Planetary Politics Now

The meteoric speed with which planetary realities expose themselves today is education-by-shock. These realities demand attention, recasting the meaning of materialist determinism. On the surface, in the US-Iran standoff we see a showdown between capitalist tyrant and theocratic dictatorship. But the images project more. With the global spotlight on fossil-fuel dependency, made manifest by the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, we recognize the economic and political irrationalities of the global order. The political power-distortions, the violation of international standards for the legitimate use of violence in defense of an obsolete energy resource, are aired to the viewing world. The planet is indifferent to political discourses. It counts time in eons, not presidential tenures. Planetary-thinking forces awareness that the cognitive maps of modernity no longer make sense. Neither conservative nor liberal political positions are up to the task of the present, because these imaginaries are lodged within bounded nation-states that separate politics – the realm of human agency – from economic/material realities that persist in their obedience to the laws of the natural world.

Hegel begins the Phenomenology des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit, 1806) with an observation: “Spirit has broken with the world.” He means by this that common understandings of reality, including the cultural values that once gave legitimacy to human actions, no longer hold. The young Hegel described optimistically his era’s revolutionary transformation from feudal relations into those of bourgeois modernity. With capitalism’s imperialist expansion, this modernity became a global order. My position is simply that this order, now in disorder, is disintegrating and cannot be rescued, not by the left, not by the right, because the very terms “left” and “right” have weakened in referential power. They are pre-planetary terms.

As earthlings, we ask again the Lenin-question - What to do? (Что делать?) - because within the narrow confines of our effectiveness and agency, what we do – what we do together – matters. First: a recognition that the alternatives are not within existing binaries of action. The disintegration of the old order means just that. A crumbling order cannot sustain the new. The world is in fragments. And yet, within these fragments are splinters of possibility. We discover them because, whatever the economic or cultural conditions reflected in them, whether birthed by capitalist greed or political oppression, they show a public face, a potential for humanity to transcend the narrow limits of the now. We name them: internet technologies that make possible infinite sharing of knowledge. Science aimed at sustaining life in its myriad forms. Cultural sharing that is premised on diversity, hence inclusive at its very core. Communication within a media landscape that transcends the confines of the old imperial languages and hierarchies of power.   Neo-fascism, neo-imperialism – these terms are not radical enough to name the situation that already defines us. Only planetary vision will be adequate for perceiving the world we now inhabit together.

There is no single revolutionary class. There is only the recognition that we – all of us, everywhere – continue to be drawn ever more deeply into a system that is unlivable.  It distorts human interdependency into brutal structures of inhuman domination. It places us into complicity with actions that are morally repulsive to individuals and undermine society with ethical rot. Financial success appears to be the escape route, lifting (some of) us above the fray. Fences and borders provide the illusion of control, while the deterritorialization of economic power, beyond the reach of national sovereignty, has long since been the consequence of unfettered capital flows.

There is no Marxist blueprint for the moment. And yet, Marx’s texts continue to be read (accessed freely at marxists.org), and socialist alternatives continue to be discussed, because the human-toxic failures of today’s finance capitalism require it. Remarkable is how the most innovative critical thinkers keep finding inspiration in the epistemological breakthroughs initiated by Marx: Sylvia Wynter on ongoing accumulation, World-System Analysis on underdevelopment, David Harvey on accumulation by dispossession, Melinda Cooper on the neo-liberal family, and many (Andreas Malm, Jason Moore, Justin McBrien) on the ecological devastation of fossil fuel –to mention just writers in English. Notice that these critiques are not based on either/or discursive categories: class orrace, class or sex, class or post-colonial identities. So: the “culture battles” are not beside the point; they are central. There is no contradiction here, no matter how strongly right-wing politicians attempt to divert attention away from finance-capitalist takeovers of power by propagating a cultural civil war. When ideologues claim that race-blind laws ensure race-neutral outcomes while simultaneously pushing the pseudo-science of race-differences in IQ, or when they support women’s “natural,” nurturing role in the family, reducing the need for publicly-financed child-care, or health care, or security for the aged, then we know we are facing a counter-thrust to democracy’s basic principles of freedom, equality and justice for all.

