million of the global workforce according to the 2015  Bureau of Labour Statistics report [2]), hideous levels of wealth inequality, stark social decline of the high street, lingering nightmares bisected across class and race (essentially the same thing in countries like America), and a system trenching its way through the mire of a semi-permanent recession. The age of monopoly was already essentially here; check out the increasingly terrifying power that Disney has managed to consume, swallowing whole sections of  our culture like an omnivorous black hole, the film and media market essentially being pushed into a increasing cartelisation). The Financial Times has reported that Starbucks market value has blow up to 80%, while small to mid sized coffee trains are in the pits of collapse, the US alone is forecasted to loose almost 2000 coffee shops this year. It seems we've ended up in a bizarre reversal of the Leninist dictum for global capitalism, much fewer, but worse. 

In this sense, it does feel different to 2008, which saw the starkest and most vicious reimposition of neoliberalism ever seen, in the savage trade policies (such as TITIP) or the unrelenting psychotic economic necrophilia of whole nations through utterly calamitous austerity (in the UK, although for sheer naked sadism and insanity no one has managed to beat the heads of the Eurozone in their treatment of Greece, Italy and Spain). And certainly, it is doubtful the response will be the same. 1), in the UK at least, austerity is now about as popular as HIV, a true success of Jeremy Corbyn's time as leader to toxify it totally and force the Tories into dumping it - their own internal reports said it cost them dearly in 2017 (although the Financial Times has reported that due to demanded rises in council tax and concurrent pressures on local councils to fund services essentially amounts to "austerity by stealth", to the tune of £1bn a year to the taxpayers. So don't hold your horses, the Tories are junkies when it comes to austerity, they are pathologically addicted to it and cannot get off it), and Johnson's response so far has been an entirely weak willed and half-hearted attempt at a sort of jumped start National Green Industrial policy (weak as it is, it is to be welcomed). It does represent, at least on the policy side, a somewhat slide into a sort of monopoly capitalistic relationship, and I think lurking in the background legacies of Dominic Cumming's vivid fantasies of a state orientated tech drive to compete with China. 2), especially for the USA, the threat of China means they just will have to start playing similarly to their game. The USA is toast, that much is certain. If Trump had one they'd been irredeemably doomed. Biden now allows the Empire some breathing space, but essentially any sane leader would be trying to manage decline, as China destroys America epidemiologically, economically, internationally, and even in some areas morally. One can already see the US military (historically always the most dynamic sector of the US economy, it did create the entire tech revolution after all) returning to its role as a system of militarised Keynesianism, stimulating other areas of the economy in the new war over rare earth mineral supplies, essentially jump starting whole companies in order to compete with China (“There is no free market solution to this problem of a non-Chinese supply chain] without significant initial government backing,” as put by Dylan Kelly, an analyst at Ord Minnett, a Sydney-based brokerage). In which case the USA will have to enviably change its economic foundation, (although not significantly), in order to try and retain some relevance. In which case, as Blakely notes, the left's criticisms cannot simply be the call for more spending. In fact, the problem with the UK's government's approach has been they had spent a fortune on total and utter fuck ups (an estimated £17 million on test kits that did not actually work, for one, as the Lancet reports). Instead, it must call for more targeted spending, and for things that have long lasting, structurally transformative roles, with long term dividends (like a massive Green New Deal, or a Federal Jobs Guarantee in the US). 

