Thank you, this is really powerful and helps one think through a lot. To pick up a theme, we are clearly living in an era of "hodgepodge". Neither candidate is offering anything like a coherent vision of a way forward, just opportunistic pandering, on both sides. I would, however, quibble with one point. Is it so obvious that the working class needs housing, child care, and health care "first"? Doesn't stability of the prospect of reasonable employment a necessary precondition, both economically and psychologically?
George Friedman's STORM BEFORE THE CALM (2015) advanced many of the same considerations. To name my trope: if one discounts individual agency (which much of the discourse you anatomize visibly does), your powerful and salient point re 'history is not a womb' is, I suggest, diluted to near impotence. I'll go further: the limiting case to change agency is social currency—trust. That's what's being reassembled, mostly on the quiet. Not an interregnum but rather a process within emergent (non-linear) change. Big big challenge, to be sure. But that reassembly is fuelled not by tropes (detailing notably linear policies) but by individual acts of generosity and, reciprocally, gratitude. Nothing else actuates what you seek to identify. That's our toolkit. That ain't policy: it's driven by how we feel about how we feel: metaemotions. So what scales trust? Valid hope...and that's what's bubbling away, everywhere, far from oversight or the data scientists. Emergent human action isn't captured well by GAAP or the scientific method: it's a network effect...and that no AI or policy wonk can parse. What 'saves' us ain't policy: it's the ability, like the'citizen juries' in deeply Catholic Ireland that enacted a revolution in reproductive rights, to 'see the other.' End rant. Thank you: your work is a profound inspiration to think...and act. Onward.
Your hegemony series is very insightful. Have you considered creating a sub-substack on the topic. I try to save them all and print them off to read them (I'm old and printed paper works better for my comprehension) but they can be hard to track down in you feed. Maybe this is the beginning of a book, but being able to have all of this series in one place would be helpful.
BTW, if there is a way already to do this and I don't know how it works, just let me know.
I would also be grateful for suggestions as to how to find series (and specifically the hegemony one) within a given substack archive. I get the impression that working with substack's archive system is not easy for others as well. It may be that one simply has to scroll through, item by item, all the way back.
I can't help but contrast this with the China/Climate series and wonder if the West's policy chaos ('hodgepodge of elements') vs China's potential path ('shaping our planetary future') can be reduced to a 'model of governance' debate...
Buy of an aside, but I loved the reference to military spending as being extravagantly decadent. I read an article in the New York Review of Books about the US spending upwards of $1.3 trillion modernising its nuclear arsenal. I mean think of that as an unprecedented hurricane hurtles towards Florida. We’re spending an eye-watering sum on absurd weapons to defend ourselves against an illusionary threat and yet we’re not spending anywhere near what we should on the imminent threat that is displacing millions and killing thousands.
"In its classic period in the 20th century US hegemony was built not born. Hegemonic crises are problems of construction not organic obstructions. History is not a womb. We are on our own. As far as historical process of change are concerned, we have no mother. We live amongst the wreckage of what we have made and unmade."
This reminds me why Panitch and Gindin (two who take heavily from Gramsci) are so important. U.S empire was made and it will either be re-made or un-made by policy decisions in response to contradictions and crises
I suppose the overall project to resolve this contradiction has to take the form of decarbonization of the world economy and building resilience to the effects of climate change that are unavoidable on our current trajectory. If we don't do that all of our other plans and visions for the future will be overwhelmed.
Some aspects of that strategy would fit very well into the current trade dispensation, e.g. China's current dominance of solar panel and lithium ion battery manufacturing, which are very amenable to an export-driven policy. Other aspects are difficult to imagine in the current dispensation, e.g. relocation of vulnerable populations, which is hard to compel in any way that's compatible with liberal ideas about freedom of movement and hard to pay for. You're certainly quite right that the expenditures required are on the order of trillions and no one seems prepared to even contemplate that possibility.
On a more practical note, will _More and More and More_ be published in the US? It appears to be only available in the UK at the moment but it's very much up my street.
You seem to conclude that the world economy is not going to change in the near future. China and the global South will continue to do the manufacturing. The United States will prioritize the service economy and financial manipulations.
Great post. I would add: the greatest fear of American parents of a child who does not fit into the American education"system" is this: that the child will "end up" working in a factory. Note this is regarded as the end of a life in the literal sense and not the beginning of a career. Thank you for highlighting in a much needed way the absurdity of endowing some scattered chip fabricators. Naive, senseless, and as you hint it may never come to fruition. US President as Santa Claus.