Moreover, the power of these struggles for cultural democracy is their appeal across nation-state boundaries. They have planetary resonance. The only force that can defeat the global oligarchy is an unbounded popular response. And here we discover a key to the hyper-nationalist agenda whereby capitalist forces exert political control. The centrality of anti-immigrant hatred, the blatant rekindling of racism, the forcing of cultural life back behind national borders – these are indispensable requirements for camouflaging global-capitalism’s threat to democratic nation-states. The vulnerability of “progressive” politics if it remains focused at the national level is that without confronting global power structures, it is objectively impossible to deliver on promises of social welfare and the public good.

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This is the heart of the matter. Hyper-nationalism (race-nationalism, religious-nationalism) is the optimal point for obfuscating the transformation whereby finance-capitalist interests not only operate in national politics but move to take over its institutional forms. Jared Kushner said it outright when he occupied a White-House office in Trump’s first term: “A country is a company.”  This needs to be understood literally. The claim is serious. The US President is reimagined as the nation’s CEO – who acquires the most technologically advanced army, air force, navy, marines, and “special forces” as an asset of the company. He unleashes, at taxpayer’s expense, an immigration-deporting militia (ICE) loyal to his will, with the implication that low-level immigrant jobs, once vacated, will be available for the native-born “low IQ” people to fill. He hires and fires at will. He nominates corporate-trained lawyers as federal judges and pressures his own Supreme Court appointees to give the CEO-President absolute power in his executive role. Control of government’s institutions create the bundle of assets that ensures the CEO’s success. His daily and limitless access to national media coverage is prime-time brand-advertising, free of charge. He has exclusive access to top-secret surveillance technology. In sum, the powers of a sovereign nation-state are transformed into the company’s privatized assets – giving thiscompany a massive advantage over the capitalist competition, because this company, a family firm with Trump as its CEO, controls the awarding of contracts and licenses to the others and, using the force of every public institution, enhances its own, privatized “growth.” Invest in this company and you will get rich, you will make your families rich, you will make your allies rich. Moreover, maintaining personal loyalty to the firm places you beyond the reach of criminal prosecution.

This form of state power is new. Conventional conservatives were against “big government,” in favor of low taxes and removal of regulatory control. This new form also removes regulations, lowers taxes, and fires federal employees, but it delivers so much more. It destroys national governmental institutions that have been constructed for the purpose of protecting the public and transforms them into protections for the privatized goals of profit-making. It would like to eliminate the very idea of a public realm that sets itself against the fantasy-utopia of free markets and the private interests of money-making concerns. But it does this not to eliminate the state – we are far from Peter Thiel’s “anarcho-capitalism.”  Trump’s unfriendly state takeover is a massive act of privatization. He is creating a super-firm, a corporation-state, a capitalist-sovereign power, subverting the only institutions that could check its power by democratic, citizen-organized opposition. This is a public crime in the extreme sense. Not a crime against the public but a crime that would destroy the public, swallowing the very idea of a common good.

The next goal is to acquire foreign subsidiaries, expanding into regional markets. This process was signaled by the attempt to rebrand the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, and then simply to buy sovereign land (Greenland) from an existing nation-state (Denmark). The “arrest” of Venezuela’s leader enacted a newly claimed corporate-sovereign power to punish crimes and control oil resources of an erstwhile sovereign state, violating with impunity the fundament of international law. These moves prefigure the new foreign-policy model of promoting home-grown, corporate-presidents in the regional subsidiaries, who see the private wealth-accumulating advantages of collaboration with the parent company: the media star Javier Milei in Argentina; Marcel Kirst in Chile; Bolsonaro & Son in Brazil.  And now in Ecuador with Daniel Noboa, in Bolivia with Rodrigo Paz, and in Columbia with Abelardo de la Espriella, Trump launches perhaps the most brazen of his foreign adventures, deploying his trans-global power-advantage as a mega-firm to supposedly challenge the trans-global mega-firms of the drug cartels on the latter’s own dark-money financial terrain. In reality, drug cartels have benefitted from the way global finance covers up the sources and movements of money. As the Panama Papers exposed in 2016, so do tax-dodging capitalists and corrupt politicians.  By promising to fight the drug gangs with an “iron fist” in a “narco-security cooperation effort,” the Trump network occupies these criminal spaces and eliminates the competition.

