stagnation

The world has been posthegemonic. by Gerardo Muñoz

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.

War and stagnation. by Gerardo Muñoz

The global stock market crash this past Monday over fear of a forthcoming US recession has rendered materially visible the long economic stagnation across the large market economies. Those that feel content with the “not yet” moment of a strong AI financial bubble see it as an interphase of ongoing transformations on the domain of artificial intelligence. The interphase hypothesis, however, prefers to ignore that the expansion of AI will only plunge even deeper the condition of stagnation and the end of human labor. 

In this scenario, it has been interesting to see one segment of the stock market that has stood the test of the global crash; mainly, the defense giant Lockheed Martin, whose stocks S&P stood firmly at 55% and its profit has seen about 21% growth compared to a year ago and expecting revenues as high as 71 billions at the closing of this year. In fact, according to Frank St John, chief operating officer at Lookhead Martin, “the company will not slow its production rate. St John said it would “probably take three or four quarters to work our way through the backlog of jets that need to be delivered”. The active war zones in Eastern Europe have only intensified the production growth of the military economy. 

From a historical perspective there is nothing new here, and it is “business as usual”. In fact, the great German war economic theorist of the Weimar Republic, Adolf Caspary, who also authored the book Wirtschaftsstrategie Und Kriegsführung (1932), entitled as piece in the Esquire, March of 1944, entitled “War is a Business, as Usual”, where he claimed that historically “though the expenditure of war have become larger, the risk is smaller, for manpower, industrial resources and wealth decide the war – if they are mobilized”. Of course, Caspary’s historical conditions were one of ‘total mobilization’, as famously theorized by Jünger; whereas ours is one of demobilization, stagnation, and polycrises. The partial mobilization of military industries is, at best, a symptom of the epochal demobilization and paralysis. 

There is also something like an inversion of the causal relationship between wealth and hostilities: if for Caspary in the 1930s it was the effective management of wealth what could lead a nation to win a war, in our times it is the production of multiple wars and catastrophes what need to be organized in order to maintain the still too illusory, and thus compensatory, state of productive economic growth. This is also why military giants like Lockheed Martin or RTX Corporation are federal state sponsored conglomerates that nourish the otherwise decomposition of modern state form. What is unusual in the “business as usual” of war management and the economy in our days is that neither wars are won, nor is a stable productive economy ever achieved.

On American despair. by Gerardo Muñoz

The rhetoric of “decadence” now prevalent in United States has reached such heights that, regardless of political orientation, it is clear that it has become a pretext for a desired take off and accession from the objective  stagnation and paralysis. Paradoxically, the assumption that there is “decadence” is revered as a moment of forthcoming light and rejuvenation; and, thus, as a “crisis” that can be identified and managed through the end. As it is well-known, for some critics of decadence the Golden age of American life was the landing on the moon and the population boom of the 1950s; technology and family. The elements are self-serving: to accelerate the reproduction of the human species, and to lead technological gigantism against new geopolitical competitors (AI, chip wars, Green economy, etc).

In the early twentieth century Americanism was a benefactor of private Fordism (everyone could enjoy his or her car, that is, their increasing isolation), but in principle things have not changed much a century later in terms of the outlook and the techno-administrative power. But the one thing that has changed is that the age of increasing productivity and formal production is no longer the objective coordinates of social relations; rather, depopulation and stagnation are the new variables that public powers that must be governed through its effective processes. Ultimately, this also implies that the waning of the high-modern state is no longer effective, and so the established discussion about “race to the bottom” fails to understand that there is no bottom. Hence, the only race is toward planetary destruction.   

And what is curious to note is that even those that have identified the epochal crisis of Liberalism can only exacerbate and contribute to the acceleration of the ongoing destruction with cultural and rhetorical veneers notwithstanding. The ‘postliberal’ commitment to the fantasy of a “new policy of re-industrialization” cunningly allows the autonomy of state-sovereign capacity as the main orientation within the growing desert of administrative functions. In fact, this is a fort da moment in which policy makers can be in favor of empowering the nexus between executive power and the federal bureaucracy; while, at the same time, the mouthpieces of these policies can promise a dismantling of the administrative state in a post-Chevron era. This schizophrenic position is not a symptom of mere anachronistic derailments of a political movements, it is also an expression of the desperate attempts of American failed (and to a large extent non-existent) political elites to find a formal mediation between state, administrative coordination, and constituent power, precisely because this nexus is broken and in shackles. 

And truth be told, no piecemeal or nudge-driven re-industrial protectionism is “enough” to cure the social angst and despair of contemporary American subjectivity at all levels of human experience. It has been two honest economists, Anne Case & Angus Deaton in the book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2021), who taken noted that what they call “deaths of despair” is the central social affection of contemporary America, which fuels the slow but steady self-annihilation of the life that no longer truly lives (and paralyzes the economic framework as well). And, in turn, what outlives the hegemony of social domination is the regulation of pain and despair as the last dispensation of this unliving.

