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This weekend: I’m in Juneau!
After a very long time with no appearances, I’m pleased to say I’ll be in Juneau, Alaska this weekend with books, trinkets and sketches!
The 2024 Alaska Robotics Minicon takes place on Saturday, April 27 at the APK Libraries, Archives, and Museum building.
I’ll also be doing a presentation the night before, Friday 4/26, at the kickoff variety show at the Mendenhall Valley Library. The full events schedule is here!
Marxist Viewing of Dune: Part Two
The latest movie adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic novel Dune, Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve, has set truly intergalactic box office records, and been globally exalted by movie critics. Dune: Part Two has, of 24 March, hit over US$220 million in the United States domestic box-office, and worm-holed its way to over US$520 million globally. Villeneuve’s latest foray into the harsh world of Arrakis has been critically acclaimed as a masterpiece, with the film compared favourably to the brilliant Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, while it currently enjoys near-perfect popular and critical reviews.
Dune: Part Two returns us to the story of Paul Atreides, quickly picking up from where Dune: Part One left us, as he enters the harsh desert climate of Arrakis in the company of the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the Fremen. In the film, the young Atreides must rally the ‘desert power’ of the Fremen, spurred on by his mother Lady Jessica, to have any hope of exacting vengeance against the brutal Family Harkonnen, who butchered his father Duke Leo Atreides and the rest of his royal House in Dune: Part One. The film depicts Paul gradually mobilising the thousands upon thousands of Fremen warriors across Arrakis against the Harkonnen rulers, and eventually in opposition to Emperor Shaddam IV himself, as his prescient visions reveal that his growing power will lead to an intergalactic holy war, much to the initial fear of himself and the revulsion of Chani, his Fremen comrade and lover.
Much good work has been written on Dune: Part Two as an example, or critique, of the white saviour narrative; a demonstration of interplanetary fascistic war; an exposé of brutal colonial violence; a self-aware Orientalist appropriation of a sandbox of non-Western cultures; a piece that deemphasises the complexity and agency of women from Herbert’s original book; a movie that has noted analogies with the current Israel-Palestine war; and a movie that obviously took inspiration from Islamic and North African and Middle Eastern sources but equally relegates this recognition. Now, in preparation for seeing this movie for the third time at the local IMAX cinema, I wanted to do something a bit different before strolling in, and I swapped the 3D IMAX glasses for my Marxist spectacles to try to understand some key themes of this intergalactic blockbuster… spoiler alert! (for both Marxist theory and Dune: Part Two).
Worming into Dune
On the face of it, Dune: Part Two is quite obviously not a tale that focuses on the working class nor is it one that seems to deal with a recognisable form of capitalism. In the movie, there are evidently subaltern and proletarian-type collective subjects who linger on the margins of the action, such as servants for the lords and ladies of House Harkonnen, Atreides, or Corrino, or such agents who are more central to the narrative, such as the indigenous Fremen themselves. The latter of which we will address separately, below. Further, the galactic political economy of Dune: Part Two is dominated by ‘great houses’ in a brutal, feudalistic structure that stretches across the known universe, and does not seem to resemble any type of capitalism we are familiar with. Thus, it seems that more ‘orthodox’ Marxist accounts of Dune: Part Two, which seek to account for how power over means of production determines the relations of production that subsequently lay the basis for class conflict, is inappropriate. Instead, this piece seeks to foreground a Marxist approach to the philosophy of internal relations that conceives the social world, or Dune’s universe, made up of vast interconnections and relations between, and through, people and the objects that they interact with. The idea with this ontology is to understand how every subject and object in a totality, whether that be a world or universe, holds essential relations to other subjects, objects, or structures that determine themselves and their social position in this totality. As a simple and brief example, Paul Atreides is the Duke of House Atreides because of how others relate to him, and how he relates to others, alongside his presumed dominance of productive, military, or social forces that are all partly constitutive of his social position in the Dune universe. The point is that, then, any change in such intertwined relations can bring a rupture to the underlying logic of broader social structures that are made up of these relations, or equally impact the people that inhabit, and are defined by, them.
This philosophy of internal relations may give us a framework for understanding how aspects of the social universe depicted in Dune: Part Two, such as inter-House rivalries and indigenous subjugation, relate to the broader historically given context of that universe, that of a feudalistic totality, which may reveal the logic that structures these relations – and have some lessons for our own time. As such, let us start with the broader, historically given intergalactic political economy expressed in Dune: Part Two, that of the warring Feudal Houses.