The weakest section of the book by far is chapter 4. There is an irritating tendency on the left to simply justify a statement of imperialism' nature by simply citing the set text on the topic, with no thought given to whether or not the text itself was in fact correct, or even right. She cites, blandly, Lenin and Hilferding’s work on finance being the drive of imperialism, without even the slightest doubt. She then goes to list a number of left-ish sounding things on foreign policy (she's a big world systems theorist, her references to "core" and "periphery" stating as much). But this is just weak, and lazy. Even presuming that Lenin or Luxemburg were right (and I don't think they were, as Paul Mason noted once, by the time Luxemburg was writing about capitalism' inherent limits to expansion abroad, the number of cinema theatres in Berlin went from 1 to 168. Capitalism can easily create new profits internally) her own views on imperialism are nonsense. She can write a sentence like "Lenin built on (Hilferding’s) work to analyse how rising market concentration was affecting relations between states: politicians used state power to support the interests of big business..." without even once doubting the words she has wrote. What states? Where are they located? Which politicians? What party do they come from? What is there base of class support? How do they use state power? In what way? Do they do so universally or depending on country to country? Which interests of big business? How does big business express its interests? Before one accounts before an explanation of imperialism, one has to really answer all these questions and more. 

Aside from seemingly no definition of what the state actually is (hardly her fault, Marxists in general have failed to provide an adequate one) she presumes far too much that capitalism can have a unified "interest" on a state. As Poulantzas pointed out, the state, if anything, acts with "relative autonomy", a competing field of class interests with no one really running the shop. In the case of foreign policy it is even more stupid, as to presume one or more capitalist class can control the entire operations of the vast imperial apparatuses of states, while still retaining their primary role as profit seekers, is obviously false. While capitalists patently do have interests abroad, and do depend on the state for it, nearly every foreign policy decision should probably be seen as the coalition of one or more capitalist groups acting in awkward alliance, often against others, in complex hegemonies. Plus, the state itself is a separate thing, the massive institutions of the US's military buecracies having no role at all in capital production, it is entirely its own beast (hence its strength in keeping a relative stability in foreign policy across the presidents, laced with laughable conspiratorial tones by Trump and his cult as "the deep state", but more realistically called the National Security State, or “Double Government”, borrowing a phrase from Walter Bageout, as Michael Glennon has documented in extreme detail [3]). The state has its own internal logic, and the state actors have different reasons to engage in foreign policy, often with no relevance to capitalism at all (as Chomsky once wryly noted, America hardly raped Nicaragua for its thriving coco bean trade). Indeed, Vietnam, for one, essentially destroyed American capitalism, producing waves of inflation globally due to the costs of the war, undermining its system of mixed economy produced during the New Deal and effectively kneecapping the ability of it to continue. Private support for the war essentially ended after the Tet offensive, not that minded to the US at that pointed, which kept on bombing for at least 7 more years. Iraq, as Doug Stokes pointed out, could not be for a reason a simplistic as oil, America already controlled the whole globe's supply [4]). Richard Lachmann's work to me is the correct route, as he correctly stated that Marx and later Marxists asked the right questions but that the answers required a heavy dose of Weberian and elitist analysis"[5]. This is especially so in foreign affairs, where the state is absolutely key. 

Note the “on their terms”,  putting to bed any notion of benevolent US hegemony acting in a pluralist manner for spurious liberal notions.

An analysis rooted in Lenin’s world of the hyper-competitive world of intra-state relations preceding WW1, to my mind, just cannot explain how vast America’s ability to project force and violence has become. The United States, as Todd Miller has pointed out, post-9/11 created an idea of sovereignty so huge it almost defies comprehension, presuming that pretty much anything under US orbit is part of its borders, meaning anything goes when it comes to killing, far from the Negri/Hardt fantasy of the US empire eroding or dissolving borders into vapour, actually projecting and reinforcing it on a global scale. Instrumentalist accounts of the state cannot, it seem to me, no matter how intricate their models are or how eloquent their theorising, possibly explain why America spends more on its military then the next 7 countries combined, has a nuclear arsenal upgraded by Obama to the tune of a trillion dollars or over 500 military bases around the world. By the end of Obama's regime the US was in wars or conflicts in 7 out of 8 Muslim countries. Taking just the recent reign of terror by the mad incest king Donald Trump, a new report by the same Costs of War project by Brown University shows that Donald Trump’s bombing campaign in Afghanistan increased civilian casualties by a staggering 330% since 2016. In 2019 alone, airstrikes killed 700 civilians, more than any in a single year since the war started in 2001. For sure, Trump is a uniquely violent psychotic monster, but the US is also a country, in John Mearshimer's estimates, that since 1989 been at war for 2 out of every 3 years. A study in the Harvard Review of Latin America showed that between 1898 and 1994 the US successfully caused regime changes in the region 41 times, which comes out to an average of one every 28 months . Recently, a truly shocking statistics suggests that 37 million people in eight countries have been displaced since the start of the so-called global war on terrorism since 2001, (which the authors claims could be a conservative estimate, it could be as high as 48 to 59 million), so in some ways it is clearly part of a broader picture. Blakely claims that "modern day imperialism is not primarily enforced using violence" (p.41). Strange then, that the chief amongst all the imperialists, the USA, behaves which such insane violence. 