The necessary oblivion of the social production of the deaths of despair is what remains necessary so that a pseudo-theological framework of imperial “decadence” can retain its competitive narratives in the abyss. The end of real forces of autonomous production have led the way into the production of pain, which as Gianni Carchia clearly saw in his reading of Michelstaedter (Retorica del sublime, 1990), is a form of active ethical communication between souls. For all the alleged talk about spiritualism, theology, and instrumentalized Christianity in times of “decadence”, the high point of Americanism remains a techno-administrative apparatus that can only produce and conceal the prolongation of social pain. Precisely, “the parabola of the impossible so that any notion of the ‘good’ fails to be affirmed in this world”. 

Production as a total religion of man: Notes on Gramsci’s Prison Writings (VII). by Gerardo Muñoz

In an important moment of Notebook 7, Antonio Gramsci writes that production in the age of industrialization amounts to a “new religion of the common man”. This thesis conditions many aspects of Gramsci’s thought and fully exposes his thinking as determined by the epoch of industrialization. If so, this means that his thinking is fundamentally insufficient for our historical present as defined by stagnation and the end of growth. First of all, the condition of industrialization allows for the famous “war of position”, which is exerted as a moralization of politics (hegemony). It is important to note that the concept of hegemony is introduced only “after” the historical reduction to industrial productivity is rendered as the unity of all historical time. In an explicit Hegelian fashion, Gramsci argues that: “The process of historical development is a unity in time, which is why the present contains the whole of the past and what is “essential” of the past realizes itself in the present, without any “unknowable” residue that would constitute its real “essence”. Whatever is lost….it pertained to chronicle not History, a superficial episode and, in the final analysis, negligible” (175). This is at the core of Gramsci’s thinking, not at the margins.

So, the Hegelian absolute movement of the philosophy of history as coterminous with the flattening of the “rational is the real” is the metaphysical ground in which Gramsci not only operates but the venue through which he offers us a “new religion of the common man”. A few sections later (§. 35), Gramsci confesses that “hegemony was also a great “metaphysical event”. Of course, one could suppose that Gramsci was delivering a new God within the gigantomachy of the age of production. The irony is, of course, that this strict “political theology” is only justified by the industrial regime that it seeks to overturn. Therefore, the question that the so-called contemporary Gramscians (or anyone taking up Gramsci today, say from the 1970s to the present) should respond is: how can the analytical conditions of Gramsci’s thought illuminate post-Fordism in the wake of the exhaustion of growth? 

If according to Jason E. Smith’s important new book Smart Machines and Service Work (2020) since the 1980s we are witnessing an ever-expanding service sector (in the US and the UK drifting well above the 80% of the GDP) as a compensatory for growth stagnation in the age of technological innovation, how could the Gramscian “new religion” on industry mobilize a horizon of emancipation, or even minimal transformation from said regime of exploitation? On the contrary, it seems (as I tried to argue recently here) that if we take Gramsci’s insight about the material conditions of “production” in any given epoch, the work of hegemony today can only open to a demand for exploitation as subjected to servant domination in the stagnant regime. In other words, if we accept Gramsci’s own analytical conditions (industrial production), this necessarily entails that we must move beyond hegemonic domination. To think otherwise – say, believing that a “temporal form of dictatorship” or “populist takeover”, now in ruins – amounts to a solution oblivious to the historical conditions, which can only blindly accept the “command” of a hegemonic principle. It is not a surprise that only the new nationalist right in the United States today can be properly labeled “Gramscian”, since they want to recoil political form to industrialization, organic community flourishing, and national “delinking” from globalization decomposition of the regime of total equivalence. But this is only a “storytelling” (a bad one, indeed) in times of stagnation.

More broadly, this speaks to the divergence between Gramsci’s faith in industrialization and Protestantism, as he defends it in section 47 of the Notebook. While glossing Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic, Gramsci notes that only the “spirt of the Reform” can produce reciprocal positions vis-à-vis grace and “good works”; whereas in Catholicism, activity and human action is not bounded by labor form, but by corporativism. On the surface this links Gramsci’s thesis with that of Max Weber’s; however, given the conditions explained above, it also shows that Gramsci’s thinking is really at odds with a commitment to thinking reform within the concrete conditions of a historical epoch. In other words, the political categories of Gramscianism (war of position, hegemony, production) are undeniably more on the side of reaction rather than in the production of new reforms. Of course, his position is not even a Catholic reaction; since, as Carl Schmitt observed in Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), at least the Church offered formal institutionality as a response to the total electrification of the world, whether in the hands of the Soviets or the American financial elite. But, as we know, the theory of hegemony is also oblivious to the problem of institution and the concrete order.