The soft-fascist mission economy
Kojéve, Mazzucato, "governance futurism"—nightmares of the near future
The next stage in governing capitalist societies will be the stage of the soft-fascist mission economy (SFME). The State will have to once again re-think its relationship to civil society, capital and labour. The SFME will consist in the State resurrecting its proactive capacities to shape the economy qualitatively (the ‘mission’), and will aim to curb civil liberties and the self-governance of the market by imposing surveillance and austerity measures, while never formally dismantling ‘democracy’ (‘soft-fascism’). It will do so to sustain capitalism and the ‘economy’ against the contradictions that are unleashed by new technological developments. In politics, it will intensify (likely losing) struggles focused on privacy, autonomy and liberty.
Today we look at three phenomena which I think prefigure something about the coming SFME: the “mission economy” of Mariana Mazzucato, the “governance futurism” of Palladium Magazine and the mid-century musings of French political philosopher and Hegel-scholar Alexandre Kojéve and his vision for a “Latin Empire.” I expect to see elements of these modes of thinking in the politics we are going to see in the coming years.1
I will first look back at the economic history of the last century. I will then tackle the three dreamers of the SFME. I will then list some manifestations of the SFME emerging in the present.
State, capital and labour in the twentieth century
In economic history, the 20th century is often divided into three parts, defined by two great events in political economy. First, the rise of the State as an economic actor following the Depression and through WW2, leading to a ‘Fordist’ system of production, with the rise of the first welfare-consumer societies based on unionised labour and strong domestic manufacture (and the maintenance of racial-ethnic underclasses)2. Then, the crisis of this system and the ‘neoliberal turn’ in the 1980s, with a retrenchment of state spending and deregulation of the economy, leading to a global division of labour between manufacturing on the ‘periphery’ and services in the ‘core.’
The problem with this narrative is that as the 21st century gets into full swing and neoliberalism is challenged, it is becoming increasingly less helpful. And it is less helpful because the first of the two events is of incomparably greater significance, and continues to define our time. Simply put: in the 1930-60s state spending went through a massive quantitative shift worldwide, going from single-digit percentages of the GDP to 15-50% of the GDP. This then led to qualitative changes in world capitalism. (This is essentially what Polányi called the great transformation.)
Previously, capitalism was plighted by deflationary crises: when there was an economic downturn, people were laid off en masse, aggregate demand shrunk, and a doom spiral of falling wages, falling prices and destruction of capital followed. Usually this corresponded to intensifying class conflict, labour uprisings and civil strife. This was the regular crisis experience of the first and second internationals, of Marx and finally of Lenin. The intellectual discovery in the ‘capitalist core’ that corresponds to recovery was that of Kalecki, Keynes and their colleagues: if only the state spends enough money, this sort of demand-crunch crisis can never happen again. Expansion of taxation, bureaucracies and state-provided services followed. The state spent on these, on infrastructure, and on the military on a never-before-seen scale.
And this is our time, still! I remember first learning about the standard lefty ‘liberalism to Fordism to neoliberalism—small state to big state to small state again’ narrative of the 20th century as an undergraduate. I remember that a little later I was looking at a chart showing state spending as a percentage of GDP: in that graph, there is just one major event in the 20th century, not two. Reagan, Thatcher et al never really decreased state spending, only rearranged it (to the military, for example). The one great political-economic event of the 20th century (at least for understanding the current conjuncture) happened in the 1930-60s.
This period also corresponds to the start of what I called ‘the long NEP.’ Lenin’s NEP was not just a necessary correlate of an attempt at the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was the necessary resolution of ‘imperialism,’ the hitherto ‘highest stage of capitalism.’ The concept of imperialism was important to Lenin not as a phenomenon for empirical sociological analysis, but for the way it appeared in the cutting-edge political thinking of his time, in the works of Hobson and Hilfredig that he analysed. It appeared as the crisis of the consciousness of the internationally organised proletariat: support it or be against it? Especially as it started to benefit sectors of the metropolitan working class, and as colonial spoils started to subsidise an emerging bureaucratic class (causing problems outside and inside the socialist parties). What was imperialism leading into? It was leading into the New Economic Policy's recipe: expand the state through the class of bureaucrats, keep capitalism going (in a protected and ‘embedded’ way) and pacify the working class.