While rummaging about looking for tropes to help us understand these "hinge points" maybe Adam might find biological metaphors helpful in some way -- I am thinking here of the "hopeful monsters" which inspired the idea of "punctuated equilibrium."
I think what Tooze is critically missing with this repeated dismissal of Gramsci's phrase is that it's meaning is useful in the understood context and translation (now is the time of monsters), and not merely the literal direct context he meant it. He has dissected it to death in a very un-Gramscian way.
Gramsci was at one time also a theater critic, and one of his interesting ideas was that the audience often makes the performance what it is, that there is a give and take that is lost when we talk only of the actors on stage. The laughter, the reactions, everything the people listening add to the work are just as important and trying to separate that out in reviews is impossible. That in my mind is what Tooze is doing here, he is separating a thinking man for whom "the people" were everything from those same people, he is taking the audience out of the Gramsci's performance.
Gramsci's quote as it is popularly understood "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters," is useful in understanding our times. Yes, the old world is 100% dying. You've got boomers, you've got industry vs service sector, you've got actual humans doing things as opposed to machines and AI, etc. and so on. But none of these these things are gone, they are just starting to fail. The utility of this quote is in pointing out the simple fact that when self interested groups, ideas, or social elements are on the way out, they resist their replacement and it creates crazy amounts of conflict, and yeah, the whole "monsters" thing is a fair description of the schizophrenia of fascism both then and now. Or put another way, when the folks who want to improve the world start making dents in things, but they haven't gotten their shit together yet to present a strong vision of what comes next, you get some crazy monsters, some last ditch efforts to forestall change that make little sense one way or another but must be overcome. But things do improve, and that isn't some utopian dreaming.
Again, this probably isn't the meaning in any historical sense of Gramsci's quote from the Prison notebooks, but it is very Gramscian in the sense that the cultural hegemony of his ideas handed down through the generations is still shaping how different people understand their world. It is almost strange how resistant Tooze is to this, and how quick he is to brand Gramsci with the brush ideologue considering how Gramsci was very un-characteristically independent in his thinking for his period, and dealt with the currency of ideas much more than ideologies in actual fact. His politics and subject were communist but his thoughts were universal, critical , and humanist in a way anybody whose actually read the notebooks would surely appreciate.
"In its classic period in the 20th century US hegemony was built not born. Hegemonic crises are problems of construction not organic obstructions. History is not a womb. We are on our own. As far as historical process of change are concerned, we have no mother. We live amongst the wreckage of what we have made and unmade."
Adam with a machine gun : ) c'est vivifiant de regarder l'abîme !
"The politics of trade are superheated. National industrial policy is all the rage. But the evidence for major changes in the flow of trade is scant."
I have no grand theory but would posit at least a partial explanation (that could be fixed):
The world (in sort of a Fukuyama like manner) saw the US faith in prices work, notably post-Volcker taming inflation. It was long and politically fraught process, in EMs and OECDs, to head down the same path. But they did.
CO2 was a (maybe the) destroyer of that faith in prices. The EU saw it when ETS commencement in 2005 was literally ignored by US leaders. China, already beginning an evolution into an ETS of their own, noticed then too. In 2010, when the Senate sent Pigovian market mechanisms to the prison where they are still doing time, American "markets-best" hypocrcrisy was laid bare. China went petal-to-the metal on cleantech and others have been following.
What has happened since - US created global financial crisis, US goes petal-to-the-metal on oil & gas/LNG, no American leadership or funding of climate aid, US 2/3rds plus of global market cap (amid increased sectoral concentration), and US decides climate policy = industrial policy (following Trump tariffs)? Nothing very hegemon-like.
Can the US fix it's mess before "major changes in the flow of trade" became evident? Hope springs eternal.
“ But where would you even start in a world whose shapes we can see, elements of which are clearly familiar - we made them after all - but whose underlying logic is obscure. What does realism under these circumstances entail?”
My attempt for what its worth borrows from soft systems thinking, the conceptual model for the problem situation is The Human Activity System, it is teleological but can serve as a tool for thinking about all relevant factors https://brianfishhope.com/part-1-review/the-human-system
Lots of concepts to unpack. At the risk of being myopic, the US certainly stands alone on how it has run its economy as well as the world economy. Most countries concern themselves with balance of payments and fiscal responsibility. US, oppositely, appears little concerned with fiscal deficits or balance of payments. It is up to the Central Bank to resolve the incongruity. Under such conditions it would be interesting to analyze those who get the increase in wealth and who gets the inflation, within both the US as well as the rest of the world.