Why? Did Trump bomb the living shit, as he so eloquently put it, for a handful of mineral deposits there that the former head of Blackwater was campaigning for? For that we need a theory of state behaviour, of which we have none in the Marxist camp, really. Perhaps this will lead us back to cries of us indulging in realism and mystifying theories of “balance of forces”. Alas I do plead guilty. I simply do not know what else we have other than a theory that at least treats states seriously. I personally have a theory that there is a sort of ‘spatial fix’, to borrow David Harvey’s term, to states as much as capitalism. That there is a sort of internal drive to states to simultaneously compress the demands by their own populations on their sovereign bodies (following Chomsky and Hermann’s analysis of the state’s drive for more sophisticated propaganda methods, and James C. Scott’s work on the relentless drive to force and enforce the border absolutism of their nation) and on their precarious position abroad in the balance of power which requires it to constantly pivot on different types of sovereignty-protection strategies, in regards to their strategic positions, their supplies of energy sources, their vulnerability to military aggression, their geo-political (and distinctively geographic) positioning, internal class struggles, and indeed, their economic success. Even a cursory look at the drive for coal supplies globally would suggest this to me (see Andreas Malm’s amazing work on the creation of the fossil economy, through imperialism abroad, which drove the drive for more coal, which in turn created new drives for coal, to fund the search for others and so on, and also Timothy Mitchell’s work on the shift to oil in the Middle East due to class pressures on the coal supplies in the North-east of England, and the chapters in Thomas Hippler’s Governing the Skies (pp. 66-67). Adam Tooze’s work on the Nazi’s war economy also shows how much basic geographic energy scarcity, in raw materials, but also in coal and oil reserves, drove so much of their fanatical foreign policy. But this is no place to blather on such a large and unformed theory. 

Treating states as classes, as the neo-Gramscian and World Systems Theory theories seem to do, is to me completely wrong, for the simple reason that 1) capitalists have no central and unifying system of power, unlike states, which, even when federated or devolved (like in the USA or Britain) usually have a central seat of power which derives the authority of the whole of the country (Washington, Paris, London, you get the picture). 2), the state has a monopoly of legitimate violence which capitalism does not have. Napoleon supposedly boasted to the Pope of where his armies where to oppose him. Where are capitalism’s armies? It is the state’s armies. But it is still the states, to do as it pleases. The closest developed was the flirtation with private security contraction that was popular in the 90s and in the early 2000s, reaching its deranged zenith under Blackwater in Iraq. But the relative scope and size of these paramilitary forces means it was never possible to have these act with the scope and scale that a national army requires, and at any rate, the abysmal failure of Blackwater, essentially resulting in an ugly massacre, I would think would put to bed any idea of using that again as a successful system of imperial management. Plus, it should be reminded that contrary to any claims to this resulting in a weakened system of sovereignty, it in fact is still dependent on the states absolute claim to it. After all, who do the contractors sell their contractors sell too? And 3) the territorial unity of a state. A state can claim ownership to a whole area under the arbitrary boundary that it calls a “border”. Endlessly contested, largely fictional and nearly always violent they may be, they are somewhat legit, borders would need to exist in even a communist paradise of some sort (just for basic security reasons, like not letting criminals run loose, and in our capitalist world certainly for trade reasons). 