Interplanetary Feudalism
The inter-galactic political economy of the Dune: Part Two universe is clearly feudalistic. The political apparatus is defined by the dominance of ‘Great Houses’, such as the Atreides and Harkonnen, under the signorial power of an Emperor. Notables in these Great Houses establish their own ‘fiefdoms’ on entire worlds, such as that of Arrakis, and there appears to be warrior classes in each House who are obliged to provide their military power to the ruling nobles. Other signs of feudal formations are the return of trade ‘guilds’, such as the unseen space guild that has monopolised transport, or even those of mentats, like Thufir Hawat, or Suk doctors, such as Yueh. While the hidden existence of the public held corporation CHOAM that has monopolised all trade, under the directorship of the Emperor, further suggests that there is no system of capitalism operating in Dune: Part Two.
While it is not remarkable that our current historical formation has given way to a different formation, what perhaps is surprising is that it appears the Dune: Part Two universe has regressed to feudalistic organising structures. However, thinking further on these structuring relations not only unfolds our investigation into how the Houses relate to the sub-altern, such as the Arrakis-based Fremen (addressed below), but allows us to reflect on how our own neoliberal, capitalist social-economic structure could metamorphose into a feudalism like that of Dune: Part Two.
Prominently taking up this argument (minus the reference to Dune) is Yanis Varoufakis, whose most recent book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism argues that the emergence of cloud technology, the enclosure and privatisation of the internet, and the heavy flow of central bank money post-2008, has sparked an epochal shift. Varoufakis makes the point that we all collectively serve the big tech giants for free by creating content, providing data, and other virtual surplus value, in huge networks of value generation that is not tied to any means of production. This service then allows us to ‘live within their kingdom’. This new ‘Technofeudalism’ is argued by Varoufakis as being the new historical formation, which will become more acute as the global economy shifts towards the generation of virtual surplus value that is more and more disconnected from ‘real’ production.
Projecting our current formation of Technofeudalism into the future, the next technological revolution that is widely predicted to transform the underlying social relations is the introduction of Artificial Intelligence. Now, this is where the connection with Dune: Part Two becomes interesting. In the world of Dune, thousands of years prior to the movie’s setting (the movie is set approximately 20,000 years from our own time), there was a ‘Butlerian jihad’ against all ‘machines-that-think’; an imperium-wide revolt that destroyed computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots. Linking our Technofeudalist society, as per Varoufakis, to the Dune universe, we can hypothesise that its’ structures had deepened and became hegemonic worldwide, eventually creating the possibilities for space travel and interplanetary colonisation. Then, due to the alienation, deprivation, and social conflict that technofeudalism would entail on a universe-wide scale, the offending technology was destroyed through popular revolt as the intergalactic feudal political structures remained. Hence, we are left with Emperors, Dukes, and Great Houses without the technological fetishisation – maybe Emperor Shaddam IV is a distant, future relative of Mark Zuckerberg?
Indigeneity on Arrakis
The goal of the Imperium on Arrakis, the eponymous planet of Dune: Part Two, is to harvest the planet’s unique spice melange that vitally powers intergalactic space travel. The relation, then, between the Feudal Houses and the planet of Arrakis is one of extraction, which clearly resembles the real-world imperialism of our own colonial powers across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The depictions of the indigenous people on Arrakis furthers the obvious comparison between the Dune timeline and ours; the Fremen people appear culturally similar to traditions in the Middle East, their language is heavily based on Arabic in the Dune book (though the movie scrubs this influence), and their religious beliefs are inspired by Islamic practices (though again, this was much more obvious in the book, with the movie erasing these).
