I Come Not To Praise the Old World, But to Bury It

Or, Was It Everything You Ever Wanted?

Flowers in the Desert: 1946-2006

I was once told that, before I was born, it still used to rain in the desert. Not very much, or very often – of course – they were, after all, still deserts. But it did rain often enough that there were whole kinds of flora and fauna that waited eagerly beneath the surface for the time when the rains came. Little seedlings that would wait for months, or years, or decades for the dry riverbeds to flood, for the rains to fall, and the desert to become a muddy morass – the floodwaters sweeping over the low-lying parched and cracked soil and the arid scrublands. Within days it would appear, to an observer who had only visited the spot days before, like looking at a different world. In place of hardpacked earth, one would see rolling valleys of green, a running river, blooming flowers, and desert ephemerals. One would hear – everywhere – the abundance of life. Hawks and birds of prey would circle far overhead, looking for the newly-abundant field mice, insects, and rabbits which moved within the fast growing grasses. The chirp and screech of tens of thousands of crickets would almost drown out the wind. The larger animals would congregate together bleating and groaning as they drank from the running, shallow streams. For someone from a temperate climate, indeed, the region would appear to be even more verdant and full than the average mountain valley or forest. Under such circumstances there is an explosion of inhabitants, animals from miles around flock to feed on the new grasses, and predators come to eat those that eat the grass. From atop a mesa, looking down on the scene below, one could almost believe that the world had changed forever; the desert was gone and something beautiful had taken its place. Life and abundance had, at long last, triumphed over death and scarcity. Unfortunately, this is an illusion. It cannot last.

Without new rain, the rivers slowly recede; first to a trickle, then to nothing at all. The grasses and flowers fed by these rivers die. The animals follow suit, they depart for greener pastures, remove themselves beneath the surface and wait for the next rain to fall, or die and have their corpses picked clean by the circling carrion birds. The rolling hills which, mere days or weeks before appeared so green, brown and wither and die. Before long all that is left – to quote Zeng Guofan – is “yellow reeds and white bones” bleaching silently under the scorching sun. The desert never stopped being a desert, it was a rare set of conditions that briefly brought it to life. Insects, unlike most human beings, have lives that may be measured in days or weeks. If an insect were capable of abstract thought, it could go through much of its life in the blooming desert, moving from its larval stage to its ultimate demise never knowing that the grasslands it inhabits are on borrowed time. All the insect has known is the grassland – why assume the desert is the mean, and the bloom an aberration? The insect has, after all, never seen a desert before.

There are certainly parallels to this environmental tableau in human affairs. Some technologies are like this. They emerge in a specific time, within a specific political economy, to fill a specific niche – enjoy rapid, widespread adoption, and then, rather than evolve to become more efficient, are quickly abandoned when a better technological paradigm comes along, or the political-economic conditions which allowed their emergence vanish. Canals are perhaps the prime example of this phenomenon. During the early industrial revolution large quantities of raw materials would need to be sent from port to inland factory towns, coal, cotton, and ore. The finished products would, similarly, need to be returned to major seaports for export. Rather than move a small number of goods overland, by cart or wagon, it was simply more energy and cost efficient to dig a series of canals where barges – pulled by men or horses – could move several tons of goods and material along inland routes. During the early nineteenth century there was a frenzy of canal construction both in Europe and North America. These routes rapidly became integral to the economy and to national interests of the states which constructed them. At one point, the fastest and cheapest way to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh was via canal, going overland to New York, taking the Erie canal across the state, and then making a short jaunt by road to the city. The difficulty of maintaining long stretches of road contributed to this bloom in canal-building, roads were, at that time, still mostly maintained by private landowners, and often became impassible for long stretches of the year. Widespread paving was, apart from major royal roads in Europe, a pipedream. Consequently, moving goods by road kept prices high, limited growth, and slowed production. A canal barge, on the other hand, could move several times the amount of goods, faster, for a fraction of the cost.