Capitalists are by contrast, relentlessly global orientated. The making of the Atlantic ruling class, to misquote the title of the book written by Kees van der Pijl, is a defining phenomenon of the 20th century, trans-national and trans-country. Not, of course, therefore extra-national, as the truly moronic theories of Hardt and Negri, along with a cluster of other 1990s era charlatans who became obsessed with all manner of new theories of a supposed eradication of the state and the beginning of a pan-capital world of free flowing capital stated (‘the world is flat’). But one in which, as Leo Panich and Sam Gindin point out in painstaking detail, the entire globalisation sham was never about something as fanciful as corporations flittering above the state like fairies, or about the supposed “deregulatory effects” of globalisation, but was in fact a state crafted thing, specifically an American state run thing, integrating vast areas of the world using its state might and largely for its own benefit (a showcase of how baseless the claims to free trade actually was is the fact that the TTP was mostly about ensuring corporations right to stringent IP and copyright laws, using the state as a way for corporations to preserve a monopoly on the common pool of our collective culture. The actual “freeing” aspect of free trade barely exists ). Although there has undoubtedly been a weakening of many states power in the ability to set and run their own economic affairs in many areas (although this hardly applies to the USA), it hardly explains the massive increase of the state on so many other areas.

If one thinks the states capacity to do violence has simply poofed into thin air like Puff the Magic Dragon, you should check in what area it has "declined". It rarely declines totally, and often simply re-orientates itself around somewhere else. This is why debates on the US’s “imperial decline” are so asinine, and so utterly credulous, seemingly addicted to finding one single spot where one can identify a single moment when “leadership” or “hegemony” has been blown apart, the two terms by the way always completely nebulously defined, with little to no consistently or specificity to the terms, which allows people to claim ludicrous notions of global leadership of the US (in right wing terms, vacuous bullshit like “respecting global norms” or “holding to international customs” or “upholding a human rights culture”, for the left, its addiction in trying to see the ghostly hand of capitalism behind every single international act, and then deducing from such acts overstated and exaggerated proclamations of the “decline” or “strength” of class hegemonies, which inevitably means one ends up, rather like Alan Moore’s “Gullhunters” at the end of his From Hell, desperately dancing in a circle swatting at invisible butterflies with your fish nets, trampling over the same ground so much no one can work out where anyone first laid their marks). Technically, the US has been “in decline” since the Soviet Union developed a nuclear bomb, thus robbing them of their nuclear monopoly. But decline in comparison to what? Until recently, there has been no real peer competitor in the slightest to replace them. This point was made, correctly, by Stephen G Brooks and William C. Wohlforth, where they, quoting Barry Buzan, and I think this still stands nearly a decade on, stated that far from becoming a “bipolar” or “multipolar” world, what we were seeing was a “1 + X world, with one superpower and X number of great powers” . I honestly don’t see this ending any time soon, even with China’s “rise” [6] (which is primarily economic, of which, as Ramaa Vasudevan has pointed out, even despite the pandemic has shown remarkable resiliency in the preserving its dollar hegemony). At any rate, militarily although China has the largest number of army troops, they still pale in comparison to the US’s air, sea and land weapons. When China has an East Asian Nato (EATO?) and has managed to make the Renminbi the reserve currency of several nations, then we can talk of genuine “inter-imperialist rivalry. 