The Fremen are fierce fighters that constantly disrupt the extraction of spice by the ruling Harkonnnens, with the Fremen using spice as part of their diet and a central substance to their religious and cultural life. Then, if the Fremen are so problematic to the imperialists, why do they not simply destroy them? Of course, in Dune: Part Two, several Harkonnen members make loud threats to simply do just that. However, the relation between the Imperium and the Fremen is not purely a one-way extraction; the Fremen presence is vital on Arrakis because they are central to the continuance of spice itself. The Fremen’s stewardship of the gigantic worms, known to them as Shai Hulud, whose presence is fundamental to spice creation, and the Fremen’s own gathering and refinement of the melange, ensures that the Imperium is equally in a dependent relation with this sub-altern collective. Borrowing from Foucault, this insertion of Fremen bodies throughout the spice creation process is a form of biopower that can be controlled. Through the Imperium’s utilisation of deception and religious indoctrination to foster consent, and the application of brute coercion when that fails (Gramsci’s tools of hegemony), the intergalactic empire mitigates their dependence on the Fremen through the typical technics of colonial power familiar to our own time. The prescience of Paul Atreides, in the form of a white saviour trope, understands the dependent relation of the feudalistic Imperium on not just the spice itself, but equally upon the Fremen; and this is why Paul’s militant mobilisation of the indigenous Fremen against the Harkonnen’s quickly brings down the entire Imperium.
This is my Desert. My Arrakis. My Dune.
The over-dependence on spice as a central resource in the known universe in Dune: Part Two is not only intensely destabilising for the feudalistic political economy of the Imperium, but also illustrates the rapacious relations between Dune’s future humanity and the ‘external’ nature. Indeed, the underlying philosophy that provides the foundations of the Imperium’s approach to nature is strikingly similar to our own. The ontological, Cartesian dualism of Human/Nature has informed our understanding of the relations between humanity and nature during the Age of Capital, which has meant that capital has greedily metabolised the ‘free gift’ of ‘Cheap Nature’ across the world – up to a point where in 2024, the earth is on the parapet of untenable global warming, mass species death, and the end of life itself. What we see in Dune: Part Two is that the transition to Technofeudalism in the not-too-distant future and the opening of space travel has temporarily erased these ecologically destructive tendencies and contradictions of capital, geographically displacing them to all know corners of the universe.
Without reformation, the feudalism that has then persisted in Dune: Part Two over the course of thousands of years, which still sees the ‘Human’ as entirely separate to an external ‘Nature’ (which the Fremen are often categorised into, as most indigenous populations have in our time), has depleted the entire ecology of the universe. The violent extraction of spice from Arrakis is a case-in-point, with increasingly destructive sandstorms and unliveable conditions, but we also see evidence of this on other planets, too. Such as the Harkonnen home world of Giedi Prime, which has had such brutal industrialisation that the level of photosynthesis is catastrophically low, artistically captured in Dune: Part Two with infrared, black-and-white monochrome shots of the planet.
Similar to our own time, in the Dune: Part Two universe there is no recognition of the importance of the deep, intertwined relations between humanity and the nature that surrounds us. The Fremen live in the harsh conditions on Arrakis and have not only survived but thrived through an intense, respectful interconnection with the natural environment that they live within – this is not an external connection, but fundamentally an internal one between Fremen and the planet. In Dune: Part Two, the life of the Fremen within the desert is dismissed by the Great Houses, evidenced by the Harkonnen’s referring to them repeatedly as ‘rats’; and similarly to our time, indigenous ecological knowledge gained through living with the land has been equally disdained and violently rejected by colonial practices and knowledge forms. The story of Dune: Part Two reminds us of the fundamental, internal interconnections that we have with nature and the world around us, which is not separable from the political, social, and economic practices that we have chosen to determine our, rapidly deteriorating, livelihoods.
Removing my Marxist spectacles at the end of Dune: Part Two, I am struck with the resonance that the movies’ messages have for our own historical juncture. Particularly, the importance of a philosophy of internal relations does not diminish, despite the vast scale on which the inter-galactic story of Dune unfolds. Seeing our potential, post-Technofeudalistic future in Dune: Part Two, reminds me that we also have to ‘think’ the present, past and speculative futures together as an integrated, internally-related whole, if we have any chance of addressing the various poly-crises we are faced with. In the words of Lady Jessica, Reverend Mother in Dune: Part Two:
‘You cannot see the future without seeing the past’.
The post Marxist Viewing of Dune: Part Two appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Final few days for #Pintopia!
I’m excited to remind folks that we are in the LAST FEW DAYS of the Pintopia campaign!
Most of the pledge tiers are for various numbers of pins, as you might expect.
But I’ve ALSO just added a new tier called PLEDGE MANAGER ONLY:
The best deals on groups of pins can be found in the regular pledge tiers (where every additional pin is cheaper than the last, as volume pricing does its magic).