In this period, governments enthusiastically threw their weight behind even the most ill-considered canal projects: canals bloomed everywhere there was industry - and several places there weren’t. In 1830s Britain, for instance, Parliament would notoriously greenlight almost any canal proposal brought before it, securing public funds for what was then mostly a private endeavor. By the zenith of the canal era, they were subject to widespread financial speculation – investors showered construction projects with cash regardless of whether such a canal would be profitable, or indeed, whether it was actually likely to be built. The advent of the railroad quickly annihilated this era of infrastructure. Railways could move even more goods and people even faster and cheaper, were less construction intensive, and required less upkeep. Today some of these canals are still in use, but crumbling and unmaintained ones are the rule and not the exception. If you visit England today, you can see gashes in the earth stretching for miles, presently growing weeds and accumulating trash. They are the only reminder of an era of infrastructure, as pervasive once as the semitruck is now. The whole phenomenon – from birth, to keystone of the economy, to demise – took roughly less than 40 years.

The airship, too, fits neatly into this category. The zeppelin fascinated me in childhood – I was taken with their immense size and otherworldly appearance – just as it once fascinated the early twentieth century world. While they are, presently, something of a byword for hubris and inefficiency, they were once tangible representations of turn-of-the century industrial utopianism. To our modernist forebears they heralded an era where anyone could go anywhere on earth quickly, and in style. The Soviets produced posters of fleets of Red Airships they would never be able to afford to build. The Germans showed off theirs at the 1936 Olympic games and the interwar World’s Fairs. The Futurists painted them, just as they painted trains and automobiles. Children bought little die-cast models of them, just as they now buy model spaceships. The US Navy even used their two Zeppelins, the Akron, and the Macon, for recruitment flights. Some even speculated that flying aircraft carriers would change warfare forever – acting as mobile air bases that did above the land what the ship-borne carriers did at sea. There was precedent for this; in the First World War, Zeppelins had been used as long-range bombers, and could fly distances and achieve altitudes planes were as yet incapable of reaching. Though, by the end of the war, they had proven vulnerable to incendiary rounds, and their usefulness was coming to a close on the field of battle, they still broadly figured in the popular imagination as synonymous with progress. Following the Treaty of Versailles, Britain had even envisioned a fleet of airships as a way of linking together the corners of their Empire, and set aside the funds to make it a reality. Industrialists, colonial administrators, aristocrats, and officers would be able to quickly, and comfortably, reach in days what had previously taken weeks or months. This vision was ephemeral, and the end of airships had little to do with contingent decisions or disasters. Seaplanes quickly proved to be more cost-effective for mass international transportation by air and, even had the Hindenburg not exploded spectacularly at Lakehurst in 1937, the advent of the jet engine would have likely spelt their doom regardless. Today there are less than 30 airships in the world – novelties mostly used to advertise tires at football games. It is, perhaps, even more illustrative of my point that – with fuel prices rising globally and just-in-time production and travel fading into the past – airships are receiving renewed interest, as they can travel long distances on little fuel. Perhaps this desert will bloom again.

Some political conditions are also like this. Even political arrangements and dynamics that are pervasive, regionally, or globally, can be like this. Consider the ‘absolute monarchy’. There is something of a misguided notion in the popular imagination that feudal monarchies were always absolute. On this - incorrect - view, the king sits at the top of a descending pyramid of land-owning nobles, which exists parallel to the similar, but distinct and independent pyramid of the clerisy. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Europe for most of the Middle Ages, the King’s power was not only practically limited, but, ideologically, was limited as well (Marxists will note the latter, of course, stems from the former). For much of its existence, feudalism – insofar as we might consider this an all-encompassing name for a form of political economy derived from hereditary land-ownership and a set of superstructural legitimations – had no notion of monarchy as a well-defined bounded territory governed in totalis by a sovereign, whose decisions are implemented by a royal bureaucracy. Indeed, its entire understanding of ‘sovereignty,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘authority’ were wholly alien to our own.