Thank you, this is really powerful and helps one think through a lot. To pick up a theme, we are clearly living in an era of "hodgepodge". Neither candidate is offering anything like a coherent vision of a way forward, just opportunistic pandering, on both sides. I would, however, quibble with one point. Is it so obvious that the working class needs housing, child care, and health care "first"? Doesn't stability of the prospect of reasonable employment a necessary precondition, both economically and psychologically?
George Friedman's STORM BEFORE THE CALM (2015) advanced many of the same considerations. To name my trope: if one discounts individual agency (which much of the discourse you anatomize visibly does), your powerful and salient point re 'history is not a womb' is, I suggest, diluted to near impotence. I'll go further: the limiting case to change agency is social currency—trust. That's what's being reassembled, mostly on the quiet. Not an interregnum but rather a process within emergent (non-linear) change. Big big challenge, to be sure. But that reassembly is fuelled not by tropes (detailing notably linear policies) but by individual acts of generosity and, reciprocally, gratitude. Nothing else actuates what you seek to identify. That's our toolkit. That ain't policy: it's driven by how we feel about how we feel: metaemotions. So what scales trust? Valid hope...and that's what's bubbling away, everywhere, far from oversight or the data scientists. Emergent human action isn't captured well by GAAP or the scientific method: it's a network effect...and that no AI or policy wonk can parse. What 'saves' us ain't policy: it's the ability, like the'citizen juries' in deeply Catholic Ireland that enacted a revolution in reproductive rights, to 'see the other.' End rant. Thank you: your work is a profound inspiration to think...and act. Onward.
Adam,
Your hegemony series is very insightful. Have you considered creating a sub-substack on the topic. I try to save them all and print them off to read them (I'm old and printed paper works better for my comprehension) but they can be hard to track down in you feed. Maybe this is the beginning of a book, but being able to have all of this series in one place would be helpful.
BTW, if there is a way already to do this and I don't know how it works, just let me know.
I would also be grateful for suggestions as to how to find series (and specifically the hegemony one) within a given substack archive. I get the impression that working with substack's archive system is not easy for others as well. It may be that one simply has to scroll through, item by item, all the way back.
I can't help but contrast this with the China/Climate series and wonder if the West's policy chaos ('hodgepodge of elements') vs China's potential path ('shaping our planetary future') can be reduced to a 'model of governance' debate...
Buy of an aside, but I loved the reference to military spending as being extravagantly decadent. I read an article in the New York Review of Books about the US spending upwards of $1.3 trillion modernising its nuclear arsenal. I mean think of that as an unprecedented hurricane hurtles towards Florida. We’re spending an eye-watering sum on absurd weapons to defend ourselves against an illusionary threat and yet we’re not spending anywhere near what we should on the imminent threat that is displacing millions and killing thousands.
"In its classic period in the 20th century US hegemony was built not born. Hegemonic crises are problems of construction not organic obstructions. History is not a womb. We are on our own. As far as historical process of change are concerned, we have no mother. We live amongst the wreckage of what we have made and unmade."
This reminds me why Panitch and Gindin (two who take heavily from Gramsci) are so important. U.S empire was made and it will either be re-made or un-made by policy decisions in response to contradictions and crises
I suppose the overall project to resolve this contradiction has to take the form of decarbonization of the world economy and building resilience to the effects of climate change that are unavoidable on our current trajectory. If we don't do that all of our other plans and visions for the future will be overwhelmed.
Some aspects of that strategy would fit very well into the current trade dispensation, e.g. China's current dominance of solar panel and lithium ion battery manufacturing, which are very amenable to an export-driven policy. Other aspects are difficult to imagine in the current dispensation, e.g. relocation of vulnerable populations, which is hard to compel in any way that's compatible with liberal ideas about freedom of movement and hard to pay for. You're certainly quite right that the expenditures required are on the order of trillions and no one seems prepared to even contemplate that possibility.
On a more practical note, will _More and More and More_ be published in the US? It appears to be only available in the UK at the moment but it's very much up my street.
You seem to conclude that the world economy is not going to change in the near future. China and the global South will continue to do the manufacturing. The United States will prioritize the service economy and financial manipulations.
Do I understand you correctly? Please respond.
Great post. I would add: the greatest fear of American parents of a child who does not fit into the American education"system" is this: that the child will "end up" working in a factory. Note this is regarded as the end of a life in the literal sense and not the beginning of a career. Thank you for highlighting in a much needed way the absurdity of endowing some scattered chip fabricators. Naive, senseless, and as you hint it may never come to fruition. US President as Santa Claus.