But, if you’d prefer to peruse everything later and/or make à la carte selections, you can now opt in to the Pledge Manager tier for just $2.
This will give you access to the pledge manager after the campaign (with $2 credit already on board, natch), where you can then build your own reward of individual items, including:
- Pins – of course!
- Stickers – individually OR in sets
- Wondermark greeting cards
But also, a few extra things will show up in the pledge manager as well:
- Wondermark books and prints
- Stickers of each of the NEW pin designs
- T-shirts! I’ll be using this post-campaign order period to determine the long-term interest in making shirts of the new designs… So an initial, limited number will be made available.
If you haven’t joined the campaign yet, you have until APRIL 18, 1PM to pledge at any level, and gain access to these items! Here is a colorful button to click:
When you’re bright, be loud.
Today’s comic revisits another of the heroes from my #Pintopia campaign! This time, it’s that famous satellite of the planet on which most of us live – Luna, the Moon.
We first heard from this celestial character in the classic comic #302.
I have also gone back through the archives and added the new tag #astronomy to past comics involving our various friends in the heavens.
In doing so, I realized there are also quite a few comics featuring the moon in a supporting role, in the context of werewolfery — but that is another topic altogether.
I will let you know when I have completed the assignment of a #lycanthropy tag.
Meanwhile, the loud round one is also the subject of a brand new pin design, once again part of…
Once again I am including this picture of my brand-new pin designs!
You can read more about all different my pin designs over on the campaign page.
Seminar: Randall Germain, ‘The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History’
Political Economy seminar
The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History
Speaker: Randall Germain, Carleton University
When: 3-4pm, Wednesday, 24 April, 2024
Where: A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 341, The University of Sydney
About the talk: The idea of history, although present throughout much of the traditional canon of political economy and its internationalized off-shoot – international political economy (IPE) – is today largely erased as a key theoretical feature of IPE research. Where it is included as a part of the research enterprise, it is most often formulated as either context for the problem under investigation, or as a linear unit of account such as t + 1. This represents a theoretical loss for the discipline of IPE, and my effort here is to recenter the idea of history as a core feature of IPE’s broad research agenda. To do this, I first revisit how the idea of history is framed in the work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Max Weber, to demonstrate that the idea of history was a critical element of the inspiration to political economy (and IPE). I then pick up how the idea of history informs what might be described as ‘modern’ IPE, most importantly in the work of foundational IPE scholars (Antonio Gramsci, Karl Polanyi, David Mitrany, E.H. Carr, Susan Strange and Robert Cox). This intellectual history reveals the important way in which the idea of history can frame the research enterprise of IPE as an examination of transformative change within the global political economy. In period marked by what appear to be deep and disruptive change, the idea of history is a necessary addition to the IPE conceptual and analytical toolkit.
About the speaker: Randall Germain is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University, Canada. His teaching and research examine the political economy of global finance, issues and themes associated with economic and financial governance, and theoretical debates within the field of international political economy. His scholarship has been published in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, Global Governance, International Studies Quarterly, New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, and Review of International Studies. He is also the author of The International Organization of Credit (CUP, 1997) and Global Politics and Financial Governance (Palgrave, 2010). Most recently he edited Susan Strange and the Future of Global Political Economy (Routledge 2016). His current research explores how the idea of history has informed disciplinary debates in IPE.
The post Seminar: Randall Germain, ‘The Problem of History in IPE: An Intellectual History’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Book Launch: Ben Spies-Butcher, ‘Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation’
UPDATE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED AND WILL BE RESCHEDULED. STAY TUNED!
Join Ben Spies-Butcher, Frank Stilwell and Gabrielle Meagher to launch Ben’s new book, Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation.
Where: New Britannia Hotel, 103 Cleveland St, Darlington
When: Wednesday 17th April, 5.30 for 6pm-7.30pm
About Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation by Assoc Prof Ben Spies-Butcher
Neoliberalism has made Australia less equal and our welfare system more brutal. But it has also changed the politics of inequality. Using examples from health to housing, unemployment to universities, this book identifies opportunities to make a more equal Australia. Published by Anthem Studies in Australian Politics, Economics and Society. More information and to purchase the book visit: https://anthempress.com/the-politics-of-the-australian-welfare-state-after-liberalisation-hb
Catering: Drinks and food available from the venue.