Anderson, lucidly, in Imagined Communities said that the pre-absolutist feudal realm “lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life. Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity not from populations…[i]n the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimeter of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining…borders were porous and indistinct…sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another…expanded not only by warfare but by sexual politics” the great lists which accompany royal titles was a list of personally cemented loyalties, not legal or administrative ones. These cobbled together rings of authority which utilized coercive power to ensure the subservience of the peasantry, where different branches of familial ties and personal power generated a web of personal relationships are what today we call in retrospect ‘feudal realms’. It is, thus, perhaps better to think of France or England in the Twelfth century as an amorphous semi-tiered network of armed personalities and their retinues, vaguely tied, only in the loosest sense, to a geography. These networks of personal relationships were aided in their governance by the clerisy of whatever regional religious bureaucracy happened to be hegemonic at any given time, and whose authority came as much from their ability to read – they were tiny archipelagos of literacy in the great sea of ignorance – and thereby serve as couriers, advisors, and administrators as from their divine mandate. Under such circumstances the rule of one person – with a coherent bureaucracy to carry out their decisions – was not only nigh-impossible, but contrary to the mode of economic production and the ideological structure involved in the maintenance of that production. Any attempt to enforce the will of the sovereign evenly across a ‘territory’ would have been politically inadvisable to boot. Small-fry gentry and minor landowners jealously guarded their local authority, and had the economic and military muscle to do so. Monarchs that overreached could find themselves quickly in an untenable political situation. Richard III, stabbed eight times through his skull by nobles ostensibly ‘beneath’ him in political status, is perhaps illustrative of this. For a thousand years – give or take – this arrangement was not only dominant, but necessarily impelled by the technological, economic, and social conditions which spawned it across multiple continents with the except of a handful of bureaucratic empires and burger-ruled plutocratic city states.

Beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this arrangement became less tenable. What happened? In Europe, starting in the thirteenth century, the economic structure which undergirded this arrangement began to break down. There was a general crisis of feudal levies and agricultural extraction no longer yielded the power to the minor gentry that it once did, a problem only exacerbated – though not caused – by the Black Death. Trade dramatically increased and with it, primitive accumulation and the very first birth pangs of the commercialization of agriculture. Class conflict reached a fever pitch as the feudal nobility found increasing difficulty navigating these economic changes; the Great Rising of 1381, the Ciompi Revolt of 1378, and Savonarola’s rule in Florence are just a few examples of the increasing class violence of the period. The Burghers of the cities, well suited to the chaotic environment, found their overall material power increase. Lending money to cash-strapped nobles through nascent banking their material power increased, and they found they exercised more general leverage over the crowned heads of Europe than ever before.

However, despite the revolts from below and the new economic might of the monied commoners, this set of conditions did not lead to a set of successful peasant revolutions, nor did it lead to the supplanting of the feudal realms by burgher republics and merchant leagues. Quite the contrary, the crisis spawned a reified monarchical rule and eventually a set of absolutist polities. This may seem, considering the remarkable opposition to the basic pillars of feudalism, the profound changes taking place, and the general inability to resolve internal contradictions, baffling. Yet there are reasons for this – the crisis of feudalism came at a moment when – as Charles Tilly describes in Coercion, Capital, and European States – incessant and increasingly complex war-making had resulted in increasingly complex state-making. The pace of armed conflict reached a fever pitch in this period as the foundations of feudal political economy suffered a sustained crisis. To be waged under such conditions, war needed taxation, which in turn required a bureaucracy too complex to be processed through the old feudal channels of levies and family allegiance. Rather than beg the countless parochial members of the bumpkin gentry to spare them cash, sons, and retinues of armed men, Kings began to build armies themselves. This new bureaucracy was undergirded by an increase in literacy, which the printing press made possible. Increasing trade and primitive accumulation could be taxed by these bureaucracies and thereby increase the power of royal authority. As the baronets fell into incapacity, the upper echelons of the former feudal pyramid were more secure than ever before, and absolutism – as it is pictured in the popular imagination – was born.

