BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Crack-Up Capitalism
By Quinn Slobodian
Published by Penguin
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
‘Americans are deeply sceptical of once well-regarded institutions such as universities, the media and the public health system, and do not trust the functioning of democratic politics. The economy is characterised by entrenched inequality, and intense polarisation between the parties makes it all but impossible to address long-term problems such as climate change,’ says Eric Foner in the London Review of Books (4 July 2024).
‘The BJP [in India] enabled the rise of this new oligarchy by instituting special economic zones, granting environmental clearances and providing cheap development loans, while overturning basic labour protections like the right to an eight-hour work day,’ says Aditya Bahl in the same issue.
And, same issue again, James Meek, writing on the housing crisis, says ‘just as Manchester’s industrial heyday made some people prosperous, even as it demeaned and exploited others, so the new manufacturing countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa have been doing it long enough to enrich a fairly broad section of society – to create people with money to spare and eventually, money to invest. What better way to invest it than by buying a flat in Manchester? Most of the new residential towers are developed on a build-to-rent basis, designed to be sold to people who’ll let them out rather than live in them, who may never see the property they own, or to people who don’t even know they own it, because it’s bought on their behalf by a pension fund. The internet is thick with agencies like the Emirates-based, British-run RPA Group, which markets UK properties to overseas customers […]’.
A MOVEMENT HELL-BENT ON ESCAPING THE CONSTRAINTS OF DEMOCRACY AND STATE REGULATIONS
What links these perceptions, all of which are applicable interchangeably across the nations of the deindustrialising North?
As I noted in my review on Monbiot’s latest tirade against neo-liberalism, the UK has been host to an increasingly toxic asset-stripping free-market playground. We are host to freeports, and encourage the use of tax havens and ‘secrecy regimes’. Our ex-MP Sally Ann Hart kicked off her re-election campaign with a vigorous promotion of ‘free-ports’. She must be aware that they are intended to attract companies into low-tax zones, often with extreme anti-union regulations, supposedly to encourage ‘inward investment’. This creates a steep economic cliff that leads to migration of firms from within the country into these zones, and a lower-pay lower-tax regime that sucks jobs away from the areas outside the ‘special economic zones’. Boris Johnson legislated for 8 of these in the UK, on his way out the door as PM, including one nowhere near a ‘port’, in Derbyshire. This is our ‘Brexit-bonus’; we played right into the hands of the ‘market radicals’ who ‘dream of a world without democracy’, as Quinn Slobodian’s sub-title to Crack-Up Capitalism has it.
The far-right economic hell ‘libertarian capitalist’ Mary ‘Liz’ Truss sought to unleash is not really the aberration the media painted it as. It is of a piece with Johnson’s policies, and with the policies of right-wing think-tanks that have had more influence on policy than any ordinary citizens groups, more perhaps even than industry lobbyists. Slobodian’s book shows the deep history of a movement hell-bent on escaping the constraints of democracy and state regulations. They are a global force for evil, and clearly the real winners here in the post-EU UK – after all, they and their allies bankrolled much of the Leave campaign. Farage wants to take a few industries into a kind of part publicly-owned framework, but with 50% to come from pension fund investment. Pension funds can invest, but just as Meek noted above regarding housing, they are in fact often foreign-owned profiteering ventures – one of the reasons even Thatcherites began to criticise their own 80s policy of encouraging us to opt out of SERPS: there’ll be too little in the funds to come close to the demand about to hit as Boomers reach retirement age. As a stock dealer, Farage knows this well, and would ensure his investments are nicely hedged in these pension funds.
IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND THE CLIFF WE ARE DANGLING OFF
Margaret Thatcher famously ‘wrote to a friend that she thought Britain should turn away from Europe to become “a kind of free-trade and non-interventionist ‘Singapore’”.’ The ruling party of the last 14 years, and their deregulated City casino friends have pushed this agenda pretty hard. Slobodian analyses this ‘Singapore solution’, and looks, too, in depth at ‘models’ such as Dubai and Silicon Valley in order to warn us of our plight.
We can vote out politicians, but many are puppets of corporate and foreign interests, increasingly so, and they seem increasingly oblivious of our becoming aware of it. The extremist ‘gonzo capitalists’ once regarded as weirdo outliers are now very much mainstream. Any vestige of actually functioning ‘democracy’ is anathema to them, and they are winning their war against it. Small-c ‘conservatives’ may be beginning to wake up, but rather too late, and, as with Cameron’s ‘Brexit’, they have in fact enabled it: our old guard ‘establishment’ in our unequal and barely democratic system never wanted a public that could be mistaken for functioning citizens, they may insist in large numbers on real change. As the pressure-cooker of disaffection ramps up, ‘populists’ start to win, not because they are ‘right’, they are rarely so, in fact are dangerous, but it is hardly surprising that in a dysfunctional society extremism inevitably rears its head.
The left have often used the phrase ‘socialism or barbarism’. The demolition of the left-populist wave under Corbyn has left the field open for the far worse, far more cynical, and conspiracy-prone alt-right. Witness well over 4 million votes for the ‘ReformUK Party’. This is happening all across Europe. And, to a large degree, the ‘market radicals’ and their billionaire profiteering sociopath friends – the ‘global freedom class’ – are the cause.
If you want to understand the cliff we are dangling off, and the cynical alt-right role in pushing us over it, this book is a compulsory read.
Crack-Up Capitalism is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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