Borrowing from Arrighi’s flawed framework, which is addicted to flatling all imperialist powers as simply similar expression of capitalism’s class interests, and utterly exterminating any notion of states whatsoever, makes her underpinning analysis flawed. As Perry Anderson has pointed out:

“In transporting to such great effect Gramsci’s conception of hegemony from the intra-state to the inter-state plane, there was a related cost. Arrighi was aware of Guha’s work, regularly citing it in his depiction of the decline of US power in the world, which too had become ‘domination without hegemony’. But there is difference between the two planes. Relations between classes within a nation are contained with a legal and cultural framework common to them that does not exist between states. The organic composition of hegemony, in Guha’s terms, is thus always discarding in international politics, with a far higher ration of coercion to persuasion than in domestic politics. Wars remain a classic medium of relations between states – seven of them are currently waged by a Nobel peace laurate – and today sanctions form their scarcely less coercive complement. Historically, the resort to military force Arrighi took to be a sign that American hegemony had passed was a traditional exercise of it; while its correlate in economic blockage has never been so successful.” [7]

There are also clearly times when the state is operating under a kind of Neo-Bonapartism. In fact, as Mike Davis notes, a careful analysis of Marx’s writings on the mid 19th-century political system would show quite a subtle and sophisticate analysis of nationalism, rooted in the contrasting and shifting capacities of the bourgeoisie to form class hegemony. What Marx documented in his fantastic 18th Brumaire, was the: 

""extra-parliamentary bourgeoisie" - seeing political turbulence as the cause of the ongoing commercial depression - repudiat(ing) its own political and literary representatives and acquiesced in Bonarparte's coup d'etat and plebiscite. When the conflicts within the Second Republic fail to bring any class or alliance to power with the capacity to stabilize parliamentary rule, the crisis is resolved with a plebiscitary dictatorship. The Eighteenth Brumaire ends with the bizarre victory of state over society, clique over class, and nationalism (in atavistic form) over democracy) [8]. - p.168-169 

In this sense, what we call national policy is in fact nearly always the complicated toes and throws or different class compositions, rarely allaying with one or another in a perfectly harmoniously way, especially in the period when a Bonaparte like figure, without much of a class position, can arise . Dylan Riley, in an interesting but highly underdeveloped article during the early days of Trump, argued that Trump might represent some kind of twisted American reincarnation of the figure of Napoleon III, a creature that is birthed when the usual bourgeoisie fail to produce their own candidate. I can still, to this day, think of no analysis better to think through Trump, cutting through the tedious debate that seemed to occur about whether or not he was a capitalist neoliberal or a populist protectionist. He was neither. He cut taxes for the rich and deregulated industries, but he also pulled out of trade deals. The rich classes considered him a sleazy Russian-mafia drenched property parasite on the far off edge of capitalist respectability. He was only supported, as Adam Tooze noted:

"In 2016 no major corporation was willing to sponsor the convention that nominated Trump as the Republican presidential candidate: their brand advisers were too worried that Confederate flags would be waving in the convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing base, energised by funding from a small group of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained by the globalist business elite."

Yet patently no real capitalist ended up opposing him "American big business leaders", Tooze notes, "though sceptical of Trump, have profited from his administration’s tax cuts and eagerly assisted in dismantling the apparatus of environmental and financial regulation."

Trump’s foreign policy neither angered capitalism nor really benefited it, in its scope and scale it was no more than a more violent form of Obama’s foreign policy, which a rejection of troops-on-the-ground and direct military intervention in favouring air wars and covert missions. With trump, of course, it had more overt savagery, but it was fundamentally, as Greg Grandin pointed out early on, only a resurrection of the Nixon Strategy. Dylan Riley himself has written further on the nature of fascism, about how they tend to occur when there are "weakly developed political parties among the dominant class, thus creating a crisis of hegemony" (from the blur). This is important when one is understanding of foreign policy, as it may be that while a situation of Bonapartism may be a bizarre abnormality in the domestic realm, a sign of crisis amongst capitalists, in the international realm, where the state is far more freed from capitalist pressures, it may in fact be the norm. 

This analysis is acutely important when understanding the Nazis, from which the traditional instrumentalist Leninist account of foreign policy is plainly useless. 