Both Marx and Engels conceptualize this period as a kind of ‘political tutelage’ for the new bourgeois – training wheels for the capitalist epoch. Members of the bourgeois class increasing operated the commanding heights of the economy and the administration of the royal apparatus. Indeed, the bureaucracies, institutions and ideas needed to run bourgeois states gestated during the absolutist period. As Marx writes, “[t]he centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middles-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism”. These are all features of the capitalist state with unified markets, but the bourgeois did not create them – they merely staffed these institutions created by the upper nobility to resolve issues in feudalism. Out of the general crisis of feudalism as a political and economic system did not come liberation, but a feudalism renewed, empowered, and reborn under the command of monarchs, staffed by bureaucrats, and evenly governing geographies.

Despite this serendipity, Perry Anderson is right to note that these were features which emerged as the only way for the feudal state to save itself – and, for a time, it appeared that it had. The nascent absolutist state had no interest in ‘managing’ or incorporating the bourgeoisie, and the implements with which feudalism was saved could only be used by the feudal state because the bourgeois class was still too weak to assert its economic and political might. He writes, “…the absolutist state was never an arbiter between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, still less an instrument of the nascent bourgeoisie against the aristocracy: it was the new political carapace of a threatened nobility…This was precisely the epoch in which a sudden, concurrent revival of political authority and unity occurred in country after country…[t]hus when the Absolutist States were constituted in the West, their structure was fundamentally determined by the feudal regroupment against the peasantry, after the dissolution of serfdom; but it was secondarily over-determined by the rise of an urban bourgeoisie...The political order remained feudal, while society became more and more bourgeois”. Thus, the proliferation of the feudal state was only possible for a vanishingly brief moment in time. The moment when it was feasible to have large bureaucracies and administrative authorities – as well as fund and staff them. The moment when the minor gentry who would normally have resisted such moves were too overstretched and diminished in power to stop the centralization of political authority. The moment when the bourgeois class did not yet have the capability to assert political dominance, and when urbanization was not sufficiently advanced for the non-rural poor to act as shock troops in a bourgeois revolution. It was a maelstrom of perfect conditions and thus the absolutist state dominated only briefly. As some of these conditions which made absolutism possible faded, it was not long before the heads of Charles and Louis were being paraded before cheering Members of Parliament or exuberant Sans Culottes. Under absolutism, the feudal order was rescued and emerged stronger than ever - right until the day it disappeared in a cloud of burning Bastilles and the gun smoke of New Model Armies. The absolute state bloomed briefly in the desert, temporarily preserving the old political order while midwifing the new economic one.

A similar historical moment occurred, I contend, with the rapid spread of Capitalist Liberal Constitutional Democracy, particularly with expansive suffrage and at least several ostensible civil liberties. While for over a century it had been confined to a few industrialized powers, it blossomed overnight to become embraced across the globe, and, seemingly, deepened, and entrenched is its existing redoubts. From the end of the Second World War to the Great Recession, it appeared to be on an unstoppable march. It crushed all other frameworks, it bloomed even in the most unlikely of places. Liberals – of both the left and right variety – were besides themselves with joy, and then graduated into a smug and assured complacency. And then, just as suddenly, it withered up and died. Most astonishingly, it withered at the root and on the vine: it died both in its most tenuous outposts and it died where it was longest-lasting and with the firmest institutional foundations. It died in Myanmar at the same time it died in the United States. Its global life span was maybe around 70 years – depending upon how one conceptualizes it. In historical terms it was as ephemeral as the morning dew. Unlike absolutism, which preserved a political structure of feudalism while pregnant with the emerging economic and social world of capitalism, liberal democracy transformed the political order – sometimes in profound and meaningful ways – while preserving the economic logic of the capitalist epoch.