Getting there: 8 mins walk from Redfern Station, or 6 mins from Broadway. On the 352 bus route. Some timed car parking available.
The post Book Launch: Ben Spies-Butcher, ‘Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Seminar: Mareike Beck, Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on USD Debt
Political economy seminar
Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on USD Debt
Speaker: Mareike Beck, University of Warwick
When: Wednesday 17 April, 3-4pm, 2024
Where: A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 341, The University of Sydney, and Zoom
About the talk: I will speak about my new book, Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on USD Debt, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. The book offers a new account of the Americanisation of global finance. It advances the concept of extroverted financialisation as an original framework to explain US-led financialisation. The paradigmatic case study of German universal banks is used to demonstrate that the transformation of global banking towards US-style finance should be understood as a response to a revolution in funding practices that originated in US money markets in the 1960s. This new way of funding led to the securitisation of USD debt and rapid globalisation of USD flows, which has fundamentally reshaped the competitive dynamics of global finance as this has empowered US banks over their European counterparts. I argue that this has caused German banks to partially uproot their operations from their own home markets to institutionalise themselves into US money markets. I show that to be able to compete with US financial institutions, German banks had to fundamentally transform the core of their own banking models towards US-style finance. This transformation not only led to the German banks’ speculative investments during the 2000s subprime mortgage crisis but also to rising USD dependency and, ultimately, their contemporary decline.
About the speaker: I am an Assistant Professor in International Political Economy at the University of Warwick. Previously, I was Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London, after having finished my PhD at the University of Sussex. My research agenda focuses on the drivers and socio-economic impacts of financialisation at the global and everyday level. My work has addresses this in three inter-related areas. First, I am interested in a social history of global finance. My book project Extroverted Financialisation: Banking on USD Debt (under contract with Cambridge University Press) develops a novel conceptualisation, extroverted financialisation, to frame the US Americanisation of global finance. I am particularly interested in the uneven nature of the USD-based global financial architecture, and how this has shaped financial globalisation, innovations in on- and offshore finance, and financial instability. Secondly, using a feminist political economy approach, I investigate how everyday asset management and global asset management interact to produce various forms of asset-based inequalities in financialised economies. My third area of interest concerns creative and performative methodologies for knowledge exchange and impact. I regularly engage with civil society groups and local communities. For example, in May 2023, I directed and performed in an aerial acrobatics circus show that performed feminist political economy theorising of homes in their dual function as (1) an everyday living space and (2) a global financial asset.
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Clickbait capitalism – or, the return to libidinal political economy
Last year I published an edited volume called Clickbait Capitalism. The title came as a surprise, even to me. The book was meant to be called Libidinal Economies of Contemporary Capitalism. No one was interested in the volume until I changed the title. This surely tells us something about the publishing industry and how it likes to market the political-economic. A list of recently published books includes the following: Chokepoint Capitalism, Crack-up Capitalism, Cannibal Capitalism. Whatever next? One pundit on Twitter cut to the heart of the matter: “Why not ‘capitalist’ capitalism?” Anyway, I sent an email out to a few publishers: “I have a book manuscript called Clickbait Capitalism. Do you want to see it? Click here!” And just like that, they were interested. It was almost an accident. At the very least an experiment. There was no mention of clickbait whatsoever up until that point. Then suddenly it became the hook for the entire project.
In many ways, clickbait is a perfect title. It speaks directly to the intersection of money, technology, and desire. Clickbait suggests a cunning ruse to profit from unsavoury inclinations of one kind or another (FOMO, voyeurism, schadenfreude). Of course, clickbait usually ends in disappointment. The headline is a trick. The website is a con. You click away feeling cheated. I hope that is not the case with this book, which is more about the economies of desire taking shape around digital technology and finance than it is about clickbait per se. And I don’t think it will be the case, because the purpose of the trick here is to find a way of smuggling libidinal economy back into political economy discourse. And I do think there is something to be gained from putting this idea back into circulation. To give a sense of why, it is worth saying a few words about libidinal economy, about how the book is positioned in relation to the minor tradition of libidinal political economy, and about the scope of the volume in terms of the themes and approaches it covers.
First things first: What is “libidinal economy?” The phrase has its origins in Freud’s theory of psychical energy, or “libido”, and it underwent a decisive transformation during the mid-twentieth century as French intellectuals sought to stage an encounter between Freud and Marx. After this it becomes possible to speak about “libidinal political economy”. And the fundamental wager of this version of libidinal economy is that capitalism can be fruitfully engaged through the lens of desire.