While rummaging about looking for tropes to help us understand these "hinge points" maybe Adam might find biological metaphors helpful in some way -- I am thinking here of the "hopeful monsters" which inspired the idea of "punctuated equilibrium."
I think what Tooze is critically missing with this repeated dismissal of Gramsci's phrase is that it's meaning is useful in the understood context and translation (now is the time of monsters), and not merely the literal direct context he meant it. He has dissected it to death in a very un-Gramscian way.
Gramsci was at one time also a theater critic, and one of his interesting ideas was that the audience often makes the performance what it is, that there is a give and take that is lost when we talk only of the actors on stage. The laughter, the reactions, everything the people listening add to the work are just as important and trying to separate that out in reviews is impossible. That in my mind is what Tooze is doing here, he is separating a thinking man for whom "the people" were everything from those same people, he is taking the audience out of the Gramsci's performance.
Gramsci's quote as it is popularly understood "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters," is useful in understanding our times. Yes, the old world is 100% dying. You've got boomers, you've got industry vs service sector, you've got actual humans doing things as opposed to machines and AI, etc. and so on. But none of these these things are gone, they are just starting to fail. The utility of this quote is in pointing out the simple fact that when self interested groups, ideas, or social elements are on the way out, they resist their replacement and it creates crazy amounts of conflict, and yeah, the whole "monsters" thing is a fair description of the schizophrenia of fascism both then and now. Or put another way, when the folks who want to improve the world start making dents in things, but they haven't gotten their shit together yet to present a strong vision of what comes next, you get some crazy monsters, some last ditch efforts to forestall change that make little sense one way or another but must be overcome. But things do improve, and that isn't some utopian dreaming.
Again, this probably isn't the meaning in any historical sense of Gramsci's quote from the Prison notebooks, but it is very Gramscian in the sense that the cultural hegemony of his ideas handed down through the generations is still shaping how different people understand their world. It is almost strange how resistant Tooze is to this, and how quick he is to brand Gramsci with the brush ideologue considering how Gramsci was very un-characteristically independent in his thinking for his period, and dealt with the currency of ideas much more than ideologies in actual fact. His politics and subject were communist but his thoughts were universal, critical , and humanist in a way anybody whose actually read the notebooks would surely appreciate.
"In its classic period in the 20th century US hegemony was built not born. Hegemonic crises are problems of construction not organic obstructions. History is not a womb. We are on our own. As far as historical process of change are concerned, we have no mother. We live amongst the wreckage of what we have made and unmade."
Adam with a machine gun : ) c'est vivifiant de regarder l'abîme !
Thx
"The politics of trade are superheated. National industrial policy is all the rage. But the evidence for major changes in the flow of trade is scant."
I have no grand theory but would posit at least a partial explanation (that could be fixed):
The world (in sort of a Fukuyama like manner) saw the US faith in prices work, notably post-Volcker taming inflation. It was long and politically fraught process, in EMs and OECDs, to head down the same path. But they did.
CO2 was a (maybe the) destroyer of that faith in prices. The EU saw it when ETS commencement in 2005 was literally ignored by US leaders. China, already beginning an evolution into an ETS of their own, noticed then too. In 2010, when the Senate sent Pigovian market mechanisms to the prison where they are still doing time, American "markets-best" hypocrcrisy was laid bare. China went petal-to-the metal on cleantech and others have been following.
What has happened since - US created global financial crisis, US goes petal-to-the-metal on oil & gas/LNG, no American leadership or funding of climate aid, US 2/3rds plus of global market cap (amid increased sectoral concentration), and US decides climate policy = industrial policy (following Trump tariffs)? Nothing very hegemon-like.
Can the US fix it's mess before "major changes in the flow of trade" became evident? Hope springs eternal.
Will we fix this?
“ But where would you even start in a world whose shapes we can see, elements of which are clearly familiar - we made them after all - but whose underlying logic is obscure. What does realism under these circumstances entail?”
My attempt for what its worth borrows from soft systems thinking, the conceptual model for the problem situation is The Human Activity System, it is teleological but can serve as a tool for thinking about all relevant factors https://brianfishhope.com/part-1-review/the-human-system
Lots of concepts to unpack. At the risk of being myopic, the US certainly stands alone on how it has run its economy as well as the world economy. Most countries concern themselves with balance of payments and fiscal responsibility. US, oppositely, appears little concerned with fiscal deficits or balance of payments. It is up to the Central Bank to resolve the incongruity. Under such conditions it would be interesting to analyze those who get the increase in wealth and who gets the inflation, within both the US as well as the rest of the world.
I'm currently re-reading Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening; perhaps this is the fifth.