A more optimistic read, one which I am generally ambivalent on (“let it grow” as Maistre says!), is that the period into which we are entering is the capitalist equivalent of the absolutist state. One where the carapace of the bourgeois, unable to deal with the increasing crises and contradictions of capitalism, reinforce a socially conservative and autocratic state in order to buttress their position as the productive forces reconfigure themselves again – like the absolutist state from a position of weakness, not strength. I am unsure of this. Perhaps it is the case, and future historians from a post-capitalist epoch will look back on this period with stark amazement at how insecure it all was, and how the capitalist class only bought itself mere decades or a century or two of continued life while building the instruments used by post-capitalist states. Maybe it will be so. For myself, I am not sure. What I can say with a degree of confidence is that liberal democracy, married to capitalist production, bloomed for an instant. It needed a host of conditions to do so, and those conditions are now behind us.

The River Dries Up: 2006-2020

               I have been hearing about the post-America post-liberal world for much of my adult life. Longer than that, really – I have vague memories which date back to my childhood in the Clinton administration which, although the vocabulary it used was different, and its conceptual analysis more rudimentary, was attempting to grapple with the inevitable. Amidst the great liberal triumph which accompanied the ‘End of History’ the crown always sat a little uneasily at the back of everyone’s minds, even at the great center of the world-system: suburban America. There was always a gnawing sense that the goods times couldn’t last forever, even as the power brokers assured us that they could - that the ill-gotten spoils of five continents might not always flow here uninterrupted. Perhaps that is why in this period the search for an external enemy to the liberal world appeared so frenzied: WTO protestors, environmentalists, China, and Jihad all had their day in the sun as public enemy number one.

However, for a set of geopolitical conditions as anticipated as the post-America and post-unipolar world, it is quite remarkable how little thought went into imagining about what it might be like – personally and politically – to live in such a place. Handwringing over such conditions in the political center seemingly imagined a world very much like the present one, but with China at the center of global politics rather than the United States. This was certainly true of the pre-Trump fusionist center-right, which found it at least rhetorically convenient to provide this as an easy-to-digest nightmare image for grandparents scaring themselves under the bedsheets while they watched Fox or CNBC in 2010. One ad – which remains quite infamous – that sticks out in my mind is the ‘Chinese Professor’ ad put out by ‘Citizens Against Government Waste’ that year.

In it, a Chinese Professor, one presumes of History or Political Science, addresses a crowd of surprisingly engaged undergraduates in Beijing, in the distant year 2030. Next to social realist agitprop of Mao and muscular industrial proletarians he explains that America “taxed-and-spent” itself into submission to the People’s Republic, thereby going the way of the Roman Empire and the British. The condition of the United States is left to the imagination of the viewers, and never appears on screen. Presumably, in this vision, the Chinese students all live in gated suburbs getting overpriced Sichuan Chicken through Uber Eats, the cars driven by penniless American immigrants, and go down to the Ax throwing bar on weekends, while immiserated former American suburbanites from Madison, Wisconsin sweat in their threadbare Packers jerseys to make these kids’ iPhones for $2 a day. This, in itself, illustrates the simplistic zero-sum thinking of the pre-populist pre-pandemic American petite bourgeois. One hegemon must replace another. One country gets to go to Dave and Busters in their Minivans, or, if you’re the Romans go to the games in your chariots, the other countries get to throw themselves onto anti-suicide nets beneath Shenzhen factories or work in the Carthage salt pits. This is just how it works. If it’s not them, it’ll be us – Melian Dialogue rules apply.