To say that economy is a matter of desire means that it entails more than labour, production, or exchange; more than calculating costs and benefits. It is to say that economic life is organised by a range of unconscious processes and psychic drives. Libidinal political economy wants to bring these kinds of considerations to bear on economic analysis, to map “the flows of desire, the fears and anxieties, the loves and the despairs that traverse the social field”, as Foucault so memorably put it in the preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (p. xviii). When Lyotard published his own book on the theme, simply called Libidinal Economy, he went one step further: “Every political economy is libidinal” (p. 111). With this provocation, he meant to say not only that every mode of production is libidinal (feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism), but also that so too is any attempt to codify these theoretically (classical political economy, Marxist political economy, Keynesian economics). In other words, both the institutions and the concepts of contemporary capitalism must be read as vital aspects of its psychic life.
The aim with Clickbait Capitalism was to take Lyotard at his word and undertake just such a reading. To trace the psychological currents that underwrite the political and economic order of our times, even if libidinal-economic thinking is part of that order. I address this meta-theoretical level in my introduction to the volume, where I develop a preliminary account of the relations between libidinal economy and capitalism in three ways. First, by positioning libidinal economy at the intersection of economic and psychological thought. Second, by relating the development of libidinal-economic thought to the historical development of capitalism. And third, by emphasising the role of libidinal dynamics in the social reproduction of contemporary capitalism.
This is not the place to unpack each of these points in detail, but here are the headlines.
- Libidinal economy can be understood in scientific terms as marking out an intermediary space between psychoanalysis and political economy (or psychology and economics). But the story of libidinal economy stretches further back than Freud, entailing a circulation of metaphors between a much wider range of discourses. For this reason, a fully-fledged discipline of libidinal political economy is elusive, and perhaps not even desirable anyway.
- Libidinal economy is implicated in the story of how capitalism puts desire to work. The development of consumer capitalism was decisively shaped by psychoanalysis, which provided practical tools for the mass production of subjectivity alongside the mass production of commodities. It also, in its more radical form after 1968, helped to produce a form of economy that thrived on doing away with many of the repressive characteristics of industrial capitalism. Liberation from the family, from the factory, from lifelong careers and fixed identities; these legacies of libidinal economy also fuel the so-called desiring-machines of contemporary capitalism.
- Contemporary thought in this tradition revisits and replays many prior aspects of libidinal economy, including the signal moods attached to these. From Mark Fisher’s depressive libidinal economy to the manic revamped accelerationism now popular amongst tech bros; from the idea of a “world without desire” (Pettman 2020) to the idea of a “world without capital” (Fisher 2021). These are all familiar refrains and there are plenty of people out there ready and willing to continue cycling through these. And that is not a pursuit entirely devoid of value. But what if there was something to be gained by reformulating the underlying coordinates of libidinal economy too?
Consider again, then, the suggestion that “every political economy is libidinal”. Libidinal political economy wants to grapple with the libidinal dynamics of capitalism, yet it remains beholden to a very specific concept of economy derived from Marx. Why? There is simply no good reason to limit the economic concepts of libidinal economy to those associated with the rise of industrial capitalism. What is wanted, then, is a libidinal political economy fit for the analysis of contemporary capitalism, ready to engage its latest logics and symptoms, even if remains ensnared within them.
There have been some such attempts already, mostly scattered across the fringes of the social sciences. In International Political Economy, a sustained effort has been made to articulate a version of libidinal economy that draws on the ideas of heterodox institutionalists like Veblen and Commons (Amin and Palan 2001; Gammon and Palan 2006; Gammon and Wigan 2013). Meanwhile, a small but growing body of research has emerged that brings questions of libidinal economy to bear on contemporary issues, providing psychoanalytically-informed accounts of financial crisis, globalisation, and international development (Bennett 2012; Kapoor 2018, 2020; Kapoor et al. 2023). Clickbait Capitalism builds on and contributes toward the further development of a libidinal political economy along both these lines – the theoretical and the empirical – by focusing attention on the role played by desire in capitalism’s ongoing social reproduction.
