unused notes for a book introduction: endgame capitalism again

The period in which I wrote the chapters of this book has been a trying one politically. The optimism of the post war period, which, for all its peaks and troughs, can be traced through fifties social democratic state-building, the radical new left of the sixties the civil rights movement, feminism, and postcolonialism, seemed finally to dissipate between 1989 (the fall of the Wall) and 2001 (9/11 and the beginning of the war against terror.) Perhaps for those of us in the Anglophone West, however, the key moment were the elections won by the officially ‘left’ or liberal’ side: Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in Britain. Both sides had now abandoned social democracy: neo-liberalism or the rather what Phillip Bobbitt has called the market state reigned.
So this book is motivated by a particular political fear—that the current globally hegemonic regime of democratic capitalist nation-states is impossible to replace and yet is systemically, pathologically flawed. We are stuck with national-democratic capitalism for the foreseeable future since it and it alone is the political system that rationality (as we know it) legitimates and since it provides so many goods and is so open to reform. But for all that it is destructive of human capacities. It would still be destructive were able to create a just society within its framework , since what it destroys is autonomy and the will to think and (though less so), happiness, none of which concern justice. I realize that this is an extraordinarily contentious assertion whose various premises elide a library of debate. But for me, here, it’s a question not of truth but of fear.
And that fear has led me to break with the main currents of cultural studies which, as we shall see, are embedded not in exit from the system (revolution, mysticism, quietism for instance) but in reformism. This is not to say that reformism is to be rejected in practice. That would in effect to be return to classical communism or to varieties of anti-worldly Christianity. It is to say that reformism is a secondary and profoundly limited game, which lies at the heart of our intellectual life only as a sign of the system's pathologizing march. And yet it has not led me into the arms of those who are indeed enemies of national-democratic capitalism and who do have a vital presence in the academic humanitie

Contemporary democratic state capitalism is an endgame capitalism, because we can’t imagine a way out of it: it is endlessly future-directed but not a future which offers more than more accumulation, more control of nature, and (for the left) more social justice in its own terms. It’s a machine in which individual’s lack agency: or rather their collective agency has been mediated and mediatised. In effect the market-economy has taken control of the political institutions via the media, and indeed there are tendencies to politicize once neutral institutions of state in order to bring them too under the sway of the market. The mechanics of the process work like this: democratic elections require media campaigns to reach out or rather to influence the electorate since these media campaigns can in effect buy votes; since these media campaigns are themselves expensive (and under indirect control of the media owners), the money required to buy them must be donated to parties and politicians by interest-groups who often have lobbyists and intellectuals working for them on another tack. But those donations bring with them obligations to aid donors’ access to profit, prestige and power. At the same time, the periodic formal democratic vote has become swamped in continuous polling, by which various political agents seek to gauge the will of the electorate and tweak their media campaigns. The circuits between polls, media campaigns and policy, on the one side, and between donations, media campaigns and policy on the other contains little room for principled policy in terms that other than that thrown up from the circuits themselves. This is one example of a general process we can call the autonomisation of the social
At another level the integration of the global economy has created a Kantian perpetual peace. As early as the sixties it became clear that national governments had little ability to escape the logic of transnational capital: that was shown in 1964 when Harold Wilson proved incapable of implementing Labour Party policy because to do so would cause capital flight (Miliband). (Mitterand followed in a similar path in the early 1980s) This perpetual peace is secured by ever increasing tightening of immigration regimes, which are as it were nationalism’s final refuge. (John Locke still lived in a world where a child ‘was at liberty what government he put himself under’: that is impossible today, despite the societies government administer being less different from one another than in his time. 347)
The integration of economies is not merely a fact of economics: it has its military roots too. One of the key lessons to be learned from Phillip Bobbit’s The Shield of Achilles is that the market state develops from a long series of functional relationships between military and economic needs: at the beginning and still today, states encouraged markets in large part to fight wars.
The old tropes of consent and obligations do not apply to endgame capitalism: individuals do not consent to being governed and they do not have obligations (they are in something like the condition that Rousseau and Hegel posited of slaves.)
The right to strike and the effectiveness of striking has been curtailed.
The kinds of tactical resistances praised by de Certeau.
And the pluralist critique of state sovereignty which has a long (mainly ecclesiastical) history: non-jurors, Keble and the Oxford movement, the anti-Hegelians of the period around the first world war both of the right (Maitland, Figgis) and later of the left (Laski, Cole) and which reappears in the sixties (worker’s control, Paul Hirst, Rosanvallon, Michael Walzer’s Essays on Disobedience, p. 16 ff he wants “to take very seriously the possibility of joining secondary associations with limited claims to primacy”) and today in David Runciman
Endgame articulations:
Hegel after 1806.
Nietzsche’s Last Man
Kojeve’s ‘end of history’ 1946.
Lash, End of ideology
Fukayama’s End of History and the last man, after 1989

The figure of the philosopher in anti-historicist thought (the early Nietzsche, Strauss, Badiou). The philosopher in touch with wisdom, the true, an enemy of stupidity. And the figure of the critic: not wholly inside the society, a reflective alienation. And the figure of the alien: the one who simply does not belong.