This is, of course, just a fantasy. It no more resembles the reality of the post-unipolar and post-liberal world than any of the other fever dreams produced by some of the most comfortable people in the history of the world. Yet, if the rhetorical imaginings of the late-aughts and early 2010s center, left or right, bear no resemblance to the reality that came to pass, the visions of the left that salivated at the prospect of a post-America world were even more deluded; based mostly on wishful thinking and a child’s understanding of international relations and political economy. The usual fairy tale – one that I have heard dozens of times in left circles – ran something like this: American hegemony has bound the working classes of the world to a colonial capitalism, and America uses force to maintain authoritarian regimes which keep third worlders impoverished, and prevent democratic and socialist revolutions. When America falls, the masses will finally destroy the tyrants imposed on them and socialism will flourish again in a world of equal states and equal peoples. The plunder of Africa, Asia and South America will cease and the brave workers of the developing world will illuminate a path that will be followed in the global north, as the torch of liberation is lit anew. This childish fantasia is almost charming with the benefit of hindsight.

Contrary to the supposed materialist groundings of such arguments the United States – rather than being recognized for what it is in a Marxist analysis of the international capitalist system, a central node in a given arrangement of the economic world system – was a kind of special actor, uniquely and almost supernaturally responsible for a kind of pervasive satanic evil. More an omnipotent conspiracy than a major capitalist state. This is, of course, nonsense – the end of American hegemony will no more destroy capitalism than the decline of the Dutch or British empires did. It has found ready and welcome homes in Beijing, Moscow, New Delhi, Sao Palo, Jakarta, Brussels, Berlin, Sydney, Tokyo, Seoul, and Cape Town. Capitalism has not only survived the decline of global powers before, but it also thrives in them – another opportunity for creative destruction and the resultant power struggles, wars, and financial competition usually are good for systemic health. Like how the crisis of Feudalism only resulted in the birth of the absolutist state, the general crisis of Capitalism – which has been well underway since the 1970s – will only give us the National Conservative state, the Russian Imperial project, and Chinese State Capitalism. In short, the carapace with which capitalism will shield itself for the foreseeable future, even more secure than at what appeared to the grimmest and most vacuous moments of the end-of-history triumphalism of the 1990s.

What will this world be like? We have already seen enough hints to put together a picture. The first, and perhaps most dangerous, structural aspect of this world in the disappearance of the mass and the mass formation: key ingredients in politics for the last 200 years. The new world is shaping up to be much more like the nineteenth century: democracy will be meaningfully curtailed, or indeed outright eliminated, both in the metropole and in the periphery: the Hungarian state offers something of a blueprint, but even this is merely a prototype, the model will refine itself with time. Rising regional great powers - Russia, China, India, Brazil - will weave complex webs of alliances, conquering neighbors and annexing and colonizing territory outright where they can, or engaging in clientelism where they cannot. Women will be re-contained and returned to the home, a project which has rapidly accelerated as jobs have become scarcer and following the neoliberal destruction of the welfare state and the resultant rapacious need for domestic labor. Even the fig leaf of democratic legitimacy gone as states blithely dictate referenda where 99% of the population approve the latest human rights violation, the return to the patriarchal family and open racial supremacy. A world without women’s rights, without free speech, without elections, without workplace protections where the fat smug idiot petite bourgeois - in India, and Russia, and Kenya, and America alike - govern like little princelings over a fragmented, atomized, and paranoid populace. A far cry from the liberty that was promised us. It will be a more dangerous world, a more warlike world, a hotter world, and a sicker world - the worst of the nightmare has already come to Ukraine, believe you me it will come elsewhere.