In order to do this, the book brings together a motley crew of thinkers: recovering economists, geographers and development theorists, a clinical psychiatrist, political economy scholars of various stripes. The commentary is informed throughout by psychoanalytic theories of desire and the unconscious, but the broader approach adopted is one of theoretical pluralism. The book therefore mobilises a range of perspectives on desire, but also on economy, and on their relation to and interplay with one another through social institutions. Along the way, contributors draw on the ideas of Freud and Marx, Lacan and Veblen, Deleuze and Minsky, and others too. In empirical terms, the book aims to open such perspectives out onto a broader set of economic categories and themes than has normally been the case, and especially those that seem to be emerging as the calling cards of twenty-first-century capitalism. In particular, those linked to digital technology and finance.
The organisation of the volume as a whole reflects this scope and ambition. Perennial questions of death, sex, aggression, enjoyment, despair, hope, and revenge are followed onto the terrain of the contemporary, with chapters devoted to social media, online dating apps, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and meme stocks. The book unfolds in three phases. The first returns to the primal scenes of libidinal economy, connecting these to fundamental concerns in heterodox institutional economics. The second phase of the book puts libidinal-economic concepts into dialogue with structural features of contemporary capitalism, understood through the broad categories of technological change and social stratification. The book’s third phase engages contemporary forms of politics through the lens of hope and despair, offering a series of reflections on everyday responses to financial domination.
There are points of conflict between some of the chapters, which veer between different conceptions of the social and the psychic, not to mention different conceptions of economy and of capital. But the point is not to somehow resolve these differences into a unified perspective. Capitalism’s libidinal economies are unpredictable and unlikely to be mastered by systemic theorising. Instead, I like to think of the book as offering a modernist portrait of sorts; a portrait of the latest institutions to channel and reconfigure the psychic energies of political and economic life.
The book is obscenely expensive and quietly seductive. Could there be a better way to stage this return to libidinal political economy? You tell me.
The post Clickbait capitalism – or, the return to libidinal political economy appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
The Geopolitics of Global Capitalism and Ukraine
In our latest essay in Socialist Register 2024 we deliver a contribution to understanding contemporary geopolitics without shying away from placing our concerns within an analysis of capitalism.
Spotlighting contributions across the social sciences we demonstrate a common tendency to avoid any reference to capitalism as a totality. Instead, mainstream approaches commonly strive for an emphasis on a multiplicity of contingent social factors shaping geopolitics that results in mystifying economic development. We therefore argue that there is a common allergy to capitalist totality as well as historical materialism that grips the international theory of (1) the science-envy of structural realism; (2) constructivist ideas-centred accounts of geopolitical change based on contingency; and (3) approaches that focus on the discursive production and indeterminacy of geopolitics.
Ideology is always inscribed in method. Therefore, our argument is that contemporary approaches to geopolitics are trapped within a binary opposition between the form of ideology and the content of materiality. One can repeatedly witness a dualist opposition between the form of geopolitics (the states-system) and its contemporary socio-historical content (capitalism) in theorising on the international. Instead, making our own ideology explicit and drawing from Fredric Jameson, among others, we propose a rejuvenation of historical materialist dialectics to overcome this dualist opposition to offer fresh insights on competition and confrontation within the present-day conditions of capital accumulation. The reframing we propose rejects the binary dilemma of form and content.
In one table we represent these distinctions between form and content and link them to contending approaches to understanding contemporary geopolitics. Hence there is a dismissal of structural realism because of its material capabilities overemphasis on the content of the content in the historical process. Second, social constructivists are rejected for holding on to the dualism of form and content by emphasising the form of the content in an ideas-centred account of history. Finally, the approach that most focuses on the production of form, is the discursive approach to the form of form in poststructuralism. The result is a focus on a shapeless and contingent world of fetishised self/other differences that constructs the modern state and geopolitics.
As an alternative, our reframing asserts a focus on the content of the form as a historical materialist dialectical departure point for understanding the internal relation of the geopolitics of the states-system and global capitalism. Is there something peculiar in terms of the content of the capital relation that means that the states-system contingently came into being but has become the necessary form of geopolitics? How is the internal relation of the content of form represented most starkly in the modern condition of the geopolitics of global capitalism?
We pose these questions as a historical materialist move away from the separation or binary dualism of form and content to appreciate their internality, thus developing our work on internal relations as set out in an early article in International Studies Quarterly and then expanded in Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis.