But how, in democracies, is this new privatized-political sovereign form to win a final victory? How to fool people who have power as citizens to give that power up? Seeding civil distrust, challenging election outcomes, and promoting conspiracy theories against all forces of opposition are methods already well-advanced. Betting online makes the culture of casino capitalism mainstream. Parents are encouraged in child-raising to imagine themselves as heads of a family firm. Billionaire cronies flood the electoral process. Politicians endorse the equation of money with merit, that appears to justify social inequalities. The task is to prevent people from recognizing that if alone, as individuals, their power is miniscule (as neoliberal imagination has been preaching), together, they are the citizen-owners of the nation. They are the guardians of the public good. Only they have the democratic power to refuse the buy-back policies of the self-nominated nation-state CEO. The mega-firm of privatized sovereignty cannot destroy the power of citizens when they unite for a common goal.

We cannot afford to think today in nationalist terms. That is democracy’s death-knell. Our sole (but massive) power is planetary in scope, but locally grounded in practice. We, as earthlings, cannot win by mimicking the abstraction of existing global discourses. Our local struggles against anti-democratic attacks –from the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres in Honduras to the shooting of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota– must reach an audience that is trans-local, creating networks that are planetary inscale. We saw the effectiveness of planetary consciousness when George Floyd’s death by police in Minneapolis sparked anti-racist political awareness in hotspots around the world. We saw this continue with the incapacity of planet-wide people to see with their eyes the destruction of unarmed populations in Gaza, a genocide perpetuated unapologetically by Netanyahu, who is absolutely sold on Trump’s model of mega-firm state-sovereignty. Indeed (again, thanks to Kushner), the goals of the “Abraham Accords”–incidentally, the naming is a brilliant example of branding– was anticipated by Trump’s becoming the life-termed CEO of his own Board of Peace. The goal of the Abraham Accords is the merger of political power with business interests in the region, where “sovereign funds” (unlike their public-investment form in, for example, Norway) are literally funds at the sovereign’s disposal (the model for Trump’s 1.776-billion-dollar proposal for an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate his supporters convicted of breaking the law). Nations that joined Trump’s Board of Peace bought their membership for 1 billion US dollars. They share no commitment to democracy. In the five “nations” of the United Arab Emirates, only 12 per cent of the population has citizenship.  The other 11 million residents are denied permanent status no matter how long they have lived there. Note that on a global level, capitalist mega-firm sovereign-nations are willing to compete in good Chicago-School style among each other for dominance, but now it is clear, unless you have the “assets” of a nation-state in your pocket you are not competitive to win (a point where the mega-firm nation converges with the Chinese authoritarian model of state socialism).

The state as super-firm is a wild idea. But even more remarkable is the fact that Trump, in his sinister brilliance, is taking advantage of the coincidence that he turns 80 just as the nation is turning 250 to stage a series of spectacles that dramatize this takeover of the most powerful nation-state as his own capitalist-sovereign corporation.  He is placing his hand-written signature on US money. He is propagating the internet with speculative capitalist “Trump prediction markets.” He is building permanent monuments to this self-defined turning-point, this massive attack on democracy, public morality, and the rule of law. This maga-performance to celebrate the merging of his mega-firm with US sovereign power in all its capacities, intends to transform beyond recognition the cultural heritage of both American hemispheres, whose people have shared in an imperfect but magnificent struggle for social justice, racial equality and democratic rule.

Trump does not care about the mid-term elections and the fate of the Republican Party. Who needs national parties on your side so long as you can so damage the public sphere, so thoroughly infect political discourse with the propagation of outright lies, that you cloud citizen perception of the real dangers, and render democratic political discourse generally incoherent. Indeed, who needs the nation-state, when you can cast it off like a booster-rocket once you have reached the stratosphere of mega-power? Through a triumphal performance and display of theme-park magnificence, you stage what you are in the process of attempting to achieve: the overthrow of nation-state sovereign power to install a new model of corporate sovereignty, wherein any act of protest against oligarchy in the name of democratic control earns you the treasonous title: “enemy of the state.” 

We are at the end of the era of neo- and post-. No neoliberalism, no postcolonialism. Only a planetary imagination, propagated trans-locally, will move us forward. A green economy. A market that lives up to Adam Smith’s crucial insights into the moral depravity of unbridled markets acting on their own. AI systems developed for the public good, programmed to show us a way out of oligarchy. Coding that frees us from identity-categories, cancelling hallucinatory definitions of “us” versus “them.” Replacement of government surveillance by public surveillance that exposes those who strive to operate invisibly in cyberspace and remain unaccountable for their actions.

We are ready for this. Humans have always been ready for this. But we cannot develop this capacity within the old structures of life. Even if we are still not able to live in this new way, we can see it. That is planetary clarity. It takes courage, hope, and love. We act in our old roles in ways that provide a clearing for the new.