The Desert of the Future: A Brazilianized and Multipolar World

None of this is to say that every liberal democracy will falter before the tide of democratic backsliding, hybrid regimes, and outright naked authoritarianism. Some countries will prove well-situated to keep their democratic institutions, most especially states that are geographically relatively well-insulated from the immediate worst effects of climate change, that have a long history of stable and – importantly – flexible parliamentary governance, and which are net energy or food exporters. Each of these factors will help ward off the worst and create a cushion in which several states can keep the twentieth century alive. Canada, Iceland, and Norway all come to mind. Indeed, I would not be at all surprised if, twenty or thirty years hence, Toronto, Oslo, Reykjavík, and Vancouver were internationally renowned havens for the unorthodox, the dissenting and the repressed. Destinations that – in the twenty-first century – hold the niche that New York, Geneva, or Paris filled in the nineteenth. Universities, industries, and art scenes which have access to the best talent the world has to offer, and which produce technologies, films, and literature that are the envy of the globe. Yet even this potential ray of light comes with caveats. Such countries will not be immune to the issues facing the rest of world – goods will still be scarcer and more expensive, formal education will still be harder to access, women will likely still face the force of social, if not legal, censure to return to domestic labor, class mobility will still be more difficult to achieve, labor will still likely face increased state discipline. Furthermore, the difficulties of getting in will likely dramatically increase. In the nineteenth century, when the United States offered a prospect of a life of minor social mobility and some degree of political liberty, immigration laws were drastically tightened and explicitly racist in who was let in or who was kept out. Such laws, I expect, will be a common feature in the full democracies which remain.

For many states on the periphery of the former American Empire, this will be a quantitative, rather than qualitive change. The Global South, the Middle East, and North Africa especially, suffered gravely between the 1970s and 2020s. The suppression of anticolonial politics, and later, the War on Terror, did untold damage in the region. American-led interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and, by proxy, Yemen killed millions. Yet, for many of these same states, the end of the unipolar era will be very much a case of going from the frying pan to the fire. Far from ending imperial conquest and proxy war, the fracturing of the old system of alliances will likely increase the pace of bloodshed as competing powers cast about for state and non-state partners that can advance their geopolitical or economic interests. Saudi Arabia, for instance, will continue its campaign of murder in Yemen, and likely, as it finds new allies that need cheap energy – in Beijing, or Ankara, or New Delhi – it will likewise find new willing partners outbidding one another to wage its colonial war, none have any particular commitment to the lives or wellbeing of Houthi children.

All political arrangements end, or, if you like, this too shall pass. However, that is certainly not the same thing as saying, “it will get better”. The international system I have described is rife with contradictions and incapability. It builds kindling at a rapid rate, and any number of sparks could ignite that serious imperil the ruling classes of this new age. A climate refugee camp of former Floridians outside Des Moines may burn down a precinct station. A wildcat strike in a Guangzhou may bring the city to a halt. A priest may self-immolate on the steps of city hall in Beirut. A guerrilla army in Mumbai might win a high-profile victory. A military coup in Argentina may declare an end to the constitutional order. As misery worsens and the new hardened carapace of our beleaguered nobility faces crisis after crisis it will not only face an increasing number of potential flashpoints but be less able to effectively respond to each as it emerges – whether with lawyers, guns, or money.

Was It Everything You Always Wanted?

I came not to praise the old world, but to bury it. I am not a liberal, but I believe we – those who spent some portion of our lives within it – will, on the whole, miss the liberal bourgeois democratic world. The new paradigm will be – as we have seen – worse, in countless ways. The old canard ‘socialism or barbarism’ is not hyperbole, but, in my mind, it has often been misunderstood. Many socialists seemingly took this as a maxim to mean that there was no difference between bourgeois democracy and barbarism when nothing could be further from the truth. It means, or at least came to mean, that bourgeois democracy is – historically and materially – an inadequate castle built on shifting sand, and time is limited to build a genuine and lasting foundation which can preserve some of the benefits it offers and transition to something even better. That time has elapsed, we have, collectively, reached barbarism or, as Marx put it, the “common ruin of the contending classes”. In the mid and late twentieth century, when the working classes of industrialized countries eschewed proletarian revolution – and most especially following the collapse of the Soviet Union – theorists, activists, and a whole constellation of left organizations worried ceaselessly about the ‘end of ideology’. The chief concern was how to overcome the homogenous and hegemonic miasma of these arrangements. Marcuse et al, the situationists, the prefigurative politics scenes of punk, all nattered endlessly about how to perform an end run around the consciousness produced by capitalist and consumerist bourgeois democracy, which appeared as secure and ensconced as a lodestone in an Egyptian tomb.