Historical materialism provides a dialectical rudder to guide us though the binary dilemma of separating out content and form as external relations and we deploy that dialectical rudder in a geopolitical analysis of the war in Ukraine. In doing so, we distance ourselves from those analyses of geopolitics that, through the Ukraine War, make the case for expanding the permanent arms economy of military spending (such as Paul Mason). Equally, we reject those arguments that hold China as offering some form of multipolar alternative to U.S. geopolitics (such as Vijay Prasad). Additionally, those treatments of the war in Ukraine that elevate the conflict as foremost a war of self-determination and independence that must be supported with militarisation are scrutinised (such as Yuliya Yurchenko). The war in Ukraine may well be regarded as a war of independence but it is nested within wider inter-imperialist rivalries as well as the deep crisis in global capitalism. The Russo-Ukrainian War has been transformed into a proxy war between the US and its allies against Russia, fought with Ukrainian personnel on Ukrainian soil. It would be limiting to view the conflict as a war of self-determination given that Ukraine will most likely be treated post-conflict as another growth opportunity for transnational capital. Is not Ukraine part of a latest ‘bomb-and-build’ spatial fix strategy for capital accumulation? It would not be the first time in history that after a successful struggle for “self-determination” such concerns become pushed aside by the empire of capital. The geopolitical significance of Ukraine, then, is that it is one of the keystones in an arc of inter-imperialist competition that stretches across the Eurasian landmass.
In 2010, G. John Ikenberry perhaps represented most strikingly the liberal ideology of constructivism and its focus on what we call in Table 1 the form of the content. In an attempt to capture the discontents of the liberal international order, Ikenberry declared:
In the decades ahead, the United States and Europe and rising states—many of which are in Asia—will have more reasons and not fewer reasons to cooperate in open and rule-based ways.
His view was that the future would still belong to a liberal international order and that ‘the violent forces that have overthrown international orders in the past do not seem to operate today’. The contemporary geopolitics of the Russo-Ukrainian War clearly reveals how moribund such liberal internationalism and the ideology of an ideas-centred conception of political economic change actually is.
In contrast, although a historical materialist dialectical rudder does not provide finality on such issues it does offer a guiding red thread on the primacy of the category of capitalism as a totality, rather than separate parts, and how to internally relate the form of geopolitics (the states-system) and its contemporary socio-historical content (global capitalism) as moments of a whole. As a result, we argue that war in Ukraine is an inter-imperialist conflict between the US and its Western allies against Russia, which also needs to be understood as a warning signal for war against China.
Resistance against capitalism and its permanent arms economy is the only hope for a more peaceful world order. Opposition to all types of capitalist imperialism is a fundamental starting-point in this respect.
The post The Geopolitics of Global Capitalism and Ukraine appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Time Enough at Last
In honor of my #Pintopia campaign, I thought it was time to visit these dodo friends again, since they are the subject of one of the pins!
They originated in comic #729 (with a brief cameo in #730 as well).
For each of my book collections, I have colored a handful of strips to make them special for the book. Occasionally I have then run the colorful versions later on the site, but I never reposted this one, until now!
I’ve shared it online a bunch this week – such as on Reddit – and I’m pleased to say that, despite being 13 years old, it still hits.
I rounded up some of my favorite comments and reactions here.
Our dodo friend is also the subject of a brand new pin design, which is available now as part of…
#Pintopia!
As I mentioned last week, I am launching ten brand-new pin designs!
It’s a crowdfunding campaign that is live RIGHT NOW through APRIL 18. You can get:
- Any (or all!) of the nine new pins above;
- Any (or all!) of my existing pin designs:
(which are also already available individually in my store)
- AND the delightful tenth pin below, which is NOT available for purchase, but instead comes FREE when you back both my campaign and that of my “cross-collaborator,” Peter Chiykowski! (And you get HIS pin free, too.)
Peter’s offering 25 (!!!) different tabletop-RPG-themed pins, celebrating his 25 years playing D&D.
You can read more about all different my pin designs over on the campaign page.
AND…if you’ve backed any of my Kickstarter campaigns before (and you use the same BackerKit account for this project), you will automatically get a free sticker set added to your order. A computer will figure this out!!
Launch Livestream
Peter hosted a livestream on our launch day, and I joined him for the first hour or so. We discussed my work, his work, the travails of both, and all kinds of interesting topics.
You can watch us here! Should you want to!!