As Adam Tooze pointed out, in an analysis remarkably concurrent with Riley and Marx's original theory, the Nazis could be considered one very extreme case of such Bonapartism. As he pointed out correctly, and in terms better than I ever hope to vainly try and imitate, in reply to some Marxist criticisms of his Wages of Destruction he wrote:

“…I am entirely unconvinced that the operations of international power, however configured, can be understood in terms of the strategies of a specific well-defined dominant class. This seems to me to overrate the coherence and strategic capacity of class groups and of the capitalist class in particular. Furthermore, it fundamentally underestimates the autonomy of the state apparatus as a policy-making and policy executing agency. This does not mean that the organizations and resources of big business are irrelevant to the operation of modern power. This does not mean that they do not profit from this collaboration. This does not mean that at moments of national crisis they may not rally around a political regime, especially if the enemy the national regime is threatened by is something as terrifying as Stalin’s Soviet Union. But this does mean that they do not generally direct diplomacy or war, the central explanandum of Wages of Destruction. There may be circumstances in which they do wield decisive influence over economic policy and may intrude in various ways into foreign affairs, but those need to be explained not assumed axiomatically as the prior of any adequate analysis. If I were to venture on an ad hoc and speculative exercise in social theory I would argue that we should conceive of social change as driven by macroprocesses, operating both locally and transnationally, which at various times may indeed lead to the coagulation of powerful interest groups into forces capable of steering political processes up to and including the conduct of foreign policy. But this is not the normal state of affairs. Normally, states operate with a high degree of autonomy relative to civil society. Detachment and autonomy is what confers on an assembly of institutions and agencies their “statelike” qualities. More than that, there are phases of macroprocessual development, again operating both locally and on much larger geographic scales, which have the effect not of aggregating and mobilizing interest groups, but of disaggregating and pacifying them. In such situations, whatever political force has control of the institutions of the state may gain an extraordinary degree of autonomy. I venture these off the cuffs fragments of social theory in this rejoinder only because it was a model conceived along these lines that I tacitly assumed as the underpinnings of the first six chapters of Wages of Destruction. The absence that Riley and Roth both note with regard to a discussion of the role of the “dominant class” reflects not only a general scepticism towards the idea that business interests or Junker cliques were responsible for the main dynamics of the Nazi regime. My silence on these matters implies the claim, hinted at at various points but perhaps not stated clearly enough, that the early 1930s, the moment at which the Nazis achieved escape velocity, were characterized by a peculiar vacuum of power.” (my italics)

It is precisely these forces of policy makers, inside the state but patently not representing any class interest, that drive a huge sway of such foreign policy making (it is also the reason, one presumes, we on the left hope to take over these states and internationally run things abit better. Otherwise what is the point?)

Really, if we were to ever complete a total picture of state’s behaviour in regards to foreign policy, we would probably need some bizarre Frankenstein hybrid monstrosity of Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Chomsky, Gramsci, Hobbes, Schmidtt, Weber, Skopcol, Barrington Moore Jr., C. Wright Mills, Tilly, Perry Anderson, some realist and neorealist thinkers like Kenneth Waltz and John Mearshimer, James C. Scott, and , theorists of the “military revolution school”. But I also realise such an analysis would probably be a total and complete mess, so wide in its scope as to be unmanageable, and so different in its methodology and sources as to be analytically worthless. It is, alas, what I see as being the needed core for the left to probably get to grasps with international relations. Certainly, the pathetic attempts by Marxism so far, ranging from absurd over-stated proclamations of capitalism’s control of the state, and the neatly compartmentalising every conflict abroad as part of some profit making scheme, or alternatively the ludicrously abstract grandiose schemas of World Systems Analysis, which seems incapable of actually treating the state with the centrality it deserves, both are utterly inadequate.

There is also a problem in her book, in that she seems especially keen on extreme bifurcations between “core” and “periphery”, or “Global North” and “Global South”. To my mind this is pure mystification. 