Everything was tried, and I mean everything. The classic factory occupation approach combined with flooding the streets failed in Paris in ’68. The ‘Urban Guerrilla’ approach of the Red Army Faction mostly succeeded in being a sensationalist story to sell newspapers to easily frightened CDU voters. The much-vaunted prospect of ‘third world socialism’ came to nothing, you can count the ‘actually existing’ socialist regimes in the global south that remain on one hand and in all of them you will find either party-linked billionaires importing Gucci for brand-new malls exploiting Filipino migrant workers  and sending their heirs apparent to the NYU business school, or you will find a precarious extractivist economy isolated or wholly dependent on energy and mineral exports with no incentive to change. Both discipline their labor force with equal vigor to any ‘reactionary’ regime in the global south, sometimes more. Neither offer anything remotely resembling the ‘building of socialism’. Their most lasting historical contribution, according to Branko Milanovic, was to eradicate the pre-capitalist local landowning class – and all that did was jumpstart a national bourgeoisie. The squat house art collectives produced nothing but self-indulgent drivel that impressed the likeminded. Mutual aid networks could barely help a fraction of the people that local churches could and mostly devolved into charity. The academy generated nothing but epicycles of discourse. From mass action to violent cells, to ‘consciousness expansion’ to alternative networks, to ‘awareness raising’ art, everything was tried, and nothing worked – it barely made a dent. A hundred flowers were planted in the late twentieth century, but none bloomed.

I do not blame those who tried – Christ, at least they did try – but the conditions in which they made their efforts were hostile, the seeds were sown in sand. Class consciousness could not escape that tomb, like the mummy in a cheap orientalist thriller, to terrorize the bourgeois. Left theorizing directed its full efforts for scores of years wondering how to unlock the door. However, we woke up one morning and found that both the tomb and the mummy were gone.

I have spent much of these pages addressing those who, like myself, will mourn the passing of the desert bloom and have little to look forward to now that it is fading. Many won’t miss the old bourgeois democratic and liberal word, of course. This new world will be greeted with enthusiasm by countless millions, some of whom were failed by the old arrangements, others who only imagined they were not getting the respect they deserved within it. To a certain extent I find it hard to blame the former – it was a brutal system to the many when it functioned and was even worse as its arrangements began to break down. Good riddance, they will say, finally something different. Those same people will be the second ones to feel the boot fall on their necks once the social undesirables are gone and they will not get any larger slices of the shrinking pie. Their lives will not improve one jot and I have just enough heart to pity them for it, they’ll need it in the years and decades to come after us perverts and commies are dead. To the latter, the suburban mittelstand and the bourgeois, the oil dictator and the mercenary, the survival fantasist and the religious theocrat, the paranoid effluvia of the exurbs the world over and the minor gentry with their meager resentments, the post-leftists bored with doing the hard work of solidarity and Nazis who are excited at the new potentialities of the desert, who either see this emerging paradigm as a steppingstone to something better or a normatively desirable state in itself – I have little to say at all. Just one paragraph.

As the flowers recede, the grasses die, and the surviving animals crawl back into their burrows, take a good look around the drying scrubland. At long last the hated old world is dead, the twentieth century has been repealed, and your vaunted alternative is here. Close your eyes, sit in the silence of the desert, and listen to the far-off wind as it blows down from the north. Ignore your cheeks as they redden and your skin as it starts to itch and peel in the noonday sun. If you listen closely, you might hear a cricket or two as the sun starts to set. Drink in this moment, this is your victory. I hope it is everything you always wanted. Maybe it will never rain again, and you can live in your terrible, desolate world until you die of thirst. For myself, I do not think I will last long in this desert with you. If I am lucky though – very lucky indeed – perhaps you will live just long enough to see the first hints of clouds forming on the horizon and feel the first small drops of rain on your cracked and hateful forehead. Because when it rains in the desert, it’s never just a drizzle, it’s a downpour, and then a flood.