This schema describes the evolution of the early Soviet Union, degrading into Stalinism with the destruction of civil society and civil right. But it also describes the two other great state experiments that arose in the ‘core:’ fascism in Central Europe and New Dealism in the US3. The NEP spread east to west. Fascism involved corporatism, (a sort of resurrection of the Great Chain of Being in service of industrial production.) Workers, capitalists and the judicial systems regulating their relations were incorporated into ‘organic,’ self governing unities. Sans the possibility of appeal to civil courts, the odd friction in their workings was resolved through the figure of the duce or Führer. This was the account of fascism/Nazism given by Frankfurt school legal theorist Otto Kirchheimer, and it stands convincing today. Moving to the West then, the New Deal in the US, saving capitalism from itself, (and also the only attempt successful at conserving rather than destroying civil society) was recognised and heralded as fascist at the time! Some of its supporters liked it because it was fascist, and opponents decried it for the same reason. The historical memory of the moment carries a crucial recognition: Stalinism in the USSR, fascism in Central Europe and the New Deal in the US engendered the same political-economic ‘Great Transformation:’ expand the State, contain class conflict (, wage war.) This recognition was conserved by Marxists of the time, even as the differences between the US, Germany and the USSR became mystified in war, hot and cold.
The end of neoliberalism and Mariana Mazzucato
What was ‘neoliberalism,’ then? Maybe it is too early (and too late) to know, and the answer will depend on what present phenomena we want to trace back in history. But in general, at its base, neoliberalism was marked by the increased mobility of capital and labour, enabled by new information technologies and international shipping practices. The State became incapable of ruling over the booming economy networking over the world, so it increasingly outsourced decisions over capital allocation to markets, and managed crises by controlling the money supply in the economy—quantitative, rather than qualitative measures.
It is perhaps this way that neoliberalism appears to us today—but I must emphasise that I trust these appearances little, as they shift precisely because neoliberalism is in crisis. We lose confidence in what it was in the moment of its disintegration. The crisis of neoliberalism appears as a series of frustrations: the concentration of power in a few limited loci (the ‘billionaire,’ for instance), the inability to ‘do stuff’ in the real world (e.g., building housing or infrastructure—to enable the basics of the modern economy), and a series of emerging threats from humanity's increased but out-of-control technological arsenal (the atom bomb, fossil-energy production, biotechnology and artificial intelligence).
Mariana Mazzucato thinks neoliberalism was ‘the big con’ that let the economy be captured by a small subset of society, jeopardising the flourishing and wellbeing of the majority. Her solution is the restoration of the powers of the state for qualitative, positive intervention. Her main argument could be summed up like this. The state should take risks and venture out to execute large-scale societal and technological projects, and make sure it cashes in some of the rewards. This would allow projects like the moon landing (which no individual firm could undertake, at least at the time) or building out major national infrastructure (like high-speed rail networks). In the fashion of the Beveridge report of Attlee's post-war Labour government in the UK, the state could also venture out to improve the human condition in some way: for example, to eliminate a disease, or end homelessness.
Instead of the narrow goals permissible in the ‘neoliberal’ era, such as maintaining low inflation and competitive markets, the state could just decide that, if there is a housing crisis, for example, it would directly pay for and build millions of homes in a few years, instead of trying to fine-tune the market environment and the planning system to prompt large developers and landowners to deliver. The experience of the 20th century shows, according to Mazzucato, that ‘mission economies’ also produce massive positive externalities: technologies that emerged to facilitate large-scale government projects (e.g. new materials developed in the space race) translate into huge and unexpected gains for consumers within a few decades.
Mazzucato is popular, holds a prestigious professorial chair at UCL, sits on the Scottish Council of Economic Advisers, published several best-selling books, and arguably both Bidenomics and Labour leader Keir Starmer’s policy proposals have at least some resonance with her ideas. (There was a moment in the evolving Labour campaign when Starmer presented a 21st century version of watered-down Beveridge targets, or ‘missions.)’ She is also popular in the ‘policy world’—think tanks love frameworks within which they can appear to further ‘economic justice’ through proposing state interventions. I expect this way of thinking to be taken up further in the next decade: safe AI will be a state ‘mission,’ saving jobs and ‘upskilling’ workers will be a state ‘mission,’ building new towns with aesthetic houses will be a state ‘mission.’ Climate austerity and the controlled reduction in consumption, or limiting international travel might also be a state ‘mission.’
Mazzucato fulfils the 20th century requirements of the ‘long NEP:’ she tries to contain deflation, conserve the value of labour and thereby save capitalism. She also succeeds in appearing to be ‘on the Left’, and will no doubt be called a ‘socialist’, nevermind the absurdity. However, she is in a way locked in the 20th century, and to me does not take technological transition seriously enough. A more technology-conscious form of the SFME is prefigured in the obscure online publication Palladium Magazine.