I find the term “Global South” is analytically dubious. It seems to presume that everything south of the equator is exploited, and everything north rich and happy, which is obviously ludicrous. Ironically, the term “third world”, now deeply unfashionable, I think conveys it much better, making it a broader picture not specified by geography. But it also seems to complete erase the intra-class as well as the pan-class dynamics that occur in such global arrangements. Far from this neat presumption of a extractive and exploitative north helplessly preying on the weak and worthless south, it seems to be what we have seen over the past couple of decades is the creation of a truly international capitalist class, capable of operating across national boundaries (while obviously, being rooted to them), enriching themselves at the expense of both their mutual countries’ working classes. The fact of the matter is, contrary to Trump’s ridiculous presentation of globalisation in America as being a tale of dumb or somehow suckered liberal elites allowing a conclave of evil, Fu-Manchu-esque Chinese bureaucrats to evilly take away America’s jobs without it even minding or much knowing, the entire NAFTA process was one of massive entrenchment for elites of all sides. Peasant farmers in Mexico were devastated, as were the mass areas of the Rust Belt. Meanwhile, Mexican elites got phenomenally rich (is it any wonder the world’s richest man from 2010 to 2013 was Carlos Slim, a Mexican?) as did US elites. In the world so structured by class, the red princelings of the CCP share far more in common with the heads of US corporations than they do with their own mass urban and rural poor, and likewise, the American working class is structurally in much the same class position of exploitation as the workers in Shenzhen or Mumbai. Trade wars are class wars, as the title of the book by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis has correctly pointed out. In fact the whole China story shows what nonsense the zero-sum game story is, as the story of China’s ascent into the world economy is one of the USA actively encouraging it to join it, both of them skipping happily as they both mutually enriched themselves. In countries like South Africa, Brazil and India, we have seen the creation of a vast wealth inequalities and the emergence of an incredible oligarch class in those countries. It remains to me hard to say the ANC’s total neoliberalism was somehow just the imposition of western imperialist growth models, it seems to me they massacred striking miners with pretty much ease, as well as quite actively participating and encouraging this model. In fact, throughout Africa’s history, the story of neo-imperialism has always been the story of wealthy interests abroad participating with various kleptomaniacs and dictators for their mutual enrichment against the domestic populations . The only way one can seriously bring such stark binaries to the world, as Blakely does, is to presume that the relatively privileged position of western workers over that of the third world is proof of the inherent imperialism of the world. And frankly, to say to the vast drug addicted unemployed people of the Rust Belt, often dying phenomenally higher rates that the rest of the country, or to any of the British working class (as the figures I have provided above should say) are somehow better off from the benefits of imperialism, is simply trite pedantry. In fact, the abstract “neo-colonial” model she gives is so tame and banal, (IMF impositions and countries used as tax havens) I struggle to even convinced of why the word “imperialism” is even used. Surely imperialism, as a basic definition, must have some aspect of state grand strategy involved? In this model, the state even barely seems to matter. 

Not only does it seem to negate the internal plutocrats of those countries’ that have relatively higher standing amongst the world today (like Brazil under Lula, India, China, or even petro-states like Saudi Arabia), thus flattening the acute class nature of the world, it also seems to neutralise those plutocrat’s own active compliance and agency in allowing such a system to be formed. In fact, this very point was made by Bhaskar Sunkara in his talk with her following the release of her previous book Stolen, than simply trying to put utterly black-and-white binaries of colonised and colony from the late 19th and early 20th century, where the core-periphery divide was literally starkly laid out in the spots of pink in Britain's imperial map, for example, and thinking they can just neatly apply exactly the same in the massive interconnected, globalised world of modern capitalism, where after the decolonisation movement these countries were allowed to participate in the global capitalist system precisely because of their own ability to develop something like capitalism, and therefore recreated its class dynamics inside the country, seems actively mystifying.  To quote from Stokes again, working from the theories of Gindin and Panich:

“This ‘relative autonomy’ is especially clear in relation to the American state which acted as the key hegemonic within the global political economy since the postwar period, and as such has developed specific capacities to act for global capitalism as a whole…(after the war) the American state acted not just in its own interests but also in the interests of other core powers that relied upon the American state to contain the spread of world communism, roll back the third world nationalism and to underwrite the institutions and enforce the rules of the liberal international order….US hegemony was thus positive-sum in so far as it benefited other core capitalist powers…” [9]

The US too, has a scope and size that is almost stupefying in its capacity to project power. As Adam Tooze noted: 

Or, to put it another way, from Mr. Tooze again:

“the scope of America’s ambition (at the turn of the century) was truly remarkable. But the political imagination of Lenin and his cohorts, fell far short of what was actually happening after 1915. Accusations of yankee imperialism, when its conceived off as its modelled in places like Cuba, or on the lines of the United Fruit Company and its banana republics, have always fallen laughably short of capturing America’s world ordering ambition in the 20th century. The aim of US strategy from 1916 onwards was not to slice off a bigger picture of the global pie for America, but to end the argument over the pie completely, on their terms”. (My italics again).

So while not denying the fact that, patently, imperialism, especially from the US, will act in the interests of capitalist, the reiteration of these now century old theories of imperialism seem to completely miss the point in the global nature of empire today, especially in regards to the US (this is odd, considering Blakely is clearly familiar with their work, citing their book in this awful debate with Remaniac mouth-piece Zoe Williams. So either she simply did not take this in or doesn’t agree with it, despite citing it positively in reference to it. Odd). Of course, I am not entirely happy with the approach, Stokes, through Panich and Gindin and borrowing from Poulantzas, still seem to have no working idea of what a state actually is, and in the Poulantzian framework it seems the state is little more than some kind of void from which things get filled in, not a living, concrete, material thing in and of itself. This leaves the analysis always somewhat empty, and in regards to a general theory of imperialism, such as the Soviet Union’s activities, useless, as patently trying to stabilise the role of global capitalism is obviously not its goal (which leads them, seemingly, into a kind of odd reverse cold war position where America is clearly fighting for capitalism and Russia fighting for communism, suggesting the Politburo bureaucrats were actually sincere in their fight, whereas their actions in regards to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, or the early Stalin in Greece (who fundamentally agreed with Churchill on the percentages agreements of post-war Europe, and noticeably not getting involved to support Greek communists) would suggest otherwise). This, for obvious reasons, doesn’t seem adequate. But it is miles better than the simplistic formulations of the Hobson-Lenin formulations. 

Is it ridiculous to write something this fucking long on a book only 92 pages long? Yes, yes it is. But I want to, and any way, I feel this points are broader than the book itself, covering multiple areas of discussion relevant across a wide of fields. 

[1] Hague, Rod and Harrop, Martin, Comparative Government and Politics: An Introduction, 9^th Edition, p. 26

[2] As cited in Davis, Mike, Old Gods, New Mysteries, London and New York: Verso, p.4

[3] See also Greg Grandin for more literature on the subject: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-is-the-deep-state/

[4] Stokes, Doug, “Blood for Oil? Global Capital, counter-insurgency and the dual logic of American energy security”, Review of International Studies (2007), 33, 245-264

[5] Lachmann, Richard. The Man Who Mistook Sociology for Marxism: An Intellectual Biography // Trajectories, the Newsletter of the Comparative Historical Section of the American Sociological Association. — 2007. — Vol. 18, no. 2. — P. 34—36.

[6] Brooks, Stephen G. and Wohlforth, William C., “Assessing the Balance”, (2011), Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 24:2, 201-219, p.202

[7] Anderson, Perry, The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony, London and New York: Verso, pp.115-116

[8] Davis, Old Gods, pp.168-169

[9] Quoted in Stokes, p.250