In a recent text published at Verso Blog, entitled “The Coming Post-Hegemonic World”, Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra make a case for a “turn to a post-hegemonic model” that will challenge the consensus of global in the coming era. In many ways, this era is already here with its diverse and multifaceted (in terms of intensities, forces, and leverages) of protracted and bizarre nationalisms, which as Jamie Merchant has teased out brilliantly, amount to desperate attempts to offer a belated response to the decline of growth as one more stage for containing rampant processes of accumulation via state capacities. For Hardt & Mezzadra, this “posthegemonic world to come” is characterized by a global spatial reconfiguration of capital – accommodating the logistics of regional spaces of influences and exchange across the planet – and on the other, an increasingly “domestic sphere of authoritarian rule” promoted by new accelerated initiatives at generating social homogeneity in the wake of rushing fragmentation hand in hand with a war regime that has utterly scrapped ideals about “strategic autonomy” in order to trumpet an arm race (nuclear weapons included), as it is currently unfolding in Europe. 

One can claim that this posthegemonic world is one that firmly assumes the consequences of two interdependent vectors that imploded within the project of political modernity: the end of  economic growth (thus validating the law of the fall of profit outlined in Capital V.III), and the liquidation of the principle of legitimacy that for two centuries accommodated the legislative sources of the state authority in democratic constituent power. For Hardt & Mezzadra posthegemony means global fragmentation, authoritarianism, and spatial remaking; however, one should also say that it means, the opening towards stagnation, the collapse of political unity of the state, and most recently the total discredit of the foolish leftist hypothesis that promoted a “rainbow social equivalent coalitions” to push for compensatory, and in every instance insufficient and moribound, populist resurgences elevated through the combustion of ethereal but effective rhetoric (in fact, my argument in a new short book, La fisura posthegemónica, is that the push for political hegemony of the last decades only cosigned forms of consensual totalization at the expense of the production of subalternization and social death).  

Even taken as a descriptive and normative condition of the current state of Western politics, the posthegemonic situation lays bare the reciprocal impasse of the claim of its opposition: in other words, one should also put to rest social mobilization that characterized the politics of High Modernity, since ultimately movements (and total mobilization as an apparatus of social energy transfer) presupposes that “every social structure, that it can receive what form required the needs of the political adventure…total mobilization signifies nothing other that the effort to reduce the social substance to a kind of plastic”, as Gérard Granel once defined it. Hence when Hardt & Mezzadra claim that the “effective rebellion must be rooted in social movements envisioning a life beyond the rule of capital”, they are inadvertently refusing to come to terms with the factical posthegemonic reality that they are describing, which is no longer driven by expansive economic growth, but rather by stagnation, and inoperativity at planetary scale that is maintained through the a global veneer of production into regimes of competitive accumulation (of territory, contractual debt, fiscal regulation, executive taxation or tariffs, and increasing arbitrary monetary regulations in the global system) for marginal profitability, as Paul Mattick argues in his recent The Return of Inflation (2023). 

This means that there is no outlook towards ‘social mobilization’ that does not serve the subjective productivity of real subsumption, since its ultimate goal is to anaxate social energy into the force of (un)productive labor. This form of dilatant mobilization can only serve the master of illusionary hegemony, and thus promote functional and unwarranted servitude everywhere. Indeed, only a reprobate can be immune to the moralist or the realist conditions of hegemony. If push comes to shove, the posthegemonic factical world of stagnation and political fragmentation already here proves that the ongoing irruption of non-movements are irreducible to the modern movement’s energy; and that life never fully coincides with political claim to rule and legitimacy, even less so in the becoming-world of Production. 

Ultimately, this posthegemonic fissure outlives the crumbling hegemonic world of principial High Modernism and no ‘international movement’ can piece it back together again. We are all posthegemonic now, but only if one takes up this predicament seriously and candidly.