Palladium’s ‘governance futurism’
According to their self-definition ‘Palladium Magazine is a San Francisco-based, non-partisan publication that explores the future of governance and society through international journalism, long-form analysis, and social philosophy.’ If Mazzucato represents the dreams of the ‘policy world’ of the coming SFME, Palladium Magazine’s ‘governance futurism’ represents the San Francisco tech-sphere’s processing of the same reality. Palladium Magazine embodies the software engineer who recognised their own philistinism and had an eye-opening experience by taking history, culture and politics seriously.
How do they want to change the world? Like Silicon Valley—by building things, but not just startups. They are positive of culture and cautious of technological hubris. They want to build garden empires, they want to have children, they want to install a new elite (themselves?). They are of course hopelessly ‘petit bourgeois in character,’ but so are all the best thinkers of modernity. They focus little on barriers and risks, and focus more on opportunity to create and build. They recognise the present as a time of transition, and the changing role of the State at the centre of it. They are much better than Mazzucato at appreciating the severity of technological change, and I admire them for their attempt to face up to the task of understanding and processing history to understand ourselves.
They want to do, they want to build and if there should be limitations to their ambitions, they want to tackle these as they arise. Like Mazzucato, they think about new things to be created, and they base their creations in desire, and what they think is human nature. They recognise the realm of politics and civil society as the missing element in Silicon Valley’s models of changing the world in the disruptive startup. History is only built and rebuilt according to aims of the present. It has no logic of its own—it is only a shifting manifestation of human and nonhuman ‘first’ nature which is mediated through various technologies (of production and of governance).
As such, neither Mazzucato nor Palladium can have an utopia—they have desires, but they have no understanding of how these desires might result from the current situation, and how they might be indicators of how it can be transcended. The uncritical embrace of the original Will, of action, sweeps away initial barriers, but also precludes the possibility of emancipation. Hence the harking back to ancient philosophy and ancient virtues (or aesthetics of 20th century governance that seem to have been replaced arbitrarily.) And hence the questioning of bourgeois society and the idea of freedom. But this selective ignorance enables them to dream up the coming SFME.
Kojéve: the end of history and the age of Empire
The SFME is emerging from our era. But it was dreamt of earlier. Alexandre Kojéve is famous as a forerunner of the ‘end of history’ thesis, predating Fukuyama by the bulk of the 20th century. Teaching courses on Hegel in Paris in the interwar years (and fundamentally shaping how the French New Left read him), after the turmoil of the war he decided that history was basically over, and ended up working for the nascent European institutions. He once wrote a long letter to the French government, detailing his vision of a ‘Latin Empire.’
In response to the immediate danger facing France:
French policy, foreign as well as domestic, thus finds itself faced with two tasks of vital importance, which practically determine all the others:
– on the one hand, real neutrality must be ensured as much as possible during a possible war between Russians and Anglo-Saxons;
– on the other hand, during peacetime it is important to keep the country, in contrast to Germany, at the first economic and political rank in non-Soviet continental Europe.
…he innovates the concept of the Empire as the future of governance, emphasising that socialism (the unification of humanity) is not (yet) an option:
Liberalism is wrong not to perceive any political entity beyond that of Nations. But [socialist] internationalism’s sin is the fact that it sees nothing politically viable short of Humanity. It likewise was unable to discover the intermediary political reality of Empires, which is to say unions, or even international amalgamations of affiliated nations, which is exactly the political reality today. [my emphasis]
He suggested that with French leadership, the neo-Latin nations of the Mediterranean should unite in promoting a Catholic culture of art, culture and leisure against the Protestant ethic of commerce, capitalism and pragmatism promoted by Northern Europe. The Catholic civilisation, united in a new great Empire should conserve and promote what is left in humanity against—again—the cold march of technological necessity (represented in Christianity by Protestantism).
Generally speaking, [there exists a] fundamental unity of the Latin “mentality,” which is all the more striking to strangers . . . It is, to be sure, difficult to define this mentality, but it can immediately be seen that it is unique, among its type, in its deep unity. It seems that this mentality is specifically characterized by that art of leisure which is the source of art in general, by the aptitude for creating this “sweetness of living” which has nothing to do with material comfort, by that “ dolce far niente” itself which degenerates into pure laziness only if it does not follow a productive and fertile labor (to which the Latin Empire will give birth through the sole fact of its existence).
The essay is worth reading—to me it now appears as an early foreshadowing of the ‘governance futurism’ of Palladium, and carries the same essential elements as both Palladium and Mazzucato, that I think defines the SFME. Of course, I don’t think that we’re seeing an emergence of a Latin Empire, or even Empires in general. What I recognise in Kojéve’s letter is the attempt of a positivity of Will, of a futuristic vision of political mastery.
For all three thinkers, history has ended or is in decay, and there is an impending battle between humanity and its technological capacity (=a battle between the living labour of the human and the dead labour of capital). But socialism is not (or no longer, or not yet) an option, and there is no force within civil society to rise to the occasion—the initiative must be taken by the (authoritarian) State. Kojéve shares with both Palladium and Mazzucato the intuition that what is needed are conscious collective projects to wield technological forces, to produce concrete goods rather than diffuse, abstract goods in the form of increases in per-capita GDP and the efficiency of resource allocation. And: to save our humanity (or our literal lives) from destruction in a technological catastrophe, war, or simple demographic decay. In this they are right. But they are caught in wishful thinking. For pure will, sadly, is not enough to change things. Building new structures is not enough to defeat the monster that devours them. Sadly, tragically, uncomfortably and fatefully, to control our future, we need to defeat Capital.
The present and the coming SFME
I think these three sources register something that is happening independently of them—the rise of a policy of authoritarianism, censure and technological management.
The spectre of technology is key to the SFME: its ambitions and envisioned obstacles are centred around ecological, biological, cognitive and social technologies. The coming SFME is not a straightforward resurrection of the post-war ‘big state’—it is sensitive to the unique developments of the present, of the new ways in which capital is planning to restructure life. Mazzucato, Palladium, and (prematurely) Kojéve are (were) rebelling against this restructuring, or rather, want to bring it under conscious control—to once again ‘save capital from itself,’ like Roosevelt did, and from the looming deflation of the value of labour and the value of all that sustains it. But they ignore the uncomfortable and ugly reality of the State, which will not deliver the demands of human Will. The realm of social life to which they seek to escape is but another moment in the life-cycle of Capital, containing its self-destructive tendencies.
Capital marches on, casting ever larger segments of the population into inactivity, into its ‘surplus’—and ‘governance’ is following in lockstep trying to mitigate and displace the social effects of this creative destruction. Currently, technologies wreck civil society and conjure up the phantasmagoric realm in which it organises its own fragmentation along lines of algorithmically calculable opinions.4 The expression of this fragmentation in the 2010s was the political opportunism of populism—innovated by the right (Trump, Boris) and unreflectively mimicked by the Left (Bernie, Corbyn). One of the first actions is for the SFME to step in (Biden, Starmer, the EU commission): it is time to do away with online fragmentation by controlling free speech, cracking down on civil liberties and impeding the individual’s search for happiness by state-imposed missions and climate austerity. The proposed (and hopefully unenforceable) EU chat control laws, citing ‘the protection of children’ as their raison d’etre shamelessly copy the paranoia of Q-anon, which similarly baited the chronically online by the boogeyman of the pedophile. In one corner of the EU, Orbán’s government in Hungary is appealing to the same grounds for controlling sexual freedom. People who see an attempt at their freedom of movement in the recently rejuvenated (but really century-old) concept of the ‘fifteen-minute city’ are ridiculed—in spite of the fact that their fears were the reality only two years ago in the midst of the Covid pandemic.5 If the previous five-to-ten years were about struggles over the freedom of speech in an era of network effects and polarisation, the ‘struggle’ of the coming age of the SFME might be about freedom from surveillance and freedom of movement. The regression in society throws socialism further out of reach but makes liberalism momentarily progressive again.
I have lots of sympathy for Kojéve, for Palladium and for Mazzucato. I also want to get things done. I wish it was that simple. But I worry that if we follow our desires, or the appearances of our ‘nature’ we just end up reproducing more or less what we already have, and conceding either to capital or state or both. Kojéve, Palladium and Mazzucato deal with important appearances: they deal with a genuine frustration with the lack of bold new things; the intellectual shallowness in the people who mediate the march of technology in Silicon Valley and elsewhere; and with the senseless wastage of social, natural and institutional capacities to shape the human condition. But they only find a solution in the State because they ignore the problem of capital (the same way technologists bet on capital while ignoring the state). Because they gave up the hope of socialism, of realising (and going beyond) individual freedom and autonomy in civil society.
And they might be right! But if they’re right, I despair—for a future of humanity with only State and Capital is bleak. A future without a meaningfully strong civil society is a future of various soft forms of fascism. A future without a universal civil society, with individual freedom at its centre, will never be able to develop and deploy technology for human ends. This future is devoured and destroyed by robots and computer programs and atom bombs. The ideas of these three (groups of) thinkers prefigure the coming form of the State; and the extent of our enthusiasm for them reveals the degree to which we all are ready to succumb to its fascism.
Or maybe I’m wrong—that would be nice.
To me David Harvey’s recitation of this narrative in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990) will forever remain definitive.
Good Marxists know this.
Yes, I mean twitter.
Of course, both partisans and and opponents of the fifteen-minute city are partly wrong, and misunderstand each other.